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On the night table, between the two boys’ beds, lay the comics they’d read before falling asleep. He touched the small lamp. It was cold. He didn’t let them read for more than half an hour, but they would wait for their parents to fall asleep and then continue. Once, he discovered that they had covered up the slit under the door with clothing so that the line of light in the hallway wouldn’t give them away. He scolded them, of course; but inside he was proud that they had turned out clever. But even if they’d been stupid, the important thing was that they were there. Alive. Breathing.
    And coughing. Daniel had been coughing for several days.
    ‘A cold,’ the doctor had said.
    It was normal with the chilly, damp weather.
    ‘Chicken soup.’
    And, to Daniel’s delight, two days off school.
    Daniel. Dani. Daniel.
    Had it been a mistake to give him the same name as his son who’d died?
    His first Daniel had died in 1937, at eight years old. A superstitious fear made him believe that this one, the second Daniel, would only be safe once he had passed that age. He was still six months away. Six months of anguish, of trembling every time he coughed or got a bump. His wife wouldn’t understand his fears, which was why he hadn’t told her about them. She didn’t know, and Isidro hoped she never would, what it was like to lose a child. He also knew what losing your wife felt like.
    ‘They died in the war.’
    If anyone asked, that was all the explanation he gave.
    He had lost his first wife in Galicia. After the war he went to Barcelona, where he had married Araceli, a woman from Navarra who worked as a salesgirl in the El Siglo department store, in 1941. She was twenty-four years old; he was pushing forty. Araceli had fallen pregnant; when they married, she was already three months along. It was a boy, named Cristóbal after her father, although when she was seven months pregnant a woman from the neighbourhood had predicted, based on the shape of her belly, that it would be a girl.
    ‘If so, we’ll name her Régula,’ said Isidro when he heard the news.
    That was the name of his first wife.
    ‘No,’ Araceli had protested. ‘Not that! How can we give her a dead woman’s name?’
    It was the first and last time Isidro raised a hand to her. Seeing his threat, she protected her bulging belly with her left hand and used her right to grab his looming wrist.
    ‘I’m not one of the thieves and murderers you deal with at the police station. I’m your wife.’
    She didn’t have to say it twice. He never again mentioned the name of his first wife, and she didn’t seem to remember that the lost boy, who gave his name to their second son, was also called Daniel.
    That 29 April, Isidro’s sleep-deprived ill humour was exacerbated by the prospect of having to investigate the new case with someone looking over his shoulder, a journalist. Isidro had been at the police headquarters on Vía Layetana since seven and had already had an interrogation, two dressing-downs of subordinates, a wrangle with a typewriter and now, to top it all off, the conversation with Goyanes.
    ‘And from
La Vanguardia
, no less?’
    Isidro didn’t understand it. The newspaper’s treatment of the investigation into the murder of the high-class prostitute Carmen Broto in 1949 had raised hackles in police circles. Articles in
La Vanguardia
had questioned the police version, giving rise to all sorts of speculation about the important people who might have an interest in seeing that woman dead. The rumours about illustrious men among Broto’s ‘friends’ hadn’t bothered them as much as the insinuation, albeit very discreet, that the police investigation wasn’t being carried out as zealously as it should be. Gil Llamas, head of the CIB, went into a fit of rage that was still vivid in Isidro’s mind, one of those that could give you a stroke.
    ‘But weren’t we at loggerheads with
La Vanguardia
?’ he replied, although he didn’t usually