The three men turned simultaneously to the window because they’d heard muted voices from behind the double-glazing and a mechanical sound like a lift. Beyond the rail of the balcony two men in blue overalls slowly appeared, one with long black hair tied in a ponytail and the other crew cut with a black eye. They were shouting to the team eighteen metres below who were operating the lifting gear.

‘Who are those idiots?’ asked Felipe.

Falcón went out on to the balcony, startling the two men standing on the platform, which had just been raised up a railed ladder from a truck in the street.

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘We’re the removals company,’ they said, and turned their backs to show yellow stencils on their overalls which read Mudanzas Triana Transportes Nacionales e Internacionales.

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

Juez Esteban Calderón signed off the levantamiento del cadáver, which had uncovered another piece of baggable evidence. Underneath the body was a piece of cotton rag, a sniff indicated traces of chloroform.

‘A mistake,’ said Falcón.

‘Inspector Jefe?’ questioned Ramírez, at his elbow.

‘The first mistake in a planned operation.’

‘What about the hairs, Inspector Jefe?’

‘If those hairs belonged to the killer … shedding it was an accident. Leaving a chloroform-soaked rag was an error. He put Raúl Jiménez out with the chloroform, didn’t want to put the rag in his pocket, threw it on the chair and then dumped Don Raúl on top of it. Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘It’s not such an important clue …”

‘It’s an indication of the mind we’re working against. This is a careful mind but not a professional one. He might be slack in other areas, like where he got the chloroform. Maybe he bought it here in Seville from a medical or laboratory supplies shop or stole it from a hospital or a chemist. The killer has thought obsessively about what he wants to do to his victim but not all the details around it.’

‘Sra Jiménez has been located and informed. A car will drop the kids at her sister’s house in San Bernardo and bring her on alone.’

‘When will the Médico Forense do the autopsy?’ asked Falcón.

‘Do you want to be there?’ asked Calderón, weighing his mobile. ‘He said that he was going to do it immediately.’

‘Not particularly,’ said Falcón. ‘I just want the results. There’s a lot to do here. This film, for instance. I think we should all watch the La Familia Jiménez movie now before Sra Jiménez arrives. Is there anybody else from the squad here, Inspector?’

‘Fernández is talking to the conserje, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Tell him to collect all the tapes from the security cameras, view them with the conserje and make a note of anybody he doesn’t recognize.’

Ramírez made for the door.

‘And another thing … find somebody to check all the hospitals, laboratories and medical supply shops for chloroform sold to odd people or missing bottles of the stuff. And surgical instruments, too.’

Falcón rolled the TV/video cabinet back to its normal position in the corner of the room. Calderón sat in the leather scoop chair. Falcón plugged the equipment back in. Ramírez stood by the dead man’s chair, which was wrapped in plastic, ready to be taken down to the Policía Científica laboratories. He murmured into his mobile. Calderón ejected the tape, inspected the reels, put it back in and hit the rewind button.

‘The removals men are still here, Inspector Jefe.’

‘There’s no one to talk to them now. Let them wait.’

Calderón hit ‘play’. They took seats around the room and watched in the sealed silence of the empty apartment. The footage opened with a shot of the Jiménez family coming out of the Edificio Presidente apartment building. Raúl and Consuelo Jiménez were arm in arm. She was in an ankle-length fur coat and he was in a caramel overcoat. The boys were all dressed identically in green and burgundy. They walked straight towards the camera, which was across the street from them, and turned left into Calle Asunción. The film cut to the same family group in different clothes on a sunny day coming out of the Corte Inglés department store on La Plaza del Duque de la Victoria. They crossed the road into the square, which was full of stalls selling cheap jewellery and shawls, CDs, leather bags and wallets. The group disappeared into Marks & Spencer’s. The family group were shown again and again until two of the three men were stifling yawns amidst the shopping malls, the beach gatherings, the paseos in the Plaza de España and the Parque de María Luisa.

‘Is he just showing us he did his homework?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Impressively dull, isn’t it?’ said Falcón, not finding it so, finding himself oddly fascinated by the altering dynamics of the family group in the different locations. He was drawn to the idea of the family, especially this apparently happy one, and what it would be like to have one himself, which led him to think how it was that he had singularly failed in this capacity.

Only a change in the direction of the movie snapped him back. It was the first piece of footage where the family didn’t appear as a group. Raúl Jiménez and his boys were at the Betis football stadium on a day when, it was clear from the scarves, they were playing Sevilla — the local derby.

‘I remember that day,’ said Calderón.

‘We lost 4–0,’ said Ramírez.

‘You lost,’ said Calderón. ‘We won.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ramírez.

‘Who do you support, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Calderón.

Falcón didn’t react. No interest. Ramírez glanced over his shoulder, uncomfortable with his presence.

The camera cut to the Edificio Presidente. Consuelo Jiménez on her own, getting into a taxi. Cut to her paying the taxi off in a tree-lined street, waiting some moments while the car pulled away before crossing the road and walking up several steps to a house.

‘Where’s that?’ asked Calderón.

‘He’ll tell us,’ said Falcón.

A series of cuts showed Consuelo Jiménez arriving at the same house on different days, in different clothes. Then the house number — 17. And the street name — Calle Río de la Plata.

‘That’s in El Porvenir,’ said Ramírez.

‘This is the future,’ said Calderón. ‘I think we have a lover here.’

Cut to night-time and the rear of a large E-Class Mercedes with a Seville number plate. The image held for some time.

‘He doesn’t move his plot on very well,’ said Calderón, reaching his boredom threshold quickly.

‘Suspense,’ said Falcón.

Finally Raúl Jiménez got out of the car, locked it, stepped out of the street lighting and into the dark. Cut to a fire burning in the night, figures standing around the leaping flames. Women in short skirts, some with their suspenders and stocking tops showing. One of them turned, bent over and put her bottom to the fire.

Raúl Jiménez appeared at the edge of the fire. An inaudible discussion ensued. He strode back to the Mercedes with one of the women following, stumbling in her high heels over the rough ground.

‘That’s the Alameda,’ said Ramírez.

‘Only the cheapest for Raúl Jiménez,’ said Falcón.

Jiménez pushed the girl into the back seat, holding her head down as if she were a police suspect. He looked up and around and followed her in. The frame held the rear door of the Mercedes, shadowy movements beyond the glass. No more than a minute passed and Jiménez got out of the car, straightened his fly and held out a note to the girl, who took it. Jiménez got back into the driver’s seat. The car pulled away. The girl spat a fat gob on to the dirt, cleared her throat and spat again.

‘That was quick,’ said Ramírez, predictable.

More night-time footage followed. The pattern was the same, until an abrupt change of scene put the camera in a corridor with light falling into it from an open door at the end on the left. The camera moved down the corridor gradually revealing a lighter square on the wall at the end with a hook above it. The three men were suddenly transfixed, as they knew they were looking at the corridor outside the room where they were sitting. Ramírez’s hand twitched in that direction. The camera shook. The suspense tightened as the three lawmen’s heads surged with the horror of what they might be about to see. The camera reached the edge of light, its microphone picked up some groaning from the room, a shuddering, whimpering moan of someone who might be in terrible agony. Falcón wanted to swallow but his throat refused. He had no spit.

‘Joder,’ said Ramírez, to break the tension.

The camera panned and they were in the room. Falcón was so spooked that he half expected to see the three of them sitting there, watching the box. The camera focused first on the TV, which, at this remove, was running with waves and flickering but not so much that they couldn’t see the graphic performance of a woman masturbating and felating a man whose bare buttocks clenched and unclenched in time.

The camera pulled back to a wide shot, Falcón still blinking at the confusion of sound and expected image. Kneeling on the Persian carpet looking up at the TV screen was Raúl Jiménez, shirt-tails hanging over his backside, socks halfway up his calves and his trousers in a pile behind him. On all fours in front of him was a girl with long black hair, whose still head informed Falcón that she was staring at a fixed point, thinking herself elsewhere. She was making the appropriate encouraging noises. Then her head began to turn and the camera spun wildly out of the room.

Falcón was on his feet, thighs crashing into the edge of the desk.

‘He was there,’ he said. ‘He was … I mean, he was here all the time.’

Ramírez and Calderón jerked in their seats at Falcón’s outburst. Calderón ran his hand through his hair, visibly shaken. He checked the door from where the camera had just been looking into the room. Falcón’s mind bolted, didn’t know what it was looking at any more. Image or reality. He started, went on to his back foot, tried to shake his vision free of what was in his head. There was someone standing in the doorway. Falcón pinched his eyes shut, reopened them. He knew this person. Time decelerated. Calderón crossed the room with his hand out.

‘Señora Jiménez,’ he said. ‘Juez Esteban Calderón, I am sorry for your loss.’

He introduced Ramírez and Falcón, and Sra Jiménez, with mustered dignity, stepped into the room as if over a dead body. She shook hands with the men.

‘We weren’t expecting you so soon,’ said Calderón.

‘The traffic was light,’ she said. ‘Did I startle you, Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón adjusted his face, which must have had the remnants of that earlier wildness.

‘What was that you were watching?’ she asked, assuming control of the situation, used to it.

They looked at the screen. Snow and white noise.

‘We weren’t expecting you … ‘ started Calderón.

‘But what was it, Señor Juez? This is my apartment. I should like to know what you were looking at on my television.’

With Calderón taking the pressure, Falcón watched at leisure and, although he was sure he didn’t know her, he at least knew the type. This was the sort of woman who would have turned up at his father’s house, when the great man was still alive, looking to buy one of his late works. Not the special stuff, which had made him famous. That was long gone to American collectors and museums around the world. This type was looking to buy the more affordable Seville work — the details of buildings: a door, a church dome, a window, a balcony. She would have been one of those tasteful women, with or without tiresome wealthy husband in tow, who wanted to have their slice of the old man.

‘We were watching a video, which had been left in the apartment,’ said Calderón.

‘Not one of my husband’s … ‘ she said, hesitating perfectly to let them know that ‘dirty’ or ‘blue’ was unnecessary. ‘We had few secrets … and I did happen to see the last few seconds of what you were watching.’

‘It was a video, Doña Consuelo,’ said Falcón, ‘which had been left here by your husband’s murderer. We are the three officers of the law who will be running the investigation into your husband’s death and I thought it important that we saw the film as soon as possible. Had we known that you would be so prompt …’

‘Do I know you, Inspector Jefe?’ she asked. ‘Have we met?’

She turned to face him full on, her dark fur-collared coat open, a black dress underneath. Not someone to be inappropriately dressed for any occasion. She gave him the full force of her attractiveness. Her blonde hair was not quite so structured as in the desk photograph but the eyes were bigger, bluer and icier in reality. Her lips, which controlled and manipulated her dominating voice, were edged with a dark line just in case you might be foolish enough to think that her soft, pliable mouth could be disobeyed.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘Falcón … ‘ she said, feeling the rings on her fingers as she looked him up and down. ‘No, it’s too ridiculous.’

‘What is, may I ask, Doña Consuelo?’

‘That the artist, Francisco Falcón, should have a son who is the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios de Sevilla.’

She knows, he thought … God knows how.

‘So … this film,’ she said, turning on Ramírez, sweeping her coat back and fitting her fists into her waist.

Calderón’s eyes flashed across her breasts before they locked on to Falcón over her left shoulder. Falcón shook his head slowly.

‘I don’t think this is something you should see, Doña Consuelo,’ said the young judge.

‘Why? Is it violent? I don’t like violence,’ she said, without unfixing Ramírez from her gaze.

‘Not physically,’ said Falcón. ‘I think you might find it uncomfortably intrusive.’

The reels of the video squeaked. It was still playing. Sra Jiménez picked up the remote from the corner of the desk and rewound the tape. She pressed ‘play’. None of the men intervened. Falcón shifted to catch her face. Her eyes narrowed, she pursed her lips and gnawed at the inside of her cheek. Her eyes opened as the silent film played. Her face slackened, her body recoiled from the screen as she began to realize what she was watching, as she saw her children and herself become the study of her husband’s killer. When they reached the end of her first taxi ride, to what everybody now knew was 17 Calle Río de la Plata, she stopped the tape, threw the remote at the desk and walked swiftly from the room. The men tossed silence between them until they heard Sra Jiménez retching, groaning and spitting in her halogen-lit, white marble bathroom.

‘You should have stopped her,’ said Calderón, pushing his hand through his hair again, trying to shift some of the responsibility. The two policemen said nothing. The judge looked at his complicated watch and announced his departure. They agreed to meet after lunch, five o’clock in the Edificio de los Juzgados, to present their initial findings.

‘Did you see that photograph on the end there by the window?’ asked Falcón.

‘The one of León and Bellido?’ said Calderón. ‘Yes, I did, and if you look a bit closer you’ll see there’s one of the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla in there, too. Old hawk eyes, Spinola, himself.’

‘There’s going to be some pressure on this case,’ said Ramírez.

Calderón chucked his mobile from one hand to the other, slipped it in his pocket and left.

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

Falcón told Ramírez to interview the removals men — specifically to ask them when they arrived and left, and whether their gear was unattended at any stage.

‘You think that’s how he got in?’ asked Ramírez, the man incapable of just doing something.

‘This is not an easy building to get into and out of without being seen,’ said Falcón. ‘If the maid confirms that the door was double locked when she arrived this morning, it’s possible he used the lifting gear to get in. If it wasn’t then we’ll have to scrutinize the closed-circuit tapes.’

‘That takes a lot of nerve, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez, ‘to wait in here for more than twelve hours.’

‘And then slip out when the maid came in to find the body.’

Ramírez bit his bottom lip, unconvinced that that sort of steel in a man existed. He left the room as if more questions were about to turn him back.

Falcón sat at Raúl Jiménez’s desk. All the drawers were locked. He tried a key from a set on the desk, which opened all the drawers down both sides, while another opened the central one. Only the top two drawers on either side had anything in them. Falcón flicked through a stack of bills, all recent. One caught his attention, not because it was a vet’s bill for a dog’s vaccinations, and there had been no evidence of any dog, but rather that it was his sister’s practice and it was her signature on the bill. It unnerved him, which was illogical. He dismissed it as another non-coincidence.

He went through the central drawer, which contained several empty Viagra packets and four videos. From their titles, they seemed to be blue movies. They included Cara o Culo II, the sequel to the video whose slipcase had been left empty on the TV cabinet. It occurred to him that they hadn’t found the porn video that was showing on the TV while Raúl was with the prostitute. He shut the drawer. He began a detailed inspection of the photographs behind him. He thought that Raúl Jiménez might have known his father. He was, after all, a famous painter, a well-known figure in Seville society, and Jiménez seemed to be a celebrity collector. As he worked his way from the centre out to the edges he realized that this was a collection of a different order of celebrity. There was Carlos Lozano, the presenter of El Precio Justo. Juan Antonio Ruiz, known in the bullring as ‘Espartaco’. Paula Vázquez, the presenter of Euromillón. They were all TV faces. There were no writers, painters, poets, or theatre directors. No anonymous intellectuals. This was the superficial face of Spain, the Hola! crowd. And when it wasn’t, it was the bourgeoisie. The police, the lawmen, the functionaries who would make Raúl Jiménez’s life easier. The glamour and the graft.

‘Did you find who you were looking for?’ asked Sra Jiménez from behind him.

She was out of her coat, wearing a black cardigan and leaning against a guest chair. Her eyes were pink-rimmed despite the make-up repair.

‘I’m sorry you saw that,’ he said, nodding at the television.

‘I’d been warned,’ she said, taking a packet of Marlboro Lights out of her cardigan pocket and lighting one with a Bic from the desk. She threw the pack on the desk, offering him one. He shook his head. Falcón was used to this ritual sizing up. He didn’t mind. It gave him time, too.

He saw a woman about the same age as himself and well groomed, maybe over groomed. There was a lot of jewellery on her fingers whose nails were too long and too pink. Her earrings clustered on her lobes, winking from the nest of her blonde helmet. The make-up, even for a repair job, was heavily slapped on. The cardigan was the only simple thing about her. The black dress would have worked well had it not had a hem of lace which, rather than bringing grief to mind, brought sex awkwardly into contention. She had square shoulders and an uplifted bust and was full-bodied with no extra fat. There was something of the health club fitness regime about her, the way the straps of muscle in her neck framed her larynx and her calf muscles were delineated beneath her black stockings. She was what the English would call handsome.

She saw a fit man in a perfectly cut suit with all his hair, which had gone prematurely grey but belonged to a class of person who would never think of returning it to its original black. He wore lace-up shoes and the tightness of the bows led her to believe that this was someone who rarely unbuttoned his jacket. The handkerchief in his breast pocket she assumed was always there but never used. She imagined that he had a lot of ties and that he wore them all the time, even at weekends, possibly in bed. She saw a man who was contained, trussed and bound. He did not give out, which may have been a professional attitude but she thought not. She did not see a Sevillano, not a natural one anyway.

‘You said earlier, Doña Consuelo, that you and your husband had few secrets.’

‘We should sit,’ she said, pointing him into her husband’s desk chair with her cigarette fingers and pivoting the guest chair round with some dexterity. She sat quickly, slipped sideways on to one of the arms and crossed her legs so that the lace hem rode up her calf.

‘Are you married, Inspector Jefe?’

‘This is an investigation into your husband’s murder,’ he said flatly.

‘It’s relevant.’

‘I was married,’ he said.

She smoked and counted her fingers with her thumb.

‘You didn’t need to tell me that,’ she said. ‘You could have left it at “Yes”.’

‘These are games we should not be playing,’ he said. ‘Every hour that goes past takes us an hour away from your husband’s death. These hours are important. They count more than the hours, say, in three or four days’ time.’

‘You’ve separated from your wife?’ she said.

‘Doña Consuelo …’

‘I’ll be quick,’ she said, and batted the smoke away from between them.

‘We are separated.’

‘After how long?’

‘Eighteen months.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘She’s a public prosecutor. I met her at the Palacio de Justicia.’

‘So, a union of truth hunters,’ she said, and Falcón searched her for irony.

‘We are not making progress, Doña Consuelo.’

‘I think we are.’

‘I might be satisfying your curiosity …’

‘It’s more than curiosity.’

‘You are reversing the procedure. It is I who have to find out about you.’

‘To see whether I killed my husband,’ she said. ‘Or had him killed.’

Silence.

‘You see, Inspector Jefe, you’re going to find out everything about us, you’re going to dig into our lives. You’re going to strip down my husband’s business affairs, you’re going to probe his private life, uncover his little uglinesses — his blue movies, his cheap whores, his cheap … cheap cigarettes.’

She leaned over and picked up the pack of Celtas and threw them across the desk so that they skidded into Falcón’s lap.

‘And you won’t let me alone. I’ll be your prime suspect. You saw that horrible thing,’ she said, waving at the television behind her.

‘Number 17 Calle Río de la Plata?’

‘Exactly. My lover, Inspector Jefe. You’ll be talking to him too, no doubt.’

‘What’s his name?’ he asked, getting out his pen and notebook for the first time, down to business at last.

‘He is the third son of the Marqués de Palmera. His name is Basilio Tomás Lucena.’

Did he detect pride in that? He wrote it down.

‘How old is he?’

‘Thirty-six, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You’ve started before I’ve finished.’

‘This is progress.’

‘Did she meet somebody else?’

‘Who?’