Which was why last year when Father Christmas crept into Pablo’s room having checked the label tied to the sock with a ribbon and fumbled his way over car tracks to the bed, he was made to leap out of his skin by a strong beam shining directly at his face.

“Is that really your beard?”

“Go to sleep, Pablo.”

“How do you know my name?”

“We know everything in Lapland.”

“You don’t come from Lapland. You come from Tromso. My father comes from there too.”

“Well, this Papa Noël comes from Lapland.”

“You smell like Grandpa.”

“For God’s sake go to sleep, you little devil.”

“Daddy says Grandpa is stupid.”

“He’s wrong.”

“I’ve left you a note.” A request for a leather bomber jacket.

“You get what the reindeer chooses.” And switching off his torch he had tucked the little devil up and out of habit rather than affection kissed him twice, leaving a smear of bread paste on his cheeks and a sock at the end of the bed with the reindeer’s choice of Swiss glycerine soap, a pocket diary, a little antique book (second edition) about the Labours of Hercules, an orange from one of the trees in Calle Camoes, and a lollipop.

On his submerged staircase, Zamora forgot the strange birds. He raised a buttock. The soft wail of his flatulence was muted by the water. He returned to his book. The words drifted in the steam. He listened to the silence. It should have invigorated him, but it didn’t. The silence disturbed him.

All day he had felt dizzied by it and by the newly heard sounds of the city, for so long hidden in the sediment of noise and the dirt.

There was a precarious quality to this silence. Something not quite right. He could not believe it had anything to do with the discovery of Emilio’s body. In the water, Zamora felt the same presentiment he had felt when visiting the Casa del Gobierno earlier in the day. He had made an appointment with the Govenor. To tell him, formally: If Abyla had to celebrate the tunnel with a bullfight, she would do so with the contribution of her own matador. Troyano, the Cadiz matador, had agreed to sponsor Periclito in the August feria (an agreement costing Senator Zamora a life assurance policy in bribes since Troyano had not at this moment heard of Periclito, the Earthquake).

It was a rare appointment for the Senator to make. He and Menendez had nothing in common, but Zamora had arranged their meeting for Marie Amaral’s sake. He had arranged it two days before – that is, two days before the machines stopped digging – but now he wished to hear from Menendez himself the reason for the silence.

Senator Zamora might be a thousand times glad of it, but he was suspicious of what it carried in its wake. Why had the machines stopped? Menendez boasted they could pass through rock like fingernails through soap. Senator Zamora did not believe the ratas had been given a holiday, as rumoured by his political colleagues. This was not money the consortium could afford. The loan had been rescheduled twice. Was the tunnel so far advanced everyone could take a holiday? He couldn’t ask the workmen. Their mouths were sealed. Any rata found talking to an Abylan was escorted to his room and given three minutes to pack. Nor could Zamora get into the site and find out for himself. The new safety bill he had championed forbade access to the tunnel by non-technical staff.