Offering to the Storm

by Dolores Redondo

  We don’t have to experience it in order to recognise it. There’s a moment, an event, a word, a gesture, a telephone call that changes everything. And when it occurs, when it erupts, when it is spoken, it breaks the rudder we thought was guiding our lives, confronting us with reality, demolishing all our innocent plans for the future. Everything we thought was solid collapsed, all life’s worries seem absurd, because the only absolute is the chaos that forces us to surrender humbly to death’s supremacy. She couldn’t stop looking at his corpse; otherwise, her brain would go into instant denial, clamouring: no, no, no! And so she forced herself to look, tormenting herself with the sight of his closed eyes, his pale skin, his lips, now dry, the dreadful black holes where death had penetrated, his beloved blood, congealing in a dark, sticky pool. She remained kneeling beside him, motionless, contemplating the face of her best friend, yielding to the sensation that grief was taking her hostage, as she realised she would never recover from Jonan’s death, that the pain of losing him would forever be like a thorn in her heart. This knowledge felt like a dead weight, and yet she welcomed the affliction, grateful to have known him for a while, and to regret his passing for eternity.

  Feeling a hand on her shoulder, she turned to find Inspector Iriarte beckoning her to follow him. Then she felt huge, burning tears rolling down her cheeks. Amaia dried them with the back of her hand as she stood up, and she and Montes accompanied Iriarte to where Zabalza was waiting in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Iriarte looked deathly pale, he had dark circles under his eyes, which hadn’t been there that morning. Once more, he placed his hand on Amaia’s shoulder, his bottom lip quivering as he said in a tremulous voice:

  ‘Inspector, I think it’s best if you leave us here and someone takes you home.’

  ‘What!’ she said, shrugging his hand off her shoulder.

  He looked to his colleagues for support, then went on: ‘You are obviously deeply traumatised.’

  ‘So are you,’ she replied, looking at each of them in turn. ‘It would be shocking if you weren’t, but no one’s going home. I’ve been in this apartment for at least fifteen minutes, and I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me what happened,’ she said firmly. ‘Jonan Etxaide was the finest police officer I’ve had the good fortune to work with. In the years we spent together, his commitment, good judgment and loyalty were second to none; I consider his loss both a professional and a personal tragedy, but if you imagine for one moment that I’m going to go home and cry, then you don’t know me at all. They didn’t make me head of homicide for nothing, so let’s get to work. We’re going to catch the bastard who did this. Zabalza—’

  ‘When I arrived, the door was open, as if someone had left without pulling it shut properly. When I walked in, I saw him lying there,’ he said, pointing at the position near the front door, from which you could see the entire sitting room.

  ‘Did you check all the rooms?’

  ‘Yes, there was no one, although the place had obviously been searched and some electronic devices were missing.’

  ‘They didn’t take the TV,’ said Montes, gesturing towards a flat screen above the hearth.

  ‘I expect they only took what they could carry.’

  Amaia shook her head. ‘This wasn’t a burglary, gentlemen. Where’s his mobile?’

  ‘That’s missing too.’

  ‘I called him several times, and got his voicemail. If his phone is still on we can put a trace on it,’ she said, fishing out her own mobile and dialling Jonan’s number again. This time there was no ring tone. It was either switched off, or had no coverage. She switched off her own mobile. When she first entered the apartment, she had recognised Inspector Clemos, from the back-up team of the Pamplona homicide squad. If she wasn’t mistaken, they were about to be pushed off the case, and that didn’t surprise her; she would have done the same.

  ‘Has anyone questioned the neighbours? Surely they must have heard the shots?’

  ‘No one heard a thing, at least not on this floor. They’re carrying out a house-to-house right this minute.’

  Amaia turned to look at the door; she could see from the black powder traces left by the forensic team that they’d finished dusting for fingerprints.

  ‘Did they find any prints?’

  ‘Lots, most of them belonging to Jonan, and most of them useless. There’s no sign of a forced entry, so it looks like he opened the door to his killer.’

  ‘Someone he knew,’ remarked Iriarte.

  ‘Well enough to let them into the apartment. Presumably he didn’t see them as a threat, otherwise he would have drawn his weapon. We also found a bullet casing—’

  ‘Let me see,’ she asked one of the forensic team. He held up a plastic evidence bag containing the tiny gold casing. Amaia studied it: ‘From a nine-millimetre IMI, manufactured in Israel, which explains why the neighbours heard nothing. Subsonic ammunition, used with a silencer. Do you realise what this means?’

  ‘That the murderer came here to kill him,’ replied Montes.

  ‘Incidentally, where is Deputy Inspector Etxaide’s gun?’

  ‘We haven’t found it yet,’ said Zabalza.

  Amaia stepped forward, leaning into the group and spoke in hushed tones:

  ‘Listen, I want you to photograph everything, on your phones if necessary. Clemos and his team are here for a reason. Any moment now they’re going to tell us to go, and I’m sure you’ll agree that we can’t leave things like this.’

  She saw them nod reluctantly, then she brushed past them, heading for the two rooms at the end of the corridor. Iriarte was right, someone had taken a lot of trouble to search the place. She could almost feel the energy of the intruder who had rummaged through Jonan’s life with the zeal of a hunter. She’d seen many burglarised homes, the trail of chaos left by the frantic search for valuables. This intruder hadn’t made a mess or broken anything; he or she had been content to take Jonan’s laptops and cameras, his hard drives along with a clutch of USBs on which he stored copies of case files, as well as photographs. And yet, she knew the intruder had been there, probably standing on the exact same spot, steeped in the aura of the man he or she had just killed. Amaia’s eye alighted on a picture of herself and Jonan in dress uniform, on National Police Day, one of three snapshots on a shelf. In one of the others, he stood smiling next to his parents, and in the third he was with another man on the deck of a sailboat. She realised then that, despite being Jonan’s friend, she knew next to nothing about his private life. Who was that man? They looked happy in the photograph, but she didn’t even know if he had a partner.

  Walking back into the sitting room, she saw that they had covered the body with a metallic blanket. She was mesmerised for a few seconds by the light glancing off it, until a noise behind her broke her reverie. The duty magistrate had arrived, accompanied by a legal secretary, and was looking about cautiously. They greeted each other perfunctorily, while Iriarte came over holding out a telephone for her.

  ‘Boss, it’s the commissioner. He says he can’t get you on your mobile.’

  So this was it. It had taken a little longer than she’d expected. She and Clemos exchanged a few awkward glances, and Clemos positioned himself next to the magistrate.

  ‘Yes, my battery’s dead,’ she lied.

  She listened to the commissioner explain that the back-up team would be leading the investigation.

  ‘Sir, I am head of homicide,’ she protested.

  ‘I’m sorry, Salazar, but I’m not putting you in charge of this investigation. You know I can’t, and if the boot were on the other foot, you’d do the same.’

  ‘All right, but I expect to be kept informed.’

  ‘Naturally, and I trust you’ll collaborate with the team, providing any information they might need to help solve this case.’

  Before hanging up, the commissioner added:

  ‘Inspector … I’m sorry for your loss.’

  She murmured her appreciation, then handed the phone back to I
riarte.

  33

  She wished the world would stop. But when someone we love dies, the world keeps turning. She had heard and read the expression often, and that day she wished it were true, in the same way she wished God or true love existed, because if they didn’t … She had received a first lesson from death when she was very young and had lost her Amatxi Juanita, again when she was a teenager and her father died, and also through her own brush with death. When someone we love dies, and also world doesn’t grind to a halt, instead it changes shape around us. As if the earth’s axis had shifted slightly, in a way that is imperceptible to everyone else, and yet which gives us a clarity of vision, allowing us to perceive aspects of reality we never knew existed. All at once, we are permitted the dubious privilege of seeing behind the scenes of the play, off limits to anyone not taking part. We see the ropes, the pulleys, the scaffolds that move the stage sets, and suddenly we discover that from up close it looks surreal, dusty and grey. The actors’ make-up is exaggerated, their over-loud voices are directed by a jaded prompter reciting from a play in which we no longer have a role. When someone we love dies, he or she becomes the lead in a play to which we haven’t been invited, the lines of which are unfamiliar to us. For although Jonan Etxaide had been murdered, and would soon be spread out on San Martín’s slab, the power of his absence would dominate the days that followed with as much intensity as if he’d been alive and directing the performance.

  Her legs, back and head ached. As she sat in the waiting room at the Navarre Institute of Forensic Medicine, she recalled the many times she had observed victims’ relatives waiting, as she was now. She glanced around the room, studying the expressions on her colleagues’ faces as they sat in a huddle, talking in that hushed tone reserved for funerals and wakes, like the women gathered at Inés Ballarena’s farmhouse. She rose from her seat and went over to the window. The big, dry snowflakes had turned the street white, muffling the sounds of the city, which seemed suddenly brought to a standstill. She thought about how pretty Elizondo must look, and she wished she was there. Montes appeared silently by her side, and, with an apologetic gesture, offered her coffee in paper cup. She clasped it in her hands.

  ‘You knew he was dead when you called me.’

  Montes paused for a moment then nodded. He could have denied it, but that would have made Zabalza look foolish.

  ‘Yes, Zabalza told me. I take full responsibility.’

  Without replying, she turned to face the window, feeling the warm cup of coffee in her ice-cold hands.

  Josune had been working as Dr San Martín’s assistant for two years. During that time she had grown accustomed to the puzzled look on her friends’ faces when she told them what an amusing guy her boss was, how much she loved her job. She couldn’t say that about today. She had already prepared everything San Martín might need: his instruments, the cameras, the spotlights. There were no students today, and lying on the slab was the body of that police officer who couldn’t stomach autopsies. She drew back the sheet that was draped over him, and looked with sorrow at his face, so young, lips parted, brown hair caked with blood, his skull horribly swollen where the bullet had exited.

  He always used to stand back, and never approached the table or touched the bodies. Dr San Martín would poke fun at him after he had left, but she knew he liked Deputy Inspector Etxaide, he appreciated his intelligence, his sensitivity. You could analyse a body without touching it, and his obvious squeamishness towards the dead didn’t make him a worse detective. Indeed, when San Martín was playing the professor, she had often noticed his satisfaction with Etxaide’s responses.

  Yielding to an impulse, she reached out her hand and gently stroked the young man’s face. She imagined he had liked her a little too … She drew the sheet back over his face and waited for her boss.

  Dr San Martín glanced at his watch again as he sat in the office he used primarily as a gallery for his collection of bronzes, which with its oak panelling and heavy furniture took up a disproportionate amount of space on the second floor. He had inherited it from his predecessor, a sophisticated, and apparently ostentatious fellow, who had even installed a mini-bar behind the panelling. In bygone days, this would have been well stocked with expensive liquor, but San Martín kept only a bottle of Macallan’s, the seal unbroken. He tore it off and poured some of the peaty liquid into one of the fine cut glass tumblers he had also inherited. He took a small sip, appreciating the liquor, which burned his throat. After draining his glass, he poured himself another generous dose, screwed the top back on, then returned to the comfortable armchair behind the table. He observed that the tremor in his hand had diminished. He had made the correct decision; this wasn’t the first time in his career he’d balked at performing an autopsy. It was his custom to avoid newborns and very young children; his hands seemed too big to manipulate their tiny organs; he felt clumsy and brutish, and he couldn’t help glimpsing in their tiny faces gestures that haunted him for days. And so, for a while now, he had entrusted such operations to colleagues who didn’t share his qualms. Until now, he had never refused to perform an autopsy on an adult, and it was only when he saw Salazar’s grief that he realised: there were things a man should do and others he should never do.

  The old Bakelite telephone on the table emitted a shrill sound. San Martín lifted the receiver and listened as his assistant announced the arrival of Dr Maite Hernández.

  ‘Good, I’ll be right down,’ he said.

  All the heat she had managed to wrest from the dregs of her coffee evaporated while she spoke on the telephone in the foyer. She had preferred this to being stared at by her colleagues, and the back-up team, who were waiting for San Martín to begin the autopsy.

  The snowploughs had done their work, creating white mounds at the sides of the roads, and burying a couple of cars in the process. She descended the steps, listening to James’s worried voice on the other end of the phone, aware of the ground crunching beneath her feet and the unnatural silence into which the city had been plunged by the snow, as if night had fallen early.

  ‘Are you all right, Amaia?’

  She didn’t need to think. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘I’ve no idea how long it will take me to get there, I’m not even sure the motorway is open, but I’m leaving right now.’

  ‘No, James, don’t come, they’ve only just started clearing the streets, half the city is shut down.’

  ‘I don’t care, I want to be with you.’

  ‘James, I’m fine.’ She contradicted herself. ‘The place is teeming with police officers, we’re still waiting for the autopsy to start, and then we’ll have to give statements. This is going to take hours, I won’t even be able to be with you …’

  An uneasy silence descended over the conversation.

  ‘Amaia … I realise this isn’t the right moment, but there isn’t going to be another …’

  More silence.

  ‘It’s about the trip. My father is having surgery on Monday.’

  ‘James,’ she started to say, ‘right now—’

  ‘I know,’ he cut in, ‘and I understand, but you do understand that I have to go?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed.

  ‘I have to be there, Amaia. He’s my father and, despite my mother’s attempts to play it down, the operation isn’t a walk in the park.’

  ‘I said, I understand,’ she replied wearily.

  ‘And, well, I’m guessing that if you aren’t in charge of the investigation you may be able to join us in a few days’ time, after the funeral.’

  ‘After the funeral?’ she protested. ‘James, I’m head of homicide and Jonan was my colleague and my best friend …’ As she was speaking, another thought dawned on her. ‘Did you say “us”?’

  ‘Amaia, I’m taking Ibai with me, like we planned. You won’t be able to look after him, and it’s too much of a responsibility for your aunt. In a couple of days we’ll all be together.’

  A feeling of bewilderment and desolat
ion came over her at the thought of being separated from Ibai. But James was right, she wouldn’t be able to look after him, and they should stick to their original plan. She felt a terrible weariness as she reflected once more about how a word had changed the course of her life, demoting her to the rank of spectator in the debacle that was her life. Yes, James was right. And yet, she wanted to protest, to shout ‘What?!’, to demand, to insist. But she herself didn’t know what, nor did she have the strength for it.

  A taxi pulled up outside, and a middle-aged woman stepped out.

  ‘All right, James, we’ll talk about it later. I need to hang up.’

  ‘Amaia.’

  ‘What?’ she said, irritated.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied, ending the call.

  Five minutes later, San Martín came into the waiting room, accompanied by Dr Maite Hernández.

  ‘Inspectors,’ he said, addressing the general company. ‘For personal reasons, I will not be performing the autopsy on Deputy Inspector Etxaide. My esteemed colleague here, Dr Maite Hernández, will be taking my place. I shall oversee the results,’ he added, as they exchanged handshakes.