The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

by Robert Wilson

  'As I told you, Lucia was a beautiful woman,' said Cabello, embarking on a story that he'd built inside himself over years. 'There was no shortage of men who wanted to marry her… and she married a man whose father had a large farm outside Cordoba. They went to live in a house on the farm and they were very happy, until Lucia did not conceive. She went for tests. They told her that there was nothing wrong with her and that perhaps they should consider IVF. The husband refused. Lucia always thought that he was afraid to find that he had a problem. Things were said in the heat of the moment that could not be undone and the marriage was dissolved. Lucia came back to live with us. She was twenty-eight years old by now and had missed out on the best of her generation.

  'I still owned these pieces of agricultural land in and around Seville. They weren't big pieces of land, but some of them were strategic – without them an area could not be successfully developed. A lot of developers knocked on my door and one of the most persistent was a nameless person represented by Carlos Vázquez.

  'Lucia had been working for the Banco de Bilbao. They had a caseta at the Feria de Abril every year. Lucia was a beautiful dancer. She lived for the Feria de Abril and went every night, all night. She looked forward to that time of year. It was a week in which she could forget about all her problems and be herself. That's where she met him. He was an important client at the bank.'

  'He was twenty years older than her,' said Falcón.

  'She'd missed out on her own generation. All the eligible men were taken. She had no interest in what was left. Then an important man took an interest in her. Her superiors at the bank were happy about it. They started to take notice of her. She was promoted. He was already wealthy. He had found his place in the world. There was certainty with him. All these things were very seductive to someone who thought they'd been left on the shelf.'

  'What did you think?'

  'We told her to make sure that a man of that age still wanted to have a family.'

  'Were you surprised that he hadn't been married before?'

  'But he had been married before, Inspector Jefe.'

  'Yes, I forgot, Sr Vázquez mentioned a death certificate that had to be supplied.'

  'We know only that she came from Mexico City. She might have been Mexican, but we're not sure. As always with Rafael, we were told the minimum that was relevant to us.'

  'Were you concerned that his reticence was because of a criminal past?'

  'Well now, Inspector Jefe, you have uncovered my shame. I was prepared to overlook his reticence. My financial circumstances then were not like they are now. I had land, but no job. Capital, but no income. Rafael Vega solved those difficulties for me. He made me a partner in a business that paid a large sum of money for several plots of my land. We built apartments financed by the Banco de Bilbao and rented them out. He made me wealthy and gave me an income. That's how an old farmer like me lives in a penthouse in El Porvenir.'

  'What did Sr Vega get out of it, apart from your daughter's hand in marriage?'

  'One of the other plots I sold to him separately was the key that unlocked a very large development for him in Triana. And there was a second plot, which one of his competitors wanted very badly. When that plot came into Rafael's hands they had to sell out to him. It meant that he could be more generous to me than any other developer.'

  'So, he didn't have to marry your daughter?' said Falcón. 'He was offering you a very sweet deal anyway.'

  'I have the mentality of a farmer. That land was only going to go to someone who would marry my eldest daughter. I am old-fashioned and Rafael is a traditionalist. He knew the key to unlock the problem. His meeting of Lucia was no accident. It is my shame that

  I allowed the business to cloud my judgement of the man. I had no idea how cold a brute he would be to her.'

  'Was he violent?'

  'Never. If he had beaten her, that would have been the end of it,' said Cabello. 'He reduced her. I mean he… this is difficult… he was reluctant to perform his marital duties. He implied it was her fault, that she was not making herself attractive to him.'

  'One thing… did the death certificate of his previous wife give a cause of death?'

  'Accidental. He told us she drowned in a swimming pool.'

  'Did he have any children from this previous marriage?'

  'He said not. He said he wanted children… so it was strange that he didn't want to do what was necessary to make them happen.'

  'Did you know of any previous relationships here, before he met Lucia?'

  'No. Lucia hadn't heard of any either.'

  Falcón took out the plastic sachet containing the partial photograph of the girl that Vega had burnt at the bottom of the garden.

  'Do you recognize this person?'

  Cabello put on glasses, shook his head.

  'She looks foreign to me,' he said.

  They arrived at the Instituto on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan and parked in the hospital grounds. Falcón found the Médico Forense, who showed them into the room for the body identification and left them there for a few minutes. Sr Cabello started to pace the room, nervous at what he'd let himself in for – his daughter dead on the slab. The Médico Forense returned and opened the curtains. Sr Cabello stumbled forwards and had to put a hand up on the glass to steady himself. With the fingers of his other hand he dug into his skull through his thinning hair as if he was trying to tear this unnatural image from his brain. He nodded and coughed against the violence of the emotion. Falcón drew him away from the glass. The Médico Forense supplied the paperwork and Sr Cabello put his signature to his daughter's death.

  They went outside into the fierce heat and light whose savagery had sucked all colour from everything so that the trees seemed vague, buildings merged with the white sky and only dust looked as if it belonged in this place. Sr Cabello had shrunk in his suit; his thin neck, loose in its collar, jumped and gasped as he tried to swallow what he'd just seen. Falcón shook his hand and eased him into the car. Cristina Ferrera took the old man round to the hospital entrance. Falcón called Calderón and arranged a meeting for seven o'clock to discuss the autopsies.

  He went back into the chill of the morgue. He sat with the Médico Forense in his office, the two autopsy reports open on the desk. The doctor puffed on a Ducados whose smoke was sucked up into the air conditioning unit and spat out into the crushing heat.

  'Let's start with the easy one,' said the doctor. 'Sra Vega was suffocated to death by the application of a pillow over her face. She was probably unconscious while this was happening, due to a severe slap across the face which dislocated her jaw. It's probable that the heel of the hand made contact with her chin.'

  The Médico Forense gave an unintentionally comical slow-motion replay of the blow, his cheek, jowl and lips shunting to one side into a slobbery air kiss.

  . 'Very graphic, Doctor,' said Falcón, smiling.

  'Sorry, Inspector Jefe,' he said, more self-conscious now. 'You know how it is. Long days in the company of dead people. The heat. The holidays nearly, nearly there. The family already at the coast. I forget who I'm with sometimes.'

  'It's all right, carry on, Doctor. You're helping me,' said Falcón. 'What about time of death? It's important for us to know if she died before or after Sr Vega.'

  'I'm not going to be much help to you on that. Their deaths occurred within the same hour. Their body temperatures were nearly the same. Sra Vega was only slightly warmer. The ambient temperatures were the same in the kitchen and the bedroom, but Sr Vega was lying bare chested on a tiled floor while his wife was in bed with her face under a pillow. I wouldn't be able to stand up in court and say with any conviction that she'd died after her husband.'

  'All right, what about Sr Vega?'

  'He died directly as a result of the ingestion of a corrosive liquid. Cause of death was a combination of effects on his vital organs. He'd suffered renal failure, liyer and lung damage… It was a real mess in there. The composition of what he ingested is interesting.
I seem to remember it was a regular brand of drain cleaner…'

  'That's right: Harpic.'

  'Well, normally those gels are a mixture of caustic soda and disinfectant. The caustic element would be about a third of the contents. Of course, that would do your system no good at all, but it would take time

  for it to kill a grown man in good health. This product killed him in less than quarter of an hour because it had been powerfully boosted with hydrochloric acid.'

  'How easy is that to get hold of?'

  'Any hardware store would sell it to you under the name of muriatic acid. It's used for cleaning cement off paving stones, for instance.'

  'We'll check his garage,' said Falcón, making a note. 'There's no going back once you've ingested something that strong?'

  'Irreparable damage would be done to the throat, digestive tract and, in this case, the lungs as well.'

  'How did it get into the lungs?'

  'It's very difficult to tell what damage was caused by force or violence and what was caused by the corrosiveness of the liquid. I would say that he, or someone else, had rammed the bottle down his throat. Under those circumstances some of the liquid would inevitably find its way into the lungs. There's evidence of corrosive action in the nasal passages, so product was being coughed up. With the mouth occupied by the bottle the only way out was via the nose.'

  'You seem to think he could have accomplished this on his own.'

  'I have to say that's doubtful.'

  'But not impossible?'

  'If you were going to kill yourself in this horrible way I imagine that you would try and put yourself beyond rescue by making sure you ingested as much of the product as possible in the first moments. I think there would be a certain amount of nervousness involved, too… and that would cause you to ram the neck of the bottle down your throat. That of course would also set off the gagging mechanism. I think it would be a messy business, unless there was someone holding the bottle in place and holding the victim steady as well.'

  'The floor was clean apart from some droplets close to the neck of the bottle.'

  'There was spotting on his chest and clothes, but nothing like the quantities you'd expect if he gagged and spurted it out all over.'

  'Any evidence of holding – marks on arms, wrist, neck, head?'

  'Nothing on the wrists. There are burn marks on the arms in the crooks of his elbows, but the dressing gown had slipped down and it's possible that happened as he writhed in agony on the floor. There are marks on the head and neck, and claw marks on the throat. I would say they are self-inflicted. He had product on his hands. But the marks could just as easily have been made by someone holding him in a kind of neck lock.'

  'You know what I'm trying to do here, Doctor,' said Falcón. 'I've got to go back to Juez Calderón and show him conclusive proof that someone else was in the room with Sr Vega, who was responsible for his death. If I can't do that there may well be no murder inquiry. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you think, like me and the forensics, that it was probably murder.'

  'But conclusive proof of another party's presence is more difficult,' said the Médico Forense.

  'Is there anything that would link Sr Vega to the death of his wife?'

  'I didn't find anything. Sr Vega had only his own tissue under his fingernails from clawing at his throat.'

  'Anything else?'

  'What's the psychological profile of the victims?'

  'She was suffering from mental illness,' said Falcón. 'He doesn't seem to have been suicidal, but there are questionable aspects to his mental state.'

  Falcón gave a brief resume of what he'd been told by Dr Rodríguez and how disturbed Vega had been since the beginning of the year.

  'I see what you mean,' said the Médico Forense. 'This could go either way.'

  'To balance that, the victim had a 9mm handgun, a surveillance system he didn't use and bulletproof windows.'

  'Expecting trouble.'

  'Or just a nervous, wealthy person close to the Poligono San Pablo.'

  'And the unused surveillance system?'

  'Nerves again,' said Falcón. 'Maybe his mentally ill wife was paranoid. She showed off to her neighbours about the windows. Or possibly Vega himself wanted to discourage outsiders but not leave a record of people who came to the house.'

  'Because he's involved in something criminal?'

  'A neighbour saw some Russian visitors who didn't look like they'd come from the Bolshoi.'

  'There's plenty of talk about the Russian mafia these days, especially down on the Costa del Sol, but I didn't know they'd reached Seville,' said the Médico Forense.

  'This is a nasty way to die, isn't it, Doctor?'

  'Revenge or punishment, maybe an example to others. What about his sex life?'

  'His father-in-law says he was reluctant to perform his marital duties… ever, even before his wife got depressed. The mother-in-law reckoned he was having an affair which went wrong, which was why he'd been so withdrawn since the beginning of the year,' said Falcón. 'Is there anything else I should know?'

  'Just one curious thing. He's had some cosmetic surgery done to his eyes and neck. Nothing extraordinary, just bags removed from under the eyes, and skin removed from the neck to tighten up and reveal the jawline.'

  'Everybody's having cosmetic surgery these days.'

  'That's true, and this is the curious thing. The work is pretty old. Difficult to say exactly how old, but more than ten years.'

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, 25th July 2002

  On the way back to the Jefatura Falcón drove while Ferrera read the autopsy reports. It was lunch time, the temperature had now reached 45°C. There was no one on the streets. Cars bulldozed the heat down the shimmering tarmac. When they arrived at the Jefatura he told Ferrera to leave the reports on Ramírez's desk and they would reconvene at 6 p.m.

  The heat had broken Falcón's appetite. At home he managed a bowl of gazpacho, of which Encarnación made a daily supply. He could not find the energy, with the heat crammed into every corner of the house, to look through the Jiménez photographs he'd brought in from the car. He went upstairs, stripped and showered and collapsed into the air-conditioned cool of his bedroom. His brain wavered and released images of the day. He lurched into sleep and a recurring dream where he entered a public toilet which was pristine until he flushed it, whereupon it started filling up with sickening quantities of shit until it overflowed. He found himself trapped and had to climb the walls of the cubicle, only to find all the other toilets were doing the same thing so that he felt a rush of nausea followed by a deep animal panic. He woke up, his hair full of sweat and his mind inexplicably latched on to Pablo Ortega until he remembered the actor's cesspit problem.

  It was 5.30 p.m. The shower drilled the muck out of his hair and head. His mind tripped forwards and backwards under the pummelling water. He knew why he had dreamt the dream – another investigation, his own past and the past of others all rucked up by the tragedy. What he was unprepared for was his mind's next leap, which told him that he should go and visit Pablo Ortega's son, Sebastián, in prison. This would be nothing to do with his investigation, just a separate mission. The idea made him feel good. Something creaked open in his chest. He felt more able to breathe.

  He took the Jiménez photographs into the study and pulled out the shots of Pablo Ortega. There was one of Pablo smiling and talking to two men. One of these men was obscured by people in the foreground and the other man he did not know. He took the photo with him, put it on the passenger seat.

  Ramírez was typing up his report on his interviews in Vega's offices and the latest on the search for Sergei. Falcón told him about the passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and the key. Ramírez took down the details.

  'I'll e-mail this to the Argentinean Embassy in Madrid, see what they make of it,' said Ramírez. 'And I'll put a trace right back to the original issuing office on Rafael Vega's ID.'

  'Can we get something on that before the we
ekend?'

  'Not in July, but we can try.'

  'Any news on Sergei?'

  'He was seen some time in the last couple of weeks in a bar on Calle Alvar Nunez Caleza de Vaca with a woman who was not Spanish and talked the same language as him. The woman had been seen there before and the barman thought she came from the Poligono San Pablo. He also thought she was a hooker. We've got a full description and Serrano and Baena are working with it now.'

  Falcón listened to his messages, staring at the photograph he'd brought up from the car. Calderón had postponed their meeting until the following morning. He put a call through to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes from GRUME (Grupo de Menores), who was responsible for crimes against children, and asked if he could pass by for an informal chat. Ferrera arrived as he was leaving and he told her to work on the phone numbers listed beside calls in and out of the Vegas' house and Rafael Vega's mobile, and then join Serrano and Baena looking for the woman seen with Sergei.

  'What about the key we found with the passport in Vega's house?'

  'Sergei is more important at this stage. We need a witness,' said Falcón. 'Work on the key if you have time. Start with the banks.'

  On the way up to Montes's office he dropped in on Felipe and Jorge in the lab. He talked them through the autopsies. They looked dismal. They had nothing to offer from the crime scene. The pillow had been clean of any sweat or saliva. The only curious thing they'd come across was to do with the note in Vega's hand.

  'As his lawyer said, it's clearly his own handwriting, but we thought it interesting that he should describe it as "careful" so I looked at it under the microscope,' said Felipe. 'It's traced over.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'He'd written it before, which left an indent on the page beneath, then he'd gone back to the pad and traced over the indent… as if he wanted to see what had been written.'

  'But he'd written it in the first place?' said Falcón.