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twin of that chair,’ said Falcón, not taking his eyes off her. ‘His forearms, ankles and head had been secured with flex. He was barefoot because his socks had been used to gag him. He was being forced to watch something on the screen, something so horrific to him that he fought with all his strength not to see it.’
    As he said this it occurred to him that it was only half true. The on-screen horror might have been the start of it, but what made Raúl Jiménez writhe convulsively was coming round in agony to find that a madman had cut his eyelids off. After that he’d have known there was nothing to lose and he’d have fought like a dog until his heart gave out.
    ‘What was he being forced to watch?’ she asked, confused. ‘I didn’t see …’
    ‘What you saw had a certain amount of horror for you personally. Being stalked is creepy, but it’s not something that you would fight to the point of self-mutilation not to see.’
    She sat down straight in the chair, knees pressed together like a good little girl. She leaned forward, grasping her shins, holding herself in.
    ‘I can’t think,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything like that.’
    ‘Nor can I,’ said Falcón.
    She drew on the cigarette, spat out the smoke as if it was disgusting. Falcón searched for any hint of pretence.
    ‘I can’t think,’ she said it again.
    ‘You have to think, Doña Consuelo, because you have to go over every minute that you spent with Raúl Jiménez plus everything you know about his life before you met him and you must tell it all … to me and then perhaps between us we can find the small crack … the …’
    ‘The small crack?’
    Falcón’s mind went blank. What crack was he talking about? An opening. A chink. But into what?
    ‘We might find something that will give us an insight,’ he said. ‘Yes, an insight.’
    ‘Into what?’
    ‘Into what your husband feared,’ said Falcón, losing his thread.
    ‘He had nothing to fear. There was nothing frightening in his life.’
    Falcón reined in his thoughts. His fear? What was he thinking of? What was this man’s fear going to tell him?
    ‘Your husband had certain … tastes,’ said Falcón, fingering the pack of Celtas. ‘Here we are in one of themost prestigious apartment buildings in Seville, or at least they were fifteen years ago …’
    ‘Which was about when he bought it,’ she said. ‘I never liked it here.’
    ‘And where were you moving to?’
    ‘Heliopolis.’
    ‘Another expensive place to live,’ said Falcón. ‘He has four of the most well-known restaurants in Seville attended by the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. And yet … Celtas, which he smoked with the filters broken off. And yet … cheap prostitutes picked up in the Alameda.’
    ‘That was only a recent development. No more than two years … since … since Viagra became available. He was impotent for three years before that.’
    ‘His taste in tobacco probably goes back to a time when he had no money. When was that?’
    ‘I don’t know, he never talked about it.’
    ‘Where does he come from?’
    ‘He never talked about that either,’ she said. ‘We Spanish don’t have such a glorious past that his generation would choose to wallow in it.’
    ‘What do you know about his parents?’
    ‘That they’re both dead.’
    Consuelo Jiménez was no longer maintaining eye contact. Her ice-blue eyes roved the room.
    ‘When did you and Raúl Jiménez meet?’
    ‘At the Feria de Abril in 1989. I was invited to his caseta by a mutual friend. He danced a very good Sevillana … not the usual shuffling about that you see from the men. He had it in him. We made a very good pair.’
    ‘You would have been in your early thirties? And he was in his sixties.’
    She smoked hard and trashed the cigarette. She walkedto the window where she became a dark silhouette against the bright blue sky. She folded her arms.
    ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said, mouth up against the