The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'Have you been thinking over the past few days why your father killed himself?' she asked.

'Yes, I have. I've thought very hard about his note to me,' said Sebastián. 'My father loved words. He loved to talk and write. He liked his own voice. He liked to be verbose. But in that letter he reduced himself to one line.'

Silence. Sebastián's head trembled on his neck.

'And what did that line mean to you?'

'It meant that he believed me.'

'And why do you think he'd come to that conclusion?'

'Before I was convicted, my father had reached a point in his life when he never questioned himself. Whether it was to do with his belief in his own brilliance, or the sycophants around him, I don't know. But he never thought that he might be wrong, or have made a mistake… Until I was arrested. Once they put me in here I refused to see him, so I can't be sure, but I think that was when doubt started to creep into his mind.'

'He had to leave the barrio,' said Alicia. 'He was ostracized.'

'They didn't much like him in the barrio. He thought they all loved him in the same way that all his audiences loved him, but he never bothered with any of them as individual people. They were just there for the further glorification of Pablo Ortega.'

That must have given him reason to doubt.'

'That, and the fact that his work was drying up gave him reason to start living in his own head more. And, as I know, if you do that you come across all sorts of doubts and fears, and they grow large in your loneliness. He probably spoke to Salvador, too. He wasn't a bad man, my father. He took pity on Salvador and helped him with money for his drugs. I doubt Salvador would have told him straight, because of the force of my father's personality and his own fear of Ignacio, but once there was doubt in his mind he might have started to pick up on things. And when they were added to his doubts he might have found the answer to that horrible equation in his head, which was the sum of all his fears. It must have been devastating for him.'

'But don't you think that this was an incredibly drastic action on your part – to put yourself in here?'

'You don't think I did this just to get my father's attention, do you?'

'I don't know why you did this, Sebastián.'

He took his wrist away from her and covered his head with his arms. He rocked to and fro on his chair for several minutes.

'Perhaps we've had enough for today,' she said, finding his shoulder.

He calmed down, disentangled himself. Held out his wrist again.

'I was scared of what I had growing in my own mind,' he said.

'Let's take this up tomorrow,' said Alicia Aguado.

'No, I'd like to try and get this out,' he said, putting her fingers to his wrist. 'I'd read somewhere… I couldn't help reading this sort of thing. The newspapers are full of stories of child abuse and my eyes used to close in on every story because I knew they were relevant to me. I extracted things from these stories which created doubt in me, and I began to find a corner of myself that I could no longer trust. It grew from there, until it became a certainty in my head. Only a matter of time before… before…'

'I think this is too much for you today, Sebastián,' she said. 'You're driving your mind too hard.'

'Please let me get this out,' he said. 'Just this one thing.'

'What did you extract from these stories?' said Alicia Aguado. 'Just tell me that.'

'Yes, yes, that was the beginning of it,' he said. 'What I saw in these stories that was relevant to me was that… the abused become abusers themselves. When I first read that I didn't think it could be possible… that I could end up with the same sly little look that Uncle Ignacio had when he sat on my bed at night. But when you're lonely, doubt creates more doubt, and I really began to think that it could be something that might happen to me. That I wouldn't be able to control it. Already, I found that kids liked me and I liked them. I loved to share in their innocence. I loved to be with them in their unconscious world. No past horrors, no future worries, just the glorious unravelling present. And the thought grew that eventually I might do something unspeakable, and I lived in constant fear of it. And then one day I couldn't bear it any longer and I thought that I would just do it. When the moment came, though… I couldn't, but it didn't matter any more because the fear inside me was already so great.

I let him go, Manolo, and while I waited for the police to come I found myself praying for them to put me in a cell and throw away the key.'

'But you couldn't do it, Sebastián,' she said. 'You didn't do it.'

'My fear was not telling me that. My fear was telling me that eventually it would happen.'

'But what did you feel when you faced the reality of your intention?'

'I felt nothing but revulsion. I felt that this would be a very wrong, unnatural and cruel thing to do.'

Falcón dropped Alicia back in Calle Vidrio and continued home. He went to his study with a bottle, and a glass full of ice. The whisky tasted good after the day he'd had. He sat in his study with his feet up on the desk, thinking about the man he'd been only twelve hours ago. He wasn't depressed, which surprised him. He felt oddly solid, connected and determined, and he realized that anger was holding him together. He wanted to get Consuelo back and he wanted to bury Ignacio Ortega.

Virgilio Guzmán arrived punctually at 10 p.m. Falcón poured him a whisky and they sat in the study. After the morning's outburst, he'd expected Guzmán to come in hard about the cover-up he'd smelt in the Jefatura, but he seemed more interested in talking about his holiday in Mallorca, which was coming up in a week's time.

'What's happened to the crusading journalist who stormed out of my office this morning?' asked Falcón.

'Drugs,' said Guzmán. 'The whole reason I left Madrid was to come down here and lead a more relaxed lifestyle. I get a whiff of that story and I go mad. My blood pressure went through the roof. Now I'm on tranquillizers and, you know, life's really quite nice when it comes to you filtered.'

'Does that mean you're dropping the story?'

'Doctor's orders.'

They sat in silence while Falcón tested that for veracity.

'Did someone talk to you, Virgilio?'

'It's a very close-knit community down here,' said Guzmán. 'The paper's not going to run with it unless somebody else cracks it open first. And you know something, Javier? I don't give a shit. That's drugs for you.'

'How about giving me some advice, as an impartial observer?'

'Don't make me drink too much whisky,' he said. 'It doesn't mix with the drugs.'

Falcón told him everything about the cover-up: the Montes finca, the dead bodies up in the sierra, the arsonists, the tape – both the original and the copy upstairs. Guzmán listened and nodded throughout as if this was stuff that came to his ears every day.

'What do you want from all this?' said Guzmán. 'What's your minimum requirement?'

'To put Ignacio Ortega away for a very long time.'

'That's understandable. He sounds like a very nasty piece of work.'

'Do you think I'm being too narrow-minded?' said Falcón. 'Should I be gunning for our hallowed institutions?'

'That's the whisky talking,' said Guzmán. 'You haven't got a chance. Concentrate on Ortega.'

'He seems to be well protected by his connections.'

'So, how do you weaken that protection to get at him?'

'I don't know.'

'Well, that's your training. You're trained to think within the limits of the law,' said Guzmán, putting down his empty whisky glass. 'I'm going now before it's too late.'

'And you're not going to tell me?'

'It wouldn't be right for me to tell you. I don't want that responsibility,' said Guzmán. 'The answer's in front of you, but I don't want to be the one to infect your mind.'

Chapter 31