He hadn’t handled a murder investigation for more than two years and he wasn’t used to this level of brutality in the few murders that had come his way.
‘They didn’t want him recognized, did they?’ said Falcón. ‘Any distinguishing marks on the rest of the body?’
‘Let me get him back to the lab and cleaned up. He’s covered in filth.’
‘What about other body damage?’ asked Falcón. ‘He must have arrived in the back of a refuse truck to end up here. There should be some marks.’
‘Not that I can see. There might be abrasions under the filth and I’ll pick up any fractures and ruptured organs back at the Forensic Institute once I’ve opened him up.’
Falcón nodded. Juez Romero signed off the levantamiento del cadáver and the paramedics moved in and thought about how they were going to manipulate a stiffened corpse in this position into a body bag and on to the stretcher. Farce crept into the tragedy of the scene. They wanted to cause as little disturbance as possible to the body’s noxious gases. In the end they opened up the body bag on the stretcher and lifted him, still prostrate, and placed him on top. They tucked his wrist stumps and feet into the bag and zipped it up over his raised buttocks. They carried the tented structure to the ambulance, watched by a gang of municipal workers, who’d gathered to see the last moments of the drama. They all laughed and turned away as one of their number said something about ‘taking it up the arse for eternity’.
Tragedy, farce and now vulgarity, thought Falcón.
The forensics completed their search of the area immediately around the body and brought their bagged exhibits over to Falcón.
‘We’ve got some addresses on envelopes found close to the body,’ said Felipe. ‘Three have got the same street names. It should help you to find where he was dumped. We reckon that’s how he ended up in that body position, from lying foetally in the bottom of a bin.’
‘We’re also pretty sure he was wrapped in this—’ said Jorge, holding up a large plastic bag stuffed with a grimy white sheet. ‘There’s traces of blood from his severed hands. We’ll match it up later…’
‘He was naked when I first saw him,’ said Falcón.
‘There was some loose stitching which we assume got ripped open in the refuse truck,’ said Jorge. ‘The sheet was snagged on one of the stumps of his wrists.’
‘The Médico Forense said the wrists were well tourniqueted and the hands removed after death.’
‘They were neatly severed, too,’ said Jorge. ‘No hack job—surgical precision.’
‘Any decent butcher could have done it,’ said Felipe. ‘But the face burnt off with acid and scalped…What do you make of that, Inspector Jefe?’
‘There must have been something special about him, to go to that trouble,’ said Falcón. ‘What’s in the bin liner?’
‘Some gardening detritus,’ said Jorge. ‘We think it had been dumped in the bin to cover the body.’
‘We’re going to do a wider search of the area now,’ said Felipe. ‘Pérez spoke to the guy operating the digger, who found the body, and there was some talk of a black plastic sheet. They might have done their post-mortem surgery on it, sewed him up in the shroud, wrapped him in the plastic and then dumped him.’
‘And you know how much we love black plastic for prints,’ said Jorge.
Falcón noted the addresses on the envelopes and they split up. He went back to his car, stripping off his face mask. His olfactory organ hadn’t tired sufficiently for the stink of urban waste not to lodge itself in his throat. The insistent grinding of the diggers drowned out the cawing of the scavenging birds, wheeling darkly against the white sky. This was a sad place even for an insentient corpse to end up.
Sub-Inspector Emilio Pérez was sitting on the back of a patrol car chatting to another member of the homicide squad, the ex-nun Cristina Ferrera. Pérez, who was well built with the dark good looks of a 1930s matinée idol, seemed to be of a different species to the small, blonde and rather plain young woman who’d joined the homicide squad from Cádiz four years ago. But, whereas Pérez had a tendency to be bovine in both demeanour and mentality, Ferrera was quick, intuitive and unrelenting. Falcón gave them the addresses from the envelopes, listing the questions he wanted asked, and Ferrera repeated them back before he could finish.
‘They sewed him into a shroud,’ he said to Cristina Ferrera as she went for the car. ‘They carefully removed his hands, burnt his face off, scalped him, but sewed him into a shroud.’
‘I suppose they think they’ve shown him some sort of respect,’ said Ferrera. ‘Like they do at sea, or for burial in mass graves after a disaster.’
‘Respect,’ said Falcón. ‘Right after they’ve shown him the ultimate disrespect by taking his life and his identity. There’s something ritualistic and ruthless about this, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps they were religious,’ said Ferrera, raising an ironic eyebrow. ‘You know, a lot of terrible things have been done in God’s name, Inspector Jefe.’
Falcón drove back into the centre of Seville in strange yellowing light as a huge storm cloud, which had been gathering over the Sierra de Aracena, began to encroach on the city from the northwest. The radio told him that there would be an evening of heavy rain. It was probably going to be the last rain before the long hot summer.
At first he thought that it might be the physical and mental jolt he’d had from colliding with Consuelo that morning which was making him feel anxious. Or was it the change in the atmospheric pressure, or some residual edginess left from seeing the bloated corpse on the dump? As he sat at the traffic lights he realized that it ran deeper than all that. His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new. The unidentifiable corpse was like a neurosis; an ugly protrusion prodding the consciousness of the city from a greater horror underneath. It was the sense of that greater horror, with its potential to turn minds, move spirits and change lives that he was finding so disturbing.
By the time he arrived back at the Jefatura, after a series of meetings with judges in the Edificio de los Juzgados, it was seven o’clock and evening seemed to have come early. The smell of rain was as heavy as metal in the ionized air. The thunder still seemed to be a long way off, but the sky was darkening to a premature night and flashes of lightning startled, like death just missed.
Pérez and Ferrera were waiting for him in his office. Their eyes followed him as he went to the window and the first heavy drops of rain rapped against the glass. Contentment was a strange human state, he thought, as a light steam rose from the car park. Just at the moment life seemed boring and the desire for change emerged like a brilliant idea, along came a new, sinister vitality and the mind was suddenly scrambling back to what appeared to be prelapsarian bliss.
‘What have you got?’ he asked, moving along the window to his desk and collapsing in the chair.
‘You didn’t give us a time of death,’ said Ferrera.
‘Sorry. Forty-eight hours was the estimate.’
‘We found the bins where the envelopes were dumped. They’re in the old city centre, on the corner of a cul-de-sac and Calle Boteros, between the Plaza de la Alfalfa
