Driss robs the Bloodworths and murders Angela

Driss robs the Bloodworths and murders Angela in an episode where domestic familiarity gives way to calculated violence. The crime follows a period in which Driss and Angela have shared work and conversation, but it is also shaped by the Bloodworths’ financial difficulty and Driss’s desire for money. Recounted by Driss to Ismael, the episode presents the robbery not as a sudden accident but as a decision that hardens through a sequence of justifications, threats, and consequences.

Circumstances and Prior Intimacy

After Roger Bloodworth leaves for England to raise money from his family, Driss tells Ismael about a day he spent working with Angela in the garden. Together they had made a new bed of sunflowers. Driss describes her manner as brisk but tender, and says that, without her husband present, she seemed freer with him. After the work, they went inside, where Angela served Earl Grey tea and raisin scones. Their shared activity and private conversation make the later crime a betrayal of an established, if unequal, familiarity.

Angela tells Driss that the business is not doing as well as hoped and that fewer tourists are visiting the marina at Sotogrande. Roger has gone to England to raise additional funds, but Angela explains that the money will take months to arrive. Driss asks whether Roger will return with a great deal of money. Her answer establishes the immediate circumstances: the household is under financial pressure, and the expected funds are not available now. Driss’s response to Ismael makes clear that he sees the delay as a moment to act rather than a reason to wait.

From Inquiry to Robbery

Driss begins by asking Angela about the safe, saying that he has watched Roger open it and cannot work out how it works. The question initially takes the form of curiosity, but he then states that he needs the money inside. Angela tells him that the safe contains only two thousand euros and challenges whether that sum is worth taking. For Driss, it is enough. The shift from asking about the mechanism to declaring his intention turns their conversation into a confrontation.

Driss’s account describes him approaching Angela and trying to control the situation. When she resists, he searches a kitchen drawer and takes a serrated bread knife, using it to threaten her into revealing the safe’s combination. Angela gives him the numbers, which he memorizes. The threat is not merely a means of opening the safe: it marks the point at which their prior relationship is subordinated to Driss’s pursuit of money. He casts Angela in his thoughts as an unbeliever who will not give him what he wants, replacing the particular woman with a category that makes his aggression easier to justify.

Murder and Immediate Aftermath

Taking the money does not resolve Driss’s predicament. He realizes that he has no real plan for what to do next. It is already night; he cannot simply leave without considering how Angela might summon the police, and he imagines himself being hunted by people he labels infidels. His own account thus places fear of discovery and his concern about escape directly after the robbery. Rather than retreating from the crime, he considers killing Angela as a way to remove the obstacle he believes she represents.

Driss kills her, then lets go of the knife, cleans it in the sink, and returns it to the drawer. The house becomes quiet, with birds calling in the olive grove outside. These details mark the contrast between the ordinary domestic setting and the irreversible violence that has taken place there. Driss’s narration registers a feeling of elation after the killing, but the surrounding circumstances expose the hollowness of any sense of control: he has gained the cash and eliminated the immediate witness, yet he still has to leave and avoid capture.

Flight and Narrative Significance

Driss leaves with a bag containing cash and clothes and makes his way to the road near San Martín. He returns to the gas station where he had begun, among trucks and cars carrying immigrant families who have recently arrived by ferry. Because many of them are heading to Paris, he offers to pay their fuel in exchange for a place in a car. A young family with a grocery store in Marx Dormoy takes him. His flight therefore moves from a crime committed inside the Bloodworths’ home to a calculated effort to blend into a route already being taken by other travelers.

The episode is framed as Driss’s account to Ismael, not as a detached report by an outside witness. That framing makes his explanations part of the evidence: he repeatedly treats necessity, religious difference, and the prospect of pursuit as reasons that make his choices seem inevitable, while the sequence he recounts shows that he asks about the safe, takes its money, and then kills Angela. The difference between his rationalizations and his actions gives the event its moral force. A garden, tea, and conversation had briefly suggested trust; the safe becomes the focus of a planned theft, and the journey toward Paris begins with a murder that Driss must leave behind but cannot undo.