‘Are they asleep?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ he said, closing his eyes in one of his expressions that she knew well and which had nothing to do with sleeping.
‘Are you worried?’ she asked, running a finger across his forehead.
‘Yes.’ There was no point in lying to her, she knew him well.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I don’t know what it is, that’s what’s worrying me; there’s something that’s not right and I don’t know what it is.’
‘Is it to do with that pretty inspector?’ she asked sarcastically.
‘Well I guess she might have something to do with it, but I’m not sure. She’s got a slightly different way of doing things, but I don’t think that’s so bad.’
‘Do you think she’s good at her job?’
‘Yes, I think she’s very good, but … I don’t know how to explain it, she’s got a kind of dark side, a part that I can’t quite see, and I suppose that’s what worries me.’
‘Everyone has a hidden side and you haven’t known her long; it’s a bit early to pass judgement, don’t you think?’
‘It’s not that, it’s a sort of feeling, like an instinct. You know I don’t normally make judgements based on first impressions, but perceptions are very important in my work. I think we ignore the signs of things that worry us about other people a lot of the time just because we don’t have a sound basis for them, but sometimes the feeling we’ve had and decided to ignore comes back after a while and this time there are reasons to back it up. Then we regret having failed to pay attention to what some call perception, instinct or first impressions which, deep down, have a firm scientific basis, since they’re based on body language, facial expressions and little white lies.’
‘So you think she’s a liar, then?’
‘I think she’s hiding something.’
‘And yet you say you have confidence in her judgement.’
‘That’s about right.’
‘Perhaps what you’re noticing is emotional imbalance, people who don’t love or aren’t loved. People who have problems at home can give you that feeling.’
‘I don’t think that’s the case. Her husband is a famous American sculptor and he’s come to Elizondo with her for the duration of the investigation. I’ve heard her speaking to him on the phone and there’s no tension there. Furthermore, she’s staying at her aunt’s house with one of her sisters; it seems like everything’s normal on the family front.’
‘Do they have children?’
‘No.’
‘Well there you go,’ she said, lying back on the pillow and switching off her bedside lamp. ‘I think that no woman of child-bearing age can be complete if she doesn’t have children, and I assure you that that can be a huge, dark and secret burden. I love you, but I’d feel incomplete if I didn’t have children,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘Even though they leave me exhausted.’
He looked at her with a smile, thinking about her simple and direct way of looking at the world and how often she was right.
42
Amaia felt much better after a long hot shower, although no more relaxed. Her muscles were as tense as an athlete’s before a competition. She still didn’t understand how instinct, that complicated machinery in an investigator’s head, worked, but in a very subtle way she could almost hear the cogs of the case turning, interlocking, their slow movement dragging together hundreds of little pieces that meshed in with hundreds more in turn, making everything make sense, as if their advance were clearing away the fog that had been clouding her vision. She heard Agent Dupree’s voice in her head again. The blockage.
That man’s instinct had hit the bulls-eye once again, even with an ocean between them.
Whatever was causing the blockage had not diminished in the slightest. She was certain deep down in her soul that what came to her in the night had only taken a step back to hide itself in the shadows, like an old vampire intimidated by the sunlight flooding in through the crack she had opened up the night before. She had been afraid to open up the crack, torn between a desire to free herself and fierce panic at the sight of the light. It was a small crack in the prison of fear, silence and heavy secrecy she had built to contain the monster, but she was sure that something more dazzling would come through it in the coming months, unless she allowed it to close and the vampire to lean over her bed once more. But, for today, she could imagine a world where the ghosts of the past let her sleep in peace, where she could be as honest with James as she ought to be and where the capricious spirits of nature would align the stars to reveal her destiny.
But there was something else Dupree had said that was going round and round in her head like one of those jingles you can’t stop singing, even if you don’t remember all the words. Where did he come from? It was an intelligent question she had already asked herself and to which she didn’t have the answer, but that didn’t mean it lost its importance. A murderer like that didn’t just appear out of nowhere overnight, but their search for delinquents who fitted the profile had not shone any light on the case. Reset. Switch off and then on again. Sometimes the answer is not the solution to the enigma. Everything depends on you knowing how to ask the right question. The question. The formula. What is it I need to know? What I need to know is what the question is. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and was struck by a certainty. She hurriedly tossed her bathrobe aside and dressed again in the same clothes she’d been wearing before. When she arrived at the police station only Zabalza was still there.
‘Hello Inspector, I was just leaving,’ he said, as if apologising for still being there.
‘Well, I need to ask you to stay a little longer.’
He nodded. ‘Of course, whatever you want.’
‘I need you to access all the records concerning murders of young women in the valley in the last twenty-five years.’
His eyes bulged.
‘That could take us hours, and I’m not sure we’ll even have all the information. It will be in the general records, but the Policía Foral weren’t responsible for murder investigations back then.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, without disguising her annoyance. ‘How far back can we go?’
‘Ten years or so, but Inspector Iriarte and I already did that and we didn’t find anything.’
‘OK, you can go.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I just thought of something … Don’t worry, we’ll talk tomorrow.’
She took out her phone and looked up a number.
‘Padua, you remember that favour you owe me?’
Fifteen minutes later she was at the Guardia Civil barracks.
‘Twenty-five years is a long time and some of those cases aren’t even on the system. If you want to access the paper copies you’ll have to go to Pamplona; the homicide team was part of the Policía Nacional at that time and we were more concerned with policing roads, the mountains, and the borders and with counter-terrorism duties … But I’ll do what I can. What exactly do you want?’
‘Crimes committed against young women anywhere in the valley. We’ve gone back ten years, but I need almost everything from before then.’
He nodded as he worked out what she was asking for and started to look up records on the computer.
‘From ’87 onwards … If you could be more specific … What sort of murder are you looking for?’
‘Ones where the victims were found by the river, in the forest, strangled, naked …’
‘Aha!’ he said, as if he had remembered something. ‘There was a case, my father used to talk about it, a girl who was raped and strangled in Elizondo. It was a long time ago, I was only a little boy. She was called Kraus, she was Russian or something similar … Let me look it up,’ he said, typing again. He put in a few dates until he found it. ‘Here it is: Klas, not Kraus. Teresa Klas. She was found raped and strangled in the fields of the estate where she worked as a companion to the old mistress. They arrest
ed the woman’s younger son, but he was released without charge. They questioned various workers, but it came to nothing in the end.’
‘Who carried out the investigation?’
‘The Policía Nacional.’
‘Does it say who exactly?’
‘No, but I remember that when I started at the Academy,’ he said as he searched, ‘the head of homicide was a captain in the Policía Nacional in Irun. I don’t remember his name, but I can call my father, he used to be a Guardia too and he’s bound to know,’ he went on, dialling the phone number. He spoke for a few minutes and hung up. ‘Alfonso Álvarez de Toledo, does that ring any bells?’
‘Isn’t he a writer or something?’
‘Yes, he retired to focus on his writing. He still lives in Irun, my father gave me his phone number.’
In contrast with Elizondo, Irun was unusually busy given that it was one o’clock in the morning. The bars on Calle Luis Mariano were overflowing with drinkers who spilled over and out of the nightspots, accompanied by the sound of music. In a stroke of luck, Amaia managed to park in a space vacated by two noisy couples who had just got into their car.
Alfonso Álvarez de Toledo had a real beach tan, which was surprising at that time of year, and seemed unconcerned by the thousands of tiny lines that criss-crossed his face, due as much to his excessive taste for the sun as to his age.
‘Inspector Salazar, it’s a pleasure, I’ve heard a lot of very good things about you.’
She was taken aback, especially bearing in mind the fact that the former head of homicide had decided to retire early after achieving considerable fame with a series of detective novels which had been a great success some years earlier. He led her down a wide passage into a living room where a woman in her sixties was watching television.
‘We can talk here. And don’t worry about my wife, she’s been a policeman’s wife her entire life and I’ve always discussed my cases with her … I can assure you that the police lost a great detective in that woman.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Amaia, smiling at the woman, who shook her hand and then turned away to concentrate on a chat show that looked like it would carry on for some time.
‘I hear you want to talk about the Teresa Klas case.’
‘I’m definitely interested in any cases in which the victims were young women. In Teresa’s case, it seems that she was raped and the profile that I’m looking for doesn’t include rapes; in fact, there’s no sex of any type involved.’
‘Oh, don’t let yourself be fooled, sweetheart, the fact that the report says that the girl was raped doesn’t necessarily mean that she was raped.’
‘Why not? Raped is …’
‘Look, I was once head of the homicide team and things were very different then … To give you an idea, there were no women on the force and the detectives had little more than basic training; we didn’t have the benefits of the scientific advances you do now. If the semen was visible there was semen, if it wasn’t there wasn’t any … It wasn’t much use for anything because we didn’t carry out DNA analyses. It was the Eighties, and you have to realise that the attitude that even the police shared back then wasn’t far off sanctimonious and proper, not to say prudish. If they arrived at a crime scene and there was a girl with her underwear around her ankles, they took it as given that there had been sexual violence; consensual sex was almost never noted unless the case involved a prostitute.’
‘So was Teresa raped or not?’
‘There was something very sexual about the way in which the corpse was laid out, she was completely naked with her eyes open and some cord around her neck, which had come from that very farm. You can imagine the scene.’
Amaia could imagine it.
‘Did she have her hands arranged in any special way?’
‘Not that I remember. Her clothes were scattered around nearby, as if tossed carelessly next to the contents of her handbag, a few coins and sweets … There were even some on the body.’
Amaia felt something like a powerful nausea contract her stomach.
‘There were sweets on her?’
‘Yes, a few, they were thrown all over the place. Her parents told us she had a real sweet tooth.’
‘Do you remember how they were arranged on her body?’
Alfonso inhaled and held his breath for a couple of seconds before exhaling, giving the impression that it took a great effort to remember.
‘Most of them were scattered around her and between her legs, but there was one on her lower stomach, more or less on her pubic mound. Does that mean something to you? We assumed that they’d fallen out of her bag when her attacker grabbed it looking for money; it was the start of the month and perhaps he thought she was carrying her salary with her. Everything was paid in cash back then.’
She was struck by a sudden certainty.
‘What month was it?’
‘It was around this time of year, February; I remember it because my daughter, Sofía, was born a few days later.’
‘Can you tell me anything about this crime, anything that caught your attention?’
‘I can tell you something that caught my attention years later in other crimes, which happened to involve young women and which made me remember Teresa, although it was just a detail, something slightly strange. Do you remember, Matilde?’ he said, addressing his wife. ‘The dead girls whose hair had been brushed?’
She nodded without taking her eyes off the screen.
‘The body of a German camper was found “raped” and strangled near a campsite in Bera six months or so later. In spite of the coincidences it was a different type of crime; he tried to rape the girl, there were signs she had fought back, and the animal cut off her hand and took it with him; she was also strangled with a cord from her own tent, and he cut her clothes to see her naked after she was dead. He was a pervert, a caretaker on the campsite, a disgusting fifty-something-year-old who already had a record of spying on female campers while they showered. The strange thing is that in spite of all the signs of violence evident on the body, her hair was parted down the centre and brushed as if she were posing for a photo. The guy denied everything, having killed her, having brushed her hair, but there were witnesses who had seen them arguing several days earlier when the girl caught him sniffing around her tent while she was changing. They put him away for twenty years. A year later we had another case of a dead girl whose hair had been brushed. A girl became separated from her hiking group on the mountain. At first they thought she’d got lost and they organised search parties; we found her almost ten days later. She was under a tree, as if she were napping, and her body presented with an unusual kind of dehydration that a forensics expert could explain better than I can. The fact is that the body seemed mummified, her clothes weren’t there and her bun had been undone and her hair arranged perfectly to either side of the body, as if somebody had combed it.’
Amaia could barely control the tremor in her legs.
‘Was there anything on the body?’
‘No, nothing, nothing at all, although she did have her hands palm-upwards. There was something very strange about it, but there was nothing on the body, he’d taken everything off her: clothes, underwear, shoes … Although now I think about it, her shoes did turn up; in fact it was thanks to that that she was found: they were at the edge of the path that led into the forest.’
‘Arranged side by side, like when someone goes to bed or for a swim in the river,’ Amaia recited.
‘Yes,’ he admitted, looking at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Did they catch the attacker?’
‘No, there were no clues, there were no suspects … Her friends and family were questioned, just routine. The same as with Teresa, the same as with the others. Young women, some of them almost still children, only just waking up to life. And someone cut their wings off …’
‘Do you think there’s any chance I could have access to those reports?’ she asked, almost begging.
<
br /> ‘I suppose you know what I do for a living nowadays … When I left the police I made myself a copy of all the cases I’d worked on.’
Amaia drove to Elizondo with the information Álvares de Toledo had just given her bubbling in her head. The reports presented her with common factors, suspicious dates, the same type of victim, a modus operandi that had been perfected, that had been fine-tuned … She had found his origins, his trail of death that had extended across the whole valley to Bera and possibly beyond. Now she was sure that the killer lived in Elizondo and she knew that Teresa had been the first victim, an opportunistic crime which had led him to distance himself as far from his home as possible in the following ones. Teresa, who was prettier than she was clever, a freska as her Amatxi Juanita would have called her, sassy and sure of her charms, a girl who enjoyed flaunting her assets. The killer had been unable to resist the temptation of her daily presence, of the provocation of seeing her every day and thinking her to be dirty and evil, playing at being a woman when she should have been doing little more than playing with dolls. Her existence seemed unbearable and he killed her like the others, without raping her, but exposing her little girl’s body that had crossed the boundary of what he considered decent. Afterwards he had focused on perfecting his technique, the cut clothing, the hands in an offertory pose, the hair neatly brushed to either side of the head … And suddenly there was nothing, years of silence, years when he might have been serving his time for a minor crime, or when he had moved away to another area for a time, but he had come back, mature and cold, in February, perhaps as a macabre homage to Teresa, with a more refined technique, replacing the sweet, the detail that symbolised childhood, with a sweet, hand-made cake, which, in Amaia’s opinion, represented his true signature.
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