They reached the corner, and everything happened fast. Someone inside the car lowered the driver’s window to toss out a cigarette. Cesar dropped his umbrella and his hat, raised the poker and walked round to the left side of the car, prepared, if necessary, to kill the pirates or whoever was inside. Julia, her teeth gritted and the blood pounding in her temples, started to run. She took the pistol out and stuck it through the window before the driver had time to wind it up again. In front of her pistol appeared an unknown face: a young man with a beard, who was staring at the gun with terrified eyes. The man in the passenger seat jumped when Cesar wrenched opened the door, the iron poker raised threateningly above his head.

“Get out! Out!” shouted Julia, almost beside herself.

His face deathly pale, the man with the beard raised his hands with his fingers wide, in a gesture of supplication.

“Calm down, Senorita!” he stammered. “For God’s sake, calm down! We’re the police.”

“I recognise,” said Inspector Feijoo, clasping his hands together on his office desk, “that so far we haven’t been terribly efficient in this matter…”

He smiled placidly at Cesar, as if the police’s lack of efficiency was justified. Since we’re in sophisticated company, his look seemed to say, we can allow ourselves a certain amount of constructive self-criticism.

But Cesar seemed ill-disposed to accept this.

“That,” he said disdainfully, “is one way of describing what others would call sheer incompetence.”

It was clear from Feijoo’s crumbling smile that Cesar’s remark was the last straw. His teeth appeared beneath the thick moustache, biting his lower lip and he began an impatient drumming on the desk with the end of his cheap ballpoint. Cesar’s presence meant that he had no option but to tread carefully, and all three of them knew why.

“The police have their methods.”

These were empty words, and Cesar grew impatient, cruel. The fact that he had dealings with Feijoo didn’t mean that he had to be nice to him, still less when he’d caught him in some funny business.

“If those methods consist of having Julia followed while some madman out there is on the loose, sending anonymous messages, I would rather not say what I think of such methods.” He turned towards Julia, then back to the policeman. “I can’t believe that you consider her to be a suspect in the death of Professor Ortega. Why haven’t you investigated me?”

“We have.” Feijoo was piqued by Cesar’s impertinence, and had to bite back his anger. “The fact is, we investigated everyone.” He turned up his palms, accepting responsibility for what he was prepared to acknowledge had been a monumental blunder. “Unfortunately, these things do happen in this job.”

“And have you found out anything?”

“I’m afraid not.” Feijoo reached inside his jacket to scratch an armpit and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “To be perfectly honest, we’re back at square one. The pathologists can’t agree on the cause of Alvaro Ortega’s death. If there really is a murderer at large, our only hope is that at some point he makes a mistake.”

“Is that why you’ve been following me?” asked Julia, still furious. She was clutching her bag in her lap. “To see if I make a mistake?”

The Inspector looked at her grimly.

“You shouldn’t take it so personally. It’s purely routine. Just police tactics.”

Cesar arched an eyebrow.

“As a tactic it doesn’t strike me as being either particularly promising or particularly efficient.”

Feijoo gulped down the sarcasm. At that moment, thought Julia with wicked delight, he must be deeply regretting any illicit dealings he’d had with Cesar. All it needed was for Cesar to open his mouth in a few opportune places and, with no direct accusations being made and with no official paperwork involved, in the discreet way that things tend to be done at a certain level, the Inspector would find himself ending his career in a gloomy office in some far-flung police department, as a pen-pusher with no prospect of extra income.

“I can only assure you,” he said at last, when he’d managed to digest some of the rancour which, as his face plainly revealed, was still stuck in his gullet, “that we will continue our investigations.” He seemed to remember something, reluctantly. “And of course the young lady will be put under special protection.”

“Don’t bother,” said Julia. Feijoo’s humiliation was not enough to make her forget her own. “No more blue cars, please. Enough is enough.”

“It’s for your own safety, Senorita.”

“As you see, I can look after myself.”

The policeman looked away. No doubt his throat still hurt from the bawling out he’d given the two policemen for letting themselves be surprised. “Idiots!” he’d screamed at them. “Bloody amateurs! You’ve really dropped me in the shit this time and, believe me, you’re going to suffer for it!” Cesar and Julia had heard it all while they were waiting in the corridor at the police station.

“As for that…” he began now, after waging what had obviously been a hard battle in his mind between duty and convenience, and crumbling before the weightier demands of the latter. “Given the circumstances, I don’t think that… I mean that the pistol…” He swallowed again before looking at Cesar. “After all, it is an antique, not a modern weapon in the real sense of the word. And you, as an antiques dealer, have the correct licence.” He looked down at the desk, doubtless remembering the last piece, an eighteenth-century clock, for which, only weeks before, Cesar had paid him a good price. “For my part, and I’m speaking here for my two men involved as well…” Again he gave that treacherous, conciliatory smile. “I mean that we’re prepared to overlook certain details of the matter. You, Don Cesar, may reclaim your derringer as long as you promise to take better care of it in future. As for you, Senorita, keep us informed of any new developments and, of course, phone us at once if you have any problems. As far as we’re concerned, there never was any gun. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Cesar.

“Good.” His concession over the gun seemed to give Feijoo some sort of moral advantage, so he appeared more relaxed when he spoke to Julia. “As for the tyre on your car, I need to know if you want to make a complaint.”

She looked at him, surprised.

“A complaint? Against whom?”

The Inspector waited before replying as if hoping that Julia would guess his meaning without recourse to words.

“Against a person or persons unknown,” he said. “On a charge of attempted murder.”

“Alvaro’s, you mean?”

“No, yours.” His teeth appeared beneath his moustache again. “Because whoever is sending you those cards has something more serious than chess on his mind. You can buy an aerosol like the one used to fill your tyre, once he’d let the air out, in any shop selling spare parts. Except that this particular aerosol was topped up with a syringeful of petrol. That, with the gas and the plastic stuff already in the container, becomes highly explosive above certain temperatures. You would only have had to drive a few hundred yards for the tyre to heat up sufficiently to produce an explosion immediately underneath the petrol tank. The car would have burst into flames with both of you inside.” He was smiling with evident malice, as if his telling them that was a minor act of revenge. “Isn’t that terrible?”

Munoz arrived at Cesar’s shop an hour later, his ears sticking out above his raincoat collar and his hair wet. He looked like a scrawny stray dog, Julia thought as she watched him shaking off the rain at the door. He shook Julia’s hand, an abrupt handshake, without warmth, a simple contact that committed him to nothing, and greeted Cesar with a nod of the head. Doing his best to keep his wet shoes away from the carpet, he listened unblinkingly to what had happened in the Rastro, moving his head every now and then in a vaguely affirmative gesture, as if the story about the blue Ford and Cesar’s poker held no interest for him whatsoever. His dull eyes only lit up when Julia took the card out of her bag and placed it before him. Minutes later he had laid out his small chess set, which recently he’d never been without, and was intent on studying the latest position of the pieces.