His mobile rang.
'Diga,' he said.
'Are you on your way back?' asked Ramírez.
'I'm on the Plaza de Cuba.'
'Good, because Inspector Jefe Montes has just jumped out of his second-floor window and landed on his head in the car park.'
Falcón accelerated down the Avenida de Argentina. His tyres squealed on the hot tarmac as he turned into the Jefatura car park. There was a crowd gathered beneath the window from which he'd seen Montes looking out only last week thinking… thinking: has the moment come?
The ambulance lights flashed almost invisibly in the glare of the brutally bleaching light that beat down on the scene in the car park. Women's faces stared out from the dark ground-floor office windows, mouths covered. Men stood at first-floor windows, heads viced in their hands, squeezing out this unnatural image. Falcón pushed through the crowd in time to see the paramedics officially give up on the inert Montes. His shoulder and head looked as if they were buried in dark bloody tarmac soft enough to take this terrible indentation. But Falcón knew from the look of it what that body would reveal on the slab: shattered shoulder, compound fracture of the collarbone, broken neck vertebrae, severed spinal cord, smashed skull, catastrophic brain haemorrhage.
Members of Montes's squad were in the crowd. They were crying. Comisario Elvira came out of the Jefatura and made a carefully designed speech to disperse the crowd. His eyes fell on Falcón. He told him to have photographs taken, the body removed and to make an initial verbal report within the hour. The Juez de Guardia arrived with the Médico Forense.
As the crowd dispersed, Ferrera took three of them off to make witness statements. Falcón told Ramírez to seal off Montes's office. Felipe took the necessary shots. The paramedics removed the body under instruction from the Juez de Guardia. The crime scene cleaners moved in and washed away the blood, which was already congealing in the sun.
As Falcón went up to his office to get a fresh notebook, he had a terrible sense of convergence – Vega, Ortega and now Montes. The homicide squad three men short because of the holiday season. Each death not apparently connected and yet somehow being the precursor of the next.
He found Ferrera, gave her Salvador Ortega's details and told her to speak to someone in the Narcotics squad. A current address was all he wanted. He also told her to check all post offices in the Seville area to see if either Rafael Vega or an Argentinean called Emilio Cruz held a postbox for receiving mail.
'Is this more important than Rafael Vega's key?'
'Did you get anywhere with that?'
'He doesn't have a safe-deposit box in the Banco de Bilbao. That was as far as I got.'
'Work on the key later,' he said. 'It'll take time.'
He picked up his notebook and walked slowly up the stairs to the second floor where Ramírez stood with a master key for Montes's office. The members of GRUME were lined up in the corridor, waiting. Felipe came up from the car park sweating with his camera.
Ramírez opened the door. Felipe took his shots and left. Falcón shut the window. They looked around, sweating, while the air conditioning reasserted itself. On Montes's desk was a sheet of notepaper covered in his handwriting and a sealed envelope addressed to his wife. Falcón and Ramírez moved round to read the writing on the notepaper, which was addressed to 'My Fellow Officers':
It probably seems ridiculous to you that I should have taken my own life so close to retirement. I should have been able to bear the pressure of my job for a little longer, but I could not. This is no reflection on the men and women with whom it has been my honour to work.
I joined the police force with the belief that I could do some good. I had a strong sense of the value of the policeman in society. I have not been able to do the good that I intended. I have felt increasingly powerless to act against the new waves of depravity and corruption which are now sweeping through my country and the rest of Europe.
I have been drinking, hoping that it would dull my senses to what was happening around me. I did not succeed. A growing oppression has weighed down on my shoulders until at times I have felt unable to rise from my chair. I have felt trapped and unable to speak to anyone.
I only ask that you, my friends, protect my family and forgive me for this last disastrous act of mine.
Falcón read the letter out to the squad members crowding the door. The women cried open-eyed, staring in disbelief. He asked if someone who knew Sra Montes would accompany Ramírez to give her the letter and break the news to her personally. Montes's number two stepped forward and he and Ramírez left.
There was nothing of interest in the office and the interviews with the various members of the squad, who were all shaken, were monosyllabic. By the time he'd finished, Ramírez was back, having left the inspector of GRUME with Sra Montes. They sealed Montes's office and went back down to their own, where Cristina Ferrera was on the phone. Falcón told her to check for postboxes in the name of Alberto Montes as well. She nodded and scribbled down the name.
Ramírez followed him into his office and they stood at the window overlooking the car park, which was already clean and dry.
'You think Montes was on the take?' asked Ramírez.
'Some of the words he used in his letter were interesting,' said Falcón. 'Like: "I have not been able to do the good I intended", "powerless against corruption", "growing oppression", "trapped" and finally the phrase that really drew my attention: "protect my family". Why should anybody say anything like that? "Look after" maybe, but "protect"? This was a guy whose subconscious was leaking into his everyday life and he couldn't bear it.'
Ramírez nodded and stared into the car park, imagining himself crumpled, corrupted, damaged beyond repair. The man discarded from life.
'You didn't get the idea that he was on the take from that letter,' said Ramírez. 'So what else do you know?'
'I don't know what I know.'
'Don't start with that shit.'
'I mean it. I think Montes thought I knew something,' said Falcón.
'Well, if he was on the take, he's looking like the source for any information the Russians have on you.'
'Montes thought I was putting pressure on him, which I wasn't. I was just asking him about these Russians… to see if he'd heard of them. Nothing more than that.'
'His mind did the rest,' said Ramírez.
'And now I feel like an archaeologist who's found a few unusual shards of pottery and been asked to rebuild a civilization from them.'
'Tell me the shards,' said Ramírez. 'I'm good at gluing things back together.'
'I'm almost too embarrassed to tell you,' said Falcón. 'They're hints revived from the old Raúl Jiménez case. Some names from Rafael Vega's address book. The Russian mafia involvement in the two Vega Construcciones projects. Their threats. The timing of Ortega's death. The timing of this suicide today. They're not even solid enough to be called shards, and if they are they might not be from the same pot but just dislocated fragments.'
'Let's get some things straight in our heads about Vega,' said Ramírez. 'First of all, he's security conscious: the handgun – which I checked and it wasn't licensed – the bulletproof windows, the surveillance system, even if he didn't use it, the front door…'
'The front door which is normally fully locked at night but which we discovered only shut on the morning of his death.'
'As was the back door into his garden, meaning…'
'Possibly indicating,' said Falcón, correcting him, 'that Vega let someone into the house late at night whom he knew.'
'All his immediate neighbours knew him socially,' said Ramírez, 'but nobody called first to say they were coming round, if indeed they did.'
'We know from Pablo Ortega that the Russians used to visit him at home,' said Falcón. 'But as Vázquez said, Vega was "facilitating their business needs" so their motive for wanting him removed is not clear. Marty Krugman put up the possibility that Vega was in some way cheating the Russians.'