The Client Relationship Between Alice Gould and Raimundo García del Olmo

Alice Gould’s relationship with Raimundo García del Olmo is both professional and central to the novel’s central uncertainty: he hires her to investigate his father’s death and the threatening letters connected to it, yet the commission leads her into an asylum where she cannot tell whether her client is merely seeking help or has also become part of the circumstances that trap her. Raimundo is the person who gives Alice her investigative purpose; as the investigation unfolds, she must also consider what his actions mean for her own confinement.

The Commission and Its Stakes

Raimundo engages Alice to investigate the death of his father, who had been found dead by his own son more than two years earlier, when Raimundo returned from a professional congress in Paris. The case carries an uncomfortable complication: Alice explains that police had suspected Raimundo might have hastened his father’s death out of pity. She explicitly rejects that feared account as untrue, but its existence makes the commission more than a routine search for a killer. Her client is connected to the death under investigation, and the investigation must account for both the crime and the suspicion surrounding the person who commissioned it.

The assignment is financially substantial. Raimundo gives Alice a cheque as an advance and promises an equal amount if she completes the investigation successfully. At first she considers the fee unusually high; once she confronts the conditions in which she must work, she recognizes why the payment may have been justified. The fee marks the commission as a serious undertaking, but it does not make its risks predictable: Alice has to pursue the case from inside a psychiatric hospital, among people whose identities and histories she is still trying to understand.

Raimundo also asks Alice to trace the source of weekly letters he has been receiving. Her examination of the handwriting leads her to conclude that the author is psychotic and confined at the same hospital where she is investigating. The paper supplies a separate clue: it is not the stationery provided to patients, but office paper used at the institution. She recognizes it as the same kind of letter paper used by the director, with the upper portion cut away to remove the hospital’s name and address. The commission therefore joins an external murder inquiry to evidence originating within the hospital itself.

A Client’s Network and an Absent Ally

Raimundo is an intimate friend of Samuel Alvar, a doctor who is also Alice’s accomplice in her plan to enter the hospital while feigning paranoia. Alvar knows with certainty that she is sane, advises her on the disguise, and promises to assist by providing information about suspects. That promise makes Raimundo’s friendship with Alvar practically important: Alice expects the client’s connection to give her access to knowledge that will help the investigation.

But Alvar is not present when Alice needs him. She realizes that, without him in his post, the inquiry will be much harder, and she cannot simply wait for his return before forming judgments about the people around her. The absence changes the working conditions of Raimundo’s commission. Alice must evaluate the residents and pursue leads without the promised guidance, while remaining dependent on a plan that brought her into the institution under false pretenses.

The Client Enters the Admission Story

At a later meeting with the hospital’s doctors, Alice explains that Raimundo brought her to the hospital himself. She insists that her husband did not accompany her on the day she entered; it was her client, Raimundo, who did so. She presents this as a surprise because she had expected the director to be present and instead encountered his substitute. The detail sharpens the distinction between her public identity as a patient and her actual purpose as an investigator, while also placing Raimundo directly at the threshold of her confinement.

This disclosure complicates the commission without, by itself, proving that Raimundo arranged Alice’s detention or knew what would happen after her arrival. What it establishes is his personal involvement in bringing her to the institution and Alice’s dependence on the assistance she expected from Alvar. The client is no longer only a figure at the beginning of the case, waiting for a result; his actions are part of the circumstances Alice has to explain.

Suspicion and an Unresolved Motive

When Alice privately tries to interpret Raimundo’s conduct, she finds his possible motive for having her confined terribly vague. She can imagine that her client wanted her to enter the hospital to carry out a particular investigation on his behalf, but she cannot see why a man of his standing would risk the consequences of such an act or what benefit he might gain from it. Her reasoning does not clear Raimundo; it records the limits of what she can infer. His place in the story becomes a question she cannot settle with the evidence then available.

That uncertainty matters because the commission begins with a seemingly clear division of roles: Raimundo is the client, Alice the investigator, and the murder and letters the objects of inquiry. The hospital breaks down that arrangement. The investigation’s clues point back into the institution, Alvar’s promised help is unavailable, and Raimundo’s own participation in Alice’s admission demands attention. Yet Alice cannot complete the chain from those circumstances to a definite explanation of her client’s purpose. Their relationship consequently remains both the source of her investigation and one of its unresolved problems.