Robert Wilson - The Blind Man of Seville

Still the sweat didn’t stop but appeared elsewhere. Top lip, small of the back, trickling down to his waist from his armpit. He knew what he was doing. He was pretending, persuading himself that it was hot in the room, that the coffee he’d just taken … He hadn’t had any coffee.

The face.

For a dead man it was a face with presence. Like El Greco’s saints whose eyes never left you alone.

Were they following him?

Falcón moved to one side. Yes. Then the other. Absurd. The tricks of the mind. He pulled himself together, clenched a latex fist.

He stepped over the taut lead from the wall to the TV/video and went behind the dead man’s chair. He looked up to the ceiling and let his eyes fall on to Raúl Jiménez’s wire-wool hair. The back of the head was matted thick, black and red, from where he’d rammed his head repeatedly against the carved coat of arms on the chair back. The head was still secured to the chair with flex. Originally it must have been tight but Jiménez had gained some slack through his struggle. The flex had cut deeply into the flesh beneath his nose and had ridden up until it had bitten into the cartilaginous material of the septum and it had even sawn through that to reach the bone of the bridge. The nose was hanging off his face. The flex had also cut into the flesh over his cheekbones as he’d thrown his head from side to side.

Falcón turned away from the profile only to see the full frontal in the blank TV screen. He blinked, wanting to close those staring eyes, which, even in reflection, penetrated. His stomach leapt at the thought of the horror images that had forced a man to do this to himself. Were they still there, burned on to the retina, or further back in the brain in some cubist digitalized state?

He shook his head, unused to these wild thoughts interfering with his investigative coolness. He moved around to confront the gory face, not quite full on because the TV/video cabinet was up against the man’s knees, and, at this moment, Javier Falcón came up against his first physical failing. His legs would not bend. None of the usual motor messages could get beyond the roiling panic in his chest and stomach. He did what the Juez de Guardia had advised and looked out of the window. He noted the brightness of the April morning, remembered that restlessness as he’d got dressed in the shuttered dark, the uneasiness left after a long, lonely winter with too much rain. So much rain that even he had noticed how the city’s gardens had burgeoned to the density of jungle, to the richness of an abundant botanical exhibit. He looked down on the Feria ground, which two weeks from now would be transformed into a tented Seville crowded with casetas, marquees, for the week-long session of eating, drinking fino and dancing Sevillanas until dawn. He breathed in deeply and lowered himself to meet Raúl Jiménez’s face.

The terrible staring effect was produced by the man’s eyeballs bulging out of his head as if he had a thyroid problem. Falcón glanced up at the photos. Jiménez was not bug-eyed in any of them. This was caused by … His synapses shunted like cars crunching into each other nose to tail. The visible ball of the eye. The blood down the face. The coagulation on the jaw line. And these? What are these delicate things on his shirtfront? Petals. Four of them. But rich, exotic, fleshy as orchids with these fine filaments, just like fly-catchers. But petals … here?

He reeled backwards, his feet kicking at the rug edge and the parquet flooring as he fell over the television lead, yanking the plug out of the wall socket. He crabbed on the heels of his hands and feet until he hit the wall and sat legs splayed, thighs twitching, shoes nodding.

Eyelids. Two top. Two bottom. Nothing could have prepared him for that.

‘Are you all right, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Is that you, Inspector Ramírez?’ he asked, getting up slowly, messily.

‘The Policía Científica are ready to move in.’

‘Send the Médico Forense down here.’

Ramírez slipped out of the doorframe. Falcón shook himself down. The Médico Forense appeared.

‘Did you see that this man had had his eyelids cu—his eyelids removed?’

‘Claro, Inspector Jefe. The Juez de Guardia and I had to satisfy ourselves that the man was dead. I saw that the man’s eyelids had been removed and … it’s all in my notes. The secretaria has noted it, too. It’s hardly something you’d miss.’

‘No, no, I didn’t doubt that … I was just surprised that it wasn’t mentioned to me.’

‘I think Juez Calderón was about to tell you, but …’

The bald head of the Médico Forense rolled on his shoulders.

‘But what …?’

‘I think he was in awe of your experience in these matters.’

‘Do you have any opinion about the cause and time of death?’ asked Falcón.

‘The time, about four, four-thirty this morning. The cause, well, vamos a ver, the man was over seventy years old, he had been overweight, he was a heavy smoker of cigarettes which he preferred with the filter removed and, as a restaurateur, someone who enjoyed a glass of wine or two. Even a young and fit man might have found it difficult to sustain these injuries, that physical and mental distress, without going into deep shock. He died of heart failure, I’m sure of it. The autopsy will confirm that … or not.’

The Médico Forense finished, flustered by the steadiness of Falcón’s look and annoyed by his own idiocy at the end. He left the frame, which was instantly reoccupied by Calderón and Ramírez.

‘Let’s get started,’ said Calderón.

‘Who called the emergency services?’ asked Falcón.

‘The conserje,’ said Calderón. The concierge. ‘After the maid had …’

‘After the maid had let herself in, seen the body, ran out of the apartment, and taken the lift back down to the ground floor …?’

‘… and hammered hysterically on the door of the conserje’s flat,’ finished Calderón, irritated by Falcón cutting in. ‘It took him some minutes to get any sense out of her and then he called 091.’

‘Did the conserje come up here?’

‘Not until the first patrol car arrived and sealed off the crime scene.’

Was the door open?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the maid … now?’

‘Under sedation in the Hospital de la Virgen de la Macarena.’

‘Inspector Ramírez …’

‘Yes, Inspector Jefe …’

All exchanges between Falcón and Ramírez started like this. It was his way of reminding the Inspector Jefe that Falcón had moved down from Madrid and stolen the job that Ramírez had always assumed would be his.

‘Ask Sub-Inspector Pérez to go down to the hospital and as soon as the maid … Does she have a name?’

‘Dolores Oliva.’

‘As soon as she is sensible … he should ask her if she noticed anything strange … Well, you know the questions. And ask her how many times she turned the key in the lock to open the door and what exactly were her movements before she found the body.’

Ramírez repeated this back to him.

‘Have we found Sra Jiménez and the children yet?’ asked Falcón.

‘We think they’re in the Hotel Colón.’

‘On Calle Bailén?’ asked Falcón, the five-star hotel where all the toreros stayed, only fifty metres from his own … from his late father’s house — a coincidence without being one.

‘A car has been sent,’ said Calderón. ‘I’d like to complete the levantamiento del cadaver as soon as possible and get the body down to the Instituto Anatómico Forense before we bring Sra Jiménez up here.’

Falcón nodded. Calderón left them to it. The two Policía Científica, Felipe in his mid fifties and Jorge in his late twenties, moved in murmuring buenos días. Falcón stared at the TV plug lying on the floor and decided not to mention it. They photographed the room and, between them, began to put together a scenario, while Jorge took Jiménez’s fingerprints and Felipe dusted the TV/video cabinet and the two empty slipcases on top. They agreed on its normal position and the fact that Jiménez would usually have been watching it from a leather scoop chair whose swivel base when lifted revealed a circular mark on the parquet. The killer had incapacitated Jiménez, swivelled the leather chair, which was unsuitable for his purposes, and moved one of the high-backed guest chairs so that he could shift the body in one turning movement. The killer had then secured the wrists to the arms of the chair, stripped the socks off the feet, stuffed them in Jiménez’s mouth and secured the ankles. He then manoeuvred the chair by pivoting it on its legs until he achieved the ideal position.