‘My sister Flora is in Elizondo, insisting we hold a funeral service for our mother; just thinking about it makes me feel sick, and as if that weren’t enough, the rest of my family is siding with her, including James. I’ve tried to explain my reasons for thinking she’s still alive, but I’ve only succeeded in making them angry with me for preventing them from closing this chapter in their lives.’
‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t believe she fell in that river either.’
Amaia gave a sigh, looking straight at him.
‘Of course it is, Jonan, very much so … You’re a good cop, and I trust your instinct. It’s a great relief to have you on my side.’
Jonan nodded without much conviction, as he went round the table gathering up the photographs.
‘Do you need me to go somewhere with you, boss?’
‘I’m off home, Jonan,’ she replied.
He smiled wistfully at her on his way out, leaving her with the familiar feeling of having been unable to pull the wool over his eyes.
As she drove towards the Txokoto River, she passed Juanitaenea, the house that had belonged to her grandmother. James had planned to restore it so that they could live there; the building materials he’d ordered were sitting on pallets outside the house, but there was no sign of any activity.
She was tempted to stop off at the bakery on her way, but decided against it: she had too much going on in her head to become embroiled in another discussion with Ros over the funeral. Instead, she crossed the Giltxaurdi Bridge and parked near the old market. She knew the house she was looking for was close by, but all the houses on that street looked the same and she couldn’t remember which one it was. In the end she took a guess, smiling with relief when Elena Ochoa opened the door.
‘Can we talk?’ Amaia asked her.
The woman responded by seizing her arm and pulling her into the house, then she leaned out to look up and down the street. As on her previous visit, Amaia followed Elena through to the kitchen. Not a word was exchanged as Elena made coffee for them both, placing two cups on a plastic tray covered with kitchen roll. Amaia was grateful for the silence; every instant the woman spent on her precise coffee-making ritual gave Amaia time to order the instincts – for she could scarcely call them thoughts or ideas – that had brought her there. They clattered in her head like the echo from a blow, as the stream of images in her mind amalgamated with others engraved on her memory. She had gone there searching for answers, yet she wasn’t sure she had the questions. Aunt Engrasi always used to tell her: ‘You’ll only find the answers if you know which questions to ask.’ But all she had to go on in this case was a small, white coffin, weighted with bags of sugar, and the word ‘sacrifice’. It was an ominous combination.
She noticed that the woman was trying to steady her hands as she spooned sugar into two cups. She began to stir the brew, but the chink of the spoon on the china seemed to exasperate her to the point where she hurled the spoon on to the tray.
‘Forgive me, my nerves are bad. Tell me what you want, and let’s be done.’
This was Baztán hospitality. Elena Ochoa had no desire to speak to her, in fact she couldn’t wait for her to leave the house and would heave a sigh of relief when she saw her walk through the door, yet she wouldn’t renege on the sacred ritual of offering a visitor something to drink or eat. She was one of those women who did what had to be done. Reassured by that thought, Amaia cupped her hands round the coffee she wouldn’t have time to drink, and spoke.
‘When I came here last, I asked you whether the sect had ever carried out a human sacrifice …’
At this, Elena began to shake uncontrollably.
‘Please … You must leave, I have nothing to say.’
‘Elena, you’ve got to help me. My mother is still out there. I need you to tell me where that house is, I know that’s where I’ll find answers.’
‘I can’t – they’ll kill me.’
‘Who?’
She shook her head, terrified.
‘We’ll give you protection,’ said Amaia, casting a sidelong glance at the little effigy of the virgin with a flickering candle in front of it, and a worn string of rosary beads draped at the base; beside it stood a couple of postcards bearing images of Christ.
‘You can’t protect me from them.’
‘Do you think they carried out a sacrifice?’
Elena stood up, emptying the remains of her coffee into the sink, her back to Amaia as she washed up her cup.
‘No. The proof is that you’re still alive; at the time, the only pregnant woman in the group was Rosario. I’ve thanked God a thousand times for keeping you safe. Perhaps in the end they were trying to impress us, to cow us into submission by making themselves seem more dangerous and powerful …’
Amaia took in the array of talismans with which Elena had surrounded herself: the poor woman was desperately trying to convince herself that she was in control, and yet her body language betrayed her.
‘Elena, look at me,’ she commanded.
Elena turned off the tap, dropped the sponge and swung round to look at her.
‘I had a twin sister who died at birth. The official cause was registered as cot death.’
Pale with fear, the woman raised her hands, placed them over her distraught face, moist with tears, and asked: ‘Where is she buried? Where is she buried?’
Amaia shook her head, watching the woman flinch as she went on to explain:
‘We don’t know. I found her tomb, but the coffin was empty.’
Elena gave a terrible, visceral howl, and lunged at Amaia, who leapt to her feet, startled.
‘Leave my house! Leave my house and never come back!’ she screamed, corralling Amaia to force her to walk on.
Before opening the front door, Amaia turned once more to plead with the woman.
‘At least tell me where the house is.’
After the door slammed shut, she could still hear the woman’s muffled sobs coming from inside.
Instinctively, she reached into her pocket for her phone and dialled Special Agent Aloisius Dupree. She pressed it tightly to her ear as she walked back to her car, listening hard for the faintest sound at the other end of the line. She was about to hang up, when she heard a crackle. She knew he was there, the FBI agent who had been her mentor during her time in New Orleans, and who remained an important part of her life, despite the distances. The sound that reached her through the earpiece a moment later made a shiver run up her spine: the repetitive drone of a funeral chant, the echo of voices suggesting a large space, possibly a cathedral. There was something bleak and sinister about the way three words were repeated over and over again in a monotone. But it was the shrill, anguished death cry that made her stomach turn. The tortured death throes continued for a few seconds, then at last the pitiful sound faded, she assumed because Dupree was moving away.
When at last he spoke, his voice betrayed the same anguish she herself felt.
‘Don’t call me again, I’ll call you.’ Then he hung up, leaving Amaia feeling so small and far away from him that it made her want to scream.
She was still holding her phone when it rang. She looked at the screen with a mixture of hope and panic. She recognised the FBI’s ID number and heard Agent Johnson’s friendly voice greeting her from Virginia. He announced that the seminars at Quantico had been given the green light, and they were hoping she might contribute to the area of studies concerned with criminal behaviour. They were currently in the process of requesting permission from her superior.
Up to that point, their conversation didn’t differ from any of the previous conversations she’d had with FBI officials, but the fact that she’d received the call moments after speaking to Dupree didn’t escape her notice, and what Agent Johnson said next instantly confirmed to her that they were monitoring her calls.
‘Inspector, have you had any type of contact with Special Agent Dupree?’
Amaia bit her lip, hesitating, as she recalled the conve
rsation she’d had with Agent Johnson a month or so ago, when he’d advised her not to use official telephone lines for anything relating to Agent Dupree, and had given her a special number to call. On the rare occasions when she had managed to get in touch with Dupree, his voice always sounded far away, plagued with echoes; invariably, they got cut off, and on one occasion his number had vanished from her phone as if the call had never taken place. Then there had been the mysterious emails she’d asked Jonan to look into; he’d succeeded in tracking the source to an IP address in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – at which point the FBI stepped in and ordered him to desist with the search. Johnson had asked her about Dupree as if he’d forgotten what she’d told him during their last conversation, namely that Dupree always answered her calls. In any event, Johnson was calling her now because he knew she had just spoken to Dupree. Informing her that she had been accepted on to the course was simply a pretext.
‘Not very often. I occasionally call to say hello, the same way I do with you,’ she said, nonchalantly.
‘Have you spoken to Agent Dupree about the case he is currently working on?’
Johnson sounded as if he were ticking boxes on an internal questionnaire sheet.
‘No, I didn’t even know he was working on a new case.’
‘If Agent Dupree gets in touch with you again, will you inform us?’
‘You’re freaking me out, Agent Johnson, is something wrong?’
‘Only that in the last few days we’ve had trouble contacting Agent Dupree. I expect the situation has gotten a little complicated, and for reasons of security he’s decided to lie low. There’s no need for you to be alarmed, Inspector. However, if Dupree does get in touch with you, we’d be grateful if you’d let us know immediately.’
‘I’ll do that, Agent Johnson.’
‘Thank you, Inspector, we look forward to seeing you here very soon.’
She hung up, then sat in her car for ten minutes waiting for the phone to ring again. When it did, she recognised Johnson’s private number on the screen.
‘What was that all about?’
‘I told you, Dupree has his own way of doing things. He’s been incommunicado for some time, which, as you know, is normal when you’re working undercover. Finding the right moment can be difficult. However, that, together with Agent Dupree’s somewhat irreverent attitude, is causing them to question the security of his identity.’
‘You mean they think his cover might have been blown?’
‘That’s the official version. The truth is, they think he may have been taken hostage.’
‘What do you think?’ she said, warily, wondering how far she could trust Johnson. How could she be sure this second call wasn’t also being recorded?
‘I think Dupree knows what he’s doing.’
‘So do I,’ she declared, with all the conviction she could muster, as the grotesque cries she had heard when Dupree answered his phone resounded once more in her head.
10
They had spent the afternoon at the shopping centre on Carretera de Francia on the pretext of buying clothes for Ibai, and to escape the cold brought by the fog that was thickening as night fell; by the time they left for dinner in the evening, they could scarcely see beyond the far bank of the river. The Santxotena restaurant was relatively lively, the murmur of laughter and voices reaching them as soon as they crossed the threshold. They were in the habit of reserving a table by the kitchen that opened on to the spacious dining room, so that they could watch the orderly bustle of three generations of women, clad in starched white aprons over black uniforms, moving about the kitchen as if it were a formal dance they’d rehearsed a thousand times.
After choosing from the wine list, James and Amaia were content to enjoy the atmosphere in the restaurant for a while. They hadn’t touched on the subject of the funeral, and had avoided bringing to a head the palpable tension that had arisen between them that afternoon. They knew they needed to talk, but had made a tacit agreement to wait until they were alone.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ James asked.
She looked at him, debating how to answer. Since she joined the police force, she had been meticulous about never discussing her work with her family, and they knew not to ask. She had no desire to talk to James about the more disturbing aspects of her job, in the same way she felt there were scenes from her past it was best not to mention, even though he already knew about them. She found it difficult to talk about her childhood, and for years she’d buried the truth beneath a false veneer of normality. When the barriers holding back all that horror had burst open, driving her to the edge of sanity, confiding in James had been the chink in the wall of fear that allowed light to flood in, creating a place for them to come together – a place that had delivered her back to a world where, if she was vigilant, the old ghosts could not touch her.
And yet, she’d always known that fear never goes away completely, it merely shrinks back to a dark, dank place, where it waits, reduced to a tiny red light you can still see even if you don’t want to, even if you refuse to acknowledge its existence, because it prevents you from living. She also knew that fear is a private thing, that no amount of talking about it, or naming it, will make it go away; that the old cliché ‘a burden shared is a burden halved’ didn’t apply where fear was concerned. She had always believed that love would triumph over everything, that opening the door and revealing herself to James with all the baggage of her past would suffice.
Now, sitting opposite him, she still saw the handsome young man she had fallen in love with. The self-assured, optimistic artist no one had ever tried to kill, with his simple, almost childlike way of looking at things that enabled him to follow a steady path, safe from life’s cruelties. It allowed him to believe that turning the page, burying the past, or talking to a psychiatrist for months about your mother’s desire to eat you, would help her to overcome her fears, to live in a world of green meadows and blue skies sustained by simply willing it to be so. This belief that happiness was a choice struck her as so naïve as to be almost insulting. She knew James didn’t really want to know how her work was going, and that when he asked he wasn’t expecting her to explain that she had questioned a psychopath about where her mother or her vanished sister’s body were.
She smiled at him, because she loved him, because his way of seeing the world still intrigued her, and because she knew that part of love was making the effort to love someone.
‘Quite well. I’m hoping to wrap up the case in a couple of days,’ she replied.
‘I spoke to my father today,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t been feeling well lately. My mother insisted he have a check-up and they’ve found a lesion in his heart.’
‘Oh, James! Is it serious?’
‘No, even my mother is relaxed. Apparently he has a small blockage in one of his coronary arteries due to early stage arteriosclerosis. He needs a bypass to prevent future heart attacks. However, he’ll have to stop working. My mother has been pressuring him to hand over the day-to-day management of the company, but he likes to keep busy, so while his health held out he was content to carry on indefinitely. She seems almost happy about it, and is already talking about the trips they’ll make when he gets over the surgery.’
‘I hope it all goes well, James, and I’m glad you’re taking it this way. When’s the operation?’
‘Next Monday. That’s why I asked how your work was going. I was hoping the three of us could fly over there together. My parents haven’t seen Ibai since the baptism.’
‘Hm …’
‘We could leave after the funeral. Flora stopped by this morning to tell us she thinks it’ll be on Friday. She’s going to confirm tomorrow. We’d only stay for a few days. I doubt you’ll have a problem taking vacation at this time of year.’
Too many loose ends, too much that needed sorting out. Yes, the investigation would be officially closed in a few days, but there was that other business; she had yet to receive confirmation from the commissio
ner’s office about whether she’d be attending the seminars at Quantico, and she hadn’t even mentioned that to James.
‘I don’t know, James … I’ll have to think about it.’
The smile froze on his face.
‘Amaia, this is really important to me,’ he said solemnly.
She instantly grasped the implication. He had given her a glimpse yesterday. He had his own needs, his own plans, he wanted a place in her life. The image of the stalled works at Juanitaenea flashed into her mind, together with Yáñez’s words: ‘a house isn’t the same as a home’.
She reached across the table to clasp his hand.
‘Of course, it’s important for me too,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘First thing tomorrow, I’ll put in a request. As you say, I doubt they’ll object, no one goes on holiday at this time of year.’
‘Excellent,’ he replied cheerily. ‘I’ve been looking at flights. As soon as you’ve got permission, I’ll book our tickets.’
James spent the rest of the dinner planning their trip, excited at the idea of taking Ibai to the States for the first time. She listened, saying nothing.
11
She was aware of his hot breath on her skin, of becoming intensely aroused as she sensed his closeness. He murmured something she couldn’t hear, but she didn’t care, something about his voice mesmerised her. It evoked the contours of his mouth, his moist lips, the smile she had always found so troubling. Inhaling the warmth of his skin stirred her desire; she longed for him, eyes closed, holding her breath, as her senses yielded to pleasure. She felt his lips on her neck, descending in a slow, unstoppable advance, like lava flowing from a volcano. Every nerve in her body was engaged in a furious struggle between pleasure and pain, pleading for more, wanting more, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling, her nipples contracting, a burning sensation between her thighs. She opened her eyes, glancing about, confused. The little light she always left on at night permitted her to recognise the familiar shape of their bedroom in Engrasi’s house. Her body tensed, alarmed. James whispered in her ear as he went on kissing her.
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