Amaia Finds and Investigates Argi Beltz

Amaia Salazar’s search for Argi Beltz turns Elena Ochoa’s warning of a black house into a place she can find and investigate. The property first presents itself as a puzzle: its newer house and carefully concealed entrance seem unlike the old farmhouse Elena described, while its name and meadow make it difficult for Amaia to dismiss.

Finding Argi Beltz

After searching roads and tracks through the morning, Amaia spotted a broad, level meadow behind a house with a red gabled roof, wide front windows, a wooden porch, and a dining table beside a modern barbecue. An old, vegetation-covered wall screened the approach; even the green-painted cast-iron mailbox was hard to see. It bore the surnames Martínez Bayón. Beyond a vine-covered fence, a video intercom and security-company plaque guarded a modern entrance, while an artisan-carved beam identified the property as Argi Beltz, or “black light.”

A Photograph and an Inherited History

The property’s modern appearance did not settle whether it was Elena Ochoa’s house. A woman at a neighboring farmhouse brought down an old cocoa tin filled with photographs and selected one taken about fifty years earlier, when her parents had rebuilt their chimney after a lightning strike. In the image, behind a man posing on the roof beside the chimney, stood an older farmhouse in the middle of a flat meadow. The woman insisted it was the same house Amaia sought, though it looked nothing like the place now. The photograph supplied what the altered building could not: a visible link between Elena’s description and the property Amaia had found.

The neighbor’s account also gave the site a history of violence, passed down to her by her grandmother. The original owners, she said, were three siblings: two brothers and a sister. After their mother died young, their father was overcome by grief and became mentally ill; the family confined him in the upper part of the house. The brothers treated their sister cruelly and kept her from marrying so she would remain to serve them. When a horse trader came to take her away, one brother allegedly welcomed him by showing him a barrel containing her dismembered body. The trader fought back and wounded one brother; when the Guardia Civil arrived, one brother had bled to death and the other had hanged himself. In the attic, officers found the father’s mummified corpse chained to a bed. The farmhouse was then closed for more than seventy years, and local people said the family’s spirits remained trapped inside. Amaia mentally noted the dates, treating the grim story as a lead to check rather than proof of what had happened.

The Collective and the Child Who Died

The neighbor’s account moved from the farmhouse’s inherited violence to the community that occupied it in the 1970s. She remembered as many as twenty young men and women living there, with older visitors coming and going, and described their gatherings as cultural or spiritual meetings. They invited her to join them, but she declined: she was raising four children and had no time for what she considered foolishness. The old house, already in poor condition after years of neglect, had a small garden, chickens, pigs, and sheep; the animals wandered across the meadow, while the residents scarcely tended the land or kept it clean.

Around that period, a couple arrived who, according to the neighbor, still lived at the property. They had a daughter, Ainara Martínez Bayón, who died at about fourteen months old. The neighbor recalled seeing the child wander alone across the field to her home shortly before her death. Her eldest daughter washed the dirty child’s face and hands and offered her anise pastries softened in milk. The child ate with such urgency that the neighbor feared she might choke; she appeared desperately hungry. The neighbor went out to alert the parents and found them searching frantically, a display of alarm that seemed to her at odds with the child’s evident neglect.

The neighbor later gathered used clothes for the child and went to the farmhouse, where she found a gathering in progress. The father met her at the door and told her that the girl had died. The neighbor remembered returning home and crying for three days, still not knowing the child’s name. She had often seen the girl outside, inadequately dressed and among the animals’ filth, and continued to wonder whether she should have done more. A priest told her that Ainara had not been baptized and had no funeral for her soul. The account gave Amaia a history of a child’s death at Argi Beltz, but it was a neighbor’s recollection, not an independently established cause of death.

The Residents and the Pattern

By the time Amaia returned to the property, the house’s history had acquired a contemporary counterpart. The neighboring woman said that the 1970s communal residents had eventually disappeared, leaving only the couple who had arrived around the time their daughter died. They appeared to have prospered: the old farmhouse had been extensively rebuilt, a garden laid out in front, and a wall erected around the estate. The neighbor often saw expensive BMWs and Mercedes on the approach road, along with frequent visitors, a sharp contrast with the couple’s poverty when they first arrived. She recognized Doctor Berasategui’s car by the doctor’s parking sticker, but had never seen Rosario, whose photograph Amaia also showed her.

Amaia encountered the owners as a BMW four-wheel-drive vehicle passed her and entered the concealed drive. She ran after it, raised her badge at the slowly opening automated gate, and kept one hand instinctively near the Glock at her waist. The occupants confirmed that they owned the house. When Amaia told them that their friend Doctor Berasategui had died, they exchanged a quick, meaningful glance before the man acknowledged knowing him. He asked whether the death had been an accident; Amaia, concealing what the investigation had established, said that its cause was not yet known and asked how they knew the doctor. They denied recognizing Rosario when Amaia showed them her photograph.

Rather than end the conversation there, Amaia raised the deaths of infants in the valley and asked whether their daughter’s death might have been sudden infant death syndrome. The woman reached for her husband, who had turned ashen. He answered that their daughter had died of a cerebral stroke at fourteen months. Asked her name, he said Ainara. He then claimed that she had died during a trip to the United Kingdom and had been buried there, adding that the subject was painful for his wife and asking Amaia to stop. The neighbor’s account and the parents’ version thus met at the child’s identity and age, but not as independent confirmation of the asserted cause or burial: the claim of a British burial became a detail for Amaia’s investigation to test.

That inquiry later widened from the house to the geography of infant deaths. In Jonan Etxaide’s files, Amaia found an address list of investigated deaths in which he had added her sister but removed Yolanda Berrueta’s children. When she replotted the locations, the pattern did not follow the highway as she had first considered; it traced the Baztán River, from Erratzu through Arraioz, Elbete, and Elizondo, and onward to Oieregi, where Haizea’s case extended the line. Amaia’s return to Argi Beltz had therefore connected a neglected child’s reported death to a wider question: whether the valley’s infant deaths formed a pattern along the river, rather than a series of unrelated losses.

Extending the Map

The river pattern became a working hypothesis, not a solved case. Amaia told her colleagues that they had no way to confirm their suspicions about the child from Ainhoa or to justify another examination of her grave: judicial permission to reopen it was out of reach. Instead, she set out to profile the families and compare what was known. The deaths involved girls; most families had been in poor financial circumstances when the child died, then experienced improved fortunes in the years that followed. In at least four cases, including those of Yolanda Berrueta and Esparza, investigators knew that the parents had said life would improve after the child’s death. These correspondences sharpened the inquiry, but did not by themselves establish a cause or identify a perpetrator.

The search for earlier cases required patient work through baptismal records. Each child’s address had to be matched to a parish, and the parish priest—the person with access to the relevant information—could usually be consulted only during limited office hours. In Hondarribia, checking four cases reduced the number to two: one child had been a German visitor who died during her parents’ holiday, while another had been baptized. A wider search across Navarra produced many more records, so Amaia narrowed the scope to towns adjoining the river. The resulting map marked one case in Elizondo, one in Oronoz-Mugaire, one in Narbarte, two in Doneztebe, and the two remaining cases in Hondarribia.

Amaia then asked the team to distinguish the older deaths on the map, adding the girl from Argi Beltz, her own sister, the girl from Lesaka, the daughter of the lawyers Lejarreta y Andía in Elbete, and the child whose father had confronted the forensic doctor in Erratzu. Taken together, the points ran from the river’s source toward its mouth, following the Baztán River and then the Bidasoa under its later name. The pattern’s force lay in its reach: a succession of infant deaths across towns and administrative boundaries now appeared spatially connected, while the unresolved graves and incomplete records kept the map from becoming proof.

The Name and the Closed Gate

The carved name sharpened the connection Amaia was trying to establish: Argi Beltz meant black light, and Elena Ochoa’s description of a black house returned to her mind as she stood outside. Yet the gate yielded no confirmation. Amaia rang, waited, and rang again; just as she was about to leave, she thought she heard a click from the intercom, although its indicator remained dark. The possibility that someone inside had heard her without answering left her feeling watched and irritated. The episode kept the discovery unresolved: the name and meadow made the property a compelling lead, but its residents had not yet opened the door.

Local Protection and Oral Testimony

The neighboring woman’s certainty about Argi Beltz rested not on firsthand knowledge of its original owners but on the stories passed down in her family; her own claim was that the property had always drawn strange, dangerous people. She insisted that she feared none of them because the land was hers and she was protected. Amaia silently connected that confidence to the large stone crosses guarding the approaches to the farmhouses. The exchange set local belief beside the practical work of investigation: the woman’s account offered leads and dates to verify, while her sense of protection belonged to the valley’s inherited understanding of the place.

The Files Behind the Map

Before treating the infant addresses as a pattern, Amaia examined the wider set of records Jonan Etxaide had assembled. The Salazar folder brought together photographs of her sister’s empty coffin in a San Sebastián tomb, the old bones and the clean white bones found after the desecration in Arizkun, and enlarged sections of the only photograph she had managed to take of Rosario’s down jacket before it was found in the river. It also contained maps of possible foot routes from the cave at Arri Zahar. In another folder, Amaia found photographs apparently taken inside a café: they showed the judge’s secretary speaking with Yolanda Berrueta. These separate traces—an empty grave, a garment recovered from the river, a possible escape route, and a meeting captured on camera—made the archive more than a list of infant deaths. They placed the river map within a larger field of missing evidence and concealed connections, while leaving Amaia to distinguish what the records showed from what they only suggested.