by Chris Lloyd
'You do that, Sotsinspector. I'm sure you'll find people on the force who share your priorities.'
Àlex hung up, shaking with anger. He knew he'd gone too far. Well, he thought, at least it meant that the family would probably be able to move back to Barcelona while he looked for a new job. He closed his eyes and opened them immediately, the argument and the threat of impending dismissal already compartmentalised and locked away in another part of his mind. He looked through the desk drawers for an aspirin.
*
Both fortunately and unfortunately for Àlex, Elisenda was in a foul mood when she got back to Vista Alegre an hour later.
'Is there anyone in this city who actually wants us to do our job,' she cursed, throwing her bag onto her desk. Àlex kept quiet. 'Another morning wasting my time with people who don't want us to find who killed Daniel Masó.'
Josep and Montse followed her into their unit, equally frustrated by a morning of prevarication and stonewalling. Montse sat down with a heavy thump. Josep stared at the screensaver in front of him.
All of which was fortunate for Àlex in that when Micaló rang through to Elisenda demanding a meeting, she was just ready to let off some steam before her long-delayed first coffee of the day.
'I am going to lodge an official complaint against Sergent Albiol,' was Micaló's first and last statement in the matter.
'One,' Elisenda said to him, 'I am the same rank as you, you do not summon me to your office. Two, Sergent Albiol is a good policeman, one of the best I've worked with. He feels passionately about police work and about the victims of crimes. Which brings me to three. You don't. And if you even attempt to threaten Sergent Albiol's career, I will come for you with everything I have. You and I both know you'll be gone from Girona on the next rung as soon as you can. I suggest you don't make any more enemies while you're still here. Now if you don't mind, I need a coffee before I lose my temper.'
By the time she got back along the corridor to her office, word had already got through to the Serious Crime Unit of her showdown with Micaló. Josep was sheepishly putting the phone down from a caporal in the Regional Investigation Unit when she walked through the door of the outer room. He and Montse exchanged a look.
'Àlex,' Elisenda said, looking straight ahead, 'my office.'
Àlex followed her into her room and closed the door behind him.
'Don't sit down,' she told him, 'you won't be long.'
'I'm sorry, Elisenda.'
She looked up at him and nodded. 'You're a city boy, aren't you, Àlex? You like the city?'
'Yes.'
'Good. Because if you ever pull a stunt like that again, I will make sure you get posted to the back of beyond. Up to the Pallars-Noguera, where you will spend your evenings writing up reports about missing goats and describing electricity to farmers. Do I make myself clear? You cannot take the law into your own hands.'
'Yes, Elisenda.'
'Good. Now go and get me a coffee while I still have my good humour.'
'Yes, Elisenda.' He stopped and turned in the doorway. 'And thanks.'
'Coffee,' she said. She watched him go, half a smile playing at the edges of her mouth.
Chapter Eighteen
'Who is this guy?' Carme, Àlex's wife, asked him.
Àlex walked in from the kitchen carrying a glass of Rioja for Carme and an orange juice for himself. 'The boys have dropped off,' he told her. 'Finally.'
He sat down on the sofa next to his wife and looked at the television on the low bookshelves. The local TV channel, showing yet another talking heads programme. 'Isn't there anything else on?' he asked, although he knew it was pointless. Carme loved this sort of thing and had only recently discovered the local station, with its late-night menu of earnest and endless debate.
'You haven't answered my question,' she said. He'd barely registered it. 'Who's the guy on the right? Literally and politically.'
Àlex focused on the screen. Together, they listened to the head on the box calling for a return of traditional values, which appeared to mean the reintroduction of making contraception illegal, banishment of unmarried mothers and "corrective surgery" for homosexuals. Àlex felt, as he always did, that the TV station allowed him to spew this rubbish so they could quite rightly and comprehensively shoot him down. And so people would watch another otherwise dull example of televised radio.
'He can only be a priest,' Carme said. 'That or Franco's come back to haunt us.'
'Priest,' Àlex confirmed. 'Mossèn Eduard Viladrau. Circa 1950.'
Carme looked at Àlex. 'Can we go back to Barcelona now?' she joked.
He simply grunted. 'I can't take much more of this guy. I'm going for a walk around the block, if that's OK.'
'Sure,' Carme replied, taking another sip. She was getting used to his late-night walks last thing before bed.
Outside, Àlex walked quickly into the city centre as far as the river and entered a low-lit bar squatting darkly on a nondescript modern square. The barman, wiry and dangerous, stared cold-eyed at Àlex as he walked in. A man with two signet rings on each hand sat on a stool in silence, the thin young woman with him, her arms streaked with reddened track marks, talking too much. To the rear of the darkened room, a group of four men, older, more powerful, sat around an alcove table, their discussion frozen from the moment Àlex walked in.
Àlex stood at the bar next to the man with the signet rings. 'Beer,' he said at the figure behind the counter.
He looked around him and took in a deep breath of the stale, hostile air.
He felt alive for the first time all day.
*
The last of the plates and cutlery rattled into the dishwasher as the shuffle on Elisenda's iPod pushed Sopa de Cabra through the Bose speakers, filling her small flat with the hypnotic two-guitar riff from Carrer dels Torrats. Now disbanded, they were the Girona sound of her youth. A lifetime ago. Literally, she thought with a jolt, recalling David Costa and his thoughtless question about Lina, her daughter, who she placed in a corner of her mind when the pain of remembering her got too great. Her daughter, who died. Once again, she sealed up the seams of her thoughts to protect herself. Absently, she stared out of her top-floor apartment window at the Friday-night people joyfully interweaving back and forth across Pont de Sant Agustí and washed her wine glass from dinner. The song reminded her of a night long ago at La Sala del Cel, the huge club out along the river, dancing with some guy from school whose name she couldn't remember.
'You're showing your age, girl,' she said out loud.
Looking at the people on the bridge below and then focusing on her own reflection in the night-blackened window, she dropped the damp cloth into the sink.
'And now it's Friday night and you're at home washing up one wine glass and talking to yourself.'
She waited until the song ended before switching the system off with the remote, slipping on smarter jeans and a pair of rope-soled coffee-coloured espardenyes and warily checking all the rooms in her flat. They were empty. She turned the lights off and went out of the door.
A group of young people, stopped off for a coffee between dinner and a late-night bar, was just leaving the window seat in La Terra as she walked in. She recognised some of them and said hello before taking one of their vacated seats overlooking the same bridge as before. She laughed to herself. Same view, just fifteen years younger, she thought.
The waitress brought her a glass of red wine and Elisenda chatted for a while to two guys who took a couple of cushioned places on the tiled bench at the other end of the window seat. She watched them go and ordered a licor de café.
She considered the Masó case. Considered the four thugs. She considered again how that investigation had gone to Micaló's team, her own team left with just the one major case. That worried her. How long before the politicians in the Mossos decided her unit wasn't cost-effective? Wasn't justifying its existence? Serious crimes strangled at birth because no one knew what a serious crime was. Just as there was more to the
Masó case, so was there more to the corridors and closed rooms of the Mossos.
'Connections,' she mouthed at her reflection in the blackened window. There are connections everywhere, she thought. 'But what are they?' A couple nearby stared at her muttering to herself and looked away. Masó and the muggers. Small-town crooks and small-time criminals. Both now victims themselves. And Joaquim Masó, on the outside, looking in.
With one last look at the river and the bridge, she finished her drink and went to pay at the bar before climbing the narrow stairs back up to her apartment when her mobile rang. She looked at the caller number and sighed. It had been a long day.
She listened to the voice at the other end and hung up, immediately dialling another mobile number.
'Àlex?' she said when he replied. She could hear street noises in the background. 'Meeting tomorrow morning at eight. The station's just called me. Chema GM has just died in hospital. The case is ours now.'
She hung up.
'This changes things,' she murmured.
Chapter Nineteen
'Tell them to turn those damned sirens off,' the Seguretat Ciutadana sergent yelled, 'and get that ambulance to shut it too.'
Scarcely able to take his eyes off the scene in front of him, Mosso Paredes walked out from under the arches on the Rambla and went towards his patrol car, which was slewed on the paving stones in front of L'Arcada's terrace of empty aluminium chairs and tables. Despite the early hour, a crowd was already gathering on the Rambla, stopping the ambulance in its journey the wrong way along the promenade. Two other Seguretat Ciutadana mossos were struggling to pull up a barrier to stop nosy civilians from sneaking around under the arches to get a glimpse of what was going on. A third was trying to clear a path for the ambulance through the onlookers, ignoring the flash of a mobile phone camera in his face.
Taking a deep breath, Paredes rang through to the station to deliver the message telling all cars to turn their sirens off.
He had never seen so much blood.
Not even that Masó guy hanging out of the window had shed so much blood. He'd been sick that time, he recalled. That sotsinspectora from that new bunch in the Serious Crime Unit had told him to go get a brandy. He hadn't, just in case his own boss saw him, but at least he hadn't been sick this time. Barely ten days' difference between the two events and already he was used to it. He wasn't sure how he felt about that.
He steeled himself and went back under the arches.
The man, he thought it was a man, was lying propped up against the inside angle of the arch, facing inwards to the shops away from the Rambla, hidden from view until you were almost on top of him. Despite himself, Paredes retched at the sight, but was still able to keep it down. The blood hadn't spread far but had congealed on the man's body. Just a few small rivulets ran in thin trails along the cracks in the stones. He'd been cut open, Paredes thought. A dark reddish brown lump of fat and gristle emerged from his stomach, dribbling down over his groin, blood soaking into his tan-coloured trousers. Whoever had done it had pushed something into the man's mouth, it too dripping blood down the man's chin and into the fabric of his shirt. His heart, Paredes immediately thought with a shudder. He finally saw the man's right hand. It was clutching hold of something. Paredes crouched down to take a closer look. It looked like a small plastic square had been fastened to the victim's hand by brown tape wound tightly around it.
'What is it, Paredes?' the sergent asked him. Paredes jumped. He hadn't heard the sergent approach. He looked more closely.
'It's a DVD case, Sergent Ayats.'
'Don't touch it until the Científica get here,' Ayats told him.
'Right, Sergent,' Paredes replied. He'd had no intention whatsoever of touching it.
Ayats stared at the man on the ground for a moment and hurried out from under the arches, dodging the tables and chairs on the terrace. He saw a Científica car. 'I need you in here now,' he shouted through the swelling crowd. Another Seguretat Ciutadana patrol car was pulled up alongside Paredes' car, its two occupants helping push back the throng of spectators and trying to set up a fence with some yellow municipal barriers they'd commandeered. Two other members of the Policia Científica were removing their equipment from the boot of another car. 'You two,' he called to them, making sure everyone around could hear, 'I want videos of the crowd. Anyone caught obstructing the Mossos or the medics will be prosecuted.'
While the onlookers retreated slightly under the threat, the first two Científica followed Ayats back under the arches.
'Hòstia puta,' the younger of the two cursed when they rounded the thick stone arch.
Both newcomers stopped and stared at the figure lying on the ground.
They made Paredes move to one side and the younger one, a mosso, began recording the scene on video while the other, a sergent, knelt down next to the man on the ground. 'We're going to need our colleagues in here,' he told Ayats.
'Paredes,' Ayats ordered, 'get the other two Científica in here.' Paredes got up, relieved to be getting away from the sight in front of him. The heat of the day was just beginning and the smell rising from the man on the ground was worming its way into his nostrils. 'And come back with them,' Ayats added.
'Yes, Sergent,' Paredes muttered.
The young mosso re-entered the arches after running his errand in time to see the Científica sergent pick up part of whatever was lying on the man's stomach. Paredes put his hand over his mouth.
'I recognise him,' one of the new Científica members said. The sergent peered at the man's face, not yet touching whatever it was protruding from the victim's mouth. Ayats and the video cameraman crowded in for a better look.
Ayats let out a low whistle. 'We all do.'
Paredes leaned in and saw a face he recognised emerge from under the streaks of blood and tissue covering it. He also saw the sergent carefully pull the piece of flesh from the man's groin.
'What is it?' Ayats asked them.
'Well, it's not part of this guy,' the sergent said.
'Is he dead?'
'He's dead all right.' The sergent unbuttoned the victim's shirt to reveal his unharmed stomach. 'But this isn't his.'
Another of the Científica poked the piece of flesh wedged tightly in the victim's mouth and looked up at Ayats. 'It's an abortion,' he said simply. He looked at it closely. 'A pig, if I'm not mistaken.'
Paredes' breakfast finally gave up its struggle to stay inside.
Chapter Twenty
'Where were you last night when I rang?'
Àlex shrugged. 'Out walking. Clear my head.'
Elisenda nodded. 'Sounded busy.'
'Girona. Big city, bright lights.'
'Less of your Barcelona sarcasm.'
Àlex simply grinned back at her. She understood, though. A glass of licor de café, she thought, and one of the window seats in La Terra. That's how she cleared her head. After calling him last night, she'd gone back and spent another hour nursing a second glass and staring at the lights reflected on the river.
'They're connected,' she suddenly said to Àlex. Her eight o'clock meeting in her office. Just Elisenda, Àlex, two coffees and a buff folder. The only other member of the team in the office on a Saturday was Pau, working on a computer in the outer office.
'They?' Àlex asked. 'Daniel Masó being one, I take it. And the other?'
'Chema GM,' Elisenda replied. She took a mouthful of milky coffee.
Àlex stared back at her. 'Masó and Chema GM? How are they connected? There's no record of Guijarro Martín doing any work for Masó. He was the classic small-town yob. Masó was an organised criminal. He would have seen Chema GM as a liability.'
'Not in life,' Elisenda corrected him. 'In the way of their passing. So sadly missed by all.' Àlex looked surprised at her last comment. 'That's the point,' she went on, noticing his reaction. 'At best, no one is going to miss them. More to the point, most people are rejoicing that they've gone.'
'So are you coming down more in favour of the v
igilante angle? Especially now with Chema GM?'
'Vigilante, victim. I'm not saying it's necessarily villagers with pitchforks, but there's just something in it all that tells me there's more to it than we've been seeing. Two career criminals who've made the city's lives a misery. Both killed in highly elaborate ways. Both bodies staged theatrically.'
'Or one gang killing. As retribution or takeover. As Puigventós and Roca see it. And one reprisal. Or unrelated vigilante attack. And, anyway, Chema GM wasn't dead. We don't know if he was supposed to die. The other three in his gang didn't.'
'I don't think that's the point. There's something in the way of their death, or staging, that's common. And that's what we're not seeing.'
Àlex didn't look convinced. 'Masó was killed with a knife, Chema GM was drugged. We're still not certain that Chema GM was meant to die. And there's a big difference between slicing someone's face with a knife and putting drugs in a drink. I don't see how the same person could have done both. The first, at least, sounds like a gang killing.'
'The first was opportunist,' Elisenda said. 'Masó was there, the killer had a knife. Or Masó did. They argued. Masó came off worse.'
'But the second was planned. Elaborate.'
'Precisely. It was inspired by the first, but more cautious, planned, not spur of the moment. The killer was emboldened by having killed Masó, but not enough to carry out the second killing face-to-face. And the dressing-up of it after was every bit as elaborate as Masó. That's where the connection lies.'
'If you think they're connected because they're staged, doesn't that rule out Joaquim Masó?'
Elisenda opened the folder in front of her. 'These are the strands we've been working on. Significantly, no other gangs appear to be involved or trying to muscle in. I'm beginning to think we can rule that avenue out. The vigilante or victim angle hasn't thrown up any realistic names, but I think it's still worth pursuing. And I think an internal Masó issue is still of interest, particularly Joaquim Masó. I think we should pull him in for more formal questioning at this stage, if only to see what falls out of the tree.'
