'I thought she was.'
'But she wasn't,' said Zorrita. 'She woke up, didn't she? And what did she do?'
'All right, she found my digital camera and started downloading the images I had on it. They included two shots of Marisa.'
'You must have been very angry when you found out. When you came across her in the act, caught her red-handed,' said Zorrita, not quite able to ease back on his relish. 'She was very fragile, your wife, wasn't she? The Medico Forense estimates her weight before the catastrophic blood loss as 47 kilos.'
'Look, we were in the kitchen, I just brushed her aside,' said Calderon. 'I didn't realize my own strength or her fragility. She fell awkwardly against the kitchen counter. It's made out of granite.'
'But that doesn't explain the fist mark on her abdomen, or the toe mark over her left kidney, or the amount of her hair we've found distributed around your apartment.'
Calderon sat back. His hands fell from the edge of the table. He was not a career criminal and he was finding resistance very hard work. The only time he could remember having to trump up such a quantity of lies was when he'd been a small boy.
'As I swept her aside I must have tapped her diaphragm. She hit the counter and came down on my foot.'
'The autopsy found a ruptured spleen and a bleeding kidney,' said Zorrita. 'I think it was less of a tap and more of a punch, wasn't it, Sr Calderon? The Medico Forense thinks from the shape of the bruise around her loin area and the darker red imprint of a toenail, that it was more of a kick with a bare foot than someone "falling" on to a foot, which would, of course, be flat on the floor.'
Silence.
'And all that took place on Tuesday morning?'
'Yes,' said Calderon.
'How long was that after your lover's little joke about solving the problem of your divorce?'
'Her joke had nothing to do with that.'
'All right, when was the next time you beat your wife?' asked Zorrita. 'Was it after you found out that your wife and lover had accidentally met in the Murillo Gardens?'
'How the fuck do you know that?' asked Calderon.
'I asked Marisa if she'd ever met your wife,' said Zorrita, 'and she started off by lying to me. Why did she do that, do you think?'
'I don't know.'
'She said she hadn't, but you know, I've been interviewing liars more than half my working life and after a while it's like dealing with children; you become so practised at reading the signs that their attempts become laughable. So why do you think she lied on your behalf?'
'On my behalf?' asked Calderon. 'She didn't do anything on my behalf.'
'Why didn't she want me to know that she had had this…vocal confrontation with your late wife?'
'I've no idea.'
'Because she was still angry about it, Sr Calderon, that's why,' said Zorrita. 'And if she was angry about being insulted by your wife, about being called a whore, in public, by your wife…I'm wondering how she made you feel about it…Well, she told me.'
'She told you?'
'Oh, she tried to protect you again, Sr Calderon. She tried to make it sound like nothing. She kept repeating: "Esteban's not a violent man," that you were just "annoyed", but I think she also realized just how very, very angry you were. What did you do on the night that Marisa told you Ines had called her a whore?'
More silence from Calderon. He'd never found it so difficult to articulate. He was too stoked up with emotion to find the right reply.
'Was that the night you came home and pummelled your wife's breasts and whipped her with your belt so that the buckle cut into her buttocks and thighs?'
He'd come into this interview with a sense of resistance as dense and powerful as a reinforced concrete dam, and within half an hour of questioning all that was left were some cracked and frayed bean canes. And then they caved in. He saw himself in front of a state prosecutor, facing these same questions, and he realized the hopelessness of his situation.
'Yes,' he said, on automatic, unable to find even the schoolboy creativity to invent the ridiculous lie to obscure his brutality. There was nothing ambiguous about the welt of a belt and the gouge of its buckle.
'Why don't you talk me through what happened on the last night of your wife's life,' said Zorrita. 'Earlier we'd reached the moment when you'd just made love to Marisa on the balcony.'
Calderon's eyes found a point midway between himself and Zorrita, which he examined with the unnerving intensity of a man spiralling down to the darker regions of himself. He'd never had these things said to him before. He'd never had these things revealed to him under such emotional circumstances. He was stunned by his brutality and he couldn't understand where, in all his urbanity, it came from. He even tried to imagine himself dealing out these beatings to Ines, but they wouldn't come to him. He did not see himself like that. He did not see Esteban Calderon's fists raining down on his fine-boned wife. It had been him, there was no doubt about that. He saw himself before and after the act. He remembered the anger building up to the beatings and it subsiding afterwards. It struck him that he had been in the grip of a blind savagery, a violence so intense that it had no place in his civilized frame. A terrifying doubt began to crowd his chest and affect the motor reflex of his breathing, so that he had to concentrate: in, out, in, out. And it was there, in the lowest and darkest circle of his spiralling thoughts, the completely lightless zone of his soul, that he realized that he could have murdered her. Javier Falcon had told him once that there was no greater denial than that of a man who had murdered his wife. The thought terrified him into a state of profound concentration. He'd never looked with such microscopic detail into his mind before. He began to talk, but as if he was describing a film, scene by horrible scene.
'He was exhausted. He had been completely drained by the experiences of the day. 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. She told him he had to get up. It was past three o'clock. He had to go home. He couldn't wear the same clothes as he had yesterday and appear on television. She called a taxi. She took him down in the lift. He wanted to sleep on her shoulder in the street. The cab arrived and she spoke to the driver. He fell into the back seat and his head rolled back. He was only vaguely aware of movement and of light flashing behind his eyelids. The door opened. Hands pulled at him. He gave the driver his house keys. The driver opened the door to the building. He slapped on the light. They walked up the stairs together. The driver opened the apartment door. Two turns of the lock. The driver went back down the stairs. The hall light went out. He went into the apartment and saw light coming from the kitchen. He was annoyed. He didn't want to see her. He didn't want to have to explain…again. He moved towards the light…'
Calderon paused, because he was suddenly unsure of what he was going to see.
'His foot crossed the edge of the shadow and stepped into the light. He turned into the frame.'
Calderon was blinking at the tears in his eyes. He was so relieved to see her standing there at the sink in her nightdress. She turned when she heard his footfall. He was going to skirt the table and pull her to him and squeeze his love into her, but he couldn't move because when she turned she didn't open her arms to him, she didn't smile, her dark eyes did not glisten with joy…they opened wide with abject terror.
'And what happened?' asked Zorrita.
'What?' asked Calderon, as if coming to.
'You turned into the kitchen doorway and what did you do?' asked Zorrita.
'I don't know,' said Calderon, surprised to find his cheeks wet. He wiped them with the flat of his palms and brushed them down his trousers.
'It's not unusual for people to have blank moments about terrible things that they have done,' said Zorrita. 'Tell me what you saw when you turned into the doorway of the kitchen.'
'She was standing at the kitchen sink,' he said. 'I was so happy to see her.'
'Happy?'
said Zorrita. 'I thought you were annoyed.'
'No,' he said, holding his head in his hands. 'No, it was…I was lying on the floor.'
'You were lying on the floor?'
'Yes. I woke up on the floor in the corridor and I went back to the kitchen light and it was then that I saw Ines lying on the floor,' he said. 'There was a terrible quantity of blood and it was very, very red.'
'But how did she end up lying on the floor?' asked Zorrita. 'One moment she was standing and the next she's lying on the floor in a pool of blood. What did you do to her?'
'I don't know that she was standing,' said Calderon, searching his mind for that image to see if it really existed.
'Let me tell you a few facts about your wife's murder, Sr Calderon. As you said, the cab driver opened the door of the apartment for you, with two turns of the key in the lock. That means the door had been double locked from the inside. Your wife was the only person in the apartment.'
'Ye-e-e-s,' said Calderon, concentrating on Zorrita's every syllable, hoping they would give him the vital clue that would unlock his memory.
'When the Medico Forense took your wife's body temperature down by the river it was 36.1°C. She was still warm. The ambient temperature last night was 29°C. That means your wife had just been killed. The autopsy revealed that your wife's skull had been smashed at the back, that there had been a devastating cerebral haemorrhage and two neck vertebrae had been shattered. Examination of the crime scene has revealed blood and hair on the black granite work surface and a further large quantity of blood on the floor next to your wife's head which also contained bone fragments and cerebral matter. The DNA samples taken from your apartment belong only to you and to your wife. The shirt that was taken from you down by the river was covered in your wife's blood. Your wife's body showed indications of your DNA on her face, neck and lower limbs. The scene in the kitchen of your apartment was consistent with someone who had picked Ines up by the shoulders or neck and thrown her down on the granite work surface. Is that what you did, Sr Calderon?'
'I only wanted to embrace her,' said Calderon, whose face had broken up into the ugliness of his inner turmoil. 'I just wanted to hold her close.'
32
Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 18.30 hrs
The Taberna Coloniales was at the end of the Plaza Cristo de Burgos. There was something colonial about its green windows, long wooden bar and stone floor. It was well known for the excellence of its tapas and it was popular for its traditional interior and the seating outside on the pavement of the plaza. This was Angel and Manuela's local. Falcon didn't want Angel's journalistic nose anywhere near the police work around the destroyed apartment block, nor did he want to have to discuss anything sensitive in the glass cylinder of the ABC offices on the Isla de la Cartuja. Most important of all, he needed to be close to Angel's home so that there would be the least trouble possible for him to give Falcon what he wanted. This was why he was sitting outside the Taberna Coloniales under a calico umbrella, sipping a beer and biting into the chilled flesh of a fat green olive, waiting for Angel to appear.
He took a call from Pablo.
'The Americans have sent over the handwriting samples you asked for-the Arabic and English script belonging to Jack Hansen.'
'He looks more like a Tateb Hassani to me than a Jack Hansen,' said Falcon.
'What do you want us to do with the samples?'
'Ask your handwriting experts to make a comparison between Tateb Hassani's Arabic script and the notes attached to the drawings found in the fireproof box in the mosque. And compare the English script to the handwritten notes in the copies of the Koran found in the Peugeot Partner and Miguel Botin's apartment.'
'You think he was one of them?' asked Pablo. 'I don't get it.'
'Let's make the comparison first and the deductions afterwards,' said Falcon. 'And, by the way, the Imam's mobile phone records-we need to have a look at them. One of those numbers he called on Sunday morning belongs to the electrician.'
'I've spoken to Juan about that,' said Pablo. 'Gregorio's checked out all the numbers the Imam called on Sunday morning. The only one he couldn't account for was made to a phone registered in the name of a seventy-four-year-old woman living in Seville Este who has never been an electrician.'
'I'd like access to those records,' said Falcon.
'That's something else for you to talk to your old friend Flowers about,' said Pablo, and hung up.
Falcon sipped his beer and tried to persuade himself that he was calm, and that the present strategy was the right one. He'd taken Serrano and Baena away from their task of touring the building sites looking for the electricians, and had directed them to help Ferrera locate the hedge whose clippings had been dumped with the body. Ramirez and Perez had photographs of Tateb Hassani and were walking the streets around the Alfalfa trying to find anybody who recognized him. This meant that no one from the homicide squad was now working on anything directly linked to the Seville bombing. He wasn't worried about Elvira for the moment. The Comisario had his hands too full of public relations problems to be worried about the gamble Falcon was taking.
'For a man who's supposed to be running the largest criminal investigation in Seville's history, you're looking remarkably relaxed, Javier,' said Angel, taking a seat, ordering a beer.
'We have to present a calm exterior to a nervous population who need to believe that somebody has everything under control,' said Falcon.
'Does that mean that it isn't under control?' asked Angel.
'Comisario Elvira is doing a good job.'
'He might be, from the policeman's point of view,' said Angel. 'But he doesn't imbue the general public with confidence in his ability. He's a public relations disaster, Javier. What was he thinking of, asking that poor bastard…the judge…'
'Sergio del Rey.'
'Yes-him. Putting him on national television when the guy could barely have had time to read the files, let alone comprehend the emotional aspect of the case,' said Angel. 'The Comisario must know by now that television is not about the truth. Is he the kind of guy who watches reality TV and thinks that it is reality?'
'Don't be too hard on him, Angel. He's got a lot of excellent qualities that just don't happen to suit the televisual age.'
'Well, unfortunately, that's the age we're in now,' said Angel. 'Now, Calderon, he was the man. He gave the TV what it craves: drama, humour, emotion and brilliant surface. He was a huge loss to your effort.'
'You said it: "brilliant surface". It wasn't so pretty underneath.'
'And how do you think you look now?' asked Angel. 'Remember the London bombings? What was the story that kept rolling out in the days after those attacks? The story that maintained the emotional pitch and focused the emotions? Not the victims. Not the terrorists. Not the bombs and the disruption. That was all part of it, but the big story was the mistaken shooting by plainclothes special policemen of that Brazilian guy, Jean Charles de Menezes.'
'And what's our big story?'
'That's your problem. It's the arrest, under suspicion of his wife's murder, of the Juez de Instruccion of the whole investigation. Have you seen the stuff coming out of the television about Calderon? Just listen…'
The tables around them had filled up and a crowd had gathered outside the open doors of the bar. They were all talking about Esteban Calderon. Did he do it? Didn't he do it?
'Not your investigation. Not the terrorist cells that might be active in Seville at the moment. Not even the little girl who survived the collapse of the building,' said Angel. 'It's all about Esteban Calderon. Tell Comisario Elvira that.'
'I have to say, Angel, that for a man who loves Seville more than almost anyone I know, you seem…buoyant.'
'It's terrible, isn't it? I am. I haven't felt as energized in years. Manuela's infuriated. I think she preferred me when I was dying of boredom.'
'How is she?'
'Depressed. She thinks she's got to sell the house in El Puerto de Santa Maria. In fact
she is selling it,' said Angel. 'She's lost her nerve. This whole idea of the Islamic "liberation" of Andalucia has taken hold in her mind. So now she's selling the gold mine to save the tin and copper mines.'
'There's no talking to her when she's like that,' said Falcon. 'So, why are you so buoyant, Angel?'
'If you're not watching the news very much you probably don't know that my little hobby is doing rather well.'
'You mean Fuerza Andalucia?' said Falcon. 'I saw Jesus Alarcon with Fernando Alanis on television a few hours ago.'
'Did you see the whole thing? It was sensational. After that programme Fuerza Andalucia picked up 14 per cent in the polls. Wildly inaccurate, I know. It's all emotional reaction, but that's 10 per cent more than we've ever polled before, and the Left are floundering.'
'When did you first meet Jesus Alarcon?' asked Falcon, genuinely curious.
'Years ago,' said Angel, 'and I didn't much care for him. He was a bit of a boring banker type and I was dismayed when he said he wanted to go into politics. I didn't think anybody would vote for him. He was a stiff in a suit. And as you know, these days it's not about your policies or your grasp of regional politics, it's all about how you come across. But I've got to know him better since he came down here and, I tell you, this relationship he's developed with Fernando Alanis…it's gold dust. As a PR man, you just dream of something like that.'
'Was that the first time you met him-when you were doing PR work?'
'When I left politics I did a PR commission for Banco Omni.'
'That must have been nice work to walk into,' said Falcon.
'We Catholics stick together,' said Angel, winking. 'Actually, the Chief Executive Officer and I are old friends. We went to school, university, did our national service together. When I finished with those wankers in the Partido Popular, he knew that I wouldn't be able to just "retire", so he commissioned me and it led to other things. They were the bankers for a group in Barcelona and I did their fortieth anniversary PR for them; then there was an insurance group in Madrid, and a property company on the Costa del Sol. There was a business for me if I could have been bothered with it. But, you know, Javier, corporate PR, it's so…small. You're not going to change the world doing that shit.'
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