The Invisible Guardian

‘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.