“Which he didn’t do.”

“Evidently not. Not only did he not forget, but he decided to take revenge. And that’s where he made a real mistake. He hired investigators to poke around into Valls’s past. That’s how they came across Sebastián Salgado, a rogue who was still rotting away in Montjuïc Prison, and also discovered a series of shady incidents and abuses Valls committed against a number of inmates and their families during his years as prison governor. There turned out to be a long list of possible candidates to take the lead in a supposed revenge against Valls. The only thing missing was a convincing narrative. So Sanchís devised a plot to avenge himself on the minister, by manufacturing what would look like a political or personal vendetta stemming from the minister’s dark past. He began to send threatening letters through Salgado, whom he had offered a sum of money for acting, so to speak, as bait—money he would receive after obtaining the pardon that was being processed for him. Sanchís knew the letters would be tracked, and that the tracking would lead to Salgado. He also hired a former Montjuïc prisoner, someone called Valentín Morgado, who had more than enough reasons not to feel the slightest affection for Valls. Morgado had been released in 1945, but he blamed Valls for his wife’s death from an illness while he’d been imprisoned. Morgado was hired as a chauffeur for the family. It was Morgado—with the help of an old prison guard, a guy called Bebo, who received a considerable amount of money from Sanchís, as well as a low-rent flat in Pueblo Seco, owned by Metrobarna—who supplied his benefactor with information concerning the prisoners most severely punished by Valls during his years in Montjuïc. One of them, David Martín, a writer with serious mental problems known to the other inmates as the Prisoner of Heaven, turned out to be the ideal candidate for Sanchís’s plot. It seems that Martín had disappeared under strange circumstances after Valls ordered two of his men to take him to a large house near Güell Park and murder him. Martín, who had lost his mind completely while in solitary confinement in one of the towers of the castle, managed to escape, and Valls always feared that one day he would return to take his revenge, because he blamed Valls for the murder of a woman called Isabella Gispert. Are you following me?”

Alicia nodded.

“Sanchís planned to convince Valls of the existence of a conspiracy to make public his abuses and crimes against prisoners under his governorship. The hidden hand behind it all would be Martín’s, and that of other former prisoners. They wanted to make him nervous, force him to come out of the cocoon of protection his position afforded and confront them in person. The only way he could silence them would be to destroy them before they destroyed him.”

“But it was all just a trap,” Alicia pointed out.

“A perfect trap, because when the police investigated, they would discover the components of personal revenge and financial chicanery that Valls himself had taken care to cover up. And Salgado was the perfect bait. He could be easily linked to other prisoners, and in particular to David Martín, the supposed hidden hand in the shadows. Even so, Valls kept his sangfroid for years. But after the alleged 1956 attempt perpetrated by Morgado in the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Valls began to lose his cool. He arranged for Salgado to be released so he could follow him, hoping he’d lead him to Martín; but Salgado was eliminated—the ex-prisoner died just when he thought he was about to recover some old booty he’d left hidden in one of the lockers of the Estación del Norte, shortly before being arrested in 1939. Salgado was no longer useful, and silencing him would leave a dead trail.