Prologue — The Station

He had been at the station since seven. Mornings like this were the shape of most of his mornings now: a hurt pride, a car with a scratched door, a neighbour and another neighbour and the wall between them. In his division, calls that began with someone has been killed came perhaps twice a year. He had heard one last November and he had heard nothing since. He took that as the correct proportion of things. He was not a young man anymore. He preferred his mornings like this, boring and a little overheated, the radiator ticking against the wall, the desk clock clicking once per second, the coffee dying unnoticed next to his wrist.

The door to the waiting room opened.

The woman who walked in was dressed as if she were about to be photographed. South-American looking — and the detective caught himself thinking the phrase and then, immediately and not for the first time, reminded himself of its uselessness. His mother had come from Argentina in a suitcase with a second pair of shoes and she had spent the rest of her life being misidentified by men exactly like him. He tried not to be his mother's mistake.

So: a woman, early thirties, tall in heels she carried well, her hair done, her face done, her nails a red that would show up on a photograph in a magazine and would not show up on a photograph in a police report. A lawyer at her elbow. A folder the lawyer was holding with both hands, as if the folder were a child.

They came to the counter. The detective stood up. The lawyer produced a card and a smile. The woman produced nothing. She looked around the room exactly once.

"Good morning, inspector," the lawyer said.

"Detective," the detective said.

"Forgive me. Detective."

The woman nodded at him. It was a nod with which people tell you, quickly, that you are beneath the work you are about to do for them. The detective, for whom this was a new thing to observe on a quiet morning, observed it.

They set the folder on the counter between them. The lawyer opened it. The paper was good paper. The documents were already filled in — not in the lawyer's clean hand but typewritten, printed, stamped. The detective began to thumb the top sheet while the lawyer spoke.

"We'd like to file a denuncia," the lawyer said. "We've prepared everything. To save your time."

The detective, against himself, smiled. It was a small smile, and it was a genuinely grateful smile. Most of the people who came to him on a morning like this were in shock, or in tears, or in a rage so small and jagged that it took forty minutes of form-filling just to get their address right. A lawyer with a pre-filled folder was not his favourite kind of morning — those were still the mornings with no one walking through the door at all — but it was a workable morning. It was the kind of morning in which a man might finish a report by lunch and go and find another coffee and listen to the radio for an hour.

He began to take the documents off the top of the stack.

He stopped at the third.

"These are all separate complaints," he said.

"Yes," the lawyer said.

"Against the same party?"

"In part."

The detective nodded slowly and did not look up. The stack had been, at first glance, one thick file. It was six thin ones. Possibly seven. There was a document from a notary — he saw the seal — then another document from a notary, then a third, which was from a different notary in a different city, apostilled, not the kind of thing a person filed because they had gone to the first lawyer they could find. The detective, in his head, began to revise the rest of his morning.

"Take a seat," he said. "This will take a while."

"We have time," the lawyer said.

"I don't doubt it," the detective said.

He was smiling again, but this time the smile was for himself, and a little bit for the woman in the red nails, who had still not spoken.

He started on the forms.

It took him almost two hours — two hours in which the coffee, which he would not finish, continued to do the opposite of cool, which was to become, with patience, unrecognisable as coffee. In that time he learned that the woman's name was Maribel Matos Mendoza; that she was a director and majority shareholder of a Madrid-registered robotics company whose name he had never heard of and would not remember that afternoon; that she had come to file complaints relating to the conduct of several persons, some of whom were also directors of that company; that she was represented in this matter by the lawyer whose card he now had in his pocket; that the lawyer had, in addition to the documents in the folder, a list of further documents that would be arriving from a second notary by courier within the hour; and that she had a meeting that afternoon with the head of the financial crimes unit upstairs, which was very considerate of her to mention, because it meant he knew how long to take.

When they left, the detective watched them through the glass.

They went out onto the street and did not hurry. The lawyer opened the passenger door of a car the detective could not have afforded in six years and held it for her. She got in. The lawyer closed the door with the particular gentleness of a man who wanted to be seen closing it. He walked around to his side and got in.

They did not drive off.

For perhaps a minute, the car did not move. The detective could see the shapes of them inside it: his head turning toward her, her head turning toward him.

The lawyer leaned over and kissed her.

They stayed there for another moment, quiet, settled, like two people who had been working the same piece of ground for a long time. Then the lawyer sat back. She took a tablet out of the bag at her feet. She pulled up a document. They began to review something together, as if the next meeting had already begun.

The detective turned away from the window.

He went back to his desk. He stacked the folders. He put the radio on low. He took a sip of the cold coffee by accident and put the cup down again.

Everyone, he thought, and did not yet know why he was thinking it, was about to find out who Maribel Matos Mendoza was.