The Hidden Assassins

The streets were still wet from last night’s rain, the cobbles greasy. He was sweating and the smell of Marisa came up off his shirt. It occurred to him that he’d never felt guilty. He didn’t know what it was other than a legal state. Since he’d been married to Inés he’d had affairs with four women of whom Marisa had lasted the longest. He’d also had one-night stands or afternoons with two other women. And there was the prostitute in Barcelona, but he didn’t like to think of that. He’d even had sex with one of these women whilst having an affair with another as a married man, which must make him a serial philanderer. Except it didn’t feel like philandering. There was supposed to be something enjoyable about philandering. It was romantic, wasn’t it…in the eighteenth-century sense of the word? But what he’d been doing was not enjoyable. He was trying to fill a hole, which, with every affair, grew bigger. So what was this expanding void? Now that would be a thing to answer, if he could ever find the time to think about it.

He slipped on a cobble, half fell, scuffed his hand on the pavement. It pulled him out of his head and on to more practical business. He’d have to have a shower as soon as he got in. Marisa was in his sinuses. Maybe he should have had a shower before he left, but then there would have been the smell of Marisa’s soap. Then another revelation. What did he care? Why the grand pretence? Inés knew. They’d had fights—never about his affairs, but about ridiculous stuff, which was a cover for the unmentionable. She could have got out. She could have left him years ago, but she’d stayed. That was significant.

The graze on his hand was stinging. His thoughts made him feel stronger. He wasn’t afraid of Inés. She could strike fear into others. He’d seen her in court. But not him. He had the upper hand. He fucked around and she stayed.

His apartment block on Calle San Vicente appeared before him. He opened the door with a flourish. He didn’t know whether it was the conclusion he’d arrived at, his stinging hand or the fact that he tripped up on the stairs because the decorators, those idle sods, had pushed their dustsheets to one side rather than clearing them away—but he began to feel just a little bit cruel.

The first-floor apartment was silent. It was 6.30 a.m. He went to his study and emptied the pockets of his suit on to his desk in the dark. He took off his jacket and trousers and left them on a chair and went to the bathroom. Inés was asleep. He stripped off his pants and socks, threw them in the laundry basket and showered.

Inés was not asleep. She lay with her shiny, dark eyes blinking in the sepia light as morning crept through the louvred shutters. She had been awake since 4.30 a.m. when she’d found her husband’s side of the bed vacant. She’d sat up in bed, arms folded across her flat chest, her brain seething. She’d run the marathon of her thoughts for two hours, her insides molten with rage at the humiliation of finding his undented pillow. But then she would suddenly feel weak at the thought of facing this latest demonstration of his infidelity, because that’s what it was—a demonstration.

In those hours she realized that the only area of her life that was functioning was her work, which now bored her. Not that the work had changed in any way, but her perspective had. She wanted to be a wife and mother. She wanted to live in a big old house with a patio, inside the city walls. She wanted to go for walks in the park, meet her friends for lunch, take her children to see her parents.

None of that had happened. After the American bitch had been removed from the scene, she and Esteban had come together, had, in her mind, grown closer. She had stopped using contraceptives without telling him, wanting to surprise him, but her periods kept coming with plodding regularity. She’d gone for a check-up and been pronounced a perfectly healthy female of the species. After sex one morning she’d saved a sample of his sperm and taken it for a fertility test. The result was that he was a man of exceptional virility. Had he known, he would have framed the result and hung it next to their wedding photograph.

The sale of her apartment had gone through quickly. She’d banked the money and started looking for her dream home. But Esteban loathed the houses that she wanted to buy and refused to look at them. The property market boomed. The money she’d got for her apartment now looked paltry. Her dream became an impossibility. They lived in his very masculine, aggressively modern apartment on the Calle San Vicente and he became angry if she tried to change a single detail. He wouldn’t even let her put a chain on the door, but that was because he didn’t want to have to be let in by her reeking of sex after a night out.

Their sex life began to falter. She knew he was having affairs from the tireless grind of his lovemaking and the paucity of his ejaculations. She tried to be more daring. He made her feel foolish, as if her proposed ‘games’ were ridiculous. Then suddenly he’d taken up her offer to ‘play games’ but given her debasing roles, seemingly inspired by internet porn. She subjected herself to his ministrations, hiding her pain and shame in the pillow.

At least she wasn’t fat. She inspected herself minutely in the mirror every day. It satisfied her to see the deflation of her bust, her individual ribs and her concave thighs. Sometimes she would feel dizzy in court. Her friends told her she’d never get pregnant. She smiled at them, her pale skin stretched tight over her beautiful face, her aura frighteningly beatific.

Inés was toying with the idea of a massive confrontation when she heard Esteban put his key in the lock. Her stick-thin forearms seemed to have grown more hair and they made her feel curiously weak. She sank down into the bed and pretended to be asleep.

She heard him empty his pockets and go to the bathroom. The shower came on. She ran barefoot to his study, saw his suit and sniffed it over like a dog: cigarettes, perfume, old sex. Her eyes were riveted to the digital camera. She touched it with her knuckle. Still warm. She burned to know what was on its memory. The shower door rolled open. She ran back to bed and lay with her heart beating fast as a cat’s.

His weight tipped her feather-light frame in the bed. She waited for his breathing to settle into the pattern that she knew was his sleep. Her heart slowed. Her mind cooled. She slid out of the bed. He didn’t move. In the study she pressed the camera’s quick-view button and caught her breath as a miniature Marisa appeared on the screen. She was naked on the sofa, legs apart, hands covering her pubis. Inés pressed again. Marisa naked, kneeling and looking backwards over her shoulder. The whore. She pressed again and again and only found her husband’s alibi of the judges’ dinner. She went back to the whore. Who was she? The black bitch. She had to know.

Inés’s laptop was in the hall. She took it into the kitchen and booted it up. In the grey-bar time she went back to his study and scoured the shelves for the download lead. Back to the kitchen. Opened up the camera, plugged in the lead, connected it to her laptop. Total concentration.

The icon appeared on the screen. The software automatically loaded. She clicked on ‘import’ and clenched her fist as she saw she was going to have to download fifty-four shots to get the ones she wanted. She stared at the screen, willing it to process faster. She heard only the breathing of the computer’s fan and the flickering of the hard disk. She didn’t hear the bedclothes stir. She didn’t hear his bare foot on the wooden floor. She didn’t even hear his question properly.

His voice did turn her round. She was conscious of her cotton nightdress on the points of her shoulders, its hem brushing the tops of her thighs, as she took in the full-frontal nudity of her husband standing in the frame of the kitchen door.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘What?’ said Inés, her eyes unable to look anywhere other than his treacherous genitals.

He repeated his question.

The adrenaline spike was so powerful she wasn’t sure that her heart could cope with the sudden surge.

After nearly twenty years’ experience in the criminal element Calderón could recognize terror when he saw it. The wide eyes, the mouth neither open nor closed, the paralysed facial muscles.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, for a third time but with no sleep in his voice, pure weight.

‘Nothing,’ she said, keeping her back to the laptop, but unable to stop the reflex action of her arms fanning out to prevent him from seeing her laptop.

Calderón swept her aside, not roughly, but she was so light she had to stop her fragile ribs from cracking against the edge of the black granite work surface. He saw his camera, the lead, the thumbnails of the lawyers’ dinner appearing in the photo library. And then plink, plink. Two shots of Marisa: My present to you. It was embarrassing, incriminating and worse: it was the little boy being found out.

‘Who is she?’ asked Inés, her finger ends white against the black granite.

His look was murderous and in no way offset by the ridiculousness of his nudity.

‘Who is she, that you can stay out all night, leaving your wife alone in the marital bed?’

The words incensed him, which was Inés’s calculation. Her fear had vanished. She wanted something from him—his concentrated attention.

‘Who is she, that you can whore with her until six in the morning, in defiance of your marital vows?’

Another calculated sentence, using some of the oratory she employed in court.

He turned on her, with the slow intent of an animal who’s found a rival on his territory. The thickness around his belly, the shrivelled penis, the slim thighs should have made him laughable, but his head was dipped down and his eyes looked up from under his brow. His rage was palpable. Still Inés couldn’t help herself. The taunts leapt from her lips.

‘Do you fuck her like you fuck me? Do you make her shout with pain?’

Inés did not finish because she was unaccountably on the floor, with her feet pedalling against the white marble tiles, trying to fight air back into her lungs. She focused on his toes, the knuckles crimped as they gripped. He kicked her. His big toe invaded her kidney. She bit on air. She was shocked. It was the first time he’d ever hit her. She’d provoked him. She’d wanted a reaction. But she had been shocked by his restraint. She’d thought he would lash out, backhand her across the face to shut that taunting uxorial mouth, fatten her lip, bruise her cheek. She wanted to wear the badge of his violence to show the world what he was really like and draw some daily remorse from him until the damage faded. But he’d hit her under the arch of her ribs, kicked her in the side.

Her chest creaked as she found the motor memory to breathe again. She felt her husband’s hand at the back of her head, stroking. You see, he did love her. Now for the remorse and the tenderness. This was just another fling…But he wasn’t stroking her, he was reaching into her hair, he was sheafing it. His nails dug into her scalp. He shook her head as if she were a dog, caught by the scruff, and stood up from his crouch. She hadn’t found her feet and she hung from his hand. He dragged her from the kitchen, hauled her down the corridor and flung her at the bed. She bounced and rolled off to the side. Three strides and he was on her again. She scrambled under the bed.

It hadn’t worked out as she’d thought. His hand reached for her under the bed, grabbing at her nightdress. She flinched away from it. His face appeared, hideous with rage. He stood up. His feet moved off. She watched them, as if they were loaded weapons. They left the room. He swore and slammed the door. Her scalp burned. Her fear was overriding all other emotions. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t cry.

Under the bed was good. There were childhood memories of safety, of observing in secrecy, but they couldn’t contain her confusion. Her brain lunged at what she wanted to be certainties, but they wouldn’t support her. Instead she found herself trying to accommodate his behaviour. She had proved his infidelity to him. She had humiliated him. He was angry because he felt guilty. That was natural. You lashed out at the one you loved. That was it, wasn’t it? He didn’t want to be whoring with that black bitch. He just couldn’t help himself. He was an alpha male, a virile, high-octane performer. She shouldn’t be so hard on him. She held on to her side and squeezed her eyes shut at a jab of pain in her kidney.

The door swung open, the feet came back into the room. His presence made her shrink. He took fresh socks and pants from the drawer and put them on. He stepped into a pair of trousers and took a crisp, white shirt, ironed by the laundry where he still sent his clothes. He shook it out and drove his arms into the sleeves, shot the cuffs. He whipped a crimson tie into a perfect knot. He was efficient, vigorous and precise. He rammed those brutal feet into a pair of shoes, threw on a jacket—his savagery now perfectly disguised.

‘I’m working late tonight,’ he said, his tone back to normal.

The apartment door clicked shut. Inés crawled out from under the bed and flopped against the wall. She sat with her legs splayed out, her hands helpless by her sides. The first sob jolted her away from the wall.

5

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 06.30 hrs

Falcón came to in the profound darkness of his shuttered bedroom. He lay there in his private universe, contemplating last night’s events. After the disappointment at Consuelo’s restaurant the drink with Laura had gone better than expected. They’d agreed to see each other as friends. She was only a little offended that he was ending their affair with, as he’d told her, no other prospect in sight.

He showered and put on a dark suit and white shirt and folded a tie into his pocket. He had meetings planned all morning after he’d been to see the Médico Forense. It was a morning of shimmering brilliance, with not a cloud in the sky. The rain had cleansed the atmosphere of all that puzzling electricity.

A temperature gauge outside in the street told him it was 16°C while the radio warned that a great heat was about to descend on Seville and by evening they should expect temperatures in excess of 36°C.

The Forensic Institute was next to the Hospital de la Macarena behind the Andalucían Parliament, which itself looked across the road to the Basilica de la Macarena, just inside the old city walls. At 8.15 a.m. Falcón was early, but the Médico Forense had already arrived.

Dr Pintado had the file open on his desk and was reminding himself of the detail of the autopsy. They shook hands, sat down and he resumed his reading.

‘What I concentrated on in this case,’ he said, still scanning the pages, ‘apart from the cause of death, which was straightforward—he was poisoned with potassium cyanide—was giving you as much help as possible on the identification of the body.’

‘Potassium cyanide?’ said Falcón. ‘That’s not exactly in keeping with the ruthlessness of the post-mortem operations. Was it injected?’

‘No, ingested,’ said Pintado, other things on his mind. ‘The face…I might be able to help you with that, or rather I have a friend who is interested in helping. You remember I was telling you about a case I handled in Bilbao, where they made a facial model from a skull found in a shallow grave?’

‘It cost a fortune.’

‘That’s right, and you don’t get resources like that for any old murder.’

‘So how much does your friend cost?’

‘He’s free.’

‘And who is he?’

‘He’s a sort of sculptor, but he’s not that interested in the body, just faces.’

‘Would I have heard of him?’

‘No. He’s strictly amateur. His name is Miguel Covo. He’s seventy-four years old and retired,’ said Pintado. ‘But he’s been working with faces for nearly sixty years. He builds them out of clay, makes moulds for wax, and carves them out of stone, although that’s quite a recent development.’

‘What’s he proposing and why is it free?’

‘Well, he’s never done this kind of thing before, but he wants to try,’ said Pintado. ‘I let him take a plaster cast of the head last night.’

‘OK, so there’s no decision,’ said Falcón.

‘He’ll make up a half-dozen models, do some sketches and then start working up the face. He’ll paint it, too, and give it hair—real hair. His studio can give you the creeps, especially if he likes you and introduces you to his mother.’

‘I’ve always got on well with mothers.’

‘He keeps her in a cupboard,’ said Dr Pintado. ‘Just a model of her, I mean.’

‘It would be cruel to keep a woman in her nineties in a cupboard.’

‘She died when he was small, which was when his fascination with faces started. He wanted the photographs of her to be more real. So he recreated her. It was the only time he fashioned a body. She’s in that cupboard with real hair, make-up, her own clothes and shoes.’

‘So, he’s weird, too?’

‘Of course he is,’ said Pintado, ‘but likeably weird. You might not want to invite him to dinner with the Comisario and his wife, though.’

‘Why not?’ said Falcón. ‘It would make a change from the opera.’

‘Anyway, he’ll call you when he has something, but…not tomorrow.’

‘What else have you got?’

‘It’s all helpful, but not as helpful as a physical image,’ said Pintado. ‘I worked with a guy who did forensics on mass graves in Bosnia and I learnt a bit from him. The first thing is dental. I’ve made a full set of digital X-rays and notes about each tooth. He’s had extensive orthodontic work done to get the teeth all straight and looking perfect.’

‘How old is this guy?’

‘Mid forties.’

‘And normally you’d have that sort of work done in your early teens.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And there wasn’t a lot of orthodontic work being done in Spain in the mid seventies.’

‘Most likely it was done in America,’ said Pintado. ‘Apart from that, there’s nothing much else to go on, dentally. He’s had no major work done, and only a molar missing on the lower right side.’

‘Have you found any distinguishing marks on the outside of the body—moles, birthmarks?’

‘No, but I did come across something interesting on his hands.’

‘Forgive me, Doctor, but…’

‘I know. They were severed. But I checked the lymph nodes to see what was deposited there,’ said Pintado. ‘I’m sure our friend had a small tattoo on each hand.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a snapshot of it in the lymph node?’ asked Falcón.

‘Lymph nodes are quite clever about killing bacteria and neutralizing toxins, but their talent for recreating images from tattoo ink, introduced into the bloodstream via the hand, is extremely limited. There was a trace of ink and that was all.’

‘What about surgery?’

‘There‘s good news and bad there,’ said Pintado. ‘He’s had surgery, but it was a hernia operation, which is just about the world’s most common procedure. His was also the most common type of inguinal hernia, so he has a scar on the right side of his pubis. I’d guess it was about three years old, but I’ll get one of the vascular surgeons to come over and confirm that for me. Then we’ll take a look at the mesh they used to patch the hernia and hopefully he’ll be able to tell me who supplied it, then you can find the hospitals they supply…and, I know, it’s going to take a lot of work and time.’

‘Maybe he had that done in America as well,’ said Falcón.

‘Like I said: good news and bad.’

‘What about his hair?’ asked Falcón. ‘They scalped him.’

‘He had hair that was at least long enough to cover his collar.’

‘How do you get that?’

‘He’s been on the beach this year,’ said Pintado, turning some photographs around for Falcón to look at. ‘You can see the tan lines on his arms and legs, but if you turn him over you don’t see any tan line at the back of his neck. In fact, if you look, it’s quite white compared to the rest of his back, which to me means that it rarely sees the sun.’

‘Would you describe him as “white”?’ asked Falcón. ‘His skin colour didn’t look Northern European to me.’

‘No. He’s olive-skinned.’

‘Do you think he was Spanish?’

‘Without doing any genetic testing, I would say that he was Mediterranean.’

‘Any scars?’

‘Nothing significant,’ said Pintado. ‘He’d sustained a fracture to his skull, but it’s years old.’

‘Anything interesting about the structure of his body that would give us an idea of what he did?’

‘Well, he wasn’t a bodybuilder,’ said Pintado. ‘Spine, shoulder and elbows indicate a deskbound, sedentary life. I’d say that his feet didn’t spend much time in shoes. The heels are more splayed than usual, with a lot of hardened skin.’

‘As you said, he liked the sun,’ said Falcón.

‘He also smoked cannabis and I would say he was a regular user, which could be thought of as unusual in someone in his mid forties,’ said Pintado. ‘Kids smoke dope, but if you’re still doing it in your forties it’s because it’s your milieu…you’re an artist, or a musician, or hanging out with that sort of crowd.’

‘So he’s a desk worker with long hair, who spent time in the sun, not wearing shoes, and smoking dope.’

‘A hard-working hippy.’

‘They might have been like that in the seventies, but it’s not the profile of a modern-day drug smuggler,’ said Falcón. ‘And potassium cyanide would be an unusual method of execution for people with 9mm handguns in their waistbands.’

The two men sat back from the desk. Falcón flicked through the photographs from the file hoping that something else might jump out at him. He was already thinking about the university and the Bellas Artes, but he didn’t want to confine himself at this early stage.

In this momentary silence the two men looked up at each other, as if they were on the brink of the same idea. From beyond the grey walls of the Facultad de Medicina came the unmistakable boom of a significant explosion, not far away.

Gloria Alanis was ready for work. By this time she would normally be on her way to her first client meeting, thinking how much, as it receded in the rearview mirror, she hated the drab seventies apartment block where she lived in the barrio of El Cerezo. She was a sales rep for a stationery company but her area of operation was Huelva. On the first Tuesday of every month there was a meeting of the sales team at the head office in Seville, followed by a team-building exercise, a lunch and then a mini-conference to show and discuss new products and promotions.

It meant that for one day during the month, she could put breakfast on the table for her husband and two children. She could also take her eight-year-old daughter, Lourdes, to school, while her husband delivered their three-year-old son, Pedro, to the pre-school which was visible from the back window of their fifth-floor apartment.

On this morning, instead of hating her apartment, she was looking down on the heads of her children and husband and feeling an unusual sensation of warmth and affection early in the week. Her husband sensed this, grabbed her and pulled her on to his lap.

‘Fernando,’ she said, warning him, in case he tried anything too salacious in front of the children.

‘I was thinking,’ he whispered in her ear, his lips tickling her lobe.

‘It’s always dangerous when you start doing that,’ she said, smiling at the children, who were now interested.

,‘I was thinking there should be more of us,’ he whispered. ‘Gloria, Fernando, Lourdes, Pedro and…’

‘You’re crazy,’ she said, loving those lips on her ear, saying these things.

‘We always talked about having four, didn’t we?’

‘But that was before we knew how much two cost,’ she said. ‘Now we work all day and still don’t have enough money to get out of this apartment or take a holiday.’

‘I have a secret,’ he said.

She knew he didn’t.

‘If it’s a lottery ticket, I don’t want to see it.’