The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'It seems odd that he should have waited until he was over fifty before starting a family.'

Silence, while Vázquez riffled through his lawyerly mind.

'I can't help you there, Inspector Jefe,' he said.

'But I'm making you think.'

'I mentioned the death certificate. I was just going over other conversations.'

'You met him when he was nearly forty years old. He had money enough to buy land.'

'He had to borrow as well.'

'Still, someone of that generation, with that sort of money, would normally have a family.'

'You know, he never talked about his life, that part of it before he and I met.'

'Apart from his father's butchery business.'

'And that only came up because of the planning permission needed to build this room when he renovated the house. I saw the drawings. It needed an explanation.'

'When was that?'

'Twelve years ago,' said Vázquez. 'But I didn't get the full family history.'

'He told you how he was punished by his father.'

'It was just fragments. There was no major discussion.'

Felipe, the older of the two forensics, put his head round the door.

'Do you want to talk about this now, Inspector Jefe?'

Falcón nodded. Vázquez gave him his card and the house keys and said he'd be in Seville for at least another week before the August holidays. As he turned to leave he told Falcón to open the door on the other side of the butcher's room. It gave on to the garage, in which there was a brand-new silver Jaguar.

'He took delivery of that last week, Inspector Jefe,' said Vázquez. 'Hasta luego.'

Falcón joined the forensics in the kitchen. Felipe was watching Jorge working his way around the foot of the kitchen units.

'What have we got?' asked Falcón.

'Nothing so far,' said Felipe. 'The floor has been recently cleaned.'

'The work surfaces?'

'No, there are prints all over those. It's just the floor,' said Felipe. 'You'd have thought with a litre of drain cleaner in his guts he'd have gone into convulsions. You ever had gallstone trouble, Inspector Jefe?'

'Fortunately not,' he said, but he caught the glimmer of horror in Felipe's eye. 'Don't they say it's the closest a male can get to the pain of childbirth?'

'I told my wife that and she reminded me both her babies were nearly four kilos each and that a gallstone is about nine grammes.'

'There's very little sympathy in the pain stakes,' said Falcón.

'I thrashed around on the bathroom floor like a lunatic. There should be latent prints everywhere.'

'Fingerprints on the bottle?'

'One set, very strong and clear… which is surprising, too. I wouldn't have thought Sr Vega would buy his own drain cleaner. There should be others.'

'It must have been doctored with something stronger, or with poison, or he must have taken pills. Conventional drain cleaner would take some time, wouldn't it?'

'Strange way to do it, if you ask me,' said Jorge, from the foot of the kitchen units.

'Well, I think this points to what we all saw when we first took a look at the crime scene,' said Falcón.

'It didn't look right,' said Felipe.

'I thought it was "off", too,' said Jorge.

'Nothing you can put your finger on?' said Falcón.

'It's always the same with these scenes,' said Felipe. 'It's what's missing that matters. I took one look at the floor and thought: No, I'm getting nothing from that.'

'Did you hear about the note?'

'Weird,' said Jorge.'"… the thin air you breathe…" what's that?' 'Sounds pure,' said Falcón.

'And the 9/11 stuff?' asked Jorge. 'We're a long way from New York.'

'He was probably bankrolling al-Qaeda,' said Felipe.

'Don't joke about it,' said Jorge. 'Anything can happen these days.'

'All I know is that this is wrong,' said Felipe. 'Not so wrong that I'm totally convinced that he was murdered, but wrong enough to make me suspicious.'

'The position of the bottle?' asked Falcón.

'Had it been me, I'd have drunk it and flung it across the room,' said Jorge. 'There should be droplets everywhere.'

'And there aren't any, except at the point where the bottle lay just over a metre from the body.'

'But there are some drops?'

'Yes, they've dripped from the neck of the bottle.'

'Any between the body and the bottle?'

'No,' said Felipe, 'which again is odd, but not… impossible.'

'Just as he could have thrashed around on the floor wiping away any latents and droplets with his dressing gown?'

'Ye-e-es,' said Felipe, unconvinced.

'Give me some conjecture, Felipe. I know you hate it, but just give me some.'

'We only deal in facts here,' said Felipe, 'because facts are the only things that stand up in court. Right, Inspector Jefe?'

'Come on, Felipe.'

'I'll say it,' said Jorge, getting to his feet. 'We all know what's missing from this crime scene and that is… a person. We're not sure what they did, or whether they were involved even. We just know that somebody was here.'

'So we have a phantom,' said Falcón. 'Any of you believe in ghosts?'

'Now they really don't go down well in a court of law,' said Felipe.

Chapter 3

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

Consuelo Jiménez opened the door to Javier Falcón and led him down the corridor to her L-shaped sitting room overlooking a manicured lawn, whose greenness was lurid in the bleaching sunlight. The water in the blue pool, with its necklace of white tiles, trembled against its confinement pushing silky rhomboids towards the garden house, whose walls and roof were blasted by purple bougainvillea.

Falcón stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors with his hands clasped behind his back, feeling self-consciously official. Consuelo sat on the sofa dressed in a tight cream silk skirt and a matching blouse. They were tense but oddly comfortable with each other.

'Do you like bougainvillea?' she asked.

'Yes,' he said, without thinking, 'it gives me hope.'

'I'm beginning to find it trite.'

'Perhaps you see too much of it here in Santa Clara,' said Falcón. 'And framed by these windows it looks like a painting that says nothing.'

'I could have a man endlessly diving naked into the pool and call it my Hockney vivant,' she said. 'Can I get you anything? I've made some iced tea.'

He nodded and looked at her figure as she went to the kitchen. His blood stirred at the sight of the muscles in her calves. He glanced around the room. There was a single painting on the wall of a large cerise canvas with a dark blue widening stripe diagonally across it. The surfaces of tables and a sideboard contained photographs of her children – individuals and grouped. Apart from a dark blue sofa which turned a right angle with the L-shaped room and an armchair there was little else. He turned back to the facile garden thinking that she'd mentioned Hockney because this barrio, in the incessant sunshine, was much more like California than Andalucía.

Consuelo Jiménez handed him an iced tea and pointed him into the armchair. She lounged on the sofa, nodding her foot at him, her low-heeled sandal hanging from her toes.

'It doesn't feel like Spain out here,' said Falcón.

'You mean we're not falling over each other like a basket of puppies.'

'It's quiet.'

They sat in silence for a moment – no traffic, no church bells ringing, no whistling, no handclapping down the streets.

'Double-glazing,' she said. 'And I live with noise all the time in the restaurants. I live my Spanish life three times over while I'm there so when I'm out here it's like… the afterlife. I'd have thought you'd be the same, doing what you do.'

'I prefer to be in the midst of things these days,' said Falcón. 'I've done my time in limbo.'

'I'm sure in that massive house of your father's you don't exactly feel in… I mean, not your father… Sorry.'

'I still refer to Francisco Falcón as my father. It's a forty-seven-year habit which I haven't been able to break.'