The identification of Xabier Markina as the doctor known as Tabese reveals that the celebrated physician behind a long-running Madrid clinic was Judge Markina’s father. The discovery gives a name and family history to a figure whose medical career had been obscured behind the clinic’s own name, and sends Amaia’s investigation toward his grave in Hondarribia.

The identification

The breakthrough comes when a colleague reports that the Madrid Medical Association has confirmed the existence of a Clínica Tabese in Las Rozas. It operated from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, and its proprietor, publicly known as Doctor Tabese, had been popular among Madrid’s affluent patients. His reputation rested on innovative treatments imported from the United States. The association could not establish exactly when he died, but confirmed that he had withdrawn from public life and settled in Hondarribia after leaving practice.

The apparent absence of a straightforward record is explained by the name itself: Tabese was the name the doctor adopted for his medical work, taken from his clinic, rather than his personal name. The colleague places an enlarged black-and-white photograph before Amaia. When she recognizes the surname Markina, he confirms that Doctor Xabier Markina was Judge Markina’s father. A professional identity that had concealed the man’s name thus resolves into a direct family connection.

A career under an adopted name

The report traces a career whose public identity was built around the clinic. Tabese was not simply an informal nickname: it was the name under which Xabier Markina practiced psychology for years, while the clinic’s treatments and prestige made the name familiar in Madrid society. His later retirement to Hondarribia provides the first clear location for pursuing his final records.

The revelation establishes a significant link, but it does not itself prove that Xabier Markina committed a crime or explain why he adopted the clinic’s name. The available confirmation concerns his professional history, retirement, death, and burial location. The distinction matters: the identity is now established, while the meaning of that identity within Amaia’s wider investigation remains to be tested.

Judge Markina’s family history

The news unsettles Amaia because Judge Markina had already told her that his father worked in medicine. He had described the death of his infant brother when he was twelve: the baby was three weeks old, and Judge Markina remembered seeing his mother attempt to revive him before his father pulled her away. In the aftermath, his mother’s grief and guilt became so overwhelming that she attempted suicide and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. She ceased speaking to her husband and son, and, as Judge Markina recounted it, seemed to forget that they existed. His father, too, later died after his mother’s prolonged decline.

That earlier account makes the newly discovered identity more than a biographical detail. The physician now connected to Clínica Tabese is the same father whose family life Judge Markina had described through the loss of a baby and the devastation that followed. The revelation does not invalidate that testimony; it changes the frame around it, setting the judge’s private history beside his father’s concealed professional name and public reputation.

The search in Hondarribia

After receiving the confirmation, Amaia immediately calls Iriarte, whose team is already close to Hondarribia. She instructs them to proceed discreetly, search the municipal records for Xabier Tabese’s burial, and request both the death certificate and the cemetery burial record. She warns that he may be recorded under either his adopted professional name or his birth name, Xabier Markina.

The identification therefore converts a lead into a concrete investigative task: locate the grave and establish the documentary trail behind the doctor’s death and burial. At this point, the records have not yet been recovered, and the revelation is a turning point rather than a resolution. Its force lies in joining the clinic, the father, and Judge Markina’s family history while leaving the next evidentiary step open.