Given the circumstances, the investigation into Ines's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderon had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderon, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcon had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcon that Vicente Cortes from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcon checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcon for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

'When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,' said Falcon. 'What about the briefcase?'

'The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,' said Jorge. 'We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S amp;M stuff, that kind of thing.'

'You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?'

'No, just played it on a DVD player.'

'Where are the disks now?'

'On top of the safe there.'

Falcon locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortes from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martin Diaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO.