by Chris Lloyd
Rigau introduced the man sitting a short distance away as Joan Culell, the court secretary. Culell looked over and nodded his head in greeting but didn’t get up.
Elisenda asked if the forensic doctor was here.
‘Inside,’ Rigau told her. ‘Riera.’
‘You’d better follow us,’ Poch told them.
Elisenda and her team pulled on their white overalls and blue gloves and drew a deep breath before entering. A path had been marked through the hallway and along a corridor where they could walk. Elisenda had barely enough time to register the surroundings. Old but good quality rustic furniture with some antiques that looked to be genuine and books and papers stacked untidily on shelves. Clean but not necessarily cared for.
They passed a living room where a uniformed mossa was comforting a middle-aged woman in a housecoat and carpet slippers who was sobbing uncontrollably onto her shoulder.
‘The cleaner,’ Poch explained in a whisper. ‘She found him. He lived alone and she comes in once a week.’
‘I’ll want to talk to her after,’ Elisenda told him.
The sergent from La Bisbal nodded and showed them in through an open door into a room that looked like it had been added to the house at a later date.
‘A studio,’ Poch told them. ‘He was a sculptor.’
A shocked gasp rolled in a wave from the mouths of Elisenda and her team as they entered the studio, Elisenda in the lead, Àlex at the rear.
‘His name was Ferran Arbós,’ Jutge Rigau told them. He looked at the notes on his tablet to tell them. Elisenda guessed it was to avoid having to see the scene that lay out in front of them. She could scarcely blame him. ‘He was a sculptor, exhibited locally with some success.’
Without taking her eyes off the man standing falsely opposite them, Elisenda asked him if there was anything to connect the man with the archaeological dig at El Crit.
‘Nothing specific that we know of. But he took up sculpting after he retired. Before that, he was a curator. It appears he worked for various museums, including projects relating to Iberian sites.’
Elisenda nodded slowly, all the time studying the man.
He was pinned to the wall.
Between a metal shelf cluttered with tools and old pots and a cork board with faded photographs and newspaper cuttings, Ferran Arbós was held heavily on the tips of his feet, staring emptily at his viewers in one last exhibition.
‘It’s his own chisel,’ one of the Científica told them.
Mirroring the round pin through the skull of the first body at El Crit and the mattock through the second, the head of the wooden end of a chisel was jutting from the forehead of an elderly man. The other end was embedded in the wall, securing him in place. It was supporting the entire weight of his body, holding him unnaturally on his feet, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his head tilted slightly forward as though he’d simply nodded off to sleep.
‘Display,’ Elisenda murmured.
His features were hidden by a torrent of blood that had flowed down his face and chest and legs to a pool that was drying on the floor at his feet. Pieces of stone from a sculpture he’d evidently been working on glinted like teeth in the congealed mess. His eyes remained open behind a frail curtain of crimson tassels hanging from his brows.
‘So what was your crime?’ Elisenda asked out loud to the dead man before she could stop herself. She looked at Josep and Montse and knew they were also seeing the awful crimes they’d witnessed the autumn before.
Glancing over to Àlex, she saw him slowly clench his fists, a nerve in his cheek flickering with nascent rage. It was the one sign of good in a room stolen by evil.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Jutge Rigau insists that you lead the investigation.’
‘So do I,’ Elisenda told Puigventós.
‘Is your team ready for it, Elisenda? I have my reservations.’
‘We’re more than ready to take it on, Xavier. We need it so we can heal.’
After a show of reluctance, the inspector finally agreed to the Serious Crime Unit taking the investigation. The two murders committed over thirty years apart were too obviously connected for him not to.
‘You will come under a lot of scrutiny, you realise,’ he warned her.
‘As I say, I think that’s what we need.’
Elisenda had gone to see Puigventós the moment she and her unit arrived back at Vista Alegre. The judge had consented to the body being removed long before Riera and the Científica had finished their examination of the scene and had returned to La Bisbal, evidently to start the wheels in motion for Elisenda’s team to be given the investigation.
Elisenda had spoken to the cleaner but got little out of her. Arbós had no visitors and kept very much to himself.
‘He wasn’t popular in the village but he was always decent to me,’ the woman had told her. ‘He always paid on time.’
‘Was there anyone in the village who wished him harm?’ Elisenda had asked her.
‘Not like this.’
Elisenda was inclined to agree. To her, it was more obviously linked to the victim having some sort of connection to the El Crit dig, but she knew they had to question the neighbours to cover all angles.
She rose now to leave Puigventós’ room, but he had one last parting shot.
‘The candidates. Have you decided on the shortlist?’
‘Getting there.’
‘Well, please get there sooner, Elisenda. The panel interviews are scheduled for next week. We have an inspectora from Barcelona coming. Please don’t make me waste her time. In light of the situation and experimental nature of your unit, the procedure has been adapted to suit you enough as it is. Don’t do anything to make me have to change that.’
‘I’ll try not to, Xavier.’
Back with her own team, she wanted to talk to them about how the new investigation was going to tie in with the cold case.
‘They’re obviously connected until we prove to ourselves otherwise,’ she began. ‘In that case, I want us all to work simultaneously on both killings so we have a clear picture of the parallels that we find. Josep’s already tracked down two of the archaeologists from the 1981 dig, so he and I will interview the guy in Barcelona. Montse and Àlex will see the woman here in Girona. Besides that, Josep will carry on looking for the other two archaeologists from the 1981 team and Àlex will continue to chase up the students who worked on the dig in 1980 and 1981. Montse, you keep looking into Esteve Mascort, check up on the wife, get the DNA swab from the father.’
‘Shouldn’t we be focusing on the Arbós murder?’ Àlex asked.
‘We are. But I have the feeling that they are so intertwined that we need to solve the past to solve the present. And vice versa.’
‘The past again,’ Àlex muttered, voicing all their thoughts.
‘As for the present case, Àlex, I want you to look into the victim. Find out everything you can about his work as a curator. I think that’s where we’re going to find the connection with the 1981 victim. I’d say we can assume the first victim is Mascort, although we still need to keep an open mind on that until it’s confirmed, so we should be looking for any connections between him and Arbós. And any links between Arbós and anyone involved in the 1981 dig. We also need to question Ferran Arbós’s neighbours. I don’t think we’ll find our answer there, but someone might have seen or heard something.’
‘Do we think Arbós is responsible for Mascort’s murder?’ Àlex asked. ‘And this is revenge?’
‘It’s the same doubt as with the Indiketa skulls,’ Elisenda said, nodding. ‘Is this display or deterrent? If it’s display, Arbós’s killer somehow knows or suspects that Arbós killed Mascort and is exacting revenge, like-for-like. And if it’s deterrent, Mascort’s killer is still alive and is sending out a warning through Arbós to anyone else who may have been around in 1981 about what could happen to them if they speak out.’
‘One killer or two, in other words,’ Àlex commented.
>
‘Why wait over thirty years?’ Josep wanted to know.
‘Because Mascort’s body has been found,’ Elisenda suggested. ‘And the killer is now covering tracks they never thought they’d have to cover. Anyway, it’s all good supposition. Initially, we’ll work on the basis that it could be one of those, and we’ll narrow it down as we learn more.’
She watched them all get up to leave the room once they’d all been allocated their jobs and her eyes went to the tightly-closed drawer where the candidates’ applications remained unread. She really didn’t want to have to look at them now, not when her team were more united and motivated than they had been at any time since Pau’s death. For a fleeting moment, she missed his unique blend of logic and imagination. She was seeing more and more how, in the team as it stood, Josep was taking on a large part of the organisation and doing it well and Montse’s ability to see less obvious paths was increasingly coming out. And Àlex. Àlex was a wounded version of himself, his passion and sharp mind numbed by what had happened to him, but she could see the wounds beginning to heal.
‘It’s your job to make sure they all mend fully,’ she told herself.
More than ever, she didn’t want a new member of the team to disturb the fragile balance of that process.
* * *
Unknown to her, Montse had one of Elisenda’s moments when she couldn’t face going home. Still living with her parents, given the difficulty of getting a mortgage these days, she’d left the nursing home where Esteve Mascort’s father was cared for in need of some time to herself. Returning the pool car to Vista Alegre, she’d walked along the river in the evening gloom to +Cub, at the start of Carrer Albereda, where she sat at a table with her back to the window onto the small square, one of the bar’s special gin and tonics with herb-infused ice cubes in front of her.
‘His hearing is poor,’ the nurse at the home had warned her. She and the mosso from Científica who’d come with Montse to take the sample had accompanied the man in light blue uniform and clogs along a hushed and institutional corridor. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’
The nurse had left them in Esteve Mascort’s father’s room, where Montse had sat down on a chair she’d pulled up in front of the father.
‘Senyor Mascort,’ she said, repeating her name to him three times, each one increasingly louder.
He’d looked at her, a smile on his face, trusting.
The hardest part was having to tell him in a raised voice, shorn of dignity or compassion, that they believed that they might have found his son.
‘I’m afraid he’s dead,’ she’d repeated a fourth time, having to shout to get through to the frail man in cotton pyjamas buttoned to the throat.
His face had folded. Tears formed in his eyes and quickly began to stream down his cheeks. He crumpled further into the well-worn high-winged chair, his clenched hands shaking in his thin lap in grief.
‘He was all I had left,’ the old man said, his voice failing on every word.
Montse had leaned forward in her chair and held him, his face against her neck, the bones of his shoulders frail in her arms.
The nurse had returned when they took the DNA sample, to witness that it was done with the elderly man’s consent. The Científica officer quickly took the swab from inside Senyor Mascort’s cheek, who barely moved or reacted while he was doing it, and nodded to Montse that he was done.
‘Thank you, Senyor Mascort,’ Montse had said, although he didn’t hear her, his eyes focused on the darkened window in front of him.
With the lights from the square casting her shadow over the table, she took a long sip of her gin and tonic, the herbs both soothing and stimulating. She wondered, not for the first time, whether to try and find a flat to share, not out in the Santa Eugènia suburb where she’d grown up but in the city centre. And not with other cops, but with people with whom she could switch off and talk running and cooking and the trivia of everyday nonsense rather than the minutiae of loss and evil.
She only noticed the guy at the next table when he spoke to her. Good-looking in a cleansed and moisturised sort of a way, he wasn’t her usual type, if there was such a thing. He asked if she wanted another drink and what she did. She lied on both counts, saying yes to a drink and to working in an office. When he asked her if she wanted to go for dinner, she sighed and reached for her coat.
‘Maybe another time,’ she told him.
* * *
Five minutes’ walk away, Josep sat in the same bar as the previous evening and waited for his girlfriend. He had reacted less at the time than the others to the scene in Vall-Llobrega but it had not left his memory for one moment since seeing it. Nursing a small beer at the bar, he sat hunched more than was usual even for him, his long legs crossed over on the stool, cramped against the counter, his shoulders pulled in, trying to take up as little space as he could.
‘Hi,’ his girlfriend said, cooler this time, her eyes searching his.
‘Hi.’
‘Do you want to go for dinner?’
He sighed. ‘Do you mind if we don’t? It’s been a hard day.’
‘Isn’t that what I’m here for?’
He looked at his glass and give a single shake of his head. Neither of them knew what it meant.
* * *
‘They’re asleep, Àlex.’
‘I didn’t see them this morning.’
Carme, Àlex’s wife, sighed and got up from the sofa. She’d got used to the change in the sound of her husband but still couldn’t get used to him staying in every evening. She could tell that his voice was slowly returning to normal, the trauma to his neck and vocal chords recovering with time, but she fervently hoped the same would hold true for his mind. For the time being, she’d lost the confident, knowing man who had always driven her up the wall and excited and fascinated her in equal measure.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he told her, following her along the corridor to their sons’ bedrooms.
Mateu, the six-year-old, was awake, sneakily reading a comic under the bedclothes.
‘You are so like your father,’ Carme teased him sadly.
Àlex went to the next room to wake up Jordi, who was just four and lying legs akimbo on the bed, trusting the world.
‘Am I allowed to stay up, papa?’ Jordi asked him.
‘It’s an order,’ Àlex told him, hugging him close.
Back on one of the armchairs in the living room, Carme sipped at her glass of Rioja and half-watched a programme on TV where a dozen or so people sat around a table and talked about something that appeared to matter to them. Out of the corner of her eye, she studied Àlex playing on the sofa with the two boys, holding them close to him in mock-fight. Her sons could barely keep their eyes open.
* * *
‘Not yet,’ Elisenda told herself, looking up at her darkened building reaching into the Girona night.
Instead, she went in through the glass door that led into La Terra, a gentle lively hubbub of a Thursday night in February. Rosa, the young woman behind the bar, smiled at her and pointed to a bottle of red wine. Elisenda nodded and looked for a seat. The tile and cushion benches in the window were all taken, so she sat at a cast iron and marble table under the big mirror. From where she sat, she could still make out her touchstone of the lights on the other side of the river and a steady flow of people strolling over the footbridge.
Looking around her, she saw two people she’d been to school with, so she picked up a newspaper lying on a chair nearby and opened it at random in front of her to fend off company. They saw her and waved, but didn’t come over. She wondered when she’d long for them or people like them to come and talk to her.
The rest of the Thursday-night crowd were younger, students or twenty-somethings, earnestly but ineffectually changing the world the way she had when she was their age. Except the world had changed, was constantly changing around us. She was reminded of the old Lluis Llach protest song at the time of Franco, L’Estaca, where we were all tied to a stake hamm
ered into the ground, but if you pulled a little on your side and I pulled a little on my side, then one day the stake would fall and we’d be free. Glumly, she felt that all that ever really changed was the nature of the stake.
‘Didn’t his head cave in?’
She perked up when she heard a teenage girl’s voice ask the question on the table next to her. The boy she was with replied.
‘No, he had like this brain and everything.’
They were discussing a comic the boy had read. Elisenda couldn’t help smiling. They were only about seven or eight years older than her own daughter would be now.
Taking one last sip of her glass of wine, she paid and climbed the stairs to her apartment. Once inside, with the door closed behind her, she heard a child’s voice singing.
‘Lina, please,’ she whispered to the emptiness. ‘Grow up.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘Zero tolerance for minor offences,’ Puigventós avowed at the morning meeting with Elisenda and Micaló. ‘I’ve spoken to the head of the Policia Municipal and he’s in agreement with me on this, pledging to clamp down on driving offences in the city.’
Micaló nodded his head vigorously. ‘I’ve set my unit targets in terms of petty crimes. We made four arrests yesterday, one for littering and three for anti-social behaviour.’
And my team is investigating the murders of two men who were impaled on spikes through the head, Elisenda thought wryly to herself.
‘Is there any way we could institute on-the-spot fines for these offences, Xavier?’ Micaló continued.
‘What are your thoughts, Elisenda?’ Puigventós asked her.
‘Probably a good idea,’ she finally told him. And it probably was, she had to admit. The problem was she was struggling with a question of scale. ‘Yes, I believe we do have to nip minor issues in the bud to prevent greater ills in the future.’
