The Hidden Assassins

‘A minimum of two,’ said Ferrera.

‘Killing, scalping, severing hands, burning off features with acid…yes, why did they cut off his hands when they could have easily burnt off his prints with acid?’

‘Something significant about his hands,’ said Pérez.

Falcón and Ferrera exchanged a look.

‘Keep thinking, Emilio,’ said Falcón. ‘Anyway, it was planned and premeditated and it was important that his identity was not known. Why?’

‘Because the identity of the corpse will point to the killers,’ said Pérez. ‘Most victims are killed by people—’

‘Or?’ said Falcón. ‘If there was no obvious link?’

‘The identity of the victim and/or knowledge of his skills might jeopardize a future operation,’ said Ferrera.

‘Good. Now tell me how many people you really think it took to dispose of that body in one of those bins,’ said Falcón. ‘They’re chest high to a normal person and the whole thing has got to be done in seconds.’

‘Three to deal with the body and two for lookout,’ said Pérez.

‘If you tipped the bin over to the edge of the car boot it could be done with two men,’ said Ferrera. ‘Anybody coming down Calle Boteros at that time would be drunk and shouting. You might need a driver in the car. Three maximum.’

‘Three or five, what does that tell you?’

‘It’s a gang,’ said Pérez.

‘Doing what?’

‘Drugs?’ he said. ‘Cutting off his hands, burning off his face…’

‘Drug runners don’t normally sew people into shrouds,’ said Falcón. ‘They tend to shoot people and there was no bullet hole…not even a knife wound.’

‘It didn’t seem like an execution,’ said Ferrera, ‘more like a regrettable necessity.’

Falcón told them they were to revisit all the apartments overlooking the bins first thing in the morning before everybody went to work. They were to establish if there was black plastic sheeting in any of the bins and if a car was seen or heard at around three in the morning on Sunday.

Down in the forensic lab, Felipe and Jorge had the tables pushed back and the black plastic sheet laid out on the floor. The two large bins from Calle Boteros were already in the corner, taped shut. Jorge was at a microscope while Felipe was on all fours on the plastic sheet, wearing his custom-made magnifying spectacles.

‘We’ve got a blood group match from the victim to the white shroud and to the black plastic sheet. We hope to have a DNA match by tomorrow morning,’ said Jorge. ‘It looks to me as if they put him face down on the plastic to do the surgery.’ He gave Falcón the measurements between a saliva deposit and some blood deposits and two pubic hairs which all conformed to the victim’s height.

‘We’re running DNA tests on those, too,’ he said.

‘What about the acid on the face?’

‘That must have been done elsewhere and rinsed off. There’s no sign of it.’

‘Any prints?’

‘No fingerprints, just a footprint in the top left quadrant,’ said Felipe. ‘Jorge has matched it to a Nike trainer, as worn by thousands of people.’

‘Are you going to be able to look at those bins tonight?’

‘We’ll take a look, but if he was well wrapped up I don’t hold out much hope for blood or saliva,’ said Felipe.

‘Have you run a check on missing persons?’ asked Jorge.

‘We don’t even know if he was Spanish yet,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m seeing the Médico Forense tomorrow morning. Let’s hope there are some distinguishing marks.’

‘His pubic hair was dark,’ said Jorge, grinning. ‘And his blood group was O positive…if that’s any help?’

‘Keep up the brilliant work,’ said Falcón.

It was still raining, but in a discouragingly sensible way after the reckless madness of the initial downpour. Falcón did some paperwork with his mind elsewhere. He turned away from his computer and stared at the reflection of his office in the dark window. The fluorescent light shivered. Pellets of rain drummed against the glass as if a lunatic wanted to attract his attention. Falcón was surprised at himself. He’d been such a scientific investigator in the past, always keen to get his hands on autopsy reports and forensic evidence. Now he spent more time tuning in to his intuition. He tried to persuade himself that it was experience but sometimes it seemed like laziness. A buzz from his mobile jolted him: a text from his current girlfriend, Laura, inviting him to dinner. He looked down at the screen and found himself unconsciously rubbing the arm which had made contact with Consuelo’s body in the entrance of the café. He hesitated as he reached for the mobile to reply. Why, suddenly, was everything so much more complicated? He’d wait until he got back home.

The traffic was slow in the rain. The radio news commented on the successful parading of the Virgin of Rocío, which had taken place that day. Falcón crossed the river and joined the metal snake heading north. He sat at the traffic lights and scribbled a note without thinking before filtering right down Calle Reyes Católicos. From there he drove into the maze of streets where he lived in the massive, rambling house he’d inherited six years ago. He parked up between the orange trees that led to the entrance of the house on Calle Bailén but didn’t get out. He was wrestling with his uneasiness again and this time it was to do with Consuelo—what he’d seen in her face that morning. They’d both been startled, but it hadn’t just been shock that had registered in her eyes. It was anguish.

He got out of the car, opened the smaller door within the brass-studded oak portal and went through to the patio, where the marble flags still glistened from the rain. A blinking light beyond the glass door to his study told him that he had two phone messages. He hit the button and stood in the dark looking out through the cloister at the bronze running boy in the fountain. The voice of his Moroccan friend, Yacoub Diouri, filled the room. He greeted Javier in Arabic and then slipped into perfect Spanish. He was flying to Madrid on his way to Paris next weekend and wondered if they could meet up. Was that coincidence or synchronicity? The only reason he’d met Yacoub Diouri, one of the few men he’d become close to, was because of Consuelo Jiménez. That was the thing about intuition, you began to believe that everything had significance.

The second message was from Laura, who still wanted to know if he would be coming for dinner that night; it would be just the two of them. He smiled at that. His relationship with Laura was not exclusive. She had other male companions she saw regularly and that had suited him…until now when, for no apparent reason, it was different. Paella and spending the night with Laura suddenly seemed ridiculous.

He called her and said that he wouldn’t be able to make dinner but that he would drop by for a drink later.

There was no food in the house. His housekeeper had assumed he would go out for dinner. He hadn’t eaten all day. The body on the dump had interrupted his lunch plans and ruined his appetite. Now he was hungry. He went for a walk. The streets were fresh after the rain and full of people. He didn’t really start thinking where he was going until he found himself heading round the back of the Omnium Sanctorum church. Only then did he admit that he was going to eat at Consuelo’s new restaurant.

The waiter brought him a menu and he ordered immediately. The pan de casa arrived quickly; thinly sliced ham sitting on a spread of salmorejo on toast. He enjoyed it with a beer. Feeling suddenly bold he took out one of his cards and wrote on the back: I am eating here and wondered if you would join me for a glass of wine. Javier. When the waiter came back with the revuelto de setas, scrambled eggs and mushrooms, he poured a glass of red rioja and Javier gave him the card.

Later the waiter returned with some tiny lamb chops and topped up his glass of wine.

‘She’s not in,’ he said. ‘I’ve left the card on her desk so that she knows you were here.’

Falcón knew he was lying. It was one of the few advantages of being a detective. He ate the chops feeling privately foolish that he’d believed in the synchronicity of the moment. He sipped at his third glass of wine and ordered coffee. By 10.40 p.m. he was out in the street again. He leaned against the wall opposite the entrance to the restaurant, thinking that he might catch her on the way out.

As he stood there waiting patiently he covered a lot of ground in his head. It was amazing how little thought he’d given to his inner life since he’d stopped seeing his shrink four years ago.

And when, an hour later, he gave up his vigil he knew precisely what he was going to do. He was determined to finish his superficial relationship with Laura and, if his world of work would let him, he would devote himself to bringing Consuelo back into his life.

2

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

Consuelo Jiménez was sitting in the office of her flagship restaurant, in the heart of La Macarena, the old working-class neighbourhood of Seville. She was in a state of heightened anxiety and the three heavy shots of The Macallan, which she’d taken to drinking at this time of night, were doing nothing to alleviate it. Her state had not been improved by bumping into Javier early in the day and it had been made worse by the knowledge that he’d been eating his dinner barely ten metres from where she was now sitting. His card lay on the desk in front of her.

She was in possession of a terrible clarity about her mental and physical state. She was not somebody who, having fallen into a trough of despair, lost control of her life and plunged unconsciously into an orgy of self-destruction. She was more meticulous than that, more detached. So detached that at times she’d found herself looking down on her own blonde head as the mind beneath stumbled about in the wreckage of her inner life. It was a very strange state to be in: physically in good shape for her age, mentally still very focused on her business, beautifully turned out as always, but…how to put this? She had no words for what was happening inside her. All she had to describe it was an image from a TV documentary on global warming: vital elements of an ancient glacier’s primitive structure had melted in some unusually fierce summer heat and, without warning, a vast tonnage of ice had collapsed in a protracted roar into a lake below. She knew, from the ghastly plummet in her own organs, that she was watching a pre-figurement of what might happen to her unless she did something fast.

The whisky glass travelled to her mouth and back to the desk, transported by a hand that she did not feel belonged to her. She was grateful for the ethereal sting of the alcohol because it reminded her that she was still sentient. She was playing with a business card, turning it over and over, rubbing the embossed name and profession with her thumb. Her manager knocked and came in.

‘We’re finished now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be locking up in five minutes. There’s nothing left to do here…you should go home.’

‘That man who was here earlier, one of the waiters said he was outside. Are you sure he’s gone?’

‘I’m sure,’ said the manager.

‘I’ll let myself out of the side door,’ she said, giving him one of her hard, professional looks.

He backed off. Consuelo was sorry. He was a good man, who knew when a person needed help and also when that help was unacceptable. What was going on inside Consuelo was too personal to be sorted out in an after-hours chat between proprietor and manager. This wasn’t about unpaid bills or difficult clients. This was about…everything.

She went back to the card. It belonged to a clinical psychologist called Alicia Aguado. Over the last eighteen months Consuelo had made six appointments with this woman and failed to turn up for any of them. She’d given a different name each time she’d made these appointments, but Alicia Aguado had recognized her voice from the first call. Of course she would. She was blind, and the blind develop other senses. On the last two occasions Alicia Aguado had said: ‘If ever you have to see me, you must call. I will fit you in whenever—early morning or late at night. You must realize that I am always here when you need me.’ That had shocked Consuelo. Alicia Aguado knew. Even Consuelo’s iciest professional tone had betrayed her need for help.

The hand reached for the bottle and refilled the glass. The whisky vaporized into her mind. She also knew why she wanted to see this particular psychologist: Alicia Aguado had treated Javier Falcón. When she’d run into him in the street, it had been like a reminder. But a reminder of what? The ‘fling’ she’d had with him? She only called it a fling because that’s what it looked like from the outside—some days of dinners and wild sex. But she’d broken it off because…She writhed in her chair at the memory. What reason had she given him? Because she was hopeless when in love? She turned into somebody else when she got into a relationship? Whatever it was, she’d invented something unanswerable, refused to see him or answer his calls. And now he was back like an extra motivation.

She hadn’t been able to ignore a recent and more worrying psychological development, which had started to occur in the brief moments when she wasn’t working with her usual fierce, almost manic, drive. When distracted or tired at the end of the day sex would come into her mind, but like a midnight intruder. She imagined herself having new and vital affairs with strangers. Her fantasies drifted towards rough, possibly dangerous men and assumed pornographic dimensions, with herself at the centre of almost unimaginable goings on. She’d always hated porn, had found it both disgustingly biological and boring, but now, however much she tried to fight it with her intelligence, she was aware of her arousal: saliva in her mouth, the constriction of her throat. And it was happening again, now, even with her mind apparently engaged. She kicked back her chair, tossed Aguado’s card into the gaping hole of her handbag, lunged at her cigarettes, lit up and paced the office floor, smoking too fast and hard.

These imaginings disgusted her. Why was she thinking about such trash? Why not think about her children? Her three darling boys—Ricardo, Matías and Darío—asleep at home in the care of a nanny. In the care of a nanny! She had promised that she would never do that. After Raúl, her husband, their father, had been murdered she had been determined to give them all her attention so that they would never feel the lack of a parent. And look at her now—thinking of fucking while they were at home in another person’s care. She didn’t deserve to be a mother. She tore her handbag off the desk. Javier’s card fluttered to the floor.

She wanted to be out in the open, breathing the rain-rinsed air. The five or six shots of The Macallan she’d drunk meant that she had to walk up to the Basilica Macarena to get a taxi. To do this she had to pass the Plaza del Pumarejo, where a bunch of drunks and addicts hung out all day, every day, and well into the night. The plaza, under a canopy of trees still dripping from the earlier storm, had a raised platform with a closed kiosk at one end and at the other, near the shuttered Bodega de Gamacho, a group of a dozen or so burntout cases.

The air was cool around Consuelo’s bare legs, which were numbed by the whisky. She had not considered how obtrusive her peach-coloured satin suit would be under the street lamps. She walked behind the kiosk and along the pavement by the old Palacio del Pumarejo. Some of the group were standing and boozing, gathered around a man who was talking, while others slumped on benches in a stupor.

The wiry central figure in a black shirt open to the waist was familiar to Consuelo. His talk to this unsavoury audience was more of an oration, because he had a politician’s way with words. He had long black hair, eyebrows angled sharply into his nose and a lean, hard, pockmarked face. She knew why the group around him hung on his words and it had nothing to do with the content. It was because under those satanic eyebrows he had very bright, light green eyes, which stared out of his dark face, alarming whoever they settled on. They gave the powerful impression of a man who had quick access to a blade. He drank from a bottle of cheap wine, which hung by his side with his forefinger plugged into its neck.

A month ago, while Consuelo was waiting to cross the road at a traffic light, he’d approached her from behind and muttered words of such obscenity that they’d entered her mind like a shiv. Consuelo had remonstrated loudly when it happened. But, unlike the usual perpetrators, who would slink off into the crowds of shoppers, ignoring her, he’d got up close and silenced her with those green eyes and a quick wink, that made her think he knew something about her that she, herself, did not.

‘I know your sort,’ he’d said, and touched the corner of his mouth with the point of his tongue.

His bravado had paralysed her vocal cords. That and the horrible little kiss he’d blown her, which found its way to her neck like a horsefly.

Consuelo, distracted by these memories, had slowed to a halt. A member of the group spotted her and jerked his head in her direction. The orator stepped towards the railing holding the bottle up, letting it dangle from his forefinger.

‘Fancy a drink?’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any glasses, but I’ll let you suck it off my finger if you want.’

A low, gurgling laugh came from the group, which included some women. Startled, Consuelo began walking again. The man jumped off the raised platform. The steel tips on the heels of his boots hammered the cobbles. He blocked her path and started to dance an extremely suggestive Sevillana, with much pelvic thrusting. The group backed him up with some flamenco clapping.

‘Come on, Doña Consuelo,’ he said. ‘Let’s see you move. You look as if you’ve got a decent pair of legs on you.’

She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herself in such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong—potentially violent.

The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.

‘Fucking hell, Doña Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,’ he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. ‘Now you’re leading me astray down this dark alley. For God’s sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don’t go showing your eagerness so early on. We’ve barely met, we haven’t even danced.’

Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she’d be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall, whose whitewash hung off in brittle flakes, and crackled as her cheek made contact. Her heart thundered in her chest.

‘Have you been watching me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said, his face appearing over her shoulder, the sourness of his winy breath in her nostrils. ‘Have you been keeping a little eye out for me? Perhaps…since you lost your husband your bed’s been a bit cold at night.’

She gasped as he slipped his hand between her bare legs. It was rough. An automatic reflex clamped her thighs shut. He sawed his hand up to her crotch. A voice in her head remonstrated with her for being so stupid. Her heart walloped in her throat while her brain screamed for her to say something.

‘If it’s money you want…’ she said, in a voice that whispered to the flaking whitewash.

‘Well,’ he said, pulling his hand away, ‘how much have you got? I don’t come cheap, you know. Especially for the sort of thing you like.’

He took her handbag off her shoulder, flipped it open and found her wallet.

‘A hundred and twenty euros!’ he said, disgusted.

‘Take it,’ she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.

‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. ‘But that’s not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.’

He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.

He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.

‘Fuck off, whore,’ he said. ‘You make me sick.’

The steel tips receded. Consuelo’s throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he’d gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away from the wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she’d managed to get into her mouth. The driver lit it for her.

At home she found money in her desk to pay for the taxi. She ran upstairs and checked the boys in their beds. She went to her own room and stripped off and looked at herself in the mirror. He hadn’t marked her. She showered endlessly, soaping and resoaping herself, rinsing herself again and again.

She went back to her desk in her dressing gown and sat in the dark, feeling nauseous, head aching, waiting for dawn. When it was the earliest possible acceptable moment, she phoned Alicia Aguado and asked for an emergency appointment.

3

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

Juez Esteban Calderón was not on business. The urbane and highly successful judge had told his wife, Inés, that he was working late before going to dinner with a group of young state judges who had come down from Madrid on a training course. He had worked late and he had gone to the dinner, but he’d excused himself early and was now taking his favourite little detour down the side of the San Marcos church to reach ‘the penthouse of promise’, which overlooked the church of Santa Isabel. He usually enjoyed smoking a cigarette at the edge of the small, floodlit plaza, looking from within the darkness at the fountain and the massive portal of the church. It calmed him after long days spent with prosecutors and policemen and kept him out of the way of some bars around the corner, which were frequented by colleagues. If they saw him there it would get back to Inés and there’d be awkward questions. He also needed a few moments to rein in his quivering sexual tension, which started every morning when he woke up and imagined the long coppery hair and mulatto skin of his Cuban girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, who lived in the penthouse just visible from where he was sitting.

His cigarette hissed in a puddle where he’d tossed it, half smoked. He took off his jacket. A breeze sprayed droplets of water from the orange trees on to his back, and he caught his breath at the lash of its sudden chill. He kept to the wall of the church until he was in the darkness of the narrow street. His finger hovered over the top button of the entry phone as an accumulation of half thoughts made him hesitate: subterfuge, infidelity, fear, sex, dizziness and death. He scratched at the air above the button; these unusual thoughts made him feel that he was on the brink of something like a great change. What to do? Either step over the edge or fall back. He swallowed some thick, bitter saliva from his fast smoking. The sensuality of the lash of raindrops across his back reached that nexus of nerves in the base of his spine. The unease disappeared. His recklessness made him feel alive again and his cock leapt in his pants. He hit the buzzer.