Rosario Cifuentes

Rosario Cifuentes is 36 and the typist and archivist at the Naval Command of Huelva. Born in Seville, the daughter of a notary's clerk, she studied typing at a convent school and married at 24 a Navy lieutenant who died a year ago. Since then she has lived off her job, wears the closed black of mourning and speaks softly, as if afraid the walls are listening.

She lives in a small two-room apartment on the second floor of a tiled building, with black lace curtains, an iron bed, a walnut wardrobe and a prayer niche with a candle always lit. She eats lunch at the kitchen table, washes her clothes by hand and visits her sister on Saturdays. The neighbors describe her as a model widow: she never receives visitors, never makes noise, never pays the rent late.

She is slender, with an oval, pale face, dark attentive eyes and black hair in a low bun held with pins. She wears a black mourning dress closed to the neck, black stockings, a small silver crucifix on her chest and fingers stained by typewriter ribbon ink. She is discreet, precise, chooses her words carefully and keeps an expression on her face that gives nothing away.

About the Naval Command, her account is routine: she types the case files, files the mail and the porter's book and develops the photos of the harbor maps, and this job has supported her since her husband died. On Friday, at 1 p.m., she saw the lieutenant lock the briefcase in the safe, and together they signed a strip pasted on the door. The commander has been in Seville since Thursday.

Rosario knows the employee who handles the archive, the photos and the key to the lab is one of the few people with the means to open a sealed briefcase. When the detective says she photographed the English letters, her pale face flushes, she recalls that she is an officer's widow and claims the right not to be insinuated against. It could be the dignity of a woman in mourning treated as a defendant. It could be someone protecting a more intimate secret. The detective will have to decide which.