The order to burn the orchards was signed by her uncle

Previously: Elsa Trigo, a beekeeper, inherited 96 hives from her uncle Ovidio. Eleven hold boxes of seed from a pear tree declared extinct in 1994.

Seventy-one hives are still unchecked and Elsa has not gone up the hill. At ten past nine she is at the door of the county farming office, on the ground floor of a brick building with two windows and a scratched perspex sign.

Inside it smells of cold paper. Pura Escanciano, an archive clerk here since 1989, has a mug on the counter and does not move it when Elsa leans in.

"I've come to see the plant health files from ninety-four."

"That's the reading room, and the reading room closes at two. Name, and what for?"

"Elsa Trigo. Beekeeper. To find out what was burned in Sorbeda."

Pura looks at her over the mug and stops writing.

"Trigo, from Sorbeda." She stands up. "Plant health files are public after twenty-five years, so you may read them. Annexes with private individuals' names are not photocopied. If you want a copy, written request and a month's wait."

"They're taking my hives away on the thirtieth."

"Then read fast."

The reading room is a long table with two lamps, and the file arrives in a cardboard box tied with cotton tape. On the lid, in marker: PLANT HEALTH 94/117 — ERWINIA. Pura sets it down with both hands, the way you set down something heavier than it looks.

"Fire blight," she says. "A bacterium that dries out pear and apple trees from the inside and jumps from tree to tree with water and with bees. That summer there was no cure and there still isn't: you pull it up and you burn it. That is all anyone can do."

The order is on the first page, with the provincial service stamp and the date: 11 July 1994. Two dry paragraphs. The parish of Sorbeda and the four villages along the river are declared an infected zone. The uprooting and on-site burning of all host plant material within five hundred metres of each outbreak is ordered.

Annex II is the list. Eighty orchards, one per line, with the owner's name, the plot, the number of trees and the variety. Elsa runs her finger down the margin: pears, apples, the odd quince. Names she knows from the bar and from the cemetery. On line forty-one she reads, typewritten with a correction inked in above it: winter pear of Sorbeda, fourteen trees, upper Sorbeda plot.

It is the variety in box number 1. The one Amaro Cid, the county vet, told her yesterday had been declared extinct.

Annex III is a single sheet and it is the one that stays inside her. It is headed certificate of destruction. Below it, a table with three columns: orchard, date of burning, plant material removed before burning. The third column is filled in from top to bottom with the same word eighty times: none.

"None," Elsa reads out loud.

"That's normal," says Pura. "With fire blight you don't save a graft or a seed. It all goes on the fire the same day it comes out of the ground. If a single bud leaves that place, the whole county gets infected again."

"And if somebody had taken seed, would it be in that column?"

"It would have to be. That column exists for no other reason."

In her bag Elsa has a paper envelope with seven seeds in it and the label of a pear tree that this document swears does not exist. She does not take it out. She looks at the sheet and understands, for the first time since she opened hive twelve, that what she has at home is nobody's oversight: it is the opposite of this document. The variety is alive because somebody wrote none eighty times knowing it was not true.

"Who fills in this sheet?"

"The county plant health officer. He goes orchard by orchard, checks the burning has been done and signs. Without his signature the province doesn't close the file and doesn't pay the compensation."

Pura turns the box and pulls out the last sheet, the one with the signatures. There are three. The head of the provincial service, a scrawl. The mayor of the day, with a wide flourish. And at the bottom, in the county officer's slot, two words in cramped handwriting, the same cramped handwriting as the labels on the envelopes: Ovidio Trigo.

Elsa keeps her hand on the paper longer than it takes to read it.

"How many of those eighty orchards did he sign off in person?"

Pura runs her index finger down the margin of Annex III, counting under her breath, and stops at the last line.

"All eighty. All approved by him, and all on the same day."