Inspector Iriarte

Inspector Iriarte is a responsible and technically minded police officer whose steady professionalism makes his reaction to Elena Ochoa’s autopsy unusually revealing. He is both a trusted colleague of Amaia Salazar and a representative of the rational, controllable order that her investigations repeatedly unsettle: he can accept that evil exists, but struggles with what he has seen when it will not fit an ordinary explanation.

Identity and Professional Character

Amaia Salazar has known Inspector Iriarte for a little over a year and regards him as a good person and an excellent professional: responsible, correct, and unusually composed. His strengths are practical and procedural. He is a technical police officer, though Amaia considers him perhaps too protective of the institution to be brilliant. Until the autopsy case, she had never seen him lose control.

His composure rests on a particular way of making sense of the world. Amaia compares him with her husband, James: both know that human lives can be dark and wretched, yet prefer to stay within what they can explain and manage. Iriarte’s choice of police work may reflect a plain commitment to family, right and wrong, and protecting those things at any cost. This is Amaia’s interpretation of him, rather than a statement of his own motives.

The Autopsy of Elena Ochoa

After the autopsy of Elena Ochoa, Iriarte telephones Amaia late at night, exhausted after a day that had begun early. He tells her that the examination was the most disturbing thing he has encountered. Forensic Doctor San Martín has classified the death as suicide by ingestion of sharp objects, a conclusion Iriarte relays with nervous laughter and visible unease. The official finding gives the death a comprehensible label, but does not settle what has troubled him.

At a later team meeting, he sits rigidly with the autopsy report before him and cannot take his eyes from it. Amaia understands that the report itself is not the whole source of his distress: what confounds him is what he saw on the steel table at the Institute of Legal Medicine. The distinction matters to his character. Iriarte can repeat the forensic conclusion, but the physical evidence has exceeded the limits of the explanation he is prepared to trust.

Relationship with Amaia Salazar

Iriarte’s working relationship with Amaia combines professional respect with reservations. He first recognized her ability when they worked on the Basajaun case, and says that serving beside her has given him access to levels of investigation he would never have expected. He regards her presence in the station as a professional asset, while acknowledging that she is difficult and that her complexity is integral to how she makes deductions.

He also admits that he has sometimes seriously doubted the direction of her progress. Even so, he has continued to support her, including through silence when he has not been ready to endorse her conclusions openly. His praise is difficult for him to deliver, and his hesitation makes the admission more than routine collegial courtesy: it records a relationship in which disagreement has not erased respect.

Conduct and Narrative Significance

Iriarte’s steadiness is tested not only by Elena Ochoa’s death but by the wider sequence of disturbing cases. The child remains in the Tarttalo investigation, the Esparza girl’s body found in a backpack, and the deaths of Ochoa, Esparza, and Berasategui have all contributed to his growing gloom and concern. After the search at Fina Hidalgo’s home, he becomes nearly silent, suggesting how heavily the investigations have weighed on him without specifying more than the evidence allows.

His support for Amaia also takes a concrete form: he once accompanied her in the rain as she covered the bones of her ancestors with the dark earth of the family itxusuria. That gesture stands alongside his professional loyalty and his guarded response to the inexplicable. Iriarte is not presented as abandoning reason; rather, the strain lies in his effort to preserve a controllable account of events after experience has made that account inadequate.