“All that is there?”

“In Brians’s file notes, yes.”

“Go on.”

“During the years when Valls was governor of Montjuïc Prison, the following individuals coincide at some point as prisoners and as clients represented by Fernando Brians: first, Sebastián Salgado, alleged author of the threats sent by post to Valls for years and resplendent beneficiary of a pardon arranged by the minister, which gets him out of prison. He survives in the outside world for about six weeks. Second, Valentín Morgado, ex-sergeant of the Republican army, included in an amnesty of 1945 thanks to a heroic act he performed in prison: according to Brians’s notes, he saved a captain of the castle’s regiment from dying in an accident during the rebuilding of one of the castle walls. When he leaves the prison, having signed up for a parole and rehabilitation program backed by a group of wealthy patricians with a bad conscience, Morgado is hired as a hand in the Ubach family garages, where in time he is promoted to chauffeur. When Ubach, the banker, dies, Morgado enters the service of his daughter Victoria, who marries your friend Sanchís, director general of Metrobarna.”

“Is there more?”

“I’m only just beginning. Third, David Martín. An ill-fated writer, accused of a series of bizarre crimes committed before the war. Martín had managed to escape from the police in 1930, and eventually ends up in France. For reasons that are unclear he tries to return incognito to Barcelona, but is arrested in Puigcerdá, a town in the Pyrenees, soon after crossing the border into Spain in 1939.”

“What connection does David Martín have with all this, apart from having been in prison during those years?”

“That’s where it starts to get interesting. Martín is the only one of these prisoners who is not directly a client of Brians. The lawyer is hired to represent Martín at the request of Isabella Gispert.”

“Of Sempere & Sons?”

“The mother of Daniel Sempere, yes. Gispert was her maiden name. She allegedly died of cholera, shortly after the end of the war in 1939.”

“Allegedly?”

“According to Brians’s personal notes, there are elements pointing to the possibility that Isabella Sempere was murdered. Poisoned, to be precise.”

“Don’t tell me . . .”

“Exactly, by Mauricio Valls. The result of an unhealthy obsession and an unrequited desire, or so supposes Brians, who obviously can’t prove anything, or doesn’t dare.”

“And Martín?”

“David Martín is the object of another of Valls’s unhealthy obsessions, according to Brians’s notes.”

“Does the minister have any other sort of obsessions?”

“It seems that while Martín was in prison, Valls was trying to force him to write books that the future minister intended to publish later under his own name, to satisfy his vanity and his yearning for literary renown, or whatever. Unfortunately, according to Brians, David Martín is a sick person who has been slowly losing his mind. He hears voices and thinks he’s in touch with a character of his own invention, someone called Corelli. While in prison, Martín’s ravings, plus the fact that during the last year of his life Valls decides to put him in solitary confinement at the very top of one of the castle towers, earn him the nickname among the inmates of the Prisoner of Heaven.”