“This is starting to have a very Alicia feel about it.”

“In 1941, seeing that his plan for manipulating the writer wasn’t working, Valls apparently orders two of his lackeys to take David Martín to an old mansion next to Güell Park and murder him. Something unexpected happens there, and Martín manages to escape alive.”

“So David Martín is alive?”

“We don’t know. Or Brians doesn’t know.”

“But he suspects it.”

“And probably Valls does too—”

“—who thinks he’s the one who has been sending him the threats and has been trying to murder him. To avenge himself.”

“That’s my hypothesis,” Alicia agreed. “But it’s only a conjecture.”

“There’s more still?”

She smiled. “I’ve left the best for the end.”

“Fire away.”

“Four: Víctor Mataix, author of the series The Labyrinth of the Spirits, of which you and I found a volume hidden in Valls’s desk, and which, according to what his daughter Mercedes remembers about the night he disappeared, was the last document the minister consulted before evaporating from the face of the earth.”

“What’s the connection between Mataix and the other three?”

“Mataix appears to have been a friend and old colleague of David Martín, back in the thirties, when they were both hired to write novels by installments under pseudonyms for a publishing house called Barrido & Escobillas. Brians’s notes hint that Mataix may have been the victim of a similar plan to the one Valls had tried on Martín. Who knows, perhaps Valls was trying to recruit ghost writers so he could build a body of work that would give him a name and a reputation in the literary world. It’s obvious that Valls hated seeing himself relegated to the role of regime jailer, a position obtained through his marriage of convenience, and he aimed much higher.”

“There must be something else. What happened to Mataix?”

“Mataix is sent to Montjuïc in 1941, moved there from La Modelo. A year later, if you want to believe the official report, he committed suicide in his cell. He was probably shot and his body thrown into a common grave, with no record remaining.”

“And the unhealthy obsession in this case is . . .”

Alicia shrugged. “In this case Brians does not jot down any suppositions, but I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that when Mauricio Valls starts his own publishing company in 1947, he christens it Ariadna, the name of the protagonist in the books of The Labyrinth of the Spirits series.”

Vargas sighed and rubbed his eyes, trying to process everything Alicia had just told him. “Too many coincidences,” he said at last.

“I agree,” said Alicia.

“Let’s see if I understand this. If all these connections exist, and we, or rather you, have been able to establish them within three days, how is it possible that the police and the higher echelons of the state, after an investigation that went on for a number of weeks, are still at a loss?”

Alicia bit her lower lip. “That’s what worries me.”