The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson
‘Any further thoughts, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked.
‘Did we get a statement from Marciano Ruíz?’
Ramírez nodded at the desk, said there was nothing new in it. Falcón read it through only to avoid having to tell Ramírez about his trip to Madrid and the Jiménez family horrors. It had to have more relevance to the murder or Ramírez would start undermining him, and he’d find other officers looking at him sadly as the guy who’d started a murder inquiry by going back to an incident of thirty-six years ago.
‘I went to see Eloisa Gómez yesterday afternoon,’ said Ramírez.
‘Did you get anything out of her?’
‘She didn’t offer me a free blow job, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Not after what you did to her yesterday,’ said Falcón. ‘Did she crack?’
‘She’s not going to talk to me even if she did do it, and now she’s scared.’
‘You were getting on so well,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought you were going to ask her home.’
‘Maybe I should have been more patient,’ said Ramírez. ‘But, you know, I really thought she’d let him in and a hard verbal shock might do the trick.’
‘We’ll start the day with Mudanzas Triana,’ said Falcón, moving along. ‘Then we’ll go to the Jiménez funeral with a video camera and film the mourners. We’ll check those mourners off against the address list and follow up with interviews. We’ll build a picture of his life.’
What about Eloisa Gómez?’
‘Pérez can pull her in again this afternoon. That’ll be nearly forty-eight hours since she was with Raúl Jiménez. If she was an accomplice, the killer will have made contact by then and that might have changed her mental landscape.’
‘Or her entire landscape,’ said Ramírez. ‘For the worse.’
Ramírez picked up the video camera and drove them to Mudanzas Triana, who were on the Avenida Santa Cecilia. They spoke to the boss, Ignacio Bravo, who listened to their theoretical scenario with unmoving eyes behind puffy lids while smoking one Ducados lit from another.
‘First of all, it’s impossible,’ he said. ‘My workers are —’
‘They signed a statement,’ said Ramírez, dead bored, handing it over.
Bravo read the document, flicking ash in the vague direction of a miniature tyre that enclosed an ashtray.
‘They will be fired,’ he said.
‘Talk us through your arrangement with Sr and Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘You can start with why they wanted to move during Semana Santa, which must be the busiest time of year for a restaurant.’
‘And not cheap for removals. Our rates double. I explained it all to her, Inspector Jefe. But we couldn’t do it the next week when her restaurants were closed because. we’re all booked up … as is everybody else. So she paid her money. She didn’t care.’
‘When did you first take a look at the job?’
‘I went there last week to see the layout, the quantity of large furniture, the number of packing cases needed, all that stuff. I called her the next day to tell her it would be a two-day job and gave her a quote.’
‘A two-day job?’ said Ramírez. ‘So when did you start?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘Which would make it a three-day job.’
‘Sr Jiménez called to say he didn’t want his study moved until Thursday. I told him it would cost even more than double and that we could do the job in the time. He insisted. I don’t argue the point with rich people; I just make sure they pay. They’re the worst …’
He trailed off when he saw the look from the policemen.
‘How many people knew about the change from the original arrangement?’ asked Falcón.
‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said, unable to get comfortable. ‘Of course, everybody had to know. It involved changing all the jobs around. You don’t think that one of my men is the murderer?’
‘What’s intriguing us,’ said Falcón, leaving Bravo’s suspicion to hang in the air, ‘is that, if our scenario is correct, the murderer must have known about the change in the arrangement. He must have known that Sr Jiménez was going to stay an extra night and be on his own. He could only know that from Sr Jiménez himself or from here. When did you confirm the job with Sra Jiménez?’
‘Wednesday, 4th April,’ he said, flicking through his diary.
‘When did Sr Jiménez make the change?’
‘Friday, 6th April.’
‘Had you already assigned a work team for the job?’
‘I did that on the Wednesday.’
‘How do you do that?’
‘I call my secretary, who informs the depot foreman, who writes it up on a whiteboard downstairs.’
Falcón asked to speak to the secretary. Bravo called her in: a small, dark nervous woman in her fifties. They asked what she’d said to the foreman.
‘I told him that there’d been a change, that Sr Jiménez didn’t want the study to be touched until Thursday morning and that a small bed should be left in the kids’ room.’
‘What did the foreman say?’
‘The foreman made a coarse remark about what the bed would be used for.’
‘What does he do with that information?’
‘He puts it up on the whiteboard in red to show that it’s a change,’ she said. ‘And he posts the comments about the study and bed in a separate column.’
‘He also types it on to their worksheets,’ said Bravo, ‘so there’s two ways they can’t forget. They’re not very gifted people in the removals business.’
The three men went down into the depot and looked at the whiteboard, which contained all the information for all jobs in April and May but with the Jiménez job still open. The foreman came out. The secretary was right, he looked the sort who kickstarted the day with a couple of brandies.
‘So everybody in this depot would know of the change to the Jiménez job?’ said Falcón.
‘Without a doubt,’ said the foreman.
‘What’s the security like here?’ asked Ramírez.
‘We don’t store anything here, so it’s minimal,’ said Bravo. ‘One man, one dog.’
‘During the day?’
Bravo shook his head.
‘No cameras either?’
‘It’s not necessary.’
‘So you can just walk in off the street through the back there from Calle Maestro Arrieta?’
‘If you wanted to.’
‘Any overalls gone missing?’ asked Ramírez.
Nothing had gone missing, nothing had been reported. The overalls were all standard issue with MUDANZAS TRIANA stencilled on the back. It wasn’t a difficult thing to copy.
‘Anybody been in here who shouldn’t?’ asked Ramírez.
‘Just people looking for work.’
‘People?’
‘Two or three guys a week come in here and I tell them the same thing. We don’t recruit people off the street.’
‘What about