Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Dolores Redondo 2013

Translation copyright © Isabelle Kaufeler 2015

Dolores Redondo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Originally published in 2013 by Ediciones Destino, Spain, as El guardián invisible

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007525355

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780007525348

Version: 2018-03-16

Praise

‘Forceful and brutal. Don’t miss it’

El Periódico

‘Terrifying’

Sydney Morning Herald

‘Utterly compelling’

Publishing Perspectives

‘One of the biggest literary surprises of recent times’

Mía

‘Man vs the bestiality of crime, ancestral legends vs modern investigation techniques, family traumas vs dark beliefs’

L’Express

‘A landscape thriller. And what a landscape it is’

Page des Libraires

‘A novel about the fear of returning to fear’

La Vanguardia

‘Seductive Spanish magical realism … solid and well-forged language, with surprising and impressive elements and formulations. With a richness and variety rare in its genre’

VG, Norway’s biggest newspaper

‘I was very surprised by it, I really loved it. I strongly recommend it’

María Dueñas, author of The Time in Between

‘Dolores Redondo has broken the traditional mould of the publishing industry’

David Morán, ABC

Dedication

For Eduardo, who asked me to write this book, and for Ricard Domingo, who saw it when it was invisible.

For Rubén and Esther, for making me cry with laughter.

‘Forgetting is an involuntary act. The more you want to leave something behind you, the more it follows you.’

William Jonas Barkley

‘This is no ordinary apple; it’s a magic wishing apple.’

Walt Disney’s Snow White

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

Ainhoa Elizasu was the second victim of the basajaun, although the press were yet to coin that name for him. That came later, when it emerged that animal hairs, scraps of skin and unidentifiable tracks had been found around the bodies, along with evidence of some kind of macabre purification rite. With their torn clothes, their private parts shaved and their upturned hands, the bodies of those girls, almost still children, seemed to have been marked by a malign force, as old as the Earth.

Inspector Amaia Salazar always followed the same routine when she was called to a crime scene in the middle of the night. She would switch off the alarm clock so it wouldn’t disturb James in the morning, pile up her clothes and, with her mobile balanced on top of them, go very slowly downstairs to the kitchen. She would drink a milky coffee while she dressed, leave a note for her husband and get in the car. Then she would drive, her mind blank except for the white noise that always filled her head when she woke up before dawn.

These remnants of an interrupted night of insomnia stayed with her all the way to the crime scene, even though it was over an hour’s drive from Pamplona. She took a curve in the road too sharply and the squealing of the tyres made her realise how distracted she was. After that she made herself pay attention to the motorway as it wound its way upwards, deep into the dense forest surrounding Elizondo. Five minutes later, she pulled over next to a police sign, where she recognised Dr Jorge San Martín’s sports car and Judge Estébanez’s off-roader. Amaia got out, walked round to the back of her car and fished out a pair of wellingtons. She sat on the edge of the boot to pull them on while Deputy Inspector Jonan Etxaide and Inspector Montes joined her.

‘It’s not looking good, chief, the victim’s a young girl,’ Jonan consulted his notes, ‘twelve or thirteen years old. When she didn’t arrive home by eleven last night, her parents contacted the police.’

‘A bit early to report her missing,’ observed Amaia.

‘True. It looks like she rang her older brother on his mobile at about ten past eight to tell him she’d missed the bus from Arizkun.’

‘And her brother waited until eleven before saying anything?’

‘You know how it is, “Aita and Ama will kill me. Please don’t tell them. I’m going to see if any of my friends’ parents will give me a lift.” So he kept quiet and played on his PlayStation. At eleven, when he realised his sister still hadn’t arrived home and his mother was starting to get hysterical, he told them Ainhoa had called. The parents went down to the station in Elizondo and insisted something must have happened to their daughter. She wasn’t answering her mobile and they’d already spoken to all her friends. A patrol found her. The officers spotted her shoes at the side of the road as they were coming round the bend.’ Jonan shone his torch towards the edge of the tarmac where a pair of black patent high heeled shoes glistened, perfectly aligned. Amaia leaned over to look at them.

‘They look like they’ve been arranged like this. Has anyone touched them?’ she asked. Jonan checked his notes again. The young deputy inspector’s efficiency was a god-send in cases as difficult as this one was shaping up to be.

‘No, that’s how they found them, side by side and pointing towards the road.’

‘Tell the crime scene technicians to come and check the lining of the shoes when they’ve finished what they’re doing. Whoever arranged them like that will have had to touch the inside as well as the outside.’

Inspector Montes, who had stood silently staring at the ends of his Italian designer loafers until this point, looked up abruptly as if he had just awoken from a deep sleep.

‘Salazar,’ he acknowledged her in a murmur, then walked off towards the edge of the road without waiting for her. Amaia frowned in bewilderment and turned back to Jonan.

‘What’s up with him?’

‘I don’t know, chief, but we came in the same car from Pamplona and he didn’t open his mouth once. I think he might have had a drink or two.’

Amaia thought so too. Inspector Montes had slipped into a downward spiral since his divorce, and not just in terms of his recent penchant for Italian shoes and colourful ties. He had been particularly distracted during the last few weeks, cold and inscrutable, absorbed in his own little world, almost reluctant to engage with the people around him.

‘Where’s the girl?’

‘By the river. You have to go down that slope,’ said Jonan, pointing towards it apologetically, as if it were somehow his fault that the body was down there.

As Amaia made her way down the incline, worn out of the rock by the river over the millennia, she could see the floodlights and police tape that marked the area where the officers were working in the distance. Judge Estébanez stood to one side, talking in a low voice with the court clerk and shooting sideways glances to where the body lay. Two photographers from the forensics team were moving around it, raining down flashes from every angle, and a technician from the Navarra Institute of Forensic Medicine was kneeling beside it, apparently taking the temperature of the liver.

Amaia was pleased to see that everyone present was respecting the entry point that the first officers on the scene had established. Even so, as always, it seemed to her that there were just too many people. It was almost absurd, and it may have been something to do with her Catholic upbringing, but whenever she had to deal with a corpse, she always felt a pressing need for that sense of intimacy and devotion she experienced in a cemetery. It seemed as though this was violated by the distant and impersonal professional presence of the people moving around the body. It was the sole subject of a murderer’s work of art, but it lay there mute and silenced, its innate horror disregarded.

She went over slowly, observing the place someone had chosen for the death. A beach of rounded grey stones, no doubt carried there by the previous spring’s floods, had formed beside the river, a dry strip about nine metres wide that extended as far as she could see in the gloomy pre-dawn light. A deep wood, which got denser further in, grew right up to the other bank of the river, which was only about four metres wide. Amaia waited for a few seconds while the technician from the forensics team finished taking photographs of the corpse, then she went over to stand at the girl’s feet. As was her custom, she emptied her mind of all thoughts, looked at the body lying beside the river and murmured a brief prayer. Only then did Amaia feel ready to look at the girl’s body as the work of a murderer. A pretty brown colour in life, Ainhoa Elizasu’s eyes now stared into endless space, frozen in an expression of surprise. Her head was tilted back slightly and it was just possible to make out part of the coarse string buried so deep in the flesh of her neck it had almost disappeared. Amaia leant over the body to look at the ligature.

‘It’s not even knotted, the killer just pulled it tight until the girl stopped breathing,’ she said softly, almost to herself.

‘It would take some strength to do that,’ observed Jonan from behind her. ‘Do you think we’re looking for a man?’

‘It seems likely, although the girl’s not that tall, only five foot one or so, and she’s very thin. It could have been a woman.’

Dr San Martín, who’d been chatting with the judge and the court clerk accompanying her until this point, bade her a rather flowery farewell and came over to the body.

‘Inspector Salazar, it’s always a pleasure to see you, even in such circumstances,’ he said jovially.

‘The pleasure’s all mine, Dr San Martín. What do you make of this?’

The pathologist gave Jonan an appraising look, weighing up his youth and likely knowledge, then took the notes offered him by the technician and flicked through them quickly whilst leaning over the body. It was a look Amaia knew well. A few years earlier it was her who’d been the young deputy inspector in need of instruction in the mysteries of death, a pleasure that, as a distinguished professor, San Martín never let pass him by.

‘Don’t be shy, Etxaide, come closer and perhaps you’ll learn something.’

Dr San Martín put on a pair of gloves he’d pulled out of a leather Gladstone bag and gently palpated the girl’s jaw, neck and arms.

‘What do you know about rigor mortis, Etxaide?’

Jonan sighed, then started to speak in a voice similar to the one he must have used when answering the teacher in his school days. ‘Rigor mortis is caused by a chemical change in the muscles. It is evident in the eyelids first and spreads through the chest, trunk and extremities, achieving maximum stiffness after around twelve hours. The body starts relaxing again in reverse order about thirty-six hours later when the muscles start to decompose due to the effects of lactic acid.’

‘Not bad. What else?’ the doctor encouraged him.

‘It’s one of the principal indicators used to estimate the time of death.’

‘And do you think you can make an estimation based solely on the degree of rigor mortis?’

‘Well …’ Jonan hesitated.

‘No,’ declared San Martín, ‘absolutely not. The degree of rigidity can vary according to the deceased’s muscular tone, the temperature of the room or, as in this case, the exterior, since extreme temperatures may give the semblance of rigor mortis, for example if a cadaver’s been exposed to high temperatures, or when a body suffers a cadaveric spasm. Do you know what that is?’

‘I think that’s the term for when the extremities tense at the moment of death in such a way that it would be difficult to relieve them of any item they might have been holding at that precise instant.’

‘Correct, which is why forensic pathologists have to shoulder a great deal of responsibility. They shouldn’t establish the time of death without keeping all these factors in mind, and, of course, you can’t forget hypostasis … you might know it as livor mortis. You must have seen those American series where the forensic pathologist kneels by the body and establishes the time of death in less than two minutes,’ he said, raising an eyebrow theatrically. ‘Well, take it from me, that’s all lies. Analysis of the quantity of potassium present in the vitreous fluid represents a major step forward, but I’ll only be able to establish the time of death with any certainty once the autopsy has been carried out. Now, based purely on what’s in front of me, I can state: thirteen years of age, female. Taking into consideration the temperature of the liver, I would say she’s been dead around two hours. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet,’ he confirmed, palpating the girl’s jaw again.

‘That fits in more or less with the timing of her call home and her parents reporting her missing at the police station. Yes, two hours, if that.’

Amaia waited for him to stand up and then took his place kneeling next to the girl. She didn’t miss Jonan’s look of relief at being released from the forensic pathologist’s scrutiny. The girl’s eyes stared blankly into infinity and her mouth was half open in what looked like surprise, or perhaps a final attempt to inhale, giving her face an air of child-like amazement like a little girl on her birthday. All her clothing seemed to have been slit cleanly down the middle from her neck to her thighs and was pulled open to either side, like a half-unwrapped gift. The gentle breeze coming off the river moved the girl’s fringe a little and Amaia caught the scent of shampoo mixed with the more bitter aroma of tobacco. She wondered whether the girl had been a smoker.

‘She smells of tobacco. Do you know whether she was carrying a bag?’

‘Yes, she was. It hasn’t turned up yet, but I’ve got officers combing the area as far as a kilometre downstream,’ said Inspector Montes, gesturing toward the river with his arm.

‘Ask her friends where they were and who they were with.’

‘I’ll do it first thing in the morning, chief,’ said Jonan, tapping his watch. ‘Her friends will be thirteen-year-old girls, they’ll be asleep right now.’

Amaia observed the girl’s hands lying beside her body. They looked white and unblemished and their palms were turned upwards.

‘Have you noticed how her hands are positioned? They’ve been arranged like that.’

‘I agree,’ said Montes, who was still standing next to Jonan.

‘Get them to photograph and preserve them as soon as possible. She may have tried to defend herself. Her nails and hands look fairly clean, but we might be in luck,’ she said, addressing the officer from Forensics. Dr San Martín bent over the girl again, opposite Amaia.

‘We’ll have to wait for the autopsy, but I’d suggest asphyxiation as the cause of death, and, given the force with which the string’s cut into her skin, I’d say it was very quick. The cuts on the body are superficial and were only intended to slash her clothes. They were made with a very sharp object, a knife, a cutter or a scalpel. I’ll confirm this for you later, but the girl was already dead by this point. There’s barely any blood.’

‘And what about her pubic area?’ interrupted Montes.

‘I think the killer used the same blade to shave off her pubic hair.’

‘Perhaps they wanted to take some away as a trophy, chief,’ suggested Jonan.

‘No, I don’t think so. Look at how they’ve scattered it at the sides of the body,’ observed Amaia, pointing out several small piles of fine hair. ‘It seems more likely they wanted to get rid of it to replace it with this,’ she said, gesturing to a small, sticky, golden cake that had been placed on the girl’s hairless pubic mound.

‘What a bastard. Why do people do that sort of thing? As if it wasn’t enough to kill a young girl without putting that there. What on earth can they be thinking to do something like this?’ exclaimed Jonan in disgust.

‘Well, kid, it’s your job to work out what that swine was thinking,’ said Montes, going over to San Martín.

‘Was she raped?’

‘I don’t believe so, although I won’t know for certain until I examine her more thoroughly. The staging is decidedly sexual … cutting her clothes, leaving her chest exposed to the air, shaving her pubic area … and, of course, the cake … it looks like some kind of cupcake, or …’

‘It’s a txantxigorri,’ Amaia interrupted him. ‘It’s a local speciality made to a traditional recipe, although this one’s smaller than normal. It’s definitely a txantxigorri though. Jonan, get them to bag it, and please,’ said Amaia, addressing the group, ‘don’t mention this to anybody. It’s classified information, at least for now.’

They all nodded.

‘We’re finished here. She’s all yours, San Martín. We’ll see you at the Institute.’

Amaia got up and took one last look at the girl before going up the slope to her car.

2

Inspector Montes had chosen an eye-catching, and doubtless very expensive, violet tie that morning, which stood out against his lilac shirt. The overall effect was elegant, but it did have an incongruous air of Miami Vice about it. The cops who joined them in the lift must have thought the same thing and Amaia didn’t miss the disapproving looks they exchanged as they got out. She glanced at Montes since it was likely he’d noticed too, but he carried on checking the messages on his smartphone, enveloped in a cloud of Armani aftershave and apparently unaware of the effect he was having.

The meeting room door was closed, but before Amaia could even touch the handle it was opened from inside by a uniformed officer, as if he’d been stationed there expressly to await their arrival. He stepped aside, giving them a clear view of a light, spacious conference room and more people than Amaia was expecting. The Commissioner was at the head of the table with two empty spaces to his right. He waved them forward and began the introductions as they moved into the room.

‘Inspector Salazar, Inspector Montes, you already know Inspector Rodríguez from Forensics and Dr San Martín. This is Deputy Inspector Aguirre from Narcotics and Deputy Inspector Zabalza and Inspector Iriarte from the police station in Elizondo. They happened to be out of town when the body was found yesterday.’

Amaia nodded a greeting to those she knew and shook hands with the others.

‘Salazar, Montes, I’ve called you here because I’ve got a suspicion Ainhoa Elizasu’s case is going to be trickier than expected,’ said the Commissioner, taking his seat and gesturing to them to do the same. ‘Inspector Iriarte contacted us this morning to share some information that could be important when we see how the case you’re working on develops.’

Inspector Iriarte leant forwards, putting his enormous aizkolari woodsman’s hands on the table.

‘A month ago, on January 5th to be precise,’ he said, consulting a small black leather-bound notebook that was almost hidden by his hands, ‘a shepherd from Elizondo was taking his sheep to drink at the river when he found the body of a Carla Huarte, a seventeen-year-old girl. She disappeared on New Year’s Eve after going to the Crash Test night club in Elizondo with her boyfriend and a group of friends. She left with him at around four in the morning and he returned alone about three quarters of an hour later. He told a friend they’d had a fight and she’d become so angry she’d got out of the car and stormed off. The friend convinced him to go and look for her and they went back an hour later but they couldn’t find any trace of her. They say they weren’t too worried because there were a lot of courting couples and stoners around the area. Furthermore, the girl was very popular so they assumed someone had given her a lift. We found hair belonging to the girl and one of those silicon bra straps in the boyfriend’s car.’

Iriarte paused for breath and looked at Montes and Amaia before continuing.

‘And here’s the bit that might interest you. Carla’s body turned up in an area about two kilometres from where Ainhoa Elizasu was found. She’d been strangled with parcel string and her clothes had been cut open from top to bottom.’

Amaia looked at Montes in alarm.

‘I remember reading about this case in the papers. Had her pubic area been shaved?’ she asked.

Iriarte looked at Deputy Inspector Zabalza, who replied, ‘The truth is, there wasn’t much of it left; her whole pubic mound had been torn away by what looked like animal bites. The autopsy report mentions tooth marks from at least three different types of animal and hairs from a wild boar, a fox, and possibly a bear.’

‘A bear? Are you serious?’ exclaimed Amaia with an incredulous smile.

‘We’re not one hundred per cent sure, we sent moulds of the tooth marks to the Institute for the Study of Pyrenean Plantigrades. Apparently, since bears walk on all fours with flat feet, they fall under their area of expertise. We haven’t heard back from them yet, but …’

‘What about the little cake?’

‘There wasn’t a little cake … well, maybe there was. That would explain the bites around the pubic area, since the animals would have been attracted by such a sweet, unfamiliar smell.’

‘Were there bite marks elsewhere on the body?’

‘No, although there were some hoof and paw prints.’

‘What about pubic hair arranged around the body?’ asked Amaia.

‘We didn’t find that either, but you should keep in mind that Carla Huarte’s body was found in the river, submerged from her ankles to her thighs, and there had been torrential rain in the days following her disappearance. If there was anything, the rain would have washed it away.’

‘Didn’t you remember this case when you examined the girl yesterday?’ Amaia turned to the forensic scientist.

‘Of course,’ agreed San Martín, ‘but it’s not that simple, they’re only similarities. Do you have any idea how many bodies I see in the space of a year? There are common elements in many cases that are entirely unconnected. Anyway, yes, I did think of this case, but I needed to consult my notes from the autopsy before saying anything. In Carla’s case, everything pointed to a sexual assault by her boyfriend. The girl had alcohol and all kinds of drugs in her system, several love bites on her neck and a bite mark on her chest that matched the boyfriend’s dental imprint. We also found suspicious fragments of skin under her nails that matched a deep scratch on his neck.’

‘Did you find traces of semen?’

‘No.’

‘What did the boy have to say for himself? And what’s his name, by the way?’ asked Montes.

‘He’s called Miguel Ángel de Andrés. He told me he’d been drinking and had also taken cocaine and ecstasy, and I’m inclined to believe him,’ Aguirre smiled. ‘We arrested him on the sixth of January, during the Reyes Magos Epiphany celebrations and he was as high as a kite then, too. He tested positive for four different drugs including cocaine.’

‘So where’s this little treasure now?’ asked Amaia.

‘He was refused bail and is on remand in the prison in Pamplona, awaiting trial for sexual assault and murder … He’s got previous drug-related convictions,’ said Aguirre.

‘I think this calls for a trip to the prison to question Miguel Ángel de Andrés again, don’t you? Perhaps he wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t kill the girl.’

‘Could you give us a copy of Carla Huarte’s autopsy report, Dr San Martín?’asked Montes.

‘Of course.’

‘What we’re most interested in are the photos taken at the scene.’

‘I’ll get them to you ASAP.’

‘And it’s probably worth inspecting the girl’s clothes again now we know what to look for,’ added Amaia.

‘Inspector Iriarte and Deputy Inspector Zabalza are leading the investigation at the station in Elizondo,’ intervened the Commissioner. ‘That’s where you’re from originally, isn’t it, Inspector Salazar?’

Amaia nodded.

‘They’ll give you all the help you need,’ said the Commissioner and he got to his feet, bringing the meeting to an end.

3

The boy sitting opposite her was slightly hunched over as if he were carrying a heavy load on his shoulders, his hands were resting loosely on his knees, hundreds of tiny red capillaries showed through the skin of his face, and there were deep, dark circles under his eyes. Nothing like the photo Amaia remembered seeing in the papers a month earlier, in which he was posing defiantly next to his car. There was no trace of his former self-assurance or cocky pose and he looked visibly older. When Amaia and Jonan Etxaide entered the interview room, the boy had been staring at a point in the middle distance from which he found it difficult to return.

‘Hello, Miguel Ángel.’

He didn’t answer. He sighed and looked at them in silence.

‘I’m Inspector Salazar and this,’ she gestured to Jonan, ‘is Deputy Inspector Etxaide. We want to talk to you about Carla Huarte.’

He lifted his head and, as if overwhelmed by immense fatigue, muttered, ‘I have nothing to say, everything I have to tell you is in my statement … There’s nothing to add, it’s the truth, there’s nothing to add, I didn’t kill her and that’s a fact, there’s nothing to add, leave me in peace and talk to my lawyer.’

He hung his head again and focused all his attention on his pale, dry hands.

‘Right,’ said Amaia with a sigh, ‘I can see that we haven’t got off to a good start. Let’s try again. I don’t think you killed Carla.’

Miguel Ángel looked up, surprised this time.

‘I think she was alive when you left the mountain, and I think that someone else approached her later and killed her.’

‘That’s …’ Miguel Ángel stammered, ‘that’s what must have happened.’ Fat tears poured down his face as he started to tremble. ‘Yes, that’s what must have happened, because I didn’t kill her, please believe me, I didn’t kill her.’

‘I believe you,’ said Amaia, sliding a packet of paper tissues across the table towards him. ‘I believe you and I’m going to help you get out of here.’

The boy clasped his hands together as if praying.

‘Please, please,’ he muttered.

‘But first, you have to help me,’ she said, almost sweetly. He dried his tears but was still snivelling as he nodded. ‘Tell me about Carla. What was she like?’

‘Carla was great, she was an amazing girl, really pretty, really outgoing, she had a lot of friends …’

‘How did you meet?’

‘At school. I’d already left and I work … until all this happened I worked with my brother, tarring roofs. It suited me, and it was money in my pocket; it’s a shitty job but it’s well paid. She was still studying; she was repeating a year, though, and wanted to drop out, but her parents insisted and she gave in.’

‘You’ve said she had a lot of friends, do you know whether she was seeing anyone else? Any other boys?’

‘No, no, nothing like that,’ he said, regaining some energy and frowning. ‘She was with me and no one else.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I am. Ask her girlfriends, she was crazy about me.’

‘Did you have sex?’

‘Yes, and it was good,’ he said, smiling.

‘When Carla’s body was found there were marks from your teeth on her chest.’

‘I already explained this at the time. That’s how it was with Carla, she liked it like that and so did I. Alright, we liked rough sex, so what? I never hit her or anything like that, they were just games.’

‘You say that she was the one who liked hard-core sex, however, in your statement,’ Jonan consulted his notes, ‘you said that she didn’t want to have sex that night, and that this made you angry. Something doesn’t add up here, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘It was because of the drugs, one moment she was like a motorbike going full-throttle and the next she came over all paranoid and said she didn’t want to … Of course I got angry, but I didn’t force her and I didn’t kill her, it had happened to us before.’

‘And when it happened before did you make her get out of the car and leave her stranded on the mountainside?’

Miguel Ángel shot him a furious look and swallowed before answering.

‘No, that was the first time, and I didn’t make her get out of the car: she was the one who took to her heels and didn’t want to get back in, even though I asked her to … Eventually I got fed up and left.’

‘She scratched your neck,’ said Amaia.

‘I’ve already told you, she liked it that way; she’d leave my back in shreds sometimes. Our friends can tell you; they saw the bite marks on my shoulders in the summer when we were sunbathing and they had a great laugh about it, calling her a she-wolf.’

‘When was the last time you’d had sex before that night?’

‘Um, probably the day before, whenever we saw each other we ended up fucking. As I said, she was crazy about me.’

Amaia sighed and got to her feet, signalling to the guard.

‘Just one more thing. How did she like to keep her pubic area?’

‘Her pubic area? You mean the hair around her pussy?’

‘Yes, the hair around her pussy,’ said Amaia without blinking. ‘How did she keep it?’

‘She shaved it, she just left a tiny bit,’ he said, barely hiding his smile.

‘Why did she shave it?’

‘I’ve already told you that we both liked that sort of thing. I loved it …’

Miguel Ángel got to his feet as they made their way to the door.

‘Inspector.’ The guard gestured at him to sit down. Amaia turned towards the boy.

‘Tell me, why now and not before?’

The inspector looked at Jonan before replying, considering whether that cocky little shit deserved an explanation or not. She decided that he did.

‘Because another girl has been found murdered and the crime is a bit similar to what happened to Carla.’

‘Well there you go! Don’t you see? When will I get out of here?’

Amaia turned towards the exit before answering. ‘We’ll keep you posted.’

4

Amaia was looking out of the window as the room started to fill up behind her. As she heard the scraping of chairs and the murmur of conversations she put her hands against the glass, pearly with microscopic drops of breath. The cold left no doubt that it was still winter outside and Pamplona looked damp and grey on that February evening as the light fled rapidly towards darkness. The gesture filled her with nostalgia for a summer that was so distant it seemed to belong to another world, a universe of light and warmth where dead girls would never be found abandoned on a river’s icy bank.

Jonan appeared at her side, offering her a cup of milky coffee. She thanked him with a smile and held it in both hands, hoping in vain that the warmth from the cup would transfer to her frozen fingers. She sat down and waited while Montes closed the door and the general murmur abated.

‘Fermín?’ said Amaia, inviting Inspector Montes to start things off.

‘I’ve been to Elizondo to talk to the girls’ parents and the shepherd who found Carla Huarte’s body. Nothing from the parents. Carla’s say that they didn’t like their daughter’s friends, that they went out a lot and got drunk, and they are convinced her boyfriend did it. One important detail: they didn’t report her missing until the fourth of January, bearing in mind that the girl left the house on the thirty-first … Their explanation is that the girl turned eighteen on the first and they thought she’d left home like she’d often threatened to do. It was only after they contacted her friends that they realised she hadn’t been seen for days.

‘Ainhoa Elizasu’s parents are in complete shock and are here in Pamplona at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, waiting for the body to be released once the autopsy’s taken place. The girl was wonderful and they don’t understand how someone could have done this to their daughter. The brother hasn’t been much help either; he blames himself for not having said anything sooner. And her friends from Elizondo say that they were at one of their houses first and then they went for a wander around town. Ainhoa suddenly realised what time it was and had to run; nobody went with her to the bus stop because it was very close to where they were. They don’t remember being approached by anyone suspicious, they didn’t argue with anyone, and Ainhoa didn’t have a boyfriend and nor was she messing around with anyone. The most interesting thing was talking to the shepherd, José Miguel Arakama, who’s a real character. He’s sticking to his initial statement, but the most important thing is something he remembered days later, a detail he didn’t think was important at the time because it didn’t seem to be at all related to the discovery of the body.’

‘Are you going to tell us then?’ interrupted Amaia impatiently.

‘He was telling me that a lot of prostitutes hang around that area and leave it in a real mess, with cigarette butts, empty cans, used condoms and even knickers and bras lying around, when he happened to mention that one day one of them left a pair of brand-new red party shoes there.’

‘The description matches the ones that Carla Huarte was wearing on New Year’s Eve, and they weren’t found with the body,’ pointed out Jonan.

‘And that’s not all. He’s sure that it was New Year’s Day that he saw them; he was working that day and, although he didn’t take the sheep down to drink there, he saw the shoes clearly. In his own words, it looked as if someone had left them like that deliberately, like when you go to bed or for a swim in the river,’ he said, reading from his notes.

‘But didn’t they find Carla’s shoes when her body was discovered?’ asked Amaia, looking at the report.

‘Someone had taken them,’ clarified Jonan.

‘It seems that the killer left the shoes behind on purpose to mark the area, so it wouldn’t have been him,’ said Montes, who considered this idea for a moment and then continued, ‘Other than that, we know both girls were students at the high school in Lekaroz and, even if they knew one another by sight, which is fairly likely, they weren’t close: different ages, different friends … Carla Huarte lived in the Antxaborda neighbourhood. You must know it, Salazar,’ Amaia nodded, ‘and Ainhoa lived in the neighbouring town.’

Montes leant over his notes and Amaia noticed his hair was covered in an oily substance.

‘What have you put in your hair, Montes?’

‘It’s brilliantine,’ he said, running his hand over the back of his neck, ‘they put it on at the barber’s. Can we continue?’

‘Of course.’

‘Right, well there’s not much more at the moment. What have you got?’

‘We’ve been speaking to the boyfriend,’ Amaia replied, ‘and he’s told us some very interesting things, such as his girlfriend liked rough sex with scratching and love bites and stuff. This has been confirmed by Carla’s girlfriends, with whom she liked to share her sex life in explicit detail, explicit being the operative word here. That would explain the scratches and the love bite on her chest. He’s sticking to his earlier statements; the girl was really feeling the effects of the drugs she’d taken and she became literally paranoid. It’s in line with the toxicology report. He also told us that Carla Huarte normally shaved her pubic hair off, which would explain why there was no trace of it at the scene.’

‘Chief, we’ve got the photos of the crime scene where Carla Huarte was found.’

Jonan spread them out on the table and everyone leaned in around Amaia to see them. Carla’s body had turned up in an area where the river tended to flood. Her red party dress and her underwear, which was also red, appeared to have been slashed from her chest down to her groin. The cord with which she’d been strangled wasn’t visible in the photo due to the swelling of her neck. Something semi-transparent was hanging from one of her legs. Amaia initially thought it was skin but then identified it as the remains of Carla’s knickers.

‘She’s quite well preserved given that she spent five days out in the open,’ observed one of the technicians. ‘It must be due to the cold: it didn’t get above six degrees during the day that week and the temperature dropped below zero for several nights.’

‘Look at the position of her hands,’ said Jonan, ‘they’re turned upwards, like Ainhoa Elizasu’s.’

‘For New Year’s Eve, Carla chose a short, red, strappy dress and a white jacket made of some kind of plush fabric which hasn’t been found,’ read Amaia. ‘The murderer tore her clothing from the neckline to the hem, separating the underwear and the two parts of the dress so they lay to either side. An irregular shaped piece of skin and flesh, about ten centimetres square, is missing from the pubic area.’

‘If the murderer left one of those txantxigorris on Carla’s pubic mound, it would explain why the vermin only bit her there.’

‘And why didn’t they bite Ainhoa?’ asked Montes.

‘There wasn’t time,’ replied Dr San Martín as he entered the room. ‘Sorry I’m late, Inspector,’ he said, taking a seat.

‘And fuck the rest of us,’ murmured Montes.

‘Animals come down to drink at first light; unlike the first girl, she was there for barely a couple of hours. I’ve brought the autopsy report and a lot of news. The two girls died exactly the same way, strangled with a cord that was pulled tight with extraordinary force. Neither of them defended themselves. Both girls’ clothes were slashed with a very sharp object that produced superficial cuts on the skin of their chests and abdomens. Ainhoa’s pubic hair was shaved off, probably using the same sharp object, and sprinkled around the body. A small, sweet cake was left on her pubic mound.’

‘A txantxigorri,’ commented Amaia, ‘it’s a typical local delicacy’.

‘No cake of any kind was found on Carla Huarte’s body. However, as you suggested, Inspector, following careful examination of her clothing, we have found traces of sugar and flour similar to those used in the cake found on Ainhoa Elizasu’s body.’

‘It’s possible that the girl ate one for dessert and a few crumbs fell on her dress,’ said Jonan.

‘She didn’t eat any at home, at any rate, I checked,’ said Montes.

‘It’s not enough to link them,’ said Amaia, tossing her biro onto the table.

‘I think we’ve got what you need, Inspector,’ said San Martín, exchanging a knowing look with his assistant.

‘What are you waiting for, Dr San Martín?’ asked Amaia, getting to her feet.

‘For me,’ answered the Commissioner, entering the room, ‘please don’t bother getting up. Dr San Martín, tell them what you told me.’

The pathologist’s assistant attached a comparative analysis graph with various coloured lines and numerical scales to the whiteboard. San Martín stood up and spoke with the confidence of someone who is used to being believed without question.

‘Our tests confirm that the cords used in the two crimes are identical, although this, in itself, is not conclusive. It’s parcel string, which is commonly used on farms, in construction, in the wholesale business … It’s made in Spain and sold in hardware stores and big DIY chain stores like Aki and Leroy Merlin.’ He paused theatrically, smiled and continued, looking first at the Commissioner and then at Amaia. ‘What is conclusive is the fact that the two pieces came consecutively from the same ball,’ he said, showing them two high definition photographs in which two pieces of string of the same size whose ends matched perfectly could be seen. Amaia sat down slowly without taking her eyes off the photos.

‘We’ve got a serial killer,’ she whispered.

A ripple of suppressed excitement spread around the room. The growing murmur ceased immediately when the Commissioner began to speak.

‘Inspector Salazar, you told me you’re from Elizondo, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, sir, my family all live there.’

‘I think your knowledge of the area and certain aspects of the case, together with your training and experience, make you the ideal candidate to lead the investigation. Furthermore, your time in Quantico with the FBI could prove very useful to us right now. It seems we’ve got a serial killer on our hands and you did in depth work with the best in this field during your time there … methods, psychological profiling, background research … In any case, you’re in charge and you’ll receive all the support you need, both here and in Elizondo.’

The Commissioner raised his hand in a farewell gesture and left the room.

‘Congratulations, chief,’ said Jonan, grinning as he shook her hand.

‘My felicitations, Inspector Salazar,’ said San Martín.

Amaia didn’t miss Montes’s expression of disgust as he watched her in silence while the other officers came over to congratulate her. She did her best to escape the slaps on the back.

‘We’ll leave for Elizondo first thing tomorrow, I want to attend Ainhoa Elizasu’s funeral. As you already know, I have family there, so I’ll definitely be staying. The rest of you,’ she said, turning to the team, ‘can drive up each day for the duration of the investigation. It’s only fifty kilometres and the roads are good.’

Montes came over before leaving. ‘I’ve just got one question,’ he said in a markedly scornful tone, ‘will I have to call you chief?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Fermín, this is just temporary and …’

‘Don’t bother, chief, I heard the Commissioner, and you’ll have my full cooperation,’ he said, before giving her a mock military salute and stalking out.

5

Amaia walked slightly distractedly through the old town of Pamplona, making her way towards her house, an old restored building right in the middle of Calle Mercaderes. In the Thirties there had been an umbrella shop on the ground floor and the old sign announcing Izaguirre Umbrellas ‘Hold quality and prestige in your hands’ was still visible. James always said that the main reason he had chosen the house was for the space and light in the workshop, a perfect location to install his sculptor’s studio, but she knew that the thing that had prompted her husband to buy the house in the middle of the bull running course was the same thing that had brought him to Pamplona in the first place. Like thousands of North Americans, he felt an enormous passion for the San Fermín festival, for Hemingway and for this city, a passion that seemed almost childish to her and which he revived each year when the festival arrived. Much to Amaia’s relief, James didn’t take part in the bull running, but every day he would stroll along the eight hundred and fifty metres of the course from Santo Domingo, learning by heart each curve, each stumbling block, each paving stone all the way to the square. She loved the way she would see him smile each year as the festival drew near, the way he would dig his white clothes out of a trunk and would set out to buy a new neckerchief, even though he seemed to have hundreds already. He had been in Pamplona for a couple of years when she met him; he was living in a pretty flat in the city centre at the time and renting a studio to work in very near the town hall. When they decided to get married, James took her to see the house on Calle Mercaderes and she thought it was magnificent, although too big and too expensive. This wasn’t a problem for James, who was already starting to earn a certain prestige in the art world. Furthermore, he came from a wealthy family of state-of-the-art work-wear manufacturers in the United States. They bought the house, James installed his studio in the old workshop and they promised themselves they would fill it with children as soon as Amaia became an inspector on the homicide team.

It was four years since she’d become an inspector, San Fermín came round each year, James became more famous in artistic circles, but the children didn’t arrive. Amaia lifted her hand to her stomach in a subconscious gesture of protection and longing. She quickened her pace until she overtook a group of Romanian immigrants who were arguing in the street and smiled when she saw the light glowing in James’ workshop between the slits in the shutters. She looked at her watch, it was almost half past ten and he was still working. She opened the front door, left her keys on the old table that acted as a sideboard and went to the workshop, passing through what used to be the house’s entrance hall, which still retained its original floor of large round stones and a trapdoor that led to a blind passage where wine or oil had been stored in the old days. James was washing a piece of grey marble in a sink full of soapy water. He smiled when he saw her.

‘Give me a minute to get this great toad out of the water and I’ll be with you.’

He arranged the piece of stone on a rack, covered it with a piece of linen and dried his hands on the white cook’s apron he normally wore to work in.

‘How are you, my love? Tired?’

He wrapped his arms around her and she felt like there were butterflies in her stomach, as she always did when they embraced. She breathed in the scent of his chest through his jersey and waited a moment before replying.

‘I’m not tired, but it’s been a strange day.’

He drew back enough to be able to see her face.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Well, we’re still working on the case of the girl from my town. It turns out that it’s quite similar to another one from a month ago, also in Elizondo, and it’s been established that the cases are related.’

‘Related in what way?’

‘It looks like it’s the same killer.’

‘Oh God, that means there’s an animal out there who kills young girls.’

‘They’re almost still children, James. The thing is, the Commissioner has put me in charge of the investigation.’

‘Congratulations, Inspector,’ he said, kissing her.

‘It hasn’t made everyone all that happy, Montes didn’t take it very well. I think he got quite angry.’

‘Don’t worry about him, you know Fermín: he’s a good man but he’s going through a difficult time right now. He’ll get over it, he admires you.’

‘I’m not sure …’

‘But I am, he admires you. Believe me. Are you hungry?’

‘Have you made something?’

‘Of course, Chef Westford has prepared the house special.’

‘I’m dying to taste it. What is it?’ asked Amaia, smiling.

‘What do you mean what is it? Beggars can’t be choosers! Spaghetti with mushrooms and a bottle of Chivite rosé.’

‘You go and open it while I shower.’

She kissed her husband and headed for the shower. Once beneath the water she closed her eyes and let it run down her face for a while, then rested her hands and her forehead against the tiles, which were cold in contrast, and felt the jet of water stream down her neck and shoulders. The day’s events had followed on from one another in quick succession and she hadn’t yet had the chance to weigh up the consequences the case might have for her career or for her immediate future. A gust of cold air surrounded her as James got into the shower. She stayed where she was, enjoying the warmth of the water, which seemed to carry any coherent thought down the drain with it. James stood behind her and kissed her shoulders very slowly. Amaia tilted her head sideways offering him her neck in a gesture that always made her think of the old Dracula films, in which his naïve and virginal victims surrendering themselves to the vampire, would uncover their necks as far as the shoulder and half close their eyes in the hope of superhuman pleasures. James kissed her neck, pressing his body against hers and turned her as he searched for her mouth. Contact with James’s lips was enough, as always, to banish all other thoughts from her mind. She ran her hands sensuously over her husband’s body, delighting in the feel of him, in the smooth firmness of his flesh, and let him kiss her sweetly.

‘I love you,’ James groaned in her ear.

‘I love you,’ she murmured. And she smiled at the certainty that this was true, that she loved him more than anything, more than anyone, and at how happy it made her to have him between her legs, inside her, and to make love with him. When they finished, this same smile would last for hours, as if a moment with him was enough to exorcise all the world’s ills.

Deep down, Amaia thought that only he could really make her feel like a woman. In her daily professional life she let her feminine side take second place and concentrated solely on doing a good job; but outside work, her height and her slim, sinewy body, together with the rather sober clothes she usually chose, made her feel quite unfeminine when she was around other women, particularly the wives of James’s colleagues, who were shorter and more petite, with their small, smooth hands that had never touched a dead body. She didn’t normally wear jewellery except her wedding ring and some small earrings that James told her were like a little girl’s; her hair in its practical ponytail and the minimal make-up she wore combined to give her a serious and rather masculine appearance which he loved and she cultivated. In addition, Amaia knew that the firmness of her voice and the confidence with which she spoke and moved were enough to intimidate those bitches when they made malicious comments about her delayed motherhood. A subject she found upsetting.

They chatted while they ate and went to bed straight away. She admired James’s ability to disconnect from the day’s troubles and close his eyes as soon as his head hit the pillow. She always took a long time to relax enough to sleep; sometimes she read for hours before she managed it, and she would wake up at even the smallest noise during the night. The year she was promoted to Inspector she used to become so tense and nervous during the day that she would fall exhaustedly into a deep, amnesiac sleep, only to wake up two or three hours later with her back paralysed by a painful spasm that would prevent her from dropping off again. The tension had decreased with time, but she still wasn’t getting very good quality sleep. She used to leave a small lamp on the landing switched on so that its slanting light would reach the bedroom and help her orientate herself when she woke with a start from one of her frequent nightmares. Now she tried in vain to concentrate on the book she was holding. Eventually, exhausted and preoccupied, she let it slip to the floor. She didn’t turn out the light, though, but stared at the ceiling, planning the coming day. Attending the funeral and burial of Ainhoa Elizasu. With crimes like these, the killer often knew his victims, and it was probable that he lived near them and saw them every day. These murderers demonstrated a remarkable audacity. Their self-confidence and morbid tastes would often lead them to collaborate with the investigation, taking part in the search for the missing victims and attending vigils, funerals, and burials, in some cases offering public displays of their sympathy and distress. For the moment they couldn’t be sure of anything, not even the relatives had been ruled out as suspects. But as a starting point it wasn’t bad, it would be useful to get a feel for the situation, to observe reactions, to listen to comments and people’s opinions. And, of course, to see her sisters and her aunt … It hadn’t been long since she’d last seen them, on Christmas Eve, and Flora and Ros had ended up arguing. She sighed deeply.

‘If you don’t stop thinking out loud, you’ll never get to sleep,’ said James drowsily.

‘I’m sorry, darling, did I wake you up?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled, sitting up beside her. ‘But do you want to tell me what’s going on in your head?’

‘You already know I’m going up to Elizondo tomorrow … I’ve been thinking about staying for a few days. I think it would be better to be there, to speak to the families and friends and get more of a general impression. What do you think?’

‘It must be pretty cold up there.’

‘Yes, but I’m not talking about the weather.’

‘I am, though. I know you, you can never sleep if you’ve got cold feet, and that would be terrible for the investigation.’

‘James …’

‘I could come with you to keep them warm for you if you want,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

‘Would you seriously come with me?’

‘Of course I would, I’m well-ahead of schedule with my work and it would be nice to see your sisters and your aunt.’

‘We’d stay at her house.’

‘Great.’

‘I’ll be quite busy and I won’t have much free time, though.’

‘I’ll play Mus or Poker with your aunt and her friends.’

‘They’ll clean you out.’

‘I’m very rich.’

They both laughed at this and Amaia carried on talking about what they could do in Elizondo until she realised that James was asleep. She kissed him gently on the head and covered his shoulders with the duvet. When she got up to use the toilet she noticed bloody marks on the paper as she wiped herself. She looked at herself in the mirror as the tears welled up in her eyes. With her long hair falling over her shoulders she looked younger and more vulnerable, like the little girl she had once been.

‘Not this time, either, darling, not this time either,’ she whispered, knowing that there would be no consolation. She took a painkiller and, shivering, got back into bed.

6

The cemetery was full of neighbours who had taken time off work and even closed their shops in order to attend the burial. The rumour that she might not be the first girl to die at the hands of this criminal was beginning to spread. During the funeral, which had taken place barely two hours earlier in the parish Church of Santiago, the priest had implied in his sermon that evil appeared to be stalking the valley and during the prayer for the dead, around the open grave in the ground, the atmosphere was tense and ominous, as if an inescapable curse was hovering over the heads of those present. The silence was broken only by Ainhoa’s brother who, supported by his cousins, doubled over with a harsh, convulsive groan that came from deep inside him and reduced him to heartrending sobs. His parents, standing nearby, seemed not to hear him. Holding one another for support, they wept silently without taking their eyes off the coffin that contained their daughter’s body. Jonan recorded the entire service from his position leaning on top of an old vault. Standing behind the parents, Montes observed the group just opposite them, closest to the grave. Deputy Inspector Zabalza had stationed himself near the gate in a camouflaged car and was taking photos of all the people who entered the cemetery, including those heading towards different graves and those who didn’t actually go in but stayed outside, talking in huddles or standing by the railings.

Amaia saw her Aunt Engrasi, who was holding Ros’s arm, and wondered where her layabout of a brother-in-law could be; almost certainly still in bed. Freddy had never made an effort in his life; his father had died when he was only five and he had grown up anaesthetised by the fuss made of him by a hysterical mother and a multitude of aging aunts who had spoiled him rotten. He hadn’t even turned up for dinner last Christmas Eve. Ros hadn’t eaten a bite while she watched the door with an ashen face and dialled Freddy’s number time and again, only to be told it was unavailable. Although they had all tried to pretend it didn’t matter, Flora had been unable to resist the opportunity to say exactly what she thought of that loser and they had ended up arguing. Ros had left halfway through dinner and Flora and a resigned Víctor had followed suit as soon as dessert was over. Since then things between them had been even worse than normal. Amaia waited until everyone had offered the parents their condolences before approaching the grave, which the cemetery workers had just closed with a grey marble cover which did not yet feature Ainhoa’s name.

‘Amaia.’

She saw Víctor coming over, making his way through the parishioners who were flooding out of the cemetery after Ainhoa’s parents. She had known Víctor since she was a young girl, when he had first started going out with Flora. Although it was now two years since they had separated, to Amaia, Víctor was still her brother-in-law.

‘Hello Amaia, how are you?’

‘Fine, given the circumstances.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he said, casting a troubled glance at the tomb. ‘Even so, I’m very happy to see you.’

‘Likewise. Did you come by yourself?’

‘No, with your sister.’

‘I didn’t see you.’

‘We saw you …’

‘Where is Flora?’

‘You know her … she’s already gone, but don’t take it the wrong way.’

Aunt Engrasi and Ros were coming up the gravel path; Víctor exchanged a friendly greeting with them and left the cemetery, turning to wave when he reached the gate.

‘I don’t know how he puts up with her,’ remarked Ros.

‘He doesn’t anymore, had you forgotten that they’ve separated?’ said Amaia.

‘What do you mean he doesn’t anymore? She’s like a dog in the manger. She neither eats nor lets others eat.’

‘That does describe Flora rather well,’ agreed Aunt Engrasi.

‘I’ve got to go and see her, I’ll let you know how it goes later.’

Founded in 1865, Mantecadas Salazar was one of the oldest confectionery and patisserie companies in Navarra. Six generations of Salazars had run it, although it had been Flora, taking over from their parents, who had known how to make the necessary decisions to keep such a company going in the current market. The original sign engraved on the marble façade had been retained, but the wide wooden shutters had been replaced by huge frosted windows that prevented people seeing in. Making her way round the building, Amaia arrived at the door to the warehouse, which was always open when there was work underway. She gave it a rap with her knuckles. As she went in she saw a group of workers chatting while they made up boxes of pastries. She recognised some of them, greeted them, and made her way to Flora’s office, breathing in the sweet smell of sugared flour and melted butter that had been a part of her for so many years, as integral to her sense of identity as her DNA. Her parents had been the forerunners of the process of change, but Flora had steered it to completion with a steady hand. Amaia saw that she had replaced all the ovens except the wood-fired one and that the old marble counters on which her father had kneaded dough were now made of stainless steel. Some of the dispensers had been upgraded and the different areas were separated by sparklingly clean windows; if it hadn’t been for the powerful aroma of syrup it would have reminded her more of an operating theatre than a pastry workshop. In contrast, Flora’s office was a big surprise. The oak desk that dominated one corner was the only piece of furniture that looked at all businesslike. A large rustic kitchen with a fireplace and a wooden worktop acted as the reception; a floral sofa and a modern espresso machine completed the ensemble, which was really very welcoming.

Flora was making coffee and arranging the cups and saucers as if she was receiving guests.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said without turning round when she heard the door.

‘This must be the only place you wait, you almost ran out of the cemetery.’

‘That’s because I, Amaia, don’t have time to waste, I have to work.’

‘So do the rest of us, Flora.’

‘No, not like the rest of you, sister dear, some more than others. I’m sure that Ros, or rather Rosaura, as she now wants to be called, has time to spare.’

‘I don’t know what makes you say that,’ said Amaia, somewhere between surprised and upset by her older sister’s dismissive tone.

‘Well, I say it because our darling sister’s got problems with that loser Freddy again. She’s been spending hours on the phone recently trying to find out where he is, that is when she’s not wandering around with puffy red eyes from crying over that shit. I tried to tell her, but she just wouldn’t listen … Until one day, two weeks ago, she stopped coming to work under the pretext of being ill and I can tell you exactly what was wrong with her … she was in a temper with a capital“t” thanks to that PlayStation champion. He’s no good for anything except spending the money Ros earns, playing his stupid computer games and getting off his head on dope. To get back to the point, a week ago Queen Rosaura deigned to turn up here and hand in her resignation. What do you think of that?! She says she can no longer work with me and she wants her final pay slip.’

Amaia looked at her in silence.

‘That’s what your darling sister did; instead of getting rid of that loser she comes to me and asks for her final pay slip. Her final pay slip,’ she repeated indignantly. ‘She ought to reimburse me for having to put up with all her shit and her complaints, her martyr’s face. She looks like she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders but she’s the one who chose to carry it in the first place. And do you know what I think? So much the better. I’ve got twenty other employees and I don’t have to hear sob stories from any of them, let’s see whether they let her get away with half of what I have in her next job.’

‘Flora, you’re her sister …’ murmured Amaia, sipping her coffee.

‘Yes, and in exchange for that honour I have to put up with all her ups and downs.’

‘No, Flora, but one would hope that as her sister you might be a bit more understanding.’

‘Do you think I haven’t been understanding?’ Flora asked, raising her head as she took offence.

‘Perhaps a little patience wouldn’t have done any harm.’

‘Well, that’s the final straw.’ She huffed as she tidied the items on her desk.

Amaia tried again. ‘When she hadn’t been to work for a couple weeks, did you go and see her? Did you ask her what was wrong?’

‘No, no I didn’t. What about you? Did you go and ask her what was wrong?’

‘I didn’t know anything was wrong, Flora, otherwise you can be sure I would have gone to see her. But answer me.’

‘No, I didn’t ask her because I already knew what the answer would be: that that shit has made her into a complete mess. Why ask when we all know the answer?’

‘We also knew the reason when it was you who was suffering, but both Ros and I stood by you.’

‘And now you can see that I didn’t need you, I dealt with it how you should deal with these things, by cutting my losses.’

‘Not everyone is as strong as you are, Flora.’

‘Well you ought to be. The women of this family always have been,’ she said, tearing a piece of paper loudly and tossing it at the wastepaper basket.

The resentment in Flora’s words made it clear she saw her sisters as weaklings, handicapped and half-baked, and looked down on them with an unsympathetic mixture of contempt and disdain.

While Flora washed the coffee cups, Amaia looked at some blown-up photos that were sticking out of an envelope on the table. They showed her older sister dressed as a pastry chef and smiling as she kneaded some sticky dough.

‘Are they for your new book?’

‘Yes,’ her tone softened slightly, ‘they’re the ideas for the front cover. They only sent them to me today.’

‘I understand the last one was a success.’

‘Yes, it worked out quite well, so the publishers want to continue along the same lines. You know, basic pastries that any housewife can make.’

‘Don’t play it down, Flora, almost all my friends in Pamplona have a copy and they love it.’

‘If someone had told Amatxi that I’d become famous for teaching people how to make madeleines and doughnuts she wouldn’t have believed it.’

‘Times have changed … home-baking’s become exotic and trendy.’

It was easy to see that Flora felt comfortable with the praise and the taste of her success; she smiled, looking at her sister as if weighing up whether or not to share a secret with her.

‘Don’t tell anyone, but they’ve suggested I do a baking programme for TV.’

‘Oh my God, Flora! That’s amazing, congratulations,’ said Amaia.

‘I haven’t signed anything yet, but they’ve sent the contract to my lawyer so that he can go over it and as soon as he gives me the go-ahead … I only hope all this fuss about the murders doesn’t affect it. It’s been a month since that girl was killed by her boyfriend, and now there’s that other girl.’

‘I don’t know quite how they would affect you and your work; the crimes have nothing at all to do with you.’

‘No, not in terms of doing my work, but I think my image and that of Mantecadas Salazar are inextricably linked with that of Elizondo, and you have to admit that a thing like this affects the town’s image, tourism and sales.’

‘Well, what a surprise, Flora, here you are making much of your great humanity as usual. Don’t forget we’ve got two murdered girls and two destroyed families, I don’t think it’s quite the right moment to think about how this might affect tourism.’

‘Someone has to think of it,’ Flora declared.

‘That’s what I’m here for, Flora, to catch the person or people who’ve done this and help Elizondo return to peace.’

Flora stared at her sceptically.

‘If you’re the best the Policía Foral can send us, God help us.’

Unlike Rosaura, Amaia wasn’t affected in the slightest by Flora’s attempts to upset her.

She supposed that the three years spent surrounded by men at the police academy and the fact that she was the first woman to reach the rank of inspector in the homicide division meant that she’d experienced enough jokes and teasing along the way to leave her with a steely inner strength and cast-iron composure. She would almost have found Flora’s spiteful comments funny if not for the fact that she was her sister and Amaia was saddened to be reminded of how callous Flora was. Every gesture, every word that came out of her mouth was designed to wound and cause as much damage as possible. Amaia noticed the way Flora pursed her mouth slightly in a grimace of annoyance when she responded calmly to her provocations and the mocking tone her big sister used, as if she was talking to a stubborn, ill-mannered child. She was just about to answer when her phone rang.

‘We’ve got the photos and the video from the cemetery, chief,’ said Jonan. Amaia looked at her watch.

‘Great. I’ll come now; I’ll be there in about ten minutes. Gather everyone together.’ She hung up and, smiling, said to Flora, ‘I have to go. As you can see, in spite of my ineptitude, duty calls me too.’

Flora looked as if she were about to say something, but in the end she thought better of it and remained silent.

‘Why the long face?’ smiled Amaia. ‘Don’t be sad, I’ll be back tomorrow, I want to ask you about something, and have another of your delicious coffees.’

As she was leaving the workshop she almost collided with her brother-in-law, who was on his way in with an enormous bunch of red roses.

‘Thank you, Víctor, but you shouldn’t have gone to such trouble,’ exclaimed Amaia with a smile.

‘Hello Amaia, they’re for Flora. It’s our wedding anniversary today, twenty-two years,’ he said, smiling back at her. Amaia remained silent. Flora and Víctor had been separated for two years now and, although they hadn’t divorced, Flora had stayed in their shared home and he had moved into the magnificent traditional farmhouse on the farm his family owned on the outskirts of town. Víctor noticed her discomfort.

‘I know what you’re thinking, but Flora and I are still married, on my part because I still love her and on her part because she says she doesn’t believe in divorce. I don’t mind what the reason is, but I’ve still got a hope, don’t you think?’

Amaia put her hand over his hand that was holding the bunch of flowers.

‘Of course you have, Víctor, good luck.’

He smiled.

‘When it comes to your sister I always need luck.’

7

Like the police stations in Pamplona and Tudela, the new Policía Foral station in Elizondo was of a modern design, moving away from the typical architecture of the town and the rest of the valley. It was a truly unique building, characterised by its walls of whitish stone and huge, thick plate-glass windows spread over two rectangular storeys, the second of which overhung the first forming a kind of inverted staircase effect and giving it a certain resemblance to an aircraft carrier. A couple of patrol cars parked under the overhang, the surveillance cameras and the mirrored glass all underlined the building’s purpose. During Amaia’s brief visit to the Elizondo commissioner’s office he had reiterated the same expressions of support and assurances of collaboration that he had already given her the day before, along with the promise of providing every assistance she might need. The high definition photographs didn’t reveal anything they might have missed at the cemetery. The funeral had been well-attended, as they usually were in such circumstances. Entire families, plenty of people Ainhoa had known since her childhood, among whom Amaia recognised a few of her own classmates and old friends from school. All the staff and the head teacher were there, a few local councillors and Ainhoa’s friends and classmates, forming a chorus of tearful girls with their arms around one another. And that was all; no delinquents, no paedophiles, nobody with an outstanding arrest warrant, no solitary man wrapped in a black raincoat, wolfishly licking his lips as the sun glinted off his canines. She tossed the mountain of photos onto the table with a look of disgust thinking how often this job could be so frustrating and disheartening.

‘Carla Huarte’s parents didn’t attend the funeral or the burial, and they weren’t at the reception at Ainhoa’s home afterwards,’ remarked Montes.

‘Is that strange?’ asked Iriarte.

‘Well, it’s unexpected; the families knew each other, if only by sight, and keeping in mind that and the circumstances of the girls’ deaths …’

‘Perhaps it was to avoid fuelling any gossip; let’s not forget that they’ve believed Miguel Ángel to be their daughter’s killer all this time … It must be hard to accept that we don’t have the killer and, furthermore, that he’s going to be released from prison.’

‘You could be right,’ admitted Iriarte.

‘Jonan, what can you tell me about Ainhoa’s family?’ asked Amaia.

‘After the funeral almost all the mourners went back to their home. The parents were very upset but quite calm, supporting one another. They held hands the whole time and didn’t let go even for an instant. It was hardest for the boy; it was painful to see him, sitting on a chair all by himself, looking at the floor, receiving everyone’s condolences without his parents even deigning to look at him. It was a shame.’

‘They blame the boy. Do we know whether he was really at home? Could he have gone to pick his sister up?’ inquired Zabalza.

‘He was at home. Two of his friends were with him the whole time, it looks like they had to do a project for school and then they got absorbed in playing on the PlayStation; one other boy joined them later, a neighbour who dropped in for a game. I’ve also spoken to Ainhoa’s friends. They didn’t stop crying or talking on their mobiles the entire time, a really bizarre combination. They all said the same thing. They spent the evening together in the square and wandering around town, and then they went to a bar on the ground floor of the building where one of them lives. They had a bit to drink, although not very much according to them. Some of them smoke, although Ainhoa didn’t; even so, it would explain why her skin and clothes smelled of tobacco. There was a little gang of boys drinking beer with them, but they all stayed where they were after Ainhoa left; it looks like she was the one with the earliest curfew.’

‘And much good it did her,’ commented Montes.

‘Some parents think that making their daughters come home earlier keeps them safe from danger, when the most important thing is that they don’t come home alone. By making them come home before the rest of the group, they’re the ones putting them at risk.’

‘It’s difficult being a parent,’ murmured Iriarte.

8

As she walked home, Amaia was surprised to realise how quickly the light had faded that February afternoon and she had a strange sense of being cheated. The early nights during winter made her feel uneasy. As if the darkness carried an ominous charge, the cold made her shiver beneath the leather of her jacket and yearn for the warmth of the quilted anorak James had tried so hard to persuade her to wear, and which she had rejected because it made her look like the Michelin man.

The warm atmosphere of Aunt Engrasi’s house dispersed the unwelcome remnants of winter that clung to her. The scent of the wood in the hearth, the huge rugs that covered the wooden floor and the incessant chatter from the television, which was permanently on even though nobody ever watched it, welcomed her back again. There were much more interesting things to do there than listen to the TV and yet it was always on in the background like a poltergeist, ignored as an absurdity and tolerated out of habit. She had once asked her aunt why and she had replied, ‘It’s an echo of the world. Do you know what an echo is? It’s a voice you can still hear once the real one has died away.’

Back in the present, James took her by the hand and led her over to the fire.

‘You’re frozen, my love.’

She smiled, nuzzling her nose into his jersey and inhaling the scent of his skin. Ros and Aunt Engrasi came out of the kitchen carrying glasses, dishes, bread and a tureen of soup.

‘I hope you’re hungry, Amaia, because your aunt’s made enough food to feed an army.’

Aunt Engrasi’s footsteps may have been slightly slower than they were at Christmas, but her mind was as clear as ever. Amaia smiled tenderly as she noticed this detail and her aunt snapped at her, ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not slow, it’s these damn shoes your sister gave me that are two sizes too big. If I pick my feet up I’m likely to go flying so I have to walk as if I’m wearing a dirty nappy.’

They chatted while they ate, with James telling jokes in his American accent and Aunt Engrasi sharing the local gossip, but Amaia couldn’t help noticing the deep sadness that lay behind the smile with which Ros tried to follow the conversation and the way she tried to avoid eye contact with her sister.

While James and her aunt took the plates through to the kitchen, Amaia caught her sister’s attention with just a few words.

‘I was at the workshop today.’

Ros looked at her as she sat down again with an expression that revealed both her disappointment and relief at being found out.

‘What did she tell you? Or rather, how did she tell you?’

‘In her own way. As she does everything. She told me that they’re going to bring out her second book, that they’ve brought up the possibility of a television show, that she is the backbone of the family, a paragon of virtue and the only person in the whole world who knows the meaning of the word responsibility,’ she recited the litany in an exaggerated sing-song voice until she managed to make Ros smile.

‘… And she also told me that you don’t work at the workshop anymore and that you have serious problems with your husband.’

‘Amaia … I’m sorry that you found out that way, perhaps I should have told you sooner, but it’s something that I’m working through bit by bit, something that I have to do by myself, that I should have done a long time ago. Anyway, I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘Don’t be daft, you know worrying is part of my job description and I’m good at my job. As for the rest, I agree with you, I don’t know how you managed to work with her for so long.’

‘I suppose it was all there was. I didn’t have any other options.’

‘What are you trying to say? We all have more than one option, Ros.’

‘We’re not all like you, Amaia. I suppose it was what was expected, that we would continue to run the workshop.’

‘Are you trying to reproach me for something? Because if that’s the case …’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but when you went it was as if I didn’t have any choice.’

‘That’s not true, you have a choice now and you had a choice then.’

‘When Aita died, Ama started behaving very strangely, I suppose it was the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and I suddenly found myself trapped between the responsibility Flora demanded of me, Ama’s episodes and Freddy … I suppose at that point Freddy seemed like an escape route.’

‘And what’s changed now? Because there’s something you mustn’t forget, and that’s that although Flora might act like the owner and boss of the workshop, it’s as much yours as it is hers, and I gave up my share to you two on that condition. You’re as capable of running the company as she is.’

‘That may be so, but it’s more than just Flora and work at the moment, it’s not only because of her, although she has played her part. I suddenly felt like I was drowning there, listening to her and her litany of complaints every day. On top of the problems in my personal life it was just unbearable. Having to go there every morning and listen to the same old story made me so anxious I felt physically ill and emotionally drained. But somehow I also felt as calm and clear-headed as ever. Determined, that’s the word. And all of a sudden, as if the heavens had opened and sent me a sign, it all became clear: I wasn’t going to go back, I didn’t go back, and I won’t go back, at least not for the time being.’

Amaia brought her hands up to head height and began to clap slowly and rhythmically.

‘Well done, Ros, well done.’

Ros smiled and gave a mock curtsey.

‘And now what?’

‘I’m working at an aluminium factory, keeping the accounts. I manage the payroll and organise the weekly diary, arrange the meetings. Eight hours a day, Monday to Friday, and when I leave the office I forget all about it. It’s nothing to get too excited about, but it’s just what I need right now.’

‘And what about Freddy?’

‘It’s bad, really bad,’ she said, biting her lip and shaking her head.

‘Is that why you’re here, staying with Aunt Engrasi?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Why don’t you tell him to leave? When all’s said and done, it’s your house.’

‘I’ve already told him, but he refuses to even consider moving out. Since I left he spends all day going from the bed to the sofa and the sofa to the bed, drinking beer, playing on the PlayStation and smoking joints,’ said Ros with disgust.

‘That’s what Flora called him, “The PlayStation champion”. Where’s he getting the money from? Surely you’re not …?’

‘No, that’s all stopped, his mother gives him money and his friends keep him well supplied.’

‘I can pay him a visit if you want. You know what Aunt Engrasi says, a man with plenty to eat and drink can go a long time without working,’ said Amaia, laughing.

‘Yes,’ replied Ros with a smile, ‘she’s absolutely right, but no. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Let me sort things out, I will sort them out, I promise.’

‘You’re not going to go back to him, are you?’ said Amaia, looking her in the eye.

‘No, I’m not going back.’

For a moment Amaia wasn’t convinced. Then she realised her doubt must be showing on her face and was reminded of Flora and her lack of faith in other people. She made herself smile openly.

‘I’m glad for you, Ros,’ she said with all the conviction she could muster.

‘That part of my life is behind me now, and that’s something that neither Flora nor Freddy can understand. Me changing jobs at this point is incomprehensible to Flora, but at thirty-five years of age, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working under my older sister’s yoke. Putting up with the same reproaches every day, the same snide comments and malicious remarks, as she shares her poison with the whole world. And Freddy … I suppose it’s not his fault. For a long time I thought that he was the answer to all my questions, that he’d have the magic formula, a kind of revelation that would give me a new way of living. So opposite to everyone else, so rebellious, a non-conformist, and most of all, so different to Ama and Flora, and with that ability to really irritate her,’ she smiled mischievously.

‘That’s true. The guy does have the ability to get on Flora’s nerves, and I like him just for that,’ replied Amaia.

‘Until I realised that Freddy isn’t so different after all. That his rebellion and his refusal to accept the rules are nothing more than a cloak to hide a coward, a good-for-nothing capable of giving forth like Che against the evils of consumer society while spending the money that he wheedles out of his mother or me on getting stoned. I think it’s the only thing on which I agree with Flora: he is the PlayStation champion; if he was paid money for it, he’d be one of the richest men in the country.’

Amaia looked at her with tenderness.

‘At a certain point, I found myself on a different path to the one we’d been on together. I knew I wanted a different way of life and that there had to be something more to life than spending every weekend drinking beer at Xanti’s bar. That, and having children. Perhaps that’s the real issue, because as soon as I decided to change my way of living, having a child suddenly became really important to me, an urgent need, my role in life. I’m not an idiot, Amaia, I didn’t want to have a child only to bring it up in a cloud of smoke from all the joints, but even so, I stopped taking the pills and hoped, as if everything would just happen according to a plan drawn up by destiny.’ Her face darkened, and her eyes seemed to lose their sparkle. ‘But it wasn’t to be, Amaia; it looks like I can’t have children either,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I got more and more desperate as the months passed without my falling pregnant. Freddy told me that perhaps it was for the best, that we were fine as we were. I didn’t answer him, but the rest of the night while he was asleep, snoring at my side, a voice was thundering inside me saying, “No, absolutely not, I am not fine like this.” And the voice kept thundering in my head while I got dressed to go to the workshop, while I dealt with the telephone orders, while I listened to Flora’s tireless litany of reproaches. And that day, when I hung my white overall in my locker, I already knew I wouldn’t go back. While Freddy was moving onto the next level of Resident Evil and I was warming the soup for supper, I also realised that my life with him was over. Just like that, without shouting or tears.’

‘You shouldn’t be embarrassed, tears are necessary sometimes.’

‘That’s true, but the time for tears had passed, my eyes had run dry from crying so much while he snored away beside me. From crying with shame and understanding that I was ashamed of him, that I could never be proud of the man at my side. Something broke inside me, and what had, until that point, been pure desperation to save our relationship became a war-cry from somewhere very deep inside me, and it condemned him. Most people are mistaken; they believe you can go from love to hate in a moment, that love suddenly breaks down, as if your heart had imploded. But, that’s not how it was for me. The love didn’t suddenly break down, but I had a sudden realisation that I had wasted myself in a relentless sanding-down process, scritch, scratch, scritch, scratch, day after day. And that was the day when I realised that there was nothing left. It was more like suddenly seeing something that has been there all along. Making those decisions made me feel free for the first time in a long time, and that’s made things straightforward for me, but neither your sister nor my husband were prepared to let me go that easily. You’d be surprised by how similar their arguments, their reproaches, their tricks were … because the two of them played tricks, you know, and they used the very same words.’ She smiled bitterly as she remembered them. ‘Where are you going to go? Do you think you’ll find something better? And, finally: who will love you? They’d never believe it, but although their tricks were designed to undermine my conviction, they had just the opposite effect: I saw how small and cowardly they were, so inept, and anything seemed possible, easier without them dragging me down. I wasn’t sure about everything, but at least I had an answer to the last question: I am; I’m going to love myself and take care of myself.’

‘I’m proud of you,’ said Amaia, hugging her. ‘Don’t forget you can count on me, I’ve always loved you.’

‘I know you have, and James, Aunt Engrasi, Aita and even Ama, in her own way. The only one who didn’t really value me was me.’

‘Then love yourself, Ros Salazar.’

‘There’s been a change there, too: I prefer people to call me Rosaura.’

‘Flora told me, but why? It took you years to get everyone to call you Ros.’

‘If I do have children one day, I don’t want them to know me as Ros, it’s a stoner’s name,’ she declared.

‘You could say that about any name,’ said Amaia. ‘And tell me something, when are you planning to make me an aunt?’

‘As soon as I find the perfect man.’

‘I should warn you that it’s rumoured he doesn’t exist.’

‘You can talk, you’ve already got one.’

Amaia forced a smile.

‘We’ve tried, too. And we can’t, at the moment …’

‘But have you seen a doctor?’

‘Yes. At first I was afraid I had blocked tubes like Flora, but they told me everything appears to be in order. They recommended one of those fertility treatments.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Ros’s voice trembled a bit, ‘have you started yet?’

‘We haven’t been to the clinic, the very thought of having to undergo one of those painful treatments makes me feel ill. Do you remember how bad it was for Flora, and all for nothing?’

‘Of course, but you shouldn’t think like that, you said yourself that you don’t have the same problem as her, perhaps it will work for you …’

‘It’s not just that, I feel a sort of aversion to having to conceive a child that way. I know I’m being stupid, but I don’t believe it should happen like that …’

James came in carrying Amaia’s mobile.

‘It’s Deputy Inspector Zabalza,’ he said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Amaia took the phone.

‘Inspector, a patrol has found a pair of girl’s shoes left on the hard shoulder and positioned facing the motorway. They let us know just now. I’ll send a car over and meet you there.’

‘What about the body?’ asked Amaia, lowering her voice and partially covering the phone.

‘We haven’t found it yet, the area’s difficult to access, quite different from the previous cases; the vegetation’s very thick, the river isn’t visible from the road. If there’s a girl down there it’s going to be a challenge to get to her. I keep asking myself why he’s chosen a place like that; perhaps he didn’t want us to find her as easily as the others.’

Amaia weighed up the idea.

‘No. He wants us to find her, that’s why he’s left the shoes to indicate the location. But by choosing a place that isn’t visible from the road he can guarantee that no one will disturb him until he’s got everything in place to show his work to the world. Simply put, it avoids interruptions and hitches.’

They were a pair of white patent Mustang court shoes with quite high heels. A police officer was taking photos of them from different angles under Jonan’s direction. The camera flash made the plastic glimmer and shine, making them look even more strange and out of place, positioned there in the middle of nowhere; they almost seemed enchanted, like the shoes belonging to a princess in a fairy tale, or like the shocking and absurd work of a conceptual artist. Amaia imagined the effect of a long line of party shoes lined up in that remote wilderness. Zabalza’s voice brought her back to reality.

‘It’s disturbing … the thing with the shoes, I mean. Why does he do it?’

‘He marks his territory like a wild animal, like the predator he is, and he provokes us. He leaves them here to draw us in: “Look what I’ve left you, Olentzero has been and left you a little something.”’

‘What a bastard!’

With a concerted effort she managed to tear her gaze from the princess’s enchanting shoes and turn towards the dense woodland. A metallic sound reverberated from the walkie-talkie in Zabalza’s hand.

‘Have they found her?’

‘Not yet, but, as I said, the river runs through the vegetation in a kind of natural canyon with steep walls around here.’

The beams of light from powerful lanterns threw ghostly glimmers through the bare trees, which grew so close together that they produced the effect of an inverse dawn, as if the sun was emerging from the earth instead of in the sky. Amaia pulled on her boots while she considered the effect that the landscape had on her thoughts. Inspector Iriarte appeared from the thick vegetation with an agitated gasp.

‘We’ve found her.’

Amaia went down the slope behind Jonan and Deputy Inspector Zabalza. She noticed how the earth gave way beneath her feet, softened by the recent rain, which, in spite of all the thick foliage, had managed to penetrate deep into the ground, turning the fragments of leaves that coated the floor of the woods into a slimy and slippery carpet. The trees grew so close together that they were obliged to take a zig-zag route down, but the branches did provide useful hand-holds. She could not help feeling a certain malicious satisfaction when she heard Montes’s incoherent mutterings a few steps behind her as he found himself having to come down in his expensive Italian shoes and leather jacket.

The woods stopped abruptly at the edge of a near-vertical rock face on either side of the river, which opened out forming a narrow ‘v’ like a natural funnel. They went down as far as a dark, low-lying area which the police officers were trying to illuminate with portable spotlights. The current and flow of the river were faster there, and there was less than a metre and a half of dry gravel between the steep walls and the river bank on either side. Amaia looked at the girl’s hands, which lay open at the sides of her despoiled body, stretched out in an ominous gesture of entreaty; the left one was almost touching the water, her long blonde hair reached nearly to her waist and her green eyes were covered by a whitish steam-like film. Her beauty in death and the almost mystical scene that the monster had come up with achieved the intended effect. For a moment he had managed to draw Amaia into his fantasy, distracting her from protocol, and it was the princess’s eyes that brought her back, those eyes crying out for justice from the bed of the River Baztán in spite of being clouded by the mist, which sometimes filled her dreams during her darkest nights. She took a couple of steps back to murmur a brief prayer and put on the gloves that Montes was holding out to her. Acutely sensitive to other people’s distress, she looked at Iriarte who had covered his mouth with his hands and brought them almost brusquely down to his sides when he felt he was being observed.

‘I know her … I knew her, I know her family, she’s Arbizu’s daughter,’ he said, looking at Zabalza as if seeking confirmation. ‘I don’t know what she’s called, but she’s Arbizu’s daughter, there’s no doubt about it.’

‘She’s called Anne, Anne Arbizu,’ confirmed Jonan holding out a library card. ‘Her bag was a few metres upstream,’ he said, gesturing to an area that was now dark again.

Amaia knelt down next to the girl, observing the frozen grimace on her face, almost a parody of a smile.

‘Do you know how old she was?’ she asked.

‘Fifteen, I don’t think she’d turned sixteen yet,’ replied Iriarte, coming over. He looked at the body and then started running. About ten metres downstream he doubled over and vomited. Nobody said anything, not then nor when he came back, wiping the front of his shirt with a tissue and murmuring his apologies.

Anne’s skin had been very white; but not washed-out, almost transparent, plagued by freckles and red patches. It had been white, clean and creamy, completely hairless. Covered as it was by droplets from the river’s mist it was like the marble of a statue on a tombstone. In contrast to Carla and Ainhoa, this girl had fought. At least two of her nails seemed to be torn down to the quick. There seemed to be no fragments of skin beneath the rest. No doubt she had taken longer to die than the others; the burst blood vessels that indicated death by asphyxiation and the suffering caused by oxygen deprivation were visible in spite of the clouding that covered her eyes. Furthermore, the killer had faithfully reproduced the details of the previous murders: the thin cord buried in her neck, the clothes torn and pulled open to the sides, the jeans pulled down to her knees, the shaved pubic area and the fragrant, sticky cake placed on her pubic mound.

Jonan was taking photographs of the hair scattered on the ground near the girl’s feet.

‘It’s all the same, chief, it’s like looking at the other girls all over again.’

‘Fuck!’ a restrained yell was heard from several metres downstream, together with the unmistakable thunder of a shot which bounced off the rock walls producing a deafening echo that stunned them all for a moment. Then they drew their weapons and pointed them towards where the river narrowed.

‘False alarm! It’s nothing,’ shouted a voice from the direction of a torch that was moving towards them along the river bank. A smiling uniformed officer came walking over with Montes, who was visibly upset as he looked at his gun.

‘What happened, Fermín?’ asked Amaia, alarmed.

‘I’m sorry, it caught me by surprise, I was searching the river bank and I suddenly saw the biggest fucking rat ever, the beast looked at me and … I’m sorry, I fired instinctively. Fuck! I can’t stand rats, and then the officer told me it was a … I’m not sure what.’

‘A coypu,’ clarified the officer. ‘Coypus are a kind of mammal that originally came from South America. Some of them escaped from a French breeding farm in the Pyrenees a few years ago, and they happened to adapt well to the river. Although they’ve more or less stopped spreading, you still see one or two. But they’re harmless, in fact they’re herbivorous swimmers, like beavers.’

‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Montes, ‘I didn’t know. I’m musophobic, I can’t stand the sight of anything that looks like a rat.’

Amaia looked at him uncomfortably.

‘I’ll submit the weapons discharge form tomorrow,’ he muttered. He looked at his shoes in silence for a while, then moved aside and stood there without saying anything more.

Amaia almost felt sorry for him and for the fun the others would have at his expense over the next few days. She knelt by the body again and tried to empty her mind of everything other than the girl and her immediate surroundings.

The fact that the trees didn’t grow all the way down to the river along that stretch meant that there was no scent of soil and lichen, which had been so powerful up in the woods. Down there, in the gorge that the river had carved in the rocks, only the mineral odours from the water competed with the sweet, fatty smell of the txantxigorri. Its aroma of butter and sugar filled her nose, mixed with another more subtle scent that she recognised as that of recent death. She panted as she tried to contain her nausea, staring at the cake as if it were a repulsive insect and asking herself how it was possible for it to smell so strong. Dr San Martín knelt at her side.

‘Goodness, doesn’t it smell good?’ Amaia looked at him aghast. ‘That was a joke, Inspector Salazar.’

She didn’t reply, but stood up to give him more room.

‘But to tell the truth, it does smell very good and I haven’t had supper.’

Unseen by the pathologist, Amaia grimaced in disgust and turned to greet Judge Estébanez, who was making her way down between the rocks with enviable ease in spite of her skirt and heeled boots.

‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Montes, who didn’t seem to have recovered from the incident with the coypu yet. The judge gave a wave of general greeting then went over to Dr San Martín to listen to his observations. Ten minutes later she had already gone again.

It took them more than an hour and a real team effort to get the coffin containing Anne’s body up from the gorge. The technicians suggested putting her in a body bag and hoisting her up, but San Martín insisted that she should be in a coffin in order to perfectly preserve the body and avoid the multiple bumps and scratches it might receive if it were dragged up through the jungle-like forest. At certain points the narrowness of the gaps between the trees obliged them to turn the coffin on its end and wait for fresh hands to take over from others. After several hairy moments they managed to carry the coffin as far as the hearse that would transport Anne’s body to the Navarra Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pamplona.

Each time Amaia had seen the body of a minor on the autopsy table she had been overwhelmed by a sense of her own impotence and helplessness and that of the society she lived in. A society where the death of its children signified its inability to protect its own future. A society that had failed. Like she had. She took a deep breath and entered the autopsy room. Dr San Martín was filling in the paperwork before the operation and greeted her as she made her way over to the steel table. Already stripped of all clothing, Anne Arbizu was laid out under the harsh light which would have revealed even the slightest imperfection on any other body, but in her case only underlined the unscathed whiteness of her skin, making her seem unreal, almost painted; Amaia thought of one of those marble Madonnas found in Italian museums.

‘She looks like a doll,’ she murmured.

‘I was saying the same thing to Sofía,’ the doctor agreed. The technician raised a hand in greeting. She would have made an excellent model for one of Wagner’s Valkyries.

Deputy Inspector Zabalza had just come in.

‘Are we waiting for anyone else or can we get started?’

‘Inspector Montes should have arrived by now …’ said Amaia, consulting her watch. ‘You start, Doctor, he’ll arrive any moment.’

She dialled Montes’s number but it went straight to voicemail; she supposed he must be driving. Under the harsh lights she could see some details she hadn’t noticed before. There were several short, dark, quite thick hairs on the skin.

‘Animal hairs?’

‘Probably, we found more stuck to the clothes. We’ll compare them with the ones that were found on Carla’s body.’

‘How long do you reckon she’s been dead for?’

‘Judging by the temperature of the liver, which I took when we were by the river, she might have been there two or three hours.’

‘That’s not very long, not long enough for any animals to approach the body … the cake was intact, it almost seemed freshly baked, and you could smell it as well as I could; if there had been animals close enough to leave hairs on her they would have eaten the cake like they did in Carla’s case.’

‘I’d have to ask the forest rangers,’ commented Zabalza, ‘but I don’t think it’s somewhere the animals normally go to drink.’

‘An animal could get down there easily,’ Dr San Martín observed.

‘Yes, they could get down there, but the river forms a narrow pass at that point which would make escape difficult, and animals always drink in the open where they can see as well as being seen.’

‘Well, in that case, how do you explain the hairs?’

‘Perhaps they were on the murderer’s clothes and were transferred during contact.’

‘That’s a possibility. Who would wear clothes covered in animal hair?’

‘A hunter, a forest ranger, a shepherd,’ said Jonan.

‘A taxidermist,’ added the technician who was assisting Dr San Martín and had remained silent until that point.

‘Right, we’ll have to track down anyone who matches that profile and was in the area, and also take into account that it must have been a strong man, a very strong man in my opinion. If it weren’t for the intimacy required by this sort of fantasy, I’d say there was more than one murderer. But one thing is certain, and that’s that not just anybody would have been able to carry a body down that slope, and it’s clear from the lack of scratches and grazes that he carried her down in his arms,’ said Amaia.

‘Are we sure she was already dead when he took her down there?’

‘I’m sure, no girl would go down to the river at night, even with someone she knew, and she certainly wouldn’t leave her shoes behind. I think he approaches them then kills them quickly before they suspect anything; perhaps they know him and that’s why they trust him, perhaps not and he has to kill them straight away. He gets the string round their necks and they’re dead before they know it; then he takes them to the river, arranges them just as he imagined in his fantasy and once he’s completed his psychosexual rite he leaves us a signal in the form of the shoes and lets us see his work.’ Amaia suddenly fell silent and shook her head as if waking from a dream. They were all looking at her as if spellbound.

‘Let’s move on to the string,’ said San Martín.

The technician grasped the girl’s head at the base of the cranium and lifted it high enough for Dr San Martín to extract the string from the dark channel in which it had been buried. He paid special attention to the sections adhering to the sides, on which small whitish fragments of something that looked like plastic or glue could be seen.

‘Look at this, Inspector, this is something new: unlike the other cases, there are bits of skin attached to the string. You can see that by pulling so hard he inflicted a cut, or at least a graze, which took away some of the skin.’

‘Given the absence of fingerprints, I thought he must be using gloves,’ Zabalza chipped in.

‘It would seem likely, but sometimes these killers can’t resist the pleasure they get from feeling a life end under their own hands, a feeling that would be deadened by gloves. As a consequence they sometimes end up taking them off, if only at the key moment. Even so, it’s sometimes enough for us.’

As Amaia had expected, Dr San Martín agreed that Anne had defended herself. Perhaps she had seen something that her predecessors hadn’t, something that had made her suspicious and was enough to prevent her from going to her death submissively. The symptoms of asphyxia were obvious, and it was clear that the killer had tried to use Anne to recreate his fantasy. He had succeeded up to a certain point, because at first glance that crime and all the paraphernalia the killer had used were identical to the previous ones. However, Amaia had the inexplicable impression that the killer hadn’t been at all pleased with the death, that the little girl with her angelic face, who could have been the monster’s masterpiece, had been tougher and more aggressive than the others. And although the killer had made an effort to arrange her with the same care as he had the others, Anne’s face didn’t reflect surprise and vulnerability but rather the fight for her life that she had kept up to the last and a parody of a smile that was actually rather terrifying. Amaia observed some reddish marks that had appeared around her mouth and extended almost as far as her right ear.

‘What are those red marks on her face?’

The technician took a sample using a swab. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as we know for certain, but I would say that it’s …’ she smelled the swab, ‘gloss.’

‘What’s gloss?’ asked Zabalza.

‘It’s like lipstick, Deputy Inspector, a greasy, shiny lipstick,’ explained Amaia.

In the course of her time as a homicide inspector she had attended more autopsies than she wanted to remember, and considered that she had more than fulfilled her quota of what I need to do to prove a woman can do this. With that in mind, she didn’t stay to watch the rest. The brutality of the y-shaped incision performed on a corpse is unparalleled by any other surgical procedure. The process, which consisted of removing and weighing the organs and then replacing them in the cavities, was never pleasant, but when the body belonged to a child or a young girl, as in this case, it was unbearable. She knew that it was less to do with the technical, unvarying steps of the autopsy procedure than the inexplicable reasons why a child would be on that steel table, which they ought to be forbidden from as a matter of course. The incongruity of that diminutive little body which barely filled the surface it had ended up on, the explosion of brilliant colours inside it and, most of all, the girl’s small, pale face with tiny drops of water still trapped in her eyelashes acted like clamorous cries to which she could not help but respond.

9

Based on the light levels, Amaia guessed it must be about seven in the morning. She woke Jonan, who was asleep under his anorak in the back of the car.

‘Good morning, chief. How did it go?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes.

‘We’re going back to Elizondo. Has Montes called you?’

‘No, I thought he was at the autopsy with you.’

‘He didn’t turn up and he’s not answering his phone. I keep getting his voicemail,’ she said, visibly annoyed. Deputy Inspector Zabalza, who had come down to Pamplona in the same car as them climbed into the back seat and cleared his throat.

‘Well, Inspector, I’m not sure if I should get involved in this, but I don’t want you to worry. When we left the ravine, Inspector Montes told me he’d have to go and change because he’d arranged to have dinner with someone.’

‘To have dinner?’ she couldn’t contain her surprise.

‘Yes, he asked whether I was going to Pamplona with you for the autopsy, I said yes and he told me that in that case he’d be less concerned, that he supposed that Deputy Inspector Etxaide would be going too and that everything would be fine if that was the case.’

‘Everything would be fine? He was well aware that he should have been here,’ said Amaia furiously, although she immediately regretted making a fool of herself in front of her subordinates.

‘I … I’m sorry. From the way he was talking I assumed that you’d agreed to it.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him later.’

She wasn’t at all tired in spite of not sleeping. The faces of the three girls stared into the void from the surface of the table. Three very different faces, but made equal in death. She carefully studied the enlargements of the pictures of Carla and Ainhoa she had requested.

Montes came in silently with two coffees, placed one in front of Amaia and sat down a short distance away. She looked up from the photos for a moment and gave him a penetrating stare until he dropped his gaze. Another five officers from her team were also in the room. She took the photos and slid them towards the centre of the table.

‘Well, gentlemen, what do you see in these photos?’

They all leaned over the table expectantly.

‘I’m going to give you a clue.’

She added Anne’s picture to the other two.

‘This is Anne Arbizu, the girl who was found last night. Do you see the pinkish marks that extend from her mouth almost as far as her ear? Well, they’re from lip gloss, a pink, greasy lip gloss that makes the lips look wet. Take another look at the photos.’

‘The other girls aren’t wearing any,’ observed Iriarte.

‘Exactly, the other girls aren’t wearing any, and I want to know why. They were very pretty and trendy, they had high heels, handbags, mobile phones and perfume. Isn’t it strange that they weren’t wearing even a trace of make-up? Almost all girls their age start wearing it, at least mascara and lip gloss.’

She looked at her colleagues who were regarding her with confused expressions.

‘The stuff for your eyelashes and the one for your lips that’s somewhere between lipstick and lip balm,’ Jonan translated.

‘I think that he removed Anne’s make-up, which would explain the traces of lip gloss, and that he had to use make-up remover and a tissue to do it, or, more likely, facial wipes; they’re like the ones used to wipe babies’ bottoms, but with a different solution on them, although you could use the ones designed for babies. I also think it highly likely that he did it by the river; there was next to no light down there and even if he had a torch with him it wasn’t enough, because he didn’t finish the job on Anne. Jonan and Montes, I want you to go back to the river bank and look for the wipes; if he used them and didn’t take them with him, we might be able to find them somewhere round there.’ She didn’t miss the look on Montes’s face as he looked down at his shoes, a different style, brown this time, and clearly expensive. ‘Deputy Inspector Zabalza, please speak to Ainhoa’s friends and find out whether she was wearing make-up the night she was killed; don’t bother her parents with this, especially since she was quite young and it’s quite possible that even if she did wear make-up, her parents wouldn’t have known … Lots of teenage girls put it on once they’ve left the house and take it off again before they get back. As for Carla, I’m sure she would have been wearing more make-up than a clown wears face-paint. She’s got it on in all the photos we have of her alive and, furthermore, it was New Year’s Eve. Even my Aunt Engrasi wears lipstick on New Year’s Eve. Let’s see if we can find anything by this afternoon. I want everyone back here at four.’

Spring 1989

There were some good days, almost always Sundays, the only day her parents didn’t work. Her mother would bake crisp croissants and raisin bread at home, which would fill the whole house with a rich, sweet fragrance that lasted for hours. Her father would come slowly into the room, open the blinds on the windows facing the mountain and go out without saying anything, leaving the sun to wake them with its caresses, unusually warm for winter mornings. Once awake, they would stay in bed, listening to their parents’ light chatter in the kitchen, savouring the feeling of their clean bedding, the sun warming the bedclothes, its rays drawing capricious paths through the dust in the air. Sometimes, before breakfast, their mother would even put one of her old records on the record player, and the house would resonate with the voice of Machín or Nat King Cole and their boleros and cha-cha-chas. Then their father would put his arms around their mother’s waist and they would dance together, their faces very close and their hands entwined, going round and round the whole living room, skirting the heavy, hand-finished furniture and the rugs woven by someone in Baghdad. The little girls would get out of bed, barefoot and sleepy, and sit on the sofa to watch them dance while the adults smiled rather sheepishly, as if, instead of seeing them dance, their daughters had surprised them in a more intimate act. Ros was always the first to clasp her father’s legs to join in the dance; then Flora would attach herself to their mother, and Amaia would smile from the sofa, amused by the clumsiness of the group of dancers singing boleros under their breaths as they turned. She didn’t dance, because she wanted to keep watching them, because she wanted that ritual to last a bit longer, and because she knew that if she got up and joined the group the dance would end immediately as soon as she brushed against her mother, who would leave them with a ridiculous excuse, like she was tired already, she didn’t feel like dancing anymore or she had to go and check on the bread cooking in the oven. Whenever that happened, her father would give her a desolate look and carry on dancing with the little girl a while longer, trying to make up for the insult, until her mother came back into the living room five minutes later and turned off the record player, claiming that she had a headache.

10

After a brief siesta, from which she woke disorientated and confused, Amaia felt worse than she had in the morning. She took a shower and read the note that James had left her, a bit annoyed that he wasn’t at home. Although she would never tell him, she secretly preferred him to be nearby while she slept, as if his presence could soothe her. She would feel ridiculous if she ever had to put into words what waking up in an empty house did to her and her wish that he had been there while she was asleep. She didn’t need him to lie down beside her, she didn’t want him to hold her hand; but it wasn’t enough for him to be there when she woke up. She needed his presence while she was asleep. If she had to work at night and sleep in the morning she would often do it on the sofa if James wasn’t at home. She didn’t manage to sleep so deeply there as when she was in bed, but she preferred it, because she knew that if she got into bed it would be impossible. And it didn’t make a difference if he went out once she had fallen asleep: although she might not hear the door, she would immediately notice his absence, as if there wasn’t enough air, and on waking up she would know for certain that he was not in the house. I want you to be at home while I sleep. The thought was obviously and rationally absurd, which was why she couldn’t say it, couldn’t tell him that she woke up when he went out, that she felt his presence in the house as if she detected it with a sonar system and that she secretly felt abandoned when she woke up and found he had left his place at her side to go out and buy bread.

Back at the police station and three coffees later, she wasn’t feeling much better. Seated behind Iriarte’s desk, she was heartened to observe the evidence of his domestic life. The blond children, the young wife, the calendars with pictures of the Virgin, the well-tended plants that grew near the windows … he even had saucers under the pots to collect the excess water.

‘Have you got a moment, chief? Jonan said you wanted to see me.’

‘Come in, Montes, and don’t call me chief. Please take a seat.’

He made himself comfortable in the chair opposite and looked at her, his mouth forming a slight pout.

‘Montes, I was disappointed that you didn’t attend the autopsy. I was concerned that I didn’t know the reason why you weren’t there and it made me very angry that I had to find out from someone else that you weren’t coming because you were going out for dinner. I think you could at least have saved me the embarrassment of spending the whole night asking after you, wasting my time on phone calls you didn’t answer, only for Zabalza to tell me what was going on.’

Montes looked at her impassively. She continued.

‘Fermín, we’re a team, I need absolutely everyone in place all the time. If you wanted to go I wouldn’t have stopped you; I’m just saying that with what we’ve got on our plates I think you could have at least called me or told Jonan or something, but you certainly can’t disappear without giving any explanation. Right now, with another murdered girl, I need you at my side constantly. Well, anyway, I hope it was worth it,’ she smiled and looked at him in silence waiting for a response, but he continued to stare straight through her with an expression that had twisted from the childish pout to disdain. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything, Fermín?’

‘Montes,’ he said suddenly, ‘Inspector Montes to you. Don’t forget that although you might be in charge of this investigation for the moment, you’re speaking to an equal. I don’t have to explain myself to Jonan, who’s my subordinate, and I let Deputy Inspector Zabalza know. My responsibility stops there.’ His eyes half closed with indignation. ‘Of course you wouldn’t have stopped me going out for dinner, that’s not up to you, even if you have begun to think so lately. I had already been working on the homicide team for six years when you started at the academy, chief, and what’s pissing you off is looking incompetent in front of Zabalza.’ He settled back in the seat and gave her a challenging look. Amaia looked at him with a feeling of sadness.

‘The only one who looked incompetent is you, incompetent and a poor policeman. For God’s sake! We’d just found the third body in a series, we still don’t have anything and you go off out for dinner. I think you resent me because the Commissioner assigned the case to me, but you have to understand that I had nothing to do with that decision and what we ought to be worried about now is solving this case as soon as possible.’ She softened her tone and looked Montes in the eye, trying to gain his support, ‘I thought we were friends, Fermín. I would have been happy if it were you. I thought you respected me, I thought I’d have every possible help from you …’

‘Well, keep thinking that,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t you have anything else to say to me?’ He remained silent. ‘Alright, Montes, have it your way, I’ll see you at the meeting.’

The girls’ dead faces were there again, their eyes gazing into infinity and veiled by death, and, beside them, as if to emphasise the great loss they represented, were other photos, colourful and bright, showing Carla’s mischievous smile as she posed by a car that undoubtedly belonged to her boyfriend, Ainhoa holding a week-old lamb in her arms and Anne with her school theatre group. A plastic bag contained various wipes that had almost certainly been used to remove the make-up from Anne’s face and there was another that held the ones that had been found at the scene of Ainhoa’s death. No-one had paid them any attention at the time because it had been assumed that they had blown down to the river from the esplanade up by the road where couples often met.

‘You were right, chief. The wipes were there, they’d been dumped a few metres away, in a crack in the river bank. They’ve got pink and black marks on them, from the mascara I suppose. Her friends say she usually wore make-up and I’ve also got the original lipstick, which was in her handbag. It’ll help us confirm whether it’s the same one. And these,’ he said, pointing to the other bag, ‘are the ones found where Ainhoa was killed. They’re the same kind with the same stripy pattern, although these ones have got less make-up on them. Ainhoa’s friends say she only used lip gloss.’

Zabalza got to his feet.

‘We haven’t been able to find anything where Carla was killed, too much time has passed and we have to bear in mind that the body was partially submerged in the river; if the killer left the wipes nearby it’s likely they were washed away by the flood water … We’ve confirmed with her family that she used to wear make-up pretty much every day, though.’

Amaia stood up and started to walk around the room, moving behind her colleagues, who remained seated.

‘Jonan, what do these girls tell us?’

The deputy inspector leant forward and touched the edge of one of the photos with his index finger.

‘He removes their make-up, takes off their shoes, which are high-heels, women’s shoes in all three cases. He arranges their hair so it hangs to either side of their faces, he shaves off their pubic hair, he makes them into little girls again.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Amaia, vehemently. ‘It seems to this guy that they’re growing up too fast.’

‘A paedophile who likes little girls?’

‘No, no, if he were a paedophile he would choose little girls in the first place, and these are teenagers, more or less young women, at the stage when young girls want to seem older than they are. It’s nothing unusual, it’s part of the adolescent growing up process. But this killer doesn’t like these changes.’

‘What’s most likely is that he knew them when they were smaller and he doesn’t like what he sees now, and that’s why he wants to make them go back to how they were,’ said Zabalza.

‘It’s not enough to take off their shoes and make-up and shave off their pubic hair and leave their sexes like a little girl’s,’ Amaia continued. ‘He slashes their clothes and exposes their bodies, which are not yet those of the women they wished they were, and instead of a body that symbolises sex and the profanation of his concept of childhood, he gets rid of the body hair, which is a sign of maturity, and replaces it with a pastry, a soft little cake, which symbolises past times, the traditions of the valley, the return to childhood, and so on. He disapproves of how they dress, the fact they wear make-up, their adult ways, and he punishes them by using them to represent his idea of purity; that’s why he never violates them sexually, it’s the last thing he’d want to do, he wants to preserve them from corruption, from sin … And the worst of all is that, if I’m right, if this is what torments our killer, we can be sure that he won’t stop. More than a month passed between the murders of Carla and Ainhoa, and barely three days between the murders of Ainhoa and Anne; he feels provoked, confident and like he has a lot of work to do; he’s going to continue recruiting young girls to return to purity … Even the way he arranges their hands facing upwards symbolises surrender and innocence. Where have you seen hands and expressions like these before?’ She looked at Iriarte and pointed at him with her finger.

‘Inspector, can you bring me the calendars from your desk?’

Iriarte was back in barely two minutes. He put a calendar with a picture of the Immaculate Conception and another with a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes on the table. The virgins smiled, full of grace, as they held their open hands at either side of their bodies, generous and without any reserve, showing their palms, from which shone rays of sunlight.

‘There you have it!’ exclaimed Amaia. ‘Like virgins.’

‘This guy is completely crazy,’ said Zabalza, ‘and the worst thing is that if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that he’s not going to stop until we make him.’

‘Let’s update his profile,’ said Amaia.

‘Male, aged between twenty-five and forty-five,’ said Iriarte.

‘I think we can narrow it down a bit more, I’m inclined to think that he’s older. This resentment he shows towards youth doesn’t really match up with a young man; there’s nothing impetuous about him, he’s very organised, he takes everything he might need with him to the scene, and yet he doesn’t kill them there.’

‘He must have some other place, but where could it be?’ asked Montes.

‘I don’t think it can be a building, at least not a house. It’s impossible that all the girls would agree to go to a house, and we have to remember that they didn’t put up a fight, with the exception of Anne, who resisted at the end, at the moment he attacked her. There are two possibilities: either he stalks them and carries out surprise attacks somewhere he might be seen, which doesn’t really fit his modus operandi in my opinion, or he persuades them to go somewhere, or even better, takes them there himself, which implies that he has a car, a large car, because he has to transport the body afterwards … I prefer the latter theory,’ said Amaia.

‘And, bearing in mind what’s going on, do you think girls would get into just anyone’s car?’ asked Jonan.

‘They might not in Pamplona,’ explained Iriarte, ‘but in a small town it’s normal. You’re waiting for the bus and some neighbour or other stops and asks where you’re heading; if it suits them they’ll give you a lift. It’s not at all unusual, and would confirm the fact that it’s someone from the town who’s known them since they were little and who they trust enough to get into his car.’

‘OK, a white man, aged between thirty and forty-five, perhaps slightly older. It’s likely he lives with his mother or elderly parents. It’s possible he had a very strict upbringing, or entirely the opposite, that he ran wild as a child and he created his own moral code which he now applies to the world. It’s also possible that he suffered abuse as a child or that he lost his childhood in some way. Perhaps his parents died. I want you to look for any man who has a history of harassment, indecent exposure, loitering … Ask the couples who hang out around there whether they know of any incidents or have heard about any. Remember, these delinquents don’t just appear, they come from somewhere. Look for men who lost their families as a result of violence, orphans, victims of abuse, loners. Question every man in the Baztán Valley with a history of abuse or harassment. I want everything added to Jonan’s database and, while we haven’t got anything else to go on, we’ll continue questioning the families, friends and closest acquaintances. Anne’s funeral and burial are taking place on Monday. We’ll carry out the same process we did for Ainhoa’s and at least we’ll have some material to compare. Make a list of all the men who attended both funerals and match the profile. Montes, it would be interesting to speak to Carla’s friends to find out whether anyone recorded the funeral or burial on a mobile phone or took photos. It occurred to me when Jonan said that Ainhoa’s friends didn’t stop crying or talking on their mobiles; teenagers don’t go anywhere without their phones, so check it out,’ she said, leaving out the ‘please’ on purpose. ‘Zabalza, I’d like to speak to someone from the Guardia Civil’s Nature Protection Service or the forest rangers. Jonan, I want all the information you can find about bears in the valley, sightings … I know they’ve got a few GPS tagged, let’s see what they can tell us. And I want to know immediately if anyone finds anything, no matter what time it is. This monster is out there and it’s our job to catch him.’

Iriarte came over as the other officers left.

‘Inspector, go along to my office. You’ve got a phone call from the General Commissioner in Pamplona.’ Amaia picked up the phone.

‘I’m afraid I can’t give you any good news, Commissioner. The investigation’s moving forward as fast as possible, although I’m afraid the killer is quicker than we are.’

‘It’s alright, Inspector, I think I’ve put the investigation in the best possible hands. I received a phone call an hour ago from a friend, someone connected to the Diario de Navarra. They’ll be publishing an interview with Miguel Ángel de Andrés, Carla Huarte’s boyfriend who was in prison accused of her murder, tomorrow. As you know, he’s been released. There’s no need to tell you where that leaves us; in any case, that’s not the problem: in the course of the interview, the journalist insinuates that there’s a serial killer on the loose in the Baztán Valley, that Miguel Ángel de Andrés was freed after it was discovered that the murders of Carla and Ainhoa are linked, and, on top of all this, the murder of the latest girl, Anne—’ it sounded like he was reading from notes, ‘—Urbizu, will be made public tomorrow.’

‘Arbizu,’ Amaia corrected him.

‘I’ll fax you a copy of the articles exactly as they’re going to appear tomorrow. I warn you that you’re not going to like them, they’re revolting.’

Zabalza came back with two printed sheets on which several sentences appeared to have been underlined.

Miguel Ángel de Andrés, who spent a month in Pamplona prison accused of the murder of Carla Huarte, confirms that the officers are linking the case with the recent murders of young girls in the Baztán Valley. The killer slashes their clothes and hairs of non-human origin have been found on the bodies. A terrible lord of the woods who kills within his domains. A bloodthirsty basajaun.

The article about Anne’s murder was headed ‘Has the Basajaun Struck Again?’

11

The enormous Baztán forest, which before its transformation by man consisted of beech woods up in the mountains, oak woodland on the low ground and chestnut, ash and hazel trees in between, now seemed to be almost entirely covered in beech trees, which reigned despotically over all the rest. Meadows and scrubland comprising furze or gorse, heather and ferns made up the carpet on which generation after generation of baztaneses walked, a truly magical place comparable only to the forest at Irati but now stained by the horror of murder.

The wood always gave Amaia a secret feeling of proud belonging, although its immense size also gave her a sense of fear and vertigo. She knew that she loved it, but hers was a reverent and chaste love based upon silence and distance. When she was fifteen she had briefly joined a hiking group. Walking in their boisterous company hadn’t been as pleasant as she’d expected and she quit after three outings. She only returned to the woodland paths once she’d learnt to drive, attracted once again by the forest’s magnetic pull. She had been amazed to discover that being alone on the mountain provoked in her a terrifying anxiety, the sensation of being watched, of being in a forbidden place or of committing an act of sacrilege. Amaia had gone back down to her car and returned home, excited and unnerved by the experience, and conscious of her atavistic fear, which seemed ridiculous and childish in Aunt Engrasi’s living room.

But the investigation had to continue, and Amaia returned to the thick undergrowth of the Baztán forest. Winter’s death throes were more noticeable in the forest than anywhere else. The rain that had been falling all night was taking a break now, leaving the air cold and heavy, weighed down by humidity that penetrated both her clothes and her bones, so that she shivered, in spite of the heavy blue anorak James had made her wear. Darkened by the excess water, the tree trunks shone like the skin of an ancient reptile in the tentative February sun. The trees that hadn’t lost their leaves gleamed with a green worn by the winter, the gentle breeze revealing silvery reflections on the underside of their leaves. The presence of the river could be detected further down in the valley, flowing through the woods and acting as a mute witness to the horror with which the killer had adorned its banks.

Zipping up his jacket, Jonan increased his pace until he reached her side.

‘There they are,’ he said, pointing out the Land Rover with the Forest Rangers’ emblem on it.

The two uniformed men watched them approach from some distance away and Amaia guessed that they were making some kind of jokey remark because she saw them look away and laugh.

‘Here we go, the typical yokel comments about girls,’ murmured Jonan.

‘Easy tiger, it’s not a big deal,’ she muttered as they approached the men.

‘Good afternoon. I’m Inspector Salazar, from the Policía Foral’s homicide team; this is Deputy Inspector Etxaide,’ she introduced them.

The two men were extremely thin and wiry, although one of them was almost a head taller than the other. Amaia noticed how the taller of the two stood up straighter on hearing her rank.

‘I’m Alberto Flores, Inspector, and this is my colleague Javier Gorria. We’re in charge of keeping watch over this area; it’s very big, more than fifty square kilometres of woodland, but if we can help you in anyway, you can be sure that we will.’

Amaia looked at them in silence without replying. It was an intimidation tactic that almost never failed, and it worked this time too. The ranger who had stayed leaning against the Land Rover stood up and moved forward a pace.

‘Ma’am. We’ll do everything we can to help. The bear expert from Huesca arrived an hour ago, he’s parked a bit further down,’ he said, indicating a bend in the road. ‘If you’ll come with us, we’ll show you where they’re working.’

‘Good, and you can call me Inspector.’

The path became narrower as they went into the wood, opening out again in small clearings where the grass grew green and fine like a beautiful garden lawn. In other areas the wood formed a sheltered, sumptuous and almost warm maze, an impression reinforced by the endless carpet of pine needles and leaves that stretched before them. The water hadn’t penetrated as far into that level, scrubby area as it had done on the slopes, and great dry, springy patches of windblown leaves crowded around the bases of the trees as if forming natural beds for the forest-dwelling lamias. Amaia smiled as she remembered the legends Aunt Engrasi had told her as a child. In the middle of the forest it didn’t seem so far-fetched to accept the existence of the magical creatures that shaped the past of the people of the region. All forests are powerful, some are frightening by dint of being deep or mysterious, others because they are dark and sinister. The Baztán forest is enchanting, with a serene, ancient beauty that effortlessly brings out people’s most human side; a childlike part of them that believes in the fairies with webbed ducks’ feet that used to live in the forest. These fairies would sleep all day, emerging only at nightfall to comb their long blonde hair. Known as lamiak, they would give their golden combs to any man who chose spend the night with them, despite their ducks’ feet, thus granting him his heart’s desire.

Amaia felt the presence of such beings in that forest so tangibly that it seemed easy to believe in a druid culture, the power of trees over men, and to imagine a time when the communion between magical beings and humans was a religion throughout the valley.

‘Here they are, the Ghostbusters,’ said Gorria, not without a hint of sarcasm.

The expert from Huesca and his assistant were wearing garish orange overalls and were each carrying a silver coloured briefcase similar to the ones used by forensics officers. When Amaia and Jonan reached them they seemed absorbed in observing the trunk of a beech tree.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Inspector,’ said the man, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Raúl González and this is Nadia Takchenko. If you’re wondering why we’re wearing these clothes, it’s because of the poachers; nothing appeals to those riffraff like the rumour that there’s a bear in the area, and you’ll see them popping out from all kinds of places, even under rocks, and that’s no joke. The big macho Spaniard sets out to catch a bear, and he’s so terrified that the bear might catch him first that he’ll shoot at anything that moves … It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve shot at us thinking we were bears, hence the orange overalls. You can see them two kilometres away; in the Russian forests everybody wears them.’

‘What have you got to tell me? Habemus bear or not?’ asked Amaia.

‘Dr Takchenko and I believe it would be too precipitate to confirm or refute something like that at this stage, Inspector.’

‘But you can at least tell me whether you’ve come across any sign, any clue …’

‘We could say yes, we’ve undoubtedly come across traces that indicate the presence of large animals, but nothing conclusive. In any case, we’ve only just arrived, we’ve barely had time to inspect the area and the light is almost gone,’ he said, looking at the sky.

‘Tomorrow at dawn we will get down to work, is that how you say it?’ asked Dr Takchenko in strongly accented Spanish. ‘The sample you sent us is certainly from a plantigrade. It would be very interesting to have a second sample.’

Amaia decided it was best not to mention that the sample had been found on a corpse.

‘You’ll have further samples tomorrow,’ said Jonan.

‘You can’t tell me anything else, then?’ persisted Amaia.

‘Look, Inspector, the first thing you ought to know is that bears aren’t often sighted. There have been no reports of a bear coming down into the Baztán Valley since the year 1700, which is when the last recorded sightings occurred; there’s even a register that lists the compensation paid to the hunters who killed one of the last bears in this valley. Since then, nothing. There’s no official record that a bear has come down this low, although there have always been rumours amongst the people in the area. Don’t misunderstand me, this is a marvellous place, but bears don’t enjoy company, company of any kind, not even their own kind. And especially not human company. It would be quite rare for a man to come across one by chance, the bear would smell him from several kilometres away and head away from the human without their paths crossing …’

‘And what if a bear had, by chance, come down as far as the valley, following the scent of a female, for example? My understanding is that they’re capable of travelling hundreds of kilometres with that as a lure. And what if it was attracted by something special?’

‘If you’re referring to a corpse, it’s quite unlikely. Bears don’t eat carrion; if there’s a shortage of prey they gather lichen, fruit, honey, young shoots, almost anything rather than carrion.’

‘I wasn’t talking about a corpse, more something like processed foods … I’m afraid I can’t be more specific.’

‘Bears are strongly attracted to human food; in fact, the chance to sample processed food is what leads bears to approach populated areas to search for rubbish bins instead of hunting, unable to resist the scent of it.’

‘In that case, could a bear feel so attracted by the scent of processed food that it would approach a corpse, if that corpse smelled of it?’

‘Yes, if we assume that a bear had come down as far as the Baztán Valley, which is pretty unlikely.’

‘Unless they’ve confused a bear with a, how do you say it? With a sobaka again,’ laughed Dr Takchenko. Dr González looked towards the forest rangers, who were standing a few steps further away.

‘Dr Takchenko is referring to the supposed discovery of a bear’s body very near here in August 2008; following an autopsy, it was found to be that of a large sobaka dog. The authorities made a big fuss over nothing.’

‘I remember the story, it was in the papers, but on this occasion aren’t you the ones who are confirming that we’re dealing with bear hairs?’

‘Of course the hairs you sent us belong to a bear, although … In any case, I can’t tell you anything more at the moment. We’ll be here for a few days, we’ll inspect the places where the samples were found and we’ll set up cameras at strategic points to try and film it, if there is one around here.’

They picked up their briefcases and went back up the path along which the others had come. Amaia moved forward a few metres, walking between the trees, trying to find the traces that had so interested the experts. She could almost sense the hostile presence of the forest rangers behind her.

‘And what can you tell me, gentlemen? Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in the area? Has anything caught your attention?’ she asked, turning round so as not to miss their reactions.

The two men looked at one another before answering.

‘Are you asking whether we’ve seen a bear?’ asked the shorter one in an ironic tone.

Amaia looked at him as if she’d only just noticed his presence and was still deciding how to class him. She went over to him until she was so close she could smell his aftershave lotion. She saw that he was wearing an Osasuna t-shirt beneath the khaki collar of his uniform shirt.

‘What I’m asking, Señor Gorria … it is Gorria, isn’t it? – is whether you’ve noticed anything worth mentioning. An increase or decrease in the number of deer, wild boar, rabbits, hares or foxes; attacks on livestock; unusual animals in the area; poachers, suspicious day-trippers; reports from hunters, shepherds or drunks; UFO sightings or the presence of a T-Rex … Absolutely anything … And, of course, bears.’

A red flush spread down the man’s neck and up to his forehead like an infection. Amaia could almost see the small drops of sweat forming on the taut skin of his cheeks; even so, she remained at his side a few seconds longer. Then she took a step back without dropping her gaze and waited. Gorria turned to his colleague again, looking for support that was not forthcoming.

‘Look at me, Gorria.’

‘We haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary,’ Flores intervened. ‘The forest has its own heartbeat and its natural equilibrium seems unchanged. I think it’s highly unlikely that a bear would come so far down into the valley. I’m not an expert on plantigrades, but I agree with the Ghostbusters. I’ve been working in these woods for fifteen years and I’ve seen a lot of things, I can tell you, some of them quite rare, or even extraordinary, like the body of the dog that appeared in Orabidea that the guys from the Environment Agency thought was a bear. We never believed it,’ Gorria shook his head, ‘but, in their defence, I will say it must have been the biggest dog ever and it was very decomposed and swollen. The fireman who retrieved the body from the pothole where it was found had an upset stomach for a month afterwards.’

‘You’ve heard the expert, there’s a possibility that it might be a young male who’s strayed from his usual path following the scent of a female …’

Flores pulled a leaf off a bush and started folding it symmetrically in half while he considered his reply.

‘Not this low down. If we were talking about the Pyrenees, fine, because however clever those expert plantigrade specialists think they are, it’s likely that there are more bears than they’ve counted. But not here, not so low down.’

‘And how would you explain the fact that hairs that undoubtedly belong to a bear have been found?’

‘If it was the Environment Agency who carried out the initial analysis, they’ll be dinosaur scales until they discover that it’s a lizard skin, but I don’t believe it. We haven’t seen tracks, animal bodies, dens, faeces, nothing, and I don’t think the Ghostbusters are going to find anything we’ve missed. There’s not a bear here, in spite of the hairs, no sirree. Perhaps something else, but not a bear,’ he said, carefully unfolding the leaf he’d been folding to reveal a dark, wet grid of sap.

‘Do you mean another kind of animal? A large animal?’

‘Not exactly,’ he replied.

‘He means a basajaun,’ said Gorria.

Amaia put her hands on her hips and turned to face Jonan.

‘A basajaun. Now, why didn’t we think of that before? Well, I can see that your job leaves you time to read the papers.’

‘And to watch TV,’ added Gorria.

‘It’s on the TV too?’ Amaia looked at Jonan in dismay.

‘Yes, Lo que pasa en España ran a segment on it yesterday, and it won’t be long before we’ve got reporters turning up here,’ he answered.

‘Fuck, this is just like a Kafka novel. A basajaun. And what? Have you seen one?’

‘He has,’ said Gorria.

Amaia didn’t miss the way Flores glared at his colleague as he shook his head.

‘Let me get this clear, you’re telling me that you’ve seen a basajaun?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ muttered Flores.

‘Damn it, Flores! There’s nothing funny about it, lots of people know about it, it’s in the incident report, someone will end up telling her about it, you’d be better off doing it yourself.’

‘Tell me,’ insisted Amaia.

Flores hesitated for a moment before starting to speak.

‘It was two years ago. A poacher shot me by mistake. I was in the trees taking a piss and I guess the bastard thought I was a deer or something. He got me in the shoulder and I was left lying on the floor unable to move for at least three hours. When I woke up I saw a creature squatting down at my side, his face was almost totally covered in hair, but not like an animal’s, more like a man whose beard starts right below his eyes, intelligent, sympathetic eyes, almost human, except the iris covered almost the whole eye; there was barely any white, like a dog’s eyes. I fainted again. I woke up when I heard the voices of my colleagues who were looking for me; then he looked me in the eyes one more time and raised a hand, as if he were waving goodbye, and he whistled so loudly that my colleagues heard it almost a kilometre away. I passed out again and when I woke up I was in hospital.’

He had folded the leaf up again while he’d been talking and now he cut it into tiny pieces with his thumbnail. Jonan went and stood next to Amaia and looked at her before speaking. ‘It could have been a hallucination as a result of the shock from being shot, the loss of blood and knowing that you were alone on the mountain, it must have been a terrible moment; or perhaps the poacher who shot you felt remorse and stayed with you until your colleagues arrived.’

‘The poacher saw that he’d shot me, but, according to his own statement, he thought I was dead and he ran away like a rat. They stopped him hours later for a breathalyser test, which was when he told them what had happened. Ironic, huh? I still have to be grateful to the bastard, if he hadn’t confessed they wouldn’t have found me. As for hallucination as a result of shock of being shot, it’s possible, but in the hospital they showed me an improvised bandage made of overlapping leaves and grasses arranged to form a kind of impermeable dressing that prevented me from bleeding to death.’

‘Perhaps you put the leaves there yourself before you lost consciousness. There are known cases of people who after suffering an amputation whilst alone have put on a tourniquet, preserved the amputated limb and called the emergency services before losing consciousness.’

‘Sure, I’ve read about that online, but tell me something: how did I manage to press hard enough to keep the wound closed while I was unconscious? Because that’s what that creature did for me, and that was what saved my life.’

Amaia didn’t answer. She raised her hand and put it over her mouth as if holding back something she didn’t want to say.

‘I see, I shouldn’t have told you about it,’ said Flores, turning towards the path.

12

Night had fallen when Amaia reached the entrance of the Church of Santiago. She pushed the big door, almost sure that it was closed, and was a little surprised when it opened smoothly and silently. She smiled at the idea that they could still leave the church doors unlocked in her home town. The altar was partially lit and a group of fifty or so children were sitting in the front few pews. She dipped her fingers in the holy water stoup and shivered slightly as the icy drops touched her forehead.

‘Have you come to collect a child?’

She turned towards a woman in her forties with a shawl around her shoulders.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought you’d come to collect one of the children.’ It was obvious the woman had recognised her. ‘We were giving the first communion classes,’ she explained.

‘This early? We’re still in February.’

‘Well, Father Germán likes to do these things properly,’ she said, with an apologetic shrug. Amaia remembered his long-winded speech about the evil that surrounds us during the funeral and wondered how many other things the parish priest of Santiago liked to do properly. ‘In any case, I don’t think we do have that much time left, just March and April, and then the first group are due to make their first communion on the first of May.’ She suddenly stopped.

‘Sorry, I’m sure I’m delaying you, you must be here to speak to Father Germán, aren’t you? He’s in the sacristy, I’ll go and let him know you’re here.’

‘Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself, the truth is that I’ve come to the church in a personal capacity,’ she said, employing an almost apologetic tone for the last two words, which immediately gained her the sympathy of the catechist, who smiled at her and took a few steps back like a selfless servant withdrawing.

‘Of course, may God be with you.’

Amaia walked up the nave, avoiding the main altar and stopping in front of some of the carvings that occupied the side altars, thinking all the while about those young girls and their washed faces, devoid of make-up and life, that someone had taken it upon himself to present as beautiful works of macabre imagery, beautiful even in that state. She gazed up at the saints and the archangels and the mourning virgins, their tense, pale faces bereft of colour, expressing purity and the ecstasy achieved through agony, a slow torture, desired and feared in equal measure, and accepted with an overwhelming submission and surrender.

‘That’s what you’ll never achieve,’ whispered Amaia.

No, they weren’t saints, they wouldn’t surrender themselves in a submissive and selfless manner; he would have to snatch their lives from them and steal their souls.

Leaving the Church of Santiago she walked slowly, taking advantage of the fact that the darkness and the intense cold had left the streets empty in spite of the early hour. She crossed the church gardens and admired the beauty of the enormous trees that surrounded the building, their height competing with that of the church spires, conscious of the strange sensation that came over her in those almost deserted streets. The urban centre of Elizondo was spread across the plain at the bottom of the valley and its layout was heavily influenced by the course of the River Baztán. It had three main streets which ran parallel to one another and constituted the town’s historic centre, where the grand buildings and other houses built in the typical local style still stood.

Calle Braulio Iriarte ran along the northern bank of the River Baztán and was linked to Calle Jaime Urrutia by two bridges. The latter was the old main street until the construction of Calle Santiago, and it ran along the southern bank of the River Baztán. Crammed with spacious town houses, Calle Santiago was the starting point of the area’s urban expansion, along with the construction of the main road from Pamplona to France at the start of the twentieth century.

Amaia arrived at the main square feeling the wind between the folds of her scarf as she looked at the brightly lit esplanade, which no longer possessed half the charm it must have had in the previous century when it had mostly been used for playing pelota. She went over to the town hall, a noble building dating from the end of the eighteenth century which had taken Juan de Arozamena, a famous local stone mason, two years to build. On its façade was the familiar chequered coat of arms with an inscription reading ‘Baztán Valley and University’, and in front of the building, at the bottom left of the façade, was a stone known as a botil harri which was used for the type of pelota known as laxoa in which the players wore gloves.

She reached out and touched the stone almost ceremonially, feeling how the cold spread up through her hand. Amaia tried to imagine how the square would have been. The two teams of four pelotaris would have lined up facing each other, a little like a game of tennis with too many players and no net, each with a laxoa, or glove, instead of a racket to pass the ball amongst themselves. In the nineteenth century this game had fallen into decline. Even so, she remembered her father once telling them that one of his grandfathers had been a great fan of the game and ended up gaining a reputation as a glove maker thanks to the quality of the gloves he sewed himself, using leather that he also treated and tanned.

This was her hometown, the place in which she had lived for most of her life. It was a part of her, like a genetic trace, it was where she returned to in her dreams, when she wasn’t dreaming about the dead bodies, assailants, killers and suicides which mingled obscenely in her nightmares. But when her sleep was calm, she went back to those streets and squares, to those stones, to the place she had always wanted to leave. A place she didn’t know if she loved or not. A place that no longer existed, because what she was starting to miss now was the Elizondo of her childhood. However, now that she had returned almost sure there would be signs of definite change, she found things hadn’t changed that much. Yes, perhaps there were more cars in the streets, more streetlights, flower beds and little gardens which painted the face of the town like fresh make-up. But not so much that it prevented her from seeing that its essence hadn’t changed, that everything was still the same underneath.

She wondered whether the Alimentación Adela grocery shop or Pedro Galarregui’s shop in Calle Santiago were still open, or the shops like Belzunegui or Mari Carmen where her mother used to buy their clothes, the Baztanesa bakery, Virgilio’s shoe shop, or Garmendia’s junk shop on Calle Jaime Urrutia. And she knew that it wasn’t even this Elizondo that she missed, but rather the older and more visceral one, the place that formed part of her being and that would die in her only when she breathed her last. The Elizondo of harvests ruined by plagues, of children dying in the whooping cough epidemic of 1440. The Elizondo whose people had changed their customs to adapt themselves to a land that was initially hostile, a people determined to stay in that place near the church which had been the origin of the town. The Elizondo of sailors recruited in the square to travel to Venezuela in the employ of the traders belonging to the Royal Gipuzkoan Company of Caracas. The Elizondo of elizondarras who rebuilt the town after the River Baztán’s terrible floods and the times when it burst its banks. In her mind she recreated the image of the altar from one of the side chapels floating down the street along with the bodies of livestock. And of the residents lifting it over their heads, convinced that its presence in the middle of that quagmire could only be a heavenly sign, a sign that God hadn’t abandoned them and that they should endure. Brave men and women, forged thus by necessity, interpreters of signs from nature who always looked to the heavens hoping for pity from a sky that was more threatening than protective.

She turned back along Calle Santiago and went down as far as Plaza Javier Ziga, where she set off across the bridge and stopped in the middle. Leaning on the low wall, she murmured as she ran her fingers over the rough stone where its name, Muniartea, was engraved. She stared into the blackness of the water that carried its mineral aroma down from the peaks. There was still a commemorative plaque in Calle Jaime Urrutia on the house that had belonged to the Serora, the woman who had been responsible for looking after the church and the rectory, which marked the point reached by the flood waters on 2 June 1913. That same river was now witness to a new horror, one that had nothing to do with the forces of nature, but rather with the most absolute human depravity, which turned men into animals, predators who mingled with the righteous in order to be able to approach them, to be able to commit the most deplorable act, giving free rein to desire, anger, pride and the insatiable appetite of the most disgusting gluttony.

A shudder ran down her back, she snatched her hands from the cold stone and put them in her pockets with a shiver. She took one last look at the river and set off home as it started to rain again.

13

Amaia could hear James and Jonan’s voices mingling with the omnipresent murmur of the television as they chatted in Aunt Engrasi’s little living room. It sounded like they were sitting separately from the six old ladies who were making a real din as they played poker at a hexagonal table covered with green baize that wouldn’t be out of place in a casino. Her aunt had had it brought all the way from Bordeaux so that honour and a few euros could be gambled on it each afternoon. When they saw her in the doorway, the two men moved away from the gaming table and came over to her. James gave her a quick kiss as he took her hand and led her to the kitchen.

‘Jonan’s waiting for you, he needs to talk to you. I’ll leave you alone.’

The deputy inspector came forward and handed her a brown envelope.

‘Chief, the report on the samples has arrived from Zaragoza, I thought you’d want to see it as soon as possible,’ he said, looking round Engrasi’s enormous kitchen. ‘I thought places like this didn’t exist anymore.’

‘You’re right, they don’t, believe me,’ she replied, pulling a sheet of paper out of the envelope. ‘This is … enlightening. Listen, Jonan, the hairs we found on the bodies come from wild boar, sheep, foxes and, although they’re still waiting for confirmation on this, possibly a bear, although that’s not conclusive; furthermore, the epithelial fragments we found on the string are, wait for it, goatskin.’

‘Goatskin?’

‘Yes, Jonan, yes, we’ve got Noah’s fucking ark here, I’m almost surprised they haven’t found elephant snot and whale sperm …’

‘Any human traces?’

‘Nothing human; no hair or fluids, nothing. What do you think our friends the forest rangers would say if they could see this?’

‘They would say there’s nothing human because it isn’t a human. It’s a basajaun.’

‘In my opinion, that guy’s an idiot. As he himself explained, basajauns are supposed to be peaceful creatures, protectors of the life of the forest … He said himself that a basajaun saved his life, so you tell me how that fits in with our story so far.’

Jonan looked at her, weighing up her comment.

‘Just because the basajaun was there doesn’t mean he killed the girls, it’s more likely the opposite: as the protector of the forest, it’s logical that he would feel responsible, insulted and provoked by the presence of this predator.’

Amaia looked at him in surprise.

‘Logical? … You’re just having a laugh about all this, aren’t you?’ Jonan smiled. ‘You love all this rubbish about the basajaun, don’t deny it.’

‘Only the bits that don’t involve dead girls. But you know better than anybody that it’s not rubbish, chief, and I speak with authority, since I’m an archaeologist and anthropologist as well as a police officer.’

‘That’s rich. OK then, let’s hear your explanation: why do I know better than anybody?’

‘Because you were born and grew up here. Surely you’re not going to tell me you weren’t brought up on these stories? They’re not nonsense, they form part of the culture and history of the Basque Country and Navarra, and we mustn’t forget that what is now considered mythology was originally a religion.’

‘Well don’t forget that in 1610 in this very valley, in the name of the most extreme forms of religion, dozens of women were persecuted and condemned and died on the fires of the auto-da-fé as a result of beliefs as ridiculous as this one, which have, fortunately, been left behind by evolution.’

He shook his head, giving Amaia a glimpse of the knowledge hidden behind his deceptively modest title of deputy inspector.

‘It’s well known that religious fervour and fear fed by legends and ignorant peasants did a great deal of damage, but you can’t deny that it constituted one of the most overwhelming belief systems in recent history, chief. A hundred years ago, or one hundred and fifty at the most, it was unusual to find someone who claimed they didn’t believe in witches, sorgiñas, belagiles, basajauns, the tartalo and, most importantly, in Mari, the goddess, genius, mother, guardian of the harvests and livestock, whose whims could make the sky thunder and cause hailstorms that left the town suffering the most awful famines. It reached a point where more people believed in witches than in the Holy Trinity, and this didn’t escape the notice of the Church, which saw how its faithful would leave after Mass only to continue observing the ancient rituals that had formed part of their families’ lives since time immemorial. And the ones who waged all-out war on the old beliefs were the half-crazed obsessives like Pier de Lancré, the Inquisitor of Bayonne, who managed to reverse the balance of belief through their madness. What had always formed part of the people’s beliefs suddenly became something damned, to be persecuted, the object of absurd denunciations which, in most cases, were made in the hope that anyone who collaborated with the Inquisition would be free of suspicion themselves. But before this madness, the old religion had been an integral part of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees for hundreds of years without causing the slightest problem. It even coexisted with Christianity without significant issues, until intolerance and madness made their appearance. I think that our society could do with reclaiming some of the old values.’

Impressed by these words from the normally rather introvert deputy inspector, Amaia said, ‘Jonan, madness and intolerance always make their appearance in every society, and you seem like you’ve just been talking with my Aunt Engrasi …’

‘No, I haven’t, but I’d love to. Your husband told me that she reads cards and that sort of thing.’

‘Yes … and that sort of thing. You stay away from my aunt,’ said Amaia with a smile, ‘your head’s buzzing as it is.’

Jonan laughed without taking his eyes off the roast that was sitting next to the oven waiting for its final browning before dinner.

‘Speaking of buzzing heads, do you have any idea where Montes is?’

The deputy inspector was about to reply when he was overcome by a fit of discretion and bit his lip and dropped his gaze. His expression did not escape Amaia’s notice.

‘Jonan, we’re conducting the most important investigation of our lives here, there’s a lot riding on this case. Reputation, honour, and, most importantly, getting that rat off the streets and making sure he doesn’t do what he’s already done to those girls to anybody else. I appreciate your sense of solidarity, but Montes is a bit of a loose cannon and his behaviour could seriously interfere with the investigation. I know how you feel, because I feel the same. I still don’t know what to do about it, and of course I haven’t reported him, but much as it hurts me, much as I respect Fermín Montes, I won’t allow his flaky behaviour to prejudice the work of so many professionals who are slogging their guts out, ruining their eyesight and losing sleep over this. Now, Jonan, tell me: what do you know about Montes?’

‘Well, chief, I agree with you, and you already know my loyalty lies with you; if I haven’t said anything before it’s because it seemed to me to be something of a personal nature …’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

‘At lunch time today I saw him eating at the Antxitonea restaurant … with one of your sisters,’ he finished in a mumbled rush.

‘With his sister?’ she said in surprise.

‘No, with your sister.’

‘My sister? My sister Rosaura?’

‘No, the other one, with your sister Flora.’

‘With Flora? Did they see you?’

‘No; you know it has a semi-circular bar that runs from the entrance and goes back towards the entrance to the pelota court; I was by the window with Iriarte, but I saw them come in. I was going over to say hello but then they went into the dining room and it didn’t seem appropriate for me to follow them. When we left half an hour later I saw through the window into the bar that they had ordered and were about to eat.’

Jonan Etxaide had never let rain intimidate him. In fact, walking in a downpour without an umbrella was one of his favourite things and, in Pamplona, he would go for a walk with his anorak hood pulled up whenever he could, the only one walking slowly as everyone else hurriedly fled to the nearest cafés or lined up under buildings’ treacherous eaves which dripped huge drops on them, making them even wetter. He walked the streets of Elizondo admiring the smooth curtain of water that seemed to fall across the roads, producing a curious effect like a slanting wedding veil. The car headlights pierced the darkness, drawing watery ghosts in front of them, and the red light of the traffic lights seemed to spill out as if it were a solid, forming a pool of red water at his feet. In contrast with the deserted pavements, there was a steady flow of traffic at that hour, when it seemed like everyone was in a rush to get somewhere, like lovers on their way to a tryst. Jonan walked along Calle Santiago to the square, fleeing the noise with rapid steps, which slowed as soon as he drew near enough to make out the clean outlines of the buildings that immediately transported him to another era.

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