“And Beatriz turns up?”

“No. But Daniel does.”

“The husband?”

“Exactly.”

“Had Beatriz told him about the letters?”

“Or he’d found them. . . . It doesn’t matter either way. The thing is that Daniel Sempere turns up at the Ritz, and when Cascos opens the door in Casanova attire—perfumed bathrobe, slippers, and a glass of champagne in hand—good old Daniel beats the crap out of him until Cascos’s face looks like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

“I like the sound of Daniel.”

“Hang on a minute. According to Cascos, whose face is still bruised, Daniel very nearly finished him off, and would have succeeded if the thrashing hadn’t been interrupted by a plainclothes policeman who happened to be passing by.”

“What?”

“This last bit doesn’t seem to add up. My impression is that the policeman was no such thing, but a friend of Daniel’s.”

“And then?”

“Then Cascos returned to Madrid looking like a piece of toast, his tail between his legs and fear in his bones, thinking of what he was going to tell Valls.”

“What did Valls say?”

“He listened to him without saying a word and made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened or what he’d asked him to do.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s what it looked like until, a few days before he disappeared, Valls phoned him again and asked him to come around to his home to talk about something. Although he didn’t specify what that was, it might have been related to the Semperes, Isabella, and the mysterious David Martín.”

“A meeting to which Valls never turned up.”

“And that’s as far as the story goes,” Vargas concluded.

“What do we know about this David Martín? Were you able to gather any information about him?”

“Very little. But what I’ve found is promising. A forgotten author and, get this, a prisoner in Montjuïc Castle between 1939 and 1941.”

“Coinciding with Valls and Salgado,” remarked Alicia.

“Classmates, one could say.”

“And once he leaves the prison, what happens to David Martín after 1941?”

“There is no after. The police records have him as ‘disappeared and deceased during an attempted escape.’”

“And translated, that would mean . . . ?”

“In all likelihood a summary execution and burial in a ditch or a common grave.”

“On Valls’s orders?”

“Most probably. At that time Valls would have been the only person with the authority and power to do it.”

Alicia weighed all that up for a few moments. “Why would Valls look for a dead man he himself had ordered executed?”

“Sometimes dead men aren’t completely dead. Take El Cid, for example.”

“Then let’s suppose that Valls thinks Martín is still alive . . .”

“That would make sense.”

“Alive and seeking vengeance. Perhaps pulling Salgado’s strings in the shadows, waiting for the moment when he can get his revenge.”

“Old friends made in prison are not easily forgotten,” Vargas agreed.

“What isn’t clear is what relationship there can be between Martín and the Semperes.”