The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  She turned round and smiled as she zipped up her anorak.

  ‘Good night, Jonan.’

  She asked the patrol car to drop her off at Bar Saioa, where she asked for a black coffee, which the owner set in front of her without complaint despite the fact that he had already cleaned the coffee machine. It was boiling hot and she drank it in small sips, savouring the strength of the brew and pretending not to notice the interest she was arousing among the few regulars who were still there at that time of night, drinking gin and tonic out of cider glasses complete with ice cubes and ignoring the Siberian cold that threatened outside. When she went out into the street the temperature seemed to have dropped by a further five degrees in one go. She put her hands in her pockets and crossed the street. As in the rest of the valley, most of the houses in Elizondo were adapted to its damp, rainy climate with a square or rectangular façade, three or four floors and a slanting tiled roof with large eaves, which constituted the outer edge of the building and, for more experienced walkers like herself, some slight refuge from the rain. According to Barandiaran, it was this narrow space, into which the rain poured off the roof, that used to be used for the burial of aborted foetuses and stillborn babies. There was a belief that their small spirits, the mairu, guarded the house, protecting it from evil and at the same time remained in the maternal home forever as eternal infants. She remembered that her aunt had once told her that when a house had been knocked down and they were digging around it they had found bones belonging to more than ten babies that had been buried beneath the eaves of the house like guards during the passage of the centuries.

  Amaia walked along Calle Santiago, staying close to the doorways in an attempt to shelter from the wind, which was even stronger when she turned down Calle Javier Ciga, past the imposing town house after which the bridge was named. The river was pouring over the dam with a deafening roar that made her wonder how the locals whose windows overlooked that small waterfall could sleep. The lights of the trinquete were off. The street was as deserted as a ghost town. Little by little, carried by the current of that other river that flowed inside her, she went down what used to be Calle del Sol towards Calle Txokoto, until she arrived at the door to the workshop again. She took a hand out of her jacket pocket and put it on the icy handle. She leant her head forward until her forehead touched the rough wood of the door and started to cry silently.

  24

  She had died. She knew this with the same certainty with which she had known that she had been alive before. She had died. And, just as she was aware of her death, she was also aware of everything that was happening around her; the blood that was still flowing from her head, the heart that had stopped in the middle of a beat that would never be completed now.

  The strange silence in which her body had been plunged, which seemed almost deafening from the inside, allowed her to hear other sounds from her surroundings. A drop falling onto a metal sheet again and again. A panting noise, the effort and determination with which someone pulled on her lifeless limbs. Rapid, irregular breathing. A murmur, perhaps a threat. But it didn’t matter anymore, because everything had come to an end. Death is the end of fear, and knowing this almost made her happy, because she was a dead little girl in a white tomb and somebody, who was panting with the effort, had started to bury her.

  The earth was soft and fragrant and it covered her cold limbs like a cool, soft sheet. She thought that earth was kind to dead people. But the person burying her wasn’t. They were hurling fistfuls of dust over her hands, over her mouth, over her eyes and her nose, covering her, hiding the horror. The earth got into her mouth and became a thick, sticky paste; it stuck to her teeth and grew hard on her lips. It got into her nose, invading her nasal passages and then, despite the fact she had thought she was dead, she inhaled that merciful earth and started to cough. The shovelfuls of earth that were falling on her face increased, as did the kind of contained cry of panic emitting from the pitiless monster who was burying her. The earth of her white tomb flooded her mouth but she shouted desperately in spite of this, ‘I’m only a little girl, I’m only a little girl.’

  But her mouth was full of mud and the words didn’t get past her teeth, which were stuck together by the paste.

  ‘Amaia, Amaia,’ James shook her.

  She looked at him, still terrified, as she found herself coming out of the dream as if she were in an elevator going up at top speed out of the abyss in which she was trapped, and she forgot the details almost immediately. When she looked at James and answered, she could only remember the sensation of fear and being unable to breathe. James stroked her head tenderly, running his hand through her hair.

  ‘Good morning,’ murmured Amaia.

  ‘Good morning, I’ve brought you a coffee,’ he smiled.

  Having a cup of coffee in bed was a habit that went back to her days as a student in Pamplona when she had lived in a tiny flat with no heating. She would get up to make a coffee and take it back to bed to enjoy it under the bedclothes, and only when she had warmed up and was feeling sufficiently awake would she get out from under the sheets to dress quickly. James never had breakfast in bed, but he had fed her habit by waking her with a coffee every day.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked, trying to reach her mobile, which was on the bedside table.

  ‘Half past seven. Don’t worry, you’ve got time.’

  ‘I want to see Ros before she goes to work.’

  James shook his head.

  ‘She’s just set off.’

  ‘Fuck, it was important. I wanted to …’

  ‘Perhaps it’s better this way. She seemed calm to me, but I think it’s better you leave it a few hours, that you give her time to calm down. You can see her tonight, and I’m sure that everything will be back to normal by then.’

  ‘You’re right,’ admitted Amaia, ‘but you know what I’m like, I like to resolve things as soon as possible.’

  ‘Well, for now you can drink this coffee and resolve this husband of yours who you keep abandoning.’

  She put the cup on the bedside table and pulled on James’s hand until he was lying on top of her.

  ‘Done!’

  And she kissed him passionately. She loved his kisses, the way he drew close to her, looking into her eyes and knowing that they would make love as soon as he touched her. First he would search for her hands, take them in his and guide them up to rest on his chest or his waist. Then his eyes would follow the route that his lips would take later, from her eyes to her mouth, and when he finally reached her lips his kisses would lift her off the ground. When James kissed her, she felt the passion and contained strength of a Titan, but she also felt the tenderness and respect of a man kissing the woman he loves. She thought that no other man on earth could kiss like that; James’s kisses followed a pattern of connection as old as the world, the connection that meant that lovers would always seek and find one another. James belonged to her and she belonged to him, and that was a plan that had been forged a long time before she had been even the shadow of a life. And his kisses were the foretaste of what sex would bring later. James made love to her in a delicious way; sex with him was a dance, a dance for two dancers in which neither one of them was more important than the other. James would run his hands over her body, overcome with passion, but without hurrying or stumbling, conquering every centimetre of her body with his capable hands and making her tremble with the feverish kisses that he planted on her skin. He would conquer and master territories that were his by right, but to which he always returned with the same reverence he had shown the first time. He let her be herself, he lifted her up alongside him without directing her or forcing her. And she felt that nothing else mattered. Just the two of them.

  James watched her closely as they lay naked and exhausted. He was studying her face with the utmost tenderness, trying to find a clue to the source of her disquiet. She smiled at him and he smiled back at her with a look in which Amaia detected a note of preoccupation that was surprising
in him since he was naturally confident, with that slightly childish character that is specific to North Americans outside their home country.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m great, how about you?’

  ‘I’m OK, although I am a bit cold,’ she complained affectionately.

  He sat up, reached for the duvet, which had fallen onto the floor, and covered Amaia, holding her against his chest. He let a few seconds pass as he enjoyed the feel of her breathing against his skin.

  ‘Amaia, yesterday …’

  ‘Don’t worry, my love, it was nothing, just stress.’

  ‘No, my love, I’ve seen you overwhelmed by cases on other occasions, and this is different. Then there are the nightmares … You’re having them too often. And there’s what you told me yesterday when I found you in front of the workshop.’

  She sat up so as to look him in the eyes.

  ‘James, I swear that you don’t need to worry, nothing’s going on. It’s a difficult case, with Fermín and his attitude and those dead little girls. It’s stress, nothing more, nothing I haven’t faced before.’ She gave him a swift kiss on the lips and got out of bed.

  ‘Amaia, there’s something else. I rang the Lenox Clinic yesterday to rearrange this week’s appointment and they told me you’d already rung to cancel the treatment.’

  She looked at him without replying.

  ‘You owe me an explanation, I thought we’d agreed to start the fertility treatment.’

  ‘See? This is what I mean. Do you really think I can think about that right now? I’ve just told you that I’m stressed, and you’re not making things any better.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Amaia, but I’m not going to give in, this is something that’s very important to me, something I thought was important to you too, and I think that you ought to at least tell me whether you’re planning to have the treatment or not.’

  ‘I don’t know, James …’

  ‘I think you know, otherwise why did you cancel it?’

  She sat on the bed and started tracing invisible circles on the duvet with her finger. Without daring to look at him, she replied, ‘I can’t give you an answer right now, I thought I was sure, but in the last few days my doubts have been increasing so much that I’m not sure I want a child that way.’

  ‘By “that way” do you mean using fertility technology or do you mean us?’

  ‘James, don’t do this to me, there’s nothing wrong between us,’ she countered, alarmed.

  ‘You’re lying to me, Amaia, and you’re hiding things from me; you cancel the treatment without discussing it with me, as if you were going to have the child alone and you say nothing’s happening between us.’

  Amaia got up and headed toward the bathroom.

  ‘Now’s not a good time, James, I have to go.’

  ‘My parents rang yesterday, they send their best regards,’ he said as she closed the bathroom door.

  Mr and Mrs Westford, James’s parents, seemed to have undertaken a campaign to acquire a grandchild or die in the attempt. She remembered her wedding day when her father-in-law had raised a toast to her in which he asked for grandchildren as soon as possible, and when the children didn’t arrive after several years of marriage, her parents-in-law’s previously open attitude towards her had turned into a kind of veiled reproach that she imagined would not be so veiled from James.

  James remained stretched out on the bed, staring at the bathroom door and listening to the water running, asking himself what the hell was happening to them.

  25

  James Westford had been living in Pamplona for six months when he met Amaia. She was still a young trainee police officer then and she had come to the gallery where he was going to exhibit to inform the owner that petty thieves were operating in the area. He remembered her wearing her uniform, standing next to her colleague, captivated by one of his sculptures. James had been bending over a box, fighting with the packaging that still covered the other works he was going to exhibit. He stood up without taking his eyes off her and, without thinking, went over to her and gave her one of the flyers the gallery had prepared for the exhibition. Amaia took it without smiling and thanked him without paying him any further attention. He felt frustrated when he realised that she wasn’t reading it, she didn’t even glance at it, and when they left he saw her put it down on a table near the entrance. He saw her again the Saturday following the opening of the exhibition. She was wearing a black dress and her hair was loose and brushed back off her face; at first he hadn’t been sure that it was the same girl, but then she had gone over to the same sculpture as before and, waving to him, had said, ‘I haven’t been able to get the image of this out of my head since I saw it the other day.’

  ‘Then you’ve been feeling the same as me; I haven’t been able to get the image of you out of my head since I saw you the other day.’

  She had looked at him and smiled.

  ‘Well, you’re very ingenious and talented with your hands, what else are you good at?’

  When the gallery closed they walked through the streets of Pamplona for hours talking non-stop about their lives and their jobs. It was almost four in the morning when it started to rain. They tried to reach a nearby street, but the intensity of the rain obliged them to seek shelter under the eaves of the nearest house. Amaia shivered under her thin dress and, ever the gentleman, he offered her his jacket. As she wrapped it round her, she had inhaled the aroma it gave off as the rain grew heavier, forcing them to move back until they were pressed against the wall. He looked at her with a sheepish smile and, trembling with nerves, she moved close enough to brush against him.

  ‘Can you hold me?’ she asked, looking into his eyes.

  He pulled her against his body and embraced her. Amaia suddenly began to laugh. He looked at her, surprised.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, I was just thinking that it’s taken a torrential rain shower for you to embrace me. I wonder what will need to happen next for you to kiss me.’

  ‘Amaia, anything you want from me, you only have to ask for it.’

  ‘Then kiss me.’

  26

  On the other side of the large windows of the new police station the day looked like it might not fully dawn. The light level was very low and, together with the fine rain that hadn’t stopped falling since the previous night, it contrived to obscure the fields and trees, which were mostly bare thanks to the effects of a winter that seemed never-ending. Amaia looked out of the window, holding a cup of coffee in her hands, which were numb from the cold, and wondered, once again, what to do about Montes. His insubordination and defiance had reached unexpected levels. She knew that he dropped by the station every so often and chatted with Deputy Inspector Zabalza or with Iriarte, but he hadn’t answered any of her calls and she’d barely seen him. He had reluctantly attended the confrontation with Ros and had then been present for the search, but he hadn’t come to the meeting that morning. She told herself once again that she had to do something about the situation, but she hated just the idea of making a complaint against Fermín.

  She didn’t really understand what was going on in his head. They had been colleagues for the past two years, and perhaps even friends for the last year, when Fermín had told her that his wife had left him for a younger man. She had listened in silence with downcast eyes, resolved not to look him in the face since she knew that a man like Montes was not sharing his disgrace: he was confessing it. As if making an act of contrition, he had enumerated his faults and her reasons for leaving him, for not loving him. She had listened without saying a word and, as if in absolution, she had handed him a paper tissue as she turned away so as not to see his tears, so incongruous for a man like him. She followed the details of his divorce and went for various glasses of wine and beers with him, tainted with venom towards his ex-wife. They had invited him to come over for lunch on Sundays and, in spite of his initial reticence, he had got on well with James. He had been a good
police officer, perhaps a little old fashioned, but gifted with good instincts and perception. And a good colleague, who had always been respectful and conciliatory when faced by the macho attitudes of other police officers; that was why she was so surprised by this sudden attack of jealousy typical of a dethroned alpha male. She turned towards the table and the noticeboard where the pictures of the girls were on display. She had more important things to worry about for the moment.

  She had had a meeting first thing with the team who worked on crimes against minors since two of the victims had not yet reached the age of majority. She had immediately reached the conclusion that these were not typical crimes against minors and that their usual profiles of victims and aggressors were very different to the kind of murders she was now facing. What was most shocking about the basajaun’s criminal profile was the almost textbook nature of his behaviour. Amaia remembered her time at the FBI criminal profiling course and, amongst other things she had learnt there, that the psycho-sexual paraphernalia that lots of serial killers arrange around the corpse indicates their wish to personalise them in order to create a link between themselves and their victims that would not otherwise exist. There was logic in his actions and he showed no obvious signs of a mental disorder. The crimes were perfectly planned and premeditated, to the point where the killer was able to reproduce the same crime over and over again with different victims. He wasn’t spontaneous, he didn’t make sloppy mistakes like choosing a victim at random or being opportunistic. Killing them was only one step of the many he had to carry out to complete his tableau, his master plan, his psycho-sexual fantasy, which he was compelled to repeat over and over again without his thirst ever diminishing, without his expectations being satisfied. He needed to personalise his victims to make them part of his world, to link himself to them and to make them belong to him beyond mere sexual possession.