Alicia Suspects a Plot and Plans Her Escape

Alice Gould’s deduction that she has been deliberately trapped transforms her confinement into a second mystery: not only what crime she was meant to investigate, but who needed her kept inside the asylum. She considers escape, but first tries to identify the motive and the people with the power to hold her there. Her reasoning ultimately points to her client, Raimundo García del Olmo, and to the director, Samuel Alvar, while leaving her uncertain about the deeper purpose of the scheme.

Confinement as the Immediate Fact

The straitjacket does not occupy Alice Gould’s thoughts as a personal humiliation. Even with her hands crossed in her lap and the long sleeves tied behind her, she could have endured the restraint for hours without changing her central conviction: she was being held against her will, by force and outside the law. The distinction matters. Her attention fixes not on the indignity of her present condition but on the mechanism that has made departure impossible.

After crossing the Central Hall for the Forsaken, Alice Gould passes into the park on a visiting day, when patients walk with friends and relatives. The sight of visitors makes escape imaginable, but does not make this a suitable moment to attempt it. The thought returns persistently, then recedes; she decides she will have other opportunities to plan. She knows that money held in the hospital offices could provide enough to get away and contact Heliodoro Almenara, but she sets that practical problem aside. For now, she must decide how to deal with the doctors and other patients, and discover why she has been confined.

Turning Motive into a Test

Alice Gould withdraws toward the walls, avoiding the part of the grounds where El Gnomo attacked her. Patients favor the garden and sports areas; the quieter stretch near the wall is mostly used by those who avoid social contact and by melancholic patients. Seated apart from the others, she fixates on the word motive as if it were a nail boring into her mind. The scene turns her isolation into an improvised workspace: she tries to give the unknown captor’s possible benefit a structure she can examine.

She divides that benefit into two broad possibilities. Someone might gain positively from her confinement through interest or revenge; alternatively, the confinement might prevent her from reaching a particular goal. Revenge remains plausible because, in her profession, she has harmed people, many of them blackmailers and fraudsters. She does not dismiss the possibility that one of them might retaliate. But the idea that she has been stopped from uncovering a crime catches her attention more strongly: whoever feared her investigation need not be right about what she would find, only convinced that she might find it.

That hypothesis imposes a further test. A person who feared her inquiries would also need the power to arrange her confinement. Alice Gould narrows the possibilities to three: Heliodoro Almenara, her husband; Raimundo García del Olmo, her client; and Samuel Alvar, the hospital director. She begins assessing them rather than treating suspicion as proof. Her preliminary reasoning discounts Heliodoro Almenara: although she is wealthier, he can obtain what he needs and earns enough to maintain a high standard of living. She also recalls that he did not collaborate in her confinement; she herself deceived him in order to enter the hospital.

The Admission Papers as a Trap

The most consequential inconsistency lies in the way Raimundo García del Olmo arranged her entry. He wanted her inside the hospital to investigate a matter for him, yet the investigation could apparently have been pursued after a voluntary admission. In that version, Alice Gould could have entered as a paying patient under observation and, if the doctors found her healthy, been told to leave after fifteen days. The procedure would have allowed her to conduct the inquiry without making her departure difficult.

Instead, her admission was involuntary. That choice required the complications of a medical opinion, a signature legalized by an authority, and a husband’s application for her internment; the documents were falsified. Alice Gould sees no obvious advantage in taking those risks if the same investigative access could have been obtained through a voluntary admission. The contradiction becomes a clue: the method of entry was not incidental to the plan. By choosing the more complicated procedure, someone ensured that she could not simply leave when she wished.

Her conclusion is stark. Raimundo García del Olmo was, in her reasoning, the material author of the abduction, with Samuel Alvar’s complicity and her own unwitting, reckless assistance. The promised criminal inquiry had served as bait, drawing her into a trap built from the very admission formalities that should have been administrative preliminaries. She believes she has identified who arranged her confinement, but not why; the reasons behind Raimundo García del Olmo’s role remain beyond her knowledge.

Escape Deferred, Investigation Continued

Although the deduction sharpens her sense of danger, it does not immediately produce an escape attempt. She weighs the possibility repeatedly and judges that the present moment is unsuitable. Even the question of reaching the money in the hospital offices can wait. Her priorities remain the cause of her detention and the stance she should take toward the people around her. Escape is a continuing intention, not yet an action.

The investigative purpose that brought her in nevertheless persists. In a later account, Alice Gould explains that she asked Samuel Alvar for records of selected patients so she could determine who had been permitted to leave the hospital on the dates when Raimundo García del Olmo’s father was murdered. She had access to only one file relevant to her inquiry, and that opportunity came when the commissioner requested it for the office. Her effort to establish movements through records gives concrete form to the goal she had feared someone wanted to frustrate.

Her later reasoning also draws on details of the deaths. The two ETA prisoners were found with their throats cut by a knife. Alice Gould explains that someone who spoke Basque stopped them, offered help, and led them into the labyrinth of basement rooms with the promise of a secret passage through the old monastery walls; the promised guide returned with a knife rather than a lantern. When she recognized that the dead man was Remo, she says, she suspected who the killer was. Asked whether she had witnessed everything she described, she does not answer directly. The account therefore shows both the force of her investigative inference and a limit the scene leaves unresolved: the reader hears her reconstruction, but not a straightforward claim that she saw the killing.

The Reversal in Her Position

The episode reverses Alice Gould’s initial understanding of her admission. She had entered believing that the hospital was the means by which she could pursue a client’s case; now she sees its procedures as the means by which someone can prevent her from leaving. Her own deception of Heliodoro Almenara helped her get inside, but the involuntary paperwork made that entry a confinement. The bait and the trap are joined in a single arrangement.

That recognition does not settle whether every suspicion is correct, nor does it reveal the hidden reason behind Raimundo García del Olmo’s actions. It does, however, give Alice Gould a working model: identify who benefits, determine who has the authority to act, and test the model against concrete inconsistencies. Her private analysis and later casework share this method. The walls that first mark the limit of her freedom become the place where she organizes an investigation—one directed at the murders, and another at the machinery that has kept her inside.