The Hidden Assassins. Robert Thomas Wilson

as the paramedics uncovered each body and placed it in a body bag. He had to remind Fernando to breathe. At the third body Fernando’s knees buckled and Falcón lowered him to the ground, where he fell forward on to all fours and crawled around, like a poisoned dog looking for a place to die. One of the paramedics shouted and pointed. A TV cameraman had come around the back, through the pre-school, and was filming the bodies. He turned and ran before anybody could react.

      The ambulance moved off. The ghostly crowd surged after it and gave up, with a final spasm of grief, before dissolving into groups, with the bereaved women supported from all sides. Television journalists and their cameramen tried to force their way in to talk to the women. They were rebuffed. Falcón pulled Fernando to his feet, pushed him back into the pre-school out of sight, and went to find a policeman to keep journalists away.

      Outside a journalist had found a young guy in his twenties, with a couple of bloody nicks in his cheek, who’d been there when the bomb exploded. The camera was right in his face, inches away, the proximity giving the pictures their urgency.

      ‘…straight after it happened, I mean, the noise…you just can’t believe the loudness of that noise, it was so loud I couldn’t breathe, it was like…’

      ‘What was it like?’ asked the journalist, an eager young woman, stabbing the microphone back into his face. ‘Tell us. Tell Spain what it was like.’

      ‘It was like the noise took away all the air.’

      ‘What was the first thing you noticed after the explosion, after the noise?’

      ‘Silence,’ he said. ‘Just a deathly quiet. And, I don’t know whether this was in my head or it actually happened, I heard bells ringing…’

      ‘Church bells?’

      ‘Yes, church bells, but they were all crazy, as if the shock waves of the explosion were making them ring, you know, at random. It made me sick to hear it. It was as if everything had gone wrong with the world, and nothing would be the same.’

      The rest was lost in the clatter and thump of a helicopter’s rotor blades, thrashing away at the dust in the air. It went up higher, to take in the whole scene. This was the aerial photography Falcón had ordered up.

      He posted a policeman at the entrance of the school, but found that Fernando had disappeared. He crossed the corridor to the wrecked classroom. Empty. He called Ramírez as he crashed through the broken furniture.

      ‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘We’ve just arrived. We’re on Calle Los Romeros.’

      ‘Is Cristina with you?’

      ‘We’re all here. The whole squad.’

      ‘All of you come round to the pre-school now.’

      Fernando was back at the wall of rubble and collapsed floors. He threw himself at it like a madman. He tore at the concrete, bricks, window frames and hurled them behind him.

      ‘…rescue teams working on this side,’ roared Ramírez, over the noise of the helicopter. ‘There are dogs in the wreckage.’

      ‘Get over here.’

      Fernando had grabbed at the steel netting of a shattered reinforced concrete floor. He had his feet braced against the rubble. His neck muscles stood out and his carotid arteries appeared as thick as cord. Falcón pulled him off and they fought for some moments, tripping and floundering about in the dust and rubble until they were ghosts of their former selves.

      ‘Have you got Gloria’s phone number?’ roared Falcón.

      They were panting in the choking atmosphere, their sweating faces caked with grey, white and brown dust, which swirled around them from the chopper’s blades.

      The question transfixed Fernando. Despite hearing all these mobile phones ringing, his mind was so paralysed with shock, he hadn’t thought of his own. He ripped it out of his pocket. He squeezed life into the starter button. The helicopter moved off, leaving an immense silence.

      Fernando blinked, his brain fluttering like torn flags, trying to remember his PIN. It came to him and he thumbed in Gloria’s number. He stood up from his kneeling position and walked towards the wreckage. He held a hand up as if demanding silence from the world. From his left came the faint, tinny sound of some Cuban piano.

      ‘That’s her,’ he roared, moving left. ‘She was on this side of the building when…when I last saw her.’

      Falcón got to his feet and made a futile attempt to dust himself down just as his homicide squad turned up. He stayed them with his hand and moved towards the tinkling piano, which he recognized as a song called ‘Lágrimas Negras’—Black Tears.

      ‘She’s there!’ roared Fernando. ‘She’s in there!’

      Baena, a junior detective from Falcón’s squad, ran back and fetched a rescue team with a dog. The team pinpointed the spot from where the ringing tone was coming and managed to get Fernando to tell them that his wife and daughter had been on the fifth floor. They gave him steady looks when he released that information. In the face of his radiant hope not one of them had the heart to tell him that the fall, with three storeys coming down on top, meant that, at this moment, they were praying only.

      ‘She’s in there,’ he said, to their still, expressionless faces. ‘That mobile is always with her. She’s a sales rep. “Lágrimas Negras” was her favourite song.’

      Falcón nodded to Cristina Ferrera and they guided Fernando back to the pre-school and got a nurse to clean him up and dress his cuts. Falcón called the homicide squad into the school latrines. He washed his hands and face and looked at them in the mirror.

      ‘This is going to be the most complicated investigation that any of us have ever been involved in, and that includes me,’ said Falcón. ‘Nothing is straightforward in terrorist attacks. We know that from what happened on March 11th in Madrid. There are going to be a lot of people involved—the CNI’s intelligence agents, the CGI’s antiterrorist squad, the bomb disposal teams and us—and that’s just on the investigative side. What we’ve got to do is keep it clear in our minds what we, as the homicide squad, are trying to achieve. I’ve already asked for a police cordon to keep the site clear for us.’

      ‘They’re in place,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re working on getting the journalists out.’

      Falcón turned to face them, shaking his wet hands.

      ‘By now you all know that there was a mosque in the basement of that block. Our job is not to speculate on what happened and why. Our job is to find out who went into that mosque, and who came out, and what went on inside it in the last twenty-four hours, and then forty-eight hours, and so on. We do that by talking to every possible witness we can find. Our other crucial task is to find out about every vehicle in the vicinity. The bomb was big. It would have had to be transported to this place. If that vehicle is still here, we have to find it.

      ‘At the moment the first task is going to be difficult, with all the occupants of the apartments evacuated from their buildings. So our priority is to identify all vehicles and their owners. José Luis will divide you up and you will search every sector, starting with cars closest to the collapsed building. Cristina, you’ll stay with me for the moment.

      ‘And remember, everybody here is suffering in some way, whether they’ve lost somebody or seen them injured, whether they’ve had their home destroyed or their windows smashed. You’ve got a heavy workload and you’re going to be under a lot of pressure, with or without the media on your backs. You’ll get more information by being sensitive and understanding than by treating this as the usual process. You’re all good people, which is why you’re in the homicide squad—now go out there and find out what happened.’

      They filed out. Ferrera stayed behind. Falcón washed his hair under the tap and then wiped his face and hands.

      ‘His name is Fernando. His wife and daughter were in the collapsed apartment