Buch lesen: «Offering to the Storm»

2

Amaia had been watching the house for twenty minutes from her car. With the engine switched off and the windows closed against the steady drizzle, condensation had formed on the windows, blurring the contours of the building with the dark shutters.

Presently, a small car pulled up outside the front door. A young man stepped out, opened his umbrella, and leaned over the dashboard to pick up a notebook, which he glanced at before tossing it back in the car. Then he went to the boot, retrieved a flat package and walked up to the house.

Amaia drew level with him just as he rang the doorbell.

‘Excuse me, who are you?’

‘Social services, we deliver this gentleman’s meals every day,’ he replied, indicating the plastic tray in his hand. ‘He’s housebound, and has no one else to take care of him. Are you a relative?’ he enquired hopefully.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Navarre police.’

‘Ah,’ he said, losing interest.

He rang the bell again, then, leaning close to the door, shouted:

‘Señor Yáñez. It’s Mikel. From social services. Remember me? I’ve brought your lun—’

Before he could finish his sentence, the door swung open, and Yáñez’s wrinkled, grey face appeared.

‘I remember you, I’m not senile, you know … Or deaf,’ he replied, irritated.

‘Of course not, Señor Yáñez,’ said Mikel, smiling as he brushed past him into the house.

Amaia fumbled for her badge to show Yáñez.

‘There’s no need,’ he said, recognising her and moving aside to let her pass.

Over his corduroy trousers and woollen sweater, Yáñez wore a thick dressing gown, the colour of which Amaia couldn’t make out in the gloomy house. She followed Yáñez down the corridor to the kitchen, where a fluorescent light bulb flickered before coming on.

‘Señor Yáñez!’ the young man exclaimed in an over-loud voice. ‘You didn’t eat your supper last night!’ He was standing by the open fridge, exchanging food trays wrapped in cling film. ‘I’ll have to log that in my report, you know. Don’t go blaming me if the doctor tells you off,’ he added, as if speaking to a child.

‘Log it wherever you want,’ muttered Yáñez.

‘Didn’t you like the fish in tomato sauce?’ Mikel went on, ignoring his reply. ‘Today you’ve got stewed meat and chickpeas, with yoghurt for pudding, and soup, omelette and sponge cake for supper.’ He spun round holding the untouched supper tray, then crouched under the sink, tied a knot in a small rubbish bag containing only a few discarded wrappings, and started towards the door. Pausing next to Yáñez, he addressed him once more in an over-loud voice: ‘All done, Señor Yáñez, bon appetit, until tomorrow.’ Then he turned to leave, nodding to Amaia on the way out.

Yáñez waited until he heard the front door close before speaking.

‘What do you make of that? And today he stayed longer than usual. Normally he can’t get away quick enough,’ he added, turning out the kitchen light, and leaving Amaia to make her way to the sitting room in semi-darkness. ‘This house gives him the creeps. And I don’t blame him, it’s like visiting a cemetery.’

A sheet, two thick blankets and a pillow lay partially draped over the brown velvet sofa. Amaia assumed that Yáñez not only slept, but lived in this one room. Amid the gloom, she could see what looked like crumbs on the blankets and an orangish stain, possibly egg yolk. Amaia studied Yáñez as he sat down and leaned back against the pillow. A month had gone by since she’d interviewed him at the police station. He was awaiting trial under house arrest because of his age. He had lost weight, and his hard, suspicious expression had sharpened, giving him the air of an eccentric hermit. His hair was well kept, and he was clean-shaven, but Amaia wondered how long he’d been wearing the pyjama top showing beneath his sweater. The house was freezing, and clearly hadn’t been heated for days. Opposite the sofa, in front of the empty hearth, a flat-screen TV cast a cold, blue light over the room.

‘May I open the shutters?’ asked Amaia.

‘If you insist, but leave them as they were before you go.’

She nodded, pushing open the wooden panels to allow the gloomy Baztán light to seep through. When she turned around, Yáñez was staring at the television.

‘Señor Yáñez.’

The man continued gazing at the screen as if she wasn’t there.

‘Señor Yáñez …’

He glanced at her, irritated.

‘I’d like to …’ she began, motioning towards the corridor. ‘I’d like to have a look round.’

‘Go ahead,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. ‘Look all you like, just don’t touch anything. After the police were here, the place was a mess. It took me ages to put everything back the way it was.’

‘Of course.’

‘I trust you’ll be as considerate as the officer who called yesterday.’

‘A police officer came here yesterday?’ she said, surprised.

‘Yes, a nice lad. He even made me a cup of coffee.’

Besides the kitchen and sitting room, Yáñez’s bungalow boasted three bedrooms and a largish bathroom. Amaia opened the cupboards, checking the shelves, which were crowded with shaving things, toilet rolls and a few bottles of medicine. The double bed in the main bedroom looked as if it hadn’t been slept in recently. Draped over it was a floral bedspread that matched the curtains, bleached by years of sunlight. Judging by the vases of garish plastic flowers and the crocheted doilies adorning the chest of drawers and bedside tables, the room had been lovingly decorated in the seventies by Señora Yáñez, and preserved intact by her husband. It was like looking at a display in an ethnographic museum.

The second bedroom was empty, save for an old sewing machine standing next to a wicker basket beneath the window. She remembered it from the inventory in the report. Even so, she removed the cover to examine the spools of cotton, recognising a less faded version of the curtain colour in the main bedroom. The third bedroom had been referred to in the inventory as ‘the boy’s room’, and it was exactly that: the bedroom of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy. The single bed with its pristine white bedspread; the shelves lined with children’s books, a series she recalled having read herself; toys, mostly model ships and aeroplanes, as well as a collection of toy cars, all carefully aligned, and without a speck of dust on them. On the back of the door was a poster of a classic vintage Ferrari, and on the desk some old school textbooks, and a bundle of football cards tied with a rubber band. As she picked them up, she saw that the degraded rubber had stuck to the faded cards. She put them back, mentally comparing the cold bedroom to Berasategui’s flat in Pamplona.

There were two other rooms in the house, plus a small utility area and a well-stocked woodshed where Yáñez kept his gardening tools and some boxes of potatoes and onions. Over in a corner, Amaia noticed an unlit boiler.

She picked up one of the dining chairs, and placed it between Yáñez and the television.

‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

He used the remote beside him to switch off the TV. Then he stared at her in silence, waiting with that same look of anger and resentment he’d directed at Amaia the first time they met.

‘Tell me about your son.’

The man shrugged.

‘What sort of relationship did you have?’

‘He’s a good son,’ Yáñez replied, too quickly. ‘He did everything you’d expect a good son to do.’

‘Such as?’

This time Yáñez had to give it some thought.

‘Well, he gave me money … sometimes he did the shopping, bought me food – that sort of thing.’

‘That’s not what I’ve been hearing. People in the village say that after your wife died, you packed your son off to school abroad, and that he didn’t show his face around here for years.’

‘He was studying. He was a good student, he did two degrees, and a masters, he’s one of the top psychiatrists at his clinic …’

‘When did he start visiting you more frequently?’

‘I don’t know, about a year ago.’

‘Did he ever bring anything other than food? Something he kept here, or that he asked you to keep for him somewhere else?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve looked over the house,’ she said, glancing about. ‘It’s spotless.’

‘I have to keep it clean.’

I understand. You keep it clean for your son.’

‘No, for my wife. Everything is exactly the way it was when she left …’ Yáñez’s face twisted into a grimace of pain and grief. He remained that way for a few seconds, not making a sound. Amaia realised he was crying when she saw the tears roll down his cheeks.

‘That’s the least I could do; everything else I did was wrong.’

Yáñez’s eyes danced from one object to another, as if he were searching for an answer hidden among the faded ornaments standing on doilies and side tables, until he met Amaia’s gaze. He grasped the edge of the blanket, lifting it in front of his face for a few seconds, then flinging it aside, as though disgusted with himself for having cried in front of her. Amaia felt certain the conversation would end there, but then Yáñez reached behind the pillow he was leaning against and pulled out a framed photograph. He gazed at the image as if spellbound, then passed it to her. Yáñez’s gesture took Amaia back to the previous year, when, in a different sitting room, a grieving father had handed her the portrait of his murdered daughter, which he also kept hidden under a cushion. She hadn’t seen Anne Arbizu’s father since, but the memory of his pain had stayed with her.

A woman no older than twenty-five smiled at her from the picture. Amaia glanced at her, then handed the photograph back to Yáñez.

‘I thought we’d live happily ever after, you know? She was a young, pretty, kind woman … But after the boy was born she started acting strangely. She grew sad, she never smiled, she wouldn’t even hold him, she said she wasn’t ready to love the boy, and that he rejected her. Nothing I said did any good. I told her she was talking nonsense – of course the boy loved her – but she only grew sadder. She was sad all the time. She kept the house tidy, she did the cooking, but she never smiled; she even stopped sewing, and the rest of the time she slept. She kept the shutters closed, the way I do now, and she slept … I’ll never forget how proud we were when we first bought this place. She made it look so pretty: we painted the walls, planted window boxes … Life was good. I thought nothing would ever change. But a house isn’t the same as a home, and this became her tomb … Now it’s my turn, although they call it house arrest, and the lawyer says they’ll let me serve out my sentence here. I lie here every night, unable to sleep, smelling my wife’s blood below my head.’

Amaia looked intently at the sofa. The cover didn’t go with the rest of the décor.

‘I had it recovered because of the bloodstains, but they’d stopped making the original fabric so they used this one instead. Otherwise everything’s the same. When I lie here, I can smell her blood beneath the upholstery.’

‘The house is cold,’ said Amaia, disguising the shiver that ran up her spine.

He shrugged.

‘Why don’t you light the boiler?’

‘It hasn’t worked since the night of the storm, when the power went.’

‘That was over a month ago. You mean to say you’ve been without heating all this time?’

Yáñez didn’t reply.

‘What about the people from social services?’

‘I only open the door to the fellow who brings the trays. I told them on day one that if they come round here, I’ll be waiting for them with an axe.’

‘You have plenty of wood. Why not make a fire? There’s no virtue in being cold.’

‘It’s what I deserve.’

Amaia got up and went out to the shed, returning with a basket of logs and some old newspapers. Kneeling in front of the hearth, she stirred the cold ashes to make space for the wood. She took a box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the fire. Then she sat down again. Yáñez stared into the flames.

‘You’ve also kept your son’s room just as it was. I find it hard to imagine a man like him sleeping there.’

‘He didn’t. Occasionally he stopped for lunch, and sometimes supper, but he never spent the night. He would leave, then come back early the next day. He told me he preferred a hotel.’

Amaia didn’t believe it; they had found no evidence of Berasategui staying at any of the hotels, hostels or bed and breakfast places in the valley.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I think so, but I can’t be a hundred per cent sure – as I told the police, my memory is worse than I let on to social services. I forget things.’

Amaia plucked her buzzing phone from her pocket. The display showed several missed calls but she ignored them, scanning through her photos until she found the right image, then touching the screen to enlarge it. Averting her eyes from the photo, she showed it to Yáñez.

‘Did your son ever come here with this woman?’

‘Your mother.’

‘You know her? Did you see her that night?’

‘No, but I’ve known your mother for years. She’s aged, but I recognise her.’

‘Think again, you just told me your memory isn’t so good.’

‘Sometimes I forget to have supper, or I have supper twice because I forget I’ve already had it, but I remember who comes to my house. Your mother has never set foot in here.’

She slipped the phone back into her coat pocket, replaced the dining chair, pulled the shutters to and left. As soon as she was in the car, she reached for her phone and, ignoring the insistent buzzing, dialled a number from her contacts list. After a couple of rings, a man answered.

‘Could you please send someone to fix a boiler that broke down on the night of the storm,’ she said, and gave him Yáñez’s address.