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‘No,’ Amaia protested. ‘I’ll make something light at home, and try to rest. I was thinking of going shopping tomorrow; I found a store where they sell cute dresses.’
Clarice took the bait: the prospect of a shopping spree with her daughter-in-law instantly made her relax, and she beamed contentedly.
‘Oh, of course, my dear, we’ll have a wonderful time, you’ll see. I’ve seen so many gorgeous things since I came. You have a rest, dear,’ she said, making her way towards the exit.
Thomas stooped to give Amaia a peck before he left.
‘Well played,’ he whispered, winking at her.
Their house in Calle Mercaderes revealed none of its splendours from the outside: the tall ceilings, large windows, wood panelling, the wonderful mouldings that ornamented most of the rooms and the ground floor, which had once been an umbrella factory and where James now had his studio.
Amaia took a shower then stretched out on the sofa, pamphlet in one hand and watch in the other.
‘You look more tired today than usual. I noticed that during lunch you weren’t paying as much attention to my mother’s foolishness.’
Amaia grinned.
‘Is it because of something that happened at the courthouse? You mentioned that the trial had been adjourned, but you didn’t say why?’
‘Jasón Medina killed himself this morning in the courthouse toilets. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow.’
‘Well,’ James shrugged. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry.’
‘Me neither. He’s no great loss, but I imagine the girl’s family must be a bit disappointed that he won’t be standing trial. On the other hand, they’ll be spared the ordeal of having to listen to all the gory details.’
James nodded thoughtfully.
Amaia considered telling him about the note Medina had left for her, but decided it would only upset him. She didn’t want to ruin this special moment by bringing that up.
‘But, yes, I am more tired today, and my mind is on other things.’
‘Such as?’ he asked.
‘At twelve thirty I started having contractions every twenty-five minutes. At first, they only lasted a few seconds, now they’re getting stronger and I’m having them every twelve minutes.’
‘Oh, Amaia, why didn’t you tell me before? Were you suffering all through lunch? Are they really painful?’
‘Not really,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s more like an intense pressure, besides I didn’t want your mother going hysterical on me. I need a bit of calm now. I’ll rest and keep checking the frequency of the contractions. When I’m ready, we can go to the hospital.’
The skies above Pamplona were still overcast, and the distant twinkle of winter stars was barely visible.
James was asleep face down, sprawled over a larger area of the bed than he was entitled to, in that peaceful, relaxed way of his that Amaia had always envied. At first he had hesitated about going to bed at all, but she had persuaded him to rest while he could because she’d need him awake later on.
‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ he had insisted.
‘I’m sure, James. I only need to check the frequency of the contractions. When it’s time to go I’ll let you know.’
He had fallen asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow, and the house was silent save for his steady breathing and the soft rustle as she turned the pages of her book.
She broke off reading as she felt another contraction. Gasping, she clutched the arms of the rocking chair she’d been sitting in for the past hour, and waited for it to subside.
Frustrated, she put down the book without bothering to mark her page, realising that, although she’d read quite a lot, she hadn’t taken any of it in. In the past half-hour the contractions had grown more painful, almost making her cry out. Even so, she decided to wait a little longer. She leaned out of the window gazing down into the street, which was quite busy that Friday night, despite the cold, the occasional drizzle, and the fact that it was well past midnight.
She heard a noise in the hallway and went over to listen at the bedroom door.
It was her in-laws, returning after dinner and a stroll. She glanced at the soft glow coming from the reading lamp she had switched on and thought about turning it off, but there was no need; although Clarice meddled in virtually every area of their lives, she wouldn’t dare barge into their bedroom.
Continuing to check the increasing frequency of the contractions, she listened to the sounds in the house, to James’s parents going to bed, and how everything stopped, giving way to a silence troubled only by the creaks and whispers that inhabited the enormous building, as familiar to her as her own breath. She had nothing to worry about now; Thomas was a heavy sleeper, while Clarice took tablets every night, so she wouldn’t be awake before dawn.
The next contraction was truly terrible, and despite concentrating on breathing in and out the way she’d been taught in her prenatal classes, she felt as if she was wearing a steel corset that was squeezing her kidneys and lungs so tight it made her panic. What frightened her wasn’t so much giving birth, although she admitted feeling some trepidation about it, whilst being aware that this was perfectly normal. No, she knew that what frightened her was something far more profound and deep-seated, because this wasn’t the first time she had confronted fear. She had carried it around with her for years like an unwanted, invisible traveller that only appeared when she was at her lowest ebb.
Fear was an old vampire looming above her bed while she slept, hidden in the darkness, filling her dreams with terrifying shadows. Suddenly she remembered her grandmother Juanita’s word for it: gaueko: ‘the night visitor’. A visitor who retreated into the darkness whenever she succeeded in opening a breach in her own defences, a breach that let in the light of understanding, only to reveal the cruelty of the terrible events that had marked her life for ever, and which through sheer willpower she kept buried deep in her soul. The first step had been to comprehend, to identify the truth and to confront it. And yet, even in that instant of euphoria when she believed she had triumphed over her fear for the first time, she realised she hadn’t won the war, only a battle – a glorious one, but a battle all the same. From then on she had worked hard to keep that breach open, allowing the light that flooded in to strengthen her relationship with James, as well as the image of herself she had built up over the years. And as a postscript, this pregnancy, the little being growing inside her, brought her a feeling of serenity she could never before have imagined. Throughout her pregnancy she had felt amazing: no morning sickness, no discomfort, her sleep was restful and serene, free from nightmares or sudden jolts; she had so much energy during the day that she even surprised herself. The perfect pregnancy, until a week ago, the night that evil returned.
She had been going in to the police station every day as usual; they were investigating the case of a missing woman, whose partner was the chief suspect. For months the disappearance had been regarded as intentional, but her daughters’ insistence that their mother hadn’t left of her own accord had aroused Amaia’s interest, and she had reopened the investigation. Besides her two daughters and three grandchildren, the middle-aged woman was a catechist at her local church and paid daily visits to the care home where her elderly mother lived. Too many commitments for her to vanish without a word. They had established early on that suitcases, clothes, personal documents and money were missing from her house. Even so, when Amaia decided to take over the investigation, she insisted on going back there. Lucía Aguirre’s house was as neat and tidy as the photograph of its smiling owner, which had pride of place in the hallway. In the tiny sitting room, a piece of crochet lay on a coffee table covered with photographs of her grandchildren.
Amaia searched the kitchen and bathroom, which were spotlessly clean. In the master bedroom, the bed was made and there were few clothes in the wardrobe and chest of drawers. In the spare room were twin beds.
‘Jonan, do you notice something strange here?’
‘The bedcovers are different,’ said Deputy Inspector Etxaide.
‘We noticed that the first time around. The matching counterpane is in the wardrobe,’ explained the accompanying officer, checking his notes.
Amaia opened the wardrobe to find the blue counterpane matching one of those on the bed neatly folded in a see-through plastic pouch.
‘And didn’t it strike you as odd that this neat, house-proud woman wouldn’t take the trouble to use matching bedspreads, when she had them to hand?’
‘Why start changing bedspreads if she was planning to disappear?’ the officer said with a shrug.
‘Because we’re slaves to our nature. Did you know that some women from East Berlin mopped the floors of their houses before fleeing to West Germany? They were abandoning their country, but they didn’t want anyone saying they weren’t good housewives.’
Amaia pulled the bulky package out of the wardrobe and put it on one of the beds before unzipping it. The sharp odour of bleach permeated the room. With one gloved hand, she tugged at the edge of the counterpane, unfolding it to reveal a yellowish stain in the middle where the bleach had eaten away the colour.
‘You see, officer, it doesn’t fit,’ she said, turning towards the policeman, who nodded, speechless.
‘Our murderer has seen enough TV programmes about crime scene investigations to know that bleach gets rid of bloodstains, but he’s a terrible house husband because he didn’t take into account that it also removes the colour. Call in Forensics to do a blood search – this stain is enormous.’
After a thorough search by the forensic team, traces had been found, which, despite the attempted clean-up, revealed amounts of lost blood that would have resulted in loss of life: the human body contains five litres of blood; losing five hundred millilitres is sufficient to cause fainting, and the tests suggested more than two litres had been spilled. They had arrested the suspect the same day: a vain, cocky individual, his overly long hair streaked with grey, and his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. Amaia suppressed a laugh when she saw what he looked like from the adjoining room.
‘The return of El Macho,’ said Deputy Inspector Extaide. ‘Who’s going to question him?’
‘Inspector Fernández, they’ve been working on the case from the beginning …’
‘I assumed it would be us, now that this is a murder inquiry. If it hadn’t been for you, they’d still be waiting for her to send a postcard from Cancún.’
‘It’s a matter of courtesy, Jonan. Besides, I can’t interrogate suspects in this state,’ she said, pointing to her belly.
Inspector Fernández entered the interview room and Jonan switched on the recorder.
‘Good morning, Mr Quiralte. My name’s Detective Inspector Fer—’
‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Quiralte. He raised his cuffed hands, accompanying the gesture with a flick of his hair worthy of a diva in a celebrity magazine. ‘Don’t I get to be interrogated by the star cop?’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘You know, that inspector woman from the FBI?’
‘How do you know about that?’ asked Fernández, taken aback. Amaia clicked her tongue in annoyance. Quiralte smirked.
‘Because I’m smarter than you.’
Fernández looked nervous. He had little experience interrogating murderers, and the suspect had already succeeded in unsettling him.
‘Don’t let him get the upper hand,’ muttered Amaia.
As if he could hear her, Fernández took control of the interview.
‘Why do you want her to interrogate you?’
‘Because they tell me she’s hot, and I’d rather be questioned by a pretty woman inspector than by you any day,’ he said, settling back in his chair.
‘Well, you’ll have to make do with me. The inspector you are referring to is on leave.’
Sneering, Quiralte turned towards the two-way mirror as if he could see through it.
‘Well, that’s a shame, I’ll just have to wait until she gets back.’
‘You don’t intend to give a statement?’
‘Of course I do.’ He was clearly enjoying himself. ‘Don’t pull that face, if the star cop isn’t here, take me before the judge and I’ll tell him I killed that stupid cow.’
And that was precisely what he did. He confessed straight away, only to remind the magistrate impudently that without a body there was no crime, and that for the moment he had no intention of telling them where it was. One of the youngest magistrates on the circuit, Judge Markina’s chiselled looks and stonewashed jeans occasionally fooled some felons into giving too much away, as had been the case with Quiralte. He gave the man one of those dazzling smiles that wrought havoc among the female clerks, before ordering his detention.
‘So, no body, eh, Mr Quiralte? Well, then we’ll just have to wait until it appears. I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many American movies. The fact of admitting that you know where the body is while refusing to divulge this information is reason enough to detain you indefinitely. Moreover you’ve confessed to a murder. A spell in jail might refresh your memory. I’ll talk to you again when you have something to tell me. Until then …’
Amaia had walked home, trying to thrust the details of the case from her mind, as an exercise in self-control but also to get herself in the mood for celebrating her final day at work with James. The baby was due in two weeks’ time, and although she felt perfectly capable of working right up until the last moment, James had persuaded her to take some annual leave because his parents were due to arrive the following day. After dinner, she had fallen into bed, exhausted, and gone to sleep without realising it. All she remembered was that one minute she was talking to James and then, nothing.
She heard the woman first, before she saw her. She was shivering with cold; the sound of her teeth chattering bone against bone was so loud it caused Amaia to open her eyes. Lucía Aguirre was wearing the same red-and-white knitted sweater as in the photograph in her hallway, a gold crucifix round her neck, short fair hair, no doubt dyed to mask the grey. Nothing else about her appearance resembled the cheerful, self-possessed woman who was smiling at the camera. Lucía Aguirre wasn’t weeping, wailing or sobbing, yet there was a deep, distressing pain in her blue eyes that gave her face an air of profound bewilderment, as if she understood nothing, as if she couldn’t accept what was happening to her. She stood quietly, disoriented, rocked by a relentless wind that seemed to blow from every direction and made her sway rhythmically, adding to her air of helplessness. Her left arm was clasped about her waist, in a self-protective gesture that afforded her little comfort, and every now and then her eyes would cast about like searching probes, until they met Amaia’s gaze. She opened her mouth, surprised, like a little girl on her birthday, before starting to speak. Amaia watched the woman’s lips, blue with cold, but no sound emerged. She sat up in bed, concentrating as hard as she could, trying to understand what the woman was saying, but she was far away and the deafening wind carried off the muted sounds emerging from her lips, intoning over and over words that Amaia couldn’t hear. She woke up in a daze, infected by the woman’s anguish, and her own increasing sense of despair. This dream, this phantom-like apparition, had shattered her state of grace, the freedom from fear she had enjoyed since conceiving her daughter, a time of peace when all the nightmares, the gauekos, the ghosts had been exiled to another world.
Some years earlier, in New Orleans, sitting one evening with a cold beer in a bar on St Louis Street, a jovial agent from the FBI had asked her:
‘So, tell me, Inspector Salazar, do murder victims appear at the foot of your bed during the night?’
Amaia’s eyes had gaped in astonishment.
‘Don’t try to fool me, Salazar; I can tell a police officer who sees ghosts from one who doesn’t.’
Amaia stared at him in silence, trying to decide whether he was joking or not, but the agent went on talking, an inscrutable smile playing on his lips.
‘I know, because they’ve been doing the same to me for years.’
Amaia smiled, but Special Agent Aloisius Dupree looked her straight in the eye and she knew he was serious.
‘You mean …’
‘I mean, Inspector, waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the victim of the crime you are investigating standing beside your bed.’ Dupree’s smile had vanished.
She gazed at him uneasily.
‘Don’t let me down, Salazar. Are you going to tell me you don’t see ghosts? I’d be disappointed.’
She was alarmed, but not enough to run the risk of looking like a fool.
‘Agent Dupree, ghosts don’t exist,’ she said, raising her glass in a silent toast.
‘Of course they don’t, Inspector, but if I’m not mistaken – and I’m not – more than once you’ve awoken in the middle of the night having sensed the presence of one of those lost victims at the foot of your bed. Am I mistaken?’
Amaia took a sip of beer, determined not to tell him anything, but inviting him to go on.
‘You shouldn’t feel ashamed, Inspector … Would you prefer me to say that you “dream” about your victims?’
Amaia sighed. ‘I’m afraid that sounds just as disturbing, dubious and deranged.’
‘Aye, there’s the rub, Inspector: labelling it as deranged.’
‘Explain that to the FBI shrink or his equivalent in the Navarre police,’ she retorted.
‘Oh, come on, Salazar! Neither of us would be foolish enough to expose ourselves to the scrutiny of a shrink when we both know this is something he or she would be incapable of understanding. Most people would think that a cop who has nightmares about a case is at the very least stressed out or, at worst, if you push me, emotionally over-involved.’
He paused, draining the dregs of his glass then raised his arm to order another two beers. Amaia was about to protest, but the stifling New Orleans heat, the soft tones of a piano whose keys someone was stroking at the far end of the room, and an old timepiece stopped at ten o’clock which took pride of place above the bar, made her change her mind. Dupree waited until the barman had set down two fresh glasses in front of them.
‘The first few times it scares the pants off you, to the point where you think you’re starting to go crazy. But that’s not true, Salazar. On the contrary, a good homicide detective doesn’t possess a simple mind, or simple thought processes. We spend hours trying to figure out how a murderer’s mind works, how he thinks, what he wants, how he feels. Next, we go to the morgue, where we view his work, hoping the body will tell us why, because once we know the killer’s motive, we have a chance of catching him. But in the majority of cases the body isn’t enough, because a dead body is just a broken shell. For too long perhaps, criminal investigations have been more focused on understanding the mind of the criminal than that of the victim. For years, murder victims have been seen as little more than the end products of a sinister process, but at last victimology is coming into its own, showing that the choice of victim is never random, even when it’s made to appear so, that too can provide clues. In dreaming about victims, we are accessing images projected by our subconscious, but that doesn’t make them any less significant. It’s simply another form of thought-processing. For a while those apparitions of victims by my bed tormented me. I used to wake up drenched in sweat, terrified and anxious. I’d feel that way for hours, while I tried to figure out to what extent I was losing my mind. I was a rookie agent back then, partnered with a veteran. Once, during a long, tedious stakeout, I woke up suddenly in the middle of one of those nightmares. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” my partner said. I froze. “Maybe I did,” I replied. “So, you see ghosts too?” he said. “Well, next time you should pay more attention to what they say instead of hollering and trying to resist.” That was good advice. Over the years, I’ve learned that when I dream about a victim, part of my brain is projecting information which is already there, but which I haven’t been able to see.’
Amaia nodded slowly. ‘So, are they ghosts or projections inside the investigator’s mind?’
‘Projections, of course. Although …’
‘Although what?’
Agent Dupree didn’t reply. He raised his glass and drank.
She roused James, trying not to alarm him. He sat up in bed with a start, rubbing his eyes.
‘Is it time to go to the hospital?’
Amaia bobbed her head, her face pallid as she gave a weak smile.
James pulled on the pair of jeans and jumper that he had laid out in readiness on the end of the bed.
