Pamplona Prison becomes a pivotal investigative setting when Ramón Quiralte insists that only Inspector Amaia Salazar can hear where he hid Lucía Aguirre’s body, then dies before disclosing it. The prison’s cells also make the recurring TARTTALO inscription physically visible: a written mark that helps investigators distinguish the repeated signature from the separate acts of violence surrounding it.

Setting and Investigative Access

The prison stands on the hill of Santa Lucía, outside Pamplona. When Amaia arrives to meet Quiralte, she shows her police badge and is escorted directly to an office, where the prison director is waiting with Judge Markina and a court secretary. The controlled passage from entrance to office places the prison’s institutional routines around a meeting whose terms have been set by an inmate.

Quiralte had requested an interview with the director and offered information about Lucía Aguirre’s body only on condition that Amaia visit him. He had previously boasted of the murder but refused to say where he had left the body. The offer therefore makes the prison a threshold between a confessed crime and an unresolved disappearance: access to the answer appears possible, but remains in Quiralte’s hands.

Quiralte’s Condition and Death

The officials are uncertain whether Quiralte’s promise is genuine or a ploy. The director describes him as sociable and active, eating and sleeping well; Judge Markina likewise stresses that the prisoner has been cocky and boastful about the crime. Quiralte’s insistence that Amaia come, and that she alone do so, gives the proposed meeting an unusual personal condition without resolving what he intends to accomplish.

Amaia later returns toward Pamplona Prison with Jonan Etxaide driving. From Azanza, the journey takes about thirty minutes. Under an overcast sky that has brought premature darkness, they see an ambulance in the prison parking area with its lights off. Amaia immediately understands that Quiralte is going to kill himself. A prison employee leads them inside by a corridor that avoids the security arch, and they run through the building as he explains what has happened.

The Inscription in the Cell

Asked whether Quiralte left a letter or note, the doctor points Amaia toward the bunks. On the wall above the lower bunk, Quiralte has written TARTTALO. The word is not a disclosure of Lucía Aguirre’s whereabouts; it is a final mark that redirects attention from the promised information to the larger pattern Amaia is investigating.

The prison scene echoes another account of a cell-wall inscription. Investigators learn that the Logroño murderer also died by suicide in his cell after leaving the same message, in the same distinctive spelling with two t’s. Elsewhere in the investigation, a photograph records the word scratched firmly into plaster with the handle of a toothbrush, even after the wall was painted over. The repeated inscription makes the prison wall more than a backdrop: it is where a signature survives the killer’s silence.

The Prison and the Murder Linkage

The cases initially resemble violent domestic murders by men who abused their victims over time, often alongside alcohol or drugs. The shared post-mortem amputation of the same arm, with the limb missing from the scene, is what disrupts that familiar profile. In Johana Márquez’s case, Jasón Medina confessed to forcing and killing her, then sexually abusing her body, but appeared genuinely perplexed when asked about the severed arm. He had left to fetch a rope to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was gone.

That gap between the known killer’s actions and the missing limb strengthens the possibility of a second person acting across cases. Amaia asks how a TARTTALO could have appeared at precisely the right moment to take the trophy if Medina’s killing was impulsive and unplanned. The answer proposed is that the offender knew Medina and followed him. Against this reasoning, the prison’s inscriptions supply a stark, repeatable trace: the men confess to their own crimes, but the mark points beyond them to a shared operator whose presence is harder to establish.