“Ariadna?” asked Vargas.

“It’s the name of a publishing company owned by Don Mauricio,” the secretary explained.

“That detail doesn’t appear in your statement to the police,” said Alicia.

“Excuse me?”

“The meeting Don Mauricio had himself set up for that morning. You didn’t mention this to the police. May I ask why?”

Doña Mariana smiled somewhat condescendingly, as if she thought the question were trivial. “Since the meeting never took place, I didn’t think it was relevant. Should I have?”

“You have now, and that’s what matters,” said Vargas amicably. “It’s impossible to remember every detail—that’s why we’re taking advantage of your kindness and insisting so much. Please continue, Doña Mariana.”

Valls’s secretary accepted the apology and went on, although she ignored Alicia, looking only at Vargas.

“As I said, I found it odd that the minister should have left without alerting me beforehand. I asked the servants, and they informed me that apparently the minister hadn’t slept in his room. He’d been in his office all night.”

“Do you spend your nights here, in the main building?” Alicia interrupted.

Doña Mariana looked offended. She shook her head, pressing her lips together. “Of course not.”

“I’m sorry. Do go on, if you’d be so kind.”

Valls’s secretary huffed impatiently. “Shortly afterward, at about nine o’clock, Señor Revuelta, the head of security at the house, told me he wasn’t aware that Vicente Carmona and the minister had planned to be anywhere that morning, and that, furthermore, the fact that they left together without any other escort was highly irregular. At my request, Señor Revuelta consulted first with the staff at Don Mauricio’s ministry and then spoke to the Ministry of the Interior. No one had any news of him, but we were told they’d call us as soon as they could locate him. It was then that Mercedes, Don Mauricio’s daughter, came to see me. She was crying, and when I asked her what the matter was, she told me that her father had left and would never return.”

“Did Mercedes say why she thought that?” asked Vargas.

Doña Mariana only shrugged.

“What did you do then?”

“I called the secretariat at the Ministry of the Interior and spoke first with José Moreno and later with the head of police, Señor Gil de Partera. The rest you already know.”

“That was the point at which you mentioned the anonymous letters the minister had been receiving.”

Doña Mariana gave herself a moment to reply. “That’s right. The subject arose during the conversation with Señor Gil de Partera and his subordinate, someone called García—”

“García Novales,” Vargas completed.

The secretary nodded.

“The police, of course, were already aware of the existence of those letters. They’d been supplied with copies for months. It so happens that that morning, when I was going through the minister’s datebook in his office, I found the folder in which he kept them.”

“Did you know he kept them?” asked Alicia.

Doña Mariana shook her head,

“I thought he’d destroyed them after showing them to the police at the time of the investigation, after the incident in the Círculo de Bellas Artes, but I realized I’d been mistaken, and Don Mauricio had been looking at them. I mentioned this to your superiors.”