The Invisible Guardian

‘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 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.

9 (#ulink_dfd9298d-2134-5637-a7cb-73ceb239d668)

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.