Madrid

Madrid enters the story less as a city explored in its own right than as a destination and a fact with consequences: a place connected to an alibi, to Alice Gould’s professional past, and finally to the home she fears may no longer be hers. Its presence shifts between practical geography and anxious imagination. The city is at once where evidence may be checked, where Alice expects to return, and where an empty apartment holds the possibility of what has changed in her absence.

A Point of Reference Beyond the Asylum

Madrid appears first as a place from which Alice can obtain copies of her academic work. During her account of earlier lies, she corrects a false claim about her qualifications: she is not a chemistry graduate but a doctor of Philosophy and Letters, with a doctoral thesis on the psychology of juvenile offenders. She offers to ask Madrid to send copies. The detail gives her past an institutional and intellectual dimension, and makes the city a source of documents that could verify a claim about who she is.

That possibility is striking beside Alice’s circumstances in the hospital. She speaks of Madrid as reachable through a request, while she herself cannot communicate freely with Heliodoro Almenara. She has told him she was going to Buenos Aires to investigate a possibly forged will; now he does not know where she is, and the letters she has written have failed to reach him. Madrid is not the destination she named to her husband, but it belongs to the larger geography of a life from which she has become cut off. The contrast is between information that might travel from the city and personal news that cannot find its recipient.

Madrid in the Murder Inquiry

The city also becomes a point on a carefully tested travel route in the inquiry into the murder of Raimundo García del Olmo’s father. The victim was an octogenarian, and his son found the body after returning from a trip to Paris, where he had attended a professional congress. Alice recalls that Raimundo could establish that no air connection would have allowed a journey from Paris to Madrid and back to the point of departure between the end of an invited opera performance and the first session the following morning.

The force of this detail lies in its timetable, not in Madrid as a crime scene. Raimundo presided over that morning session and arrived punctually; the travel possibility was tested against those fixed obligations. Madrid functions as a leg in the proposed journey whose feasibility can be challenged. Alice’s account turns a broad suspicion into a question of time and movement, showing how a city name can matter in an investigation even when the narrative does not place the murder there.

The Road Back

Later, Madrid becomes the destination of Alice’s departure from the hospital. Montserrat Castell has arranged to accompany her as far as the town where she can take a bus to Zamora and spend the night. The next morning Alice plans to hire a car for the journey to Madrid. This route is specific and staged: first an escort out to the bus, then an overnight stop, then a hired vehicle for the final leg. The return is not instantaneous; it unfolds through successive changes of transport and place.

From Villacastín, with the Sierra de Madrid visible to the north, the destination changes from a plan on a journey into something looming ahead. The view fills Alice with dread. Beyond the pine-covered ridges, the land opens out across the high Castilian plateau, while Madrid appears as a polluted, restless metropolis, crowded with the dangers she associates with the capital. The movement of the road brings her nearer, but the landscape does not make arrival reassuring. The mountains divide the place she is leaving from the city she must face.

The Empty Home

Within Madrid, Alice’s focus narrows from the scale of the metropolis to her own vacant home, situated somewhere among its countless buildings and streets. The city’s vastness makes the apartment difficult to locate in the imagination, yet emotionally it is intensely particular: it is the place where she expects the life she left behind to have been kept intact. The scene makes the return less a simple homecoming than a confrontation with uncertainty.

Alice wonders whether Heliodoro Almenara has taken the furniture, the paintings, the collection of antique pipes she inherited from her father, or the English embroidery frame her mother used. These are not confirmed losses; the fear lies precisely in not knowing what remains. She would rather not find out. Madrid therefore holds both the address of her anticipated return and the possibility that the objects linking her to family and home have disappeared. The city’s narrative significance rests on that tension: reaching it may end physical distance, without restoring the security Alice associates with home.