The Blind Man of Seville

Jiménez sat sideways in his chair, one leg crossed over the other. He flexed his hand open and shut. Falcón thought he might want to know what had happened to Raúl, but didn’t want to ask.

‘The evil mind has a deep understanding of human nature,’ said Jiménez, after some moments. ‘It is a mind quite happy pottering about amongst revenge and betrayal, nurturing them. It knows instinctively where and how to strike and reach the very heart of … things. They didn’t kill my father, which would probably have been just. They didn’t rape and murder my mother or my sister or me, which would have been unjust and cruel. They did the one thing that they knew would successfully tear my father’s family apart. They took Arturo. They just took him one day and we never heard from him or them ever again.’

Jiménez blinked rapidly, lost in the vast wasteland of his incomprehension.

‘You mean they kidnapped him?’

‘On the way to her school Marta would always take Arturo to his. On the way back she would pick him up. One day he wasn’t there and he wasn’t at home either. We scoured the town while my mother called my father at the site. He was six years old. Still a baby really. And they took him.’

Jiménez stared up at his family photographs as if their richness was tainted by this poisonous memory. His bottom lip trembled. His Adam’s apple leapt in his throat.

‘Didn’t the police get anywhere?’ asked Falcón.

‘No,’ said Jiménez, the word coming out like a ghost’s breath.

‘Normally when a child goes missing …’

‘They got nowhere, Inspector Jefe, for the simple reason that they were given no information.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Jiménez leaned across the desk, which creaked; his eyes bulged from his head.

‘My father reported the abduction, told them it was a mystery, and within twenty-four hours we had left Almería,’ said Jiménez. ‘I don’t know whether it was because he was terrified that these people might strike again or whether it was his way of avoiding difficult questions from the authorities, or both. But we left Almería. We spent two weeks in a hotel in Málaga. I was with Marta, who retreated into herself and never spoke another word. My mother and father were next door and the screaming … the tears … My God, it was terrible. Then he moved us all to Seville. We rented some apartment in Triana and then moved into the Plaza de Cuba later in the year. My father had to go back to Almería a few times to wrap up his business and make an appearance in front of the authorities, and that was the end of Arturo.’

‘But what did he say to you, the family? How did he explain it and his bizarre reaction?’

‘He didn’t explain it. He just used his volcanic anger to make us understand that we should all forget Arturo … that Arturo did not exist.’

‘And the kidnappers — are you saying there were no demands …?’

‘You haven’t understood, Inspector Jefe,’ said Jiménez, pushing his pleading hands across the table. ‘There were no demands. That was their price. Arturo was their price.’

‘You’re right. I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it.’

‘Then you are in our club. My dead mother, my mad sister, me, and now you,’ said Jiménez. ‘In that move between Almería and Seville we lost all trace of Arturo. No evidence of him arrived with us. All photos, his clothes, toys, even his bed. My father rewrote family history and left Arturo out. By the time we moved into the apartment in Plaza de Cuba we were like the living dead. My mother stared out of the window all day, looking in the street below, jumping at the glass whenever a small boy appeared. My sister maintained her silence and had to be taken out of the school she’d just been put into. I stayed away from there as much as I could. I lost myself … with new friends, who would never know me as the boy who’d had a younger brother.’

‘Lost yourself?’

‘I think that’s what happened to me. I had a strange inability to recall anything before I was fifteen. Most people have memories as far back as three or four, some even as far back as babies in their prams. I had nothing distinct, just vague hints, shadowy forms of what I’d been … until a few years ago.’

Falcón tried to remember his first memory and couldn’t get much beyond breakfast yesterday.

‘And you have no idea why your father made this devastating decision?’

‘I assume it was something criminal. A serious investigation into Arturo’s abduction would have necessitated major revelations, which presumably would have ruined my father … probably put him in prison. It obviously had something to do with that ugly business in Tangier. There may have been a moral angle to it as well, appalling behaviour of some sort, which might have turned his wife against him. I don’t know. Whatever, my father must have reasoned it out in his own peculiar way, that Arturo would have been in North Africa or certainly in a ship bound for North Africa within hours of his abduction. He must have weighed it up, in his monstrous mind, that the police would have no chance, that he would have no chance.

‘The kidnappers’ message was clear. This is the price for what you’ve done. And now this is your choice: come after him and ruin yourself or accept this heavy price and continue. Don’t you think that the perfection of this terrible choice is in the nature of pure evil? They were saying, Do you want to embrace good or evil? If you are a good man you will come after your son, you will do everything in your power and it will ruin you utterly. You will end up living in exile or prison. Your family will be destroyed. And … this is the horror of it, Inspector Jefe, still you will not get Arturo back. Yes, that was it. That’s what I worked out. They forced him to embrace evil and, having done it, he had to resort to the devil’s means to survive. He persuaded himself and us that Arturo did not exist. He stamped him out and us with him. He forced us to cope with the loss in his way and he destroyed everything. His wife and his family. And this must have been his final calculation: given that Arturo is lost, that my family will be destroyed whatever I do, then what would I prefer?’

Jiménez held up a hand, weighed it, lifted it high and said:

‘The feathery lightness of moral goodness?’

He brought the other hand up and sent it crashing to the desk:

‘Or the golden weight of power, position and wealth?’

Silence while both men contemplated the unevenness of those scales.

‘I thought,’ said Falcón, through the leathery hush of the book-lined room, ‘that we’d outgrown the age of tragedy, an age where there could be tragic figures. We no longer have kings or great warriors who can fall from such heights to such depths. Nowadays we find ourselves admiring screen actors, sportsmen or businessmen, who somehow lack the stuff of tragedy and yet … your father. He strikes me as that rare beast … the modern tragic figure.’

‘I just wish the play had not been my life,’ said Jiménez.

Falcón stood to leave and saw his coffee cold and undrunk on the edge of the desk. He shook Jiménez’s hand for longer than usual to show his appreciation.

‘That was why I had to call you back,’ said Jiménez. ‘I had to speak to my analyst.’

‘To ask permission?’

‘To see if he thought I was ready. He seemed to think it was a good idea that the only other person to hear my family story should be a policeman.’

‘To act on it, you mean?’

‘Because you would be bound by confidentiality,’ said the lawyer seriously.

‘Would you prefer that I didn’t talk to Consuelo about any of this?’

‘Would it serve any purpose other than to frighten her to death?’

‘She has had three children with your father.’

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard.’

‘How did you hear?’

‘My father dropped me a line whenever one appeared.’

‘She had to force him into it. It was a condition of their marriage.’

‘That’s understandable.’

‘She also told me that he was obsessively security conscious. He installed a very serious door in the apartment and made it his business to lock it every night.’

Jiménez stared down at his desk.

‘She told me something else which should interest you …’

Jiménez’s head came up on a very tired neck. There was a trace of fear in his eyes. He didn’t want to hear anything that might demand more revision of his newly constructed view of events. Falcón shrugged to let him off the hook.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘First, she believed her gregarious restaurateur husband, with his collection of smiling photos, to be a man in the grip of abject misery.’

‘So it did get him in the end,’ said Jiménez, with no satisfaction. ‘But he probably didn’t know what it was.’

‘The second thing was a detail of the will. He left some money to his favourite charity, Nuevo Futuro — Los Niños de la Calle.’

Jiménez shook his head, in sadness or denial of the fact, it was difficult to tell. He came round to Falcón’s side of the desk and opened the door. He walked his sled-dragging walk down the corridor. Had he walked differently before his analysis? thought Falcón. Maybe he’d been stooped then, as under a weight, and now at least the baggage was behind him. Jiménez produced Falcón’s coat, helped him into it. A single question rocked in the balance of Falcón’s mind. To ask it or not?

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Falcón, ‘that Arturo might still be alive? Forty-two years old he’d be by now.’

‘It used to,’ he said. ‘But it’s been better for me since I achieved a sense of finality.’

10

Friday, 13th April 2001, the AVE Madrid-Seville

Even this AVE, the late one, which wouldn’t get into Seville until after midnight, was full. As the train shot through the Castillian night, Falcón brushed the crumbs of a bocadillo de chorizo from his lap and stared out of the window through the transparent reflection of the passenger opposite him. Thoughts trickled through his mind, which was tired but still racing from the intrusions he’d made into the Jiménez family.

He’d left José Manuel Jiménez at 3 p.m., having asked if he’d mind him visiting Marta at the San Juan de Dios mental institution in Ciempozuelos, forty kilometres south of the city. The lawyer warned him that it wasn’t likely to be a productive meeting but agreed to phone ahead so that he’d be expected. Jiménez had been right, but not for the reasons he’d thought. Marta had had a fall.

Falcón came across her in the surgery having a couple of stitches put in her eyebrow. She was ashen, which he supposed could have been her normal colouring. Her hair was black and white, wound up and pinned in a bun. Her eyes were set deep in her head and their surrounds were charcoal grey with large purple quarter-circles that reached the top of her cheekbones. It could have been bruising from the fall, but had a more permanent look to it.

A Moroccan male nurse was sitting with her, holding her hand and murmuring in a mixture of Spanish and Arabic, while a female junior doctor stitched the eyebrow which had bled profusely, spattering the hospital-issue clothing. Throughout the operation she held on to something attached to a gold chain round her neck. Falcón assumed it was a cross, but on the one occasion that she released it he saw there was a gold locket and a small key.

She was in a wheelchair. He accompanied the nurse as he pushed her back to the ward, which contained five other women. Four were silent while the fifth maintained a constant murmur of what sounded like prayer but was in fact a stream of obscenities. The Moroccan parked Marta and went to the woman, held her hand, rubbed her back. She quietened.

‘She always becomes agitated at the sight of blood,’ he explained.

The Moroccan’s name was Ahmed. He had a degree in psychology from Casablanca University. His good nature and openness iced over visibly when Falcón showed him his police ID.

‘But what are you doing here?’ asked Ahmed. ‘These people don’t go out. They’re permanent residents, barely capable of the simplest of things. Beyond the gates is as good as another planet to them.’

Falcón looked down on Marta’s salt-and-pepper head, the white pad over her eyebrow, and an immense sadness broke inside his chest. Here was the real casualty of the Jiménez story.

‘Does she understand anything of what we say?’ he asked.

‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If you talked about C-A-T-S, she might react.’

‘What about A-R-T-U-R-O?’

Ahmed’s face settled into a bland wariness, which Falcón had seen before in immigrants under police questioning. The blandness was to minimize any irritation in the officer, the wariness to combat intrusive questioning. It was an attitude that might have worked with Moroccan police, but it annoyed Falcón.

‘Her father has been murdered,’ he said quietly.

Marta coughed once, twice and the third was followed by a stream of vomit, which pooled in her lap and dripped to the floor.

‘She’s in shock from her fall,’ said Ahmed, and moved away.

Falcón sat on the bed, his face level with Marta’s. Vomit clung to some hairs on her chin. She was panting and not looking at him. Her hand still held the locket. Ahmed returned with new clothes and cleaning equipment on a trolley. He screened Marta off. Falcón sat across the room to wait. Under her bed was a small, padlocked metal trunk.

The screens were pulled back and Marta reappeared in new clothes. Falcón walked with Ahmed as he pushed his trolley.

‘Have you ever talked to her about Arturo?’

‘It’s not my job. I’m qualified, but only in my own country. Here I am a nurse. Only the doctor talks to her about Arturo.’

‘Have you been present?’

‘I have not been in attendance, but I have been there.’

‘What’s her reaction to the name?’

Ahmed performed his cleaning tasks on automatic.

‘She becomes very upset. She brings her fingers to her mouth and makes a noise, a kind of desperate pleading noise.’

‘Does she articulate anything?’

‘She is not articulate.’

‘But you spend more time with her, maybe you understand her better than the doctor.’

‘She says: “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault.”’

‘Do you know who Arturo is?’

‘I haven’t seen her case notes and nobody has seen fit to inform me.’

‘Who is her doctor?’

‘Dra Azucena Cuevas. She is on holiday until next week.’

‘What about the kitten? Wasn’t it you who brought in the kitten and she started …?’

‘There are no cats allowed on the ward.’

‘The locket round her neck, and the key — is that the key to the trunk under her bed? Do you know what she keeps in there?’

‘These people don’t have very much, Inspector Jefe. If I see something private, I leave it for them. It’s all they have apart from … life. And it’s amazing how long you survive if that is all you have.’

That was Ahmed. A perfectly intelligent, reasonable and caring individual, but not an expansive one, not in front of authority. He had irritated Falcón. He tried to picture him as the blackness ripped past the window of the AVE, just as he had done José Manuel Jiménez, whose tormented features were pin-sharp in his mind. He failed because Ahmed had done what all immigrants seek to do. He’d blended in. He didn’t stand out. He’d merged with his drab, grey surroundings and disappeared into modern Spanish society.

The trickle of these thoughts stopped as he found that the transparent reflection of the woman opposite was returning his look. He enjoyed this: to stare at his leisure as if he was doing nothing more than admiring the hurtling night. The flickering of sex started up in him. He had been celibate since Inés had left. Their sex had been nearly riotous in the early days. It made him pull at his collar to even think of it. Eating outside on the patio and Inés suddenly coming round to his side of the table and straddling him, tugging at his trousers, pushing his hands up her dress. Where had all that gone? How had marriage snuffed that out so quickly? By the end she wouldn’t let him look at her dressing. ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón.’ What was she talking about? Did he watch blue movies? Did he fuck prostitutes while watching blue movies? Would he stamp out the existence of his own child? And yet … Raúl Jiménez still had, yes, the comfort of a beautiful woman. Consuelo, his consolation.

The woman opposite was no longer meeting his eye in the glass. He turned to her real face. There was a small horror there, a minor pity as if she’d perceived the complications of a mid-forties man and wanted none of it. She dived into her handbag, would have liked it to swallow her whole, but it was a little Balenciaga number with room for a lipstick, two condoms and some folding money. He turned back to the glass. A small light hovered in the blackness, remote, with no other in sight.

He slumped back exhausted from the endless cycles of thought, not of his investigation but of his failed marriage. That always induced some internal collapse as soon as he came up against the wall of Inés’s words: ‘No tienes corazón, Javier Falcón.’ It even rhymed.

It was the new chemistry in his brain, he decided later, that had given him his first new thought about Inés, or rather a realization about an old thought. He wasn’t going to be able to move on, he wasn’t going to be able to flirt with a woman in a railway carriage until he’d proved to himself that Inés’s words were wrong, that they did not apply. It hit him harder than he’d expected. There was even a jolt of adrenalin, which should have meant fear, except that all he was doing was sitting in the AVE roaming around his own head, which contained the uncomfortable notion that she might be right.

He drifted into sleep, a man in a silver bullet train speeding through the dark to an unknown destination. He had the dream again of being the fish; of flashing through the water with fear driving his tail as the visceral tug slowly tore through him. He came awake thumping his head into the seat. The carriage was empty, the train in the station, crowds of passengers pouring past his window.

He went home and watched a movie without taking anything in. He turned off the television and collapsed unfed and unsettled into his bed. He dipped in and out of sleep, not wanting to have the dream again but not wanting to be awake with an anxious world outside his walls. Four o’clock brought him round into a permanent dark wakefulness and he worried about the new chemicals in his brain, which might alter the balance of his mind, while the wooden beams in his vast house groaned like other less fortunate inmates in a distant part of the asylum.

Saturday, 14th April 2001

He got up at 6 a.m. unrested, his nerves jangling like keys on a gaoler’s ring so that he actually started thinking about keys in the house and where they were, the ones that would open his father’s studio. He went to the desk in the study and found a whole drawer full of keys. How could there be so many doors? He took the drawer up to the wrought-iron gate that locked off the part of the gallery in front of his father’s studio. He tried them all, but none of them worked and he walked off, leaving the drawer there on the floor, the keys spread out.

He showered, dressed, went out, bought a newspaper, the ABC, and drank a café solo. He checked the death notices. Raúl Jiménez was being buried today at eleven o’clock in the Cementerio de San Fernando. He drove to the office, checked the voice mail on his mobile, which was all from Ramírez.

There was a full turnout of all six officers from the Grupo de Homicidios, which was not usual for a Saturday before Easter. He briefed them on the outcome of the discussion with Calderón and put Pérez and Fernández into the Feria ground opposite the Edificio Presidente, Baena in the streets around the apartment block, and Serrano on working up a list of laboratories and medical suppliers who might have had an unusual sale of chloroform or missing instruments. The four men left. Ramírez stayed, arms folded, leaning against the window.

‘Any further thoughts, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked.

‘Did we get a statement from Marciano Ruíz?’

Ramírez nodded at the desk, said there was nothing new in it. Falcón read it through only to avoid having to tell Ramírez about his trip to Madrid and the Jiménez family horrors. It had to have more relevance to the murder or Ramírez would start undermining him, and he’d find other officers looking at him sadly as the guy who’d started a murder inquiry by going back to an incident of thirty-six years ago.

‘I went to see Eloisa Gómez yesterday afternoon,’ said Ramírez.

‘Did you get anything out of her?’

‘She didn’t offer me a free blow job, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Not after what you did to her yesterday,’ said Falcón. ‘Did she crack?’

‘She’s not going to talk to me even if she did do it, and now she’s scared.’

‘You were getting on so well,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought you were going to ask her home.’

‘Maybe I should have been more patient,’ said Ramírez. ‘But, you know, I really thought she’d let him in and a hard verbal shock might do the trick.’

‘We’ll start the day with Mudanzas Triana,’ said Falcón, moving along. ‘Then we’ll go to the Jiménez funeral with a video camera and film the mourners. We’ll check those mourners off against the address list and follow up with interviews. We’ll build a picture of his life.’

What about Eloisa Gómez?’

‘Pérez can pull her in again this afternoon. That’ll be nearly forty-eight hours since she was with Raúl Jiménez. If she was an accomplice, the killer will have made contact by then and that might have changed her mental landscape.’

‘Or her entire landscape,’ said Ramírez. ‘For the worse.’

Ramírez picked up the video camera and drove them to Mudanzas Triana, who were on the Avenida Santa Cecilia. They spoke to the boss, Ignacio Bravo, who listened to their theoretical scenario with unmoving eyes behind puffy lids while smoking one Ducados lit from another.

‘First of all, it’s impossible,’ he said. ‘My workers are —’

‘They signed a statement,’ said Ramírez, dead bored, handing it over.

Bravo read the document, flicking ash in the vague direction of a miniature tyre that enclosed an ashtray.

‘They will be fired,’ he said.

‘Talk us through your arrangement with Sr and Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘You can start with why they wanted to move during Semana Santa, which must be the busiest time of year for a restaurant.’

‘And not cheap for removals. Our rates double. I explained it all to her, Inspector Jefe. But we couldn’t do it the next week when her restaurants were closed because. we’re all booked up … as is everybody else. So she paid her money. She didn’t care.’

‘When did you first take a look at the job?’

‘I went there last week to see the layout, the quantity of large furniture, the number of packing cases needed, all that stuff. I called her the next day to tell her it would be a two-day job and gave her a quote.’

‘A two-day job?’ said Ramírez. ‘So when did you start?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘Which would make it a three-day job.’

‘Sr Jiménez called to say he didn’t want his study moved until Thursday. I told him it would cost even more than double and that we could do the job in the time. He insisted. I don’t argue the point with rich people; I just make sure they pay. They’re the worst …’

He trailed off when he saw the look from the policemen.

‘How many people knew about the change from the original arrangement?’ asked Falcón.

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said, unable to get comfortable. ‘Of course, everybody had to know. It involved changing all the jobs around. You don’t think that one of my men is the murderer?’

‘What’s intriguing us,’ said Falcón, leaving Bravo’s suspicion to hang in the air, ‘is that, if our scenario is correct, the murderer must have known about the change in the arrangement. He must have known that Sr Jiménez was going to stay an extra night and be on his own. He could only know that from Sr Jiménez himself or from here. When did you confirm the job with Sra Jiménez?’