The Silent and the Damned (3 page)

'There seems to be a note in Sr Vega's right hand,' said Calderón. 'The body's cooled down quickly in the air con and I want him to get it out without tearing it. Any first thoughts, Inspector Jefe?'

'On the face of it, it looks like a suicide pact. He's smothered his wife and then drunk some drain cleaner, although that's a nasty, lingering way to kill yourself.'

'Pact? What makes you think there was an agreement?'

'I'm just saying that's what it looks like,' said Falcón. The fact that the little boy was left out of it might indicate some collusion. A mother wouldn't be able to bear the thought of the death of her own child.'

'And a father could?'

'It depends on the pressure. If there's the possibility of financial or moral disgrace he might not want his male child to see that or live with the knowledge of it. He would see killing him as a favour. Men have killed their entire families because they think they have failed them and that it's better nobody survives bearing their name and its shame.'

'But you have your doubts?' said Calderón.

'Suicide, whether it's a pact or not, is rarely a spontaneous thing and there are some spontaneous elements to this crime scene. First, the door was not securely locked. Consuelo Jiménez had called to say that Mario had fallen asleep so they were sure he wasn't going to return, but they didn't double lock the door.'

The door was shut, that was enough.'

'If you're about to do something unnatural you would put yourself behind locked doors to make absolutely certain there was no possibility of interruption. It's a psychological necessity. Serious suicides normally take full precautions.'

'What else?'

'The way everything has just been left here: the phone, the chocolates, the slippers. There seems to be a lack of premeditation.'

'Well, certainly on her part,' said Calderón.

That is a point, of course,' said Falcón.

'Drain cleaner?' said Calderón. 'Why would you take drain cleaner?'

'We may find there was something stronger than drain cleaner in the bottle,' said Falcón. 'The reason? Well, he could be meting out punishment to himself… you know, cleaning himself of all his sins. There's also the advantage of it being noiseless and, depending on what else he's taken, irrevocable, too.'

'Well, that does sound premeditated, Inspector Jefe. So there are both spontaneous and planned elements to these deaths.'

'All right… if they were lying on the bed together holding hands, dead, with a note pinned to his pyjamas then I'd be happy to treat it as suicide. As it stands, I would prefer to investigate the deaths as murder before deciding.'

'Perhaps the note in his hand will…' said Calderón. 'But strange to get dressed for bed before you… or is that another psychological necessity? Getting ready for the biggest sleep of all.'

'Let's hope he was the sort who left his security cameras on and the recorders loaded with tapes,' said Falcón, returning to the pragmatic. 'We should have a look in his study.'

They crossed the entrance hall and went down a corridor by the stairs. Vega's study was on the right with a view of the street. There was a leather chair tilted back behind a desk, with a framed poster of this year's bullfights held during the Feria de Abril hanging on the wall.

The desk was a large, empty, light-coloured piece of wood with a laptop and a telephone. Three drawers on castors sat underneath. Behind the door were four black filing cabinets and at the end of the room the recording equipment for the security cameras. There were no LEDs and the plugs were out of the wall sockets. Each recorder had an unused tape inside.

'This doesn't look good,' said Falcón.

The filing cabinets were all locked. He pulled at the mobile set of drawers under the desk. Locked. He went upstairs to the bedroom and found a walk-in closet, with his suits and shirts to the right and her dresses and a vast number of shoes (some worryingly similar) to the left. A tall set of drawers had a wallet, set of keys and some change on top.

One of the keys opened the drawers under the desk. There was nothing unusual in the top two, but as he pulled on the third drawer something at the back butted up against the ream of paper at the front. It was a handgun.

'I haven't seen many of these,' said Falcón. 'This is a Heckler & Koch 9 mm. You own one of these if you're expecting trouble.'

'If you had one of those,' said Calderón, 'would you drink a litre of drain cleaner or blow your brains out?'

'Given the choice…' said Falcón.

The lawyer appeared in the doorway, his dark brown eyes set hard in his head.

'You have no right -' he started.

'This is a murder investigation, Sr Vázquez,' said Falcón. 'Sra Vega is upstairs on the bed, she's been suffocated with a pillow. Any idea why your client should have one of these in his study?'

Vázquez blinked at the gun.

'Seville is one of those curious cities where the wealthy and privileged people of Santa Clara are separated from the drug-ridden disadvantaged ones of the Poligono San Pablo by a small barrio, the paper factory and the Calle de Tesalónica. I imagine he had it for his own protection.'

'Like the security cameras he didn't bother to switch on?' said Falcón.

Vázquez looked at the inert recorders. His mobile went off playing the first few bars of Carmen. The lawmen grinned at each other. Vázquez went down the hall. Calderón closed the door and Falcón knew what he'd suspected as he'd shaken the Juez's hand that morning – there was news and it was relevant to him.

'I wanted you to hear this from me,' said Calderón, 'and not the rumour machine in the Jefatura or the Edificio de los Juzgados.'

Falcón nodded, his larynx suddenly paralysed.

'Inés and I are getting married at the end of the summer,' said Calderón.

He'd known this was coming but the news still rooted him to the floor. It seemed like minutes before his feet, moving at the pace of a diver's on the ocean floor, brought him close enough to shake Calderón's hand. He thought about gripping the judge's shoulder in comradely fashion but the bitterness of his disappointment filled his mouth with the taint of a bad olive.

'Congratulations, Esteban,' he said.

'We told our families last night,' said Calderón. 'You're the first outsider to know.'

'You'll make each other very happy,' said Falcón. 'I know.'

They nodded to each other and disengaged.

'I'll get back to the Médico Forense,' said the judge and left the room.

Falcón went to the window, took out his mobile and thumbed up Alicia Aguado's number from the address book. She was the clinical psychologist he'd been seeing for more than a year. His thumb stroked the call button and a flash of anger helped him to resist pressing it. This could wait until their regular weekly appointment the following evening. They'd covered his ex-wife Inés a million times over and she would just chastise him again for not moving on.

Javier and Inés had settled their differences. It had been a part of the rebuilding process after the Francisco Falcón scandal had broken fifteen months ago.

Francisco was the world-famous artist whom Javier had always believed to be his father, but who had been revealed as a fraud, a murderer and not his real father after all. Inés had forgiven Javier even before they'd arranged to meet some months after the media frenzy. It had been his coldness, captured by her terrible rhyming mantra,
Tú no tienes corazón, Javier Falcón.
'You have no heart, Javier Falcón', that had finished their short marriage. Given his family history it was now clear to her why he should have been deficient in this fundamental human way. Over the last few months of his therapy thoughts of her had subsided, but whenever her name came up there was an unmistakable leap in his stomach. Her terrible accusation still mangled his mind and, in forgiving him she'd become, in his unstable state, someone to whom he had to prove himself.

And now this. Still, Inés had been seeing the judge for nearly a year and a half. They were the new golden couple not just of the Seville legal system, but of Seville society as well. Their marriage was an inevitability, which didn't made the news any easier to bear.

Vázquez appeared on his shoulder in the reflection of the glass. Falcón switched back into professional mode.

'How surprised are you to find your client dead under these strange circumstances, Sr Vázquez?' he asked.

'Very,' he said.

'Where's the licence for his gun, by the way?'

That's his private affair. This is his house. I'm only his lawyer.'

'But he entrusted you with the keys to his home.'

'He has no family here. When they went away for the summer they often took Lucia's parents, as well. There is someone in my office all the time. It seemed…'

'What about the Americans next door?'

'They've been here barely a year,' said Vázquez. 'He rents that house to them. The husband works for him as an architect. He didn't like people to get too involved in his life. He gave them my telephone number in case of emergencies.'

'Is Vega Construcciones his only company?'

'Let's say he's in the property business. He builds and rents out apartments and offices. He constructs industrial property to order. He buys and sells land. He has a number of estate agencies.'

Falcón sat on the edge of the desk, his foot swinging.

'This gun, Sr Vázquez, is not for discouraging burglars. It's a gun for stopping a man dead. Even if you clipped a man on the shoulder with a 9 mm bullet from a Heckler 8- Koch you'd probably kill him.'

'If you were a rich man who wanted to protect his family and home, would you go out and buy a toy or a serious piece of weaponry?'

'So, as far as you know, Sr Vega is not involved in anything criminal or borderline illegal.'

'Not that I know of.'

'And you can think of no reason why anybody would want to kill him?'

'Look, Inspector Jefe, I'm involved with the legal aspects of my clients' businesses. I rarely get involved in their personal lives unless it has an impact on their business. I know about his company. If he was doing anything else then he was not employing me as his lawyer. If he was having an affair with another man's wife, which I doubt, I wouldn't have known about it.'

'So what is your reading of this crime scene, Sr Vázquez? Sra Vega upstairs, suffocated by a pillow. Sr Vega downstairs, dead with a litre of drain cleaner by his side. While their son, Mario, is in the hands of a neighbour for the night.'

Silence. The brown eyes steadied on Falcón's chest.

'It looks like suicide.'

'At least one of those deaths has to be a murder.'

'It looks like Rafael killed his wife and then himself.'

'Did you ever see any evidence of that level of instability in your late client?'

'How's anybody supposed to know what goes on inside a man's head?'

'So, he wasn't looking at business failure or financial ruin?'

'You'd have to speak to the accountant about that, although the accountant was not the finance director. His knowledge would probably be confined.'

'Who was the finance director?'

'Rafael kept things close to his chest.'

Falcón gave him his notebook. Vázquez wrote down the accountant's name, Francisco Dourado, and his details…

'Is there any scandal brewing that you know of, involving Sr Vega or his company?' asked Falcón.

'Now
I know you,' said Sr Vázquez, smiling for the first time with astonishingly perfect teeth. 'Falcón. I didn't make the connection before. Well…
you 're
still here, Inspector Jefe, and my client hasn't gone through anything like you did.'

'But
I
didn't commit any crime, Sr Vázquez. I wasn't facing moral ruin or personal shame.'

'Shame,' said the lawyer. 'Do you think shame still has that sort of power in our modern world?'

'It depends on the society in which you have built your life. How important its opinion is to you,' said Falcón. 'By the way, do you hold Sr Vega's will?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Who is the next of kin?'

'As I said, he has no family.'

'And his wife?'

'She has a sister in Madrid. Her parents live here in Seville.'

'We'll need someone to identify the bodies.'

Perez appeared in the doorway.

'They've pulled the note out of Sr Vega's hand,' he said.

They went to the kitchen, squeezing past the forensics who were crowding the corridor with their cases, waiting to get on to the crime scene.

The note was already in a plastic evidence bag. Calderón handed it over, eyebrows raised. Falcón and Vázquez frowned as they read it, and not just because its ten words were written in English.

'… the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…'

'Do these words mean anything to you?' asked Calderón.

'Nothing at all,' said Vázquez. 'Does the handwriting look normal to you?' 'It's definitely Sr Vega's… that's all I can say.' 'It doesn't differ from his usual handwriting in any way?'

'I'm not an expert, Juez,' said Vázquez. 'It doesn't seem to have been written with a trembling hand, but it is not exactly fluid either. It seems careful rather than dashed off.'

'It's not what I would call a suicide note,' said Falcón. 'What would you call it, Inspector Jefe?' asked Vázquez.

'An enigma. Something that's demanding to be investigated.'

'Interesting,' said Calderón.

'Is it?' said Vázquez. 'We are always given the impression that detective work is
very
exciting. This…?'

'If you were a murderer you would normally
not
want to have your work investigated,' said Falcón. 'You would hope to get away with it. You told me earlier that you thought this crime scene looked like a suicide. A killer with a motive would usually try to give that notion authority with a straightforward suicide note and not with something that makes the investigating team think: What's this all about?'