“Perhaps this profession takes too much from our lives. If our job requires us to deal with criminals, to surround ourselves with them, then what type of people are we letting into our personal lives, Estíbaliz? How could we not be affected by all that toxicity? Every night we bring home all this hatred, all these unresolved neuroses. How can we avoid being influenced by that?”
“Everyone has neuroses in some form or another,” she pointed out. “The world is filled with unresolved conflict. And even if we didn’t work in criminal investigation, we’d still be affected. Leaving the force won’t bring you peace of mind.”
“All I’m saying is that not all countries are at war,” I murmured to myself, gazing out at the rain-drenched streets.
Estí looked me up and down, as though inspecting me for the first time in a long while.
“In all the years I’ve worked with you, I’ve never heard you talk like this.”
“And I’ve never seen you lying in a heap with all your bones broken. It upset me. Fuck, Estí, I thought you were going to die,” I said, frustrated. “You’re the one who always protects me. I can’t imagine my life without you. Now, I feel broken, like the emotional connection between us has snapped—and I’m going to have to carry on the investigation without you. It terrifies me.”
“You’re frightened.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. I rested my head on her thigh and watched the rain. Estíbaliz seemed content to stroke my hair, avoiding my scar.
33
YENNEGO
DIAGO VELA
Summer, the Year of Our Lord 1199
Seven years go by quickly for a man who sees the faces of his son and cheerful wife first thing when he wakes every morning.
Thus passed the seven happiest years of my life.
Should I have heeded the silent warning on the southerly wind—the dreaded hegoaizea, said to drive men mad? It greeted us that ill-fated morning as soon as we flung open our shutters.
Alix drew the sheet over her head, fleeing the light. I loved to comb her hair when she wore it loose at home and detested her four-coned wimple as much as she did.
“Where’s Yennego?” she asked drowsily.
“His uncle Nagorno arrived at dawn and took him out riding.” I cast a sidelong glance at the open window. “I expect they’ll have returned from their jaunt by now.”
We dressed and set off for the North Gate. When we arrived, Nagorno was dismounting from Altai, and Yennego was holding the reins to a fine-looking colt.
“Father!” he exclaimed when he saw me. He ran into my arms despite his bad leg. “Look what Uncle has given me! A big horse, just for me!”
Yennego was seven summers old now, and had helped thaw relations between my brother and me. Nagorno adored his nephew and treated him as though he were his own son. He indulged his every whim and had taught him to ride a horse and to make jewelry.
I embraced Yennego. He had my dark hair, but he smelled of pastries, like his mother. He was born with a good pair of lungs—a healthy baby—but when he was two years old, an accident on Rúa de la Astería had injured one of his legs, stunting its growth.
All the same he learned to walk, and then he learned to ignore the mockery that came his way, even though at times he was forced to throw stones to defend himself. As a result of the other children’s teasing, Yennego preferred to spend all day on horseback, where his infirmity was indiscernible. When he wriggled free of my arms, I saw him grimace.
“Is it your tooth, son?”
“It’s coming loose, Father, and it hurts. Grandmother Lucía gave me a bracelet with a hedgehog’s tooth in it, but it still aches.” He showed me a length of braided red yarn, identical to the ones she had woven for Alix and me prior to our betrothal. The bracelets were the only things we never took off, even between the sheets or on winters’ nights when we talked in our bathtub.
“Try walking around Sant Michel Church three times,” said a voice behind us. “They say that takes away pain.”
It was Onneca, as serious and circumspect as ever. Her unhappiness had grown as the years passed and she waited for an heir that never came. Her brother had been killed in an ambush after he returned from the Crusades, which left her to bear the burden of continuing the de Maestu line. She was finding it difficult. She never showed her nephew any affection, nor did I expect it. I was polite to her whenever we met, but that was all.
But Alix, ever hopeful, never stopped trying.
“Better not, son,” my wife interjected, walking over to Onneca and tenderly clasping her arm. “Apparently, a young maid who walked around the church in Respaldiza three times was taken by a demon and never seen again.”
“Pray, don’t frighten my nephew, my lady. Today is a day for rejoicing, if I’m not mistaken,” said Nagorno, who was always in an excellent mood after a ride.
“I know of no reason for jubilation, although I see that you’ve made a generous gift of Olbia’s foal for the boy,” retorted Onneca.
“Won’t you share your news with us, dear sister-in-law?” asked Nagorno, drawing closer to Alix to caress her belly. “The child will arrive at the end of autumn, isn’t that so?”
“My brother has a good eye. Apparently he can detect the emergence of new life. We’ve yet to tell anybody, except for Yennego, who knows he’ll have a little playmate by the end of the year,” I said, avoiding Onneca’s gaze.
Her eyes were brimming with sorrow. It sparked in me an old pain I was loath to revisit.
Just then horses entered through the North Gate. This past summer, King Sancho VII, called the Strong because he stood two heads higher than any of his subjects, had appointed a new lieutenant. The man had served him well at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the starting point for pilgrims following the Way of Santiago. Sancho’s lieutenants were military men who came and went, sent to take control of one castle or another. They never settled nor did the soldiers under their command. Sancho’s son, Petro Remírez, had recently come of age, and the king was moving his lieutenants around in response to alarming news coming out of Toledo.
Throughout Navarre, there was talk of Sancho’s journey south, to the land of the Saracens, where he would seek an alliance with the new caliph, Miramamolín. The king was widely criticized for seeking allies in the land of the infidels; the pope had threatened him with excommunication. Some of the townsfolk in Victoria weren’t happy about being forced to pay taxes to a king they did not know, a king who bedded infidel women in southern lands. When the wine flowed in the wayside inns from Tudela to Pamplona, from San Sebastian to Santander, conversations turned to salacious stories of Moorish princesses lying in the Navarrese giant’s arms. In our town, many looked favorably on the advances of Alfonso VIII, King of Castile. In Portal Oscuro, the Mendozas and the Isunzas spoke of the Castilian monarch, saying that he had granted them more favors than King Sancho VI, called the Wise, and his son. Under the Castilian kings’ charters, minor nobles were treated the same as any other free men within the town’s walls.
We had been awaiting the arrival of Martín Chipia, Sancho’s new lieutenant, and the detachment of soldiers from Tudela. The lieutenant had shoulder-length hair and a flattened nose, the result of a drunken brawl. His short legs and broad shoulders made him appear top-heavy.
“Here are my new men.” He leaped nimbly from his horse. His head was level with my chest. “They will cause no trouble in town. But I bring worrisome tidings from the king’s advisers. Alfonso has launched an offensive, and we must be prepared. Tomorrow we will discuss provisions. There will be enough time to bring in the harvest, God willing. The fields I saw along the way looked green. Are your granaries filled?”
“Not yet,” replied Alix. “But judging from the summer rains this year, the harvest will be plentiful.”
“Then let us pray for sun these
next few days so we can reap it all,” he said. “King Sancho doesn’t trust his Castilian cousin, and my orders are to ensure that Victoria does not surrender.”
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” Nagorno interjected.
* * *
—
Our nightmare began when darkness fell.
Alix and I had just come home after putting Grandmother Lucía to bed. She had little appetite lately, and every day her voice grew fainter.
We left Yennego capering among the market stalls at Santa María with the other boys from Villa de Suso. Every Thursday, fish arrived from the northern ports. We had to buy sardines or salted cod to get through Friday, a day of fasting decreed by the Church of Rome.
In the evenings, once the fishmongers had gathered up their baskets, the gravestones in the Santa María Cemetery were strewn with sticky scales and entrails, and the rotten stench of fish pervaded the air.
I went down to look for my son among the few remaining stragglers flitting around the cemetery, but I didn’t see him. The curfew had sounded long before, announcing the closure of the town’s three gates.
I spied a group of children nearby. “Have you seen Yennego?”
“No, sire,” replied the rope maker’s son. The lad was tall for his nine years.
“He said he was going to walk around the church three times,” said a girl, the eldest child of the farrier who worked for Lyra. “He said it would cure his toothache.”
“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“It was still daylight,” they replied.
By the time I crossed Rúa de las Tenderías, the town was practically deserted. I ordered one of Martín Chipia’s guards to open the South Gate for me and walked around the church, calling my son’s name.
Hours later, after the entire town was out looking for Yennego, I finally realized what had happened when the red-wool bracelet with the hedgehog’s tooth that Grandmother Lucía had made for him was found, unraveled, on an old tombstone in the Sant Michel Cemetery.
No demon had taken my son.
He’d been abducted by a monster.
34
LOCARD’S PRINCIPLE
UNAI
October 2019
I plunged into the cold water, swimming down one of the pool lanes. I’d become accustomed to swimming a few laps when I visited Arkaute to chat with Doctor Leiva. It relaxed me more than my morning runs: my thoughts flowed better underwater, surrounded by silence.
I had arranged to meet Doctor Leiva at lunchtime. She was running late, so I took advantage of the extra time to get some exercise and to contemplate the theft of Count Don Vela’s chronicle. Ramiro Alvar had asked his lawyer to search his private collection. Only the chronicle was missing, and the lawyer had persuaded Ramiro Alvar to report the incident. The police were treating it as trespassing with aggravated burglary.
At the police academy, I had studied Edmond Locard’s exchange principle: every crime leaves behind trace evidence. The famous criminologist had speculated that “it is impossible for a criminal to act without leaving traces of their presence.” The theft of the diary had left more trace evidence than the culprit imagined. Alvar or Ramiro Alvar could have staged the attack, but at this point I knew it was more likely that the thief had been an outsider—the person had acted on impulse. He had found out what the chronicle was worth and decided to steal it.
Thought number one: The person who had attacked Ramiro Alvar and Estí and the person who had committed the murders were one and the same. By the time the culprit read about the chronicle, they already knew it existed and where it was kept but did not know how valuable it was.
Thought number two: the thief’s motive for stealing the copy of the chronicle was money. Ramiro Alvar and Estí had been attacked simply because they were in the way. It hadn’t occurred to me that the motive for killing Antón Lasaga, the two sisters, and MatuSalem might also be money. What if that’s what it had been all along?
A voice interrupted my reverie. “I’ve done two laps with you and you haven’t even noticed I’m here.”
I glanced at the lane to my right in astonishment. Doctor Leiva had joined me in the pool and was studying me with a serene smile.
“Marina!” I gave a start. “I was lost in my thoughts.”
We swam to a corner of the pool and propped ourselves up on the edge. It was a most relaxing place for private conversation. I told her about the break-in at the tower and the theft of the chronicle.
“Look at Ramiro Alvar’s background,” she suggested, after listening patiently to the whirlwind of information. “You need to pinpoint the traumatic experience that caused his personality to split and the lie he told himself to keep going. We all invent things when we can’t accept a situation. But patients with dissociative identity disorder take this type of fabrication to an extreme: They invent alters, avatars that symbolize the perpetual reliving of that trauma. They become trapped by what they feel they ought to have done: the bully who took a stand, the impassive victim who ran away. I doubt Ramiro Alvar will tell you about the trauma if you ask him directly. Does he ever speak about his parents?”
“In glowing terms.”
“Clichés?”
“Yes.”
“Patients with DID occasionally erase periods of their lives and refill them with pleasant but vague memories they never actually experienced.”
“They seem to have enjoyed a good reputation among the villagers,” I said, “other than the fact that the father had an eccentric penchant for dressing up. Ramiro Alvar attributes it to a hereditary form of the disorder. Although in the literature you recommended, experts seem to reject the idea that DID is inherited.”
“As a rule, yes. The infrequency of cases makes even an intergenerational study impractical, let alone a genetic study. But we must keep an open mind. In my view, the condition has more to do with the story the patient tells himself. If Ramiro Alvar was a precocious child, brought up by his family to feel shame and fear about a hereditary illness that kept them isolated from others, then when his traumatic experience occurred, his mind may have latched onto his worst nightmare and he became what he feared the most. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the individual believes a situation is real, it will have real consequences.”
“There is one possible explanation for what happened, but I hope it isn’t true,” I said. “It’s possible that Ramiro Alvar woke up and saw that Alvar had slept with my colleague. He then staged a break-in and the theft of the chronicle to divert suspicion. After throwing Estíbaliz off the balcony, he climbed down the stairs, opened the window from inside, and then jumped from the lower height to ensure his own survival. This scenario aligns with Ramiro Alvar’s desire to get rid of Alvar, in the same manner as in the novel, and it explains why Estíbaliz no longer activates Alvar—Alvar no longer exists.”
Doctor Leiva considered my theory and then nodded. “In my experience, patients with DID often self-harm: they cut themselves, tattoo insults on their bodies, engage in risky behavior. But it’s normally the abusive alter who attacks the weaker personality, the ANP—not the other way around.”
“Meaning?”
“Make sure the person you think is Ramiro Alvar isn’t in fact Alvar pretending to be Ramiro Alvar. Alvar is a survival-driven alter; he’ll do whatever it takes to stay alive. He is also theatrical, so if he’s impersonating Ramiro Alvar, he’ll give himself away eventually. Don’t lose sight of your profile. You mentioned that when you confronted Ramiro Alvar with Estíbaliz, she didn’t activate his alter.”
“That’s true, but I don’t want to use her again,” I said.
“Yet Alvar had already appeared before he met Estíbaliz because the novel predates their meeting. We need to know what triggered his first appearance. Does Ramiro Alvar have other alters?”
“He says there’s only Alvar,
the priest,” I explained. “Apparently, the men in his family start dressing up when they are young, and as they grow older, they develop multiple dissociated identities. He was afraid he might end up like his father, so he wrote the novel as a therapeutic exercise to rid himself of Alvar. He claims it worked—Alvar died when he wrote the novel. He described the experience as cathartic, and he believed Alvar had gone. Then he met Estíbaliz, and Alvar reappeared.”
“The abusive personality.”
“Yes, and this is what I find puzzling: Why would Ramiro Alvar cast his deceased brother, Alvar, the priest, as the abusive alter? According to the villagers in Ugarte, the two brothers adored each other. Those feelings can’t be faked. Young children and adolescents are usually open about their likes and dislikes.”
“Is it possible Alvar became abusive later on, perhaps when he became Ramiro Alvar’s guardian?” Marina suggested.
“People in the village say Alvar died about a year after becoming ill.”
“Ramiro Alvar may have resented having to look after his brother. He was a teenager, and he had just lost both parents. That would be an extremely traumatic time for anyone, and then Alvar died a year later.”
“Apparently, although no one in the village remembers a funeral.”
“What are you implying?”
“Nothing,” I said, “just that there’s something not quite right about his death.”
“You seem to have plenty to go on. Good luck in Ugarte. I have to go now; my next class starts in thirty minutes.”
After Doctor Leiva left, I plunged back into the water and swam for a while longer, contemplating Locard’s principle that every criminal leaves some trace of themselves.
What I was about to discover is that the same is true for every act of love.
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