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example of his erudition, of how he knew all about the scientific progress of humanity. Then one day he discovered that people found what he was saying more amusing than troubling, and so he turned it into one of his main sources of tips. On this occasion, Carvalho slipped five hundred pesetas into the bootblack’s waistcoat pocket. Bromuro lifted his head to show his surprise.
    ‘Lots of dough involved?’
    ‘Enough.’
    ‘You don’t usually hand out five hundred pesetas like they were a glass of water.’
    ‘If you think it’s too much, you can give it back.’
    ‘No, I’ll see you tomorrow, OK, Pepe?’
    He picked up his box and walked away down the central passageway of the restaurant, peering to left and right at the customers’ feet as though he were mushroom hunting. Carvalho left the money for the meal on the saucer and went out. He could not immediately remember where he had left the car the night before, but felt intuitively it must have been farther up the Rambla. He walked up the centre of the avenue, stopping here and there at newspaper kiosks and bookstalls, picking up envelopes with plant seeds in them, wondering about the fate of the birds and small monkeys in their cages. But the Rambla was quickly filling up with afternoon crowds, so Carvalho made his way under the hanging sign at the entrance to the Boqueria Market. Hewanted to eat well that night. He needed to be cooking while he mulled over the problem of the dead body in the solitude of his own home, and knew that the best way to end the day was with a good meal. He bought fresh monk fish and hake, a handful of clams and mussels, a few prawns. The white, treasure-filled plastic bags dangled from his hands as the market came to life again for the afternoon. A lot of the stalls were shut, and buying food this late in the day made it feel as though he were entering a different time zone, a strange ambience filled with almost total silence, disturbed only by the sounds of buying and selling.
    Strolling aimlessly around the market was one of the few ways that this tall, dark-haired man in his thirties, who somehow contrived to look slightly dishevelled despite wearing expensive suits from tailors in the smartest part of town, allowed himself some spiritual relaxation whenever he left Charo’s neighbourhood and headed back to his lair on the slopes of the mountain overlooking Barcelona.

 
    T o reach Carvalho’s house you had to go up along a wide dirt road that wound between old, over-ornate villas, their white walls stained grey by rain over a period of fifty years. The house fronts were brightened up by a scattering of green or blue tiles, while clumps of bougainvillea or morning glory hung over their garden fences. Carvalho’s villa was not of the same pedigree. It had not been built when Vallvidrera was in its heyday, but during its second wave of popularity, when some of those who had made fortunes on the black market after the war had retired to the mountainside for the splendid view it gave them of the scene of their splendid achievements. They were small-time crooks who had got rich through small-time black-marketeering. People who saved their money and who still had the pre-war nostalgia for a house and a garden in the suburbs, if possible with a vegetable patch for their lettuces, potatoes and tomatoes, fascinating hobbies for those with free weekends and paid holidays.
    Carvalho had rented a small villa built vaguely in the modernist style popular between the wars. The architects had obviously designed a starkly functional building, but the client must have wanted ‘a bit more colour’, or ‘something to soften it’, so they had allowed him a few courses of red bricks which looked like the gaps between teeth up on the cornices, and stuck some yellow tiles on the front, whichhad once been ochre but now after thirty years had acquired a greenish tinge.
    Carvalho took the mail out of the box and walked across the bare garden with its