"The Ignoranceof Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert)

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Seville Prison, Alcala de Guadaira – Friday, 15th September 2006, 13.05 hrs

Through the reinforced glass pane of the door, Falcon watched Calderon, who was hunched over the table, smoking, staring into the tin-foil ashtray, waiting for him. The judge, who'd been young for his position, looked older. He had lost his gilded, moisturized sheen. His skin was dull and he'd lost weight where there was none to lose, making him look haggard. His hair had never been luxuriant, but was now definitely thinning to baldness. His ears seemed to have got longer, the lobes fleshier, as if from some unconscious tugging while musing on the entanglements of his mind. It settled Falcon to see the judge so reduced; it would have been intolerable had the wife-beater been his usual arrogant self. Falcon opened the door for the guard, who held a tray of coffee, and followed him in. Calderon instantly reanimated himself into an approximation of the supremely confident man he had once been.

'To what, or to whom, do I owe this pleasure?' asked Calderon, standing up, sweeping his arm across the sparsely furnished room. 'Privacy, coffee, an old friend… these unimaginable luxuries.'

'I'd have come before now,' said Falcon, sitting down, 'but, as you've probably realized, I've been busy.'

Calderon took a long, careful look at him and lit another cigarette, the third of his second pack of the day. The guard set down the tray and left the room.

'And what could possibly make you want to come and see the murderer of your ex-wife?'

'Alleged murderer of your wife.'

'Is that significant, or are you just being accurate?'

'This last week is the first time I've had since June to think and… do some reading,' said Falcon.

'Well, I hope it was a good novel and not the transcript of my interview with my Grand Inquisitor, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita,' said Calderon. 'That, as my lawyer will tell you, was not my finest hour.'

'I've read that quite a few times and I've also gone over Zorrita's interview with Marisa Moreno,' said Falcon. 'She's been to see you a number of times, hasn't she?'

'Unfortunately,' said Calderon, nodding, 'they've not been conjugal visits. We talk.'

'About what?'

'We were never very good at talking,' said Calderon, drawing hard on his cigarette. 'We had that other language.'

'I was just thinking that maybe since you've been in here you might have developed some other communication skills.'

'I have, but not particularly with Marisa.'

'So why does she come to see you?'

'Duty? Guilt? I don't know. Ask her.'

'Guilt?'

'I think there might be a few things she regrets telling Zorrita about,' said Calderon.

'Like what?'

'I don't want to talk about it,' said Calderon. 'Not with you.'

'Things like that little joke you had with Marisa about the "bourgeois solution" to costly divorce:… murder your wife.'

'Fuck knows how that bastard Zorrita squeezed that out of her.'

'Maybe he didn't have to squeeze too hard,' said Falcon calmly.

Calderon's cigarette stopped on the way to his mouth.

'What else do you think she regretted talking to Zorrita about?' asked Falcon.

'She covered for me. She said I left her apartment later than I did. She thought she was doing me a favour, but Zorrita had all the timings from the cab company. It was a stupid thing to have done. It counted against me. Made me look as if I needed help, especially taken in conjunction with the cops finding me on the banks of the Guadalquivir river trying to dispose of Ines's body,' said Calderon, who stopped, frowned and did some concentrated smoking. 'What the fuck are you doing here, Javier? What's this all about?'

'I'm trying to help you,' said Falcon.

'Are you now?' said Calderon. 'And why would you want to help the alleged murderer of your ex-wife? I realize that you and Ines weren't particularly close any more, but… still…'

'You told me you were innocent. You've said so from the very beginning.'

'Well, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon, you're the expert on the murderer's constant state of denial,' said Calderon.

'I am,' said Falcon. 'And I'm not going to pretend to you that my investigation into what happened on that night doesn't have ulterior motives.'

'All right,' said Calderon, sitting back, paradoxically satisfied by this revelation. 'I didn't think you wanted to save my ass… especially if you've read that transcript as many times as you said.'

'There's some very ugly stuff in there, I can't deny that, Esteban.'

'Nor can I,' said Calderon. 'I wouldn't mind turning back the clock on my whole relationship with Ines.'

'I have some questions relating to the transcript,' said Falcon, heading off a possible descent into self-pity. 'I understand that the first time you hit Ines was when she discovered the naked photographs of Marisa on your digital camera.'

'She was trying to download them on to her computer,' said Calderon, leaping to his own defence. 'I didn't know what her intentions were. I mean, it's one thing to find them, but it seemed to me that she was going to make use of them in some way.'

'I'm sure Ines knew you very well, by then,' said Falcon. 'So why did you leave the camera hanging around? What were you thinking of, taking shots of your naked lover?'

' I didn't take them, Marisa did… while I was asleep. She was nice about it, though. She told me she'd left some "presents" on the camera,' said Calderon. 'And I didn't leave the camera hanging around. Ines went through my pockets.'

'And what were you doing with the camera in the first place?'

'I took some shots of a lawyers' dinner I'd attended earlier in the evening,' said Calderon. 'My alibi, if Ines found the camera.'

'Which you knew she would.'

Calderon nodded, smoked, searched his memory; something he did a lot these days.

'I'd overslept at Marisa's,' he said. 'It was six o'clock in the morning and, you know, I wasn't as collected as I would have been normally. Ines appeared to be asleep. She wasn't. When I dropped off, she got up and found the shots.'

'And that was the first time you hit her,' said Falcon. 'Have you thought about that since you've been in here?'

'Are you going to be my shrink as well, Javier?'

Falcon showed him an empty pair of hands.

'If you didn't take the shots of Marisa and the only reason you had the camera with you was to provide yourself with an alibi for Ines, how come it was at hand for your lover to take photos of herself naked?'

Calderon stared into the wall for some time until he gradually started chopping the air with his cigarette fingers.

'She told me she went through my jacket pockets. She said: "I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks,"' said Calderon. 'They all go through your pockets. That's what women do, Javier. It's part of their training. They're very exigent on details.'

'Did she volunteer that information?'

'No, I asked her.'

'Any reason?'

'I don't know,' said Calderon. 'I think I was hunting for my shoes. I was nervous about getting back to my apartment and having a confrontation with Ines. I'd never stayed out all night before. I suppose Marisa's behaviour just struck me as a bit odd.'

'Any thoughts about it now?'

'It's the sort of thing a wife would do… not a lover,' said Calderon, crushing out the cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray. 'It's what Ines did when I got home.'

'You're smoking a lot, Esteban.'

'There's nothing else to do, and it calms my nerves.'

'Maybe you should think of an alternative method of calming your nerves.'

Calderon looked up, suspicious.

'You can keep trying, Javier, but I'm not going to lie down on your couch.'

'What about somebody else's couch?' said Falcon, flicking over a page in his notebook. 'Another question about the transcript…'

Calderon lit a cigarette, belligerently. He inhaled deeply without taking his eyes off Falcon and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

'Go on,' he said. 'I'm listening.'

'Why do you think Marisa told Inspector Jefe Zorrita that she'd met Ines?'

'Zorrita said that dealing with liars was like dealing with children. Marisa tried to lie about it but he broke her down.'

'Zorrita is a dictaphone man, not a note-taker. I've listened to the recording of the interview with Marisa,' said Falcon. 'If there was one bit of evidence you didn't want in Zorrita's hands it was the fact of Marisa and Ines having met before, and especially the circumstances of that meeting.'

'Probably,' said Calderon, not that interested in something he didn't regard as a development.

'Zorrita found a witness to that meeting in the Murillo Gardens on 6th June. It wasn't too difficult because, apparently, it was quite a showdown between the two women. The witness said they went at each other like a couple of whores competing for the same patch.'

'Doesn't sound like that witness hung around in very nice places.'

They smiled at each other with no humour.

'According to this witness, Marisa had the last word,' said Falcon, flicking through his notebook. 'She said something along the lines of: "Just remember, Ines, that when he's beating you it's because he's been fucking me so beautifully all night that he can't bear to see your disappointed little face in the morning." Is that what Marisa told you? Because she didn't happen to mention that to Zorrita.'

'What's your point?'

'First of all, how did Marisa find out that you'd been beating Ines? She didn't have a bruised face. Did you tell her?'

'No.'

'Maybe one of the ugly lessons she learnt in her early life in Havana was how to spot an abused woman.'

'Your point, Javier?' said Calderon, with courtroom lawyer's steel.

'Marisa gave Zorrita the impression that Ines had the upper hand. She mentioned Ines's phrase several times: "La puta con el puro."' The whore with the cigar.

'That's what she told me,' said Calderon, listening hard now.

'Zorrita thought Marisa had told him all that because she was still furious at being shamed by Ines in public, but clearly she wasn't. Marisa crushed Ines. The witness said that Ines went off like "the village cur". So what was Marisa's purpose in telling Zorrita about that meeting?'

'You think it was calculated,' said Calderon.

'I listened to the tape. Zorrita only had to prod her a couple of times to get the story out of her. And the story, her version of it, was crucial in redoubling your motive to beat Ines and perhaps take it too far and kill her. Now that would be a story that you'd want to keep out of the investigating officer's mind at all costs.'

Calderon was smoking so intently that he was making himself dizzy with the nicotine rush.

'My final question to do with the transcript,' said Falcon. 'Inspector Jefe Zorrita came to see me some hours after he'd interviewed you. I asked if you'd broken down and confessed, and his answer was: sort of. He admitted that when you refused a lawyer – God knows what you were thinking of at that moment, Esteban – it meant that he could be more brutal with you in the interview. That, combined with the horror of the autopsy revelations, seemed to create doubt in your mind and, Zorrita reckoned, it was then that you believed that you could have done it.'

'I was very confused,' said Calderon. 'My hubris was in refusing the lawyer. I was a lawyer. I could handle myself.'

'When Zorrita asked you to describe what happened when you went back to your apartment that night, he said you rendered the events in the form of a film script.'

'I don't remember that.'

'You used the third person singular. You were describing something you'd seen… as if you were out of your body, or behind a camera. It was clear you were in some kind of trance. Didn't your lawyer mention any of this?'

'Maybe he was too embarrassed.'

'There seems to be some confusion about what you saw when you came into the apartment,' said Falcon.

'My lawyer and I have talked about that.'

'In your film script version, you describe yourself as "annoyed", because you didn't want to see Ines.'

'I didn't want a confrontation. I wasn't angry, as I had been when Marisa told me about meeting Ines in the Murillo Gardens. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. Those were long days. All the work, followed by media engagements in the evening.'

Falcon flipped over another page of his notebook.

'What interested me was when you said: "He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was." What was all that about?'

'Is that a direct quote?'

'Yes,' said Falcon, putting the dictaphone on the table and pressing 'play'.

Calderon listened, transfixed, as the smoke crawled up the valleys of his fingers.

'Is that me?'

Falcon played it again.

'It doesn't seem that important.'

'I think Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot,' said Falcon.

Calderon leapt to his feet as if he'd been spiked from underneath.

'My foot was sore for days,' he said, with sudden recall. 'I had a blister.'

'Why would Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot?'

'To wake me up. I was dead to the world.'

'There are more charming ways to wake your lover up than burning his foot with a cigarette lighter,' said Falcon. 'I think that she had to wake you up because the timing of your departure from her apartment was crucial.'

Calderon sank back into his chair, lit another cigarette and stared up into the light coming in through the high, barred window. He blinked as his eyes filled and he bit down on his bottom lip.

'You're helping me,' said Calderon. 'The irony's not lost on me, Javier.'

'You need different help to what I can give you,' said Falcon. 'Now, let's just go back to my original point from the transcript. Just one more thing about that night. The two versions you gave Zorrita about how you found Ines in the apartment.'

Calderon's brain snapped back into some pre-rehearsed groove and Falcon held up his hand.

'I'm not interested in the version you and your lawyer have prepared for court,' said Falcon. 'Remember, none of this is about your case. What I'm trying to do might help you, but the design is not to get you off the hook, it's for me to find my way in.'

'To what?'

'The conspiracy. Who planted that small Goma 2 Eco bomb in the basement mosque, which exploded on the 6th of June, detonating the hundred kilos of hexogen stored there, bringing down the apartment building and destroying the pre-school?'

'Javier Falcon keeps his promise to the people of Seville,' said Calderon, grunting.

'Nobody's forgotten that… least of all me.'

Calderon leaned across the table, looked up through the pupils of Falcon's eyes into the top of his cranium.

'Do I detect something of an obsession going on here?' he said. 'Personal crusades, Javier, are not advisable in police work. Every old people's home in Spain probably has a retired detective gaping from the windows, his mind still twisted around a missing girl, or a poor, bludgeoned boy. Don't go there. Nobody expects it of you.'

'People remind me of it all the time in the Jefatura and in the Palacio de Justicia,' said Falcon. 'And what's more, I expect it of myself.'

'See you in the loony bin, Javier. Save me a place by the window,' said Calderon, sitting back, inspecting the conical ember of his cigarette.

'We're not going to end up in the loony bin,' said Falcon.

'You're pretty keen to get me down on some shrink's couch,' said Calderon, dredging for lost confidence. 'And you know what I say? Fuck off, you and anybody else. Mind your own madness. You especially, Javier. It's been less than five years since your "complete breakdown" – wasn't that what they called it? – and I can see you've been working hard. God knows how many times you went through the files on the bombing before you started combing Zorrita's reports, looking for the flaws in my case. You should get out more, Javier. Have you fucked that Consuelo yet?'

'Let's get back to what happened at around 4 a.m. on Thursday 8th June in your apartment in Calle San Vicente,' said Falcon, tapping his notebook. 'In one version you came in to see Ines standing at the sink and you were "so happy to see her", and yet in the other version you were "annoyed", there was some sort of hiatus, you woke up lying in the corridor and when you went back to the kitchen you found Ines dead on the floor.'

Calderon swallowed hard as he replayed that night in the darkness of his mind. He had done it so many times, more times than even the most obsessive director would have edited, and re-edited, a scene from a movie. It now played in short sequences, but in reverse. From that moment of intense guilt when, trapped in the patrolman's torch beam, he'd been discovered trying to throw Ines into the river, to that blissful, pre-lapsarian state when he'd got out of the cab, helped by the driver, and walked up the stairs to his apartment, with no other intention than to get into bed as quickly as possible. And that was the point he always seized on: he knew at that moment he did not have murder on his mind.

'There was no intent,' he said, out loud.

'Start from the beginning, Esteban.'

'Look, Javier, I've tried it every which way: forwards, backwards and inside out, but however hard I try there's always a gap,' said Calderon, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the last one. 'The cab driver opened the apartment door for me, two turns of the key. He left me there. I went into the apartment. I saw the light from the kitchen. I remember being annoyed – and I repeat, "annoyed", not angry or murderous. I was just irritated that I might have to explain myself when all I wanted to do was crash out. So I remember that emotion very clearly, then nothing until I woke up on the floor in the corridor beyond the kitchen.'

'What do you think about Zorrita's theory, that people have blank moments about terrible things they have done?'

'I've come across it professionally. I don't doubt it. I've searched every corner of my mind…'

'So what was this about seeing Ines alive and being so happy?'

'My lawyer tells me that Freud had a term for that: "wish fulfilment", he called it,' said Calderon. 'You want something to be true so badly that your mind invents it for you. I did not want Ines to be dead on the floor. We were not happy together, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her to be alive so badly that my mind substituted the reality with my most fervent wish. Both versions came out in the turmoil of that first interview with Zorrita.'

'You know that this is the crux of your case,' said Falcon. 'The flaws I've found are small. Marisa going through your pockets, getting the upper hand in the shouting match with Ines in the Murillo Gardens and burning your foot to wake you up. These things amount to nothing when put against your recorded statement, in which you say that you entered the double-locked apartment alone, saw Ines alive, blacked out and then found her dead. Your inner turmoil and all that wish-fulfilment crap is no match for those powerful facts.'

More concentrated smoking from Calderon. He scratched at his thinning hair and his left eye twitched.

'And why do you think Marisa is the key?'

'The worst possible thing that could have happened at that moment in our investigation into the bombing was to have our instructing judge, and our strongest performer in front of the media, arrested for the murder of his wife,' said Falcon. 'Losing you pretty well derailed the whole process. If your disgrace was planned, then Marisa was crucial to its execution.'

'I'll speak to her,' said Calderon, nodding, his face hardening.

'You won't,' said Falcon. 'We've stopped her visits. You're too desperate, Esteban. I don't want you to give anything away. What you've got to do is unlock your mind and see if you can find any detail that might help me. And it might be advisable to get a professional in to do that for you.'

'Ah!' said Calderon, getting it finally. 'The shrink.'