Navarra is more than the setting for the investigation: its towns, river corridor, and buried histories shape how Amaia Salazar understands a series of infant deaths. Mapping the victims’ homes eventually reveals a line following the Baztán River and continuing where it becomes the Bidasoa. That geography gives the cases a shared frame, but it does not by itself prove that they share a cause; the investigation tests the emerging pattern against records, family circumstances, and other evidence.

Regional setting and the river corridor

The investigation ranges across Navarra, with the Baztán Valley as its principal geographical focus. On the maps used by Amaia and her colleagues, the victims’ towns cluster around the river rather than forming a simple concentration around one crime scene. The line eventually runs from Erratzu through Arraioz, Elbete, Elizondo, and Oieregi. Farther along, the river takes the name Bidasoa, carrying the apparent pattern toward the boundary with Guipúzcoa. The map thus connects communities that might otherwise be investigated as separate local cases.

The boundary matters. Ainhoa lies across the French border, and its location initially disrupts the pattern visible on a map of Navarra alone. Amaia first marks the children’s family homes on maps of the region, then adds Ainhoa to a larger map. The resulting points seem irregular. Later, when she reconsiders the locations and excludes the Ainhoa cases from that particular comparison, the remaining marks align with the river. Ainhoa is not thereby erased from the investigation; rather, the episode shows how the scope and scale of a map can affect what pattern it makes visible.

A landscape of linked investigations

The river’s significance emerges as investigators compare the deaths of young children from different towns. Amaia orders a renewed search of sudden infant death cases across Navarra, with special attention to girls whose home towns border the Baztán River. She asks the team to examine not only the deaths but also the families’ finances before and after them. In the cases she is assessing, the children were girls, several families had been in poor financial circumstances when a child died, and some later experienced improved fortunes. Investigators also note reports that, in at least several cases, parents had said that matters would improve after the child’s death. These similarities provide lines of inquiry, not a substitute for proof in any individual case.

Expanding the search beyond the valley adds further locations. The team identifies cases in Elizondo, Oronoz-Mugaire, Narbarte, Doneztebe, and Hondarribia, including two in each of the latter two towns. Amaia then asks for older cases to be marked in a different color, including her sister’s death in Elizondo, the child associated with Argi Beltz, the infant in Lesaka, the daughter of the lawyers Lejarreta y Andía in Elbete, and the child whose father confronted the forensic doctor in Erratzu. Once these historical cases are added, the succession of points follows the river from its source toward its mouth, where it is known as the Bidasoa. The expanded map makes the geographical hypothesis harder to dismiss as a handful of isolated incidents, while leaving its explanation to be established by further investigation.

Towns, homes, and concealed networks

The mapped locations lead Amaia toward connections among families, medical workers, and a group associated with Argi Beltz. Elena Ochoa had told her that a sect-like community established itself in a farmhouse at Orabidea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It began as a commune holding cultural and spiritual gatherings, then moved toward occult practices and animal sacrifice; Elena left when the rites became too savage. Amaia later locates the house, by then renovated into a guarded mansion occupied by a wealthy couple who had belonged to the original group. The couple acknowledge knowing Doctor Berasategui, and a neighbor identifies his car at the property, but they do not explain the nature of their connection.

A separate account given to Amaia by Sarasola concerns a group established in Lesaka in 1979. According to a protected witness who had confessed years later, a leader presented himself as a psychologist or psychiatrist, visited the group regularly, and presided over ceremonies involving witchcraft, animal sacrifice, and blood rituals. The witness alleged that a couple offered their days-old baby to the group and that the child was killed as a ritual sacrifice. The group later dispersed. The accusation is handled as a serious but legally unproven case, not as a finding established by the map. Together, the accounts make Navarra’s houses and towns sites of both alleged ritual activity and an inquiry into how local relationships may have connected families across the region.

Evidence, institutions, and the limits of the map

The regional investigation depends on slow, local record-keeping as well as spatial analysis. To narrow the list of infant deaths, investigators check baptismal information parish by parish, since the relevant records are held by individual priests and can only be consulted during parish office hours. The resulting figures change as cases are added or excluded. The map is therefore not a finished diagram discovered all at once: its contents depend on the painstaking verification of who each child was and where the child lived.

Other documentary gaps deepen suspicion without resolving it. In the case of Ainara Martínez Bayón, a birth certificate records her birth in Elizondo in 1979 and gives Argi Beltz, Orabidea, as the place of birth. Investigators find no death certificate or hospital record supporting the family’s claim that she died in England, and no entry recording her death in the family register. The alleged journey is also difficult to substantiate. Such absences become part of the regional inquiry because they challenge the account attached to a particular child and household; they do not, on their own, establish what happened to her.

The cases also cross jurisdictional and institutional lines. Sarasola tells Amaia that the Lesaka confession was first made in Madrid, while the alleged crime fell within Navarra and was assigned to a court in Pamplona. The judge imposed investigative secrecy because of the sensitivity of the accusations, the possible harm to people not yet proven guilty, and security concerns; the witness lives in hiding under police and church protection. This restricted process helps explain why Amaia initially knows less about the case than Sarasola does. In the novel, Navarra is consequently both a physical area to be mapped and a jurisdiction in which information is fragmented, protected, and difficult to obtain.

Narrative and historical significance

The river map converts geography into a method of reasoning. Amaia begins with scattered addresses, tests how roads and boundaries might account for them, and then notices that the line of cases follows the watercourse more closely than a route of convenient escape. The river’s course supplies a new hypothesis, not a verdict: the investigation still has to distinguish proximity from connection and association from responsibility. That tension keeps the landscape active in the inquiry, rather than allowing it to function as mere scenery.

The author’s note identifies a real news report as the germ of the novel’s story of a baby allegedly killed in a ritual in a Navarran farmhouse about thirty years earlier. The brief report described a confession by someone who claimed to have participated with a group; the author says the body had disappeared and the members had maintained a pact of silence. She names the child Ainara and describes the injustice of a life reduced to an almost forgotten name. At the time the note was written, the investigation into Ainara’s death remained open. The author also thanks the Navarre Foral Police and especially the Elizondo Foral Police station, underscoring the connection between the fictional regional inquiry and the real-world institutional setting that helped inform it.