“Do you think they don’t want to find Valls?”

She thought about it. “I don’t think they can afford that option. Valls isn’t somebody who can just disappear and be forgotten.”

“So?”

“Perhaps they just want to know where he is. And perhaps they don’t want the real motives for his disappearance to come out into the open.”

Vargas shook his head and rubbed his eyes again. “Do you really think that Morgado, Salgado, and Martín, three ex-prisoners under Valls’s yoke, could have devised a plan to take their revenge on Valls and at the same time avenge their fallen colleague, Víctor Mataix? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Alicia shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not Morgado, the driver. Perhaps it’s Sanchís, his boss, who is involved.”

“Why would Sanchís do something like that? He is a regime man, married to the heiress of one of the great fortunes of the country . . . a budding Valls. Why would someone like him want to get himself implicated in this kind of mess?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about the list of numbers we found in Valls’s car?”

“It could be anything. Or have nothing to do with this. A coincidence. You yourself said that, remember?”

“Another coincidence? In my twenty years in the police force I’ve come across fewer real coincidences than people who told the truth.”

“I don’t know, Vargas. I don’t know what those numbers mean.”

“Do you know what really doesn’t add up for me in all this?”

Alicia nodded again, as if she could read his thoughts. “Valls.”

“Valls,” Vargas agreed. “Without going into the sordid scheming of his years in Montjuïc, and whatever it was he did—poison Isabella Gispert and murder or try to murder David Martín, Mataix, and God knows who else—basically, we’re talking about a low-class butcher, a jailer linked to the middle rungs of the regime. There are thousands like him. You pass them in the street every single day. Connected, with friends and acquaintances in the big jobs, sure, but ass-kissers when all’s said and done. Lackeys and aspiring hopefuls. How does a guy like that manage to climb, in just a few years, from the sewers of the regime to the highest point?”

“A good question, isn’t it?” said Alicia.

“Get that special little head of yours to give it an answer, and you’ll find the piece we’re missing so that all this rigmarole falls into place.”

“You’re not going to help me?”

“I’m beginning to doubt whether I should. Something tells me that discovering the key to this puzzle could be far more dangerous than not finding it, and I was hoping to retire with a full pension in a few years’ time and devote myself to reading Lope de Vega’s plays, from the first to the last.”

Alicia collapsed onto the sofa, her enthusiasm flagging. Vargas finished his cold coffee and sighed. He walked over to the window and took a deep breath. In the distance, the cathedral bells tolled again, and the policeman watched the sun beginning to cast threads of light between dovecotes and bell towers.