The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

      ‘Yes, well…“You’re not so bad,”’ she said, quoting him back. ‘You’ll have to do a lot better than that to improve your sex life. What did Pablo Ortega tell you?’

      ‘How he used his dogs to chat up women.’

      ‘You talked about him panting after Maddy and chatting up women, but I’ve always assumed he was a closet gay, or maybe just not that interested in sex,’ she said. ‘The kids love Pavarotti and Callas, but he’s never made a pass at me, and I imagine you wouldn’t miss a pass from Pablo Ortega when it happened.’

      ‘Why do you think he’s gay?’

      ‘It’s just a feeling that comes off him when he’s with women. He likes them, but he’s not interested in them sexually. It’s not just me. I’ve seen him with Maddy as well. He’s not panting. He’s showing off. He’s reminding everybody that he’s still potent but it’s got nothing to do with sex.’

      ‘He referred to you as a tough bitch,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought it was because you’d turned him down.’

      ‘Well, I am a tough bitch, but I’ve never been one with him. In fact I’ve thought that we always got on very well,’ she said. ‘Since he moved out here he’s been coming round for drinks, playing football with the kids, swimming…’

      ‘It was unmistakably sexual. He said you only smiled when you had a man’s balls in a vice – that sort of thing.’

      Consuelo spurted laughter, but she was annoyed, too.

      ‘I can only think that he believes that this is manly talk and that it would never get back to me,’ said Consuelo. ‘He’s underestimated your capacity for intimacy, Javier. But then I suppose intimacy between a cop and a…whatever. He probably thought he was safe.’

      ‘He knew Raúl, didn’t he?’ said Falcón. ‘I remember seeing him in the photographs behind the desk in your old apartment, but not in the celebrity section.’

      ‘Pablo’s brother was the connection,’ she said. ‘Ignacio had worked for Raúl.’

      ‘I’d like to see Raúl’s photographs again, if that’s possible.’

      ‘I’ll let them know at the office,’ she said.

      

      The commercial world of cars – Repsol, Firestone, Renault – flashed past as he drove down Avenida de Kansas City. While the buildings beyond the windscreen throbbed with expended energy, Falcón puzzled over his intimacy with Consuelo Jiménez. He felt comfortable with her. Despite what she referred to as the detective/suspect dynamic, she was now integrated into his past. He thought about her sitting on her sofa in the cool of her house, nodding her foot at the glass, laughing with the children as she rubbed them down with their towels, leading them off to the kitchen for food while he drove into the writhing beast of the metropolis which, beaten by heat, lay panting in its pen.

      A sign outside the Estación de Santa Justa at the end of Avenida de Kansas City told him it was 44°C. He parked and staggered through the torpid air into the station. He called Pérez, who told him that he’d persuaded Sr Cabello to leave his wife in intensive care. He was now in Sr Cabello’s apartment in Calle de Felipe II in El Porvenir, waiting for the first female member of the Grupo de Homicidios, Policía Cristina Ferrera, to replace him.

      Falcón stood at the gates of the platform for the Madrid AVE, with a handwritten piece of paper asking for Carmen Ortiz. A woman with black hair and big brown eyes floating in a pale frightened face approached him. She had two children with her and ‘distraught’ seemed a mild adjective for her condition.

      He drove back to Santa Clara. Carmen Ortiz talked at full tilt all the way, primarily about her husband, who was on a business trip to Barcelona and wouldn’t be able to fly down until the following morning. The children sat looking out of the windows as if they were being moved to a more secure prison. Falcón murmured encouragement while Sra Ortiz flooded out the silence.

      Consuelo came to the door with Mario clamped to her like a chimpanzee. The boy, after the swim, had retreated into a vulnerable silence. He transferred himself to Carmen with a swiftness that showed his need for human contact. Carmen amazed them with her limitless memory for all kinds of detail from her journey. Consuelo listened, knowing Carmen Ortiz’s purpose, which was not to allow one moment’s silence in which the calamity of the day could jam its wedge and lever time open to reveal Mario’s future of despair and loneliness.

      They went to the car. The whole family sat in the back. The children stroked Mario as if he was a damaged kitten. Consuelo leant in and kissed him hard on the head. Falcón almost heard the physical wrench as she pulled back from the car. He knew about the sickening sense of plummet that was forming in the boy’s stomach as he started his free fall into motherless chaos. The routine of love was over. The woman who made you has gone. He was filled with pity for the boy. He drove off with his bruised cargo back into the pulsating city.

      He took them up to Sr Cabello’s apartment, carrying the luggage. They arrived in the apartment like nomads. Sr Cabello sat in a rocking chair with unblinking eyes. His grandchildren animated his lips to a tremble. Mario kicked and fought to hold on to his aunt. Pérez had gone. Falcón and Ferrera withdrew and a whimpering sense of impending doom welled up in the destroyed family.

      They went down in the lift. Ferrera sighed with her head to one side as if the pain of the exchange had found its way into her neck and cricked it for good. They drove in silence into the centre of town where Falcón was going to drop her off. She shut the car door and walked back to a crossing. Falcón pulled out and drove around the Plaza Nueva. He turned right into Calle Mendez Nuñez and waited by El Corte Inglés. As he veered away from the Plaza de la Magdalena and prepared to turn down Calle Bailén his mobile went off.

      ‘I don’t want to sound like an idiot in my first week,’ said Cristina Ferrera, ‘but I think you’re being followed. It was a blue Seat Cordoba two cars behind you. I got the plates.’

      ‘Phone them through to the Jefatura and get them to give me a call,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ll check it out.’

      In the fading light he could still distinguish colour and he picked out the Seat, now only a single car behind him, as he eased past the Hotel Colón. He drove past the tile shop just before his house and turned up the short driveway and parked between the orange trees. He got out. The blue Seat stopped in front of him. It seemed to be a full car. He walked towards it and the car, in no hurry, pulled slowly away. He even had time to see the plates before it turned left past the Hotel Londres on the corner.

      The Jefatura called him on his mobile and told him that the registration number reported by Cristina Ferrera did not match a blue Seat Cordoba. He told them to report it to the traffic police to see if they could get lucky.

      He opened up the doors to his house, parked the car and closed them. He felt uneasy. His flesh crawled. He stood in the patio and looked around, listening as if he might be being burgled. The noise of distant traffic came to him. He went to the kitchen. Encarnación, his housekeeper, had left him some fish stew in the fridge. He boiled some rice, warmed the stew and drank a glass of cold white wine. He ate facing the door in a strange state of expectancy.

      After eating he did something that he hadn’t done for a long time. He picked up a bottle of whisky and a tumbler of ice and went to his study. He’d installed a grey velvet chaise longue he’d moved down from one of the upstairs rooms. He lay down on it with a good measure of whisky in the glass, which he rested on his chest. He was exhausted by the day’s events but sleep, for many reasons, was a long way off. Falcón drank the whisky more methodically than he approached any of his investigations. He knew what he was doing – it takes some purpose to blot out damage. By the bottom of the third glass he’d worked over Mario Vega’s new childhood and Sebastián Ortega’s difficult life with a famous father. Now it was Inés’s turn. But he was lucky. His body wasn’t used to this level of alcohol and he quietly passed out with his cheek on the soft grey pelt of the chaise longue.