The man bent down and delved into his glove compartment, emerging with a sizable long flashlight. Vargas grabbed it and got out of the taxi, but first he tore the note in two and handed the driver one half. “The other half when we return.”

Cipriano sighed, examining the half note as if he was staring at an expired lottery ticket. “If you return, that is,” he mumbled.

Alicia had already slipped through the narrow opening in the gate. Her silhouette could be seen gliding along a moonlit passage through the undergrowth. Vargas, who was double her size, had to struggle with the rusty bars to follow. Beyond the gate a paved path wound its way around the house up to the main entrance, which was on the other side. The cobblestones under his feet were covered in dry leaves.

Vargas followed Alicia up to a balustrade perched on the edge of the hillside, from where the whole of Barcelona could be contemplated. In the distance, the sea glowed beneath the moonlight, forming a pool of red-hot silver.

* * *

Alicia examined the facade of the large house. The images she had conjured up while she listened to Vilajuana’s account now materialized before her eyes. She imagined the house in better days, the sun caressing the ocher stone of the walls and speckling the pond below the fountain that now lay dry and full of cracks. She imagined Mataix’s daughters in that garden and the writer and his wife watching them from the French windows in the sitting room. The home of the Mataix family had been reduced to an abandoned mausoleum, its shutters swaying in the breeze.

“A crate of the best white wine if we leave this for tomorrow and return in the daylight,” proposed Vargas. “Two, if need be.”

Alicia snatched the flashlight from his hands and walked over to the entrance. The door was open, and the remains of a rusty padlock lay on the threshold. Alicia pointed the flashlight at the bits of metal and knelt down to examine them. She picked up a piece that looked as if it had been part of the main lock and examined it. It seemed to have been burst from the inside.

“A shot in the piston,” Vargas said, behind her. “High-caliber burglars.”

“If they were burglars, that is.” Alicia dropped the piece of metal and stood up.

“Can you smell what I’m smelling?” the policeman asked.

Alicia answered with a nod and, walking into the entrance hall, paused at the foot of a staircase of pale marble that climbed up in the gloom. The beam of the flashlight swept across the darkness spreading up the stairs. The skeleton of an old glass lamp dangled from up high.

“I wouldn’t trust that staircase,” warned Vargas.

They went up slowly, one step at a time. The flashlight dispelled the shadows within a range of four or five meters before blurring into a pale halo that sank into the dark. The stench they had noticed as they came in still hung in the air, but as they walked up the stairs a cold, damp breeze brushed their faces, seeming to come from the floor above.