Amelia can only bring one aboard each night

Previously: Serafín Mardones, head of service, warned Olalla that if a passenger turns up on the 803 on the 31st, she is the one who answers for it.

Eight nights left. Olalla Berruezo, conductor of the 803, got to Ribadeña station at a quarter past ten with four stapled sheets folded in her uniform pocket, and did not take them out until twenty past one in the morning.

They were a photocopy of the 1998 list: eighty-seven names written by hand, each with its trade and its village beside it. Casilda Trigo, stationmaster of Ribadeña, had run it off for her on Thursday on the office machine, with one eye on the corridor.

"I have given you nothing," Casilda said. "That has been sitting in an archive for twenty-eight years and anyone can ask for it."

"And has anyone asked for it?"

"In twenty-eight years, one person. Amelia Sanchís. In March."

At 23:40 the 803 pulled out with its lights on and not a single traveller aboard. At 00:11 Fermín Aizpún, the driver who retires in eight days, braked at kilometre point thirty-one point two and opened door one without anyone having asked him to.

Two got on. Amelia Sanchís, retired schoolteacher from Ribadeña, in her navy coat, and behind her a short man of about eighty, in a cloth cap and carrying a canvas bag.

"Aquilino Zubeldia," he said. "Knife grinder. Forty-one years with the wheel and the bicycle all over this district."

"Señor Zubeldia, this train does not carry passengers."

"So I hear. She has told me three times." He took a thin card out of his inside pocket. "Ribadeña to Puente Alcor, single, the fourteenth of November 1998. Unpunched."

Olalla did not punch it. She sat him in row nine, walked back the way she had come and stood in front of Amelia with the punch in her hand, exactly as she had the night before.

"Señora Sanchís, tonight 'ask me another day' will not do."

"I know."

"You have eighty-five tickets left and eight nights. One a night gets you to eight. You are seventy-seven people over and not one day spare. And you can count better than I can, since you were a schoolteacher for forty years. Tell me why you bring them to me one at a time."

Amelia unbuttoned her coat slowly, like someone settling in for a while.

"Because I do not know where they live."

"What do you mean, you do not know?"

"Look at the list." Amelia pointed at the four sheets in the pocket, which Olalla had not yet admitted to carrying. "Yes, I know you have it. I asked for it myself in March and they let me look at it for twenty minutes. Name, trade and village. That is everything on it. Not a street, not a number, not a telephone. In 1998 there was no need: I went house by house and I knew where every house was."

"And now you do not."

"Now Riofrío has been under the water for twenty-eight years and those people are scattered." Amelia counted on her fingers, like someone setting out a division on a blackboard. "Villaseca, Corrales, Puente Alcor, two in Bilbao, one in Alicante with her daughter. Out of the eighty-seven, in March I knew where three of them lived."

"Three."

"Puri Berruezo, your mother, who is still in the same house. Rosario Vidán, who used to cut my hair. And Amadeo Sanz, who does not count, because he runs the post office and I see him every day."

Olalla looked towards row nine. Aquilino Zubeldia had taken off his cap and was holding it on his knees, watching the window with the face of a man going somewhere.

"And him?"

"Rosario gave me him the night before last, sitting where you are sitting now, before she got off at Sotoclaro. She said: 'Aquilino the grinder lives over the bar in Ermua, you go in round the back.' Yesterday morning I went to Ermua, knocked at the back door, he opened it in his vest, it took me two hours to explain, and tonight he is here. And before he gets off he is going to tell me where the next one is."

"That is why one a night."

"That is why one a night. Every one who gets on is the only person who knows where the next one is. There is no other list, Berruezo. They are the list."

Olalla sat down. It was the first time she had done that in eleven years with the train moving.

"Eight nights, eight people."

"Nine, with me."

"That is no good to me." She ran a hand over her face. "Mardones reads me the door log every night at three fourteen. On the 31st there is a ceremony: the subdelegate is coming and so is a photographer they are paying for. If nine people turn up on that platform on the 31st, I am the one who signs the file, and you are in the photograph."

"I know that, love."

"So?"

"You are the only one on this train with a company telephone, a computer and a key to the archive. I have a borrowed bicycle and eighty-five tickets."

At 2:40, shortly before Ermua del Río, Aquilino Zubeldia got up from row nine and came down the aisle holding on to the seat backs.

"Sanchís. I have been thinking about it all night and it is two, not one."

"Two?"

"The Berrocal sisters. They sewed for the dam company store. They both signed and they both live in the same house in Corrales, the one with the vine." He stood there thinking. "Lived."

"And which of the two do I bring?"

"Both of them, woman. If one gets on and the other finds out that nobody told her, do not ever speak to me again as long as you live."

Amelia wrote "Berrocal, Corrales, the one with the vine" in the margin of an envelope. Olalla, who was a metre and a half away and said nothing, wrote it down too, on hers.

Fermín eased off at Ermua del Río and Aquilino Zubeldia got off with his canvas bag. Olalla finally took out the four sheets, unfolded them on the little table, switched on the reading lamp and went down them with a pencil in her hand, counting how many surnames meant something to her.

She counted fourteen.

And on sheet three, on line sixty-one, she found the only thing in four pages that was not a name written by hand in black ink: a name struck out in blue biro, in a single stroke, pressed so hard that it had marked the sheet underneath and left nothing readable below it.

It was the only crossing-out of the eighty-seven.

"Señora Sanchís. Who struck this one out?"

Amelia did not get up to look. She answered from her seat, without raising her voice, and it seemed to Olalla that it was the first time in five nights that the woman had said something without having thought it out first.

"I did."