Robert Wilson - The Blind Man of Seville

They ran the gauntlet to the car and rather than go back through the barrier, which was blocked by the journalists, he headed through the grounds of the faculty and out past the main hospital building on to Calle de San Juan de Ribera.

‘They should have closed his eyes,’ said Consuelo Jiménez. ‘You cannot be at peace with your eyes still open, even if they don’t see anything.’

‘They couldn’t close his eyes,’ he said as the traffic lights released them to turn left on to Calle Muñoz León.

He drove past the old city walls and found a parking space in the busy street. Sra Jiménez clung to the roof grip, her knuckles whitening, her face already beginning to shrink from the words that she knew were coming her way. The worst of his career.

He told her how it was, with no soft focus, giving his own appalled version. Yes, it had been the worst of his career. There were scenes he’d had to ‘process’ which perhaps sounded worse — walking into an apartment in a high-rise block in an urbanización on the outskirts of Madrid, four dead in the sitting room, blood up the walls, two dead in the kitchen, needles, syringes, tinfoil floating on gore and, in the bedroom, a child whimpering on a soiled cot. But that was all expected horror in a culture of brutality. The torture of Raúl Jiménez was something he could not be objective about and not just because he was sensitive about eyes, which were so important to his work. It was how the killer’s punishment of his victim had worked on his own imagination. It terrified him, the notion of the sheer relentlessness of reality, the lack of visual respite. As Sra Jiménez had noted, not even in death could he be seen to enjoy the big sleep but had to lie in eternal, wide-eyed horror at man’s capacity for evil.

Sra Jiménez had started crying. Really crying. This was no dabbing at the mascara but a bawling, retching, snot-streaked breakdown. Javier Falcón understood the cruelty of police work. He was not the man to comfort this woman. It was he who had put the images in her head. His job, the point of his job at this moment, was to observe not just the veracity of the emotional display but also to perceive the opening, the crack in the carapace where he would jam in his lever. It had been his conscious tactic to get her in a car, in an enclosed bubble in a busy street with nowhere to go, while an indifferent world crashed by, oblivious to the enormity.

‘You were in the Hotel Colón last night?’ he said and she nodded. ‘Were you alone after your children had gone to bed?’

She shook her head.

‘Was Basilio Lucena with you last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘All night?’

‘No.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘We had dinner in the room. We went to bed. He must have left by two o’clock.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Home, I suppose.’

‘He didn’t go to the Edificio Presidente?’

Silence. No answer, while Falcón looked into the structure of her face.

‘What does Basilio Lucena do for a living?’ he asked.

‘Something useless at the university. He’s a lecturer.’

‘What department?’

‘One of the sciences. Biology or chemistry — I can’t remember. We never talked about it. It doesn’t interest him. It’s a position and a salary, that’s all.’

‘Did you give him a key?’

‘To the apartment?’ she said, shaking her head at him. ‘Meet Basilio before you even …’

‘How do you know I haven’t?’

Silence.

‘Have you been in touch with Basilio Lucena this morning?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I thought he should know what had happened.’

‘So that he could prepare himself?’

‘You might think, Inspector Jefe, if you saw Basilio Lucena on paper that he was an intelligent man. He is certainly educated and sophisticated. But his intelligence is very finely tuned to a narrow waveband and his sophistication admired by a small clique. He has been made lazy by the lack of challenge in his job. His house and car have been paid for by his parents. He has no dependants. His income allows him an irresponsible lifestyle. He isn’t somebody who’s ever had to think on his feet because most of the time he’s lying down. Is that the profile of a murderer?’

Falcón’s mobile rang. Pérez made an elaborate report on the unidentified people picked up by the CCTV cameras. Two positive identifications, one negative, and the girl they assumed to be the prostitute had been referred to Vice. He told Pérez to follow up on the girl and asked Fernández to go through the apartments again over lunchtime.

The moment with Consuelo Jiménez had passed. He pulled out into the traffic, did a U-turn and headed west to the river. He glanced at his hostage to see how her thoughts were progressing. He sensed a crisis point, began to have that feeling that this could all be over before his first meeting with Juez Calderón. That was how this work went in his experience. All over in twenty-four hours or they went into months of long, bleak slog.

‘Are you taking me back to the apartment?’ she asked.

‘You’re an intelligent woman, Doña Consuelo.’

‘Your opportunity to flatter me has long passed.’

‘You spend your life amongst people,’ he said. ‘You understand them. I think you understand the demands of my job.’

‘That you have to be so disgustingly suspicious.’

‘Do you know how many murders there are in Seville every year?’

‘In this city of joy?’ she said. ‘In this city of handclapping in the streets, of cervecitas y tapitas con los amigos. In this city de los guapos, de los guapísimos? In this godly city of the Holy Virgin?’

‘In the city of Seville.’

‘A couple of thousand,’ she said, tossing the number up into the air with her ringed fingers.

‘Fifteen,’ he said.

‘Back-stabbing is metaphorical murder.’

‘Drugs account for most of those murders. The remaining few come under the heading of “domestic” or “passionate”. In all of those murders — all of them, Doña Consuelo — the victim and the perpetrator knew each other and in most cases they were intimate.’

‘Then you have an exception, Inspector Jefe, because I did not kill my husband.’

They went through the underpass by the old railway station at the Plaza de Armas and continued along the riverside on the Paseo Cristóbal Colón past the Maestranza bullring, the Opera and the Torre del Oro. The sun was bright on the water, the high plane trees in full leaf. It was no time to be confessing to murder and spending a lifetime of springs behind bars.

‘Denial is a very powerful human condition … ‘ he said.

‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never denied anything.’

‘… because there are no doubts … ever.’

‘I’m either a liar or completely deluded,’ she said. ‘I can’t win, Inspector Jefe. But at least I always tell myself the truth.’

‘But do you tell it to me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said.

‘So far … but perhaps I’m changing my mind.’

‘I don’t know how you persuaded your husband’s old flames that you were a silly tart.’

‘I dressed like one,’ she said, tinkling her fingernails. ‘I can talk like one, too.’

‘You’re an accomplished actress.’

‘Everything counts against me.’

Their eyes connected. His soft, brown, tobacco. Hers frozen aquamarine. He smiled. He couldn’t help liking her. That strength. The inexorable mouth. He wondered what it would taste like and shot the thought straight out of his head. They crossed the Puente del Generalísimo and he changed the subject.

‘It’s never occurred to me before what a Francoist little corner of town this is. This bridge. This street is named after Carrero Blanco …’