Once she had covered every nook and cranny in the flat and made quite sure there was nobody there, Alicia took one of the dining-room chairs and jammed it against the lock of the front door. Leaving the candle on the table, she crossed to the large window that looked out onto the street. The whole neighborhood was plunged in darkness, the serrated outline of roofs and dovecotes sketched against the dark blue that announced the oncoming dawn. Her face touching the windowpane, she scanned the shadows at street level. A glimmer of light could be seen beneath the arches of the espadrille shop. The embers of a lit cigarette. It was surely just that poor wretch Rovira, Alicia told herself, already doing his early shift at that ungodly hour. She withdrew into the dining room and took two more candles from the sideboard drawer. It was still much too early to go down to the Gran Café to meet Vargas for breakfast, and she knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep.

She went over to the bookshelf where she kept some of her best-loved books, most of which she’d read and reread a few times. Four years had gone by since Alicia had revisited her favorite among them all, Jane Eyre. She took it down and ran her fingertips over the front cover. When she opened the book, she smiled. There was the stamp: a small devil sitting on a pile of books, an old bookplate given to her by her colleagues in the unit during her first year in Leandro’s service, when they still saw her as a mysterious but harmless young girl—a whim of the boss, someone who had not yet awoken jealousy, envy, and resentment among the older members of the team.

Those had been days of poisoned wine and roses, when Ricardo Lomana had decided of his own accord that she would be his personal apprentice. Every Friday he’d given her flowers before inviting her to the cinema or to a dance hall, invitations that Alicia always found some excuse to refuse. Days when Lomana looked at her out of the corner of his eye, thinking she didn’t notice, dropping hints or flirtatious remarks that made even the older people in the room blush. A bad beginning makes a bad end, she had thought at the time. She hadn’t known the half of it.

Trying to banish Lomana’s face from her mind, she carried the book to the bathroom. There she tied up her hair and ran hot water into the bath. After lighting her candles and placing them at the head of the bathtub, she sank into the steaming hot water, letting it dispel the cold that had nestled in her bones, and closed her eyes. After a while she thought she heard footsteps on the stairs. She wondered whether it could be Vargas, coming up to make sure she was still alive, or whether she was imagining things again. The dark stupor induced by the painkillers always left a trail of half-formed pictures when she woke up, as if the dreams she had not been able to dream were trying to push their way through the cracks in her consciousness. She opened her eyes and sat up, resting her chin on the edge of the bath. A couple of voices floated in the air. Neither was Vargas’s voice. She stretched out an arm until she touched the revolver resting on the stool next to the bathtub, and listened to the echo of water dripping from the closed tap. She waited a few seconds. The voices had gone silent. Or perhaps they had never been there. Moments later, the footsteps faded away down the stairs. Probably a neighbor leaving home to go to work, she thought.