The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  ‘How kind of him!’ joked Iriarte.

  ‘Don’t you believe it, he owes me a favour,’ she said, picking up her bag.

  The facilities at the Guardia Civil barracks were old-fashioned compared to the new police station, but Amaia noticed that, in spite of this, they had a modern CCTV system with the latest cameras. A uniformed guardia greeted them at the door and directed them to an office to the right of the entrance. Another guardia led them down a narrow, poorly lit passage to a group of dilapidated doors that showed signs of more than one change of locks. The room was spacious and well heated. There was an alcove by the door containing an image of Our Lady of the Pillar and an ear of dried corn and various chairs and tables to either side. A handcuffed man of about forty-five was sitting in front of one of them. He was thin, short and dark skinned, which made his pallor and the redness that had developed beneath his eyes and mouth stand out.

  His cuffed hands loosely held a tissue that he didn’t seem inclined to use, in spite of the tears and snot that were running down his face to his chin, where they dripped onto the dark surface of the table. Beside him sat a young legal aid lawyer, who Amaia calculated must be under thirty. She was putting some papers in order while listening intently to the instructions someone was giving her by phone and looking at her client with visible disgust.

  Padua came up behind them.

  ‘He hasn’t stopped crying and shouting since the guys from the Nature Protection Service found him. He confessed as soon as he saw the officers, they told me that he didn’t shut up at all during the journey, and he hasn’t done anything except sob since we sat him here; in reality we’ve had to take his statement because he hasn’t stopped repeating that it was him and he wanted to confess since he arrived. He must be exhausted from all that wailing.’

  They went over to the table. A guardia switched on a tape recorder and, following the greetings, introductions and the statement of date and time, they took their seats.

  ‘First of all I have to say that this is very irregular: I don’t understand how they took his statement without my being present,’ complained the lawyer.

  ‘Your client hasn’t stopped shouting out his confession since the moment he was arrested and he insisted on making a statement as soon as he got through the door.’

  ‘… Even so, I could invalidate it …’

  ‘We haven’t interrogated him yet, Señora, why don’t we wait and see what he has to say?’

  The lawyer pursed her lips and pushed her chair a few centimetres back from the table.

  ‘Señor Jasón Medina,’ Padua began. It seemed as though the mention of his name brought the man out of the trance he had been in; he sat up straighter in the chair and stared at the sheets of paper Padua was holding. ‘According to your statement, on Saturday the fourth you asked your stepdaughter, Johana Márquez, to go with you to wash the car, but instead of going to the petrol station where you usually did this, you drove up the hill. When you reached a little-frequented area you asked her to kiss you; when she refused you got angry and hit her. Johana threatened to tell her mother and even to go to the police. You got angrier still and became very agitated, so you hit her again and, in your own words, she fainted.’ Jasón nodded. ‘You started the car and drove for a while longer, but on seeing her unconscious, as if she were asleep, you thought you could have sex with her without her resisting. You found a secluded place on a forest road, stopped the car, tipped the passenger seat back and climbed on top of Johana with the intention of having sex with her. But then she woke up and started to shout, is that correct?’

  Jasón Medina nodded continuously, giving the impression he was bobbing up and down, and a mixture of snot and tears continued to drip from his nose.

  ‘According to your own words, you hit her again and again. The more Johana screamed, the more aroused you became; you hit her again, but she kept on defending herself, so you had to hit her harder. In spite of this, she didn’t stop shouting or hitting you as hard as she could. You grabbed her by the neck and squeezed until she became still. When you saw that you had killed her, you decided that you had to find a place to abandon the body. You knew the hut on the mountain because you had been there several times when you were working as a shepherd. You drove along the path until you were nearby, then you carried the body to the hut and left it there. But before you left, you remembered what you had read about the basajaun in the papers over the last few days and you decided that you could make the crime look similar; you tore Johana’s clothes in the way you remembered reading about and you were so aroused that you raped her body.’

  Jasón closed his eyes for a moment and Amaia thought he might be feeling guilty, but he was obviously reliving the moment of her death, which had been burnt into his memory in full detail. He shifted in his seat, catching the attention of his lawyer, who moved away in disgust when she saw the bulge of an imminent erection forming in his trousers.

  ‘For the love of God!’ she exclaimed.

  Padua continued reading as if he hadn’t noticed.

  ‘But you didn’t have string or cord to arrange it how you remembered, so you went home before your wife returned, showered, took a piece of cord that had been left over from hanging the washing line and went back to the hut to position it around your stepdaughter’s neck. Then you returned home. When your wife insisted on reporting the disappearance, you took some of Johana’s clothes and personal items, put them in the boot of your car, told your wife that Johana had been home to collect her things and persuaded her to retract the report … Señor Medina, do you agree that this is what you said?’

  Jasón looked down and nodded.

  ‘I need to hear you say it for the record, Señor.’

  The man leant forward as if he was about to kiss the tape recorder and said clearly, ‘Yes, Señor, that’s exactly what happened and God knows it.’ His voice was smooth and slightly high-pitched, with a trace of false servility that made his lawyer blink.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.

  ‘Do you confirm your statement, Señor Medina?’

  Jasón leant forward again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you agree with everything I’ve read or do you want to add or remove anything?’

  Another parody of reverence.

  ‘I agree with all of it.’

  ‘Right, Señor Medina, now, although everything is quite clear, we’d like to ask you some questions.’

  The lawyer sat up slightly straighter, as if she understood that she would finally have some work to do.

  ‘I’ve already introduced Inspector Salazar from the Policía Foral, who wants to question you.’

  ‘I object,’ spat the lawyer. ‘You’ve already made my client’s life difficult enough with this statement, he’s already confessed. Don’t think I don’t know who you are,’ she addressed Amaia, ‘or what you’re trying to do.’

  ‘What do you think I’m trying to do?’ asked Amaia patiently.

  ‘Charge my client with the crimes committed by the basajaun.’

  Amaia laughed, shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you right now that the modus operandi doesn’t match. We knew from the very beginning that this wasn’t the basajaun, and with the information your client provided in his statement regarding the cord he used we can almost rule him out.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘There’s one element of the crime that caught our attention. Whether or not your client can give us a plausible explanation will determine how this investigation moves forward.’

  The lawyer bit her bottom lip.

  ‘Look, let’s make a deal: I’ll ask and your client only answers if you authorise him to …’

  The lawyer looked anxiously at the little pool of liquid that had spread across the surface of the table and nodded. Padua made as if to get up and give Amaia his seat facing Medina, but she stopped him, stood up, walked round the table and stopped just to the man’s left, leaning over a little
to speak to him and standing so close that she was almost touching his clothing.

  ‘Señor Medina, you said that you hit Johana a number of times and that you raped her, are you sure you didn’t do anything else to her?’

  The man shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘To what are you referring?’ asked the lawyer.

  ‘The corpse presented with a complete amputation of the right hand and forearm,’ she said, placing blown-up pictures on the table showing the full crudity of the wound.

  The lawyer frowned and leaned forward to whisper something in her client’s ear. He shook his head.

  Amaia waited impatiently for a few seconds.

  ‘Listen, after what you said in your statement, the amputation of an arm will be secondary. Did you do it so we wouldn’t be able to identify the corpse using the fingerprints?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at the photos,’ Amaia insisted.

  Jasón looked briefly at the photos then looked away, disgusted.

  ‘For God’s sake! No, I didn’t do it, when I went back to put the cord in place she was already like that, I thought it had been an animal.’

  ‘How long did it take you to go home and then back to the hut? Think about it carefully.’

  Jasón started to cry, great sobs that came from deep down inside, racking his whole body.

  ‘We’ll have to leave it there, Señor Medina needs to rest,’ suggested the lawyer.

  Amaia lost patience.

  ‘Señor Medina will rest when I say he can.’

  She gave the table a hard thump, spraying drops from the little pool in all directions and leant forward until her face was right next to the man’s. His weeping stopped immediately.

  ‘Answer me,’ she ordered in a firm voice.

  ‘An hour and a half at the most, I was in a rush because my wife was due home from work.’

  ‘And when you arrived at the hut the arm was no longer there?’

  ‘No, I swear I thought …’

  ‘Was there any blood?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was there any blood around the wound?’

  ‘Perhaps a small amount, a very small amount, a tiny puddle, barely a mark …’

  Amaia looked at Padua.

  ‘The kids?’ he suggested.

  ‘… on the plastic bag,’ murmured Jasón.

  ‘What plastic bag?’

  ‘The blood was on a white plastic bag,’ he mumbled.

  Amaia stood up, nauseated by the man’s fetid smell.

  ‘Think hard about this. Did you see anyone near the hut when you returned?’

  ‘I didn’t see anybody, but …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I thought there was someone else nearby, but I was very nervous at the time. I even thought someone was watching me. I thought it was Johana …’

  ‘Johana?’

  ‘Her spirit, you know what I mean, her ghost.’

  ‘Did you drive past any cars on the road leading to the hut or see any vehicles parked nearby?’

  ‘No, but when I was about to leave I heard a motorbike, one of those mountain ones. They make a lot of noise. I thought it was one of the guys from the Nature Protection Service, they use those when they go up into the mountains. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’

  Another Spring

  Things were very different the next time. Many years had passed. She was already living in Pamplona, although she went back to Elizondo at the weekends. Her mother, sickly and disabled, was confined to a hospital bed with complex pneumonia while the Alzheimer’s devoured her. She had barely babbled a word or two of limited vocabulary for months and then only to demand the most basic things. She had been in the University Hospital for a week at the request of her lead doctor and against Flora’s will; she had resisted her mother’s admission with all her strength, although she had had to give in when Rosario’s breathing became so laboured that she needed oxygen to keep her alive and had to travel in an ambulance. Even so, glorying in her perpetually essential role, she used every excuse in the book to avoid leaving her mother’s bedside, although she never missed a chance to criticise her sisters for not visiting Rosario more often.

  Amaia came into the room and, after listening to ten minutes of recriminations from Flora, sent her to the cafeteria promising to stay and watch their mother. When the door closed behind her sister, Amaia turned to look at the old woman who was dozing as she half sat up in the hospital bed in an attempt to ease her laboured breathing. She was aware of her fear, and that it was the first time that she had been alone with her since she’d been a child. She walked on tiptoe past the end of the bed to sit down in the chair next to the window, praying that her mother wouldn’t wake up and ask for anything. She wasn’t sure what she might feel if she had to touch her.

  She sat down in the chair and leant slowly backwards to pick up one of Flora’s magazines from the window ledge, as carefully as if she was handling an explosive. She glanced at her mother again and couldn’t suppress a yelp. Her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest. Her mother was looking at her, leaning up on her left side with a twisted smile and eyes shining with lucidity and malice.

  ‘Don’t be afraid of your Ama, little bitch. I’m not going to eat you.’

  She lay back down, closed her eyes and her breathing immediately began to sound watery and noisy again. Amaia had curled up in a ball and saw that she had crushed her sister’s magazine without realising it. She stayed like that for a few seconds, her heartbeat out of control and her logic insisting that she had imagined it, that fatigue and her memories had played a bad joke on her. She got up without taking her eyes off her mother’s face, which seemed as vacuous and lethargic as it had during the previous months. The old woman whispered something. A string of spittle lay on her cheek, her eyes remained closed. A muffled murmur, an incomprehensible word. The oxygen tube had become unhooked from behind one of her ears and was hanging at an angle, making a soft hissing noise. She seemed to be dreaming, she was babbling, asking for water perhaps? Her voice was so weak it was inaudible. She went over to the bed and listened.

  ‘Naaa waaaaaa.’

  Amaia leant over her in an attempt to hear her words.

  Rosario opened her eyes, her penetrating, cruel eyes, which showed just how much she was enjoying this. She smiled.

  ‘No, I won’t eat you, although I would if I could get up.’

  Amaia stumbled to the door without taking her eyes off her mother, who continued to watch her with those malignant eyes, laughing in satisfaction at the fear she was provoking in her daughter, stentorian cackles that seemed beyond someone with such grave respiratory problems. Amaia closed the door behind her and didn’t go in again until Flora came back.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ spat Flora when she saw her. ‘You should be inside.’

  ‘I was looking to see whether you were coming, I need to go now.’

  Flora looked at her watch and raised her eyebrows in that expression of recrimination Amaia had seen so many times.

  ‘What about Ama?’

  ‘She’s asleep …’

  And so she was, fast asleep when they went back in.

  32

  When she got home there was a note from James on the table telling her that they’d gone out for lunch and that he’d spend part of the day visiting the forest at Irati with Aunt Engrasi; they’d left food for her in the fridge and hoped to see her that evening. A quick ‘I love you’ next to his name made her feel lonely and distanced from the world in which people went out for lunch and on day trips while she interrogated despicable men who raped their own daughters. She went upstairs, listening to the sound of her own breathing and the astonishing silence in that house where while her aunt was at home, the television was never switched off. She took off her clothes and tossed them into the laundry basket, set the water in the shower running until it became warm and looked at her reflection in the mirror. She was getting thin. She’d skipped a few meals in the la
st few days and had been more or less living on milky coffee. She ran her hand over her stomach and prodded it gently, then she rested her hands in the small of her back and leant backwards, sticking out her stomach. She smiled until she met her own eyes in the mirror. James was starting to get serious about the subject of fertility treatment. She knew how much he wanted a child and she wasn’t unaware of the pressure he had to put up with during each phone call from his parents, but just thinking of the terrible physical and mental test it represented made her feel as if something was shrivelling up inside her. James, on the other hand, seemed to have found a panacea: for days he bombarded her with information, videos and pamphlets from the clinic, showing smiling parents with their children in their arms; what they didn’t show were the multiple humiliating tests, the constant analyses, the inflammation caused by the hormones or the sudden mood swings due to the cocktails of pills you had to take. She had agreed, overwhelmed by the intense emotion of the moment, but now she thought she had been too hasty to give in. The words of Anne’s mother echoed in her head, ‘I gave birth from the heart and carried my daughter in my arms.’

  She got into the shower and let the warm water run down her back, turning her skin red until the pleasure was almost painful. She leant her head against the tiles and felt better on realising that her bad mood was mostly due to the fact that James wasn’t at home. She was tired and she would have felt better for a nap, but if James wasn’t there when she woke up she would feel so bad that she would regret having slept. She turned off the water and stayed in the shower a few seconds longer while she waited for the final drops to run off her skin; then she got out and wrapped herself in an enormous towelling bathrobe James had given her. She sat on the bed to dry her hair a bit and suddenly felt so tired that the idea of a siesta that she had previously discarded suddenly seemed like a good idea. It would just be for a few minutes, she probably wouldn’t manage to fall asleep.

  The Glock 19 is a marvellous pistol with a spring-loaded firing pin; it’s lightweight, as its casing is made of plastic: 595 grams when empty, 850 when loaded. It has no external safety catches, hammers or other mechanisms that need to be released before the weapon is ready to fire. A good pistol for a police officer who has to go out on the streets, although there are those who are against the police carrying weapons without a safety, and even experts who claim that the noise produced by a weapon being cocked is more intimidating than just pointing a weapon at someone. Amaia wasn’t a fan of guns, but she liked the Glock; it wasn’t too heavy, it was fairly discreet and it was very easy to maintain. Even so, she had to dismantle and grease it every so often, and she always chose to do so when she was completely alone in the house. She took it apart, arranging the pieces on a towel, cleaned the barrel and put it back together again.