The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

      ‘No,’ said Falcón, ‘but the situation in the Vegas’ house was sufficiently enigmatic that I have to keep an open mind until I get a full forensic report and the pathology of the bodies. Also the closest person to Sr Vega, his wife, is dead, too. I have to rely on people who knew him peripherally – socially or in business.’

      ‘Lucía’s parents should be able to help you,’ said Marty. ‘They were around there almost every Sunday for lunch.’

      ‘Did you ever meet them?’

      ‘I met them once,’ said Maddy. ‘They weren’t…er…very sophisticated people. I think he used to be a farmer.’

      ‘How long have you been married?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘Twelve years,’ she said.

      ‘How did you meet?’ he said, a question he’d found himself asking every couple he’d met over the last year.

      ‘It was in New York,’ said Marty. ‘Maddy was showing a collection of her photographs at a gallery which was owned by a friend of mine. She introduced us.’

      ‘And I never went back to my apartment,’ said Maddy.

      ‘Are you still a photographer?’

      ‘She’s taken it up again since we left the States,’ said Marty, steamrollering over Maddy’s negative.

      ‘What do you photograph?’

      ‘People,’ she said.

      ‘Portraits?’

      ‘Never.’

      ‘She photographs people in their unconscious moments,’ said Marty.

      ‘He doesn’t mean when they’re sleeping,’ she said, her eyes flashing with irritation.

      ‘When they don’t know the camera is there?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘One step further than that,’ said Marty. ‘When they believe themselves to be completely alone.’

      ‘That makes me sound like a snoop,’ she said. ‘I’m not a –’

      ‘Yes, you are,’ said Marty, laughing.

      ‘No, I’m not,’ she said, ‘because that implies that I’m interested in what people are doing, and that’s not it.’

      ‘What is it?’ asked Marty. Then, turning to Falcón, he added, ‘She never shoots me.’

      ‘It’s the internal struggle,’ she said. ‘I hate it when you make me say these things. It’s just not –’

      ‘Have you got any shots of Sr Vega?’ said Falcón.

      They left Marty on the sofa and went upstairs. One of three bedrooms had been converted into a darkroom. While Maddy looked through her contact sheets Falcón checked the books on the shelves and pulled out one with Madeleine Coren on the spine. There was a photograph of her on the inside flap – a creamy beauty with sparkling eyes, challenging the camera to come closer. She had the dazzle of youth then, which had been skimmed down by life’s natural damage to its present translucence. There was still something of the celebrity about her, that quality that film producers look for: not beauty, but watchability. She absorbed things from around her – available light, unused energy and anything anybody might want to give. Falcón opened the book, tore himself away from her profile. He could feel his bone marrow weakening.

      Her photographs at first seemed to be about loneliness: old people sitting on park benches, a young man standing at a rail overlooking a river, a woman in a towelling robe on a roof terrace in Manhattan. Gradually, as the camera’s eye moved closer, other things became evident: contentment on the old person’s face, possibility in the young man’s eyes, dreaminess in the woman’s face.

      ‘They’re facile, those early ones,’ said Maddy. ‘The idea was just a gimmick. I was only twenty-two. I didn’t know anything. Take a look at these –’

      She handed him six black-and-white prints. The first three showed Rafael Vega in a white shirt and dark trousers, hands in pockets, standing on his well-clipped lawn. The camera was looking over his shoulder at his profile. His jaw was tight. Falcón waited for the shot to tell him something. Then he saw what it was.

      ‘He’s barefoot.’

      ‘That was 14th January this year.’

      ‘What was he doing?’

      ‘That’s not the point…remember,’ she said. ‘I’m not a snoop. Look at these. They’re taken down by the river. I go there a lot. I can sit with a big zoom lens on a tripod and people will stop on Calle Bétis and the bridges. I pick up a lot of contemplative looks. People go to the river for a reason…don’t they?’

      The three shots she gave him were close-ups of head and shoulders. In the first Rafael Vega was wincing, in the second he was gritting his teeth, eyes screwed up, and in the third his mouth had cracked open.

      ‘He’s in pain,’ said Falcón.

      ‘He was crying,’ said Maddy. ‘There’s saliva at the corners of his mouth.’

      He gave her back the photos. They were intrusive and he didn’t like them. He returned her book to the shelf.

      ‘And you didn’t think any of this was worth mentioning before?’

      ‘This is my work,’ she said. ‘This is how I express myself. I wouldn’t have shown you them if Marty hadn’t pushed me.’

      ‘Even though it could have a bearing on what happened in the Vegas’ house last night?’

      ‘I answered your questions – the last time we spoke, how the Vegas got along, whether he was having an affair. I just didn’t relate any of that to these shots because the point is that we should never know about them. They were not taken for the purposes of investigating causes.’

      ‘Why were they taken?’

      ‘These are shots of people suffering in intensely private moments, but out in the open. They have chosen not to hide in their homes but to walk it out of themselves in the presence of other human beings.’

      Falcón remembered the hours he’d spent walking the streets of Seville in the past fifteen months. The contemplation of the fundamentals of his existence were too unsettling for the confines even of his sprawling house on Calle Bailén. He’d walked it all out of himself, stared it all into the sloe-black waters of the Guadalquivir, shaken it all off into the empty sugar sachets and cigarette ends on the floors of anonymous bars. It was true. He had not sat at home with his horrors piling up in his mind. There was solace in the wordless company of strangers.

      Maddy was standing close to him. He was aware of her smell, the body under its thin sheath of silk, the exquisite pressure, the flimsiness of the barrier. She hovered, expectant, confident of her ability. Her white throat trembled as she swallowed.

      ‘We should go back downstairs,’ said Falcón.

      ‘There was something else I wanted to show you,’ she said, and led him across the corridor to another bedroom, which had a bare tiled floor and more of her photographs on the walls.

      His attention was grabbed by a colour shot of a blue pool with a white necklace of tiles in a green lawn with a purple flame of bougainvillea in one corner and a white cushioned lounger in the other. A woman sat on the lounger in a black bathing costume under a red hat.

      ‘That’s Consuelo Jiménez,’ he said.

      ‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ said Maddy.

      He went to the window. Across the road Consuelo’s garden was visible.

      ‘I had to get up on the roof for the angle,’ she said.

      To his left he could see the Vegas’ entrance and driveway through the trees.

      ‘Do