Consuelo Ibarguren

Consuelo Ibarguren is 41 and has spent nine of those years on the road with Club Cibeles. Born in Bilbao, the daughter of a shipyard accountant, she learned to type before she learned to dance. She joined the club at 32, to type contracts, and today knows each player's shirt and shoe number. She says she has never lost a paper of the delegation, and it's true.

In Madrid, she shares an old apartment with an aunt, near the Gran Vía: three rooms, a long hallway, hydraulic tile floors, a sideboard with a tea set and a window onto the inner courtyard, where the neighbors hang laundry. She keeps everything in order with a rigor her aunt calls exhausting. Every paper has its folder, every folder its drawer. On trips, she carries an almost empty case, because she learned to travel light.

She is of medium height, with an oval, serious face, brown eyes with dark circles and dark hair in a firm bun, held by a tortoiseshell pin. She wears a rumpled gray linen suit, a white blouse buttoned to the neck, small pearl earrings and a folder of papers pressed to her chest. Efficient, dry, she talks like someone filling out a form and doesn't tolerate disorder. She doesn't smile easily, but those who know her say her laugh, when it comes, is the most candid in the club.

About the center forward, she says on Friday he was tired and in a bad mood, as always before a match. He dined early, complained about the heat and went up at 9, asking that no one wake him before 9 a.m. About the night concierge, she recalls that he is a Republican exile, that he speaks of Franco as if spitting, and that at 5:50 he let two strangers go up. She asks the detective to draw his own conclusions. Asked where she spent Friday night, she answers at the hotel, where else, and asks him to change his tone.

It could be the dryness of an exemplary employee, offended by the disorder the crime brought to the club. It could be the rigidity of someone who has more than one paper outside the folder. The detective will have to decide which.