The nine envelopes all carry the same postmark

Previously: Cebrones has 212 registered voters and the ballot box came out tied at 87. At ten past eight, nine more envelopes arrived, off the list.

At nine in the morning on the 29th there were 198 electoral roll entries still unverified and five days to do it in. Lorena Prieto Bada, town clerk and comptroller, had already signed off the first fourteen without getting out of her chair: the two candidates, the three polling station officials, the two scrutineers and the seven neighbours who had signed the incident book the night before. Fourteen people with a name, a face, a time and a signature. Two hundred and twelve minus fourteen, one hundred and ninety-eight.

The judge's order had come by email at a quarter past eight, and it was short. Nieves Arbeloa, of the court of first instance in the district town, ordered three things: that the nine envelopes from the second mail sack be kept in custody unopened, that the clerk certify, voter by voter, which of the two hundred and twelve on the electoral roll appear as residents on the Cebrones municipal register, and that the file be at the court on 3 December, the day she would sign the declaration of the result. What the judge was asking her for was not to clean up the electoral roll — the roll is kept by the Electoral Roll Office and the town hall only sends it data — but to certify the other half of the comparison: who is on the Cebrones municipal register and who is not.

The nine envelopes were in the town hall safe, a nineteen-seventies box set into the office wall that only shuts if you give it a knock with your knee. Lorena took them out, laid them on the formica table and lined them up in three rows of three, flaps upward, without touching the seal on any of them.

Casiano Nuez, retired schoolmaster and president of the polling station, had turned up at five to nine because he had not slept.

"Can I look?"

"Look, yes. Touch, no."

Casiano put on his reading glasses and leaned over the first row with his hands behind his back, the way people look at fish in a fishmonger's.

The first thing Lorena wrote down had nothing to do with the envelopes. It was a sum. They had left in her tray the municipal register certificate she had asked for by telephone the night before, on her way out of the school: Cebrones, 198 inhabitants as at 1 January, signed by her in March. It was the wrong piece of paper and she knew it: the roll for this election closed with the August register, not with January's. She asked for the August figure before going on. It was one hundred and ninety-eight as well. The same number she had left to verify that morning, by pure coincidence, and she noted it in the margin because it amused her and because it meant nothing.

What did mean something was the other subtraction. Two hundred and twelve voters on the roll. One hundred and ninety-eight residents on the register. Fourteen names of difference. Lorena wrote the three numbers on a sheet of squared paper, one under the other, in the block capitals she uses for figures, and circled the fourteen.

Fourteen was also the number of entries she had closed that morning. The two sums are written the same way and have nothing to do with each other: one lot are neighbours she had put a face, a time and a signature to; the others are names the roll has over and above.

"Casiano, how many people live in Cebrones?"

"The ones you can see. A hundred and something."

"The register says one hundred and ninety-eight. The electoral roll says two hundred and twelve."

Casiano stayed a moment with his eyes on the table, doing a sum that was already done.

"Fourteen."

"Fourteen."

"That's nobody's mistake," he said. "That's somebody who hasn't deregistered."

It could be. That office works with the data the town hall sends it, and if somebody moves and does not say so, their name takes a while to drop off the lists. What it did not explain was why there were fourteen cases at once in a place where everybody knows which house each person sleeps in.

Lorena put that sheet aside, slid it into a new folder and wrote on the tab: ROLL / REGISTER. Then she went back to the envelopes, which were the urgent thing.

A postal vote envelope carries on the outside the voter's name, their municipality and the polling station, and it carries the postmark of the office where it was handed in, with the date. All of that can be read without opening anything. Lorena read the nine out loud while Casiano wrote them down in his schoolmaster's notebook, the one with oilcloth covers, because he said that way he had a copy of his own and two copies have never done anybody any harm.

The nine names were from Cebrones. All nine were on the roll of two hundred and twelve. And not one of the nine was on the polling station's postal vote list, the list of the nine that Casiano had read out the night before and that were already inside the ballot box.

"Eighteen," said Casiano. "Eighteen postal envelopes in a village where last year there were three."

Lorena rang the district post office at twenty past ten. Jacinta Bel, the office manager, picked up; she has been behind the same counter for twenty-odd years and she understood the question before Lorena had finished asking it.

"The postmark doesn't say where the person is from. It says where the item was handed in."

"So if I have nine envelopes with the same postmark…"

"Then all nine went in through the same place. Not necessarily on the same day or by the same hand, mind. But the place is the place."

Jacinta also explained the business of the sub-offices. A postal vote envelope has to go registered, she said, and a registered item is not dropped in a postbox: it is handed over at a counter, and the counter puts its date stamp on it and sticks a numbered label on it. In the district there are three offices and five service points that open two mornings a week, and each one has its own date stamp. With the label numbers, she added, she could tell her the day and the time of each one. Lorena wrote down the names of the three and of the five service points.

"And another thing people get muddled about," said Jacinta. "The envelope and the application are two different pieces of paper. The envelope arrives at the polling station and you have it in your hand. The application is submitted beforehand, and that one stays at the roll office."

It was the first time anybody had said out loud to Lorena that there were two pieces of paper and not one. She underlined it twice.

Between eleven and one she verified eleven entries, and that is how she learned what the week was going to cost her. Verifying an entry is not looking at a screen: it is taking down the register volume, finding the sheet for the dwelling, checking that the name and both surnames match the electoral roll letter by letter, and then telephoning to find out whether that person still sleeps in that house. With Eulogia Herrero Carbajo, 79, 14 Calle del Pozo, it took four minutes: she answered the phone herself and said she was putting on a load of washing. With the next one, a lad of twenty-three who appears at his parents' address, it took twenty: she found him on the third attempt, on an afternoon shift at a factory in Miranda, and he told her himself that he votes in Cebrones because he is still registered there and because it tickles him to vote where he went to school.

Eleven entries in two hours, and in those two hours she had also dealt with a candidate at the door. She had one hundred and eighty-seven entries left, what remained of that day and four whole days.

At half past eleven, in the middle of that count, Teodoro Sanz had turned up, owner of the gravel pit by the river and one of the two tied candidates, without his jacket this time and with his hair wet from the rain. He did not ask about the result. He asked for the names.

"I can't give them to you," said Lorena.

"They're my neighbours."

"They're nine voters and the judge's order says custody. When there's a file, you'll see it the way everybody else sees it."

Teodoro looked at the formica table, the three rows of three, and stood still for longer than was necessary. Then he asked for something else.

"Then put it in the file with my name on it. Let it be on the record that I was the one who asked, and let the date be on the record too."

"That, yes."

He left without slamming the door, which in Teodoro is a lot. Herminia Olmedo, the district vet and the other candidate, rang at one o'clock, as she was finishing a caesarean in Quintana, and asked for exactly the opposite: that nothing be opened, that what had been counted be counted, and that if it had to go to a draw, it should go to a draw.

At twenty past one she rang the provincial electoral roll office. She got a recorded message giving an email address and warning that requests for documentation are dealt with within a maximum of ten working days. Lorena hung up, looked at the town hall wall calendar — one from a feed merchant, with half a cow on it — and counted on her finger what she had left until 3 December. That day and four more. Ten is more than five in whatever order you put them.

She wrote the email anyway, at twenty to two, asking for a copy of the postal vote applications for Cebrones in this election, and sent it copying the court so that the time would be on the record.

At a quarter to two Lorena sat down in front of the nine again, with the office empty of everybody except Casiano. She took the magnifying glass from the stamp drawer, the kind for reading old minutes, and went through the stamps one by one, writing on the squared sheet the date, the number on the registered item label and the text of the outer ring.

The first, the one for Carnicero Vallejo, Hortensia: 27 November. The second, the one for Quemada Fradejas, Eladio: 27 November. The third, the fourth, the fifth. All nine with the same date and the same stamp. Lorena took out the sheet where she had written down what Jacinta dictated to her — the three offices and the five service points in the district — and started crossing out: not the district town, not Quintana, not one of the eight. That name was not on the list.

Lorena put the magnifying glass down on the table and read the name in the ring out loud, because Casiano had stayed all morning and was still there, with his oilcloth notebook open.

"Val de Sanz."

Casiano closed the notebook with his finger inside, on the page.

"There's no village at Val de Sanz, Lorena. At Val de Sanz there's an old people's home, a bar that opens in summer and a dozen shuttered houses."