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Previously: the laboratory found benzopyrene in Celso Larrauri's crust, and Paulino Garisoain asked to see the February 2024 firewood invoice.
Eight schools and ten days: that was what Celso Larrauri, master baker, had left on the morning of Monday the 18th. The ninth went at a quarter to seven, on the landline, before he had taken out the second batch.
"Celso, it's Olvido."
"Olvido. How are you."
"Badly. Listen, don't bring the bread down this morning."
Olvido Zarranz runs the kitchen at the Sagrado Corazón, the biggest of the eleven, seven hundred children, and she has bought a hundred and sixty loaves and three hundred rolls from Celso every day for twenty years.
"Until when?"
"Until you've got the paper."
"The inspection is on the twenty-eighth."
"Then call me when you've got the paper signed, not when it's fixed." Olvido had the noise of crates behind her. "Celso, I didn't decide this. Yesterday afternoon the head sent me a message with the name of the contaminant in capital letters. I can't even read it out."
"And who sent it to her?"
"An email from a company in Berriozar offering to supply us as of tomorrow."
"Panificadora Duero."
"That one."
"Olvido, the bread I've brought you these two weeks comes from the batch at the back, the one that doesn't touch what it shouldn't touch. The ones on the mouth side I set aside myself every day."
"I believe you. But I can't put bread I believe in on a school table. I have to put bread somebody signs for."
Celso hung up, took the chalk from the edge of the wall, by the wood store, where he writes the temperature of every batch of the week, rubbed out with his thumb the nine he had written on Friday and put an eight.
Eulogio Satrústegui, dough man, fifty-two years old and thirty-three of them in this house, was weighing out the roll dough two metres from there and did not look up.
At half past eleven, when he got back from the deliveries, Izaskun Larrauri, twenty-nine, the bakery's office manager and his daughter, had the computer open and a blank sheet in the printer.
"Aita, the undertaking for Tránsito. It's four lines and it has to carry a date."
"Put down whatever has to go on it."
"I can't put down whatever has to go on it. It has to say what you're fixing and by when. If I write 'the oven floor', Tránsito asks me what about the oven floor. If I write a date that isn't the date, we have it in writing and signed by you."
"Put: row one of the oven floor, the joint at the mouth, before the twenty-eighth."
"Did Paulino tell you that, or did you decide it?"
Celso took off his apron and left it on the marble counter, next to the two loaves still standing on edge there since Tuesday the fifth.
"Print it like that. I'll sign it and you send it. And if something has to change on Thursday, it changes and I tell Tránsito myself, with my mouth."
Izaskun printed it, he signed it, she scanned it and sent it at six minutes past twelve. At nine minutes past twelve the reply came: two words, received, thanks. Nothing else. Izaskun turned the screen round so her father could see it, and what her father saw was that there was not one question in it.
"And with the Sagrado Corazón we lose one child in five off the round," she said.
"I know."
"All right." Izaskun picked up the copy of the undertaking. "I'll take this down to the files and call the Erreniega, because the May rolls are ordered this week and Milagros won't be the one to call."
When the door downstairs closed, Celso took the van and drove to his house, four hundred metres away, and came back at twenty to one with a brown internal-mail envelope closed with an elastic band, which he did not take out of the cab until Paulino arrived.
Paulino Garisoain arrived at twenty past one. Eighty-one years old, thirty-one of them as the fireman of this very oven. He came on foot and without his knee pad.
"Have you got it?"
"I've got it."
"Inside, there's a wind out here."
They went into the office. Celso took the band off the envelope and put what was inside on the table: the firewood delivery notes and invoices going back to 2019, held together with a clothes peg.
Paulino went through them without reading them, looking for the year.
"February twenty-four."
"It's the one at the bottom."
Paulino pulled it out, held it up to the window light and brought it to half an arm's length, which is where he reads.
"Maderas y Palés del Arga, limited company, Noáin industrial estate."
Eulogio Satrústegui was in the office doorway with the scraper in his hand, clean, and he had been there long enough to have heard the name.
"I signed that one," he said.
"I know. He told me on Friday," said Celso.
Paulino did not look up from the paper.
"And on Saturday, in front of your daughter, you didn't correct me, knowing it since Friday."
"On Saturday I didn't know what the paper said."
"On Saturday you knew what you burn." Paulino went back to the line. "'Twenty thousand kilos of pallet offcuts for combustion. Thirty-eight euros a tonne. Seven hundred and sixty euros.'"
Nobody said anything. Outside, Monday's flour lorry turned round in the yard.
Paulino looked for January's, from that same year.
"January's was beech. A hundred and fifty-eight euros a tonne." He laid the two of them side by side on the table and smoothed them with his open hand. "Twenty tonnes of beech is three thousand one hundred and sixty euros. Twenty tonnes of this is seven hundred and sixty. Two thousand four hundred euros a year, Celso. That's what you've been saving yourself for two years and one month."
"Two thousand four hundred euros is what it costs to keep Eulogio for a month."
"I didn't ask you what for. I asked you how much." Paulino finally sat down. "Now I'll tell you what you've been burning, which is what I came to say on Thursday. A pallet isn't wood. A pallet is wood with glue, with staples, with varnish and with resinous pine, and half the pallets sold for burning are treated. That doesn't burn like beech: it burns colder and it burns dirtier, and what it gives off goes up the flues and gets into your chamber through the one joint that is open, which is the one at the mouth."
"You laid that joint in seventy-four."
"I laid that joint in seventy-four and we'll talk about that another day, because you're right and it's on me. But with beech that joint gave you nothing, because the air went inwards and nothing came out of there; I told you that on Thursday. What the laboratory took out of your bread isn't put there by the joint. It's put there by the wood."
"And what do I sign on the twenty-eighth, then?"
"Wait, you've still got the part that really hurts coming." Paulino put his finger on the product line. "Burning treated pallet in a food oven isn't frowned upon. It's waste wood. It's banned before anybody looks at your crust. Which means the three point one is the consequence, but the offence was signed in February two years ago."
Celso picked up the clothes peg and went through the papers one after another, slowly, looking only at the bottom right-hand corner.
Every beech delivery note, from the 2019 one to January's two years ago, carried his signature. The first one that said for combustion carried another, in the small upright hand of a man who has been signing delivery notes for thirty-three years: E. Satrústegui, third of February two thousand and twenty-four.