Much later, Julia said she’d known at once what it was about, but she herself acknowledged how easy it is to say such things a posteriori. She also said that it was then she realised how terribly complicated everything was becoming. In fact, as she soon found out, the complications had started long before, tying themselves into solid knots, although at that point the most unpleasant aspects of the affair had not yet emerged. To be strictly accurate, it could be said that the complications began in 1469, when that man with a crossbow, an obscure pawn whose name is lost to posterity, positioned himself by the moat of Ostenburg Castle to wait, with the patience of a hunter, for the man to pass whose death had been bought with the gold coins jingling in his pocket.

At first the policeman didn’t seem too unpleasant, given the circumstances and given that he was a policeman, although the fact that he belonged to the Art Investigation Squad didn’t seem to mark him out much from his colleagues. His professional relationship with the world in which he worked had left him with, at most, a certain affectation in the way he said “Good morning” or “Sit down”, and in the way he knotted his tie. He spoke very slowly and unemphatically and kept nodding unnecessarily. Julia could not decide if it was a professional tic intended to inspire confidence or was part of the pretence that he knew exactly what was going on. He was short and fat, sported a strange Mexican-style moustache and was dressed entirely in brown. As regards art, Inspector Feijoo considered himself, modestly, to be an enthusiast: he was a collector of antique knives.

Julia learned all this in an office in the police station on Paseo del Prado after Feijoo’s description of some of the details of Alvaro’s death. The fact that Professor Ortega had been found in his bathtub with a broken neck, presumably from slipping while taking a shower, was most regrettable. The body had been discovered by the cleaner. But the distressing part – and Feijoo weighed his words carefully before giving Julia a sorrowful look, as if inviting her to consider the tragedy of the human condition – was that the forensic examination had revealed certain disquieting details, and it was impossible to determine with any exactitude whether the death had been accidental or provoked. In other words, there was the possibility – the Inspector repeated the word “possibility” twice – that the fracture at the base of the skull had been caused by a blow from a solid object other than the edge of the bathtub.

“You mean,” Julia said, leaning on the table, “that someone might have killed him while he was taking a shower?”

The policeman adopted an expression doubtless intended to dissuade her from going too far.

“I only mention that as a possibility. The initial inspection and the first autopsy, generally speaking, confirm the theory of accidental death.”

“Generally speaking? What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to tell you the facts. There are certain details, such as the type of fracture, the position of the body – technical details I would prefer not to go into – which give rise to some perplexity, to certain reasonable doubts.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m almost inclined to agree with you,” he said, the Mexican moustache taking on the form of a sympathetic circumflex. “But if those doubts were confirmed, the situation would look very different: Professor Ortega would have been killed by a blow to the back of the neck. Then, after undressing him, someone could have put him under the shower and turned on the taps, to make it look like an accident. A new forensic study is being carried out to look into the possibility that the dead man was struck twice, not once; a first blow to knock him out and a second to make sure he was dead.” He sat back in his chair, folded his hands and looked at her placidly. “Naturally, that’s only a hypothesis.”

Julia stared at him, like someone who believes herself to be the butt of a practical joke. She couldn’t take in what she’d heard; she was unable to establish a link between Alvaro and what Feijoo was suggesting. A voice deep inside her was whispering that this was obviously a case of the wrong roles being given to the wrong people; he must be talking about someone else entirely. It was absurd to imagine Alvaro, the Alvaro she had known, murdered, like a rabbit, by a blow to the back of the neck, lying naked, his eyes wide open, beneath a shower of icy water. It was stupid, grotesque.

“Let’s assume for a moment,” she said, “that the death wasn’t accidental. Who would have wanted to kill him?”

“That, as they say in the films, is a very good question.” The policeman bit his lower lip in a gesture of professional caution. “To be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea.” He paused and adopted an air intended to convey that he was placing all his cards on the table. “In fact, I’m relying 0n your help to clear up the matter.”

“On my help? Why?”

The Inspector looked Julia up and down with deliberate slowness. He was no longer being nice, and his look revealed a certain crude self-interest, as if he were trying to establish some kind of obscure complicity between them.

“You had a relationship with the dead man… Forgive me, but mine is an unpleasant job,” he said, although, judging by the self-satisfied smile that appeared beneath the moustache, he didn’t seem to be finding his job particularly unpleasant. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a box of matches bearing the name of a four-star restaurant and, with a gesture intended to be gallant, lit the cigarette Julia had just placed between her lips. “I mean an… um… affair. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.” Julia exhaled, half-closing her eyes, embarrassed and angry. An affair, the policeman had just said, summing up with great simplicity a piece of her life whose scars were still raw. And no doubt, she thought, that fat, vulgar man, with his ridiculous moustache, was weighing up the quality of the goods. The victim’s girlfriend’s a nice bit of stuff, he’d tell his colleagues when he went down to the canteen for a beer. I wouldn’t mind doing her the odd favour.

But she was more concerned about other aspects of her situation. Alvaro was dead, possibly murdered. Absurd as it might seem, she was in a police station, and there were too many unknowns. And not understanding certain things could prove dangerous.

Her whole body was tense, alert, on the defensive. She looked at Feijoo, who was now neither compassionate nor kindly. It was a question of tactics, she said to herself. Trying to remain calm, she decided that there really wasn’t any reason the Inspector should be considerate towards her. He was just a policeman, as clumsy and coarse as the next one, merely doing his job. Anyway, she thought, as she tried to see the situation from his point of view: she was all he had, the only lead, the dead man’s ex-girlfriend.

“But that’s ancient history,” she said, letting the ash from her cigarette fall into the pristine ashtray full of paper clips that Feijoo had on his desk. “We stopped seeing each other over a year ago… as I’m sure you know.”

The Inspector put his elbows on the desk and leaned towards her.

“Yes,” he said, almost confidentially, as if his tone were irrefutable proof that they were old acquaintances now and that he was entirely on her side. “But you did have a meeting with him three days ago.”

Julia managed to conceal her surprise and merely looked at the policeman with the expression of someone who’s just heard an exceptionally foolish remark. Naturally, Feijoo had been making enquiries at the university. Any secretary or porter could have told him. But neither was it something she needed to hide.

“I went to ask for his help on a painting I’m restoring.” She found it odd that the policeman wasn’t taking notes, but assumed that was part of his method: people speak more freely when they think their words are disappearing into thin air. “As you are apparently well aware, we talked for nearly an hour in his office. We even arranged to meet later, but I never saw him again.”