The Blind Man of Seville (29 page)

‘What does he do?’ asked Calderón. ‘There’s money coming from somewhere. He has access to camera, video and computer equipment.’

‘He went to Madrid to post the pornographic movie,’ said Ramírez. ‘He wouldn’t leave that in the hands of just anybody. He has time.’

‘Anybody who’s obsessed has time,’ said Falcón. ‘He could be working in the film industry, that would give him access to the equipment and if he was working freelance he’d have the time and the money.’

‘The Médico Forense said he showed some surgical skills.’

‘All sorts of people are good with their hands,’ said Calderón. ‘You said he’s obsessed, Inspector Jefe.’

‘The second time he called me he left me in no doubt that he had a story to tell and that he was going to tell it in his way. There was anger and perhaps bitterness.’

‘So we could unsettle him by interfering,’ said Calderón. ‘We might force a mistake by making him angrier.’

‘You know what creative people hate more than anything else?’ said Falcón. ‘Criticism from people that they think are unworthy to judge. Believe me, I know — I’ve seen my father’s rage.’

‘But his work,’ said Ramírez, ‘this work … what can you say about it?’

‘We could talk to him about his mistakes,’ said Falcón.
Tell him about the chloroform rag, the sighting in the cemetery. How unprofessional he’s been.’

Calderón nodded. Falcón took out his mobile with clammy hands. There were two messages. The first was a text message, which he instinctively played because he was rarely sent them.

‘He’s beaten us to it,’ he said, and handed Calderón the mobile.

The text message was a riddle in the form of a poem.

Cuando su amor es ciego

No arde más su fuego.

Jamás abrirá los ojos

Ni hablará con los locos.

En paz yacen sus hombros

Donde se agitan las sombras.

Ahora ella duerme en la oscuridad

Con su fiel amante de la celebridad.

The lover is blind, her fire burns no more. Never again will she open her eyes nor speak to madmen. Her shoulders lie in peace where the shadows move. Now she sleeps in darkness with her faithful lover of celebrity.

‘You can tell him his poetry is shit, that should annoy him,’ said Calderón, handing back the mobile.

‘He’s killed her,’ said Falcón. ‘And he’s telling us that he’s put the body in the Jiménez mausoleum in the San Fernando Cemetery.’

‘Call him,’ said Calderón. ‘Tell him.’

Falcón pulled up Eloisa Gómez’s number from the mobile memory and punched it in. No reply. The three men left the building, got into Falcón’s car and drove along the river to the cemetery. They ran up the cypress-lined avenue to Jesús de la Pasión, Falcón trying Eloisa Gómez’s number all the way. As they neared the Jiménez
mausoleum they heard a mobile ringing from inside. Falcón terminated the call and the ringing stopped.

The mausoleum door opened to a push. The stench indicated that putrefaction had already started. Eloisa Gómez was lying on her back on the shelf underneath Raúl Jiménez’s coffin. Her mobile was on her stomach and tucked underneath it was an envelope on which was written: Sight Lesson No.2. Her skirt was rucked up, revealing black underwear and a suspender belt to which only one stocking top was attached. The other leg was bare.

Her head lay in darkness at the back of the small mausoleum. Falcón took out a pen torch and played it over her body. Her arms were crossed over her chest, each hand demurely covering a breast. There was a burn mark and deep bruising at her neck. Her face still bore the make-up of her trade. Over each eyelid there was a coin and he could tell by the way the coins had sunk into the sockets that her eyes were missing. It threw him back against the coffin of the dead wife, the pen torch fell from his grip. He crabbed his way out of there and staggered down the steps, shaking himself down, shuddering.

Ramírez was calling the Jefatura incident room, telling them to send a patrol car and the Policía Científica but not to bother with the Juez de Guardia because the Juez de Instrucción was already present.

‘What’s it like in there?’ said Calderón, seeing the horror in Falcón’s face.

‘She’s dead,’ he said, ‘and her eyeballs have been removed.’

‘Joder,’
said Calderón, visibly shocked.

‘Sight lesson number two is under the mobile on her stomach. We’ll have to wait for the forensics to come before we go any further.’

Falcón walked away, took some deep breaths. He did
a cursory check around the mausoleum and came back to Calderón.

‘We were talking about this guy’s creativity earlier,’ he said. ‘This smacks of improvisation. Somehow I don’t think this was part of the plan. This is just to show us how clever he can be. I think it’s important for him that we know this.’

‘But if she was an accomplice he must have known he was going to have to deal with her?’ said Calderón.

‘Like this? I know it sounds ridiculous, but do you know how difficult it is to get a body into a cemetery? You can’t just walk in with one over your shoulder. Look at these walls. The gates are shut at night. It’s a difficult business. And if she wasn’t his accomplice, he’s gone to the trouble of tracking her down, killing her, disposing of her body in this intricate way and … I think we’ll find out … introducing her into his theme.’

‘His theme?’

‘Sight, vision, illusion, reality.’

‘You think he’s operating alone?’

‘There are still some doubts in me about Consuelo Jiménez, but I respect what you said about giving the investigation focus, because without her we’re in an open sea. My instinct tells me he’s operating alone, but there’s an outside chance he was hired by Consuelo Jiménez, that he’s done his job and developed a taste for the work, and I mean The Work. I think this is like a work of art for him.’

‘So now you think he’s an artist?’

‘He
thinks he’s an artist with all his sight lessons and his poetry and “I’ve got a story to tell”.’

‘If she wasn’t his accomplice,’ said Calderón, ‘and she was just in the apartment in his film, and he decided he had to deal with her, how did he track her down?’

‘The girls in the Alameda said that Raúl Jiménez called
twice because Eloisa Gómez wasn’t there the first time and he was specifically interested in her. So the killer, if he was in the apartment at the time, would have overheard the name. He also stole Raúl Jiménez’s mobile. He has her number. But listen … this is interesting. There’s a line in the poem he sent us:
“Donde se agitan las sombras.”
Where the shadows move. That was Eloisa’s line — it’s what girls like her have to look out for.’

‘Then he’s spoken to her,’ said Calderón. ‘He’s formed some kind of relationship with her.’

‘And
that
is unusual between a prostitute and a client.’

‘So he
did
know her.’

‘If she was seeing somebody privately I’m surprised her girlfriends didn’t know about it,’ said Falcón. ‘But then … I think we mishandled her first interview and we’re police, after all. They don’t like us. They don’t feel inclined to talk to us.’

‘Do you think, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, nearly momentous, ‘that we have a serial killer on our hands?’

‘We have a multiple murderer and, with the killing of Eloisa Gómez, I think we have something close to a random act, although, as I said, I think we’ll find that she’s become part of his theme, so it depends how you define random. The planning and motivation that went into the Raúl Jiménez killing were absent from this murder. Where there had been logic, method and technique, now we have pure inspiration.’

‘So you think that he will kill again?’

‘I do … but I don’t think it will be random. I think it will fit into the structure of his work. And something fitted with Eloisa Gómez. She’s said something, apart from
Donde se agitan las sombras,
which has worked within the warped structure of this killer’s mind.

‘If you think about it, these girls, they scratch out their living in some dark and dangerous places. They see aspects
of human nature on a daily basis that rarely cross the path of normal people. They need insight to survive their sometimes frightening liaisons. A lot of killers prey on prostitutes. For some men the only thing that these girls arouse is all that is weak in themselves and it makes them angry. Raúl Jiménez seemed like a harmless, wealthy guy indulging himself, only we know there was some very perverse wiring in his head.’

‘Well, her instinct worked with him,’ said Calderón. ‘But it failed dramatically with the killer.’

‘He got inside her head. He touched her. She talked to him. Prostitutes survive with their clients by keeping their distance. Intimacy is fatal.’

‘That’s a world you wouldn’t want to live in … where intimacy is fatal,’ said Calderón, and Falcón, who had not made a professional friendship since he’d worked in Barcelona, knew that he liked him.

A patrol car eased up the main avenue of the cemetery, blue lights flashing between the black granite and white marble. Calderón lit a cigarette, smoked it with distaste. Falcón took out his mobile and checked the second message he’d forgotten about in the excitement of the first. It was Dr Fernando Valera telling him he’d arranged an appointment for him with a psychologist and giving an address in Tabladilla.

Felipe and Jorge, the same forensics on the Raúl Jiménez killing, turned up and they all stood around waiting for the Médico Forense. She arrived some minutes later, a woman in her thirties with long dark hair, which she stuffed into a white plastic cap. Her inspection of the body took less than fifteen minutes. She came out of the mausoleum, casually handed Falcón’s dropped pen torch to a patrolman and gave her report to Juez Calderón. She put the time of death at some time early on Saturday morning and, as rigor mortis was fully developed, she
reckoned that the body had been there since the weekend. Cause of death was by strangulation and, given the nature of the burn mark, probably done with the missing stocking. The depth of the marks around the front of the neck would indicate that the killer had tackled her from behind and used the girl’s own weight to kill her. She was not prepared to make a comment about the eyes until she had the girl back in the Instituto.

Felipe and Jorge moved in, dusted the mobile and envelope, which were clean. They opened the envelope, dusted the card inside, also clean. They handed it over to Falcón with raised eyebrows.

¿Por qué tienen que morir aquéllos a quienes les encanta el amor?

Why do they have to die, those that love to love?

And on the reverse side was the answer:

Porque tienen el don de la vista perfecta.

Because they have the gift of perfect sight.

Falcón read it out loud and then slipped it into the evidence bag. The Médico Forense conferred with Calderón and the secretaria, who took down notes. Ramírez repeated the sight lesson.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said. ‘I understand it, but … do you know what that means, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Well … maybe it’s ironic,’ said Falcón. ‘A prostitute does not love to love.’

He changed his mind almost as soon as he’d said it. The sad-eyed, stiffly embracing panda in Eloisa Gómez’s bedroom came to mind, along with the thought that maybe the killer had reached that far in.

‘And the gift of perfect sight?’

‘Maybe as you said, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, returning to the conversation, ‘these girls see things very clearly.’

‘The stocking,’ said Falcón. ‘The single stocking that was removed …’

‘He probably put her under the chloroform to get that off her,’ said Ramírez.

‘Yes, that was probably it,’ said Falcón, disappointed by the likely mundanity. He was imagining some break-through between the killer and Eloisa Gómez, that they’d achieved some intimacy, until, at the onset of sex, with all its psychological leaking, the killer’s true nature was revealed.

‘Where was she killed?’ said Calderón. ‘It has to have been local, doesn’t it?’

‘And he has to have had transport, too,’ said Ramírez.

‘Or they could have come here together and then he killed her and hid the body. There must be a lot of gardening rubbish here,’ said Falcón, and told Ramírez to get a shot of the girl sent down and run it past the
portero
to see if he recognized her. ‘We’re going to have to search this cemetery, too.’

Ramírez spoke into his mobile and surveyed the hectares of crosses and mausoleums that stretched off in all directions to the distant palm trees and cypresses at the walls of the cemetery. Falcón looked over the garish flower arrangements, the endless names, the ranks of the dead reaching off up to the blue sky and the high cirrus.

An ambulance crawled up the main avenue at a respectful pace, the blank windscreen made it seem unpeopled, impersonal.

‘I’ll speak to Comisario Lobo and get some manpower released to search this cemetery,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez nodded, pulled a cigarette from the pack with his lips and lit it.

‘The eyes,’ said Calderón. ‘Do you think he removed the eyes here as well?’

‘I have it on the authority of a jealous husband I gaoled
some years ago in Barcelona that it’s not so difficult to do,’ said Falcón. ‘He did it to his wife who was having an affair. He said they just popped out under his thumbs like a couple of bird’s eggs.’

Falcón shuddered at himself retelling the story and the forensics came over to give their report.

‘He killed her outside the mausoleum and dragged her in,’ said Felipe. ‘It was too narrow for him to carry her inside so he had to drag her up the steps and lift her in. Her skirt’s all rucked up at the back, the remaining stocking is badly laddered and the back of the bare leg is grazed. We’ve found plenty of strands of material in the shelving where he’s scraped his coat, but there’s no blood, saliva or sperm. No discernible footprints either. We did find this in the victim’s hair though, which might help you find the killing place —’