The Hidden Assassins by Robert Wilson

malfunction and she couldn’t swallow what was in her throat, nor articulate what was in her mind. Instead her face just caved in and she only managed to squeeze out a sound of such brutality and ugliness that it left Fernando’s chest shuddering. It was a sound uncontrolled by any civilizing influence. It was grief in its purest form, before its pain had been made less acute by time or morepoignant by poetry. It was a dark, guttural, heaving clot of emotion.
    Fernando was not affronted. He folded the painting up and put it back in his shirt. Falcón led him by the arm to the four small bodies. The ambulance was backing up, the rest of the crowd had been squeezed out of the scene. Two paramedics appeared with two body bags each. They worked quickly because they knew the situation would be better with those pitiful bodies removed. Falcón held Fernando around the shoulders as the paramedics uncovered each body and placed it in a body bag. He had to remind Fernando to breathe. At the third body Fernando’s knees buckled and Falcón lowered him to the ground, where he fell forward on to all fours and crawled around, like a poisoned dog looking for a place to die. One of the paramedics shouted and pointed. A TV cameraman had come around the back, through the pre-school, and was filming the bodies. He turned and ran before anybody could react.
    The ambulance moved off. The ghostly crowd surged after it and gave up, with a final spasm of grief, before dissolving into groups, with the bereaved women supported from all sides. Television journalists and their cameramen tried to force their way in to talk to the women. They were rebuffed. Falcón pulled Fernando to his feet, pushed him back into the pre-school out of sight, and went to find a policeman to keep journalists away.
    Outside a journalist had found a young guy in his twenties, with a couple of bloody nicks in his cheek, who’d been there when the bomb exploded. The camera was right in his face, inches away, the proximity giving the pictures their urgency.
    ‘…straight after it happened, I mean, the noise…you just can’t believe the loudness of that noise, it was so loud I couldn’t breathe, it was like…’
    ‘What was it like?’ asked the journalist, an eager young woman, stabbing the microphone back into his face. ‘Tell us. Tell Spain what it was like.’
    ‘It was like the noise took away all the air.’
    ‘What was the first thing you noticed after the explosion, after the noise?’
    ‘Silence,’ he said. ‘Just a deathly quiet. And, I don’t know whether this was in my head or it actually happened, I heard bells ringing…’
    ‘Church bells?’
    ‘Yes, church bells, but they were all crazy, as if the shock waves of the explosion were making them ring, you know, at random. It made me sick to hear it. It was as if everything had gone wrong with the world, and nothing would be the same.’
    The rest was lost in the clatter and thump of a helicopter’s rotor blades, thrashing away at the dust in the air. It went up higher, to take in the whole scene. This was the aerial photography Falcón had ordered up.
    He posted a policeman at the entrance of the school, but found that Fernando had disappeared. He crossed the corridor to the wrecked classroom. Empty. He called Ramírez as he crashed through the broken furniture.
    ‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.
    ‘We’ve just arrived. We’re on Calle Los Romeros.’
    ‘Is Cristina with you?’
    ‘We’re all here. The whole squad.’
    ‘All of you come round to the pre-school now.’
    Fernando was back at the wall of rubble and collapsed floors. He threw himself at it like a madman. He tore at the concrete, bricks, window frames and hurled them behind him.
    ‘…rescue teams working on this side,’ roared Ramírez, over the noise of the helicopter. ‘There are dogs in the wreckage.’
    ‘Get over here.’
    Fernando had grabbed at the steel netting of a shattered reinforced concrete floor. He had