Víctor

Víctor is Flora’s former husband of twenty years, linked to Anne Arbizu’s violent death and to the shooting in which Flora killed him. He never speaks in the evidence presented here: his character emerges through Freddy’s recollection, Flora’s defense, and Amaia’s forceful reconstruction of their marriage and its end. Those accounts make him both an alleged killer and a man whose capacity to threaten Flora is sharply contested.

Identity and Place in the Plot

Víctor’s defining relationship is his long marriage to Flora, which had lasted twenty years before she became his ex-wife. Amaia treats that history as essential to understanding the shooting: rather than accept Flora’s account of an act of self-defense, she argues that Víctor was accustomed to being under Flora’s control and could not have dared threaten her.

He is also identified by Amaia as the man who killed Anne Arbizu in the river. The evidence does not give Víctor’s own account of either Anne’s death or his marriage. Instead, the reader encounters him through what other characters saw, remembered, or believed about him, leaving his motives less directly established than the violence attributed to him.

Flora and the Disputed Marriage

Freddy says that Flora provoked Víctor. His recollection places that suspicion alongside a separate observation: he once saw Anne Arbizu and Flora together at the back entrance of a warehouse, speaking briefly before embracing warmly. On another occasion, when Anne passed while Freddy and Flora were sitting together, he noticed Flora’s conspicuous effort to conceal that she knew her. Freddy says he later asked Anne about the connection, but she denied it and became angry; he let the matter drop.

Amaia reads the marriage in starkly different terms from Flora’s later claim that Víctor threatened to kill her. She tells Flora that Víctor adored, revered, and respected her alone, and that he had been made submissive in large part by her domination. Flora insists that she knew him well, had suspected him, and that he had threatened her. Amaia rejects this version, drawing on her own presence at the shooting rather than treating Flora’s account as established fact.

Anne Arbizu and the Alleged Motive

Amaia accuses Víctor of killing Anne Arbizu in the river and argues that Flora’s reason for stopping him was personal: in her view, Flora acted because Víctor had harmed Anne, not because she cared about the other girls he was accused of killing. Amaia invokes Flora’s earlier defense of a purifying guardian who punished supposedly insolent girls as evidence for her interpretation of Flora’s attitude toward those victims.

This motive remains Amaia’s reading of the events, not a confession from Víctor or Flora. Freddy’s account that Flora and Anne embraced in private supports the existence of a closeness Flora had concealed from him, while Amaia supplies the claim that Víctor’s attack on Anne was what finally provoked Flora to act. The distinction matters: the evidence connects Víctor to Anne’s death, but it presents the explanation for Flora’s intervention as an accusation made during her confrontation with Amaia.

Death and Conflicting Accounts

Amaia recalls hearing the first shot, which she believes knocked Víctor down. When she arrived, she says, she saw Flora fire again and believes she saw her finish him. This observation underpins Amaia’s refusal to accept that Flora acted in self-defense: in her account, Víctor was already down when Flora fired the second time, and he was not the threatening aggressor Flora described.

Flora answers that Amaia has no proof, but the exchange does not resolve the disagreement through a new confession or independent finding. Víctor’s death consequently remains central to the conflict between the two women: Flora presents it as necessary self-protection, while Amaia sees it as a deliberate killing following the first shot. His role is defined by that unresolved contrast, as well as by the image of a man whom Amaia says could kill Anne yet was himself unable to confront his wife.