The Ignorance of Blood

2

Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcón drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed façade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcón's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him:

 1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville.

 2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid.

 3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing.

 4) They'd also gone through the Horizonte Group's building in Barcelona where César Benito had been an architect and board director of the construction division. They'd searched his apartments, houses in the Costa del Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing.

 5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

Every time Falcón threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcón had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for ‘the secret door’ or ‘the hidden passage’ which would take him to what he could not see.

What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderón, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

‘Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcón had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

‘I thought you were in here,’ she said, ‘but you didn't answer. Up early?’

‘A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you got anything for me?’

‘Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderón's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,’ said Ferrera.

‘And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,’ said Falcón. ‘Go on.’

‘Don't get too excited.’

‘I can tell from your face,’ said Falcón, drifting back to the wall chart, ‘that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.’

‘Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,’ said Ferrera. ‘You already know she has no criminal record.’

‘So what did you find?’ asked Falcón, catching a different tone in her voice.

‘After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.’

‘A reference?’

‘She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.’

‘Eight years ago?’ said Falcón, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Is that interesting?’

‘That's the only thing I could find,’ said Ferrera, shrugging. ‘Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.’

‘Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘Is that all?’

‘Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderón is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.’

‘Perfect.’

Ferrera left and Falcón was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderón. There was an obvious reason why Calderón was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderón's wife, Inés, was Javier Falcón's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcón had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Inés's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Inés's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderón had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderón, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcón had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcón that Vicente Cortés from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcón checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcón for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

‘When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,’ said Falcón. ‘What about the briefcase?’

‘The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,’ said Jorge. ‘We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S&M stuff, that kind of thing.’

‘You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?’

‘No, just played it on a DVD player.’

‘Where are the disks now?’

‘On top of the safe there.’

Falcón locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortés from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martín Díaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO. Both men were young, in their mid-thirties. Cortés was a trained accountant who, from the way his shoulders and biceps strained against the material of his white shirt, looked as if he'd been put through a few assault courses since he'd graduated from number-crunching. He had brown hair swept back, green eyes and a mouth that was permanently on the brink of a sneer. Díaz was a computer specialist and a linguist with Russian and Arabic up his sleeve. He wore a suit which he probably had to have made especially for him, being close to two metres tall. He played basketball to professional standard. He was dark-haired with brown eyes and a slight stoop, probably earned by trying to listen to his wife, half a metre shorter than him. This was the reality of catching organized criminals – accountants and computer whizzes, rather than special forces and weapons-trained cops.

Falcón delivered his report to the three men. Elvira, with his dark, laser-parted hair, kept straightening the files on his desk and fingering the neat and perfect knot of his blue tie. He was conservative, conventional and played everything by the book, with one eye on his job and the other on his boss, the Jefe Superior, Andrés Lobo.

‘Vasili Lukyanov ran a number of puti clubs on the Costa del Sol and some of the main roads around Granada,’ said Cortés. ‘People-trafficking, sexual slavery and prostitution were his main –’

‘Sexual slavery?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nowadays you can rent a girl for any amount of time you like. She'll do everything, from housework to full sex. When you get bored of her, you hand her back and get another one. She costs fifteen hundred euros per week,’ said Cortés. ‘The girls are traded in markets. They may come from Moldova, Albania, or even Nigeria, but they're sold and resold as much as ten times before they get here. Normal price is around three thousand euros, depending on looks. By the time the girl arrives in Spain she may have accumulated sales of thirty thousand – which she has to pay off. I know it's illogical, but that's only to you and me, not to people like Vasili Lukyanov.’

‘We found some cocaine in his car. Is that a sideline or …?’

‘He's recently moved into cocaine distribution. Or rather, his gang leader has struck a deal for product coming in from Galicia and they've now come to some form of agreement with the Colombians with regard to their operations on the Costa del Sol.’

‘So where is Lukyanov in the hierarchy?’ asked Elvira.

Cortés nodded to Díaz.

‘Difficult question, and we're wondering about the significance of finding him in a car bound for Seville with nearly eight million euros,’ said Díaz. ‘He's important. The Russians make huge profits from the sex trade, more than they make from drugs at the moment. The hierarchy has been a problem in the last year since we had Operation Wasp in 2005 and the Georgian boss of the Russian mafia here in Spain fled to Dubai.’

‘Dubai?’ asked Elvira.

‘That's where you go nowadays if you're a criminal, a terrorist, an arms trader, a money-launderer…’

‘Or a builder,’ finished Cortés. ‘It's the Costa del Sol of the Middle East.’

‘Did that leave a power vacuum here in Spain?’ asked Falcón.

‘No, his position was taken over by Leonid Revnik, who was sent from Moscow to take control. It was not a popular move with the mafia soldiers on the ground, mainly because his first act was to execute two leading mafia “directors” from one of the Moscow brigades who had encroached on his turf,’ said Díaz.

‘They were both found bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head in the Sierra Bermeja, ten kilometres north of Estepona,’ said Cortés.

‘We think that it was some old feud, dating back to the 1990s in Moscow, but what it did was create nervousness among the soldiers. They found they were having to run their business and look out for revenge attacks. There have been four “disappearances” so far this year. We're not used to this level of violence. All the other mafia groups – the Turks and Italians, who run the heroin trade; the Colombians and the Galicians, who control cocaine; the Moroccans, who traffic people and hashish – none of them practise the sort of spectacular violence they use in their own countries because they see Spain as a safe haven. They followed our old, long-standing friends the Arab arms dealers, who run their global businesses from the Costa del Sol. To all of them it's just a massive laundromat to clean their money, which means they don't want to draw attention to themselves. The Russians, on the other hand, don't seem to give a damn.’

‘Any idea why Vasili Lukyanov would be heading for Seville with eight million euros in his boot?’ asked Elvira.

‘I don't know. I'm not up to date on what's happening in Seville. It's possible that CICO in Madrid have some intelligence on what's been going on here. I've put in a request,’ said Díaz. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rival group opening up here. Leonid Revnik is fifty-two and old school. I think he'd be suspicious of someone like Vasili Lukyanov, who didn't come up through the Russian prison system but was an Afghan war veteran who bought his way in and works with women, which Revnik probably considers inferior, despite its profitability.’

‘How profitable?’ asked Elvira.

‘We have four hundred thousand prostitutes here in Spain and they generate eighteen billion euros' worth of business,’ said Díaz. ‘We are the biggest users of prostitutes and cocaine of any country in Europe.’

‘So you think Leonid Revnik despised Vasili Lukyanov, who would then have been open to offers for his expertise in a very profitable business?’ said Falcón.

‘Could be,’ said Díaz. ‘Revnik has been away in Moscow. We were expecting him back next week, but he returned early. Maybe he heard Lukyanov was making a move. I can tell you one thing for sure: Lukyanov wouldn't be going it alone. He'd need protection; but whose support he's getting, I don't know.’

‘And the eight million?’ asked Elvira, still not satisfied.

‘That's a sort of entry fee. It forces Lukyanov to burn his bridges,’ said Cortés. ‘Once he's stolen that sort of money he's never going to be able to go back to Revnik.’

‘The disks in the briefcase I mentioned in my initial report,’ said Falcón. ‘Hidden-camera stuff, older men with young girls…’

‘It's how the Russians get things done. They corrupt whoever they come into contact with,’ said Cortés. ‘We might be about to find out how our town planners, councillors, mayors and even senior policemen spent their summer holidays.’

Comisario Elvira ran his hand over his perfectly combed hair.

3

Seville Prison, Alcalá de Guadaira – Friday, 15th September 2006, 13.05 hrs

Through the reinforced glass pane of the door, Falcón watched Calderón, who was hunched over the table, smoking, staring into the tin-foil ashtray, waiting for him. The judge, who'd been young for his position, looked older. He had lost his gilded, moisturized sheen. His skin was dull and he'd lost weight where there was none to lose, making him look haggard. His hair had never been luxuriant, but was now definitely thinning to baldness. His ears seemed to have got longer, the lobes fleshier, as if from some unconscious tugging while musing on the entanglements of his mind. It settled Falcón to see the judge so reduced; it would have been intolerable had the wife-beater been his usual arrogant self. Falcón opened the door for the guard, who held a tray of coffee, and followed him in. Calderón instantly reanimated himself into an approximation of the supremely confident man he had once been.

‘To what, or to whom, do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Calderón, standing up, sweeping his arm across the sparsely furnished room. ‘Privacy, coffee, an old friend … these unimaginable luxuries.’

‘I'd have come before now,’ said Falcón, sitting down, ‘but, as you've probably realized, I've been busy.’

Calderón took a long, careful look at him and lit another cigarette, the third of his second pack of the day. The guard set down the tray and left the room.

‘And what could possibly make you want to come and see the murderer of your ex-wife?’

‘Alleged murderer of your wife.’

‘Is that significant, or are you just being accurate?’

‘This last week is the first time I've had since June to think and … do some reading,’ said Falcón.

‘Well, I hope it was a good novel and not the transcript of my interview with my Grand Inquisitor, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita,’ said Calderón. ‘That, as my lawyer will tell you, was not my finest hour.’

‘I've read that quite a few times and I've also gone over Zorrita's interview with Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘She's been to see you a number of times, hasn't she?’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Calderón, nodding, ‘they've not been conjugal visits. We talk.’

‘About what?’

‘We were never very good at talking,’ said Calderón, drawing hard on his cigarette. ‘We had that other language.’

‘I was just thinking that maybe since you've been in here you might have developed some other communication skills.’

‘I have, but not particularly with Marisa.’

‘So why does she come to see you?’

‘Duty? Guilt? I don't know. Ask her.’

‘Guilt?’

‘I think there might be a few things she regrets telling Zorrita about,’ said Calderón.

‘Like what?’

‘I don't want to talk about it,’ said Calderón. ‘Not with you.’

‘Things like that little joke you had with Marisa about the “bourgeois solution” to costly divorce: … murder your wife.’

‘Fuck knows how that bastard Zorrita squeezed that out of her.’

‘Maybe he didn't have to squeeze too hard,’ said Falcón calmly.

Calderón's cigarette stopped on the way to his mouth.

‘What else do you think she regretted talking to Zorrita about?’ asked Falcón.

‘She covered for me. She said I left her apartment later than I did. She thought she was doing me a favour, but Zorrita had all the timings from the cab company. It was a stupid thing to have done. It counted against me. Made me look as if I needed help, especially taken in conjunction with the cops finding me on the banks of the Guadalquivir river trying to dispose of Inés's body,’ said Calderón, who stopped, frowned and did some concentrated smoking. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Javier? What's this all about?’

‘I'm trying to help you,’ said Falcón.

‘Are you now?’ said Calderón. ‘And why would you want to help the alleged murderer of your ex-wife? I realize that you and Inés weren't particularly close any more, but… still…’

‘You told me you were innocent. You've said so from the very beginning.’

‘Well, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, you're the expert on the murderer's constant state of denial,’ said Calderón.

‘I am,’ said Falcón. ‘And I'm not going to pretend to you that my investigation into what happened on that night doesn't have ulterior motives.’

‘All right,’ said Calderón, sitting back, paradoxically satisfied by this revelation. ‘I didn't think you wanted to save my ass … especially if you've read that transcript as many times as you said.’

‘There's some very ugly stuff in there, I can't deny that, Esteban.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Calderón. ‘I wouldn't mind turning back the clock on my whole relationship with Inés.’

‘I have some questions relating to the transcript,’ said Falcón, heading off a possible descent into self-pity. ‘I understand that the first time you hit Inés was when she discovered the naked photographs of Marisa on your digital camera.’

‘She was trying to download them on to her computer,’ said Calderón, leaping to his own defence. ‘I didn't know what her intentions were. I mean, it's one thing to find them, but it seemed to me that she was going to make use of them in some way.’

‘I'm sure Inés knew you very well, by then,’ said Falcón. ‘So why did you leave the camera hanging around? What were you thinking of, taking shots of your naked lover?’

‘ I didn't take them, Marisa did … while I was asleep. She was nice about it, though. She told me she'd left some “presents” on the camera,’ said Calderón. ‘And I didn't leave the camera hanging around. Inés went through my pockets.’

‘And what were you doing with the camera in the first place?’

‘I took some shots of a lawyers' dinner I'd attended earlier in the evening,’ said Calderón. ‘My alibi, if Inés found the camera.’

‘Which you knew she would.’

Calderón nodded, smoked, searched his memory; something he did a lot these days.

‘I'd overslept at Marisa's,’ he said. ‘It was six o'clock in the morning and, you know, I wasn't as collected as I would have been normally. Inés appeared to be asleep. She wasn't. When I dropped off, she got up and found the shots.’

‘And that was the first time you hit her,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you thought about that since you've been in here?’

‘Are you going to be my shrink as well, Javier?’

Falcón showed him an empty pair of hands.

‘If you didn't take the shots of Marisa and the only reason you had the camera with you was to provide yourself with an alibi for Inés, how come it was at hand for your lover to take photos of herself naked?’

Calderón stared into the wall for some time until he gradually started chopping the air with his cigarette fingers.

‘She told me she went through my jacket pockets. She said: “I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks,”’ said Calderón. ‘They all go through your pockets. That's what women do, Javier. It's part of their training. They're very exigent on details.’

‘Did she volunteer that information?’

‘No, I asked her.’

‘Any reason?’

‘I don't know,’ said Calderón. ‘I think I was hunting for my shoes. I was nervous about getting back to my apartment and having a confrontation with Inés. I'd never stayed out all night before. I suppose Marisa's behaviour just struck me as a bit odd.’

‘Any thoughts about it now?’

‘It's the sort of thing a wife would do … not a lover,’ said Calderón, crushing out the cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray. ‘It's what Inés did when I got home.’

‘You're smoking a lot, Esteban.’

‘There's nothing else to do, and it calms my nerves.’

‘Maybe you should think of an alternative method of calming your nerves.’

Calderón looked up, suspicious.

‘You can keep trying, Javier, but I'm not going to lie down on your couch.’

‘What about somebody else's couch?’ said Falcón, flicking over a page in his notebook. ‘Another question about the transcript…’

Calderón lit a cigarette, belligerently. He inhaled deeply without taking his eyes off Falcón and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I'm listening.’

‘Why do you think Marisa told Inspector Jefe Zorrita that she'd met Inés?’

‘Zorrita said that dealing with liars was like dealing with children. Marisa tried to lie about it but he broke her down.’

‘Zorrita is a dictaphone man, not a note-taker. I've listened to the recording of the interview with Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘If there was one bit of evidence you didn't want in Zorrita's hands it was the fact of Marisa and Inés having met before, and especially the circumstances of that meeting.’

‘Probably,’ said Calderón, not that interested in something he didn't regard as a development.

‘Zorrita found a witness to that meeting in the Murillo Gardens on 6th June. It wasn't too difficult because, apparently, it was quite a showdown between the two women. The witness said they went at each other like a couple of whores competing for the same patch.’

‘Doesn't sound like that witness hung around in very nice places.’

They smiled at each other with no humour.

‘According to this witness, Marisa had the last word,’ said Falcón, flicking through his notebook. ‘She said something along the lines of: “Just remember, Inés, that when he's beating you it's because he's been fucking me so beautifully all night that he can't bear to see your disappointed little face in the morning.” Is that what Marisa told you? Because she didn't happen to mention that to Zorrita.’

‘What's your point?’

‘First of all, how did Marisa find out that you'd been beating Inés? She didn't have a bruised face. Did you tell her?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe one of the ugly lessons she learnt in her early life in Havana was how to spot an abused woman.’

‘Your point, Javier?’ said Calderón, with courtroom lawyer's steel.

‘Marisa gave Zorrita the impression that Inés had the upper hand. She mentioned Inés's phrase several times: “La puta con el puro.”’ The whore with the cigar.

‘That's what she told me,’ said Calderón, listening hard now.

‘Zorrita thought Marisa had told him all that because she was still furious at being shamed by Inés in public, but clearly she wasn't. Marisa crushed Inés. The witness said that Inés went off like “the village cur”. So what was Marisa's purpose in telling Zorrita about that meeting?’

‘You think it was calculated,’ said Calderón.

‘I listened to the tape. Zorrita only had to prod her a couple of times to get the story out of her. And the story, her version of it, was crucial in redoubling your motive to beat Inés and perhaps take it too far and kill her. Now that would be a story that you'd want to keep out of the investigating officer's mind at all costs.’

Calderón was smoking so intently that he was making himself dizzy with the nicotine rush.

‘My final question to do with the transcript,’ said Falcón. ‘Inspector Jefe Zorrita came to see me some hours after he'd interviewed you. I asked if you'd broken down and confessed, and his answer was: sort of. He admitted that when you refused a lawyer – God knows what you were thinking of at that moment, Esteban – it meant that he could be more brutal with you in the interview. That, combined with the horror of the autopsy revelations, seemed to create doubt in your mind and, Zorrita reckoned, it was then that you believed that you could have done it.’

‘I was very confused,’ said Calderón. ‘My hubris was in refusing the lawyer. I was a lawyer. I could handle myself.’

‘When Zorrita asked you to describe what happened when you went back to your apartment that night, he said you rendered the events in the form of a film script.’

‘I don't remember that.’

‘You used the third person singular. You were describing something you'd seen … as if you were out of your body, or behind a camera. It was clear you were in some kind of trance. Didn't your lawyer mention any of this?’

‘Maybe he was too embarrassed.’

‘There seems to be some confusion about what you saw when you came into the apartment,’ said Falcón.

‘My lawyer and I have talked about that.’

‘In your film script version, you describe yourself as “annoyed”, because you didn't want to see Inés.’

‘I didn't want a confrontation. I wasn't angry, as I had been when Marisa told me about meeting Inés in the Murillo Gardens. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. Those were long days. All the work, followed by media engagements in the evening.’

Falcón flipped over another page of his notebook.

‘What interested me was when you said: “He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was.” What was all that about?’

‘Is that a direct quote?’

‘Yes,’ said Falcón, putting the dictaphone on the table and pressing ‘play’.

Calderón listened, transfixed, as the smoke crawled up the valleys of his fingers.

‘Is that me?’

Falcón played it again.

‘It doesn't seem that important.’

‘I think Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot,’ said Falcón.

Calderón leapt to his feet as if he'd been spiked from underneath.