The Hidden Assassins Read Free

suppose they think they’ve shown him some sort of respect,’ said Ferrera. ‘Like they do at sea, or for burial in mass graves after a disaster.’
    ‘Respect,’ said Falcón. ‘Right after they’ve shown him the ultimate disrespect by taking his life and his identity. There’s something ritualistic and ruthless about this, don’t you think?’
    ‘Perhaps they were religious,’ said Ferrera, raising an ironic eyebrow. ‘You know, a lot of terrible things have been done in God’s name, Inspector Jefe.’
    Falcón drove back into the centre of Seville in strange yellowing light as a huge storm cloud, which had been gathering over the Sierra de Aracena, began to encroach on the city from the northwest. The radio told him that there would be an evening of heavy rain. It was probably going to be the last rain before the long hot summer.
    At first he thought that it might be the physical and mental jolt he’d had from colliding with Consuelo that morning which was making him feel anxious. Or was it the change in the atmospheric pressure, or some residual edginess left from seeing the bloated corpse on the dump? As he sat at the traffic lights he realized that it ran deeper than all that. His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new. The unidentifiable corpse was like a neurosis; an ugly protrusion prodding the consciousness of the city from a greater horror underneath. It was the sense of that greater horror, with its potential to turn minds, move spirits and change lives that he was finding so disturbing.
    By the time he arrived back at the Jefatura, after a series of meetings with judges in the Edificio de los Juzgados, it was seven o’clock and evening seemed to have come early. The smell of rain was as heavy as metal in the ionized air. The thunder still seemed to be a long way off, but the sky was darkening to a premature night and flashes of lightning startled, like death just missed.
    Pérez and Ferrera were waiting for him in his office. Their eyes followed him as he went to the window and the first heavy drops of rain rapped against the glass. Contentment was a strange human state, he thought, as a light steam rose from the car park. Just at the moment life seemed boring and the desire for change emerged like a brilliant idea, along came a new, sinister vitality and the mind was suddenly scrambling back to what appeared to be prelapsarian bliss.
    ‘What have you got?’ he asked, moving along the window to his desk and collapsing in the chair.
    ‘You didn’t give us a time of death,’ said Ferrera.
    ‘Sorry. Forty-eight hours was the estimate.’
    ‘We found the bins where the envelopes were dumped. They’re in the old city centre, on the corner of a cul-de-sac and Calle Boteros, between the Plaza de la Alfalfa and the Plaza Cristo de Burgos.’
    ‘When do they empty those bins?’
    ‘Every night between eleven and midnight,’ said Pérez.
    ‘So if, as the Médico Forense says, he died some time in the evening of Saturday 3rd June,’ said Ferrera, ‘they probably wouldn’t have been able to dump the body until three in the morning on Sunday.’
    ‘Where are those bins now?’
    ‘We’ve had them sent down to forensics to test for blood traces.’
    ‘But we might be out of luck there,’ said Pérez. ‘Felipe and Jorge have found some black plastic sheeting, which they think was wrapped around the body.’
    ‘Did any of the people you spoke to at the addresses on the envelopes remember seeing any black plastic sheeting in the bottom of one of the bins?’
    ‘We didn’t know about the black plastic sheeting when we interviewed them.’
    ‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Falcón, his brain not concentrated on the details, still drifting about in his earlier unease. ‘Why do you think the body was dumped at three in the morning?’
    ‘Saturday night near the Alfalfa…you know what it’s like around there…all the kids in the