Fabián shows her the door that keeps no record

Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria is verifying 214 titles before the lorries arrive. Copy 215 is recorded as destroyed in March and is still in the room.

The number on the board is 198. Ainhoa Cortabarria wipes it off with her sleeve every morning and writes the new one underneath; she has been verifying titles for sixteen days and still cannot get used to how slowly the figure falls. One title takes a good forty minutes: check the record, count what is left on the floor, sign for how many copies are surplus. Two hundred and fourteen on the first day. One hundred and ninety-eight this morning.

At twenty past nine Fabián Múgica appeared, a driver from the outer depot, in blue overalls with a ring binder under his arm.

"Remei tells me you've been asking about loans."

Remei Bagué was the floor manager, the one who signed the destruction certificates. In three weeks Ainhoa had learned that everything you asked Remei came back out, two days later, through somebody else's mouth.

"I'm asking about one in particular." She put the book on the trolley. "This one left the building and came back. It has pencil notes dated November 2036. And its loan card has been clean since 1998."

"Well of course it's clean."

"'Of course' is no good to me, Fabián."

He set the binder down beside the book and did not open it.

"Come down with me."

They went down the service stairs to level minus one, where the corridor narrows and smells of wet cardboard. At the end stood a double metal door with a push bar and a faded sticker: LOADING. No card reader. No turnstile. None of the little grey boxes that beep everywhere else in the building when a book crosses unregistered.

"This is the door," said Fabián. "No loan ever goes out this way. Pallets go out this way."

"And who registers the pallets?"

"I do. On paper." He lifted the binder. "When the room runs out of space we ship a load to the outer depot at Sabiñánigo. You fill in a delivery note, you sign for the boxes and off they go. When they come back, another note. The loans program never hears about it, because this isn't a loan, it's an internal transfer. Two different systems, and they haven't spoken to each other since the government bought them."

Ainhoa stood looking at the push bar.

"So a book can spend two years outside this building, come back, and nothing appears on its card."

"It can spend twenty. I've moved crates of twelve hundred kilos with less paperwork than you're asking me for now."

"I'm not asking for paperwork. I'm asking for this one's delivery note."

Fabián snorted and sat down on the step with the binder open across his knees. The notes are filed by year, and within the year by box number, never by title, so they had to work backwards: copy 215 was catalogued in room 2, room 2 was cleared in October 2036 for the false-ceiling works, and that load had gone out as fourteen boxes.

"Fourteen," he said. "And eleven of them wouldn't take a book this thick, because they were children's stock."

It took them twenty minutes. Ainhoa read the numbers out loud and Fabián turned the pages with a wetted thumb. In the third of the three possible boxes there was a line written by hand, in blue ballpoint, in the field the form calls RECEIVED BY, which almost nobody fills in, because the depot stamps it and that is that.

It was not a stamp. It was a name: Casimiro Lete.

Ainhoa said nothing for a few seconds. Then she pointed at the binder.

"The return is missing. If it went out in October '36 and somebody was writing inside it in November, the book had to come back afterwards."

"The return is in the thirty-seven section." Fabián flipped to the next divider and went straight to it. "Here. Ninth of May 2037, when they finished the false ceiling. Twelve boxes back, two stayed there because of damp. I drove that run myself."

"And do you remember it?"

"I remember it was raining and the goods lift was broken. I don't remember a book, Ainhoa. We carried up fourteen thousand."

The return note carried the depot's stamp, blue and crooked, the same as the other two hundred in the binder. Not one letter by hand. Ainhoa compared it with the outgoing note for a good while, and what became clear was not a mystery: it was a piece of plumbing. Copy 215 had left the building on a pallet, had spent seven months eighty kilometres away, and had come back on another pallet. Two delivery notes, two signatures, no loans at all. The card had been clean since 1998 because the book had never touched it.

The only thing in that whole chain that did not belong was two words in ballpoint.

"Who's that?" asked Ainhoa.

"No idea. Three of us sign at the depot and none of us is called that."

Ainhoa wrote the name on the back of her hand, over the ink of the 198. Upstairs, in room 2, the board still read 198 and nobody had verified anything all morning.

"So somebody walked into a state depot, took a book that wasn't his, brought it back two years later with pencil notes in it, and signed it in his own name and his own handwriting. Who is Casimiro Lete, Fabián?"