The Hidden Assassins (40 page)

‘The advantage you have at the moment is that you, personally, are clean. If you can retain that, you will always have a future. It’s only once you join hands with corruption that you’re finished,’ said Falcón. ‘Your old friend Eduardo Rivero could tell you that from the bottom of the well of his experience.’

Cristina Ferrera and Fernando were sitting in the back of Falcón’s car. She’d cuffed his hands behind his back and he leaned forward with his head resting against the back of the front seat. Falcón thought that they’d been talking but were now exhausted. He turned to face them from the driver’s seat.

‘Sr Alarcón is not going to press charges and he won’t talk to the newspapers about this incident,’ he said. ‘If I were to prosecute you I would lose one of my best officers, your daughter would lose her father and only parent and would have to be taken into care, or go to live with her grandparents. You would go to jail for at least ten years and Lourdes would never know you. Do you think that’s a satisfactory outcome for a burst of uncontrollable rage, Fernando?’

Cristina Ferrera looked out of the window blinking
with relief. Fernando raised his head from the back of the passenger seat.

‘And had your rage got the better of you, had your hatred been so dire that no reason could have appealed to it, and you’d actually killed Jesús Alarcón, then all the above would still be true, although your prison sentence would be longer, and you’d have had the death of an innocent man on your conscience,’ said Falcón. ‘How does that feel, in the dawn light of a new day?’

Fernando looked straight ahead, through the windscreen, down the street growing lighter by the moment.

He said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Seville—Friday, 9th June 2006, 08.17 hrs

‘You didn’t make it to our appointment last night,’ said Alicia Aguado.

‘I was in no condition,’ said Consuelo. ‘I left you, went to the pharmacy with the prescription you’d given me, bought the drugs and didn’t take them. I went back to my sister’s house. I spent most of the day in her spare room. Some of the time I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe.’

‘When was the last time you cried?’

‘I don’t think I ever have…not properly. Not with grief,’ said Consuelo. ‘I don’t even remember crying as a child, apart from when I hurt myself. My mother said I was a silent baby. I don’t think I was the crying type.’

‘And how do you feel now?’

‘Can’t you tell?’ said Consuelo, twitching her wrist under Aguado’s fingers.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s not an easy state to describe,’ said Consuelo. ‘I don’t want to sound like some mushy fool.’

‘Mushy fool is a good start.’

‘I feel better now than I have done for a long time,’ said Consuelo. ‘I can’t say that I feel good, but that terrifying sense of impending hideousness has gone. And the strange sexual urges have gone.’

‘So, you don’t think you’re going mad any more?’ said Aguado.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Consuelo. ‘I’ve lost all sense of equilibrium. I can’t seem to have just one feeling, I’m both extremes at once. I feel empty
and
full, courageous and afraid, angry and placid, happy and yet grief-stricken. I can’t find any middle ground.’

‘You can’t expect your mind to recover in twentyfour hours of crying,’ said Aguado. ‘Do you think you could describe what happened yesterday morning? You came to some sort of realization which completely felled you. I’d like you to talk about that.’

‘I’m not sure I can remember how it came about,’ said Consuelo. ‘It’s like the bomb going off in Seville. So much has happened that it already feels like ten years ago.’

‘I’ll tell you how it came about afterwards,’ said Aguado. ‘Concentrate on what happened. Describe it as best you can.’

‘It started off like a pressure, as if there was a membrane stretched across my mind, like an opaque latex sheet, against which someone, or something, was pressing. It’s happened to me before. It makes me feel queasy, as if I’m at that crossover point between being merry and drunk. When it’s happened in the past I’d make it go away by doing something like rummaging in my handbag. The physical action would help to reassert reality, but I’d be left with the sensation of the imminence of something that had not come to pass.
The interesting thing was that I stopped getting these moments a few years ago.’

‘Were they replaced by something else?’

‘I didn’t think so at the time. I was just glad to be rid of the sensation. But now I’m thinking that it was then that the sexual urges started,’ said Consuelo. ‘In the same way that the pressure started during a lull of brain activity, so the urges would come, sometimes in a meeting, or playing with the kids, or trying on a pair of shoes. It was disturbing to have no control over when they appeared, because they would be accompanied by graphic images which left me feeling disgusted with myself.’

‘So what happened yesterday?’ asked Aguado.

‘The membrane came back,’ said Consuelo, palms suddenly moist on the arms of the chair. ‘There was the pressure, but it was much greater and it seemed to be expanding at an incredible rate, so that I thought my head would burst. In fact, there
was
a sensation of bursting, or rather splitting, which was accompanied by that feeling you get in dreams of endlessly falling. I thought this is it. I’m finished. The monster’s come up from the deep and I’m going to go mad.’

‘But that didn’t happen, did it?’

‘No. There was no monster.’

‘Was there anything?’

‘There was just me. A lonely young woman in a rain-filled street, full of grief, guilt and despair. I didn’t know what to do with myself.’

‘When this happened, we were talking about someone you knew,’ said Aguado. ‘The Madrid art dealer.’

‘Ah, yes, him. Did I tell you that he’d killed a man?’

‘Yes, but you told me about it in a certain way.’

‘I remember now,’ said Consuelo. ‘I told you about it as if his crime was greater than my own.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That I believed that I had committed a crime?’ said Consuelo, questioning. ‘Except that I knew what I’d done. I had always faced up to the fact that I’d had the abortions, even the appalling way I’d raised the money for the first one.’

‘Which had resulted in some confusion in your mind,’ said Aguado. ‘The graphic sexual images?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘This pain you mentioned when you watched your children sleeping, especially the youngest child—what do you think that was?’

Consuelo gulped, as the saliva thickened in her mouth and tears flooded her eyes and rolled down her face.

‘You told me before that it was the love that was hurting,’ said Aguado. ‘Do you still think it was love?’

‘No,’ said Consuelo, after some long minutes. ‘It was guilt at what I had done, and grief at what could have been.’

‘Go back to that time when you were standing in the rain-filled street. I think you told me earlier that you were looking at some smart people coming out of an art gallery. Do you remember what you were thinking, before you decided that you wanted to be like them, that you wanted to “reinvent” yourself?’

There was a long silence. Aguado didn’t move. She stared straight ahead with her unseeing eyes and felt the pulse beneath her fingers, like string untangling itself.

‘Regret,’ said Consuelo. ‘I wished I hadn’t done it, and when I saw those people coming out into the street I thought that they were not the sort of people to get themselves into this state. It was then that I decided I wanted to leave this pathetic, lonely, pitiful person on this wet street and go and be someone else.’

‘So, although you’ve always “faced up” to what you’d done, there was also something missing. What was that?’

‘The person who’d done it,’ said Consuelo. ‘Me.’

The search warrants for Eduardo Rivero’s house, the premises of Fuerza Andalucía, Angel Zarrías’s apartment and Agustín Cárdenas’s residence were issued at 7.30 a.m. By 8.15 the forensics had moved in, the computer hard disks had been copied and evidence was being gathered and gradually shipped back to the Jefatura. Comisario Elvira, all six members of the homicide squad and three members of the CGI antiterrorism squad convened for a strategy meeting in the Jefatura at 8.45. The idea was that the nine-man interrogation team would interview the three suspects, with a few breaks, for a total of thirteen and a half hours. To prevent the suspects developing relationships or getting used to a certain style, every member of the team would interview each suspect for an hour and a half. While the first three interviewers worked the next wave would watch, and the third wave would rest or discuss developments. Lunch would be taken at 3 p.m. and there would be another tactical discussion. The next session would run from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. and, if none of the suspects had cracked, there would be a break for dinner and a final ninety-minute session at midnight.

The point of the interviews was not to persuade the suspects to admit to the killing of Tateb Hassani, but to force them to reveal who had put Fuerza Andalucía in touch with him, why he was being employed, where the documents he’d prepared had been delivered, and who else had been at the dinner at which Tateb Hassani had been poisoned.

Exhaustion was the communal state. The meeting broke up with sighs, hands run through hair, jackets removed and shirt sleeves rolled up. It was agreed that Falcón would take Angel Zarrías first, Ramírez would handle Eduardo Rivero, and Barros would start on Agustín Cárdenas. Once they were told that the suspects were in the interview rooms they went downstairs.

Ferrera was due to follow Falcón interviewing Angel Zarrías. They stood in front of the glass viewing panel, looking at him. He was sitting at the table, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, hands clasped, eyes fixed on the door. He seemed calm. Falcón began to feel too tired for this confrontation.

‘You’re going to find out that Angel Zarrías is a very charming man,’ said Falcón. ‘He especially likes women. I don’t know him very well because he’s the sort of man who keeps you at a distance with his charm. But there has to be a real person underneath that. There has to be the fanatic that wanted to make this conspiracy work. That’s the man we want to get to, and once we’ve got to him we want to keep him there, exposed, for as long as possible.’

‘And how are you going to do that?’ said Ferrera. ‘He’s practically your brother-in-law.’

‘I’ve learnt a few things from José Luis,’ said Falcón,
nodding at Rivero’s interview room, which Ramírez had just entered.

‘Then I’ll keep an eye on both of you,’ said Ferrera.

Angel Zarrías’s eyes flicked up as Falcón opened the door to the interview room. He smiled and stood up.

‘I’m glad it’s you, Javier,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad it’s you. Have you spoken to Manuela?’

‘I spoke to Manuela,’ said Falcón, who sat down without turning on any of the recording equipment or following any of the normal introductory procedure. ‘She’s very angry.’

‘Well, people react in different ways to having their partners arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of murder,’ said Zarrías. ‘I can imagine some people might get angry. I don’t know how I’d feel myself.’

‘She wasn’t angry about your arrest,’ said Falcón.

‘She was pretty fierce with your officers,’ said Angel.

‘It was after I’d spoken to her that she became…incandescent with rage,’ said Falcón. ‘I think that would be a fair description.’

‘When did you speak to her?’ he asked, unnerved, puzzled.

‘At about two o’clock this morning,’ said Falcón. ‘She’d already left about fifty messages on my mobile by then.’

‘Of course…she would.’

‘As you know, she can be quite a daunting prospect when she’s emotionally charged,’ said Falcón. ‘It wasn’t possible for me to just say that you’d been arrested on suspicion of murder and leave it at that. She had to know who, where and why.’

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘I had to tell her by degrees because, of course, there
are legal implications, but I can assure you I only told her the truth.’

‘What was this “truth” that you told her?’

‘That is what
you
are supposed to tell
me
, Angel. You are the perpetrator and I am the interrogator, and between us there is a truth. The idea is that we negotiate our way to the heart of it, but it’s not up to
me
to tell
you
what I think you’ve done. That’s your job.’

Silence. Zarrías looked at the dead recording equipment. Falcón was pleased to see him confused. He leaned over, turned on the recorder and made the introductions.

‘Why did you kill Tateb Hassani?’ asked Falcón, sitting back.

‘And what if I tell you that I didn’t kill him?’

‘If you like, for the purposes of this interview, we won’t draw a distinction between murder and conspiring to murder,’ said Falcón. ‘Does that make it easier for you?’

‘What if I tell you I had nothing to do with the murder of Tateb Hassani?’

‘You’ve already been implicated, along with Agustín Cárdenas, by the host of Hassani’s final and fatal dinner, Eduardo Rivero. You’ve also been identified as being present at the scene of the crime by an employee in his household,’ said Falcón. ‘So for you to say that you had
nothing
to do with Hassani’s death would be a very difficult position to defend.’

Angel Zarrías looked deeply into Falcón’s face. Falcón had been looked at like this before. His old technique, before his breakdown in 2001, was to meet it with the armour-plated stare. His new technique was to welcome them in, bring them to the lip of his deep well and
dare them to look down. This was what he did to Angel Zarrías. But Angel wouldn’t come. He looked hard but he never came to the edge. He backed off and glanced around the room.

‘Let’s not get bogged down in all the detail,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m not interested in who put the cyanide in what, or who was present when Agustín Cárdenas did his gruesome work. Although I
am
interested to know whose idea it was to sew Tateb Hassani into a shroud. Did you come up with any suitable Islamic orisons for him? Did you wash him before you sewed him up? It was a bit tricky for us to tell once we’d discovered him, bloated and stinking, with the shroud torn off, on the rubbish dump outside Seville. But I thought that was a nice touch of respect from one religion to another. Was that your idea?’

Angel Zarrías had pushed his chair back and, in his agitation, had started to pace the room.

‘You’re not talking to me already, Angel, and we’ve only just started.’

‘What the hell do you expect me to say?’

‘All right. I know. It’s difficult. You’ve always been a good Catholic, a man of great religious faith. You even managed to get Manuela to go to Mass, and she
must
have loved you to do that,’ said Falcón. ’Guilt is a debilitating state for a good man, such as yourself. Living in mortal sin must be petrifying but, equally, it’s a daunting task to bring yourself to the confessional for the greatest of human crimes. I’m going to make this easier for you. Let’s forget about Tateb Hassani for the time being and move on to something you’re more comfortable with, that you should be able to talk about, that should loosen your vocal cords so that you will,
eventually, be able to come back to the more demanding revelations.’

Angel Zarrías stopped in his tracks and faced Falcón. His shoulders slumped, his chest looked like a cathedral roof on the brink of collapse.

‘Go on then, ask your question.’

‘Where were you on Wednesday, 7th June between 1.30 p.m. and 3 p.m.?’

‘I can’t recall. I was probably having lunch.’

‘Sit down and think about it,’ said Falcón. ‘This is the day
after
the explosion. You would have received a phone call from someone who was desperate. I’m sure you’d remember that: a fellow human being in distress who needed to speak to you.’