Berasategui’s Death in Prison begins as an apparent medical event and becomes a murder-adjacent investigation into assistance, concealment, and the dead man’s control over his final image. Found in his cell at Pamplona prison, Berasategui appears untouched and almost ceremonially arranged. Amaia Salazar rejects the initial impression of natural death: the evidence eventually indicates that he took a powerful tranquilizer himself, but that a prison worker helped make the act possible.

Discovery and the apparent natural death

Amaia learns of the death in the morning, when Inspector Iriarte calls to report that Berasategui has been found dead in his cell at Pamplona prison. The prison director is waiting at the entrance, visibly agitated, and offers to take the investigators to his office. Amaia declines the detour and asks to see the body immediately. A prison officer leads them through successive security checkpoints to the isolation area, where a guard stands outside Berasategui’s heavy cell door.

The director explains that the prison doctor has found no sign of violence. Berasategui was isolated at the judge’s request and had spoken to no one since the previous day. A prison officer noticed that he was motionless and raised the alarm; only the prison doctor and director had entered before the investigators were called. The director therefore believes the death may have been natural. The cell offers little to suggest a struggle: it is clean, orderly, and stripped of personal belongings. Berasategui lies fully dressed, shoes on, on a bed whose covers are stretched taut. His hands are crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, and his face relaxed. His perfume still lingers in the cell, while the precision of his posture makes him look less like a man who has simply died than a body arranged for viewing.

The physical appearance complicates the natural-death explanation. Berasategui was thirty-six, fit, and had a gym at home; as a doctor, Amaia reasons, he would likely have recognized signs of serious illness. The prison doctor notes that the apparent signs point toward heart failure and that the body shows no defensive injuries, petechiae, or visible suffering. Fermín Montes observes that there is nothing in the cell with which Berasategui could have injured himself. These findings explain why the first assessment leans toward a quiet death, but they do not satisfy Amaia.

A death staged as an image

Amaia reads the bed and body as a deliberately composed scene. Berasategui lies at the exact center of the bunk; his clothes are smooth, his shoes remain on and clean, and his hands have been placed where they would be seen. To her, the arrangement is consistent with his vanity and narcissism: he would not allow others to discover him in a humiliating or undignified state. His apparent serenity is therefore not proof of a natural death but part of the problem to be explained.

Jonan Etxaide points out that suicide does not ordinarily fit a narcissistic personality. Amaia accepts the contradiction rather than resolving it too quickly. Suicide seems at odds with Berasategui’s self-regard, yet the deliberate presentation of his body also seems precisely like something such a man might control. She concludes that he lay down and died, but insists that he must have had help. Her inference shifts the investigation from how he arranged himself to how the means of death reached a sealed, monitored cell.

A closer examination supplies another detail beneath the polished appearance. Under a flashlight, Amaia notices pale tracks on Berasategui’s tanned skin, running through the emerging lines beside his eyes. Forensic Doctor San Martín identifies them as tears. The pillow is darker with moisture, and Amaia interprets the traces as evidence that Berasategui cried extensively while lying there: his self-pity, in her reading, did not cancel his decision to die. The wet pillow makes the scene less like an effortless, peaceful passing and more like a final act accompanied by grief and self-absorption.

Forensic evidence and the method

The initial inspection cannot settle the cause, so the autopsy provides the next turn in the reconstruction. When Amaia and Jonan arrive, Forensic Doctor San Martín is working among a room crowded with medical students and is already weighing the internal organs. Toxicology has revealed an excessive quantity of a very potent tranquilizer. San Martín has identified its active ingredient but is not yet prepared to name the product. Because Berasategui was a psychiatrist and a doctor, he would have known which tranquilizer to use and in what quantity.

The examination also suggests how he took it. Such drugs are commonly injected, but tiny abrasions along the sides of the tongue point to oral ingestion. Amaia inspects the small blisters through a magnifying glass as San Martín draws out the tongue with flat forceps. She notices a sweet, acidic odor. San Martín finds remnants of the medication in the stomach and infers that Berasategui reduced his intake of food and water to accelerate absorption; contact between the liquid and the mucous membrane had also prompted a considerable production of stomach acid. San Martín proposes opening the stomach, trachea, and esophagus to examine the effects of the fluid, but Amaia must return to Elizondo. She asks him to communicate the product’s brand once it is established, explaining that its source could clarify both how it was obtained and who helped deliver it.

The prison worker and the investigation

Security footage turns Amaia’s suspicion of outside assistance into a specific lead. It shows a prison worker approaching Berasategui’s cell and slipping something through the hatch. The object cannot be made out in the image, but investigators believe it may have been what Berasategui used to kill himself. By the time the footage is reviewed, the worker’s shift has ended and he cannot be found at home; the patrol sent there fails to locate him. The possibility that he has fled becomes part of the investigation even before the drug’s precise product has been identified.

Amaia later explains the inquiry’s progress to Markina. The missing worker was not one of the officers who had accompanied Berasategui during Amaia’s earlier meeting with him; those personnel had already been suspended. The worker lived with his parents, who allowed investigators to search his room. They found nothing incriminating there apart from a plastic bag from a pharmacy far from his home. That purchase seemed suspicious. When shown the worker’s photograph, the pharmacist remembered him because he had requested an unusual tranquilizer in ampoules. The prescription and medical registration number appeared valid—the registration had not yet been cancelled—so the pharmacist had been obliged to dispense the drug.

The recording shows the worker remaining by the cell door for about a minute. Investigators suspect that he waited for Berasategui to drink the vial’s contents, then took the ampoule away to dispose of it. The worker is placed under search, and investigators check the homes of his relatives without finding him. France or Portugal are suggested as possible destinations, not confirmed locations. The evidence thus distinguishes Berasategui’s own act from the assistance that enabled it: he administered the poison, while another person obtained and brought it into the prison, waited outside the cell, and apparently removed the container.

The event’s significance lies in that unresolved boundary between choice and complicity. The immaculate bed, the crossed hands, the tears, and the hidden vial each alter the meaning of the same death: what first looked natural becomes a controlled suicide, and what looked solitary proves to have depended on another person’s intervention. Amaia’s attention to the staged body exposes the concealment, while the autopsy and pharmacy trail give her intuition a material basis. The worker’s disappearance leaves the practical details of the assistance unfinished, but the investigation has already established that Berasategui did not die through a simple, unassisted collapse.