Chapter 36

Before dawn, David Martín, restless and angry, decides to ignore Valera’s warning and rides a tram to Sarriá. He senses he is being followed but sees no one. Reaching Casa Marlasca, he forces entry through the conservatory when no one answers his knocking.

Inside, dust and silence dominate. On the ground floor’s mosaic hall beneath a glass mural of a white angel, David notices parallel tracks in the dust with large footprints between them, deducing a wheelchair recently pushed through the house.

Exploring the first floor, David checks bedrooms that seem long unused, except the master room, which bears photographs of the fair-haired boy Ismael with his mother; Diego Marlasca is absent from the images. A banging door draws him to a dazzling all-white child’s room that feels funerary rather than playful.

There David detects a sickly sweet stench, finds a black candle, and a crucifix broken in three. He discovers a tin box beneath the bed containing a white dove pierced through the heart, which intensifies his fear.

Fleeing toward the conservatory, David hears malicious laughter and glimpses a dark figure holding a knife at the end of the corridor. He forces open the door, falls by the stagnant pool, and—briefly illuminated by sunlight—spots a wheelchair on the pool floor and the drowned body of Marlasca’s widow in a threadbare white dress.

As the light fades, David sees the intruder behind him and escapes through the garden to the street, leaving Casa Marlasca hidden once more, the mystery deepened by evidence of ritual traces, the wheelchair’s path, and the widow’s apparent murder.