Director of Santa María de las Nieves Hospital

The Director of Santa María de las Nieves Hospital is the institution’s senior authority and the principal defender of its care of Rosario. When Amaia Salazar arrives during the investigation, he presents the clinic as methodical and closely supervised; evidence that Rosario has concealed and discarded her medication unsettles that account. His role brings the hospital’s confidence in its procedures into direct contact with the limits of what those procedures have detected.

Position and First Appearance

The director is introduced in his luxurious office, where Inspector Ayegui has taken control of the desk and is speaking on the telephone. The director, a middle-aged man, waits by the carved wooden mantel, visibly dejected. He approaches Amaia Salazar solicitously and offers her a handshake stronger than she expects. When he addresses her as Miss Salazar, she corrects him: she is Inspector Salazar, of the Navarre Foral Police. The exchange establishes both his formal authority within the hospital and the changed balance of the room: the police have entered his domain to investigate events the institution must now explain.

The director’s authority is not presented as detached from the clinic’s reputation. After Rosario is taken away, he warns Amaia that removing her was a mistake and would seriously damage Santa María de las Nieves. The warning makes the institutional stakes explicit: the investigation concerns not only Rosario’s condition and conduct but also the credibility of the hospital responsible for her care.

The Clinic’s Account of Rosario’s Treatment

When investigators find that a hollow tube in a bed leg has been tampered with and contains more medication, the director reacts with emphatic disbelief. He insists that Rosario has a serious illness and that treatment has enabled the progress toward normality observed over recent months. He points to her apparent calm, smiling manner, cooperation, increased appetite, weight gain, and good sleep as signs consistent with treatment.

He also describes a formal system of oversight. Rosario’s treatment, he says, has been documented meticulously; changes in her progress, setbacks, or behavior are monitored, and a committee of nine experts together with the director decides any change in medication or therapy. He argues that stopping medication, even in part, would be dangerous and should have been noticed. By invoking both detailed records and collective review, he presents the hospital’s judgment as more than an individual impression: it is supposed to be the product of continuous observation and expert decision-making.

The evidence found in the bed, however, directly challenges that account. Inspector Ayegui reports that the pills have not been taken for months and suggests that Rosario pretended to swallow them before spitting them out; some are discolored, perhaps by saliva. The discovery does not by itself establish what the director knew, but it shows that the clinic’s monitoring had failed to reveal a prolonged interruption in treatment. His confidence in documented oversight is therefore set against a concrete, concealed fact in Rosario’s room.

Diagnosis and the Unanswered Question

Doctor Franz later identifies the unmedicated weeks as the aspect of the incident that troubles him most. The attack on a caregiver and the possibility that someone posing as a relative supplied a weapon draw immediate attention, he observes, but Rosario’s ability to remain without medication for weeks is more puzzling. He recounts that she had been diagnosed years earlier with schizophrenia, alongside Alzheimer’s disease or senile dementia. In patients with such complicated and fluctuating symptoms, he says, it can be difficult to determine where one condition ends and the other begins. He also refers to earlier violent episodes, including an aggressive incident involving a nurse at the hospital, and says the professionals who treated Rosario had agreed on the diagnosis.

The director’s medical explanation does not resolve the behavioral puzzle. Doctor Franz reasons that a patient with Rosario’s condition would ordinarily become violent after going without medication, yet she has apparently controlled her anger. He first frames the possibility as pretending to be well, then distinguishes it from the more disturbing alternative: pretending to be ill. The distinction shifts the question from whether Rosario could conceal her symptoms to whether the appearance of illness itself might have been an act. The evidence leaves this as a hypothesis rather than an established explanation, but it complicates the director’s earlier reliance on her apparent improvement as proof that treatment was being taken.

Institutional Stakes and Limits

The hospital’s procedures appear again in the visitor records: four people are listed as authorized to visit Rosario, including Amaia Salazar, Flora, Rosaura, and a visitor identified as Javier. Flora angrily rejects the claim that this visitor is their brother and denounces the presence of a stranger. The record shows that authorization and family identity do not necessarily coincide; the available evidence does not establish how the visitor was admitted or what the director personally knew about the discrepancy.

At the end of the encounter, Amaia removes her white forensic coverall and leaves. The director’s warning that taking Rosario away will harm the hospital closes the scene on an unresolved conflict. He has set out the clinic’s documented system and defended its treatment, while the concealed pills and Rosario’s unexplained behavior have exposed what the system did not account for. His importance lies in that contrast: he speaks for an institution confident in its capacity to observe and manage illness, yet the investigation has uncovered evidence that its central assumptions may not explain the patient before it.