Bonafé is found murdered in the church

Bonafé is found murdered in the church is the third death associated with Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, and the first to transform the church’s atmosphere of suspected accidents into an overt murder inquiry. The journalist’s body, abandoned in a confessional, links a possible confrontation over substituted pearls to the perilous campaign to keep the church open; yet the police reconstruction remains a hypothesis, not a final account of precisely how he died.

The Church and Its Earlier Deaths

The church is already under pressure from a proposed demolition. Archbishop Aquilino Corvo tells Lorenzo Quart that a papally sanctioned privilege dating from 1687 makes the building difficult to secularize: Mass must be said there each Thursday for its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The parish priest, Príamo Ferro, resists the archbishop’s authority, while the archbishop has sought Ferro’s suspension from office through Rome. The struggle over the building therefore joins ecclesiastical discipline to a practical question of whether the parish’s ritual obligation can still protect it from demolition.

Before Bonafé’s death, the first two fatalities are explained as accidents. Municipal architect Peñuelas, sent to prepare a report on the church’s dangerous condition, falls when a wooden scaffold railing gives way and is impaled on a metal tube. Corvo says that another official and the vicar, Óscar Lobato, were present; Lobato administered the last rites. Later, Father Urbizu dies when a scaffold shifts, dislodging a large piece of plaster cornice that falls onto his head. The police find no witness to Urbizu’s fall. These accounts establish a dangerous worksite, but the recurrence of deaths within the church makes the official language of bad luck increasingly difficult to separate from suspicion.

The conflict also has a devotional and personal dimension. Gris Marsala warns Quart that the city, the church, Ferro, and Macarena Bruner are places and people one cannot pass through without consequence. Ferro, at sixty-four, describes a life shaped by the memory of the dying, fear, and unanswered prayer; he understands faith as consolation in a world stamped by death. Macarena explains the material fragility behind the parish’s resistance: the church is impoverished, Ferro’s salary is small, and Sunday collections do not cover even the candles. Each Thursday, an archdiocesan representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch the Mass for any irregularity that might invalidate the privilege. The church’s survival depends on a repeated ceremony, while its opponents wait for a mistake.

The Body in the Confessional

The discovery follows another encounter between Quart and Corvo. As Quart leaves the Archbishop’s Palace, Corvo calls him back, pale and distracted, and tells him he cannot leave because another disaster has occurred at the church. By the time Quart arrives, a dozen or so police officers are moving through the building, photographing and examining the floor, pews, and scaffolding. The investigation occupies the battered church’s interior, where the altar, damaged stained glass, ceiling paintings, confessionals, and devotional offerings are now part of a crime scene.

Gris sits alone on the steps of the high altar. Simeón Navajo intercepts Quart and says that the church’s tally has reached three. Looking past the subcommissioner, Quart notices motionless feet protruding from the confessional. Inside, a blue canvas covers most of the body. One exposed hand lies palm-up, its skin yellow as old wax and a wound running from the wrist to the index finger. Navajo identifies the dead man as Honorato Bonafé, a well-known journalist in Seville, whom Quart recognizes from the beige trousers, small soft hand, and shoes.

When Navajo lifts the canvas, Bonafé is seen slumped against the wooden seat and the corner of the confessional, his chin folded into his heavy neck. A large purple bruise marks the left side of his face; dried brown blood runs from his nose and mouth down his neck and shirtfront. The medical examiner reports internal injuries and at least one fracture, consistent with a blow or a fall, but the police do not know how Bonafé entered the confessional—or whether someone put him there. Quart, despite his revulsion toward the journalist, says a brief prayer for the dead and makes the sign of the cross. Navajo remarks that the dead man has already been gone for some time.

The Police Reconstruction

Navajo soon tells Quart that, in his view, someone helped the church this time. He believes Bonafé was murdered and says Ferro is a strong suspect, with the priest’s absence from the scene weighing against him unless the medical examiner’s findings suggest otherwise. This is suspicion, not proof: the body’s injuries establish a violent death, but the initial discovery alone does not explain the movement from the altar to the confessional or identify the person responsible.

After further inquiries, Navajo offers a possible sequence. Bonafé may have climbed the scaffolding beside the Virgin’s statue on the high altar, with Ferro following him. The two may have argued or struggled; Bonafé then fell or was pushed from a height of five metres. The wound in his hand, Navajo suggests, came from trying to catch a scaffold screw. Badly injured but still alive, Bonafé crawled several metres, managed to get up, and reached the nearest refuge he could find: the confessional. He collapsed there and died. The reconstruction accounts for the wound, the internal injuries, and the body’s location without establishing whether the fall was accidental within a struggle or a deliberate push.

Navajo’s account is visibly a reconstruction rather than a witnessed event. As he describes it, his fingers climb an imagined scaffold, approach one another, fall, and then drag themselves across an improvised floor before lying still in the palm of his other hand, which stands for the confessional. Quart can picture the sequence, but its vividness does not remove its conditional steps. The police have to infer what happened from physical traces and circumstances; they have no eyewitness account of the confrontation.

The Suspected Motive and Its Limits

The proposed motive emerges from the investigation into the church’s pearls. Months earlier, someone replaced the Virgin’s original pearls with twenty identical imitations. Police tracing suggests that Francisco Montegrifo, a Madrid art dealer previously connected with Ferro’s irregular sale of an altarpiece from Cillas de Ansó ten years earlier, put Captain Xaloc’s pearls into circulation. A police informant, a Catalan jeweller who dealt in illegally acquired goods, had encountered a batch whose description matched them. The evidence does not prove Montegrifo’s role, but Navajo considers the indications credible.

The timing of the money supplies a possible connection to the church’s renovation. According to suppliers interviewed by Navajo’s men, the cost of building materials and rented machinery during a renewed phase of work exceeded what Ferro could have paid from his small salary and the parish collection. Navajo therefore reasons that proceeds from the pearls might have financed the works. In his hypothesis, Bonafé followed the trail, came to the church, and confirmed that the pearls were false. He may then have tried to blackmail Ferro—or Ferro may have encountered him before there was time for a demand. This gives the suspected crime a plausible financial context, but it does not independently establish that Ferro killed him or reveal how the money reached the parish.

The inquiry closes on unresolved particulars. Navajo says Ferro has refused to explain a period when he disappeared for an entire day, after spending time in the tower of Casa del Postigo; to the police, that silence is suspicious. Quart offers no account to fill the gaps, and Navajo tells him that his lack of help has not gone unnoticed. Bonafé’s death is thus exposed through a chain of physical evidence, financial leads, and conjecture, while the central question—what happened between the journalist and Ferro on the scaffolding—remains unsettled.