The Hidden Assassins. Robert Thomas Wilson
in with information.’
‘Except that they don’t know of the Peugeot Partner’s importance yet,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere until people get back into their apartments.’
The Mayor, who’d been stuck in traffic as the city had ground to a halt, finally arrived in the car park. He was joined by ministers of the Andalucían Parliament, who had just come from the hospital where they’d been filmed talking to some of the victims. A gaggle of journalists had been allowed through the police cordon and they gathered around the officials, while camera crews set up their equipment, with the destruction providing the devastating backdrop. Elvira went across to the Mayor to give his situation report and was intercepted by his own assistant. They talked. Elvira pointed him across to Falcón.
‘Only three of the twelve names given to us on that list appear on the terror suspect database,’ said the assistant, ‘and they’re all in the lowest risk category. Five of the twelve were over sixty-five. Morning prayers isn’t such a popular time with the young, as most people have to get to work.’
‘Not exactly the classic profile of a terrorist cell,’ said Falcón. ‘But then we don’t know who else was in there yet.’
‘How many under the age of thirty-five?’ asked Calderón.
‘Four,’ said the assistant, ‘and of those, two are brothers, one of whom is severely disabled in a wheelchair, and another is a Spanish convert called Miguel Botín.’
‘And the remaining three?’
‘Four, including the Imam, who isn’t on the list the woman gave us. He’s fifty-five and the other three are in their forties. Two of them are claiming disability benefit from the state after suffering industrial accidents, and the third is another Spanish convert.’
‘Well, they don’t sound like a special forces unit, do they?’ said Calderón.
‘There is one interesting point. The Imam is on the terror suspect database. He’s been in Spain since September 2004, arriving from Tunis.’
‘And before that?’
‘That’s the point. I don’t have the clearance for that level of information. Maybe the Comisario does,’ he said, and went to rejoin the media scrum around the Mayor.
‘How can somebody be in a low-risk category and yet have a higher level of clearance for his history?’ asked Ramírez.
‘Let’s look at the certainties, or the almost certainties,’ said Juez Calderón. ‘We have a bomb explosion, whose epicentre seems to be the mosque in the basement of the building. We have a van belonging to Mohammed Soumaya, a low-risk category terrorist—who 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