by Chris Lloyd
Unlike her fellow patrons.
And the owner.
She watched him now. Rings of sweat darkening the front and sides of his pale brown polyester shirt, one leg hitched high up on the rear of the counter, the wattles on his face red and shining in the heat from the kitchen behind him where three young Asian guys were hard at work.
The man Elisenda had come to see was standing opposite him. A razor-thin profile of sunken cheeks and narrow jaw atop a body so slight his shirt kept popping out of his saggy trouser belt no matter how often he tucked it back in. His prominent Adam's apple bobbed nervously behind turkey skin every time he gulped. It bobbed now as his eyes flickered warily in Elisenda's direction, so she raised her glass at him. Slung across his shoulder was an enormous light-brown leather satchel, the kind Elisenda remembering postmen carrying in her childhood. Reluctantly, he dipped into it and pulled out a small pile of garishly-coloured DVDs. The owner took them and put them in a drawer behind the counter and turned back to the thin man. 'My commission for letting you sell in my bar.'
His business over, the thin man had no other option but to walk over to Elisenda's table.
'Siset,' she greeted him affably, 'sit down.'
'Can't, Elisenda. Got to go home, look after my mother.'
'She ill?'
'Yes.'
'Sorry to hear that. Sit down.'
Grumbling, he scraped the chair opposite Elisenda across the tiled floor and sat down.
'You might want to pull your chair a bit nearer,' Elisenda told him.
'I'm fine.'
'Suit yourself.' She slowly cut up some aubergine and placed it carefully on a piece of toast. 'So, got any more information for me today?' she added in a louder voice.
'Shush,' he hissed at her, pulling his chair right up to the table, his Adam's apple almost bobbing over Elisenda's lunch.
'Now isn't that more comfortable?' she asked him.
'I don't know anything.'
'About what?'
'I don't know.'
Elisenda looked at him, chewing slowly. 'This really is very good, you know,' she said, her voice loud. She saw the owner looking over to them. Her voice dropped again. 'Daniel Masó.'
He recoiled, as though she'd stabbed him with her fork.
'I don't know anything.'
'You keep saying that.'
'But I don't,' he hissed back. 'Really I don't.'
Elisenda called the owner over. 'Can I have a glass of wine for my friend?'
'Stop it, Elisenda, you'll get me hurt,' Siset pleaded when the owner brought the drink, looking from one to the other of them. He picked up the glass in both hands and swallowed the wine in one gulp, a tiny belch emerging from his pursed lips. Elisenda could see his hands shaking as he put the glass down. The ends of his fingers were scabbed and raw where he bit them. He was wearing the same black T-shirt announcing a faded concert that he always wore, the armpits stiffly white and concertinaed with years of sweat and cheap anti-perspirant.
Elisenda shrugged. 'Sooner you tell me, sooner I go. Less damage I do. Now tell me what you know.'
'But that's the thing,' Siset whispered urgently at her. 'I don't know. No one does.'
'You see that's impossible, Siset?' Elisenda put the last of her lunch into her mouth. 'Someone must know. One person at least. Fancy a coffee?'
'It's no one in the world, Elisenda.'
'No one bragging?'
'Would you?'
Elisenda called over to the owner. 'Could I have a tallat, please? And whatever my friend wants.'
'Please, Elisenda,' Siset pleaded, his head in his cupped hands, oily brown hair spilling limply through his fingers.
Elisenda kept quiet while the owner brought her small white coffee over. 'So what are people saying?' she asked Siset after he'd gone.
'Everyone reckons it's vigilantes,' Siset replied hopefully.
Elisenda nodded. 'Because if it's vigilantes, you think I won't come back asking more questions. But I will. What else are they saying?'
'Foreigners. Lots of foreigners in Salt now. You can't move for them all eating their food and praying funny.'
'Try again.'
'I tell you, Elisenda. Everyone's as puzzled as you are.' He looked thoughtful for once. 'No one can think of anyone who'd have the balls to do it.'
'One of his victims?'
He shrugged, his head almost enveloped up to the ears by bony shoulders. 'Could be.'
'I take it Masó's bunch have thought of the same thing.'
'They've asked a few questions.'
'I'm sure they have.' Elisenda made a mental note to have Josep look into anyone with a new and unusual injury in Salt. 'What about other gangs? Incomers?'
Siset shook his head. 'Masó's family are too powerful. There's no way anyone would try and muscle in on Salt, least of all by killing Daniel.'
Elisenda nodded her head slowly. 'Was Masó looking to go into other neighbourhoods?'
'No need. The family's got Salt tied up so much, there's no need to take any of the new gangs on. They live well where they are,' he added without any irony.
'Don't they just.' She stirred her coffee, spooning through the light milk froth. 'So what about Masó's family? What are they doing about it?'
'They've put themselves about a bit. Got heavy with a couple of the Latins. No one important. They're more worried about keeping their business going than they are about revenge.'
'Sure they didn't do it?'
Siset paused a moment too long. 'You know Masó's lot wouldn't do that. They're all family. They wouldn't dare.'
Elisenda considered the Masó clan. The father and the uncles presiding over the old town in Salt. The grandfather presiding over prison on his latest conviction. A warren of cousins, brothers and nephews held in place by fear and loyalty, their sway extending into Santa Eugènia and Sant Narcís. She found it hard to imagine any of them going against the family.
'What aren't you telling me, Siset?'
Siset sighed, almost crumpling. He pushed an unruly strand of hair behind his right ear and absently wiped his hand on his shoulder. 'Please, Elisenda,' he finally said in a low voice. 'You didn't hear it from me. There's talk of one of the uncles, Joaquim. He wants in.'
'Enough to take on his own family?' Elisenda thought out loud.
'It might not be true, though. I tell you, everyone's in the dark.'
'OK,' Elisenda said, gathering her bag and getting up to pay at the bar. 'The moment you come into the light, you call me.'
'I will,' he promised.
'Because otherwise I'll call on you.'
At the bar, the owner told Elisenda lunch was on the house.
'No, it's not,' she said, reaching into her purse.
Outside, Elisenda waited around the corner for Josep to catch up with her.
'You get that?' she asked him. He'd been sitting at a table on the square, listening over his bluetooth. He nodded. 'Did you see anyone paying undue attention? Anyone leave in a hurry?'
'Only the owner of the place. He wasn't happy.'
'Bad for trade,' Elisenda agreed.
'Apart from him, no one. Some of them in there recognised you, but they didn't seem over-worried. Apart from that, lot of tourists.'
'Strange place, isn't it? Nice terrace, good food, plenty of passing trade and it's stuffed to the gills with the arse-end of the fauna of the city.'
'There are a couple of things he said that I can try following up,' Josep offered.
'Good. And check on anyone known or thought to be one of Masó's clients with dubious injuries in the last couple of days.'
Josep noted it down in his notebook. 'You were pretty tough on him,' he commented when he'd finished writing. 'The little guy.'
'Look him up on NIP,' she told him. 'Then tell me I was tough on him.'
Chapter Four
'Joaquim Masó?' Àlex asked.
'Uncle of our very own Daniel Masó. Runs a parcel delivery firm. Small-scale. Very much on th
e fringes of the family.'
'Legit?'
Elisenda shook her head. 'He's a Masó.'
Àlex smiled, a wicked, dark grin. The edgy, knowing smile that excited half the women at the station and angered the other half. Too many bad boys outside the station, the second group said. Exactly, the first group argued.
He edged forward in the stop-start traffic snarl heading for Salt, Daniel Masó's stamping ground. Once a town, then a suburb, now a town again, Salt sprawled in a humble, troubled ribbon from the western fringes of Girona to the motorway connecting France with Barcelona.
'I still find it hard to imagine a Masó taking on the family,' Elisenda added.
After seeing Siset, she'd told Josep to go back to the station and had called Àlex, who'd just left the Institut de Medicina Legal, not far from the law courts, to get him to pick her up to drive out to Salt. He'd told her of the preliminary opinion that Albert Riera, the pathologist, had given. The post mortem proper was scheduled for two days' time.
'He had two stab wounds to the chest,' Àlex told her. 'Probably either could have been the fatal blow, Riera reckons. Quite a fight, evidently. He had defence wounds to both his hands and his forearms.'
Elisenda tried to imagine the scene in the derelict building. And the killer then hanging Masó out of the window. She wondered where his nose being cut off fitted in. What at first sight seemed a straightforward killing of a vicious criminal who operated in a world where that was always a possibility took on puzzling dimensions. And now they were going to see the Masó family to question them about his death. She sighed heavily.
'We're here,' Àlex told her.
The clans had gathered.
Four generations of delinquency at the red-check plastic tablecloth restaurant owned by one of the uncles as a front. Even the children in sombre mood, not running about or hiding under the chairs, all infected by the dark anger of the three tiers of adults above them. With the grandfather in prison, it was Jaume Masó, Daniel's father, who was the head of the family.
But before him were the cousins on the door, barring Elisenda and Àlex's entry into the restaurant.
'Family only,' one of them told Àlex, placing a hand weighed down by a thick gold chain on the Mosso's chest. Àlex smiled at the man and gently removed his hand, continuing to stare at him. The man put has hand back and pushed slightly.
'We're just here to pay our respects,' Elisenda told him.
The man at the door didn't take his eyes off Àlex. 'Family only.'
A second man moved closer, flexing his chest and thrusting his shoulders forward.
The restaurant door opened and Jaume Masó came out. 'It's OK,' he told the men on the door. 'You go in. I'll deal with this.'
'Jaume,' Elisenda spoke. 'I've come to offer my condolences.'
He looked surprised at first as he stared into Elisenda's eyes, but then softened. Nodding his head slowly, he thanked her. 'You understand.'
He invited them in, but only as far as the bar. The restaurant was closed to the public but was filled with family members, who stared coldly at the two Mossos. Elisenda spotted Joaquim seated at a table away from the senior family members, near the window, where the sun was shining in, bringing him out in an uncomfortable sweat. He spoke little to the people around him.
Jaume offered them a glass of market-stall cava and a tray of cured ham, sliced from a whole ham wedged in a stand behind the bar.
'This is my sergent, Àlex Albiol,' Elisenda said, thanking him.
Jaume nodded. 'I thank you for your condolences, Elisenda, but the family would prefer you not to be here.'
'I understand that, Jaume, but a murder has been committed. We will need to interview some members of your family. To help us in our enquiries and to eliminate them from them.'
Jaume's voice dropped in temperature a few degrees. 'Eliminate them?'
'It's standard procedure, Jaume.'
Another of Jaume's brothers and his two sons, the ones on the door, came to stand nearby.
'This is my family, Elisenda,' Jaume told her. 'We look after our own.'
'And we don't need the Mossos to do it for us,' one of the cousins interrupted. Jaume gave him a stern look and he shut up.
'You know that's not possible, Jaume,' Elisenda said. 'We will need your co-operation to find whoever did this to Daniel.'
Jaume just looked at her and around the room at his family. 'But we won't need you, Elisenda. We can find whoever did this and we will deal with it. You have my word on that.'
'I'm sorry about that, Jaume. Because you have my word that if you do take the law into your own hands, I will deal with that.'
Two more members of the family came over, one of them standing very close to Àlex. Every other head in the room was facing their way, every other pair of eyes focused on the two Mossos.
'I think you should go now, Elisenda,' Jaume told her. 'Leave my family to grieve.'
Elisenda turned to go. 'I will have to come back, Jaume.'
The men around them jostled Àlex's shoulders as they walked out of the restaurant but moved aside to let Elisenda pass, their antiquated attention automatically focusing on the man, not the woman.
'So what did you make of that?' Elisenda asked Àlex when they were back in the unmarked pool car.
Àlex eased out onto the main road back to Girona. 'Uncle Joaquim seems to be a long way down the pecking order. Maybe he didn't like that.'
'Did you see the way he was dressed compared with the others? And their jewellery? You can see why he would want a piece of the family silver.'
Àlex nodded. 'Which is as good a reason as any for someone in that family to kill.'
*
Back at the Mossos' Vista Alegre station, the most recent addition to the team, Pau, another caporal, told them that Montse and Josep were in Salt, checking up on Masó's victims.
'Good,' Elisenda told him. 'There's something I want you to take a look at. Joaquim Masó. We need to know the state of his business. I'll be applying to Jutgessa Roca for a warrant to get his bank account details, if he uses one, but I want you to find out if his business is healthy or if he looks like someone who needs to take over the family empire. While you're at it, anyone else in the Masó family who looks a likely contender to kill Daniel.'
'Yes, Sotsinspectora,' Pau replied. 'I've got this for you.' He showed Elisenda a spreadsheet on the computer in front of him. Arranged in rows were the names of the Masó clan members, with a series of columns detailing criminal records, business interests and even their probability of being involved in Daniel's murder. 'I hope you don't mind.'
Elisenda looked astonished. 'Mind? Anything but. This is excellent.'
Looking slightly embarrassed, Pau told her that Joaquim was the unfavoured arm of the family. 'But he does look like someone who should interest us. His business is healthy enough, mainly thanks to being a Masó, and he's been suspected of fencing in the past, but he earns nowhere near the amount we calculate Daniel or some of the other members would be making. I think he's worth looking at.'
'I think you're right.'
Pau turned back to his computer and Elisenda watched him work for a moment, his slender honey-coloured fingers spidering gently across the keyboard, his long black eyelashes barely flickering. Private in nature, he'd been born in Girona to Andalusian immigrants, originally christened the Spanish Pablo, but he'd had it legally changed to the Catalan Pau when he turned eighteen.
'Meeting tomorrow morning at eight,' she told him and Àlex. 'Let the other two know.'
Elisenda spent the next two hours in her office going over the notes they had so far, reminding herself of the Masó family crimes. She was surprised no one had taken Daniel out before, surprised anyone had had the nerve to do it now.
'You leaving, Elisenda?' Àlex asked her as he was getting ready to go. Pau had left a few minutes earlier.
'I'll stay here a bit longer.'
She watched Àlex leave and thought of her empty flat.
Chapter Five
This was the bit that hurt.
Elisenda pushed a strand of wet hair out of her face and wiped her forehead. She had made good time along the paths skirting the east of the city outside the medieval walls, jogging on the spot to watch the sun climb above the distant hills, but the sound of a small aircraft from somewhere behind her had made her stop and turn to look for it. A single-engine plane. Low in the sky but climbing, heading towards the coast and, beyond it, the sea. Watching in silence, she'd waited until it was no longer a dot in the distance and turned away to carry on running. Numb now, she'd sprinted back into the old town past the quiet houses of the Fora Muralla before gingerly crossing the cobbles of Plaça Sant Domènec.
But this was the bit that hurt.
Running up the stone flight rising to the cathedral in little dolly steps as the slabs were too shallow to take comfortably, she could feel the bite down from the gluteus maximus, through her thighs and calves, to the Achilles. She pulled air into her lungs, grimacing with the toll the steps were taking on her legs, and waited for the perfect moment when she got to the top of the steps and curved back down along the narrow road to return to the bottom, freewheeling like a child on a bike. It was all downhill from here, back to her flat on Carrer Ballesteries.
'Hey, Elisenda.'
She stopped at her name being called and leaned forward, her hands on her knees, before standing up straight. She was almost at the bottom of Pujada de Sant Feliu, where it ran into her street.
'Xiscu,' she said, no sign of breathlessness in her voice.
'You're running,' he told her.
'I know.'
'Quiet, Pujol.' The last comment was aimed at a jerky white Scottie dog, tugging at the red and black cotton scarf rolled tightly and slipped around its neck as a lead.
