Robert Wilson - The Silent and the Damned

‘The Inspector Jefe was asking for my reasons as someone who’d been thinking of becoming a nun,’ she’d said, coolly. ‘It was my naïve belief then that the next best institution after the Church where I could do some good was the police force. My ten years on the streets of Cádiz have taught me that that is possible only on rare occasions.’

Falcón had wanted to give her the job there and then, but Ramírez wasn’t finished.

‘So why did you leave your vocation ?’

‘I met a man, Inspector. I fell pregnant, we got married and had two children.’

‘In that order?’ asked Ramírez, and Ferrera had nodded without taking her brown eyes off him.

So, a fallen angel, too. A Bride of Christ who’d found herself more mortal boots. Falcón had made his decision. The transfer from Cádiz had been slow but the few days she’d been with his squad had convinced him that he’d made the right choice. Even Ramírez had taken her out for a coffee, but that was how things changed. Ramírez, with his daughter’s mystery illness, had found himself searching for spiritual sustenance rather than the corporeal version he usually hunted for amongst the courts’ secretaries, the bar flirts, shopgirls and even, so Falcón suspected, some of the hookers that crossed his path.

Ferrera drove. Falcón preferred to lose himself in vague thoughts that might lead to better ideas. They drove to Santa Clara in silence. Falcón liked her for that resistance to the Andaluz gene for talking non-stop. His thoughts moved in a slow sickly loop. How men were changed by crisis. Ramírez had gone to church. Falcón had never been attracted to it. It made him feel fraudulent. He, like Sr Vega, had gone to the river, whose draw, he had to admit, was not always positive. There had been times when it offered him an alternative solution and he’d had to pull back and rush home to the comfort of whisky.

They pulled up outside the Vegas’ house. Falcón used the remote to open the gates to the driveway. The air conditioning was still on in the house. He gave Ferrera a guided tour of the two crime scenes, the rest of the house and the garden with Sergei’s accommodation. He profiled the two victims as they progressed. They returned to the crime scenes and went through the police photographs. Falcón filled in what he knew about the lead up to the crisis, but did not particularly emphasize murder or suicide. He wanted Ferrera to look at the crime scenes from the point of view of a woman, to think herself into Lucía Vega’s mind by going through her effects and then relive her actions.

He went into Vega’s study and sat at the desk below the bullfight poster. The laptop had been removed and was in the lab. There was only the phone and the tape outline of the position of the laptop on the desk. He looked down the list of pre-programmed numbers on the phone. There were office numbers and Vázquez’s direct line as well as the Krugmans’ and Consuelo’s. The last number was void. He picked up the phone and pressed it.

‘ Dá…zdrastvutye, Vasili,’ said a voice, clearly expecting someone else on the line.

‘Your telephone number has been selected in our grand draw,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m happy to inform you that you and your wife have won a prize. All you have to do is give me your name and address and I will tell you where to go to pick up your wonderful prize.’

‘Who are you?’ asked the voice in heavily accented Spanish.

‘Name and address first, please.’

A hand went over the receiver. Muffled voices came down the line.

‘What’s the prize?’

‘Name and –’

‘Tell me the prize,’ he said brutally.

‘It’s a watch for you and your –’

‘I’ve got a watch,’ he said, and slammed down the phone.

Falcón made a note to ask Vázquez about these Russians. The desk drawers revealed nothing unusual. The Heckler & Koch had been removed for tests. He opened up the filing cabinets with the keys he’d found the day before. He flicked through the files for telephone, bank, insurance. They were catching on something underneath – a leather-bound loose-leaf diary and address book.

The diary was private. The entries were minimal. Most of the time there was just an ‘X’ marked next to the hour and they were mostly night-time meetings. Falcón went back to Noche de Reyes and found that there was an ‘X’ marked there, too. The first daytime meeting was in March with ‘Dr A’. In June there were meetings with Dr A and another with Dr D. In the address section he found a list of doctors – Médicos Álvarez, Diego and Rodríguez. He flicked through the diary and found that Dr R was the last doctor to see Vega. He called and arranged to talk to him around midday.

He went through the address section of the book, which contained only names and telephone numbers. Raúl Jiménez’s name was there but had been crossed out. As he turned the pages, names he knew leapt out at him. A lot of them he vaguely recalled from the Raúl Jiménez murder investigation – people from the town hall and public works. There was one name though that really took him back to that turbulent time – Eduardo Carvajal. Again it had been crossed out. Like Raúl Jiménez, he was dead. Falcón had never found what linked the two men. All he’d discovered was that Jiménez had rewarded Carvajal via a fake consultancy company during Expo ‘92 and, at the time of his death in a car crash in 1998 on the Costa del Sol, Carvajal was about to face trial on charges relating to a paedophile ring.

Ortega’s name was also in the book and the last name to stand out was one that had him pacing around the house, reminding himself that there was no art on the walls of any significance. Ramón Salgado, who had been one of Seville’s best-known art dealers, was also in the book, crossed out. Maybe Vega Construcciones had invested in art or bought a piece for their head-quarters, but there was also that disturbing memory of the child pornography they’d discovered on Salgado’s hard disk after his brutal murder. In these circles everybody knew each other, links in a golden chain of wealth and influence. Another question for Vázquez.

There were no Russian names in the book. He put it back in the filing cabinet. He moved on to another cabinet which contained box files full of blueprints and photographs of buildings. In the bottom drawer of the third cabinet there was a box file with no reference number. It said simply Justicia. In the file there were pages, mostly in English and mostly from this year, which had been extracted from the internet on a range of subjects but primarily concerned with an international system of justice. There were also newspaper articles on the International Criminal Court, the Tribunal that it was designed to replace, the crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón and also the intricacies and possibilities within the Belgian legal system for bringing international war criminals to justice.

The doorbell sounded in the hall. He locked up the cabinet and went to answer it. Sra Krugman was wearing a black linen top and a skirt, bias-cut, with a scarlet silk sash hanging down the side. On the end of her long white arm was a plastic thermos jug.

‘I thought you might like some coffee, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Spanish strength. None of your American sock water here.’

‘I thought there’d been a coffee revolution in America,’ he said, thinking other things.

‘The levels of penetration have been uneven,’ she said. ‘It cannot be guaranteed.’

He let her pass, closed the door to the grotesque heat. He didn’t want this intrusion. Maddy fetched cups and saucers. He shouted upstairs to Ferrera but she didn’t want any coffee. They went into Vega’s office and sat at the desk. Maddy smoked and flicked ash into her saucer. She made no attempt at conversation. Her physical, or rather, sexual presence filled the room. Falcón still felt nauseous and he had nothing to say to her. His mind raced as he drank the coffee.