The 1998 folder holds eighty-seven signatures

Previously: the 803 makes twelve runs with no passengers and the track comes up on the 31st. Amelia and Puri boarded with unpunched 1998 tickets.

Ten nights left. Olalla Berruezo, conductor on the 803 for eleven years, reached Ribadeña station at six in the afternoon, five hours before her shift, already in uniform so that it would not look like a personal visit.

Casilda Trigo, stationmaster at Ribadeña, was pulling down the shutter of the ticket window.

—I'm not selling —she said without turning round—. I haven't been selling since Monday. It's on the sign, it's on the website and I have explained it eleven times this week.

—I'm not here to buy. I'm here about 1998.

The shutter stopped halfway.

Casilda was fifty-nine and had a theory about archives: that a badly filed piece of paper is a lost piece of paper, and that the whole district had been lost that way. She raised the shutter all the way, opened the side door and switched on the strip light in the back room, where there were four metal filing cabinets and a calendar from a sausage factory stopped in March 2014.

—Nineteen ninety-eight of what.

—The last train. The November one.

—That wasn't the last one —said Casilda—. They announced it as the last one and then they reprieved it. It ran again in January, and for another twenty-seven years after that.

—I know. I'm asking about what people did when they thought it was.

It took her seven minutes to find it. The folder was blue card, with an elastic band that snapped at a touch, and inside there were three things: a map of the line, a circular from the operator and eight stapled sheets ruled by hand.

—Here's what you're looking for, and I still don't know what you're looking for —said Casilda, and laid it on the packing table.

They were signatures. Eighty-seven signatures, numbered by somebody who had written the figures in red ballpoint down the margin, and beside each one a name, a village on the line and a telephone number of nine digits or of six, depending on the age of whoever had signed.

At the head of the first sheet, in a schoolteacher's hand:

"Residents requesting passage on the last 803. Ribadeña to Puente Alcor, 14 November 1998."

—Eighty-seven —said Olalla.

—Eighty-seven —Casilda confirmed—. And eighty-seven tickets were issued, because here's the machine slip. Not one was punched, because the train never left: there was a fault at Corrales and they put on a coach instead. By the next day it wasn't the last of anything, so nobody handed a ticket back and nobody asked for their money.

There it was, the thing Olalla had been chasing for two nights. It was not two loose tickets. It was eighty-seven, and they had been kept somewhere for twenty-eight years.

—And who ended up with them?

—Whoever handed them out, I'd say.

Olalla ran her finger down the red margin, number by number, and stopped at four.

Fermín Aizpún, driver of the 803 and retiring in ten days, put his head round the door of the back room with his flask in his hand, without coming in.

—Berruezo, it's half past seven —he said—. Are you eating today, or do I tell you about it tomorrow?

—Fermín. Did you know a list was signed in ninety-eight?

—I know how to drive a train and I know they're giving me a plaque on Thursday —he said, and went off down the platform with the flask, which was exactly what was expected of him.

Casilda, meanwhile, was doing sums out loud with her pen in the air.

—If Mrs Sanchís has eighty-seven tickets and there are ten nights left, the numbers don't work. Even at nine a night they don't work. And she hasn't been bringing nine: she brought one, and two last night. —She lowered the pen—. That woman can count. She taught school for thirty-one years in Ribadeña. If she's going one at a time, it's because she wants to go one at a time.

—And why would anybody want that?

—Ask her tonight, she gets on at Vallonga.

Olalla did not answer. She was still on number four and had not managed to lift her finger.

—Casilda. Read me number four.

Casilda put on her reading glasses, held the sheet up to the strip light and read out what had been written there, in November 1998, by a woman who sewed on a machine in a ground-floor room on Calle Hospital.

—Number four —she said—. Purificación Berruezo Lastra. Seamstress. Ribadeña.

It was the same handwriting as the name tapes Olalla had worn sewn into the collars of her school smocks.

—Casilda. Who collected these eighty-seven signatures, house by house, in November 1998?