Pamplona/Iruña serves as the novel’s principal urban base for Amaia Salazar: a place of crowded courts and prison interviews, disciplined police work, and a private life increasingly strained by pregnancy, exhaustion, and care for Ibai. Its importance lies not in a single landmark but in the routes that connect those worlds, from the courthouse and police station to her home and the restaurants near it.

A city of work and daily routes

The city first takes shape as a lived environment marked by weather and movement. At the courthouse, rain-soaked coats release their damp into crowded corridors, where the humid air mingles with the breath of hundreds of people waiting outside the courtrooms. Amaia arrives wearing a heavy coat and visibly in the last stages of pregnancy; Teniente Padua greets her with concern about whether she would be able to attend. The scene sets the city’s institutional bustle against the physical demands she carries into it.

At the Iruña bar on Plaza del Castillo, close to Amaia’s home, the same wet weather becomes a point of recognition between colleagues. She picks out Teniente Padua by the rain marks on his coat and opens their meeting by referring to the rain in Baztán. The exchange links her urban routine with the region beyond the city, while the nearby bar offers an informal counterpart to the formal rooms where their cases are discussed.

Courts, prison, and the investigation

Pamplona’s legal institutions give the city a direct role in the investigation into Lucía Aguirre’s disappearance. The new prison stands on Santa Lucía hill. After Judge Markina tells Amaia that the prisoner Ramón Quiralte has offered to disclose where Lucía’s body is, she drives to the prison, presents her badge, and is escorted to an office where the prison director and the judge are waiting. Quiralte’s offer turns the prison visit into a potential route to the missing victim, but it also leaves Amaia to assess whether he truly intends to help.

The city’s courthouse and prison thus frame two different kinds of encounter: one takes place amid public crowds, the other behind the controlled entrance of a prison. In both, Amaia’s work depends on moving through official spaces and judging what other people are prepared to disclose. The prison is not simply a setting for confinement; it is where a stalled search for Lucía’s body acquires a possible lead.

The police station as a working space

The police station is portrayed through repeated routines rather than grand architecture. When Amaia convenes a meeting, she tries to arrive first. She stands by a window looking out toward Pamplona, using the quiet before the others arrive to arrange her thoughts. Jonan Etxaide brings her coffee; she accepts it, often warming her hands around the cup and leaving it untouched. As Inspector Iriarte and Deputy Inspector Zabalza enter and take their seats, the room shifts from private preparation to collective work. The commissioner arrives as Amaia begins and invites her to continue.

The station also contains the solitary, methodical labor behind an investigation. On a cold night, with the heating kept low, Amaia enters her office in a thick wool sweater and the down jacket James has insisted she wear. She makes coffee and reviews Teniente Padua’s notes on the Logroño case. The file identifies its victim only by the initials I.L.O.; searches through newspaper archives lead her from reports naming the offender, Luis Cantero, to accounts using the victim’s full name, Izaskun López Ormazábal. In the police database, she can then bring up the woman’s identification details. Pamplona is therefore also the place where a case reduced to initials becomes attached again to a named person.

Home, fatigue, and family obligations

Amaia’s home sits close enough to the city’s professional circuits that she repeatedly moves between work and family care. At the Iruña bar, she tells Teniente Padua that she must still go home because Ibai needs to eat. The obligation is ordinary, but it shapes the schedule of her investigations: even a meeting with a colleague must fit around her son’s care.

The city’s cold becomes more intimate when Amaia returns home after an exhausting day. A police officer has delivered an envelope to the hall about an hour earlier. Before she can take the long hot bath she longs for, she notices the dark circles around her eyes and the neglected, dry ends of her hair. She turns on the shower, waits until steam clouds the glass, and begins to cry. The scene makes the private cost of her work visible without separating it from the city: Pamplona is where the official day ends, but not where its strain disappears.

Her movements around home are also practical. Rodero, near her house and close to Taconera Park, is a restaurant where she and James usually walk when dining together so that they need not worry about driving after wine. On this occasion she drives and parks nearby, intending to leave for Elizondo as soon as she has finished speaking with the judge. The familiar restaurant and park become part of a route organized around the next investigative demand rather than a leisurely evening.

Narrative significance

Pamplona/Iruña gathers the novel’s public institutions and private pressures into a compact urban geography. The courthouse makes Amaia’s pregnancy visible to colleagues; the prison gives Quiralte’s offer a place and a procedure; the police station turns observation and paperwork into investigative progress; and the home reveals what those duties cost her. The city also anchors cases whose victims and events extend beyond it, as Amaia’s research into the Logroño murder shows. Its narrative function is consequently both practical and emotional: it is the base from which she pursues distant crimes, and the place to which she returns carrying their unresolved weight.