Valentín Esparza and his daughter’s father-daughter relationship

The father-daughter relationship between Valentín Esparza and his four-month-old daughter becomes one of the novel’s most disturbing reversals: what first appears to be a bereaved father’s desperate attempt to reclaim his child is revealed as an act bound to her death and to a sacrificial group. The investigation does not establish every detail of his role, but his removal of her body, his refusal to allow cremation, his confession that he delivered her, and the forensic evidence together make paternal attachment inseparable from complicity.

Identity and the Circumstances of Her Death

The daughter is an unnamed infant, four months old, born prematurely with underdeveloped lungs. She spent two of those months in hospital and had recently been examined for a minor cold. When she died while sleeping at her maternal grandmother Inés Ballarena’s home, the pediatrician initially regarded sudden infant death syndrome as the clear explanation: the baby’s early medical vulnerabilities seemed to account for the loss without suspicion of a crime.

That account began to fracture around the grandmother’s recollection of the night. It was the first time the baby had stayed with her; her parents were out for their anniversary, and Inés had prepared a room, fed the infant, and put her to bed. Sleeping on a sofa in the adjoining room with the listening monitors on, she woke to a noise inside the house, then heard tires crunching over the gravel. At about four in the morning she saw a large gray car leaving and thought it might belong to Valentín, though she did not see its license plate. The couple’s home lay along the route, so at first she attached no particular significance to the sighting.

In the morning, the baby’s failure to wake for a feed prompted Inés to check on her, and she found her dead. The doctor placed the likely time of death between four and five, bringing the grandmother’s memory back into focus. She also remembered that her dogs, which usually barked loudly at strangers, had remained quiet. When she asked her daughter about the car, she was told that the couple had arrived home around half past one; Valentín, questioned separately, became nervous and angry, refused to answer, and suggested that some other couple might have stopped nearby. These details made the apparently settled medical explanation harder to accept, though they did not by themselves establish what had happened.

The Body, the Coffin, and the Father’s Actions

The decisive change came at the funeral home. Inés returned to the police station because she was troubled by a small circular mark on the baby’s forehead. When she had mentioned it to Valentín, he had cut off the discussion by ordering that the coffin be closed. At the funeral home, Iriarte saw him leaving with a backpack held in an unusual way. Valentín turned pale when he saw the officer and ran; caught beside his car, he shouted that he had to finish what he had started. Iriarte initially feared that the bag contained a weapon. Its contents were more terrible: Valentín was carrying his daughter’s corpse, which he had taken from the coffin.

During questioning by Amaia Salazar, he eventually acknowledged that he had been taking his daughter’s body. The wording mattered: he referred to a body, not to the baby or the child. When told that the forensic doctor would perform an autopsy and return the remains to the family, he insisted that she must not be cremated and said that he had to finish. Asked directly whether he had killed her, he denied it. But when pressed about who had, he first denied bringing anyone and then admitted that he had delivered her. He did not complete an explanation of what that delivery was meant to accomplish.

The distinction between killing and delivering remains important. Valentín denies directly killing his daughter, and the account does not supply a full explanation of precisely how he acted or what he believed the ritual required. Yet his admission does not restore the image of an innocent father: it places him in the chain of events that carried the baby from death into a planned sacrifice, and his insistence on keeping the body uncremated makes clear that, for him, the death was not finished with the funeral.

Forensic Evidence and the Sacrifice

The autopsy changed the case from a suspicious death into evidence of asphyxiation. San Martín confirmed that the mark on the infant’s forehead matched the shape and measurements of the teddy bear’s nose; white fibers at the corner of her lips also came from the toy. The report found saliva belonging to both the baby and Valentín on the infant and the bear, alongside a third trace associated with the bear’s powerful, nauseating odor whose origin had not yet been identified.

The saliva was not treated as proof in isolation. Valentín could have argued that he had kissed his daughter when leaving her at Inés’s house. Amaia tested that possibility against the circumstances: Inés had bathed the infant before putting her to bed, which should have removed parental saliva left earlier. She also said that Valentín rarely went upstairs and that, on this occasion, her daughter had accompanied her up to settle the baby. Amaia considered it unlikely that a four-month-old had asked her father to kiss the toy, and did not regard Valentín as the kind of man who would casually do so. These observations sharpened suspicion without converting every unanswered detail into certainty.

A later reading of the cell footage supplied the meaning of Valentín’s admission. Zabalza had the inaudible recording sent to someone able to read lips. The lip-reader identified Valentín as saying that he had delivered his daughter to Inguma, as many others had been sacrificed. The name did not appear in the police system as a person or alias. The revelation therefore widened the significance of the father’s conduct: his admission was not merely a private, grief-stricken attempt to recover his child, but a statement that placed her within a pattern of offerings.

Meaning and Limits of the Relationship

Valentín’s daughter remains present in the investigation through the objects that carry the evidence: the closed coffin, the stolen body, the backpack, and the teddy bear whose pressure mark and fibers connect it to her suffocation. The bear, ordinarily associated with comfort, becomes the instrument and trace of an act that the father’s words recast as an offering. His handling of the body and insistence that it not be cremated reveal a determination to complete something, but the available account does not establish the full purpose he had in mind.

The relationship is therefore defined by a contradiction between the ordinary language of parenthood and the acts that follow the infant’s death. Valentín’s conduct outwardly resembles a father’s refusal to surrender his child; his own description instead reduces her to a body to be delivered, and the lip-read statement identifies that delivery with sacrifice. His denial that he killed her cannot erase his acknowledged role, while the evidence linking him to the teddy bear makes the boundary between direct violence and ritual participation more troubling than his denial suggests. Through this father-daughter bond, the investigation exposes how the language of grief and custody can conceal an allegiance in which the child is treated not as someone to protect, but as an offering.