“If Salgado had an accomplice or various accomplices outside the prison, could they have handed him the letters so that they were sent from the prison?”

“Yes, possibly,” said Gil de Partera. “Salgado had the right to one personal visit per month. In any case, it wouldn’t make any sense if it had happened that way. It would have been much easier to send the letters by regular post and not be exposed to detection by the prison censors.”

“Unless they specifically wanted to prove that the letter had been sent from the prison,” Alicia pointed out.

Gil de Partera nodded.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Alicia continued. “If Salgado had been in Montjuïc all that time, and wasn’t released until a couple of years ago, I imagine that means he’d received the maximum thirty-year sentence. So what’s he doing out in the street?”

“You don’t understand it, nor does anyone else. Indeed, Sebastián Salgado was supposed to serve at least another ten years when he was unexpectedly granted a special pardon by the head of state. And there’s more. The pardon was processed at the request of the minister Don Mauricio Valls, and under his good auspices.”

Alicia let out a laugh of astonishment. Gil de Partera threw her a severe look.

“Why would Valls do something like that?” asked Leandro, quickly coming to her rescue.

“Against our advice, and alleging that the investigation was not producing the expected results, the minister deemed that the release of Salgado might help uncover the identity and location of the party, or parties, involved in sending him those threats and the alleged attempts on his life.”

“Sir,” said Alicia, “you refer to these facts as ‘alleged’—”

“Nothing is clear in this matter,” Gil de Partera interrupted. “That doesn’t mean that I doubt, or that we should doubt, the word of the minister in question.”

“Of course. Going back to Salgado’s release. Did it produce the results the minister was expecting?”

“No. We had him watched twenty-four hours a day from the moment he left the prison. The first thing he did was rent a room in a cheap hotel in the red-light district, where he paid for a month in advance. Apart from that, all he did was go to the Estación del Norte every day and spend hours gazing at the checked-luggage lockers in the station’s entrance hall, or perhaps keeping them under surveillance. Occasionally, he also visited an old secondhand bookshop on Calle Santa Ana.”

“Sempere & Sons,” murmured Alicia.

“That’s right. Do you know it?”

Alicia nodded.

“Our friend Salgado doesn’t seem to fit the profile of a regular reader,” Leandro suggested. “Do we know what he hoped to find in one of the station’s baggage lockers?”

“We suspect he had some sort of booty hidden there, the fruit of crimes he committed before he was arrested in 1939.”

“Was the suspicion confirmed?”

“In the second week of his release, Salgado visited the Sempere & Sons bookshop one last time and then made his way to the railway station, as he did every day. That day, however, instead of sitting down in the entrance hall to stare at the lockers, he walked over to one of them and put a key in. He pulled a suitcase out of the locker and opened it.”