by Chris Lloyd
A man was waiting outside, his face turned away from her. Before the door had opened fully, he turned back and ducked down to get under the door, bringing him into the full unforgiving light of the garage.
‘You?’ she gasped.
Chapter Forty Seven
‘Maybe we should tell Àlex,’ Montse decided.
She glanced around. Maria was in the kitchen, washing the coffee cups, Josep was at a window, peering out into the gloom. Flora hadn’t once left her post at the door.
Josep looked across at her. ‘Maybe we should,’ he whispered.
He cast his mind back to the morning at Vista Alegre searching through the records to try and find some sign of Ivan Morera, before Elisenda called and told them to get out to Maria Pujol’s cabin. Of how Manel had ceaselessly tried to order them about.
‘For Christ’s sake, leave that and start looking for the land registry records,’ he’d told Montse, the final command that had made her lose her temper with him.
‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ she’d told him, ‘you’re a caporal, the same as us.’
‘And we’ve been here longer,’ Josep had added. ‘You don’t get to tell us what to do.’
‘Just trying to get some order into this,’ Manel had replied, his closing words before an ill-tempered silence fell over the room.
Josep was brought back suddenly from his musing by a sound outside. Through the keening of the wind was an undertone of something scraping on the earth and twigs. Flora got to her feet sharply, her nose pressed up against the door. Josep and Montse exchanged a look, and Montse turned to see where Maria was. She’d evidently heard it too and was facing out into the living room from the kitchen.
‘That’s not an animal making that noise,’ Maria told them. ‘That’s some dumb human stumbling in the dark.’
‘I’ll go and look,’ Montse told Josep. ‘You stay here with Maria.’
‘Not a chance,’ Maria told her, striding forward. ‘This is my home. I’m going to look.’
She was at the door and out of it, with Flora bounding ahead of her into the dark, before Montse or Josep had time to react. Drawing their guns and holding their torches at head height, the two of them left the warmth of the cabin and followed their charge out into the night.
‘I’ll go this way,’ Montse told Josep above the wind, pointing with the beam of light at the path leading to the sea. ‘You check around the cabin first.’
He agreed and quickly made a circuit of the outside of the chaotic structure, coming back to the front door. He looked inside and closed the door before turning back to the path that Montse had taken. He couldn’t see the light of her torch or hear any noise other than the wind beginning to chant its lament in the trees on the edge of the beach at El Crit.
* * *
‘No news,’ Àlex told Manel as he got back into the car. It was pulled up in the old streets of Palamós as near to the hotel as he could get it. He’d just gone into the building to see if Sucarrats had returned. The receptionist had heard nothing from him. It was the only address they had for the owner as he lived in a suite on the top floor, so there was nowhere else they could try.
‘Is there anyone he might have gone to stay with?’ Àlex had asked the young guy behind the desk.
‘No one. I never saw him with anyone close.’
As Àlex was negotiating the narrow lanes back down to the port, his phone rang. He stopped the car to the annoyance of a couple of pedestrians behind them and answered. It was Poch in La Bisbal, calling to say that they’d had a sighting of Sucarrats’ car. The driver matched his description.
‘It was by the turnoff for La Fosca,’ Poch told him.
Àlex banged the steering wheel with his fist. He tried calling Elisenda’s mobile, but the number was unavailable. He knew that if she was in La Fosca, she would be unlikely to get a signal. Thinking, he called her sister in Girona to ask for the address of her beach house.
‘There’s no problem, Catalina,’ he told her. ‘I just need to contact Elisenda.’
With the address memorised, he moved the car forward, putting the blue light on and honking at the same irate pedestrians to get out of the way. Down in the port, he put his foot down and cut through the newer backstreets of the town on the way to La Fosca.
* * *
‘Please, close the door,’ he said urgently. ‘Quickly. I don’t know where he is.’
Instinctively, Elisenda did as he asked, but she kept her eyes on him all the time.
‘We’ve got half the Mossos out looking for you,’ she told him.
‘I don’t care,’ Sucarrats said. His normally stylish hair was dishevelled with sweat and his clothes were more on the shabby side than the usual chic. ‘Better you than him.’
‘Who?’
He was about to speak when the lights went off and the room was plunged into a more complete darkness than the winter streets outside. She tried the door button as it was closest to her but it wasn’t working. The electricity had blown. Or been switched off at the mains, upstairs where Miquel Canals was.
As her eyes grew used to the dark, she could sense that Sucarrats hadn’t moved either. She could just make out the vaguest shape where he’d been standing before. Reaching forward, she opened the car door and the courtesy light came on. He was standing where she’d last seen him, looking even more terrified than he had been less than a minute earlier. She was about to say something when a huge metallic clatter rang through the house, ringing on the tiled floor above their heads and echoing through the gloom of the garage. Someone had dropped something heavy to the ground. Like a hammer. Or a spike.
Taking her heavy police torch from the car and ruing once again having left her gun in the drawer in her bedroom, Elisenda told Sucarrats to stay where he was. She saw from the look on his face that he had no intention of moving anywhere away from the relative safety of the garage. Moving sideways so she could still see the hotelier out of the corner of her eye, she quickly climbed the stairs, making as little noise as possible. Pushing the door into the kitchen open with a rapid movement, she held the torch so the beam would dazzle anyone facing her in the room. There was no one there. No Miquel Canals, no one.
She quickly went into the living room, moving the light cast by the torch rapidly about to catch any movement or anyone hiding in a corner. Seeing no one, she made her way to the small hall at the top of the three steps and found the mains switch. Turning it on, she looked first back at the living room and then out into the dark beyond the front door, which had been left open. Whether it was by someone entering or leaving, she wasn’t sure.
For the first time, she noticed the blood on the wall by the front door. A hand that had smeared across as someone left in a hurry. Taking one more quick look at the room behind her, she ran out to the path in front of the house. The same light that had been on in Canals’ house earlier was still on, but from below she heard the sound of someone running across the shingle and splashing into the sea. Going to the edge of the low cliff, she looked down to see a figure pushing Canals’ beached kayak out into the water. The moon was behind a cloud, whipping quickly past in the rising wind, and she couldn’t make out who the person was. She shone her torch at them but they were too far away for the beam to penetrate.
As the figure steadied themselves in the kayak and began to paddle, she ran back into the house and down to the cellar. Sucarrats was still there and had locked himself in her car, although the exit was blocked by his own vehicle slewed in front of the door. Ignoring him, she grabbed a kayak from the wall and ran out into the night and towards the beach.
Pushing the craft into the water, she could just make out the person she was pursuing rowing north. Finding her position on the seat, she rammed the paddle into the black foam and pushed away from the shore. The other person had a big start on her, but the wind finally favoured her, blowing the clouds away and keeping her target in her sights. She felt her shoulders strain with practised ease and she cut through the
night water, her eyes never leaving the person ahead of her.
Only then did she remember that she hadn’t fetched her gun.
Chapter Forty Eight
‘Stop there.’
The man on the beach at El Crit turned to face Montse and raised the spear-gun, pointing it directly at her face. She shone the torch in his face, dazzling him.
‘Put the torch down, or I will fire this,’ he warned her.
She could see that despite being caught in the glare, he hadn’t wavered in the direction he was aiming the spike. Reluctantly, she angled the torch at the ground in front of him, but she didn’t turn it off. She could see him through the light reflected on the tiny pebbles, a ghostly glow under his chin, casting eerie shadows up his face.
He was old, she could see that. Wiry, with grey hair combed back in waves from a high forehead, which was accentuated by the meagre beam of light.
She heard footsteps behind her. On the edge of her vision, she saw Maria come and stand nearby, parallel to her but a short distance away.
‘Put that down,’ Maria told the man.
He looked at her and then back at Montse.
‘I can’t,’ he told Maria.
* * *
Sucarrats’ car was pulled up in front of the garage at the beach house and the large door was open, flooding the small area in front of it in halogen light.
Àlex and Manel got out of their car and approached. The first car was empty. Àlex recognised the second, the one inside, as a Mossos pool car, the one that Elisenda had been using. It was also empty.
There was no one there. Drawing his gun, Àlex told Manel to go around the outside of the house and approach the house from the front. Watching him hurry out. Àlex quickly climbed the stairs into the kitchen. Checking the downstairs rooms, he saw they were empty, but lying on the floor behind one of the large sofas was a large metal spike, the sort used on construction sites. He also saw the blood on the wall by the front door. At that same moment, Manel ran in, also looking at the stains, careful not to touch them.
‘There’s someone in the water,’ Manel told him, his voice gasping.
Running out, they peered over the cliff and saw a figure paddling a kayak hurriedly away from the beach.
‘There’s another,’ Manel said, pointing further away at another craft caught in the moonlight.
‘That’s the direction of El Crit,’ Àlex told him.
Going back into the house, they found a dishevelled and frightened man waiting for them in the living room.
‘Sucarrats?’ Àlex said, recognising him from his photo. ‘Where’s Elisenda?’
Visibly shaken, the hotelier pointed towards the stairs down to the garage. ‘She took a kayak and went outside. There was someone upstairs.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to ask Elisenda for protection. I know who it is you’re after. I think he’s after me.’
‘Who is it?’ Àlex demanded.
Sucarrats told him a name.
‘Who?’ Àlex couldn’t hide his disbelief.
Taking a decision, he told Sucarrats to come with them. Quickly putting him in the back seat and handcuffing his hands to the stanchion at the base of the front seat, Àlex turned on the blue light and floored the accelerator. In the passenger seat, Manel tried his phone, but there was no signal.
‘Where are we going?’ Sucarrats asked.
‘El Crit.’
‘No,’ the hotelier wailed, his head hanging down to his lap.
* * *
Elisenda could see that she was catching the other person up. She paused once to shine her torch at them, but they were still too far away for her to see who it was and it only slowed her down, so she thrust it back into the top of her jacket and renewed her paddling. She couldn’t help asking herself all the while she rowed, her mind chanting in rhythm with her paddle, who it was that she was chasing. An hour ago, she would have said it was Sucarrats, but that was before he turned up at her sister’s house. An hour ago, she had decided it wasn’t Canals, but that before his use of the missing student’s odd phrase. And if it wasn’t him, where was he now and whose blood was it in the hall? She also still wondered if she had Ricard Soler in her sights. Or the man picking up litter from the beach. And if he really was Ivan Morera.
Whoever it was that she was chasing also seemed to sense that she was closing the gap on them, and they suddenly veered in towards the shore. Elisenda followed them, knowing in the black that she couldn’t worry about the rocks lying below the water’s surface.
Then she heard the scream.
A woman’s scream cutting through the sea-black night, filling the darkness and pulling her inexorably back to El Crit.
* * *
Àlex drove the car further along the track towards the sea than he should have, only stopping when a rock brought them to a halt with a loud grinding crack underneath. Getting out, he left Manel to keep guard over Sucarrats and he ran through the trees, following the swathe cut by the beam of his torch and ignoring the needles flaying his face and hands. Up ahead, the wind rising from the sea curled through the night, whispering a dark lullaby in his ears.
Crashing through it, another noise tore into his head, recalling Elisenda’s legend of the beach. A woman’s scream, shrill in the void.
* * *
A woman’s scream.
It stopped Josep momentarily in his tracks, before spurring him on. He was at the top of the ragged steps down to the beach at El Crit. Below him, he could see a faint light on the stones. He took the steps as quickly as he could, their tortuous course taking the three figures he’d spotted on the beach in and out of sight as he descended them. The lull left in the aftermath of the scream brought another sound through the wind’s song. The rippling of water, of someone in the sea approaching land.
Jumping the final steps, by the fishermen’s huts, he ran out onto the beach to see Montse, Maria and a man in an uneven triangle. Montse was looking in shock at Maria. It was the older woman who had screamed. A pent-up scream born of anger and frustration.
‘Let me go.’
As Josep drew up to them, Maria walked ahead and placed herself between the man and Montse. ‘Put it down,’ she told him, her voice calmer now.
Montse saw Josep and signalled to him to move around to the other side of the man.
‘Drop your weapon,’ Josep told him, following Montse’s lead.
‘Put it down,’ Maria repeated.
Hesitantly, the man bent forward and placed the spear-gun on the ground. Montse walked up to him and removed the weapon. She handed it to Josep, who gingerly placed it at the foot of the steps, fearful its mechanism would suddenly go off.
‘Ivan Morera?’ Montse asked him.
‘Who?’ he looked puzzled.
Maria walked up to where they were standing. ‘I don’t know who your Ivan Morera is. This is Ricard Soler. The silly old duffer still thinks he has to protect me.’
‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,’ he told her, the pleading evident in his frail voice.
‘You are joking,’ Montse told them both in frustration.
The rippling of the water that Josep had heard became louder, and they turned to see a kayak grind across the surface of the water, scraping against the rocks, and beach on the pebbles at the far end of the shore from where they were held in thrall in the weak torchlight. A figure clambered off the craft and ran ashore, splashing through the thin surf. Seeing them, the shape ran to the edge of the cliff towering over the beach and vanished into the darkness. Reacting, Josep and Montse shone their torches to try and pick out whoever it was, but the beams weren’t strong enough.
A second kayak came ashore, a second figure stumbling through the water onto the pebbles. Josep ran from the steps to where the other three were still standing. Montse continued to keep an eye on Ricard Soler while Josep moved forward, his gun raised, to try and make out who the newcomer was.
‘It’s me,’ an exhausted voice
called across the beach. ‘Elisenda. Stop that person.’
Josep immediately turned back to the darkened cliff, shining his torch, but a movement at the foot of the steps caught his eye and he turned to see the figure pick up the spear-gun and start running up the steps.
Elisenda ran to join the four people gathered in torchlight, trying to catch her breath. ‘Give me your gun,’ she told Montse.
She and Josep chased after the shadow turning back on itself up the rough steps. As they reached the bottom, another light appeared at the top, descending towards them, at each turn momentarily catching their prey in its spotlight.
‘It’s me, Àlex,’ a voice called from the top.
The figure stopped, hesitating, caught between pursuers top and bottom. In the gloom and at a distance, Elisenda still couldn’t make out who it was. It ran first up the steps, then down, evidently in two minds what to do. Finally, it ran down to the first bend in the flight of steps and leapt off towards the protective shadow of the fishermen’s cottages.
They heard a wet thud that reminded Elisenda of the grappling hooks being embedded in the tuna brought ashore at the port in Palamós. A second scream rent the darkness, a man’s scream.
Àlex ran down to the bend in the steps and called down to Elisenda and Josep, who had descended once again to the bottom to make their way to the rear of the huts.
‘I know who it is,’ Àlex told them.
Elisenda led the way cautiously to the back of the nearest hut to the steps and shone her torch at a figure standing with his back to the wall. Held fast by the rusted iron bracket for hanging nets that Elisenda had spotted a few days earlier was a man, the thick spike of the metal arm thrust through the back of his skull and projecting out of his forehead.
