The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  Rosario gave a condescending smile which showed just how much she was enjoying it all.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, that sort of thing can be for boys or girls.’

  Amaia didn’t answer. She turned round very slowly and headed for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to Aunt Engrasi’s house.’

  ‘There’ll be none of that,’ said her mother, suddenly irritated. ‘Who do you think you are? You’re ungrateful for the present your parents give you and now you want to go and take your sob story to your aunt the sorgiña. Do you want her to tell you your future? Do you want to know when you’re going to get some denim dungarees like your friends have? There’ll be none of that, if you want to get out of here, go and help your father in the workshop.’

  Amaia continued walking towards the door without daring to look at her.

  ‘Take your present to your room before you go.’

  Amaia continued walking without turning round, she picked up her pace and even heard her call a few more times before she reached the street.

  The workshop welcomed her with the sweet smell of aniseed. Her father was carrying in bags of flour and leaving them beside the bin into which he would empty them afterwards. He noticed her presence immediately and went over to her, wiping the flour off his apron before giving her a hug.

  ‘What sort of face is that?’

  ‘Ama gave me my present,’ she moaned, burying her face in her father’s chest and muffling her words.

  ‘Come on, there now, it’s over now,’ he consoled her, stroking her shorn head where her beautiful hair used to be. ‘Come on,’ he said, pulling her away from him enough to be able to see her face, ‘stop crying and go and wash that little face of yours. I haven’t given you my present yet.’

  Amaia washed her face in the sink next to the table without taking her eyes off her father, who was holding a sepia envelope with her name on it in his hand. It contained a new five-thousand peseta note. The little girl bit her lip and looked at her father.

  ‘Ama will take it off me,’ she said, anxiously, ‘and she’ll tell you off,’ she added.

  ‘I’ve already thought of that, which is why there’s something else in the envelope.’

  Amaia peered into the bottom and saw that it held a key. She gave her father a questioning look. He took the envelope and emptied it into her hand.

  ‘This is a key to the workshop. I thought you could keep your money here and when you need a bit you can get in using your key while Ama’s at home. I’ve already spoken to your aunt and she’ll buy you those trousers you want in Pamplona, but this money is for you, for you to buy what you want with it. Try to be discreet and don’t spend it all at once or your mother will notice.’

  Amaia looked around, already savouring the freedom and privilege represented by the key. Her father threaded a piece of fine string through the hole in the key, tied a knot in the ends and burnt them with a match so that they wouldn’t unravel, then hung it round his daughter’s neck.

  ‘Don’t let Ama see you with it, but if she does, say that it’s for your aunt’s house. Make sure you lock up carefully when you leave and there won’t be a problem. You can keep the envelope under these jars of flavouring essence; we haven’t used them for anything for years.’

  During the following days, Amaia gathered the little treasures she had been buying with her money in her school satchel, almost all of them items of stationery. A diary with an extremely handsome Pierrot sitting on a crescent moon on the cover; a floral printed ball-point pen with rose-scented ink; a canvas pencil case whose pockets and buckles looked like the top of a pair of trousers, and a heart-shaped marker pen with three different coloured ink cartridges.

  19

  At four that afternoon Anne’s father met them in a living room that was as clean as it was full of photos of her. In spite of the slight tremor in his hands as he served the coffee, he seemed calm and in control.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse my wife, she’s taken a tranquilliser and is in bed, but if it’s important …’

  ‘Don’t worry, sir, we only want to ask some simple questions; there’s no need to disturb her unless you think it necessary,’ said Iriarte with a note of emotion in his voice that did not pass unnoticed by Amaia. She remembered the way he had reacted when he recognised Anne at the river. Anne’s father smiled in a way that Amaia had seen many times before: the smile of a defeated man.

  ‘Are you feeling better? I saw you at the cemetery …’

  ‘Yes, thank you, it was the tension, the doctor told me to take these tablets,’ he said, pointing out a little box, ‘and not to drink any coffee.’ He smiled again as he looked at the steaming cups on the side-table.

  Amaia took a few seconds to look at the man carefully and assess his pain; then she asked, ‘What can you tell us about Anne, Señor Arbizu?’

  ‘Only good things. I wanted to tell you that we didn’t have Anne biologically.’ Amaia noted that he was avoiding saying the words ‘she wasn’t our daughter’.

  ‘We’ve had nothing but happiness since the day we brought her home … She was beautiful, look,’ and he took out a photo frame with a picture showing a smiling, blonde-haired baby from beneath a cushion. Amaia guessed that he had been looking at it until they had arrived and that he had felt compelled to cover it with the cushion in order to keep things tidy. She looked at the photo and showed it to Iriarte, who murmured, ‘Beautiful’,and handed back the photo, which Señor Arbizu covered with the cushion again.

  ‘She got very good marks, you can ask her teachers, she’s … she was very bright, much more so than we are, and very good, she never gave us any problems. She didn’t drink or smoke like other girls her age, she didn’t have a boyfriend; she used to say that she didn’t have time for any of that with her studies.’

  He stopped and looked down at his empty hands. He remained like that for a few seconds, like someone who’s been mugged and doesn’t understand what has become of the thing they were holding just a moment earlier.

  ‘She was the daughter anyone would be proud to have … ,’ he murmured, almost to himself.

  ‘Señor Arbizu,’ Amaia interrupted, and he looked at her as if he had just awoken from a prolonged daze, ‘would you let us see your daughter’s bedroom?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They walked together down the passage, both walls of which were hung with more photos of Anne, photos of her first communion, at school aged three or four, dressed as a cowgirl aged seven; her father stopped in front of each photo to tell them a little anecdote. Her room seemed a bit of a mess thanks to Jonan and the team that had come to take her computer and diaries away. Amaia gave it a general once-over. Shades of pink and purple in an otherwise typical bedroom. Good quality cream coloured furniture. A bedspread with a floral pattern that was repeated on the curtains and bookshelves holding more soft toys than books. She went over and ran her eye over the titles. Mathematics, chess and astronomy mixed with romance novels; she turned to Iriarte in surprise, who, understanding the unspoken question, answered, ‘It’s all in the report, the list of titles too.’

  ‘I told you my Anne was very bright,’ her father commented awkwardly from the entrance of the room with an expression on his face that Amaia knew was an attempt to contain his tears.

  She took a last look inside the wardrobe. The kind of clothes a good Christian mother would buy for her teenage daughter. She closed the doors and followed Iriarte out of the room. The man accompanied them to the front door.

  ‘Señor Arbizu, is there any chance that Anne was hiding anything from you, that she had important secrets or friendships you might not have known about?’

  Her father gave a categorical denial.

  ‘It’s impossible. Anne used to tell us everything, we knew all her friends, we had a really good relationship.’

  When they went down, Anne’s mother approached them on the stairs. Amaia supposed she must have sat there waiting for th
em, on the stairs that separated that storey from the main entrance. She was wearing a brown men’s dressing-gown over a pair of blue men’s pyjamas.

  ‘Amaia … Excuse me, Inspector, do you remember me? I knew your mother, she and my older sister used to be friends, perhaps you don’t remember.’ She twisted her hands into one another with such anxiety while she spoke that Amaia couldn’t take her eyes off them; they were like two wounded animals seeking a shelter they would not find.

  ‘I remember you,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  Suddenly, before any of them realised her intention, the woman knelt down in front of Amaia and her hands, those painfully empty hands, caught hold of Amaia’s with a force that seemed impossible in such a fragile woman. She raised her eyes and begged her, ‘Catch that monster who killed my princess, my marvellous little girl. He killed her and there can be no peace for him.’

  Her husband groaned.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, darling, what are you doing?’

  He ran down the stairs and tried to embrace his wife. Iriarte lifted her under the arms but even then she didn’t let go of Amaia’s hands.

  ‘I know it’s a man, because I’ve often seen how men look at my Anne, like wolves, with lust and fierce hunger … A mother can see these things, she can see them clearly, and I saw how they lusted after her body, her face, her wonderful mouth. Have you seen her, Inspector? She was an angel. So perfect it seemed unreal.’

  Crying silently, her husband looked her in the eyes, and Amaia saw how Iriarte was swallowing and breathing slowly.

  ‘I remember the day I became a mother, the day they gave her to me and I held her in my arms. I couldn’t have children, the little creatures would die in my womb during the first weeks of pregnancy, the miscarriages would come on suddenly. Natural, they used to call them, as if there were anything natural about your children dying inside you. I had five miscarriages before I found Anne, and by then I had lost any hope of being a mother, I didn’t want … I didn’t want to go through all that again and I couldn’t even imagine holding a healthy baby in my arms. The day I took Anne home I couldn’t stop trembling, I was trembling so much my husband thought the little one would fall out of my arms, do you remember?’ she said, looking at him. He nodded silently. ‘On the way, while we were in the car, I couldn’t take my eyes off her perfect face, she was so beautiful she seemed unreal. When we got in I put her on my bed and stripped her completely; in the report it said that she was a healthy little girl, but I was sure she must have some defect, a blemish, a horrible mark, something to mar her perfection. I inspected her little body all over and I could only marvel at what I saw. It felt strange, it was like looking at a marble statue.’ Amaia remembered the girl’s white body, which had reminded her of a Madonna, perfect in its whiteness. ‘I spent the following days looking at her in amazement, whenever I took her in my arms I would feel so grateful that I would burst into tears of pure anxiety and gratitude. And then, in the course of those magical days, I fell pregnant again, and when I found out, do you know, I hardly cared? Because I was already a mother, I gave birth from the heart and carried my daughter in my arms, and perhaps because of that, because carrying a child was no longer the object of my existence, the pregnancy went well. We didn’t tell anybody, we didn’t tell anybody any more. After so many disappointments we had learnt to keep it a secret. But this time the pregnancy continued, I reached the fifth month; my belly was more than obvious and people started to talk. Anne was almost the same age as the child I was carrying inside me, six months old, and she was beautiful, with blonde hair that already covered her head and curled round her face, big blue eyes with those long eyelashes, they lit up her face and she was still just perfect. I would take her out in her pram wearing a little blue dress that I’ve still got and I felt so proud when people leant over to look at her that I was almost beside myself with joy. One of my sisters-in-law came over to me and kissed me. “Congratulations,” she said, “you can see how things are, you only needed to relax to fall pregnant, and now you’re finally going to have a child that’s your own flesh and blood.” I felt frozen. “Children aren’t made of flesh and blood, they’re made of love,” I told her, almost trembling. “Yes, yes, I understand you,” she replied, “taking in a child from the children’s home is very generous and everything, but if you think like that”, she said touching my stomach, “you won’t hold onto that one long.” I went home feeling sick and disgusted, I took my daughter in my arms and I held her against my chest while my anxiety and panic increased and a burning sensation spread through my stomach from the place where that witch had touched me. That very night I woke up bathed in sweat and terrified by the certainty that my child was falling apart inside me. I felt as if the fine moorings that had tied him to me were breaking and as the pain increased I felt a fierce power destroying my insides, immobilising me so that I was incapable of reaching out to my husband, who was asleep beside me, nor of doing anything more than moaning mutely until the burning liquid started to flow out between my legs. The doctor showed me the baby, with a purplish fully-formed face that was transparent in some places. He told me that he’d had to operate on me, that he’d had to perform a curettage because the placenta hadn’t come out whole. And, without taking my eyes off my dead son’s awful face, I told him that he should tie my tubes or remove my uterus, that I didn’t care, that my stomach was not a cradle, but my children’s tomb. The doctor hesitated, he told me that perhaps I could still become a mother later on, but I told him that I was, that I was the mother of an angel and that I didn’t want to be a mother to anybody else.’

  Amaia listened to the woman’s agonised tale with great sadness, recognising that the story was not unlike her own; her stomach was a tomb for unborn children. Anne’s mother continued pouring out the confession that seemed to be burning her up inside.

  ‘I didn’t speak to my sister-in-law for fifteen years, and the bitch didn’t even know why. Until the funeral today. She came over to me with tears pouring down her face and whispered to me, forgive me. It moved me so much that I embraced her and let her cry, but I didn’t answer her, because I’ll never forgive her. I’m no longer a mother, Inspector, someone has stolen the rose that grew from my heart, like in the poem, and now I have a tomb in my stomach and another one in my chest. Catch him, stop him and, when you find him, shoot him. Do it, or if you won’t do it, I will. I swear by all my dead children that I will dedicate my life to finding him, waiting for him, stalking him until I can put an end to him.’

  When they went out into the street, Amaia felt strange and disorientated, as if she had just landed after a long flight.

  ‘Did you see the walls, chief?’ asked Iriarte.

  She nodded, remembering the photographs that made the place seem like a mausoleum.

  ‘She seemed to be looking at us everywhere. I don’t know how they’re going to get over this, living in that house.’

  ‘They won’t,’ she said sorrowfully.

  She soon became aware of the presence of a woman who was coming towards them at top speed, crossing the road diagonally with the obvious intention of speaking to them. As she stopped in front of them Amaia recognised her as Anne’s aunt, the sister-in-law whom her mother had refused to acknowledge for years.

  ‘Have you just been to see them?’ she asked, panting from the effort of her dash.

  Amaia didn’t answer, sure that the reason for all that effort was not to know where they’d just been.

  ‘I …’ she hesitated. ‘I love my sister-in-law dearly; it’s terrible what’s happened to them. I’m going to their house right now to … well, to be with them. What else can I do? It’s horrible, and yet …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That girl, Anne, wasn’t normal … I don’t know if you understand me. She was pretty, very bright, but there was something strange about her, something evil.’

  ‘Something evil? And what was that?’

  ‘She was, she was the evil. Anne was a belagile,
as dark inside as she was white outside. Even as a child she seemed to look daggers at you, and it felt like she radiated evil. And witches don’t rest in peace when they die, you’ll see. This isn’t the end of Anne.’

  She stated this with the same gravity and certainty as if she were speaking before an Inquisitorial tribunal, without a shadow of embarrassment or doubt about pronouncing a word usually found only in murder mystery or horror films. And yet Amaia had the impression that she was extremely uneasy, worried, even. They saw her walk away with the assurance of someone who has completed a painful yet honourable task.

  After a few uncomfortable seconds, Amaia and the inspector continued walking along Calle Akullegi. A moment later Iriarte’s phone rang.

  ‘Yes, she’s with me, we’re just heading back towards the station now. I’ll tell her.’

  Amaia looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Inspector, it’s your brother-in-law, Alfredo … He’s in Navarra Hospital in Pamplona, he’s tried to kill himself. One of his friends found him hanging in the stairwell. Fortunately it seems he arrived in time, but his condition is very serious.’

  Amaia checked the time on her watch. It was quarter past five. Ros would be about to arrive home from work.

  ‘Go to the station, Inspector, I’ll go home; I don’t want my sister to find out from just anyone. Then I’ll go to the hospital. I’ll come back as soon as I can. You take charge of everything here in the meantime, and if …’

  He interrupted her. ‘Inspector, that was the Commissioner, he asked me to accompany you to Pamplona … It looks like your brother-in-law’s attempted suicide is related to the case.’

  Amaia looked at him, disconcerted. ‘Related to the case? To what case? To the case of the basajaun?’

  ‘Deputy Inspector Zabalza is waiting for us at the hospital, he’ll tell you more, I know as much as you do. Once we’ve been to the hospital, the Commissioner wants to see us at headquarters in Pamplona at eight.’