The Hidden Assassins. Robert Thomas Wilson
we are not sure was in the building at the time of the blast. His van bears traces of explosive, according to the bomb squad dog. We have a list of twelve people in the mosque at the time, plus the Imam. Only three, plus the Imam, make it on to a list of low-risk category terror suspects. We are investigating the deaths of four children in the pre-school and three people outside the apartment block at the time of the explosion. Anything else?’
‘The hood, the sash, the two copies of the Koran,’ said Ramírez.
‘We should get all those notes in the margins of the used copy of the Koran looked at by an expert,’ said Calderón. ‘Now, what are the questions we want answered?’
‘Did Mohammed Soumaya drive this van here? If not, who did? If that powder is confirmed as explosive then what was it, why was it being gathered here, and why did it detonate?’ said Falcón. ‘While we wait to hear from Madrid about Soumaya we’ll build up a picture of what happened in and around this mosque over the last week. We can start by asking people whether they remember this van arriving, how many people were in it, did they see it being unloaded and so on. Can we get a shot of Soumaya?’
Ramírez, who was on the phone again, trying to sort out someone to look at the copy of the Koran, nodded and twirled an index finger to show that he was on to it. A policewoman came from the wreckage site and informed Calderón that the first body in the collapsed building had been found—an old woman on the eighth floor. They agreed to reconvene in a couple of hours. Ramírez came off the phone as Cristina Ferrera arrived from the pre-school.
It was agreed that Ramírez would continue working on the vehicle identification with Sub-Inspector Pérez, Serrano and Baena. Falcón and Cristina Ferrera would start trying to find the occupants of the five-storey apartment building with the best view of the car park where the Peugeot Partner had been left. They went down the street towards the police cordon where a group of people had gathered, waiting to be able to get back into their apartments.
‘How was Fernando by the time you left him?’ asked Falcón. ‘I didn’t catch his surname.’
‘Fernando Alanis,’ she said. ‘He was more or less under control, considering what had happened to him. We’ve exchanged numbers.’
‘Has he got anybody he can go to?’
‘Not in Seville,’ she said. ‘His parents are up north and too old and sick. His sister lives in Argentina. His wife’s family didn’t approve of the marriage.’
‘Friends?’
‘His life was his family,’ she said.
‘Does he know what he’s going to do?’
‘I’ve told him he can come and stay with me.’
‘You didn’t have to do that, Cristina. He’s not your responsibility.’
‘You knew I’d offer though, didn’t you, Inspector Jefe?’ she said. ‘If the situation demanded it.’
‘I was going to put him up at my place,’ said Falcón. ‘You’ve got to go to work, the kids…you don’t have any room.’
‘He needs a sense of what he’s lost,’ she said. ‘And who’d look after him at your place?’
‘My housekeeper,’ said Falcón. ‘You won’t believe me, but I really did not intend for that to happen.’
‘We have to pull together or we let them win by falling apart,’ she said. ‘And you always choose me for this type of work—once a nun always a nun.’
‘I don’t remember saying that.’
‘But you remember thinking it, and didn’t you say that we weren’t just foot soldiers in the fight against crime,’ said Ferrera, ‘but that we’re here to help as well. We’re the crusading detectives of Andalucía.’
‘José Luis would laugh in your face if he heard you say that,’ said Falcón. ‘And you should be very wary of using words like that in this investigation.’
‘Fernando was already accusing “the Moroccans”,’ she said. ‘Ever since March 11th they’ve been watching them go into that mosque and wondering.’
‘That’s the way people’s minds naturally work these days, and they like to have their suspicions confirmed,’ said Falcón. ‘We can’t take their prejudices into this investigation. We have to examine the facts and keep them divorced from any natural assumptions. If we don’t, we’ll make the sort of mistakes they made right from the beginning in the Madrid bombings when they blamed ETA. Already there are confusing aspects to the evidence that we’ve found in the Peugeot Partner.’
‘Explosives, copies of the Koran and a green sash and black hood don’t sound confusing to me,’ said Ferrera.
‘Why two copies of the Koran? One brand-new cheap Spanish edition and the other heavily used and annotated, but exactly the same edition.’
‘The extra copy was a gift?’
‘Why leave it in full view on the front seat? This is Seville, people usually leave their cars completely empty,’ said Falcón. ‘We need more information on these books. I want you to find out where they were bought and if there was a credit card or cheque used.’
He tore the page from his notebook with the ISBNs and bar codes, recopied them and gave Ferrera the torn page.
‘What are we trying to find out from the occupants of this apartment block?’
‘Keep it simple. Everybody’s in shock. If we can find witnesses we’ll bring them to this car park, ask whether they saw the Peugeot Partner arrive, if they saw anybody getting out of it, how many, what age and if they took anything out of the back.’
At the police cordon Falcón called out the address of the apartment block. An old man in his seventies came forward and a woman in her forties with a bruised face and a plastered arm in a sling. Falcón took the old man, Ferrera the woman. As they passed the entrance to their block a bomb squad man and a fireman confirmed that the building was now clear. Falcón showed the old man the Peugeot Partner and took him back up to his thirdfloor apartment, where the living room and kitchen were covered in glass, all the blinds in shreds, the chairs fallen over, photographs on the floor and the soft furniture lacerated, with brown foam already protruding from the holes.
The old man had been lying on his bed in the back of the apartment. His son and daughter-in-law had already left for work, with the kids, who were too old for the pre-school, so nobody had been hurt. He stood in the midst of his wrecked home with his left hand shaking and his old, rheumy eyes taking it all in.
‘So you’re here on your own all day,’ said Falcón.
‘My wife died last November,’ he said.
‘What do you do with yourself?’
‘I do what old guys do: read the paper, take a coffee, look at the kids playing in the pre-school. I wander about, talk to people and choose the best time to smoke the three cigarettes I allow myself every day.’
Falcón went to the window and pulled the ruined blinds away.
‘Do you remember seeing that van?’
‘The world is full of small white vans these days,’ said the old man. ‘So I can’t be sure whether I saw the same van twice, or different vans in two separate instances. On the way to the pharmacy I saw the van for the first time, driving from left to right down Calle Los Romeros, with two people in the front. It pulled into the kerb by the mosque and that was it.’
‘What time?’
‘About ten thirty yesterday morning.’
‘And the next time?’
‘About fifteen minutes later on the way back from the pharmacy I saw a white van pull into the parking area, but not in that spot. It was on the other side, facing away from us,