Fermín Montes

Fermín Montes is an inspector whose abrasive humor and quick temper conceal a capacity for loyalty and self-recognition. As Amaia Salazar’s colleague, he helps turn a pattern of infant deaths into a broader investigation, stands beside her when suspicion falls on Jonan Etxaide, and brings both practical persistence and personal vulnerability to the work. His arc repeatedly tests the difference between anger that isolates and anger redirected into solidarity.

Identity and Working Temperament

Montes is introduced through his work alongside Jonan Etxaide and Zabalza, responding to the investigation around Valentín Esparza’s infant daughter. In the child’s overheated upstairs room, amid pink ribbons, lace, and photographs of the baby held by women in her family, Montes and Etxaide examine the space while Amaia deals with her phone and the case. The scene places him among the officers attending to the aftermath of a child’s death, rather than at a remove from its intimate domestic setting.

His manner is deliberately rough. On a drive with Zabalza, he refuses to let his younger colleague take the wheel while he is in the car, dismissing the possibility with characteristic swagger. The exchange is comic, but it also makes his authority concrete: Montes expects to remain in control, even over ordinary choices. Amaia later needles him that almost everything makes him angry, and he accepts the joke rather than contesting it. His temper is both a source of friction and a recognizable part of his working persona.

Investigation and Methods

Amaia gives Montes a specific task in tracing earlier sudden infant deaths in the Baztán Valley. Etxaide’s report has identified families whose children died in their sleep; two cases had prompted a forensic doctor to recommend social-services follow-up, and another family had struck the doctor as unnaturally happy after the loss. Amaia asks Montes to visit the families without disclosing the baby deaths as the reason. She sends Zabalza with him, partly because he has more tact. The assignment requires Montes to set aside his instinctive indignation and approach families under a pretext, making discretion as important as his forceful manner.

The visits take him and Zabalza to Elbete, Arraioz, and Pamplona. In a café during their rain-soaked trip, Montes watches Zabalza sitting apart and recognizes that his colleague is not simply having a bad few days. He understands in him the same persistent resentment he has known in himself: the sense that life has withheld what is owed, and the pride that can turn courage into a trap. Montes thinks that such bitterness can leave a person stranded, alone with hatred and self-pity. The recognition is unusually candid. His sympathy comes from having lived close to the same state, and from knowing how difficult it can be to admit error before anger consumes everything.

Montes’s investigative contribution is not limited to carrying out instructions. During the inquiry into the old groups and families connected to the infant deaths, he raises the extraordinary recovery of one mother from terminal cancer. He does not claim that the recovery proves anything; he distinguishes the striking fact from what can responsibly be concluded. In the same discussion, Amaia argues that the death of Esparza’s daughter and the later removal of her body make it necessary to consider practices beyond ordinary explanations. Montes’s contribution helps keep an anomalous detail in view without presenting it as a solution.

Loyalty, Anger, and Loss

Montes’s reaction to Berasategui’s death reveals how personally he has invested himself in the case. Security footage shows a prison officer passing something through the cell hatch, possibly the means Berasategui used to kill himself; the officer cannot be found after his shift. Montes is pleased that Berasategui is dead and feels no guilt about that relief. The reaction is not dispassionate, and the account does not soften it into a professional abstraction: for Montes, the suspect’s death is a satisfaction after the harm associated with him.

That fierce loyalty becomes clearer after Jonan Etxaide is shot. When Montes calls Amaia with the news, she experiences the world as breaking apart, then moves immediately to questions and action. Montes joins her in the car, nearly breathless, despite her having told him to wait. His arrival is an act of solidarity more than obedience. Later, when an officer keeps open the possibility that Jonan was involved in wrongdoing, Montes says he had struggled not to hit him. He defends Amaia against insinuations about her dead colleague, even while acknowledging the procedural reason for keeping hypotheses open. His anger is protective, though the investigation also requires him to recognize the difference between defending a friend and closing off inquiry.

Friendship and Personal Change

Zabalza’s wedding announcement brings out a warmer, more playful side of Montes. After hearing that Zabalza and his partner have set a date, he is astonished that his colleague had not told him. The surprise matters because it interrupts the officers’ usual pattern of irritation and guardedness: beneath his complaints, Montes expects to be included in the important parts of a friend’s life. His concern for Zabalza’s state of mind in Pamplona gives that expectation emotional weight. He can recognize another man’s suffering not as weakness but as a familiar danger.

Montes’s relationship with Flora Salazar carries a more difficult history. He tells Amaia that he and Flora have been together again for several days. Amaia’s incredulous response reflects the complications surrounding the reunion: she later explains to James that Montes had nearly shot himself because of Flora, and that this was why she and Flora had argued. The evidence establishes both the seriousness of the earlier crisis and the fact of their renewed relationship, without making the reconciliation simple or settled. For Montes, returning to Flora is a consequential personal step; for Amaia, it is inseparable from her concern about the damage the relationship has caused.

Role in the Story

Montes functions as both an investigator and an emotional counterweight to Amaia. He can be brusque with colleagues, angry at injustice, and openly pleased by an enemy’s death, yet he is also attentive to suffering that others might overlook. His insight into Zabalza’s despair comes from self-knowledge, while his presence after Jonan’s murder expresses a loyalty that needs no polished declaration. In the investigation, he helps carry Amaia’s questions into the field, contributes observations to the developing pattern, and stands by her when grief and professional suspicion collide. His roughness is not erased; the story instead shows how it can harden into destructive pride or become, when joined to empathy, a form of steadfast companionship.