The Hidden Assassins. Robert Thomas Wilson

      ‘They were neatly severed, too,’ said Jorge. ‘No hack job—surgical precision.’

      ‘Any decent butcher could have done it,’ said Felipe. ‘But the face burnt off with acid and scalped…What do you make of that, Inspector Jefe?’

      ‘There must have been something special about him, to go to that trouble,’ said Falcón. ‘What’s in the bin liner?’

      ‘Some gardening detritus,’ said Jorge. ‘We think it had been dumped in the bin to cover the body.’

      ‘We’re going to do a wider search of the area now,’ said Felipe. ‘Pérez spoke to the guy operating the digger, who found the body, and there was some talk of a black plastic sheet. They might have done their post-mortem surgery on it, sewed him up in the shroud, wrapped him in the plastic and then dumped him.’

      ‘And you know how much we love black plastic for prints,’ said Jorge.

      Falcón noted the addresses on the envelopes and they split up. He went back to his car, stripping off his face mask. His olfactory organ hadn’t tired sufficiently for the stink of urban waste not to lodge itself in his throat. The insistent grinding of the diggers drowned out the cawing of the scavenging birds, wheeling darkly against the white sky. This was a sad place even for an insentient corpse to end up.

      Sub-Inspector Emilio Pérez was sitting on the back of a patrol car chatting to another member of the homicide squad, the ex-nun Cristina Ferrera. Pérez, who was well built with the dark good looks of a 1930s matinée idol, seemed to be of a different species to the small, blonde and rather plain young woman who’d joined the homicide squad from Cádiz four years ago. But, whereas Pérez had a tendency to be bovine in both demeanour and mentality, Ferrera was quick, intuitive and unrelenting. Falcón gave them the addresses from the envelopes, listing the questions he wanted asked, and Ferrera repeated them back before he could finish.

      ‘They sewed him into a shroud,’ he said to Cristina Ferrera as she went for the car. ‘They carefully removed his hands, burnt his face off, scalped him, but sewed him into a shroud.’

      ‘I suppose they think they’ve shown him some sort of respect,’ said Ferrera. ‘Like they do at sea, or for burial in mass graves after a disaster.’

      ‘Respect,’ said Falcón. ‘Right after they’ve shown him the ultimate disrespect by taking his life and his identity. There’s something ritualistic and ruthless about this, don’t you think?’

      ‘Perhaps they were religious,’ said Ferrera, raising an ironic eyebrow. ‘You know, a lot of terrible things have been done in God’s name, Inspector Jefe.’

      Falcón drove back into the centre of Seville in strange yellowing light as a huge storm cloud, which had been gathering over the Sierra de Aracena, began to encroach on the city from the northwest. The radio told him that there would be an evening of heavy rain. It was probably going to be the last rain before the long hot summer.

      At first he thought that it might be the physical and mental jolt he’d had from colliding with Consuelo that morning which was making him feel anxious. Or was it the change in the atmospheric pressure, or some residual edginess left from seeing the bloated corpse on the dump? As he sat at the traffic lights he realized that it ran deeper than all that. His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new. The unidentifiable corpse was like a neurosis; an ugly protrusion prodding the consciousness of the city from a greater horror underneath. It was the sense of that greater horror, with its potential to turn minds, move spirits and change lives that he was finding so disturbing.

      By the time he arrived back at the Jefatura, after a series of meetings with judges in the Edificio de los Juzgados, it was seven o’clock and evening seemed to have come early. The smell of rain was as heavy as metal in the ionized air. The thunder still seemed to be a long way off, but the sky was darkening to a premature night and flashes of lightning startled, like death just missed.

      Pérez and Ferrera were waiting for him in his office. Their eyes followed him as he went to the window and the first heavy drops of rain rapped against the glass. Contentment was a strange human state, he thought, as a light steam rose from the car park. Just at the moment life seemed boring and the desire for change emerged like a brilliant idea, along came a new, sinister vitality and the mind was suddenly scrambling back to what appeared to be prelapsarian bliss.

      ‘What have you got?’ he asked, moving along the window to his desk and collapsing in the chair.

      ‘You didn’t give us a time of death,’ said Ferrera.

      ‘Sorry. Forty-eight hours was the estimate.’

      ‘We found the bins where the envelopes were dumped. They’re in the old city centre, on the corner of a cul-de-sac and Calle Boteros, between the Plaza de la Alfalfa and the Plaza Cristo de Burgos.’

      ‘When do they empty those bins?’

      ‘Every night between eleven and midnight,’ said Pérez.

      ‘So if, as the Médico Forense says, he died some time in the evening of Saturday 3rd June,’ said Ferrera, ‘they probably wouldn’t have been able to dump the body until three in the morning on Sunday.’

      ‘Where are those bins now?’

      ‘We’ve had them sent down to forensics to test for blood traces.’

      ‘But we might be out of luck there,’ said Pérez. ‘Felipe and Jorge have found some black plastic sheeting, which they think was wrapped around the body.’

      ‘Did any of the people you spoke to at the addresses on the envelopes remember seeing any black plastic sheeting in the bottom of one of the bins?’

      ‘We didn’t know about the black plastic sheeting when we interviewed them.’

      ‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Falcón, his brain not concentrated on the details, still drifting about in his earlier unease. ‘Why do you think the body was dumped at three in the morning?’

      ‘Saturday night near the Alfalfa…you know what it’s like around there…all the kids in the bars and out on the streets.’

      ‘Why choose those bins, if it’s so busy?’

      ‘Maybe they know those bins,’ said Pérez. ‘They knew that they could park down a dark, quiet cul-de-sac and what the collection times were. They could plan. Dumping the body would only take a few seconds.’

      ‘Any apartments overlooking the bins?’

      ‘We’ll go around the apartments in the cul-de-sac again tomorrow,’ said Pérez. ‘The apartment with the best view is at the end, but there was nobody at home.’

      A long, pulsating flash of lightning was accompanied by a clap of thunder so loud that it seemed to crack open the sky above their heads. They all instinctively ducked and the Jefatura was plunged into darkness. They fumbled around for a torch, while the rain thrashed against the building and drove in waves across the car park. Ferrera propped a flashlight up against some files and they sat back. More lightning left them blinking, with the window frame burnt on to their retinae. The emergency generators started up in the basement. The lights flickered back on. Falcón’s mobile vibrated on the desktop: a text from the Médico Forense telling him that the autopsy had been completed and he would be free from 8.30 a.m. to discuss it. Falcón sent a text back agreeing to see him first thing. He flung the mobile back on the desk and stared into the wall.

      ‘You seem a little uneasy, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez, who had a habit of stating the obvious, while Falcón had a habit of ignoring him.

      ‘We have an unidentified corpse, which could prove to be unidentifiable,’ said Falcón, marshalling his thoughts, trying to give Pérez and Ferrera a focus for their investigative work. ‘How many people do you think were involved in this murder?’

      ‘A minimum of two,’ said Ferrera.

      ‘Killing,