Alice Names Carolo Bocanegra as an Investigative Suspect

Alice Gould’s decision to name Carolo Bocanegra as a suspect begins with a small contradiction: although he appears not to speak, he can communicate in writing, and his oilcloth notebook bears notes in different colors. Alice treats that combination as a lead in her investigation of the criminal letters sent to her client, Raimundo García del Olmo. The notebook earns Carolo a place on her first suspect list, but the evidence presented here does not establish that he wrote the letters.

The Encounter in the Dining Room

Alice asks what a mutist is, and Ignacio Urquieta answers that mutists are people who do not speak. Astonished, Alice then asks Carolo whether he is unable to speak. Rather than answer aloud, he takes the oilcloth notebook he always carries in his pocket and writes that he can speak but does not wish to. His written response exposes a distinction that matters to Alice’s observation: silence is not the same as inability.

Alice opens her eyes wide, yet restrains herself from either laughing or commenting. Her reaction is notable because the answer invites both; instead, she keeps watching. Carolo’s notebook is not merely a means of communication. Its pages are marked with notes in different colors, a concrete detail that catches her attention amid the many things she observes in the dining room.

From Anomaly to Suspicion

Alice interprets the notebook’s colored notes as reason to investigate Carolo. She gives him the nickname “the false mute” and includes him on an initial list of suspects, considering him as a possible author of the criminal letters addressed to Raimundo García del Olmo. The sequence is precise: she first tests the claim that Carolo cannot speak, then sees that he chooses not to speak, and finally notices the marked notebook. Her suspicion grows from observation rather than from a confession or a demonstrated connection to the letters.

That distinction limits what the episode proves. Carolo’s written reply confirms that he can speak; it does not reveal why he prefers silence, what the colored notes contain, or whether he sent the letters. Alice’s action is therefore an investigative classification, not a solved accusation. The label “false mute” captures the discrepancy she has noticed, while the notebook supplies the unresolved material clue.

The Investigation Beyond the First List

The suspect list is explicitly an initial one. Later, while explaining her investigation, Alice says that she asked the director for the records of some residents and needed to learn which had permission to leave the hospital on the dates when García del Olmo was murdered. She had only an opportunity to see one of the files she wanted when the police commissioner requested that it be brought to his office. This account shows the broader kind of information she sought as the inquiry developed; it does not, in the available evidence, confirm or dismiss Carolo’s place on the list.

In a separate part of her later explanation, Alice reasons from the knife wounds on two victims and describes how someone speaking Basque lured them into the basement with a promise of a secret passage, then returned with a knife instead of a lantern. She also says that once she recognized Remo as the dead man, she suspected who the killer was. These details belong to her wider work of reconstructing deaths through physical evidence and opportunity; they do not identify Carolo as the person responsible for the letters or connect him to those killings.

Significance and Limits

Carolo’s nomination gives the investigation an early, tangible lead: a pocket notebook whose colored markings Alice notices even while attending to the crowded dining room. The scene also establishes her method in miniature. She does not take apparent mutism at face value, asks a direct question, and converts an unusual object into a testable suspicion. Yet the evidence leaves the lead open. Carolo’s silence is voluntary, his notebook is marked, and Alice names him as a possible letter writer; no further conclusion about his guilt follows from this episode alone.