The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘I can’t think,’ she said it again.

  ‘You have to think, Doña Consuelo, because you have to go over every minute that you spent with Raúl Jiménez plus everything you know about his life before you met him and you must tell it all … to me and then perhaps between us we can find the small crack … the …’

  ‘The small crack?’

  Falcón’s mind went blank. What crack was he talking about? An opening. A chink. But into what?

  ‘We might find something that will give us an insight,’ he said. ‘Yes, an insight.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Into what your husband feared,’ said Falcón, losing his thread.

  ‘He had nothing to fear. There was nothing frightening in his life.’

  Falcón reined in his thoughts. His fear? What was he thinking of? What was this man’s fear going to tell him?

  ‘Your husband had certain … tastes,’ said Falcón, fingering the pack of Celtas. ‘Here we are in one of the most prestigious apartment buildings in Seville, or at least they were fifteen years ago …’

  ‘Which was about when he bought it,’ she said. ‘I never liked it here.’

  ‘And where were you moving to?’

  ‘Heliopolis.’

  ‘Another expensive place to live,’ said Falcón. ‘He has four of the most well-known restaurants in Seville attended by the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. And yet … Celtas, which he smoked with the filters broken off. And yet … cheap prostitutes picked up in the Alameda.’

  ‘That was only a recent development. No more than two years … since … since Viagra became available. He was impotent for three years before that.’

  ‘His taste in tobacco probably goes back to a time when he had no money. When was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, he never talked about it.’

  ‘Where does he come from?’

  ‘He never talked about that either,’ she said. ‘We Spanish don’t have such a glorious past that his generation would choose to wallow in it.’

  ‘What do you know about his parents?’

  ‘That they’re both dead.’

  Consuelo Jiménez was no longer maintaining eye contact. Her ice-blue eyes roved the room.

  ‘When did you and Raúl Jiménez meet?’

  ‘At the Feria de Abril in 1989. I was invited to his caseta by a mutual friend. He danced a very good Sevillana … not the usual shuffling about that you see from the men. He had it in him. We made a very good pair.’

  ‘You would have been in your early thirties? And he was in his sixties.’

  She smoked hard and trashed the cigarette. She walked to the window where she became a dark silhouette against the bright blue sky. She folded her arms.

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said, mouth up against the cold glass. ‘The digging. The turning over. That’s why I wanted something from you first. I didn’t want to spew my life into the police machine, the one that encapsulates lives on a few sides of A4, the one that doesn’t have space for nuance or ambiguity, that doesn’t see grey but only black or white and really only has an eye for black.’

  She turned. He shifted in his seat, trying to get the light to catch her face. He turned on the desk lamp and began a reappraisal of Consuelo Jiménez in this warmer light. Perhaps the initial toughness she’d shown was what she’d learned from being with and working for Raúl Jiménez. The dress, the jewellery, the fingernails, the hair — maybe that was how Raúl Jiménez wanted her and she wore it like armour.

  ‘My job is to get to the truth,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working at it for over twenty years. In that time I … and police science, have developed hundreds of techniques for helping us get to the provable truth. I’d like to be able to tell you it is now an exact science, that it is actually scientific, but I can’t, because, like economics, another so-called science, there are people involved and where people are involved there’s variability, unpredictability, ambivalence … Does that answer your concern, Doña Consuelo?’

  ‘Maybe after all your job is not so different from your father’s.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘You were asking me about my husband. How we met. Our age disparity.’

  ‘It just struck me as unusual that an attractive woman in her thirties should …’

  ‘Go for an old toad like Raúl,’ she finished. ‘I’m sure I could think up something suitable about the emotional and economic stability of the mature man, but I think we’ve come to an agreement, haven’t we, Inspector Jefe? So I’ll tell you. Raúl Jiménez pursued me relentlessly. He cornered me, pressured me and begged me. He broke me down until I said “Yes”. And having spent months avoiding that word, in fact saying “No, no, no”, once I’d said it … it untangled me.’

  ‘What was there to untangle?’

  ‘I imagine you’ve known disappointment,’ she said. ‘When your wife left you, for instance. How old was she, by the way?’

  ‘Thirty-two,’ he said, no longer resisting her digressions.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Forty-four then.’

  She sat in the leather scoop chair, crossed her legs and swivelled from side to side.

  ‘As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not a Sevillana,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived with them for more than fifteen years but I’m not one of them. I’m a Madrileña. In fact I come from a pueblo in Extremadura, just south of Plasencia. My parents left there when I was two. I was brought up in Madrid.

  ‘In 1984 I was working in an art gallery and I fell in love with one of the clients, the son of a duke. I won’t bore you with details … only that I became pregnant. He told me we couldn’t marry and he paid for me to go to London for an abortion. We separated at the Barajas Airport and the only time I’ve seen him since is in the pages of Hola! I moved to Seville in 1985. I’d been here on holiday. I liked the city’s alegría. Four years later and not much alegría, it has to be said, I met Raúl. I was ready for Raúl. Disappointment had prepared me.’

  ‘You made it sound as if he was crazy about you. You’ve had three children by him. You seem to enjoy your work. Your choice in finally accepting him must have, as you said yourself, simplified things.’

  She went to the desk, ripped through the drawers until she came to a pile of old creamy-coloured black-and-white photographs which she shuffled through rapidly, choosing one, which she held to her chest.

  ‘It did,’ she said, ‘until I saw this —’

  She handed him the photograph. Falcón looked from the photograph to her and back again.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the mole on her top lip you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart, would you, Inspector Jefe?’ she said. ‘Apparently she was also a little shorter than me.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Raúl’s first wife,’ she said. ‘Now you see, Inspector Jefe, once a Consuelo always a Consuelo.’

  ‘And what happened to her?’

  ‘She committed suicide in 1967. She was thirty-five years old.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘Raúl said she was clinically depressed. It was her third attempt. She threw herself into the Guadalquivir — not off a bridge, just from the bank, which has always struck me as a strange thing to do,’ she said. ‘Not snuffing yourself out with sleeping pills, not savagely punishing yourself with slashed wrists, not diving into oblivion for all to see, but throwing yourself away.’

  ‘Like rubbish.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it,’ she said. ‘Raúl didn’t tell me any of that, by the way. It was an old friend of his from the Tangier days.’

  ‘I was brought up in Tangier,’ said Falcón, his brain unable to resist another non-coincidence. ‘What was your husband’s friend’s name?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It was ten years ago and there’ve been far too many names since then, you know, working in the restaurant business.’

  ‘Did your husband have any children from that marriage?’

 
; ‘Yes. Two. A boy and a girl. They’re in their fifties now or close to it. The daughter, yes, that’s interesting. About a year after we got married a letter came here from a place called San Juan de Dios.’

  ‘That’s a mental institution on the outskirts of Madrid in Ciempozuelos.’

  ‘As any Madrileño would know,’ she said. ‘But when I asked Raúl about it he invented some ridiculous story until I confronted him with a direct debit to the same institution and he had to tell me that his daughter’s been an inmate there for more than thirty years.’

  ‘And the son?’

  ‘I never met him. Raúl wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. It was closed. A past chapter. They didn’t speak. I don’t even know where he lives, but I suppose I’ll have to find out now.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘José Manuef Jiménez.’

  ‘And the mother’s maiden name?’

  ‘Bautista, yes, and she had a strange first name: Gumersinda.’

  ‘The children were both born in Tangier?’

  ‘They must have been.’

  ‘I’ll run it through the computer.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ she said.

  ‘Did he ever talk about his Tangier days … your husband?’

  ‘Now that was a very long time ago. We’re talking about the early forties and fifties. I think he left there shortly after independence in 1956. I don’t think he came straight here but I can’t be sure. All I do know was that by 1967, when his wife killed herself, he was living in a penthouse in one of those blocks of flats on the Plaza de Cuba. They were new then.’

  ‘And near the river.’

  ‘Yes, she must have looked at that river a lot,’ she said. ‘It can be quite mesmerizing, a river at night. Black, slow-moving waters don’t seem so dangerous.’

  ‘What do you know about your husband’s …?’

  ‘Call him Raúl, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Raúl’s personal and business relationships between, say, the death of his first wife and your meeting in the Feria in 1989?’

  ‘This is ancient history, Inspector Jefe. Do you think it’s relevant?’

  ‘No, I don’t, just background. I have to learn a life in a morning. I have to establish a victim in his context if I’m to have a chance at discovering motive. Most people are killed by people they know …’

  ‘Or thought they knew.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The killer knew us, didn’t he? The happy Family Jiménez.’

  ‘He knew about you.’

  Out of nowhere her face crumpled and she started crying, burst into wracking sobs and collapsed forwards on to her knees. Falcón moved towards her, unsure how to act in these situations. She sensed it and held up her hand. He held out a box of tissues, hovering like a bad waiter. She slumped back into her chair, panting, her eyes black and glistening.

  ‘You were asking about his personal and business relationships,’ she said, staring off out of the window.

  ‘He was forty-four when his first wife died. I can’t believe he went twenty years without …”

  ‘Of course there were women,’ she said savagely, angry now, possibly at him for his curiosity and his uselessness. ‘I don’t know how many there were. I imagine lots, but none of them lasted. Quite a few of them came to look at me … the winner of Raúl’s devotion. Most had their nails dipped in spite, ready to scratch. You know how I dealt with them, Inspector Jefe? I gave them the satisfaction of thinking me a silly little tart. You know, a little bit cursi, twee. It made them happy. They were superior. They left me alone after that. Some of them are friends now … in the Seville sense of the word.’

  ‘And business?’

  ‘He didn’t start the restaurants until the tourist boom in the eighties when people found there was more to Spain than the Costa del Sol. It was a hobby to begin with. He was very sociable and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t make money out of it. He started with that one in El Porvenir for his rich friends, then the one in Santa Cruz for the tourists, likewise the big one off the Plaza Alfalfa. After we married he added the two on the coast and last year we opened that one in La Macarena.’

  ‘Where did the money come from in the first place?’

  ‘He made a lot of money in Tangier after the Second World War when it was a free port. There were thousands of companies there in those days. He even had his own bank and a construction company. It was an easy place to get rich then, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘I was very young. I have no memory of the place,’ said Falcón.

  ‘He started a barging company here in Seville in the sixties. I think he even owned a steel-pressing factory for a while. Then he got into property and went into partnership with the construction company Hermanos Lorenzo, which he pulled out of in 1992.’

  ‘Was that amicable?’

  ‘The Lorenzos are regular clients of the restaurants. We used to take the children to their house in Marbella every summer until Raúl got bored.’

  ‘So since the death of his first wife and his daughter going insane you don’t think there’s been any major disturbance in Raúl’s life?’

  She remained silent for some time, staring out of the window, her foot nodding, the shoe working loose from her heel.

  ‘I’m beginning to think that Raúl was the quintessential Spaniard, maybe the quintessential Sevillano, too. Life is a fiesta!’ she said, and held her hands out in the direction of the Feria ground. ‘He was as you see him there in the photographs. Smiling. Happy. Charming. But it was a cover, Inspector Jefe. It was a cover for his total misery.’

  ‘An antidote, too, maybe,’ he said, not agreeing with her, thinking that he was Spanish, too, and he didn’t consider himself miserable.

  ‘No, not an antidote, because his alegría didn’t counteract anything. It never remedied his essential condition which, believe me, was one of abject misery.’

  ‘And you never got to the root of that?’

  ‘He didn’t want me to and I didn’t want to. He quickly discovered that while I was the visual replacement of his wife I was not her clone. Having pursued me relentlessly, he totally failed to love me. I think, in fact, I made him even more miserable by constantly reminding him of her. Still, he kept his side of the bargain, I’ll say that for him.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He absolutely didn’t want any more children and I very much wanted them. I said I wouldn’t marry him if he wasn’t going to give me children. So we … copulated, I think that’s the right word, on the three occasions necessary. He only just made it for the youngest. Those were pre-Viagra days.’

  ‘And so you found Basilio Lucena.’

  ‘I’m not finished about the children yet,’ she said, snapping. ‘Having said he didn’t want children, he then completely doted on them and was incredibly, obsessively protective of them. He was security mad. He made sure they were picked up from school. They never walked around alone. They never even played unsupervised. And have you seen the front door to this flat? That was put in after the last one was born. There are six steel bolts within the body of the door, which by five turns of the key are driven into the wall. We don’t even have a door like that to the office and there’s a safe in there.’

  ‘Who normally locked the door at night?’

  ‘He did. Unless he was away and then he’d call me at one or two in the morning to make sure I’d done it.’

  ‘Would he have locked it if he was alone?’

  ‘I’m sure he would have. He was always going on about making it routine so that it would never be forgotten.’

  ‘Did you ever ask him about this unusually obsessive behaviour?’

  ‘I was touched he cared so much about the children.’

  Ramírez called him on his mobile. He’d finished with the removals men. It had taken some time to break them down, but they’d finally admitted that they went for lunch leaving the lifting gear in place because they had one more chest of drawers to bring down.
They’d said that the gear wouldn’t work without the truck engine running, but the platform went up on rails, which was as good as a ladder. Once they’d brought the chest of drawers down nobody went back into the apartment. Falcón told him to join Fernández viewing the CCTV tapes with the conserje and hung up.

  ‘I’d like to talk about Basilio Lucena,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Did you have any plans?’

  ‘Plans?’

  ‘Your husband was an old man. Didn’t it occur to you …?’

  ‘No, it didn’t … ever. Basilio and I have a nice time together. It involves some sex, of course, but it is not a great passion. We don’t love each other.’

  ‘I was thinking back to that duke’s son you mentioned earlier.’

  ‘That was different,’ she said. ‘I have no intention of developing my relationship with Basilio. In fact, I think this might even finish it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I should have thought that you, with a famous father, would know how the eyes of society will come down on me. There will be talk and malicious thinking not dissimilar to the suspicions that you are paid by the state to have. It will all be idle … but vicious, and I will protect my children from that.’

  ‘Is it you or your husband who has the enemies?’

  ‘I am perceived as undeserving, as a rider on my husband’s coat-tails, as someone who would have failed in life were it not for Raúl Jiménez. But they will see,’ she said, her jaw muscle tensing in her cheek. ‘They will see.’

  ‘Were you aware of the contents of your husband’s will?’

  ‘I never saw him sign one, but I knew of his intentions,’ she said. ‘Everything would be left to me and the children and there would be some provision made for his daughter, his hermandad and his favourite charity.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nuevo Futuro, and the particular part of it that interested him was Los Niños de la Calle.’

  ‘Street children?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People support charities for reasons. A wife dies of cancer, the husband puts money into cancer research.’

  ‘He said that he began contributing after a trip to Central America. He was very moved by the plight of children orphaned by the civil wars in those countries.’