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.
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,
