and told him to organize three or four buses to act as improvised ambulances to ferry the lightly wounded from all these blocks of apartments down the road to the hospital.
‘The gas company have confirmed that they supply buildings in that area,’ said Ramírez, ‘but there’s been no report of a leak and they ran a routine test on that block only last month.’
‘For some reason this doesn’t feel like a gas explosion,’ said Falcón.
‘We’re getting reports that a pre-school behind the destroyed building has been badly damaged by flying debris and there are casualties.’
Falcón pressed on up through the walking wounded. There were still no signs of serious damage to buildings, but the people floating around, calling and looking for family members in the spaces at the foot of the emptying apartment blocks were phantasmal, dust-covered, not themselves. The light had turned strange, as the sun was scarfed by smoke and a reddish fog. There was a smell in the air, which was not immediately recognizable to anyone who didn’t know war. It clogged the nostrils with powdered brick and concrete, raw sewage, open drains and a disgusting meatiness. The atmosphere was vibrant, but not with any discernible sound, although people were making noise—talking, coughing, vomiting and groaning—it was more of an airborne tinnitus, brought about by a collective human alarm at the proximity of death.
Lines of fire engines, lights flashing, were backed up all the way to Avenida San Lazaro. There wasn’t a pane of intact glass in the apartment buildings on the other side of Calle Los Romeros. A bottle bank was sticking out of the side of one of the blocks like a huge green plug. A wall that ran down the street opposite the stricken building had been blown on to its back and cars were piled up in a garden, as if it was a scrapyard. The torn stumps of four trees lined the road. Other vehicles parked on Calle Los Romeros were buried under rubble: roofs crumpled, windscreens opaque, tyres blown out, wheel trims off. There were clothes strewn everywhere, as if there’d been a laundry drop from the sky. A length of chain-link fencing hung from a fourth-floor balcony.
Firemen had clambered up the nearest cascade of rubble and had their hoses trained on the two remaining sections of what had been a complete L-shaped building. What was now missing was a twenty-five-metre segment from the middle of it. The colossal explosion had brought down all eight floors of the block, to form a stack of reinforced concrete pancakes to a height of about six metres. Framed by the ragged remains of the eight floors of apartments, and just visible through the mist of falling dust, was the roof of the partially devastated pre-school and the apartment blocks beyond, whose façades were patched with black and gaping glassless windows. A fireman appeared on the edge of a broken room on the eighth floor and in the war-torn air made a sign to show that the building was now clear of people. A bed fell from the sixth floor, its frame crunched into the piled debris, while its mattress bounced off wildly in the direction of the pre-school.
On the other side of the rubble, further down Calle Los Romeros, was the Fire Chief’s car but no sign of any officers. Falcón walked along the collapsed wall and made his way around the block to see what had happened to the pre-school. The end of the building closest to the explosion had lost two walls, part of the roof had collapsed and the rest was hanging, ready to drop. Firemen and civilians were propping the roof, while unblinking women stared on in appalled silence, hands holding their faces as if to stop them from dropping off in disbelief.
On the other side, at the entrance to the school, it was worse. Four small bodies lay side by side, their faces covered with school pinafores. A large group of men and women were trying to control two of the mothers of the dead children. Covered in dust they were like ghosts, fighting for the right to go back to the living. The women were screaming hysterically and clawing madly against hands trying to prevent them from reaching the inert bodies. Another woman had fainted and was lying on the ground, surrounded by people kneeling to protect her from the swaying and surging crowd. Falcón looked around for a teacher and saw a young woman sitting on a mat of broken glass, blood trickling down the side of her face, weeping uncontrollably, while a friend tried to console the inconsolable. A paramedic arrived to give her wounds some temporary dressing.
‘Are you a teacher?’ asked Falcón, of the woman’s friend. ‘Do you know where the mother of the fourth child is?’
The woman, dazed, looked across at the collapsed apartment block.
‘She’s in there somewhere,’ she said, shaking her head.
Only firemen moved around inside the pre-school, their boots crunching over debris and glass. More props came in to support the shattered roof. The Fire Chief was in an undamaged classroom at the back of the school, giving a report to the Mayor’s office on his mobile.
‘All gas and electricity to the area has been cut off and the damaged building has been evacuated. Two fires have been brought under control,’ he said. ‘We’ve pulled four dead children out of the pre-school. Their classroom was in the direct path of the explosion and took its full force. So far we’ve had reports of three other deaths: two men and a woman who were walking along Calle Los Romeros when the explosion occurred. My men have also found a woman who seems to have died from a heart attack in one of the apartment blocks opposite the destroyed building. It’s too difficult to say how many wounded there are at the moment.’
He listened for a moment longer and closed down the phone. Falcón showed his ID.
‘You’re here very early, Inspector Jefe,’ said the Fire Chief.
‘I was in the Forensic Institute. It sounded like a bomb from there. Is that what you think?’
‘To do that sort of damage, there’s no doubt in my mind that it was a bomb, and a very powerful one at that.’
‘Any idea how many people were in that building?’
‘I’ve got one of my officers working on that at the moment. There were at least seven,’ he said. ‘The only thing we can’t be sure of is how many were in the mosque in the basement.’
‘The mosque?’
‘That’s the other reason why I’m sure this was a bomb,’ said the Fire Chief. ‘There was a mosque in the basement, with access from Calle Los Romeros. We think that morning prayers had just finished, but we’re not sure if anyone had left. We’re getting conflicting reports on that from the outside.’
Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 08.25 hrs
Desperation had brought Consuelo to Calle Vidrio early. The children were being taken to school by her neighbour. Now she was sitting in her car outside Alicia Aguado’s consulting room, getting cold feet about the emergency appointment she’d arranged only twenty-five minutes earlier. She walked the street to calm her nerves. She was not someone who had things wrong with her.
At precisely 8.30 a.m., having stared at the second hand of her watch, chipping away at the seconds—which showed her how obsessive she was becoming—she rang the doorbell. Dr Aguado was waiting for her, as she had been for many months. She was excited at the prospect of this new patient. Consuelo walked up the narrow stairs to the consulting room, which had been painted a pale blue and was kept at a constant temperature of 22°C.
Although Consuelo knew everything about Alicia Aguado, she let the clinical psychologist explain that she was now blind due to a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa and that as a result of this disability she had developed
