Padre Sarasola

Padre Sarasola enters this part of the investigation as both a mourner and a source of information: he offers condolences for Jonan Etxaide, then connects Doctor Berasategui’s concealed records to a wider Vatican concern about sects and ritual violence. His account also links Amaia Salazar’s questions about Inguma to the history of a group in Lesaka and the killing of a newborn child.

Arrival and condolences

After a doctor remarks that someone else is claiming Amaia’s attention, she turns toward the street and sees an apparently official vehicle waiting beyond the temple gate. The driver opens the rear door, where Padre Sarasola is waiting. Amaia, surprised, raises a hand to say goodbye to the doctors and gets into the car.

Sarasola says that he is sorry to meet her under these circumstances and calls Jonan a lamentable loss. Though he had known him only briefly, he had regarded the subinspector as brilliant and promising. Amaia confirms that he was. The brief exchange establishes that Sarasola’s approach comes in the immediate aftermath of Jonan’s death, even as the conversation soon turns from grief to the investigation.

Berasategui’s files and the Vatican

Sarasola tells Amaia that Doctor Berasategui kept a detailed, encrypted file on every case he had handled, both at the clinic and in his private practice. The files included the Esparza case. Sarasola does not possess them: after Berasategui’s arrest for involvement in Rosario’s release and the crimes known as the Tarttalo cases, the highest Vatican authorities took an interest and intervened in the matter.

He explains that psychiatry can serve as a route to cases displaying the particular dimension of evil that concerns the Church, which, he says, has pursued such matters since its foundation. The files therefore represent more than a collection of clinical records in his account: they connect Berasategui’s professional work to the Vatican’s scrutiny of suspected occult or sectarian activity. Sarasola’s inability to hand them over also marks the limit of what he can directly provide to Amaia.

Why he speaks about Inguma

When Amaia asks why he is telling her this now, Sarasola says he considered the matter carefully before deciding to speak. His reason is the nature of the question she put to him on her previous visit to the clinic: she had asked about Inguma. He pauses, touching his lips with his fingertips as though weighing whether to continue, before presenting the Vatican’s response to the broader problem of sects.

He reports that the Vatican has appointed eight new exorcists authorized to work in Spain in recent months, and says the appointments are not coincidental. He also gives a figure of sixty-eight active groups in the country. In the classification he describes, group A consists of organizations that do not harm their members physically or economically; many groups, he says, fall into categories B and C, associated with economic, psychological, or physical harm and abuses including forced prostitution, weapons and drug production and sales, and trafficking in children and women. His description begins to identify group D as the worst category, but does not complete its definition in this account.

Navarra and the Lesaka testimony

Sarasola frames Navarra as a place of enduring religious and historical significance: a land of saints and a pillar of the Church, but also, in his telling, a setting where evil has repeatedly appeared. He distinguishes the crimes behind old legends from the history of inquisitorial proceedings against midwives and herbalists, and insists that witchcraft and satanic practices involving human sacrifice are not confined to the past.

As evidence, he recounts a confession made three years earlier in Madrid. A man came to a police station with his lawyer, saying remorse had made life unbearable. In 1979, Sarasola says, the man had joined a sizeable group established at a farmhouse in Lesaka. The group was run by a leader who presented himself as a psychologist or psychiatrist. Although he did not live in the house, he visited regularly.

According to the confession as Sarasola relates it, the group practiced traditional witchcraft and invoked ancestral entities. Its ceremonies included sacrificing animals, mainly lambs and roosters, as well as orgies and rituals in which participants covered themselves with blood or drank it. Months later, a couple in the group had a baby and offered the child to the group as its highest sacrifice. The girl, only a few days old, was killed in a satanic ritual as an offering to evil. Hearing Lesaka draws Amaia’s full attention and brings back her first conversation with Elena Ochoa, joining Sarasola’s historical account to a thread already present in Amaia’s investigation.