by Chris Lloyd
At the end of the Rambla, they crossed the river on the narrow Pont de les Peixateries footbridge, built by Eiffel. Stopping to stare a moment at the bombazine water through the red iron lattice that embraced them, Catalina looked up and sighed.
‘I hate it when they turn the cathedral lights off,’ she commented. ‘It looks so sad.’
‘Winter sad,’ Elisenda agreed.
The solid shape rose reassuring but sombre above the city, its one tower obscuring a blackening sky. In an hour or so, you’d only know it was there by its absence, a darker shadow over the old town.
‘You’re looking better, mind,’ Catalina told her. ‘Not so tatty. Like you’re sleeping better.’
‘Ice cream,’ Elisenda reminded her sister, bundling her across the bridge towards the other side, their shoes clattering loudly on the wooden floor.
They’d ordered a cornet inside Rocambolesc, amid the fantasy red and white striped pipes, choosing a different topping each, and taken them back out on to Carrer Santa Clara to eat them.
‘I can’t eat it,’ Catalina had said after her first mouthful. ‘It’s too cold.’
‘It’s ice cream.’
Catalina gave hers to Elisenda, who stood helpless with a cone in each hand in the biting evening chill. With both hands full, she hung her head at the shrill sound of her phone clamouring for her in her pocket. Looking pointedly at her sister, she slowly placed both ice creams in a bin and reached inside her jacket.
‘I’ll be glad when this baby’s born,’ she told her.
* * *
The apartment door was wedged halfway open when Elisenda got there, two Científica examining either side of the split wood, dusting the long steel spike impaled in it and the area around the front and back of the door and the bell for fingerprints.
‘Clean so far,’ one of them told her.
Gingerly, Elisenda stepped inside the flat and studied the sharp end of the pin where it came through the spyhole. With the force of the hammer blows, it had burst through the fisheye glass inside the little metal frame, which now lay on the floor some distance into the hall next to a small plastic marker. She imagined Clara Ferré looking through it and couldn’t help wincing.
‘Through there,’ the second forensic officer told her, gesturing behind to the interior doors beyond.
The archaeologist was sitting on the sofa next to her son. She was holding a glass of wine, taking small and insistent sips from it. Her son stared at the wall opposite, his hands fluttering in his lap. She looked up when Elisenda walked in and sat down in an armchair at a right-angle to the sofa.
‘It only just missed me,’ was the first thing Ferré told her. She sounded more angry than frightened.
Elisenda listened to the woman’s account of what had happened and asked her if she knew of anyone who might want to harm her.
‘No one. Two of your people came to see me to ask about Esteve Mascort, but I really don’t know anything about that. It was all a long time ago.’
‘We think this might have more to do with Ferran Arbós,’ Elisenda told her. ‘We believe that there’s some relationship between his death and that of Esteve Mascort.’
‘But they barely knew each other as far as I know. Esteve and I were at the same stage in our careers when he went missing, and I know I had no contact with Arbós at that time, so I doubt Esteve did. You can’t think it was anything to do with that, can you? After all this time?’
The sound of footsteps came from the hall and Àlex walked into the living room. He nodded at Elisenda and sat down in another chair.
‘Can you think of any connection between you and the two of them that anyone might make?’ Elisenda continued.
The archaeologist’s hand began to shake slightly, and she put the glass down on the coffee table. Finally showing some reaction, her son reached across and held her hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ferré said, ‘but I really can’t think right now. I don’t understand why anyone would want to attack me. I don’t know anything.’
Elisenda saw that they weren’t going to get much more out of her for the time being, a delayed shock setting in, so she asked her if there was anywhere else she could stay for a few days, but Ferré shook her head vehemently.
‘I’m not being forced out of my own home. We’re staying here.’
Àlex was about to argue, but Elisenda stopped him. ‘We’ll make sure you have protection from uniformed officers,’ she told the archaeologist.
‘We’re not going to get any more sense out of her tonight,’ Elisenda told Àlex on the staircase after they’d left Ferré and her son. ‘She’s told us all we need to know about tonight’s attack, so we’ll make sure there’s a watch on her and question her again about Arbós when she’s calmer.’
‘You think it’s safe for her to stay here?’
‘If this were a genuine attack, he wouldn’t have just smashed a spike through her door. This killer’s efficient, he would’ve got inside the apartment and done the job properly. This is intimidation, another display to warn people that he’s out there and to tell them to keep quiet about anything they might know.’
‘So why kill Arbós? Why not just a deterrent with him?’
‘Because Arbós really did know the dealer. He worked with him for years and could have incriminated him or blackmailed him with Mascort’s murder after his body was found.’
Àlex nodded his acceptance of her argument.
‘If the dealer is our murderer, that is,’ she added, still uncertain.
Chapter Thirty Two
Tentacles of mist slithered across the surface of the river, slowly reaching into the gaps between the overhang of the houses and the water, probing the underside of the Pont de Sant Agustí, poising to curl over the top of the footbridge and wrap itself around the ankles of the young man walking in dawn tiredness across it. Elisenda rested her head against the cold kitchen window and watched the wintry brown of the Onyar disappear under a grim white shroud as the gelid air rolled down from the mountains. Closing her eyes, she yawned, her eyes so tight for a moment she remembered all the times she’d thought in fear as a child that they’d never open again.
Struggling to raise her eyelids, she focused on the city waking up along the river and was surprised to see Àlex on the bridge, walking towards her side of town. She’d barely had time to put away the duvet she’d wrapped around herself on the living room sofa in the fractured night and close the door on her unslept-in bed before the downstairs doorbell rang.
‘It’s Àlex,’ he called up on the intercom when she answered. ‘Come for breakfast.’
‘Be down now,’ she told him, keeping the tone of wonder out of her voice. It was the first time he’d ever called on her before work.
She laced her boots up and put her warm jacket on, taking one last look behind her before closing the door. She thought she saw a shadow flit across the living room beyond the small hallway and felt a moment of sorrow at her relief at the thought of spending that night away from home.
‘Home,’ she muttered wryly and trotted downstairs.
Àlex was waiting for her on the narrow road in front of the door to her building.
‘No chance of getting run down in the metropolis,’ he commented.
‘Yeah, so Barcelona has traffic,’ she teased him. ‘What are you doing here? Can’t keep away?’ They’d only parted outside Clara Ferré’s building a few hours earlier.
He looked uncertain for a moment before replying. ‘Interviews today. I thought you might want some support. Go for breakfast.’
She nodded. ‘Going to be a tough day, I suppose,’ she admitted. She was touched but didn’t want to show it. ‘You’re buying, I take it.’
He grinned, one of the quiet grins she was beginning to get used to. ‘You look terrible, by the way. Didn’t you sleep?’
She paused the briefest moment. ‘Bad dream.’
‘What about?’
She recalled the nightmare she’d had a few nigh
ts ago and gave him a sanitised version of her vision of a woman on the beach at El Crit. She didn’t say the woman looked like how she imagined her daughter would have been as an adult.
‘Why’s it called El Crit?’ Àlex asked her when she’d finished.
They were crossing Quatre Cantons, a cold wind from the river suddenly catching them broadside. A small plane flew overhead, briefly visible above the rooftops. Looking up, Elisenda almost missed her step on the pavement. She caught herself just in time and answered Àlex’s question.
‘The scream? You really want to know? It’s a legend.’
Àlex shook his head angrily. ‘Hell fire, Elisenda, are you lot in Girona capable of seeing anything or doing anything without attaching a legend to it? For Christ’s sake.’
She let his anger subside before continuing. ‘Some say it’s a true story. A Moorish ship raiding the coast took shelter there in a sea fog one night. The next morning they heard a cock crow and thought there must be someone living nearby. They found a house, tied up the owner and stole everything and set fire to the barn. As they were leaving, they heard a cry and discovered the owner’s daughter, but when the captain tried to take her back to the ship, she began to scream at him to let her go and bit his finger. So the captain drew his sword and cut her head off. That’s it. When the wind blows, it whistles through the cove, supposedly the daughter’s screams.’
Àlex didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘As long as that bullshit doesn’t come back to haunt us,’ he finally replied. He refused to talk any more about it, and Elisenda showed him in through a door into the welcome warmth of a café. They took a stool each at the bar.
‘This place used to be called Granja Mora,’ she told him, coaxing him to speak again. ‘It had been here for sixty-odd years before it closed. It had a ruler running up the wall over there showing how high the flood water came up when the river overflowed. I used to love it as a kid.’
Àlex grunted. ‘I’d never smelt damp in the air before coming to Girona.’
‘You see, new experiences. What more could you want? My father used to have a beard years ago, but he shaved it off one winter because he was so fed up with it being sopping wet with the humidity all the time.’
Àlex waited until he’d been served his black café sol and turned to face her. ‘That dream is bullshit, Elisenda.’
‘It’s a legend.’
‘No, the dream. You didn’t have one. Something’s up when you stay here in Girona. You don’t sleep.’
Elisenda took a slow sip of her café amb llet and tried to show nothing of what she felt. ‘This is support?’
‘Yes, Elisenda, it is. I saw the plane just now. You think we don’t notice, but you’re always looking up when you hear one. I know it’s about your daughter.’ He finished his coffee in two gulps the way he always did and put it down on the counter. Absently, he prodded at the small breakfast cheese roll in front of him. ‘When I… When I nearly died last year, you insisted that I had counselling.’
‘It’s standard procedure, Àlex.’
‘Yes, but you insisted. You thought I needed it.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t?’
He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I did. I didn’t appreciate it at the time. And I resented you telling me I needed it, but you were right. The problem is that now it’s my turn to say the same thing to you. You need to talk to someone, Elisenda.’
‘Talk to someone? Why? Where’s your counselling left you, Àlex? I can sort my own problems out.’
‘Elisenda,’ Àlex insisted, his voice cold but urgent, ‘you need to talk to someone.’
She put her cup down on the counter and asked for the bill. She didn’t wait for him to eat his breakfast.
‘We both do, Àlex.’
She picked up her bag from the floor and left for Vista Alegre.
* * *
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to put the first interview back at least half an hour,’ Puigventós told Elisenda when she went to his office. ‘The inspectora coming from Barcelona has rung to say she’s stuck in traffic. An accident on the motorway, apparently. The candidates have been told.’
Elisenda nodded, faintly relieved at the stay of execution. Checking her watch, she saw she was still early for work.
‘Breakfast,’ she told herself. The rumbling in her stomach was telling her that she hadn’t eaten yet. She hadn’t even finished her coffee before leaving Àlex in the café.
Seeing that none of her team was in the office yet, she walked out of the building and past the two cafés by the station to avoid having to get into conversation with other Mossos and went the short distance along the river away from the centre to a tiny little café on the corner of a narrow street.
Micaló was in there, and it was too late for her to back out. He saw her and gestured half-heartedly to the chair opposite him at the red-topped table.
‘Not the sort of place I’d expect to find you, Roger,’ she told him, ordering a café amb llet and two croissants from the café owner.
‘Precisely why I come here,’ he replied. ‘I’m usually left to my own thoughts. I take it you’ve been told the inspectora from Barcelona’s running late? It must be a relief to you.’
‘A relief?’
Micaló studied her before continuing. ‘I have to apologise for what I said yesterday about your unit and the death of your officer. I was perhaps too zealous about the low-level crime initiative and I took Mosso Paredes’ actions too personally.’
Elisenda was taken entirely by surprise and had to gather her thoughts before answering. ‘Apology accepted. Thank you. But why do you say it must be a relief?’
‘I’ve never lost a member of my team, or any colleague I’ve worked with, for that matter, so I can only imagine what it must have been like to lose your caporal last year. I should imagine that anything that puts off having to replace him would feel like a reprieve.’
She could only stare at him, stunned by his insight, shaken by his sympathy. She looked for any sign of insincerity, but Micaló’s face was blank, unfathomable.
‘Do you know anything about her?’ she asked, wanting to move on. ‘This inspectora from Barcelona.’
‘Fast-track, tipped for a senior post before she’s forty, that’s all I know. I read an article she wrote for La Vanguardia on modern policing, which I found very interesting, but I’ve never met her. I must admit I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Right.’ Another career politician, Elisenda instantly thought. She’d already decided that she was probably not going to like her.
‘Only one woman on the shortlist, I noticed.’
Elisenda shrugged. ‘I chose the best five.’
She had to admit to herself that she wasn’t entirely sure that that was true. In her reluctance to take on a new member of the team because it finally meant accepting Pau’s death, she knew that she hadn’t looked at the applications as closely as she had done when taking on the original officers in her unit, the excitement she felt then in stark contrast to the deep aversion to change she felt now. Her only choosing one woman to go forward for interview was unintended. When the Mossos took over policing in Catalonia, one of the ways in which they wanted to sever any connection with the past was in recruitment. Apart from police finally being from their own region, something that didn’t happen under the old Spanish system, the Catalan police took the decision that it wanted to attract more women and more graduates. But instead of having quotas, they adopted a solution that Elisenda had to admit to finding quite neat, on the whole. Rather than an equal ratio of candidates, it was the people taking the decisions in the selection process that had to fulfil quotas. At every stage in the procedure, including all the tests and all the decisions as to who went on to the next stage, and all the interviews, the panel that chose who was recruited or promoted had to be made up of an equal number of men and women of an equal rank. This was why they were waiting now for the inspectora from Barcelona. Elisenda and Micaló were t
he two sotsinspectors, Puigventós and the officer now stuck in traffic were the two inspectors. The idea was that, ultimately, the Mossos chose the best possible candidates, regardless of gender, while reducing the possibility of the gatekeepers only letting their own sort into the club. For the want of anything better, Elisenda felt it worked quite well.
‘I’d better be getting back,’ Micaló suddenly said, getting up. ‘I’ll get this.’
‘No it’s okay, thanks. I’ll get mine.’
He paused before leaving and picked up a newspaper from the adjacent table. ‘You probably need to read this.’
She watched him go before picking the paper up. The first double spread inside was an account of how Ferran Arbós had died. Elisenda cursed and read on. Despite the space given over to it, the article was mainly conjecture, but dangerous conjecture, demanding to know why the curator would have been killed so savagely and making the obvious connection between his death and the body found at El Crit.
Sighing, she folded the paper up and made to leave, when her phone rang. It was Gemma Cardoner from the Archaeology Service.
‘Elisenda, I’ve found something more for you.’
El Crit, 1981
‘I want to find a skull.’
‘Grow up.’
The student knew he was on a hiding to nothing, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘I want to find a skull with a spike,’ he insisted. ‘Something that changes what we know about the Indiketa.’
Esteve Mascort stood up from where he was digging in the trench at El Crit and grinned, a mocking gash of white picked out in the cold spotlight under the parallel line of his dark moustache.
‘Believe me, I know what you want and it’s not to find some ancient bones.’ He walked forward under the harsh glare of the arc lamps set up next to where they were both digging and pushed his face right up to the student’s. His smile increased as the student flinched. ‘Money. That’s what drives you. Wealth, position.’
