Dolores Redondo - The Invisible Guardian

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.