The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  ‘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 Baztan 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.

  ‘Goodness, doesn’t it smell good?’ Amaia looked at him aghast. ‘That was a joke, Inspector Salazar.’

  She didn’t reply, but stood up to give him more room.

  ‘But to tell the truth, it does smell very good and I haven’t had supper.’

  Unseen by the pathologist, Amaia grimaced in disgust and turned to greet Judge Estébanez, who was making her way down between the rocks with enviable ease in spite of her skirt and heeled boots.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Montes, who didn’t seem to have recovered from the incident with the coypu yet. The judge gave a wave of general greeting then went over to Dr San Martín to listen to his observations. Ten minutes later she had already gone again.

  It took them more than an hour and a real team effort to get the coffin containing Anne’s body up from the gorge. The technicians suggested putting her in a body bag and hoisting her up, but San Martín insisted that she should be in a coffin in order to perfectly preserve the body and avoid the multiple bumps and scratches it might receive if it were dragged up through the jungle-like
forest. At certain points the narrowness of the gaps between the trees obliged them to turn the coffin on its end and wait for fresh hands to take over from others. After several hairy moments they managed to carry the coffin as far as the hearse that would transport Anne’s body to the Navarra Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pamplona.

  Each time Amaia had seen the body of a minor on the autopsy table she had been overwhelmed by a sense of her own impotence and helplessness and that of the society she lived in. A society where the death of its children signified its inability to protect its own future. A society that had failed. Like she had. She took a deep breath and entered the autopsy room. Dr San Martín was filling in the paperwork before the operation and greeted her as she made her way over to the steel table. Already stripped of all clothing, Anne Arbizu was laid out under the harsh light which would have revealed even the slightest imperfection on any other body, but in her case only underlined the unscathed whiteness of her skin, making her seem unreal, almost painted; Amaia thought of one of those marble Madonnas found in Italian museums.

  ‘She looks like a doll,’ she murmured.

  ‘I was saying the same thing to Sofía,’ the doctor agreed. The technician raised a hand in greeting. She would have made an excellent model for one of Wagner’s Valkyries.

  Deputy Inspector Zabalza had just come in.

  ‘Are we waiting for anyone else or can we get started?’

  ‘Inspector Montes should have arrived by now …’ said Amaia, consulting her watch. ‘You start, Doctor, he’ll arrive any moment.’

  She dialled Montes’s number but it went straight to voicemail; she supposed he must be driving. Under the harsh lights she could see some details she hadn’t noticed before. There were several short, dark, quite thick hairs on the skin.

  ‘Animal hairs?’

  ‘Probably, we found more stuck to the clothes. We’ll compare them with the ones that were found on Carla’s body.’

  ‘How long do you reckon she’s been dead for?’

  ‘Judging by the temperature of the liver, which I took when we were by the river, she might have been there two or three hours.’

  ‘That’s not very long, not long enough for any animals to approach the body … the cake was intact, it almost seemed freshly baked, and you could smell it as well as I could; if there had been animals close enough to leave hairs on her they would have eaten the cake like they did in Carla’s case.’

  ‘I’d have to ask the forest rangers,’ commented Zabalza, ‘but I don’t think it’s somewhere the animals normally go to drink.’

  ‘An animal could get down there easily,’ Dr San Martín observed.

  ‘Yes, they could get down there, but the river forms a narrow pass at that point which would make escape difficult, and animals always drink in the open where they can see as well as being seen.’

  ‘Well, in that case, how do you explain the hairs?’

  ‘Perhaps they were on the murderer’s clothes and were transferred during contact.’

  ‘That’s a possibility. Who would wear clothes covered in animal hair?’

  ‘A hunter, a forest ranger, a shepherd,’ said Jonan.

  ‘A taxidermist,’ added the technician who was assisting Dr San Martín and had remained silent until that point.

  ‘Right, we’ll have to track down anyone who matches that profile and was in the area, and also take into account that it must have been a strong man, a very strong man in my opinion. If it weren’t for the intimacy required by this sort of fantasy, I’d say there was more than one murderer; but one thing is certain, and that’s that not just anybody would have been able to carry a body down that slope, and it’s clear from the lack of scratches and grazes that he carried her down in his arms,’ said Amaia.

  ‘Are we sure she was already dead when he took her down there?’

  ‘I’m sure, no girl would go down to the river at night, even with someone she knew, and she certainly wouldn’t leave her shoes behind. I think he approaches them then kills them quickly before they suspect anything; perhaps they know him and that’s why they trust him, perhaps not and he has to kill them straight away. He gets the string round their necks and they’re dead before they know it; then he takes them to the river, arranges them just as he imagined in his fantasy and once he’s completed his psychosexual rite he leaves us a signal in the form of the shoes and lets us see his work.’ Amaia suddenly fell silent and shook her head as if waking from a dream. They were all looking at her as if spellbound.

  ‘Let’s move on to the string,’ said San Martín.

  The technician grasped the girl’s head at the base of the cranium and lifted it high enough for Dr San Martín to extract the string from the dark channel in which it had been buried. He paid special attention to the sections adhering to the sides, on which small whitish fragments of something that looked like plastic or glue could be seen.

  ‘Look at this, Inspector, this is something new: unlike the other cases, there are bits of skin attached to the string. You can see that by pulling so hard he inflicted a cut, or at least a graze, which took away some of the skin.’

  ‘Given the absence of fingerprints, I thought he must be using gloves,’ Zabalza chipped in.

  ‘It would seem likely, but sometimes these killers can’t resist the pleasure they get from feeling a life end under their own hands, a feeling that would be deadened by gloves. As a consequence they sometimes end up taking them off, if only at the key moment. Even so, it’s sometimes enough for us.’

  As Amaia had expected, Dr San Martín agreed that Anne had defended herself. Perhaps she had seen something that her predecessors hadn’t, something that had made her suspicious and was enough to prevent her from going to her death submissively. The symptoms of asphyxia were obvious, and it was clear that the killer had tried to use Anne to recreate his fantasy. He had succeeded up to a certain point, because at first glance that crime and all the paraphernalia the killer had used were identical to the previous ones. However, Amaia had the inexplicable impression that the killer hadn’t been at all pleased with the death, that the little girl with her angelic face, who could have been the monster’s masterpiece, had been tougher and more aggressive than the others. And although the killer had made an effort to arrange her with the same care as he had the others, Anne’s face didn’t reflect surprise and vulnerability but rather the fight for her life that she had kept up to the last and a parody of a smile that was actually rather terrifying. Amaia observed some reddish marks that had appeared around her mouth and extended almost as far as her right ear.

  ‘What are those red marks on her face?’

  The technician took a sample using a swab. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as we know for certain, but I would say that it’s …’ she smelled the swab, ‘gloss.’

  ‘What’s gloss?’ asked Zabalza.

  ‘It’s like lipstick, Deputy Inspector, a greasy, shiny lipstick,’ explained Amaia.

  In the course of her time as a homicide inspector she had attended more autopsies than she wanted to remember, and considered that she had more than fulfilled her quota of ‘What I need to do to prove a woman can do this’. With that in mind, she didn’t stay to watch the rest. The brutality of the y-shaped incision performed on a corpse is unparalleled by any other surgical procedure. The process, which consisted of removing and weighing the organs and then replacing them in the cavities, was never pleasant, but when the body belonged to a child or a young girl, as in this case, it was unbearable. She knew that it was less to do with the technical, unvarying steps of the autopsy procedure than the inexplicable reasons why a child would be on that steel table, which they ought to be forbidden from as a matter of course. The incongruity of that diminutive little body which barely filled the surface it had ended up on, the explosion of brilliant colours inside the it and, most of all, the girl’s small, pale face with tiny drops of water still trapped in her eyelashes acted like clamorous cries to which she could not help but respond.
r />   9

  Based on the light levels, Amaia guessed it must be about seven in the morning. She woke Jonan, who was asleep under his anorak in the back of the car.

  ‘Good morning, chief. How did it go?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘We’re going back to Elizondo. Has Montes called you?’

  ‘No, I thought he was at the autopsy with you.’

  ‘He didn’t turn up and he’s not answering his phone. I keep getting his voicemail,’ she said, visibly annoyed. Deputy Inspector Zabalza, who had come down to Pamplona in the same car as them climbed into the back seat and cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, Inspector, I’m not sure if I should get involved in this, but I don’t want you to worry. When we left the ravine, Inspector Montes told me he’d have to go and change because he’d arranged to have dinner with someone.’

  ‘To have dinner?’ she couldn’t contain her surprise.

  ‘Yes, he asked whether I was going to Pamplona with you for the autopsy, I said yes and he told me that in that case he’d be less concerned, that he supposed that Deputy Inspector Etxaide would be going too and that everything would be fine if that was the case.’

  ‘Everything would be fine? He was well aware that he should have been here,’ said Amaia furiously, although she immediately regretted making a fool of herself in front of her subordinates.

  ‘I … I’m sorry. From the way he was talking I assumed that you’d agreed to it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him later.’

  She wasn’t at all tired in spite of not sleeping. The faces of the three girls stared into the void from the surface of the table. Three very different faces, but made equal in death. She carefully studied the enlargements of the pictures of Carla and Ainhoa she had requested.

  Montes came in silently with two coffees, placed one in front of Amaia and sat down a short distance away. She looked up from the photos for a moment and gave him a penetrating stare until he dropped his gaze. Another five officers from her team were also in the room. She took the photos and slid them towards the centre of the table.