yet,’ replied Iriarte, coming over. He looked at the body and then started running. About ten metres downstream he doubled over and vomited. Nobody said anything, not then nor when he came back, wiping the front of his shirt with a tissue and murmuring his apologies.
Anne’s skin had been very white; but not washed-out, almost transparent, plagued by freckles and red patches. It had been white, clean and creamy, completely hairless. Covered as it was by droplets from the river’s mist it was like the marble of a statue on a tombstone. In contrast to Carla and Ainhoa, this girl had fought. At least two of her nails seemed to be torn down to the quick. There seemed to be no fragments of skin beneath the rest. No doubt she had taken longer to die than the others; the burst blood vessels that indicated death by asphyxiation and the suffering caused by oxygen deprivation were visible in spite of the clouding that covered her eyes. Furthermore, the killer had faithfully reproduced the details of the previous murders: the thin cord buried in her neck, the clothes torn and pulled open to the sides, the jeans pulled down to her knees, the shaved pubic area and the fragrant, sticky cake placed on her pubic mound.
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
