Madrid

Madrid enters the investigation as both a point on a criminal evidence trail and the destination of Amaia Salazar’s pursuit of Markina’s past. The city is not developed as a setting in its own right; its significance lies in what the investigation and the characters connect to it.

The Firearm’s Madrid Connection

Ballistics linked the two recovered bullets to the same pistol used six years earlier to kill a nightclub doorman in Madrid. The weapon was associated with Eastern European mafias, found at that earlier crime scene, and later reported missing from a Madrid court’s evidence store. A small fire at the courthouse had damaged or destroyed some exhibits, and the pistol was among the items subsequently found to be missing. The result extended the inquiry beyond its immediate cases while raising questions about how a weapon held as evidence could disappear.

Amaia’s Journey

Madrid also becomes the destination of Amaia’s personal investigation into Markina. During an angry telephone exchange, Markina accused her of fleeing there to dig into his past. His accusation frames the journey as part of a wider pattern: he compares her reluctance to discuss her own mother with his decision to tell others that his mother had died when he was a child. Amaia recognizes the force of the comparison, having concealed her mother’s institutionalization and allowed people around her to assume she was dead.

Narrative Significance

These two references give Madrid distinct roles in the story. The ballistic connection makes the city part of a material chain of evidence, from an earlier murder to the disappearance of a pistol from judicial custody. Amaia’s journey, by contrast, belongs to the intimate conflict surrounding what she is willing to uncover and what she has kept hidden. In both cases, Madrid marks an outward extension of the investigation: one follows an object beyond the local cases, while the other follows a character beyond the boundaries of her own past.