Roberto Conesa Escudero

Roberto Conesa Escudero is an inspector in Madrid’s Brigada Político-Social, introduced through his response to an unidentified man’s body in Casa de Campo. The scene establishes his professional competence and his moral accommodation to dictatorship: he recognizes a precise execution, then helps make it disappear into paperwork and a common grave. His role is not that of the killer, whose identity he cannot determine, but of an official who understands how easily the state’s procedures can be bent to prevent a crime from becoming a public fact.

Identity and Introduction

Conesa enters the narrative on New Year’s Day, at home and preparing to attend noon Mass. As he ties a carefully made Windsor knot, the telephone rings; he initially assumes that the call can only be an unwelcome one from his mother-in-law. His wife’s angry expression tells him otherwise before she reports that his superior is on the line. The domestic interruption places the investigation inside an ordinary holiday morning, a contrast sharpened by the task awaiting him.

The caller describes a corpse discovered in Casa de Campo and asks Conesa to inspect it before the matter is reported to a judge. The superior has no official knowledge of the case and says no informant has brought him news, although he has asked around. He offers no conclusion about the victim, speculating only that a drunken agent might have lost control of his service weapon, and tells Conesa to call from the forensic depot with his judgment. The instruction is both practical and revealing: before any formal report begins, the police hierarchy wants an experienced inspector to assess whether the case can be handled without creating risks.

Examination of the Body

At the scene, Conesa’s professional eye quickly rules out the convenient suggestion of an accidental death. The body shows no signs of resistance: there are no defensive bruises or scratches, and no broken nails to indicate a struggle. The victim was killed with the controlled efficiency of an execution. Conesa examines the single visible wound and identifies the method: the killer had pressed a pistol’s muzzle just beneath the jaw and fired into the left carotid artery. The apparent shot had been silenced.

There is no evidence that the victim was knocked unconscious before the killing. Conesa therefore considers that the man was either caught unprepared or terrified, possibilities that point toward a murder rather than a mishap. He cannot say who committed it, but his assessment of the circumstances makes the implications plain to him: the murderer may have been a police officer or a soldier, using an unregistered weapon. That suspicion does not solve the crime. Instead, it shapes his decision about what the institutions around him are likely to do with it.

From Investigation to Concealment

Conesa steps away from the body and lights a cigarette, outwardly appearing to think through the case. Inwardly, he has already reached the conclusion that no useful investigation will follow. If the killer is a police officer or serviceman with an unregistered weapon, Conesa believes the person will never be identified; he also sees no reason to assume the risks of formally declaring the murder. His judgment is not presented as proof of the killer’s identity. It is an inference about the protection the perpetrator can expect and the cost of pursuing the truth.

He asks his driver whether the car has a body bag. When it does not, the senior Civil Guard officer, who has returned in the meantime, supplies one. Conesa leaves the physical handling to the others: he stands by while they place the body in the bag and orders them to put it in the commissioner’s car. Only then does he explain his intended procedure to the Civil Guards. He says they need not file a report because he will take the body to the forensic institute and prepare the corresponding report himself. A younger guard asks whether a judge should be called, but falls silent when his older colleague elbows him. The question briefly exposes the legal process being bypassed; the gesture that stops it helps the bypass proceed.

The forensic examination gives the cover story its administrative form. The duty pathologist estimates that the man died on the afternoon of December 29, three days before the discovery. The body has no injury beyond the fatal gunshot to the neck. Conesa and the pathologist agree to skip the autopsy, described as a delay to the burial of a body that has already been dead for three days. The corpse is dressed again and left at the depot, with the police report attached to the death certificate in an envelope pinned to the body bag. Conesa calls the document “lo de siempre” (“the usual thing”); his superior congratulates him and promises to handle the remaining paperwork.

The next day, Conesa learns that the dead man was buried soon after Conesa left the forensic institute. The inspector never finds out whether his superior spoke to a friendly judge or dealt directly with officials higher in the ministry. The uncertainty is important: the narrative shows the operation working without specifying every link in the chain. Conesa knows what has happened to the body and understands that the killing will not be pursued, while the division of responsibility keeps the precise mechanism obscure.

The Anonymous Dead and Dictatorial Impunity

The body reaches the former Eastern Cemetery, now La Almudena, at about seven in the evening. A cemetery employee assigns it to the team that buries undocumented people in a mass grave. The novel describes the decade’s unidentified dead as repeatedly attributed to the same vague cause, cardiorespiratory arrest, without further explanation. Here, however, the corpse still has the bullet wound in its neck. The graveyard workers notice the discrepancy even as the official description renders it meaningless.

The men first have to remove the corpse from the body bag so it can be returned; the foreman remarks that such equipment costs money. One gravedigger proposes taking the victim’s new-looking coat, on the reasoning that the dead man will not need it and will feel no cold. Another agrees and says he will hide it in his locker before they gamble for it at cards. This small act of theft completes the body’s reduction to disposable material: the official system has erased the murder, while the workers convert one of the dead man’s last possessions into a prize.

Conesa’s episode makes visible a distinction between recognizing violence and acting against it. He reads the wound correctly, sees that the death was an execution, and suspects the killer belongs to the very institutions expected to investigate the crime. Yet that knowledge leads him to contain the case, not expose it. The superior’s reliance on his judgment and promise to take care of the paperwork make personal initiative part of a larger apparatus of concealment. The closing reflection—that nothing makes police work easier than a good dictatorship—turns the routine of the case into its bitterest conclusion: the regime does not merely tolerate the disappearance of evidence; its hierarchy and procedures make that disappearance convenient.