Lo que la tierra esconde / What The Earth Hides

Daniel Caicoya is a civil guard in the mining area near Oviedo. He and his uncle, Paulino, a lieutenant in the headquarters, have not spoken to Matías, their brother and father, for ten years because their professional choice to become civil guards and not miners.

Daniel returns to his village because of a crime, the murder of Severino Gómez, a mysterious man with a bad reputation in the village, wealthy, suspected of having been collaborating with the Regime undercover in the mine and who also had an added problem: his son Ricardo. Ricardo was in charge of security at the time of a recent explosion that killed fourteen miners and he, in turn, had already been accused of being an exploiter and of causing deaths by coaxing the miners into working longer hours with bribes.

The general feeling of hatred seems to be the reason why El Cojo, a man in charge of pastures, found a horrifyingly murdered corpse. On his knees and the hands bound with a tape and shot in the back of the head, in the middle of a secondary road in the area. What doesn’t quite add up is the ritualistic manner of death: the hands and tongue were cut off without much care, post mortem, and apart from the ammunition for the nine-barrelled long gun, neither the casing nor the gun were found. The only witness is an elderly disabled man from the village, who lives with his two brothers, also elderly and unmarried, whom they find in a state of shock and unable to communicate. It seems, as many remember, that under that road there is a thirty-metre-deep mine shaft which was filled with soil, and which was the mass grave of those disaffected with the fascist regime after the uprising and the Civil War.

Daniel has only just begun to pull the strings when some children find a human head in a plastic bag in a lake where he used to swim as a child and, shortly afterwards, a retired army general appears dead, headless, with the hands and the tongue of the first corpse in his hands. Daniel’s instinct tells him to look far away and for that, who better than his own grandmother Elena, a nonagenarian, who suffered the repression and was only spared by the mercy of one of the guards. When it comes to light that many of Severino’s real estate properties originated from deeds of blood, from forced assignments that ended with the death of the unfortunate people who accepted the deal, he is closer and closer to finding out who is performing such acts of revenge.