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was the brilliant and beautiful young prosecutor. We were the “golden couple”, as seen on TV.’
    ‘You don’t have any children,’ said Marisa. ‘Get divorced.’
    ‘It’s not so easy.’
    ‘Why not? It’s taken you four years to find out that you’re incompatible,’ said Marisa. ‘Get out now while you’re still young.’
    ‘You’ve had a lot of lovers.’
    ‘I might have been to bed with a lot of men but I’ve only had four lovers.’
    ‘And how do you define a lover?’ asked Calderón, still fishing.
    ‘Someone I love and who loves me.’
    ‘Sounds simple.’
    ‘It can be…as long as you don’t let life fuck it up.’
    The question burned inside Calderón. Did she love him? But almost as soon as it came into his mind he had to ask himself whether he loved her. They cancelled each other out. He’d been fucking her for nine months. That wasn’t quite fair, or was it? Marisa could hear his brain working. She recognized the sound. Men always assumed their brains were silent rather than grinding away like sabotaged machinery.
    ‘So now you’re going to tell me,’ said Marisa, ‘that you can’t get a divorce for all those bourgeois reasons—career, status, social acceptance, property and money.’
    That was it, thought Calderón, his face going slack in the dark. That was precisely why he couldn’t get a divorce. He would lose everything. He had only just scraped his career back together again after the Maddy debacle. Being related to the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla had helped, but so had his marriage to Inés. If he divorced her now his career might easily drift, his friends would slip away, he would lose his apartment and he would be poorer. Inés would make sure of all that.
    ‘There is, of course, a bourgeois solution to that,’ said Marisa.
    ‘What?’ said Calderón, turning to look at her between her upturned nipples, suddenly hopeful.
    ‘You could murder her,’ she said, throwing open her hands, easy peasy.
    Calderón smiled at first, not quite registering what she had said. His smile turned into a grin and then he laughed. As he laughed his head bounced on Marisa’s taut stomach and it bounced higher and higher as her muscles tightened with laughter. He sat up spluttering at the brilliant absurdity of her idea.
    ‘Me, the leading Juez de Instrucción in Seville, killing his wife?’
    ‘Ask her ex-husband for some advice,’ said Marisa, her stomach still contracting with laughter. ‘He should know how to commit the perfect murder.’

4
    Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs
    Manuela Falcón was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer’s fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.
    ‘For God’s sake, relax,’ said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. ‘What are you so anxious about?’
    ‘I can’t believe you’ve asked that question,’ said Manuela. ‘The deeds, this morning?’
    Angel Zarrías blinked into his pillow. He’d forgotten.
    ‘Look, my darling , ’ he said, rolling over, ‘you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…’
    ‘Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens.But even you can understand that there’s uncertainty before it happens.’
    ‘But if you don’t sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don’t torture yourself with the theory of it.’
    Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt