The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

said, and, as an afterthought, ‘… his misery, I should think.’
    ‘And you can’t shed any light on that.’
    ‘People will only talk about those things if they want to, if they know how to. Something that could make my husband that wretched was probably buried so deep that he didn’t know it was there any more. It was just his condition. How would you start talking about something like that?’
    Consuelo Jiménez’s words induced a trance in Falcón. His mind tumbled back over those first hours of the investigation and he hit that fear again, the surge of panic. He was on the walk down the corridor, the double walk, because it was his and the killer’s same strides towards that blank wall with its empty hook lit by the light from the horror room. Then the face, and the eyes in the face, and the terrifying relentlessness of what they’d seen.
    ‘Don Javier,’ she said, which snapped him back to reality because she hadn’t used his rank.
    ‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was lost. I mean I was elsewhere.’
    ‘It didn’t look like somewhere I would want to be,’ she said.
    ‘I was just running over some things in my mind.’
    Then you must have seen some terrible things. You said yourself, about Raúl’s murder, the most extraordinary of your career.’
    ‘Yes, I did say that, but this wasn’t anything to do with that,’ he said, and found himself on the brink of a confession, which was not, he thought, a place the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios should ever be.

4
    Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville
    He offered her a car. She turned him down and said she’d make her own way to her sister’s house. He asked for her sister’s details just to keep the pressure on, and reminded her that he would pick her up later to go to the Instituto Anatómico Forense for the identification of the body. He wanted to interview her then, once she’d been shocked out of any residual complacency by the sight of her husband’s dead body. He asked her to think about anything unusual in Raúl’s business or personal life in the last year and told her to call the restaurant to get the names and addresses of the three people who’d been fired for feeding her husband against orders. He knew they would be dead leads, but he wanted to induce a fear in her of his thoroughness. They shook hands at the door of the apartment; his were damp, hers dry and cool.
    Ramírez followed him back into Raúl Jiménez’s study from the hall.
    ‘Did she do it,’ he asked, slumping into the high-backed chair, ‘or have it done, Inspector Jefe?’
    Falcón turned his pen over and over in his fingers.
    ‘Any news from Pérez at the hospital?’ he asked.
    ‘The maid’s still out cold.’
    ‘And the CCTV tapes?’
    ‘Four people unidentified by the conserje. Two males. Two females. One of the females I would say is the whore, but she looks very young. Fernández has taken the tapes down to the station and we’ll get some digitalized printouts to show around the building.’
    ‘What about people leaving the building by alternative exits? The garage, for instance.’
    ‘Neither of those cameras are working. The conserje called the technicians this morning but they still haven’t arrived. Semana Santa, Inspector Jefe,’ he explained.
    Falcón gave him the names and addresses of the fired employees and told him to have them interviewed as soon as possible. Ramírez left. Falcón picked up the photograph of Raúl Jiménez’s first wife — Gumersinda Bautista. He called the Jefatura and asked them to run a check on José Manuel Jiménez Bautista, born in Tangier in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
    He sat back with the other photographs, flicked through the nameless people. He came across a shot of Raúl Jiménez on the deck of a yacht. He was barely recognizable. No hint of the toadiness to come. He was handsome and confident and stood as if he knew it, hands on hips, shoulders braced, chest