The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  She didn’t dare put a name to it, even in a secret thought. The part of her that was a police officer, a twenty-first-century woman, an urbanite, refused to even consider it, because there was no doubt it was a bear, it had to be a bear. And yet …

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ James asked, looking at her.

  ‘What?’ she said surprised.

  ‘You were laughing to yourself …’ he said, visibly satisfied.

  ‘Oh … Well, it’s one of those things I’m not allowed to talk about,’ she apologised, astonished by the effect that just remembering it had on her.

  ‘OK,’ he said, smiling, ‘in any case I haven’t seen you this happy for days.’

  Dinner passed peacefully. Her aunt told them something about one of her friends who was going travelling in Egypt and James filled her in on how they had spent the day visiting the winter market in a nearby town which seemed to have the best vegetables in the whole valley. Ros barely said anything, just giving her some long, worried looks that succeeded in putting her in a bad mood again. As soon as they finished eating, Amaia apologised for being so tired and went upstairs.

  ‘Amaia,’ her aunt stopped her. ‘I know you need to sleep, but I think we ought to have a conversation about what is happening to you first.’

  Amaia paused halfway up the stairs and turned slowly, mustering her patience but unable to avoid an expression of weariness. ‘I appreciate your concern, Aunt Engrasi, but nothing’s happening to me,’ she said, addressing James and her sister, too, who had gone to stand behind Engrasi like a Greek chorus at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I haven’t slept for two nights and I’m under so much pressure …’

  ‘I know, Amaia, I’m well aware of that, but rest isn’t always achieved through sleep.’

  ‘Aunt …’

  ‘Do you remember what you asked me yesterday when your sister dealt the cards for you? Well, the time is now, I’ll deal the cards for you and we’ll talk about the evil that’s tormenting you.’

  ‘Please, Aunt,’ she said, giving James a sidelong glance.

  ‘That’s exactly why, Amaia. Don’t you think it’s time your husband knew about this?’

  ‘Knew about what?’ interjected James. ‘What should I know?’

  Engrasi looked at Amaia as if asking her permission.

  ‘For the love of God!’ exclaimed Amaia, dropping down so she was sitting on the stairs. ‘Show a little mercy, I’m exhausted, I swear I just can’t take any more today. Let’s wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow, I give you my word, I’ve taken the day off, we’ll talk tomorrow, but today I can’t even think clearly anymore.’

  James seemed satisfied with the prospect of spending a day with her and, although it was obvious that he was intrigued, in the end he took her side.

  ‘Perfect, tomorrow is Sunday, we thought we’d go to the mountain in the morning and afterwards your aunt will cook roast lamb and your sister Flora will come and eat with us.’

  The prospect of sitting down to eat with her older sister was not in the least appealing, but faced with that or continuing the conversation, she gave in.

  ‘Great,’ she said, standing up and going quickly up the stairs before they had time to say anything more.

  Special Agent Aloisius Dupree took the bag that Antoine had brought out from the back room of his crowded shop and was now holding out to him. The tourists who came for the carnival loved that sort of place, full of knick-knacks to do with the old religion and toned-down voodoo for visitors to New Orleans who wanted to take home amulets and necklaces to show their friends. Aloisius had gone straight to Antoine Meire and handed him the list of ingredients he needed, along with two fifty-dollar bills. It was expensive, but he knew that Nana would not accept the mediocre products anyone else might provide. He stopped beneath the balconies of an old inn on Saint Charles Street and watched one of the numerous Mardi Gras processions go past, part of New Orleans’ popular carnival which travelled through the streets of the French Quarter, attracting crowds of noisy and sweaty locals in its wake. The thirty degree heat, a little warm for February, and the damp from the Mississippi, which enveloped the regulars and made the door frames swell, left the air thick and heavy, encouraging the consumption of beer amongst those devotees of the carnival who didn’t need much encouragement. He waited until most of the group had passed, then crossed the street and went into one of the alleyways between the houses where the wood creaked from the heat and had not been touched by the paint provided by the local authorities to whitewash the facades. The marks that showed how high the water had risen during the time when they were visited by the evil curse that was Katrina were still visible. He climbed up a spiral staircase that creaked like an old person’s bones and went into a dark passage lit by the feeble light from a Tiffany lamp that sat on the sill of a tiny window at the end of the passage. It looked authentic and probably was. Inhaling the aroma of eucalyptus and sweat that filled the passage, he went straight to the last door. He knocked using his knuckles. A whispered voice from inside asked who was there.

  ‘Je suis Aloisius.’

  An old lady who barely came up to his chest opened the door and threw herself into his arms.

  ‘Mon cher et petit Aloisius. What brings you here to visit your old Nana?’

  ‘Oh, Nana, you never miss a thing, how are you so clever?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Parce que je suis très vieille. That’s the way life goes, mon cher, now I’m finally wise, I’m too old to go out and enjoy Mardi Gras,’ she complained as he smiled. ‘What have you brought me?’ she asked, looking at the plain brown bag he was carrying, ‘Surely not a present?’

  ‘It is, sort of, Nana, but not for you,’ he said, handing her the bag.

  ‘Mon cher enfant, believe me when I say I hope I never need someone to give me that sort of present.’

  She peered inside the bag.

  ‘I see you’ve been to Antoine Meire’s shop.’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Il est le meilleur,’ she said with approval as she smelled some dried, whitish roots that looked like the bones of a human hand in the dim light of the apartment.

  ‘J’aide une amie, une femme qui est perdue et doit trouver sa voie.’

  ‘A lost woman? Comment perdue?’

  ‘Lost in her own abyss,’ he answered.

  Nana arranged the more than thirty ingredients, carefully wrapped in little manila envelopes, small boxes like those used to store minerals and tiny bottles full of pungent substances that were illegal in all fifty states, on the oak table that took up almost the entire room.

  ‘C’est bien,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to help me move the furniture so there’s enough space and you’ll have to draw the pentagrams on the floor. Your poor Nana is very clever, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have arthritis.’

  38

  The lamp on the bedside table gave off an excessively bright white light. Amaia spent twenty minutes going round the house checking all the others for a lower voltage bulb. She discovered two things: that Engrasi had replaced all the light bulbs with those horrible energy-saving ones with their fluorescent light and that the lamps in her room were the only ones in the whole house with a narrow screw fixture. James watched her from the bed without saying anything; he knew the ritual off by heart and he knew that his wife would not settle down until she found a way of feeling comfortable. She sat on the bed, visibly annoyed, glaring at the lamp as if it were a repulsive insect. Eventually she took a purple pashmina from the chair, partially covered the lampshade and looked at James.

  ‘That’s too bright,’ he complained.

  ‘You’re right,’ she admitted.

  She picked up the lamp by its base and put it on the floor between the wall and the bedside table, took one of the cardboard folders she kept on the dressing table and opened it like a folding screen a few centimetres from the lamp, leaving it so that it was almost buried in the corner. She turned to James, checking that the light level was now much lower. She
sighed and stretched out beside him but he leant up on one elbow and started to stroke her forehead and hair.

  ‘Tell me what you were doing in Huesca.’

  ‘Wasting time. I was almost sure that there would be some kind of match between some objects that appeared at the crime scenes. Those scientists agreed to run some tests for us that were otherwise going to take ages to come back to us from our laboratory; if we’d got the results I was hoping for we would have had a much more concrete area to focus on. We could have questioned the vendors and they’re all in towns with small populations and the shop owners would remember who had bought, well, those things we need clues about. But we didn’t discover anything, and this opens a whole world of possibilities: he bought them somewhere else, from another province, or, more likely, he made them himself or a member of his family did. It would have to be someone he was close to, someone he could ask to make them for him.’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t really see a serial killer taking an interest in artisanal methods …’

  ‘I can see this one doing it, we think what he’s really looking for is a return to tradition, and there’s no denying that this is traditional. In any case, other killers have shown a predilection for making bombs, artisanal weapons, poisons … It makes them think that there’s some sense to what they’re doing.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘I don’t know, James. Freddy’s been ruled out as a suspect, Carla’s boyfriend’s been ruled out as a suspect, Johana’s father had nothing to do with the other crimes, he’s just an upstart; we didn’t find anything when we questioned the girls’ male relatives or friends, there are no registered paedophiles in the area and the men with histories of sexual assault either have an alibi or are in prison. The only thing we can do is what no crime investigator likes doing.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  ‘Wait until that bastard acts again, wait for him to make a mistake, to get nervous or give us something more out of vanity, something that leads us directly to him.’

  James leaned over and kissed her, drew back to look into her eyes and kissed her again. Amaia felt the impulse to reject him, but with his second kiss she felt how her tension vanished. She lifted her hand to James’s neck and slipped under his body, longing to feel his weight. She searched for the edge of his t-shirt and pulled it upwards, revealing her lover’s chest as he uncovered hers. She loved the way he tensed on top of her. Like a Greek athlete, with a perfect physique and a warmth that drove her crazy. She ran her hands urgently down his back to his behind, pausing on his taut buttocks and sliding a hand down to his thighs to enjoy his full strength while he busied himself kissing her neck and breasts. He liked his sex slow, smooth, certain, confident and elegant, and yet there were times when desire would overcome her so quickly, impetuous and intense, that she herself was surprised at the state of anxiety and desperation she reached in just a few seconds, clouding her reason and making her feel like an animal, capable of anything. She felt an urge to speak while they were making love, to tell him how much she wanted him, how much she loved him and how happy sex with him made her. She would be so overwhelmed with passion that she couldn’t put it into words. She knew what she needed to say, she could guess what should not be spoken, because when they loved one another in this warm and liquid way, when their mouths couldn’t keep up, when their hands were not sufficient, when their words were hoarse and faltering, a whirlpool of feelings, passions and instincts were unleashed inside her like a tidal wave. They swept away her common sense and her capacity for reason to an extent that scared her but at the same time drew her in, like an abyss which hid all that should not be said, the most torturous desires, passionate jealousy, savage instincts, desperation and the inhuman pain that she was fleetingly aware of before climaxing; that pain which was either the crown of God or the gates of Hell. A path leading either to eternal life or towards the cruel discovery that nothing would come afterwards, which her mind mercifully erased a moment after orgasm, when sleepiness wrapped her in a warm spider’s web and submerged her in a deep dream in which she could hear Dupree’s voice whispering.

  She opened her eyes and was instantly calmed on recognising the familiar outlines of the bedroom, bathed in the milky light given off by the half-hidden lamp in the corner. A hundred shades of grey to paint the nocturnal world to which she kept returning in her dream. She changed position and closed her eyes again, determined to sleep. Drowsiness immediately pulled her into a tranquil wakefulness in which she was half aware of herself, of her beloved James breathing at her side, of the rich aroma of his body, of the warmth of the flannel sheets, a warmth that drew her towards deep sleep.

  And the presence. She felt her so close and so malignant that her heart thumped in her chest in a convulsion that was almost audible. She already knew she was there before opening her eyes, standing beside the bed. She had been observing Amaia with her twisted smile and her cold eyes, secretly amused at the prospect of terrifying her, like she used to do when Amaia was little and like she still continued to do, since, after all, she lived in her daughter’s fear. Amaia knew it, but she couldn’t avoid the panic that weighed her down like a mill-stone, immobilising her, transforming her into a trembling little girl who fought against herself not to open her eyes. Don’t open them. Don’t open them.

  But she opened them and she knew before doing so whose face would be leaning over her, drawing near like a feeding vampire, feeding not on blood, but on breath. If she didn’t open her eyes the figure would get so close that she would breathe in Amaia’s breath, she would open her mocking mouth and eat her up.

  She opened her eyes, saw her and yelled.

  Her shouts mixed with James’s, who was calling her from far away, and with the sound of bare feet running along the passage.

  Amaia leapt out of bed crazy with fear, a small part of her aware that her mother was no longer there. She stumbled into her trousers and sweater, picked up her pistol and went downstairs, possessed by the urgent need to put an end to the fear once and for all. She didn’t switch the light on because she knew exactly where to look. She felt around for the carved wooden box belonging to a game of noughts and crosses which was exactly where it had always been. With agile fingers she rummaged through the thousand trinkets that had ended up inside it. Her fingertips brushed the cord and she pulled it out of the box with a jerk, spilling part of its contents, which fell onto the floor, clattering in the darkness.

  ‘Amaia!’ shouted James. She turned towards the stairs, where her aunt had just switched on the light. They were looking at her in terror, clearly wondering what on earth was going on. She didn’t respond, but moved past them, made her way to the door and went out. She broke into a run, lifting the cord and the key she clutched in her fist to her face and she realised that the nylon was still as smooth as when her father tied the key onto it for her on the day she turned nine.

  The door to the workshop was barely lit. The old streetlight on the corner of the street gave off an orange, almost Christmassy, light which barely tinged the pavement. She fumbled at the lock with her index finger and inserted the key. The smell of flour and butter enveloped her, suddenly transporting her to a night from her childhood. She closed the door and reached up above her head in search of the light switch. It wasn’t there, it wasn’t there anymore.

  It took her a few seconds to realise that she no longer needed to stretch to reach it. She turned on the light and started to tremble as soon as she could see. Her saliva became thick against her palate, like an enormous ball of breadcrumbs, impossible to break up, difficult to swallow. She walked towards the storage jars, which were still all grouped together in the same corner. She looked at them, startled, as her breathing sped up at the fear of what was going to happen, what was coming next.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  The question sounded perfectly clearly in her head.

  Tears filled her eyes, blinding her for a moment. Her retinas were burning. She was gripped by an i
ntense cold that made her tremble even more. She turned slowly and walked towards the kneading table. The terror made her shiver, but she stretched out her trembling fingers until she touched the clean surface of its metal bulk while her mother’s voice thundered powerfully in her head. An iron rolling pin lay in the sink and there was a constant drip from the tap splashing into the bottom of the basin with a rhythmic patter. The terror grew, blocking out everything.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ she whispered.

  And she knew that she had to flee, because it was the night of her death. She turned towards the door and tried to reach it. She took a step, another, another, and it happened again, just like she knew it would happen. There was no point in fleeing because it was inevitable that she would die that night. But the little girl resisted, the little girl didn’t want to die, and although she raised her hand as she turned to look at her mother in a vain attempt to protect herself from the mortal blow, she collapsed to the floor from the impact, terrified, feeling as if her heart was almost exploding from pure panic just a moment before stopping. She lay stretched out and broken. And although she felt the second blow, it didn’t hurt anymore. There was nothing after that, the dense tunnel of fog that had formed around her dispersed, clearing her vision as if someone had washed her eyes.