Free The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson Page B

had been added to the excesses of the human experience and had subtracted something greater which could never be replaced. The daylight would always be a little dimmer, the air never quite as fresh.
    ‘Do you see a lot of this?’ asked Sra Jiménez. ‘Yes, I suppose you do, I suppose you see it all the time.’
    ‘What?’ said Falcón, shrugging, knowing what she meant, not wanting to get into it.
    ‘People with perfect lives, who see them destroyed in a matter of … ‘
    ‘Never,’ he replied at the edge of vehemence.
    That word — ‘perfect’ — hardened him and he remembered her earlier words which had flayed his ‘perfect’ life alive: ‘I think that’s harder. To be dumped because she would rather be alone.’ He felt cruel and fought the urge to retaliate: ‘I think that’s hard … to be dumped for a male lover.’ He filed it in his mind under ‘Unworthy’ and replaced it with the thought that maybe Inés had ruined women for him.
    ‘Surely, Inspector Jefe …’ she said.
    ‘No, never,’ he said, ‘because I’ve never met anybody with a perfect life. A perfect past and a pristine future, yes. But the perfect past is always brilliantly edited and the pristine future a hopeless dream. The only perfect life is the one on paper, and even then there are those spaces between the words and lines and they’re rarely patches of nothing.’
    ‘Yes, we are careful,’ she said, ‘careful of what we show to others and of what we reveal to ourselves.’
    ‘I didn’t mean to be so … intense,’ he said. ‘We’vehad a long day and there’s more to come. We’ve had some shocks.’
    ‘I can’t believe I’m still such an idiot,’ she said. ‘I met Basilio in the lift of the Edificio Presidente. He was probably on his way down from the eighth floor. I didn’t think. But … but why would he … bother to seduce me?’
    ‘Forget him. He’s not important.’
    ‘Unless he’s given me something.’
    ‘Take a test,’ said Falcón, more brutal than he intended. ‘But start thinking too, Doña Consuelo, about who could possibly have a motive for killing your husband. I want names and addresses of all his friends. I want you to remember, for instance, who it was who told you how much you resembled the first wife. I want Raúl’s diary.’
    ‘He had a desk diary in the office which I kept up. He threw away his address book when he got his mobile phone. He only spoke to people on the phone anyway. He had no use for paper and he always lost pens and stole mine.’
    Falcón did not remember a mobile phone. He called the forensics and the Médico Forense. No mobile. The killer must have taken it.
    ‘Any other records?’
    ‘An old address book in the office computer.’
    ‘Where’s that?’
    ‘Above the restaurant off the Plaza de Alfalfa.’
    He handed her his mobile and asked her to arrange for him to pick up a print-out in half an hour.
    He dropped her outside her sister’s house in San Bernardo just after 3 p.m. Ten minutes later he parked up by the east gate to the Jardines de Murillo and continued on foot, half running through the crowded streets of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, where tourists gathered for the Semana Santa processions. The sun was out from behind the clouds. It was hot and he was soon sweating. The airin the enclosed streets smelt strongly of Ducados, orange blossom, horseshit and the vestiges of incense from the processions. The cobbles were spattered and slippery with candle wax.
    He stripped off his mac and cut down the backstreets he knew from the few times he’d managed to attend the English classes he kept paying for at the British Institute on Calle Frederico Rubio. He came into the southeast corner of the Plaza de Alfalfa, which was packed with all the tribes of the world. Cameras nosed at him. He sidestroked through the crowd, trotted up Calle San Juan and was suddenly carried forward by a crush of people surging down Calle Boteros. He realized his mistake too