The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

sat on the edge of the desk, his foot swinging.

      ‘This gun, Sr Vázquez, is not for discouraging burglars. It’s a gun for stopping a man dead. Even if you clipped a man on the shoulder with a 9 mm bullet from a Heckler & Koch you’d probably kill him.’

      ‘If you were a rich man who wanted to protect his family and home, would you go out and buy a toy or a serious piece of weaponry?’

      ‘So, as far as you know, Sr Vega is not involved in anything criminal or borderline illegal.’

      ‘Not that I know of.’

      ‘And you can think of no reason why anybody would want to kill him?’

      ‘Look, Inspector Jefe, I’m involved with the legal aspects of my clients’ businesses. I rarely get involved in their personal lives unless it has an impact on their business. I know about his company. If he was doing anything else then he was not employing me as his lawyer. If he was having an affair with another man’s wife, which I doubt, I wouldn’t have known about it.’

      ‘So what is your reading of this crime scene, Sr Vázquez? Sra Vega upstairs, suffocated by a pillow. Sr Vega downstairs, dead with a litre of drain cleaner by his side. While their son, Mario, is in the hands of a neighbour for the night.’

      Silence. The brown eyes steadied on Falcón’s chest.

      ‘It looks like suicide.’

      ‘At least one of those deaths has to be a murder.’

      ‘It looks like Rafael killed his wife and then himself.’

      ‘Did you ever see any evidence of that level of instability in your late client?’

      ‘How’s anybody supposed to know what goes on inside a man’s head?’

      ‘So, he wasn’t looking at business failure or financial ruin?’

      ‘You’d have to speak to the accountant about that, although the accountant was not the finance director. His knowledge would probably be confined.’

      ‘Who was the finance director?’

      ‘Rafael kept things close to his chest.’

      Falcón gave him his notebook. Vázquez wrote down the accountant’s name, Francisco Dourado, and his details.

      ‘Is there any scandal brewing that you know of, involving Sr Vega or his company?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘Now I know you,’ said Sr Vázquez, smiling for the first time with astonishingly perfect teeth. ‘Falcón. I didn’t make the connection before. Well…you’re still here, Inspector Jefe, and my client hasn’t gone through anything like you did.’

      ‘But I didn’t commit any crime, Sr Vázquez. I wasn’t facing moral ruin or personal shame.’

      ‘Shame,’ said the lawyer. ‘Do you think shame still has that sort of power in our modern world?’

      ‘It depends on the society in which you have built your life. How important its opinion is to you,’ said Falcón. ‘By the way, do you hold Sr Vega’s will?’

      ‘Yes, I do.’

      ‘Who is the next of kin?’

      ‘As I said, he has no family.’

      ‘And his wife?’

      ‘She has a sister in Madrid. Her parents live here in Seville.’

      ‘We’ll need someone to identify the bodies.’

      Pérez appeared in the doorway.

      ‘They’ve pulled the note out of Sr Vega’s hand,’ he said.

      They went to the kitchen, squeezing past the forensics who were crowding the corridor with their cases, waiting to get on to the crime scene.

      The note was already in a plastic evidence bag. Calderón handed it over, eyebrows raised. Falcón and Vázquez frowned as they read it, and not just because its ten words were written in English.

      ‘…the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…’

       2

       Wednesday, 24th July 2002

      ‘Do these words mean anything to you?’ asked Calderón.

      ‘Nothing at all,’ said Vázquez.

      ‘Does the handwriting look normal to you?’

      ‘It’s definitely Sr Vega’s…that’s all I can say.’

      ‘It doesn’t differ from his usual handwriting in any way?’

      ‘I’m not an expert, Juez,’ said Vázquez. ‘It doesn’t seem to have been written with a trembling hand, but it is not exactly fluid either. It seems careful rather than dashed off.’

      ‘It’s not what I would call a suicide note,’ said Falcón.

      ‘What would you call it, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Vázquez.

      ‘An enigma. Something that’s demanding to be investigated.’

      ‘Interesting,’ said Calderón.

      ‘Is it?’ said Vázquez. ‘We are always given the impression that detective work is very exciting. This…?’

      ‘If you were a murderer you would normally not want to have your work investigated,’ said Falcón. ‘You would hope to get away with it. You told me earlier that you thought this crime scene looked like a suicide. A killer with a motive would usually try to give that notion authority with a straightforward suicide note and not with something that makes the investigating team think: What’s this all about?’

      ‘Unless he was a madman,’ said Vázquez. ‘One of those serial killers laying down a challenge.’

      ‘Well, first of all, there’s no challenge. A half-note in Sr Vega’s handwriting is not what I would call a psychotic attempt to communicate. It’s too oblique. Secondly, the crime scene does not contain any of the qualities we associate with a psychopathic killer. They are the sort of people who think about body placement for instance. They introduce elements of their obsessions into the picture. They show that they have been here, that an intricate mind has been at work. There’s nothing casual about a serial killer’s montage. A bottle of drain cleaner is not left where it fell. Everything has importance.’

      ‘So what normal person would kill a man and his wife and want to have it investigated?’ asked Vázquez.

      ‘A murderer who had good reason to hate Sr Vega and wanted him to be revealed for the man he was,’ said Falcón. ‘As you may know, murder inquiries are very intrusive processes. To find the motive we have to conduct a post mortem, not just on the body but on the victim’s life. We have to go into everything – business, social, public, private and as personal as we can get. Perhaps Sr Vega himself…’

      ‘But, Inspector Jefe, you can never get inside a man’s head, can you?’ said Sr Vázquez.

      ‘The other possibility is that Sr Vega himself is trying to communicate with us. By balling this note in his fist he may be telling us to investigate the crime.’

      ‘You didn’t let me finish,’ said Vázquez. ‘The one thing my job has taught me is the three voices of man: the public one to address the world, the private one he keeps for his family and friends, and the most troubling one of all – the voice inside his own head. The one he uses to talk to himself. Successful people like Sr Vega have very powerful inner voices and something I’ve noticed about that kind of person…he never lets anybody have access to it – not his parents, not his wife, not his first-born child.’

      ‘That’s