Quart breaks into Ferro's home to search it

Lorenzo Quart’s covert search of Príamo Ferro’s home is an evidence-gathering operation that yields no decisive proof but alters the emotional and investigative shape of his case. While Ferro and Óscar Lobato are away at an archdiocesan meeting, Quart enters the priest’s modest residence and searches its drawers, papers, books, and diskettes. A photograph of Ferro with Macarena Bruner and an older woman reveals a tenderness Quart has not seen in the church; a set of computer disks in Lobato’s room offers a possible lead in the search for Vísperas, but remains too ambiguous to identify the hacker or establish where the intrusion was carried out.

Opportunity and Entry

Quart creates his opportunity by arranging for Ferro and Óscar to attend a bureaucratic meeting at the Archbishop’s Palace. He has about half an hour before they are expected back. From the sacristy, he reaches the priest’s living quarters by way of a narrow vestibule and a staircase with an iron railing. The house’s ordinary layout—two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small sitting room—makes the intrusion feel less like a raid on an enemy stronghold than an invasion of private life.

The modest surroundings also provide a measure of the parish’s poverty. In the sacristy, Quart has seen worn religious furnishings and a limited collection of vestments and vessels. Inside the home, he proceeds methodically, looking through rooms and containers without initially finding anything that advances his inquiry. His search depends not on a spectacular hidden chamber but on the intimacies of domestic storage: drawers, a desk, a cupboard, and papers kept among everyday possessions.

The Photograph and Ferro’s Private Face

In a drawer in the sitting room, Quart finds a poor-quality Polaroid of Ferro in an Andalusian courtyard. The priest sits at a low table with what looks like a meal, accompanied by an elderly woman dressed in light, old-fashioned clothes and Macarena Bruner. All three are smiling. Quart has encountered Ferro as an irascible, severe parish priest; in the photograph, the priest’s expression appears tender and sad, his scarred features softened and his eyes less hard. For Quart, the image briefly makes Ferro seem like a different, more human person.

The photograph therefore functions both as a clue and as a counter-image to Quart’s existing judgment. It does not establish when it was taken or explain the relationship among the three people, but it places Ferro in a moment of apparent ease with Macarena and the older woman. Quart takes the photograph before continuing his search. That small act preserves a piece of evidence while also marking how the investigation crosses into a private history that cannot be reduced to the priest’s public manner.

Papers, Books, and the Limits of Evidence

Quart examines a portable typewriter and the papers associated with it. Professional habit leads him to roll in a sheet and strike several keys, producing a sample of the typeface in case it may later help identify writing. He folds the sheet and pockets it with the photograph. The detail shows the practical, cumulative character of his work: even an inconclusive search can produce material to compare if another document later becomes relevant.

The books in Ferro’s sitting room include liturgical works, a 1992 catechism, volumes of Latin quotations, ecclesiastical history, philosophy, and Menéndez y Pelayo’s history of Spanish heterodoxy. Quart also notices astronomy books and a worn copy of Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, in which a passage about pastors losing contact with ordinary people and reducing faith to intellectual assent has been marked. The marked passage offers a suggestive point of contact with Ferro’s pastoral life, but Quart finds no direct evidence in it that explains the investigation. His search thus distinguishes between material that illuminates a person and material that can substantiate a case.

The Disks in Óscar Lobato’s Room

In the other bedroom, which appears to be Óscar Lobato’s, Quart finds twenty pages on Saint John of the Cross, printed in Courier New, and five plastic cases holding a dozen 3.5-inch diskettes apiece. The room’s mixture of theology, church history, an electronic chess set, a Vatican City guide, antihistamine tablets, and an old Tintin adventure gives no straightforward answer about the user of the disks. The files might belong to Vísperas, or they might not.

Quart judges the disks to be weak as proof but substantial as a lead worth checking. A proper examination would require copying them to his laptop’s hard drive and reviewing them later, a process likely to take more than an hour. He would also need another opportunity to keep both priests away from the house. The search therefore ends with an unresolved investigative obligation rather than a discovery: the disks are back in their case, and Quart has not found the computer equipment needed to determine their origin.

Investigation, Suspicion, and the Church

The search sits within a case already shaped by two deaths at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The archbishop describes Peñuelas’s fatal fall as an accident: the municipal architect, commissioned to prepare a report on the church’s ruin, had argued with Ferro, then fell when a wooden scaffolding rail gave way and was impaled on a metal tube. Later, the police explain Father Urbizu’s death as another possible accident, in which a moving scaffold dislodged a heavy piece of plaster from the cornice. These accounts make the restoration site both a source of physical danger and a persistent setting for suspicion.

That suspicion bears on Quart’s reading of what he finds at home. Ferro celebrates Mass every day except Sundays and feast days, when he celebrates twice; his traditional practice also appears in the old-fashioned vestments and Latin portions of the liturgy that Quart later observes. The church’s survival is tied to a more specific obligation: Mass must be said for Gaspar Bruner every Thursday at eight in the morning, the time and day associated with his death in 1709. Macarena explains that an archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch for any lapse, because failure to meet the condition could expose the church to demolition. In that setting, Ferro’s routine is at once religious practice and a legal safeguard.

Later, the police reconstruct a more incriminating possibility. They suspect Honorato Bonafé discovered that the Virgin’s twenty pearls had been replaced by imitations, with the proceeds plausibly connected to renewed construction work the parish could not afford on Ferro’s salary and the collection plate. Bonafé may have confronted Ferro at the altar scaffolding, where he fell five metres, injured his hand trying to catch a screw, and crawled to the confessional before dying. The police propose that Ferro may have killed him and then disappeared for a day, but their account remains an inference, not something Quart confirms during the discussion. Against these later suspicions, the photograph and disks from Quart’s search remain what they were when found: revealing in different ways, yet insufficient to settle the central questions about Ferro, Lobato, and the deaths at the church.