Free The Hidden Assassins by Robert Wilson Page B

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 propscame 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 abomb,’ 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.’

6
    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 disabilityshe had developed a unique technique of reading a patient’s pulse.
    ‘Why do you need to do that?’ asked Consuelo, knowing the answer, but wanting to put off the moment when they got down to work.
    ‘Because I’m blind I miss out on the most important indicators of the human body, which is physiognomy. We speak more to each other with our features and bodies than we do with our mouths. Think how little you would glean from a conversation just by hearing words. Only if someone was in an extreme state, such as fear or anxiety, would you understand what they were feeling, whereas if you have a face and body you pick up on a whole range of subtleties. You can tell the difference between someone who is lying, or exaggerating, someone who’s bored, and someone who wants to go to bed with you. Reading the pulse, which I