She wondered whether the Alimentación Adela grocery shop or Pedro Galarregui’s shop in Calle Santiago were still open, or the shops like Belzunegui or Mari Carmen where her mother used to buy their clothes, the Baztanesa bakery, Virgilio’s shoe shop, or Garmendia’s junk shop on Calle Jaime Urrutia. And she knew that it wasn’t even this Elizondo that she missed, but rather the older and more visceral one, the place that formed part of her being and that would die in her only when she breathed her last. The Elizondo of harvests ruined by plagues, of children dying in the whooping cough epidemic of 1440. The Elizondo whose people had changed their customs to adapt themselves to a land that was initially hostile, a people determined to stay in that place near the church which had been the origin of the town. The Elizondo of sailors recruited in the square to travel to Venezuela in the employ of the traders belonging to the Royal Gipuzkoan Company of Caracas. The Elizondo of elizondarras who rebuilt the town after the River Baztán’s terrible floods and the times when it burst its banks. In her mind she recreated the image of the altar from one of the side chapels floating down the street along with the bodies of livestock. And of the residents lifting it over their heads, convinced that its presence in the middle of that quagmire could only be a heavenly sign, a sign that God hadn’t abandoned them and that they should endure. Brave men and women, forged thus by necessity, interpreters of signs from nature who always looked to the heavens hoping for pity from a sky that was more threatening than protective.
She turned back along Calle Santiago and went down as far as Plaza Javier Ziga, where she set off across the bridge and stopped in the middle. Leaning on the low wall, she murmured as she ran her fingers over the rough stone where its name, Muniartea, was engraved. She stared into the blackness of the water that carried its mineral aroma down from the peaks. There was still a commemorative plaque in Calle Jaime Urrutia on the house that had belonged to the Serora, the woman who had been responsible for looking after the church and the rectory, which marked the point reached by the flood waters on 2 June 1913. That same river was now witness to a new horror, one that had nothing to do with the forces of nature, but rather with the most absolute human depravity, which turned men into animals, predators who mingled with the righteous in order to be able to approach them, to be able to commit the most deplorable act, giving free rein to desire, anger, pride and the insatiable appetite of the most disgusting gluttony.
A shudder ran down her back, she snatched her hands from the cold stone and put them in her pockets with a shiver. She took one last look at the river and set off home as it started to rain again.
Amaia could hear James and Jonan’s voices mingling with the omnipresent murmur of the television as they chatted in Aunt Engrasi’s little living room. It sounded like they were sitting separately from the six old ladies who were making a real din as they played poker at a hexagonal table covered with green baize that wouldn’t be out of place in a casino. Her aunt had had it brought all the way from Bordeaux so that honour and a few euros could be gambled on it each afternoon. When they saw her in the doorway, the two men moved away from the gaming table and came over to her. James gave her a quick kiss as he took her hand and led her to the kitchen.
‘Jonan’s waiting for you, he needs to talk to you. I’ll leave you alone.’
The deputy inspector came forward and handed her a brown envelope.
‘Chief, the report on the samples has arrived from Zaragoza, I thought you’d want to see it as soon as possible,’ he said, looking round Engrasi’s enormous kitchen. ‘I thought places like this didn’t exist anymore.’
‘You’re right, they don’t, believe me,’ she replied, pulling a sheet of paper out of the envelope. ‘This is … enlightening. Listen, Jonan, the hairs we found on the bodies come from wild boar, sheep, foxes and, although they’re still waiting for confirmation on this, possibly a bear, although that’s not conclusive; furthermore, the epithelial fragments we found on the string are, wait for it, goatskin.’
‘Goatskin?’
‘Yes, Jonan, yes, we’ve got Noah’s fucking ark here, I’m almost surprised they haven’t found elephant snot and whale sperm …’
‘Any human traces?’
‘Nothing human; no hair or fluids, nothing. What do you think our friends the forest rangers would say if they could see this?’
‘They would say there’s nothing human because it isn’t a human. It’s a basajaun.’
‘In my opinion, that guy’s an idiot. As he himself explained, basajauns are supposed to be peaceful creatures, protectors of the life of the forest … He said himself that a basajaun saved his life, so you tell me how that fits in with our story so far.’
Jonan looked at her, weighing up her comment.
‘Just because the basajaun was there doesn’t mean he killed the girls, it’s more likely the opposite: as the protector of the forest, it’s logical that he would feel responsible, insulted and provoked by the presence of this predator.’
Amaia looked at him in surprise.
‘Logical? … You’re just having a laugh about all this, aren’t you?’ Jonan smiled. ‘You love all this rubbish about the basajaun, don’t deny it.’
‘Only the bits that don’t involve dead girls. But you know better than anybody that it’s not rubbish, chief, and I speak with authority, since I’m an archaeologist and anthropologist as well as a police officer.’
‘That’s rich. OK then, let’s hear your explanation: why do I know better than anybody?’
‘Because you were born and grew up here. Surely you’re not going to tell me you weren’t brought up on these stories? They’re not nonsense, they form part of the culture and history of the Basque Country and Navarra, and we mustn’t forget that what is now considered mythology was originally a religion.’
‘Well don’t forget that in 1610 in this very valley, in the name of the most extreme forms of religion, dozens of women were persecuted and condemned and died on the fires of the auto-da-fé as a result of beliefs as ridiculous as this one, which have, fortunately, been left behind by evolution.’
He shook his head, giving Amaia a glimpse of the knowledge hidden behind his deceptively modest title of deputy inspector.
‘It’s well known that religious fervour and fear fed by legends and ignorant peasants did a great deal of damage, but you can’t deny that it constituted one of the most overwhelming belief systems in recent history, chief. A hundred years ago, or one hundred and fifty at the most, it was unusual to find someone who claimed they didn’t believe in witches, sorgiñas, belagiles, basajauns, the tartalo and, most importantly, in Mari, the goddess, genius, mother, guardian of the harvests and livestock, whose whims could make the sky thunder and cause hailstorms that left the town suffering the most awful famines. It reached a point where more people believed in witches than in the Holy Trinity, and this didn’t escape the notice of the Church, which saw how its faithful would leave after Mass only to continue observing the ancient rituals that had formed part of their families’ lives since time immemorial. And the ones who waged all-out war on the old beliefs were the half-crazed obsessives like Pier de Lancré, the Inquisitor of Bayonne, who managed to reverse the balance of belief through their madness. What had always formed part of the people’s beliefs suddenly became something damned, to be persecuted, the object of absurd denunciations which, in most cases, were made in the hope that anyone who collaborated with the Inquisition would be free of suspicion themselves. But before this madness, the old religion had been an integral part of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees for hundreds of years without causing the slightest problem. It even coexisted with Christianity without significant