Don García del Olmo's Death and Its Investigation

Don García del Olmo’s death is the event that turns Alice Gould’s admission to the asylum into an investigation. His son, Raimundo García del Olmo, found him dead on returning from a specialist conference in Paris; the police considered whether Alice, Raimundo’s client, had hastened the old man’s death out of pity. Alice’s account rejects that suspicion, but her inquiries uncover a second mystery around Raimundo: a series of weekly letters whose anonymous author appears to have had access to the hospital’s administrative paper.

The death and the suspicion

More than two years before Alice recounts the case, Raimundo García del Olmo discovered his father’s body after coming back from a conference in Paris. The narrative supplies that circumstance as the central point of departure for the investigation, without establishing here the precise manner or location of the death.

The police had suspected Alice of killing her client’s father to spare him suffering. She makes a point of distinguishing this feared explanation from what actually happened: the police had entertained it, she says, but it was not true. The suspicion places Alice herself under scrutiny as she discusses the case. In the hospital interview, she reminds the doctors that they already know the circumstances of the death, then explains that she cannot know whether Raimundo disclosed every delicate detail to the director, Samuel Alvar. Her account thus presents the case not simply as a question of who died, but as a chain of partial knowledge: what the police feared, what Raimundo told the hospital, and what Alice was commissioned to find out.

The letters and the hospital paper

Around the period of the police inquiry, Raimundo began receiving weekly letters. He asked Alice to discover where they came from. Her examination of the handwriting led her to conclude that the writer was psychotic and confined in the hospital. That finding located the source within the institution, but the paper itself pointed toward a different part of its workings.

The letters were not written on the paper supplied to patients. Alice identified it as office stationery, the same kind used for letters by the hospital director. The top of each sheet had been cut away with scissors, removing the hospital’s name and address. This detail matters because it turns an attempt at concealment into evidence: the missing letterhead concealed the paper’s institutional origin, while the stock and the cut edge helped Alice recognize it. The evidence presented does not identify the writer by name or establish who supplied the stationery; it does show how Alice moved from handwriting analysis to the material provenance of the letters.

Alice’s inquiry inside the asylum

Alice’s investigation required her to learn who could have been outside the hospital when Raimundo’s father was murdered. She asked the director for access to the files of selected residents, seeking those who had received permission to leave on the relevant dates. Her account is precise about the limits of her access: she had an opportunity to see one of the files she wanted on the day the commissioner asked for it to be brought to his office. The inquiry therefore depended not on unrestricted access, but on piecing together information under institutional constraints.

The hospital also appears in the case as a place where responsibility and care are negotiated in ordinary interactions. Earlier, a doctor offered to remain with Alice while she settled for the night, and she agreed with a nod. Elsewhere, residents voluntarily helped accompany those who were immobile, including Rómulo, who attended the Niña Oscilante and the Hombre Elefante. These details do not solve the murder or prove a connection to it. They do, however, set Alice’s investigative work within a community structured by both formal supervision and personal acts of assistance—relationships that shape what can be observed and who can obtain help.

A wider pattern of inference

In a later account of deaths within the asylum, Alice reasons from physical evidence and opportunity rather than treating suspicion as proof. Two victims were killed with a knife; she argues that they were stopped by a man who spoke Basque, promised to help them escape, and led them into the underground passages with a story about a secret route through the old monastery walls. He then left them waiting and returned with a knife instead of a lantern. When Alice recognized that the dead man Remo was involved, she says, she immediately suspected who the killer was. She also describes an attack in which the Hombre Elefante used his weight to crush a victim.

These episodes concern deaths within the asylum, not evidence that those killings were part of Don García del Olmo’s case. Their relevance lies in the way they show Alice’s method at work: she separates what was observed from what can be inferred, tests a suspect against access and physical capacity, and revises her judgment as details emerge. In the father’s case, that method is visible in her scrutiny of the police suspicion, the letters’ handwriting and paper, and the leave records. The available account leaves the precise solution to Don García del Olmo’s murder unstated, but makes the investigation’s stakes clear: an accusation against Alice, an uneasy trail leading into the hospital, and a client whose weekly letters required her to look closely at the institution that had taken her in.