* * *

Valls barely notices when the cell door opens and the jailer kneels down beside him. He carries a bucket of scalding tar. He grabs Valls’s arm and dips it in the bucket. Valls feels the fire.

The jailer is looking into his eyes. “Do you remember now?”

Valls nods.

The jailer sinks a needle into his arm. The liquid flooding into his veins is ice cold and makes Valls think of a clean blue sea. The second injection is the one that brings peace, a sleep with no end and no consciousness.

20

Alicia was awoken by the wind whistling through the cracks in the windows, making the windowpanes vibrate. She looked at the clock on her bedside table: it was a couple of minutes to five in the morning. She let out a sigh. Only then did she notice. The darkness.

She remembered having left the light on in the dining room and the corridor before snatching a few hours’ sleep after her conversation with Leandro, but now the flat was plunged in a bluish gloom. She groped for the switch of the bedside table lamp and pressed it. The light didn’t go on. Then she thought she could hear footsteps in the dining room, and the sound of a door moving slowly. A piercing cold took hold of her. She grabbed the revolver that had spent the night with her under the sheets and released the safety.

“Vargas?” she called out weakly. “Is that you?”

The echo of her voice drifted through the flat, but there was no answer. Alicia pulled the sheets aside, got up, and stepped into the corridor. The floor was icy under her bare feet. The passageway formed a dark frame around a halo of pale light at the entrance to the dining room. She walked slowly down the corridor, holding up the weapon. Her hand shook. When she reached the dining room, she felt the wall for the light switch and pressed it. Nothing. There was no power. She scanned the shadows, the outline of the furniture, and the dark corners around the room. There was a sour smell in the air. Tobacco, she thought. Or perhaps it came from the flowers Jesusa had left in the vase on the table; they were starting to shed dry petals. She didn’t notice any movement, so she walked over to the dining-room sideboard and searched in the first drawer. She found a packet of candles and a box of matches that must have been there since before Leandro had posted her to Madrid. After lighting one of the candles, she held it up, then walked through the flat slowly, the candle in one hand and the revolver in the other. She checked the front door to make sure it was locked, trying to banish the image of Lomana from her mind, smiling and motionless as a wax figure, holding a butcher’s knife, waiting for her inside a cupboard or behind a door.