‘Am I hurting you?’ asked the doctor.
‘No,’ said Javier.
‘Nurse,’ said the doctor, ‘swab these tears.’
He was out by midnight, still in his bloody shirt. He took a taxi home. He stood in the middle of the patio looking at the bronze statue leaping out of the fountain. Always on the move, that boy. He went upstairs to the studio; the black pupil of the fountain followed him round the gallery. He went into the storeroom and removed all his father’s attempts at copying Chefchaouni’s work and the five canvases that made up the obscene painting of his mother. He threw them down into the patio. He followed them with the box of money and the pornography. He took a five-litre flagon of alcohol down and drew everything into a pile next to the fountain. He poured the alcohol on top and threw a match on it. The flames thumped into life and jaundiced light flickered in the silent patio.
He went into the study where the pewter box was still on the desk. He lifted out the priceless miniatures and laid them out one by one. His father’s work. His real father’s work. And for a moment he was up in the air again, looking down into the face he’d never remembered and seeing him for the first time.
He showered and put on a new shirt. He had no desire for bed or to stay in the house. He had a sudden need to be with people, even strangers … especially strangers. He walked out into the night and was drawn to the lights along the black leathery river and then across it into the Plaza de Cuba, where the crowds drew him on up Calle Asunción towards the Feria ground.
He ended up in front of the Edificio Presidente where it had all begun, a lifetime ago, and Consuelo Jiménez came to mind with her daring eyes. He admired her strength. She had never wavered despite the continuous onslaught. Calderón was right, she’d held them all together. He remembered her dinner proposal and the click of her kitten heels on the marble flagstones. He shook his head. Too early for that.
He turned and entered the Feria de Abril through the massive, garishly lit portals of the main gate and walked into a surreal world, where everybody was beautiful and happy. Where the girls flounced in their figure-hugging trajes de flamenca with flowers and tortoiseshell combs in their hair while their men struck poses in grey bolero jackets and flat-brimmed hats. He walked, looking about him with childlike fascination under the lanterns and the bunting, past the endless marquees where everybody was eating, drinking fino and dancing. The air was full of the incense of enjoyment — music, food and tobacco. Under the silken tented ceilings women plaited the air above their heads with sinuous arms, the men upright, chins raised, shoulders braced torero-style.
He walked amongst the people, all of them smiling and laughing, as if drugged. How could there be so many and so happy? In this small galaxy he seemed to be the only human present with a direct line to misery, the only one with memories and guilt, hopelessness and fear. He wondered if he would ever be able to plug himself back into a whole life from the half-life in which he’d been living.
A burst of handclapping snapped him back into the fantasy world of the Feria. The rhythm of the Sevillanas being sung and danced all around him insinuated, and as he passed one of the smaller casetas he heard his name shouted.
‘Javier! Heh! Javier!’
A small, dumpy woman in a white traje de flamenca with big red polka dots appeared to know him. She danced a few steps, her feet suddenly dainty and her hands turning and twisting, beckoning the air, as if encouraging him.
‘You don’t recognize me. I’m Encarnación. Welcome, stranger,’ she said. ‘Will a stranger dance a Sevillana with me on the first night of the Feria de Abril?’
His housekeeper, the perfect stranger, one who represented all that was uncomplicated in the world, had finally taken bodily form. He followed her into the caseta. She insisted that they start with a dance and a glass of fino. She took two sips of her pale Tio Pepe while Javier knocked his back in one. He slammed his glass down, raised his head, clicked his heels together and they started their first Sevillana.
Encarnación was instantly transformed. The sixty-five-year-old woman became elegant and smouldering, coquettish and daring. They danced four or five Sevillanas, one after the other. He ordered more fino. They ate a plate of paella and some calamares and he remembered how good food tasted. They danced again. His anguish subsided, his misery drifted off. He forgot everything and concentrated on one thing — the mood of his Sevillana — and he threw himself into the dance, each sequence drawing him closer to the perfect expression. And he realized that he’d found it again — the Sevillano solution to misery — la fiesta — and he danced his problems out of his head, down his body to his feet and stamped them into the ground.
A Small Death in Lisbon
Robert Wilson
A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals. Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.
1941. Klaus Felsen, SS officer, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history, where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs, dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. There he meets the man who makes the first turn of the wheel of greed and revenge which rolls through to the century’s end.
Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Zé Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl. As he digs deeper, Zé overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice, for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Zé must face the most chilling opposition.
‘Compulsively readable, with the cop’s quest burning its way through a narrative rich in history and intrigue, love and death’
Literary Review
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 651202 8
The Big Killing
Robert Wilson
Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in West Africa, smells trouble when a porn merchant asks him to deliver a video at a secret location. Things look up, though, when he’s hired to act as minder to Ron Collins, a spoilt playboy looking for diamonds. Medway thinks this could be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shootout and the discovery of a mutilated body, the prospect of retreating to his bolthole in Benin becomes increasingly attractive — especially as the manner of the victim’s death is too similar to a current notorious political murder for comfort.
His obligations, though, keep him fixed in the Ivory Coast and he is soon caught up in a terrifying cycle of violence. But does it stem from the political upheavals in nearby Liberia, or from the cutthroat business of diamonds? Unless Medway can get to the bottom of the mystery, he knows that for the savage killer out there in the African night, he is the next target …
‘A narrative distilled from pure protein: potent, fiercely imagined and not a little frightening’
Literary Review
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 647986 4
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
Benin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a ‘fixer’ for traders on that part of the coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave. It’s a tough existence, but Medway can handle it … until he comes across the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off further involvement by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat, Steven Kershaw.
Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer … and sado-masochist. Against background rumblings of political disturbance and endemic official corruption, Medway pursues his elusive quarry with a doggedness even he cannot explain. But as he soon learns, nothing in Africa is what it seems, and those who seek the truth find out more than they wish to know …
‘A witty, fast-moving and picaresque tale’
NELSON DEMILLE
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 647985 7
A Dark
ening Stain
Robert Wilson
Bruce Medway, fixer for the great unfixed, does not see the disappearance of schoolgirls off the streets of Cotonou, Benin, as any of his business. That is the domain of his ex-partner, police detective Bagado, and his corrupt boss. Bruce has the more pressing matter of a visit from two sweet-natured mafiosi who want him to find Jean-Luc Marnier, a French businessman in for something nastier than a wrist-slapping.
Then an important schoolgirl goes missing and Bruce gets involved, descending into a deeper darkness of police corruption, mafia revenge, sexual depravity and illegally mined gold. To save himself he conceives a scam, one that will excite the natural greed that prevails along this coast and, when executed out on the black waters of the huge lagoon system, inevitably result in death. But then innocence has always been the burden of dark experience.
‘Unmissable … Unflinchingly imagined and executed. No hint of competition’
Literary Review
ISBN-13: 978 0 00 713042 9
Blood is Dirt
Robert Wilson
Bruce Medway, fixer and debt collector in Benin, West Africa, has heard a few stories in his time. The one that Napier Briggs tells him is patchy but it doesn’t exclude the vital fact that two million dollars have gone missing. Bruce is used to imperfect information from clients embarrassed at their own stupidity. But this time it leads to a gruesome death.
It would all have ended there but for Napier’s daughter, the sexy, sassy and sussed Selina Aguia, a commodities broker. She launches Bruce into the savage world that her apparently innocuous father had chosen to inhabit — a world of oil and toxic waste scams, of mafia money laundering, of death and violence fuelled by drink, drugs and sex. Worse for Bruce, Selina wants revenge, and with the scam she invents it looks as though she’ll get it. But this is a world where blood is dirt — nobody really cares. Not even if they love you.
‘A vivid and steamy stumble on the wild side’
VAL MCDERMID
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 713041 2
The Company of Strangers
Robert Wilson
Lisbon 1944. In the torrid summer heat, as the streets of the capital seethe with spies and informers, the endgame of the Intelligence war is being silently fought.
Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, enters this sophisticated world through a wealthy household in Estoril. Karl Voss, military attaché to the German Legation, has arrived embittered by his implication in the murder of a Reichsminister and traumatized by Stalingrad, on a mission to rescue Germany from annihilation. In the lethal tranquillity of this corrupted paradise they meet and attempt to find love in a world where no-one can be believed.
After a night of extreme violence, Andrea is left with a life-long addiction to the clandestine world that leads her from the brutal Portuguese fascist régime to the paranoia of Cold War Germany, where she is forced to make the final and the hardest choice.
‘Displaying once again Wilson’s gifts for atmospheric depiction of place, this ambitious experiment is streets ahead of most other thrillers’
JOHN DUGDALE, Sunday Times
‘A big, meaty novel of love and deceit … with this novel Wilson vaults to the front-rank of thriller writers’
PETER GUTTRIDGE, Observer
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 651203 5
The Blind Man of Seville
Robert Wilson
The man is bound, gagged and dead in front of his television. The terrible self-inflicted wounds tell of his violent struggle to avoid some unseen horror. On the screen? In his head? What could make a man do that to himself?
It’s Easter week in Seville, a time of passion and processions. But detective Javier Falcón is not celebrating. Appalled by the victim’s staring eyes he is inexorably drawn into this disturbing, mystifying case. And when the investigation into the dead man’s life sends Javier trawling though his own past and into the shocking journals of his late father, a famous artist, his unreliable memory begins to churn. Then there are more killings and Falcón finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth …
‘Gripping and exhilarating … A potent blend of beauty and terror’
HARLAN COBEN
‘An ingenious and compelling thriller’
Daily Telegraph
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 711781 9
The Silent and the Damned
Robert Wilson
At seven years old, Mario Vega faces a terrible tragedy — his parents are dead in an apparent suicide pact.
But Inspector Javier Falcón has his doubts. In the brutal heat of a Seville summer, he dissects the disturbing life of the boy’s father, Rafael Vega. His investigation draws threats from the Russian mafia whose corruption reaches deep into the city. He questions a creative American couple with a destructive past and uncovers the misery of a famous actor whose only son is in prison for an appalling crime.
More suicides follow and one of them is a senior policeman. As a forest fire rages through the hills above the city Falcón must sweat out the truth that connects it all — and find the final secret in the dark heart of Vega’s life.
‘Robert Wilson’s plotting is intricate, his detective endearingly human, Seville a captivating venue. This is crime fiction of high order’
MARCEL BERLINS, The Times
‘First rate … a taut, gripping narrative and a sensitive study of the tormented detective’
Sunday Telegraph
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 711785 7
AUTHOR’S NOTE
About halfway through writing The Blind Man of Seville I realized that the journals I wanted to integrate into the story did not exist. So in the summer of 2001 I took three months to write the diaries of the periods in Francisco Falcón’s life that I wanted to use. I didn’t know how I was going to fit them into the narrative, but it helped me to develop the fully rounded character. By the time I had finished the book I was left with diary excerpts from the latter part of Francisco Falcón’s life in Tangier which, although interesting from the characterization point of view, were not integral to the story. You can read them on www.HarcourtBooks.com
Also by Robert Wilson
The Company of Strangers
A Small Death in Lisbon
JAVIER FALCON NOVELS
The Silent and the Damned
The Hidden Assassins
BRUCE MEDWAY NOVELS
A Darkening Stain
Blood is Dirt
The Big Killing
Instruments of Darkness
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Before I could start writing this book I had to find out how the police and the judiciary worked and I interviewed a number of people who were all friendly and helpful. I would like to thank Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla Andres Palacios, los fiscales de Sevilla and the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homocidios de Sevilla Simon Bernard Espinosa, who was also very informative about his approach to murder cases. The characters who appear in this book with these titles are in no way representative of the real people nor are the professional relationships between them at all typical.
I would also like to thank Dr Fernando Ortiz Blasco who not only helped me with my hip but was also very informative about bullbreeding and bullfighting.
On the Tangier end of things I was very fortunate to be introduced by Frances Beveridge to Patrick Thursfield, who in turn put me in touch with Mercedes Guitta who lived in Tangier during and after World War 2. I thank them all for their help.
My friend Bindy North was good enough to run her professional eye over the psychological dialogues and give me her opinion, for which I am very grateful.
The main reason this book was written was because of my two friends who live in Seville, Mick Lawson and José Manuel Blanco Marcos. Over many years they have decanted, consciously and inadvertently, massive amounts of information about Spain, Andalucía and Seville. They have also been incredibly supportive of me throughout my writing career, rebuilding me when I’ve turned up broken and celebrating with
me when things have gone right. I have dedicated the book to them, which is a small way of saying that no man could wish for better friends.
Finally I want to thank my wife, Jane, who doesn’t see much more of me than a hunched back over a desk but, as always, has helped me with research, given me the benefit of her very sure editorial eye and despatched my frequent doubts to the abyss. I cannot conceive of writing a book without her, which must make her my muse.
About The Author
THE BLIND MAN OF SEVILLE
Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping and advertising in London and trading in West Africa. He is married and divides his time between England, Spain and Portugal.
He was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction for his fifth novel, A Small Death in Lisbon.
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Praise for The Blind Man of Seville
‘Robert Wilson’s fiction grows darker, deeper, more adamantly original. His seventh novel — nominally a thriller — turns the format inside out, extending its reach, tuning up the language, reinventing its anatomy. It is crime writing at its very best, but it is also something more. It observes no limits, it begs no pardon. It excites, it surprises and it satisfies. High praise but Wilson really is this good’