The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'What did Sr Vega get out of it, apart from your daughter's hand in marriage?'

'One of the other plots I sold to him separately was the key that unlocked a very large development for him in Triana. And there was a second plot, which one of his competitors wanted very badly. When that plot came into Rafael's hands they had to sell out to him. It meant that he could be more generous to me than any other developer.'

'So, he didn't have to marry your daughter?' said Falcón. 'He was offering you a very sweet deal anyway.'

'I have the mentality of a farmer. That land was only going to go to someone who would marry my eldest daughter. I am old-fashioned and Rafael is a traditionalist. He knew the key to unlock the problem. His meeting of Lucia was no accident. It is my shame that

I allowed the business to cloud my judgement of the man. I had no idea how cold a brute he would be to her.'

'Was he violent?'

'Never. If he had beaten her, that would have been the end of it,' said Cabello. 'He reduced her. I mean he… this is difficult… he was reluctant to perform his marital duties. He implied it was her fault, that she was not making herself attractive to him.'

'One thing… did the death certificate of his previous wife give a cause of death?'

'Accidental. He told us she drowned in a swimming pool.'

'Did he have any children from this previous marriage?'

'He said not. He said he wanted children… so it was strange that he didn't want to do what was necessary to make them happen.'

'Did you know of any previous relationships here, before he met Lucia?'

'No. Lucia hadn't heard of any either.'

Falcón took out the plastic sachet containing the partial photograph of the girl that Vega had burnt at the bottom of the garden.

'Do you recognize this person?'

Cabello put on glasses, shook his head.

'She looks foreign to me,' he said.

They arrived at the Instituto on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan and parked in the hospital grounds. Falcón found the Médico Forense, who showed them into the room for the body identification and left them there for a few minutes. Sr Cabello started to pace the room, nervous at what he'd let himself in for – his daughter dead on the slab. The Médico Forense returned and opened the curtains. Sr Cabello stumbled forwards and had to put a hand up on the glass to steady himself. With the fingers of his other hand he dug into his skull through his thinning hair as if he was trying to tear this unnatural image from his brain. He nodded and coughed against the violence of the emotion. Falcón drew him away from the glass. The Médico Forense supplied the paperwork and Sr Cabello put his signature to his daughter's death.

They went outside into the fierce heat and light whose savagery had sucked all colour from everything so that the trees seemed vague, buildings merged with the white sky and only dust looked as if it belonged in this place. Sr Cabello had shrunk in his suit; his thin neck, loose in its collar, jumped and gasped as he tried to swallow what he'd just seen. Falcón shook his hand and eased him into the car. Cristina Ferrera took the old man round to the hospital entrance. Falcón called Calderón and arranged a meeting for seven o'clock to discuss the autopsies.

He went back into the chill of the morgue. He sat with the Médico Forense in his office, the two autopsy reports open on the desk. The doctor puffed on a Ducados whose smoke was sucked up into the air conditioning unit and spat out into the crushing heat.

'Let's start with the easy one,' said the doctor. 'Sra Vega was suffocated to death by the application of a pillow over her face. She was probably unconscious while this was happening, due to a severe slap across the face which dislocated her jaw. It's probable that the heel of the hand made contact with her chin.'

The Médico Forense gave an unintentionally comical slow-motion replay of the blow, his cheek, jowl and lips shunting to one side into a slobbery air kiss.

. 'Very graphic, Doctor,' said Falcón, smiling.

'Sorry, Inspector Jefe,' he said, more self-conscious now. 'You know how it is. Long days in the company of dead people. The heat. The holidays nearly, nearly there. The family already at the coast. I forget who I'm with sometimes.'

'It's all right, carry on, Doctor. You're helping me,' said Falcón. 'What about time of death? It's important for us to know if she died before or after Sr Vega.'

'I'm not going to be much help to you on that. Their deaths occurred within the same hour. Their body temperatures were nearly the same. Sra Vega was only slightly warmer. The ambient temperatures were the same in the kitchen and the bedroom, but Sr Vega was lying bare chested on a tiled floor while his wife was in bed with her face under a pillow. I wouldn't be able to stand up in court and say with any conviction that she'd died after her husband.'

'All right, what about Sr Vega?'

'He died directly as a result of the ingestion of a corrosive liquid. Cause of death was a combination of effects on his vital organs. He'd suffered renal failure, liyer and lung damage… It was a real mess in there. The composition of what he ingested is interesting. I seem to remember it was a regular brand of drain cleaner…'

'That's right: Harpic.'

'Well, normally those gels are a mixture of caustic soda and disinfectant. The caustic element would be about a third of the contents. Of course, that would do your system no good at all, but it would take time

for it to kill a grown man in good health. This product killed him in less than quarter of an hour because it had been powerfully boosted with hydrochloric acid.'

'How easy is that to get hold of?'

'Any hardware store would sell it to you under the name of muriatic acid. It's used for cleaning cement off paving stones, for instance.'

'We'll check his garage,' said Falcón, making a note. 'There's no going back once you've ingested something that strong?'

'Irreparable damage would be done to the throat, digestive tract and, in this case, the lungs as well.'

'How did it get into the lungs?'

'It's very difficult to tell what damage was caused by force or violence and what was caused by the corrosiveness of the liquid. I would say that he, or someone else, had rammed the bottle down his throat. Under those circumstances some of the liquid would inevitably find its way into the lungs. There's evidence of corrosive action in the nasal passages, so product was being coughed up. With the mouth occupied by the bottle the only way out was via the nose.'

'You seem to think he could have accomplished this on his own.'

'I have to say that's doubtful.'

'But not impossible?'

'If you were going to kill yourself in this horrible way I imagine that you would try and put yourself beyond rescue by making sure you ingested as much of the product as possible in the first moments. I think there would be a certain amount of nervousness involved, too… and that would cause you to ram the neck of the bottle down your throat. That of course would also set off the gagging mechanism. I think it would be a messy business, unless there was someone holding the bottle in place and holding the victim steady as well.'

'The floor was clean apart from some droplets close to the neck of the bottle.'

'There was spotting on his chest and clothes, but nothing like the quantities you'd expect if he gagged and spurted it out all over.'

'Any evidence of holding – marks on arms, wrist, neck, head?'

'Nothing on the wrists. There are burn marks on the arms in the crooks of his elbows, but the dressing gown had slipped down and it's possible that happened as he writhed in agony on the floor. There are marks on the head and neck, and claw marks on the throat. I would say they are self-inflicted. He had product on his hands. But the marks could just as easily have been made by someone holding him in a kind of neck lock.'