The pearls of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas are switched

The pearls of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas are switched in a hidden transaction that links the church’s restoration, the death of Honorato Bonafé, and the disputed conduct of Father Príamo Ferro. The discovery that all twenty pearls on the Virgin’s image were imitations gives the police a possible motive for the killing, but does not settle every uncertainty in their reconstruction: the evidence points toward a financial connection and a confrontation, while leaving the precise circumstances of Bonafé’s death partly inferential.

The pearls and the discovery

The substitution comes to light during Lorenzo Quart’s effort to understand how and why Bonafé died. Subcommissioner Simeón Navajo produces a small nacreous object sealed in a plastic bag, recovered from Bonafé’s body. It is one of the twenty pearls set in the Virgin’s face, mantle, and crown; Bonafé had carried it in a pocket of his jacket. The apparent devotional ornament is also physical evidence connecting the dead journalist to the statue and to activity inside the church.

The crucial finding is that the recovered pearl is false—and that the other nineteen are false as well. Investigation establishes that someone replaced the statue’s original pearls months earlier with twenty matching imitations. The substitution is therefore not an isolated counterfeit found on Bonafé, but a coordinated exchange affecting the entire set. Its importance lies in the way it turns a seemingly private object into evidence of an operation whose proceeds may have supported work at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas.

The suspected chain of money and the restoration

The investigation links the substituted pearls to Francisco Montegrifo, a Madrid art dealer who had previously served as Father Ferro’s contact in the irregular sale of an altarpiece from Cillas, ten years earlier. Police inquiries had not proved that Montegrifo mediated the pearl transaction, but a confidential informant among jewelers described a batch whose characteristics matched pearls Captain Xaloc had put into circulation. The connection remained circumstantial: Montegrifo was a suspected intermediary, not an established participant.

The informant’s dating offered a second, practical clue. It coincided with a renewed phase of work at the church, when building materials were bought and machinery rented. Suppliers contacted by Navajo’s investigators said the cost of those deliveries exceeded what the parish priest could cover through his salary and the church’s collection box. The substitution thus appears in the police account as a possible source of money for restoration, tying the theft not only to the Virgin’s image but also to the material survival of the church.

The other deaths and the church’s atmosphere

The police discussion of the pearls takes place against the church’s accumulating record of deaths, which had already made its restoration seem shadowed by danger. Archbishop Aquilino Corvo dismisses the first two deaths as bad luck rather than anything mysterious. Peñuelas, the municipal architect assigned to prepare a report on the church’s ruin, had argued with Father Ferro; during his visits, an andamio’s wooden railing gave way beneath him, and he fell from the roof onto a partly assembled metal tube. Another official was with him, and Father Óscar, the vicar, administered the last rites. The official witnesses gave Corvo grounds to reject suspicion, though the fatal fall had occurred amid a direct conflict over the building’s condition.

The death of Father Urbizu is likewise described by the police as an accident, but with no eyewitness. The investigative account proposes that Urbizu may have leaned on or accidentally shifted an andamio. Its upper end struck a large piece of plaster cornice, perhaps already barely held in place by the metal structure; when the scaffolding moved, more than ten kilograms of plaster fell onto his head. Navajo accompanies the explanation with a physical mime of the swaying structure and the falling debris, making the reconstruction vivid without converting it into witnessed fact. In the police version, both earlier deaths are misfortunes associated with the church’s unstable fabric, not proven acts of violence.

Bonafé’s death and the limits of the reconstruction

When Quart later finds a body in the open confessional, its position makes the church’s accumulating deaths newly immediate. Bonafé lies beneath a piece of blue tarpaulin; his beige trousers and one wax-yellow hand remain visible. A wound runs from his wrist toward his index finger across the open palm. The location is at first simply an unsettling place to die, but Navajo’s later reconstruction connects it to the pearl found in Bonafé’s pocket and to the altar scaffolding.

According to the police account, Bonafé had climbed the scaffolding beside the Virgin’s image, and Father Ferro climbed up after him. The two argued or struggled; Bonafé fell, or was pushed, about five metres. Navajo interprets the cut across Bonafé’s hand as an injury sustained while he tried to catch a screw in the scaffolding. Still alive after hitting the floor, Bonafé dragged himself several metres, managed to rise, and reached the nearest place he could find: the confessional, where he collapsed and died. The sequence is a reconstruction, not an eyewitness account, and Navajo’s own alternatives—whether Bonafé fell or was pushed, whether the confrontation was a struggle—leave the precise action unresolved.

The evidence gives the confrontation a plausible motive. Navajo reasons that Bonafé was already following the substituted pearls, came to the church, and confirmed they were false. He may have tried to blackmail Ferro, or Ferro may have surprised him before he could do so. Navajo further suggests that Ferro locked the sacristy door, spent a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo reflecting, and then disappeared for a day. These details form the police’s proposed sequence, rather than a fully verified account; Ferro, according to Navajo, refused to explain his disappearance.

That distinction matters because Ferro has confessed to killing Bonafé, and Navajo considers the confession, together with the forensic report, sufficient for the police. Quart does not dispute that Ferro did it; he insists that he still needs to understand how and why. The pearl and the suspected restoration funding give Navajo a possible motive, but they do not independently establish the exact confrontation or resolve the uncertainty built into his reconstruction. The switched set therefore functions as both a material clue and a limit: it connects Bonafé to the church’s financial secret, while the circumstances of his death remain mediated by inference and confession.