The Hidden Assassins (47 page)

Falcón had arrived too early in the Casa Ricardo. He finished his beer and asked the passing waiter to bring him a chilled manzanilla. The waiter came back with a bottle of La Guita and the menu. The dry sherry misted the glass as it trickled in. He fanned himself with the menu. He was on a different table to the one he’d been at four years ago. This one gave him the perfect view of the door, which drew his attention every time someone came in. He couldn’t bear the teenage anxiety creeping up on him. At times like this his mind would gang up on him and he’d find himself thinking about the other thing that made him anxious: that promise he’d made to the people of Seville to find the ultimate perpetrators of the bombing. The sight of himself on the television in the Galician bar came back to him again and again, along with Juan’s sarcastic comment. Had that been a crazy thing to do or, as Juan had said, just sentimental? No, it hadn’t been, he was sure of it. He had his ideas. He knew, when he had more time, where he was going to start looking.

It’s always the way that, just as your mind engages elsewhere, the person you’ve been waiting for all this time arrives. She was over him before he knew it.

‘The pensive Inspector Jefe,’ she said.

His heart leapt in his chest, so that he sprang to his feet.

‘As usual,’ he said, ‘you’re looking beautiful, Consuelo.’

This book would have been impossible without extensive research in Morocco, especially to see how all levels of Moroccan society are reacting to the friction between Islam and the West. I would like to thank Laila for her hospitality and for introducing me to people from all walks of life. They gave me valuable insights into the Arab world’s point of view. I must stress that although all opinions are faithfully represented, none of the characters in this book remotely resembles any real person, alive or dead. They are all figments of my imagination and were generated to perform their functions in my story.

As always, I would like to thank my friends Mick Lawson and José Manuel Blanco for putting me up and putting up with me. They made the Seville end of my research for this book a lot easier. My thanks to the Linc language school in Seville and my teacher Lourdes Martinez, for doing her best to improve my Spanish.

I have been published by HarperCollins for just over ten years and I think it fitting that after a decade of
hard work on my behalf I should thank my editor, Julia Wisdom, who has not only offered perceptive advice about my books and brought them successfully to the market place, but has also been one of my greatest inhouse proponents.

Finally I would like to thank my wife, Jane, who has helped me with my research, spurred me on through the long months of writing, and been my first, and unflagging, reader and critic. Some think that being a writer is hard, but spare a thought for the writer’s wife, who while working and supporting has to watch much writhing and torment and is rewarded with scant praise and little compensation for the horrors she must witness. You’d only do it for love and I thank her for it and return it doubled.

Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping and advertising in London and trading in West Africa.

He is married and divides his time between England, Spain and Portugal. He was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction for his fifth novel,
A Small Death in Lisbon.

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The Company of Strangers

A Small Death in Lisbon

JAVIER FALCÓN NOVELS

The Blind Man of Seville

The Silent and The Damned

The Ignorance of Blood

BRUCE MEDWAY NOVELS

A Darkening Stain

Blood Is Dirt

The Big Killing

Instruments of Darkness

A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals. Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.

1941. Klaus Felsen, SS officer, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history, where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs, dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. There he meets the man who makes the first turn of the wheel of greed and revenge which rolls through to the century’s end.

Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Zé Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl. As he digs deeper, Zé overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice, for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Zé must face the most chilling opposition.

‘Compulsively readable, with the cop’s quest burning its way through a narrative rich in history and intrigue, love and death’

Literary Review

ISBN: 978 0 00 732215 2