She wanted to speak to Clemos in person. She wasn’t happy with the direction the investigation was taking, and although she realised that the ballistics results were what they were, she was afraid they would abandon other lines of inquiry out of apathy. She decided to go home and get a change of clothes. Pleased to see that her letterbox was still free of junk mail, she went upstairs, rehearsing in her head what she would say to Inspector Clemos. As she passed the sitting room, she glanced at the maps she had taped to the shelves, and hearing the drone of the fan, remembered she’d forgotten to switch off the computer. One by one she closed the various images of maps, until she reached the desktop screen, where a small flashing blue envelope told her she had mail. The account was an old one she had set up to browse the net, and she never used it; all her official mail went to the internal account at the station, and all her personal mail to her Gmail address, which she checked from her phone.
She clicked on the icon, and what she saw on the screen made her blood run cold. It was a message from Jonan Etxaide.
This was impossible. She had never received messages at that address from Jonan, or any of her colleagues; only James, her sisters and a couple of friends from university knew the account existed. But what puzzled her the most was that, according to the date, the message had been sent two days ago, in the afternoon, at the very time the funeral was taking place, more than twenty-four hours after Jonan Etxaide died. She trembled as she opened the message, which, far from dispelling her doubts, left her even more bewildered:
Jonan Etxaide wishes to share this file with you
File type – Documents and Images
Title – ***********
In order to gain access to this file a password is required
There were two fields that needed filling in: account name and password.
For a few seconds, she stared at the cursor flashing on the screen, pulse quickening, mouth dry, as the tremor in her finger poised above the mouse spread through her entire body. She stood up, feeling slightly nauseous, and went into the kitchen to fetch a bottle of ice-cold water from the fridge. She took a sip, then went back to the computer. The cursor continued to blink insistently. She reread the brief message a couple of times, as though hoping to find something she had missed, then looked again at the cursor flashing beside the word ‘account’, inexorably demanding an answer.
She typed in [email protected], then moved the cursor to ‘password’.
Marc’s words echoed in her head: ‘Offering’ and Jonan’s number.
She typed ‘Offering’ and paused … Which number? Taking out her mobile, she scrolled through her address book for Jonan’s number, ruling it out even as she did so. He would never have used anything so obvious. She typed a series of zeros until the cursor indicated that the field was full. Four digits, ten thousand possible combinations, and yet he had specified his number. She took her phone out again.
Iriarte answered at the other end.
‘Inspector, do you have Deputy Inspector Etxaide’s badge number?’
‘Hold on.’
She heard the clunk of the receiver on the table, and the tack-tack of a keyboard in the background.
‘It’s 1269.’
She thanked him and hung up.
She typed the number after the password and pressed enter.
Her palms were sweating; her heart racing as the message opened before her eyes.
There was no text, only a dozen or so files arranged in alphabetical order. She slid the cursor over them to view the titles: Ainhoa, Berasategui, Hidalgo, Salazar, Crime Scenes … She opened one at random. From the way the information was organised, it seemed the Cloud had merely been used to store a back-up copy. The documents inside were in no particular order; she found the warrant to search Fina Hidalgo’s house, an audio file of Yolanda Berrueta’s statement and Fina Hidalgo’s employment history. She opened another file entitled Markina, and saw pictures of her and Markina outside the Baluarte Congress Centre.
‘Jonan, what does all this mean?’ she whispered, horrified.
Clicking on the file entitled Ainhoa opened a series of photographs taken inside the tomb where Yolanda Berrueta’s children were buried, and included several enlarged images of specific details. Intrigued and disturbed in equal measure, she studied the tiny hands of a dead baby poking out of its coffin, and was transfixed by the blackened face of the other child. Jonan had made many enlargements. He had photographed the initials on the coffins and rotated the images, so they were legible: D.T.B. stood for Didier Tremond-Berrueta, and M.T.B. for Martín Tremond-Berrueta. Browsing the twenty-five images, she saw that Jonan had focused mainly on the metal casket, which lay open on its side. Jonan had enlarged and rotated the initials: H.T.B. He had also enlarged a corner of the plastic bag containing what she supposed were ashes, the edge of which bore a blue-and-red logo. Amaia studied the photographs, understanding why these details would have caught Jonan’s attention. Placing human ashes in a plastic bag seemed odd. In the next photographs, Jonan had collected the packaging from a dozen or so different foods, including lentils, table salt, flour and sugar, all French, all made of transparent plastic with a blue and red logo. In the following photograph, Etxaide had cut and pasted the image of the bag in the metal casket and placed it next to the kilo bag of sugar; they were identical.
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Amaia.
She instantly thought of the sack of gravel in her sister’s coffin, the bags of sugar Valentín Esparza had placed in his daughter’s coffin, wrapped in a towel. Her pulse was racing at a hundred miles an hour as she studied the photographs one by one, and Yolanda Berrueta’s question flashed into her head: ‘Why would anyone put bags of sugar inside a casket?’ She printed the images, clasping them in her hand, as she paced back and forth like a caged animal. She picked up the phone, called the Saint Collette Hospital and asked if she could speak to Yolanda Berrueta. They told her that, although Yolanda was a lot better, it would be advisable to wait a little longer. She hung up, frustrated; obviously she couldn’t ask the ex-husband about this. She went into the bedroom, tipped the contents of her bag on to the bed, spilling over her dress uniform, and found Señor Berrueta’s business card. She dialled the number. He picked up immediately.
‘Could I stop by and have a word. It’s urgent.’
The clouds moved swiftly across the leaden sky, carrying the rain away from the valley, and causing the temperature to drop by at least four degrees. Despite the cold, Yolanda’s father insisted they talk outside.
‘It’s because of my wife, you know,’ he explained. ‘She’s already suffering enough over what happened to Yolanda.’
In silent agreement, they moved away from the front door.
‘This won’t take long. In fact, I only have one question to ask you. Inside the tomb in Ainhoa, there’s another smaller casket with the initials H.T.B.’
He nodded sadly. ‘That’s my granddaughter, Haizea.’
‘You had a granddaughter?’
‘Yes, a year before the twins were born, Yolanda had a little girl. I thought you knew. A healthy, beautiful little girl, and yet she died two weeks after she was born, in this very house. That was what sparked Yolanda’s depression. From then on, things went from bad to worse. I always thought it was a huge mistake for her to get pregnant again so soon, but her husband insisted. The sooner she had more children, the sooner she would stop grieving the loss of her daughter, he said. But she was in no state to handle another pregnancy, and it showed the moment she conceived. She let herself go, she was a wreck, she didn’t care about anything. My daughter only came alive again when the twins were born, when she held them in her arms. She was a good mother, I tell you, but she’s been through a lot, her life is a tragedy. She’s given birth to three children and all three are dead.’
Amaia looked at him gloomily. This was the detail that had been eluding her, the exact same thing Valentín Esparza had said to his wife: that substituting her lost girl with an
other child would take away the pain. Esparza’s wife had also said that she couldn’t have another child, that she’d be incapable of loving it. But Yolanda was more fragile, more delicate, and in her case, the husband had got his own way.
‘Yolanda didn’t tell me about this.’
‘The medication makes her confused: she gets mixed up about when things happened; the death of her little girl was so traumatic that the whole episode has become hazy in her mind.’
Amaia recalled Yolanda telling her that she got things muddled up, and she also remembered her saying in her statement at the station about the baby not being in its casket.
‘Señor Berrueta, just one more question: was the little girl cremated?’
‘No, she wasn’t, neither were her brothers. We do things the old way, like the Tremond family. You’ve seen the family tomb in Ainhoa.’
‘I need to know for certain,’ Amaia insisted. ‘It’s very important, and I can’t ask Yolanda’s ex-husband about it.’
Berrueta pulled a face at the mention of his son-in-law.
‘You don’t need to ask him. The undertaker at Oieregi took care of it. I can give you his name and address; he’ll confirm that the girl received a traditional burial. They drove her remains from the funeral parlour to the cemetery.’
It took Amaia ten minutes to locate the owner of the funeral parlour, who backed up Berrueta’s story.
She returned to Pamplona without stopping off in Elizondo. She wanted to see her aunt, but Jonan’s files were calling her. Back at her computer, she felt disheartened. Jonan had supplied no explanation with any of the documents, so she was obliged to trawl through them all to try to figure out why they were there.
She opened the file with the photographs of her and Markina again, and looked at them uneasily. Why the interest in her private life? Why was he spying on her? Why was he reading her emails? She felt incredibly angry, and frustrated by her inability to understand, but she decided to leave that for later; for now, what mattered was that Jonan had sent her a message, he had given her something tangible, and she had to put her trust in him knowing what he was doing. She thought about the password he had chosen: ‘offering’. The word in itself was significant, but the number he had chosen to complete it was even more important to her: his badge number, the number that made him a police officer. It brought back the memory of Marc telling her how Jonan flatly refused to entertain the notion of giving up his job.
‘Damn it, Jonan, what have you been up to?’
Besides the photographs of the two of them talking that evening outside the Baluarte Congress Centre, Markina’s file contained a brief biography: where he was born, where he studied, posts he had occupied before moving to Pamplona. She was intrigued by the address and telephone number of a nursing home where a woman called Sara Durán had been hospitalised. Next to it, Etxaide had written ‘mother’. She shook her head, puzzled by this piece of information and its possible significance.
In the file labelled Salazar were images of her sister’s empty coffin inside the family tomb in San Sebastián, and of the mairu bones left in the church at Arizkun, some of them hundreds of years old, but also the bleached, white bones belonging to her sister. There were several enlargements of the only photograph he had managed to take of the Puffa coat worn by Rosario on the night she fled, the one that was retrieved from the river before Markina called off the search. He had also included maps of the mountain with possible routes she could have taken to make her escape from the Ari Zahar cave on foot.
In the file named Herranz, there was a brief biography of Markina’s secretary and something that took Amaia completely by surprise: more photographs, apparently taken inside a café, in which Markina’s secretary could be seen speaking with Yolanda Berrueta.
The file entitled ‘Crime Scene’ listed the addresses of all the babies they had looked into, and which of them had succumbed to cot death; he had added Amaia’s sister to the list, but not Yolanda’s two boys. She went to one of the maps she had used the previous afternoon and marked the various towns and villages, including Elizondo for her sister, but leaving out Ainhoa. When she joined the dots, she saw that the line criss-crossed the N-121. Could that be it? Serial killers often perpetrated their crimes close to main roads, facilitating their escape, but that wasn’t the case here.
‘Press reset, Salazar,’ she muttered, forcing herself to focus on what she knew. She printed out another map, marking the victims’ birthplaces, including hers and her sister’s. Then she noticed that, after removing the children from Ainhoa, the line was straighter. This became even clearer when, looking more closely, she saw the fine blue line marking the River Baztán. With the dots in place, the course of the river appeared to represent a crime scene stretching from Erratzu to Arraioz, through Elbete and Elizondo, and with the addition of Yolanda’s baby girl, Haizea, all the way to Oieregi. She contemplated the map. The presence of the blue line screamed out at her.
The river. ‘Cleanse the river,’ she thought, and as if those words had the power of a prayer to summon ghosts, the visions in her dreams appeared in her head like an echo, evoking images of the enormous white flowers and the empty coffins.
She sat down in an armchair, studying the maps from a distance, trying to understand what she was looking at. In her mind, images from Dupree’s book amalgamated with Jonan’s passwords, Sarasola talking about the evil nature of Berasategui’s files, and the ‘sacrifice’ carried out by the sects in Lesaka and Elizondo in the early 1980s. She rose, and went over to mark two fresh dots on the map; she couldn’t help thinking about the disgrace of not knowing their faces, of how they had been born to die, how during their short lives no one had even bothered to give them an identity, their own little place in the world.
40
She didn’t recognise the voice on the other end of the phone.
‘Amaia, it’s Marc. I didn’t know who else to call.’
It took her a few seconds to place him.
‘Marc, of course – sorry. How can I help?’
‘The police have finished searching Jonan’s apartment, and this morning they brought over the key. I didn’t want his parents to have to deal with it, so I came on my own, but the first thing I saw when I walked in was the bloodstain on the floor.’ Overwhelmed with grief, his voice faltered. ‘I don’t know why I assumed they had cleaned the place, that it wouldn’t be there … I couldn’t bring myself to go in. I’m in the hallway … I don’t know what to do.’
In less than ten minutes she was there. Marc was outside on the pavement, white as a sheet. He tried to smile when he saw her, but his mouth froze in a grimace.
‘You should have called me straight away.’
‘I didn’t want to bother anyone,’ he said, handing her the key.
She contemplated it in the palm of her hand for an instant, as if it were something completely alien. Leaning forward, Marc placed his hand over hers and gave her a kiss. Then he turned and walked away without saying a word.
It’s amazing how overpowering the stench of blood can be. The tell-tale buzz of flies told her that they had smelled it too. What was once a glistening red pool had turned a brownish colour, darker at the edges, where it had started to dry. There was a sickening movement at the centre, where hundreds of maggot larvae were wriggling frenetically. Gloves used by the crime scene technicians and police officers lay strewn on the floor, together with plastic vials and paper towels. The smell of death tainted the air, and every surface was covered in the black and white powder used to lift fingerprints. She’d encountered far worse crime scenes than this; when neighbours were alerted by the stench of a body that had been dead for days or even weeks, the result could be truly shocking.
She took out her phone, searching in her address book for the number of a cleaning service specialising in trauma and crime scenes. She gave a brief description of the scene, and promised to wait until they arrived. They usually got there quickly, did the job and left, just like her.
> It felt strange, being in Jonan’s apartment without him, but what disturbed her most was that, despite seeing the things he had seen every day, touched every day, she couldn’t feel him: all trace of his presence had vanished. Even that spilled blood was no longer his. It belonged to the flies now, and she thought about how his precious blood had become repellent.
Exhausted, she turned full circle, inspecting the room. As her gaze alighted on the sofa, she recalled the pathologist’s theory about the shot fired from low down. ‘Either that, or the killer was very short’, she said to herself out loud. She sat down, raising her hand as though holding a weapon. Jonan hadn’t been moved from where he fell, but if the assailant had been standing where she was now, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot him face on. Stooping to look under the sofa, she could see that Montes was right: there were no marks where it had been dragged across the floor, and the layer of dust beneath it was undisturbed. From her kneeling position, she looked back at the dark stain, which covered a huge area of the floor. The image of Jonan sprawled on his back flashed into her mind with photographic precision. She felt the gorge rise in her throat, but managed to stifle the sensation. Standing up, she went over to the window. She realised that more flies would come in if she opened it, but at least the fresh air would get rid of the nauseating stench. She couldn’t figure out how to draw back the curtains, but opened the window anyway. An icy breeze made them billow out into the room, and from the grey surface of one of them, Amaia noticed a strand of greyish fabric drift across the bloodstain to land on the far side of the room. Intrigued, she went over to it and saw that, although similar in colour to the curtains, it was clearly a different type of fabric. The threads were shiny, the scrap a few millimetres long. She glanced about, but could see no other obvious source. Selecting the camera app on her phone, she took several pictures of it from various angles. Absorbed by her thoughts, the incoming call made her jump, and she dropped the phone, which landed at her feet. Picking it up gingerly, she answered. It was Markina. His voice reached her, warm and sensual. Closing her eyes tight, she thrust aside the images that assailed her simply from hearing him speak.
Offering to the Storm Page 31