He had no option.

She would have liked to believe that too.

As soon as Leandro left, she’d started to feel a stabbing pain in her hip. At first she’d ignored it, but now she could feel a dull ache throbbing with her pulse. It felt as if someone was trying to nail a picture hook into her by gently hitting it with a hammer. She could imagine the tip of the metal scratching the bone’s surface and slowly digging in. She swallowed half a pill with another glass of wine and lay down on the sofa to wait for the drug to take effect. She knew she was drinking too much. She didn’t need Vargas or Leandro to look at her and remind her. She could feel it in her blood and in her breath. But it was the only thing that calmed her anxiety.

* * *

Alicia closed her eyes and began to go over Leandro’s account. He himself had taught her, when she was barely a child, to always listen and read with the headlights on. “The eloquence of an explanation,” he had told her, “is directly proportional to the intelligence of the person expressing it, in the same way as its credibility is proportional to the stupidity of the person listening to it.”

Sanchís’s confession, in the version recounted by Gil de Partera to Leandro, was perfect at first sight, especially as it didn’t seem perfect. It explained almost everything that had taken place yet left a few loose ends, as usually occurs with the most credible explanations. Truth is never perfect, never squares with all expectations. Truth always poses doubts and questions. Only lies are one hundred percent believable, because they don’t need to justify reality, they simply have to tell us what we want to hear.

Fifteen minutes later the pill began to act. Slowly the pain lessened, until all Alicia felt was a sharp prickling she was used to ignoring. She stretched an arm under the sofa and pulled out the storage box containing the files they’d stolen from Brians’s furniture warehouse. She couldn’t help smiling at the thought that Leandro had spent the morning resting his illustrious bum on that information, without realizing. She had a quick look through the folders inside the box. Much of it, or the bit that mattered, had already been incorporated into the official narrative of the case. As she rummaged around the bottom of the box, however, she recovered the envelope with just the word isabella on it in longhand. She opened it and pulled out a notebook. A piece of fine cardboard slid off the first page.

It was an old photograph, beginning to fade around the edges. The image showed a young girl with fair hair and lively eyes who smiled at the camera, her whole life ahead of her. Something about that face reminded Alicia of the young man she’d passed on her way out of the Sempere & Sons bookshop. She turned it over and immediately recognized Brians’s handwriting: