Quart performs the rite of absolution for Father Ferro at the police station

Lorenzo Quart’s act of asking Father Príamo Ferro for absolution at the police station is a decisive turn in their relationship: faced with the old priest under arrest, Quart kneels and makes his respect, contrition, and need for reconciliation visible. Ferro answers not with an argument but with the sign of the cross, offering a ritual consolation that neither resolves the evidence against him nor erases the uncertainty surrounding Honorato Bonafé’s death.

The Case Behind the Encounter

The church’s deaths had first been treated as accidents. The municipal architect Peñuelas fell when a wooden scaffold rail gave way and was impaled on a metal tube; Father Óscar was present and administered the last rites. Father Urbizu later died when a shifting scaffold dislodged a heavy piece of plaster cornice onto his head. These explanations made the church seem dangerous without establishing that either death was murder.

Bonafé’s death in the confessional brought a different set of questions. Simeón Navajo reconstructed a possible sequence: Bonafé had been on scaffolding beside the Virgin’s image, and Ferro may have climbed up after him. After a confrontation, Bonafé fell—or was pushed—from a height of five metres. A wound running from his wrist toward his index finger was consistent with an attempt to catch himself on a scaffold screw. Still alive, he crawled to the nearest refuge he could reach, the confessional, and died there.

Suspicion and the Evidence

Navajo connected the death to the Virgin statue’s pearls. Police inquiries indicated that the original pearls had been replaced months earlier by twenty identical imitations. The suspected route ran through the Madrid dealer Francisco Montegrifo, who had previously been Ferro’s contact in the irregular sale of the Cillas altarpiece. The reported circulation of pearls associated with Captain Xaloc and a police informant’s account provided a possible link, but investigators could not prove Montegrifo’s alleged role.

The money appeared to offer a motive. The date associated with the pearls’ sale coincided with renewed church repairs, including purchases of building materials and machinery. Suppliers told Navajo’s investigators that the costs exceeded what Ferro’s small priestly salary and the parish collection could cover. Navajo therefore proposed that Bonafé had discovered the imitation pearls and tried to blackmail Ferro, or that Ferro caught him investigating and killed him. That reconstruction remained a hypothesis: the police had circumstantial evidence, not a witnessed killing, and Ferro had refused to explain his own disappearance.

The Rite in the Police Station

Quart enters the small room where Ferro is being held and finds him without his cassock, in an ordinary grey-trousered outfit and an old, unpolished pair of shoes. The priest’s unkempt white hair, stubble, scars, and reddened eyes make him appear diminished and vulnerable. Although a guard stands at the door, Ferro has not been handcuffed. Quart goes to him and kneels while Navajo and the guard watch in astonishment.

Quart asks, “Father. Absolve me, for I have sinned.” The request is framed as an acknowledgment of his own responsibility: he needs to make his excuses, respect, and contrition public. Ferro is briefly startled, then raises a hand and traces the sign of the cross above Quart’s bowed head. He speaks no words; the familiar formula is conveyed in silence, through the gesture itself and the priest’s recognition of the man before him.

Meaning and Aftermath

The absolution does not function as a verdict on Bonafé’s death. Navajo’s reconstruction leaves open whether Ferro pushed Bonafé, whether Bonafé fell during a struggle, or precisely what happened on the scaffold. Quart’s gesture instead answers a moral and spiritual need that the investigation cannot settle. In a police station, under the eyes of the state, the priest briefly resumes his pastoral role and Quart accepts the vulnerability of kneeling before him.

Ferro’s silent response gives the ritual its force. The sign of the cross is at once an act of priestly care and a recognition between two men whose positions have changed: the investigator now kneels, while the detained priest gives consolation. The scene closes the encounter not with certainty about the crime, but with relief and a recovered bond—an interval of hope amid the unresolved case.