City of Good Death: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A Detective Elisenda Domènech Investigation 1)

by Chris Lloyd

  'An eye for an eye?' the woman responded. 'Bring back the death penalty?'

  'Yes. For certain cases. Bring it back.'

  'You can't be serious.'

  Suddenly depressed, Elisenda had to tune out before she was tempted to join in. She got up and went to the bar to pay to stop herself from doing just that.

  Outside, the sisters strolled back to the Rambla to find a band playing traditional music and dozens of people dancing in the warm night.

  'Thursday,' sang Catalina. 'I'd forgotten this was on.'

  Elisenda hung back and watched the musicians and the dancers while Catalina went on and joined in with them. One of the free concerts offered every Thursday through spring and autumn, heralding the summer, holding off the winter. Elisenda watched her younger sister sway gently to the hypnotic, strident keening of the bombards and clarinets amid the merrily waltzing and twirling couples and groups of friends. People who had grown up with both sisters went up to Catalina and greeted her warmly, waving hello to Elisenda when they saw her. I used to join in, Elisenda thought. Before I lost my daughter and came back to Girona a police officer. She remembered Catalina's comment in the restaurant and peeled herself away from the arches to go out on to the Rambla. She needed to be moving.

  Weaving in and out of the various groups of people dancing in more or less raucous confederation, Elisenda wandered out of the coloured light cast from the wooden stage and on to the terrace cafes, still busy at this time of night at this time of year. Give it a couple of weeks, she thought. She turned and looked back at the stage, able to stay out of the light and out of the sensation that she was somehow doing wrong in not joining in. She could see Catalina from where she stood, looking the happiest she'd appeared in ages. A white, blue and red Seguretat Ciutadana patrol car pulled up near Elisenda on the narrow road alongside the Rambla.

  Coming from over to her left, in a break between tunes, she heard heavily-accented Spanish. She looked over and saw a group of young immigrants, some seated on a bench, others standing in front of it, all talking to each other in quiet voices now the music had paused for a moment. Latin American by their accents, Elisenda realised, Cuban she thought. Some of the many who had come over to Catalonia and were working as waiters or porters or cleaners, unable to get work back home, unable to get a job over here for which they were more than qualified.

  At the bench next to them was another group of people talking. Different accent. Elisenda recognised the young Philippine woman working as a maid for Laura Puigmal's sister or mother, out with friends from her country, all probably doing similar jobs here, their evening out spent on a bench as they earned too little to do much else. Nice to see the old traditions carrying on, Elisenda thought to herself wryly. In the past, Thursday had always been the one day of the week that servants were allowed off. The modern world evidently didn't stretch to everyone in it.

  Elisenda found herself staring at the young Philippine maid.

  And staring.

  And feeling like someone had punched her in the stomach.

  Reaching into her bag for her mobile, she dialled Vista Alegre and asked for an address and a number.

  She hung up and dialled a second number.

  'Àlex,' she said. 'I think I know who the next victim is.'

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Elisenda tried the three numbers again. The landline switching to the artificial sing-song voice of the answering service after half a dozen rings, both mobiles coming back with the caller not available message.

  'Damn,' she muttered, tapping her knee nervously as she sat back into the rear seat of the patrol car she'd flagged down on the Rambla.

  She checked her watch. Gone two in the morning. After calling Vista Alegre, she'd tried calling the numbers they'd given her, with no luck. So she'd put Catalina into a taxi and got the patrol car to take her to a house in the quiet streets and swimming-pooled villas of Palau. No hurry, yet, just a need to be sure. The domains of the great and the good had been dark and shuttered, the villa she sought empty, the two Seguretat Ciutadana who'd driven her there circling the quiet black lawn.

  Àlex called her from Vista Alegre with no news.

  She got back in the car with the two uniforms and considered her next move. There was nothing to suggest an attack was imminent, she just wanted to make sure the potential victim was safe while they planned what they would do with the notion.

  'Odd night, this,' the caporal riding shotgun said, cutting across her thoughts.

  'Why's that?' she asked him, her mind only half on what he was saying.

  'Someone's been nicking full rubbish bins from outside restaurants,' he told her, chuckling. The driver, an otherwise taciturn mosso with a Barcelona accent, joined in.

  Elisenda looked straight at him and leaned forward. 'Put the light show on, we're in a hurry.'

  At Vista Alegre, Àlex told her that the person they were looking for had been seen in the old town around midnight, but there'd been no further sightings. He'd sent a patrol car to wait outside the villa in Palau and other uniformed Mossos on foot to check possible routes to the house from the old town. The rest of her unit was with them, woken in the small hours and called in to search the ancient streets.

  'It was seeing the Philippine maid again,' Elisenda told Àlex. 'The whole idea of the servant thing. It reminded me of the last time I saw Laura. We went for a meal together and made a joke about bad food. And then there were the bins.'

  'I don't get it,' he replied.

  'I'm not sure I do. It only struck a chord with me because it reminded me of a story I'd heard. A local one about a servant who did something wrong and was taunted with food, but it's not one I remember when I was growing up.'

  And then the call came through, telling her what she feared.

  She closed her eyes and cursed, holding the dead phone to her shoulder. She looked up at Àlex and nodded and they left her office, turning out the lights.

  Dawn was already breaking by the time they got to the Mercat del Lleó, the city's main covered market, just a short ride from the police station. Bleary-eyed Seguretat Ciutadana were shepherding people out of the building and setting up tape barriers. A crowd of early-starters was lingering behind the line, avidly sending rumours rippling back and forth through their shaking heads. A Policia Científica van turned up as Elisenda and Àlex went in through the main doors.

  It was the smell that hit them first. The smell and the quiet of a building that should have been thriving at that time in the morning.

  They were told by a uniformed sergent with a white paper face mask on that the first stallholders to open up had noticed the smell, but they hadn't thought any more of it. Not until one stallholder had arrived, last as usual, and thrown the aluminium shutters up on the confined space of his stand, releasing the full force of the contents of all the rubbish bins that had been stolen in the night. By that time, the first of the day's shoppers had already started trickling in.

  The audience the perpetrator wanted.

  Elisenda and Àlex accompanied the sergent to the market stall, one that had a commanding view down the central aisle, feeling the stench getting stronger the nearer they got. They were glad of the paper masks that the sergent had given them, although the bitter sweet smell still seeped through the fibres and into their nostrils.

  'Rotten food,' Elisenda remembered a little more. 'The story says she was pelted with rotten food.'

  They came to the end of the aisle and stood before the market stall, taking in what lay before them.

  It was a woman. The woman Elisenda expected to see. Held in place by padlocked chains coming from both wrists to the metal stanchions over the stall. Held in place too by the kilos and kilos of rotting fruit and vegetables and meat dumped into the small space between the narrow counter and the rear of the stand, enveloping her from legs to waist, trapping her. Her face and upper body were covered in peel and rind and skin, her hair a sticky tangle hanging limply down over her forehead. Her eye
s and mouth gaped open, her head pulled back by the forced grimace, defiant in death. Bruising around her eyes, the skin mottled and discoloured. Her mouth torn open by staring fish heads and uneaten culinary invention. A cloud of flies swarmed up angrily from the wasted food, thrown out in the rubbish from the city's restaurants, and quickly settled back on the putrid mass, its decomposition speeded up by the last heat of summer and the temperature it created in itself in the confined space.

  'For Christ's sake,' Àlex muttered. Elisenda turned to him to see his fists clenching, a muscle in his cheek twitching. She was momentarily shocked at the chill anger she saw rise in him.

  'Who is she?' he asked.

  Elisenda stood aside to let the first of the Policia Científica pass, recording as much of the scene as they could before the forensic doctor arrived.

  'Mònica Ferrer,' she told him. 'Restaurant critic with the local paper. Never read her column?'

  Àlex shook his head.

  'I make a point not to,' Elisenda said.

  'Is she really a deserving victim?'

  Elisenda looked at the familiar but sullied features of the woman in front of them.

  'She's rapacious, sarcastic, arrogant, self-important and petty-minded. She was born into one of Girona's wealthiest families and has never created one single thing in her life, only criticised. She's said to have closed down more restaurants in the city than the health department, botulism and the recession.'

  She turned to Àlex.

  'But no,' she said, 'she didn't deserve this.'

  Chapter Thirty Three

  He didn't know it, but Octavi Marsans' first-year history students called him The Showman. Had he known it, he would have been delighted. His voice rolled and boomed now like a bad impersonation of a bygone classical actor, worming its way into every crack and corner of the packed and stifling lecture theatre, curling around the toes of the pretty young women seated in silent confederation at the front and sniffing through the idle and salacious doodles of the anonymous and unfavoured young men at the back. The ten o'clock lecture on a Friday morning. Hard-core hangovers and morning-after pills. The local students making arrangements for Friday night's perfection of Thursday night's dry run. The ones from out of town, most in time-warp hostels, the lucky few with a shared and liberal apartment, ready for the off with packed bags of dirty washing at their feet, dutifully going home for the weekend, back to boyfriends and mothers, to be cleansed of the guilty sins of a Thursday night.

  And at the front, Octavi Marsans. Tanned and lined, in his trademark cream linen jacket over a pale T-shirt and loose linen trousers. The look that had made him a minor cult figure on a late-night talking heads show on the local TV station, exquisitely and articulately to cue crushing an obscure book by an obscure rival or savaging the latest Hollywood abomination.

  'Before we begin,' he declaimed to the hall now, 'I beg of you to indulge me. Just remind me how the Catalan flag came into being. The four red bars on the yellow background. The story behind its birth. Just for my benefit. I'd like to know.'

  'No shit,' muttered a voice at the back. Not enough to reach the front, although the muted giggles rippled up and down the cheap seats, but studiedly low enough not to travel the full distance. In the middle rows of the steep bank of benches, the good and the plain, the conscientious and the shrinking, looked uncertainly at each other, hoping another would take up the challenge and answer. After all, it was easy. One everyone knew. Including the bright young things in the front two rows, seated side-saddle, one ankle crossed over the other, exchanging attractive and knowing smirks. It was one of their number who answered. Roser Caselles, daughter and granddaughter of lawyers and firmly ensconced in the top flight of the city's list of most eligible young women.

  'Guifré el Pelós,' she said confidently. 'Emperor Lluís el Piadós dipped his four fingers in the blood of Guifré el Pelós, Count of Barcelona, when he was wounded in battle against the Normans and ran them down Guifré's gold shield. That's how we get the flag.'

  Octavi Marsans looked at her and smiled, and then embraced the rest of the room in his largesse. 'Guifré el Pelós,' he echoed. 'Very good.'

  Almost as one, the room nodded.

  'Guifré el Pelós,' he repeated, drawing them all into his warm conspiracy. Nodding once more, he took a long step forward and bellowed. 'Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.'

  Almost as one, the room fell into shocked silence. Roser Caselles' perfectly plucked and shaded eyebrows creased in panic over blue and gaping eyes. Almost imperceptibly, her friends either side shrank back from Marsans and away from Roser. The wag at the back sniggered, but again, not so loudly as to risk being heard at the front.

  'That would have been quite hard, don't you think, Senyoreta . . .'

  'Caselles,' Roser answered faintly, 'Roser Caselles.'

  'Senyoreta Caselles, considering Lluís el Piadós died some twenty years before Guifré was born.' He held his long, manicured fingers up beside his head, hushing anyone else who might have wanted to add to the debate. 'And before anyone else cares to join in, neither was it Carles II el Calb who did the dirty with the fingers. He was merely substituted in the legend the following century as he at least was around at roughly the same time as Guifré. But that still doesn't make it true. And neither is the flag the standard of Otger Cataló, founder of our country. And it's not the seventeen bars of Comtessa Ermessenda and Comte Ramon Berenguer II found on their tombs in Girona cathedral either. Nor is it any of the legion of myths and fabrications that some of you might feel like flinging out at me right now. This is a history lecture. History. Not legend. The four red bars on the yellow background were most probably simply the evolution of the heraldic emblem of the Counts of Barcelona through the Counts of Provence and Foix, the kings of Mallorca and then the kings of Aragon. After Pau I of Catalonia, it was known as the royal flag of Catalonia, then the flag of Aragon, and after that it was batted back and forth between the two. It was not until the nineteenth century and the Catalan Renaixença that it became identified as our national flag.'

  He paused, covering the room with his eyes. 'And if you go to Aragon, they'll no doubt tell you that it's not even our flag at all.'

  Now entirely as one, the room let out its collective breath in a protracted and nervous giggle. Octavi Marsans smiled. His existence had been utterly and irrevocably confirmed. Pity about the girl in the front row, though, he thought for a moment, as she had most definitely been on his radar of impressionable, beddable young beauties. He looked frankly at her now, her expression one of eagerness to atone. Most satisfactory, a suddenly aroused Marsans realised, unleashing the full wattage of his electric smile on her. For atone she would, of that he had no doubt.

  He flapped his fingers in front of himself to call silence. 'As I say, people, this is history. It is not legend. It is not fairytale. It is not politics.' Another pause. Even the back-row wags were silent. 'It is rarely even fact. It is history. We are historians. We do not deal in facts. We deal in symbols. We deal in collective memory. We deal in identity. So yes, Senyoreta Caselles, you are quite right. It is the legend of Guifré el Pelós. But it is not the legend of Guifré el Pelós because it is fact. Or because it is true. It is the legend of Guifré el Pelós because we all say it is. Because we all believe it is.' Another pause, also perfectly timed. 'Well, ninety-nine per cent of us, at least. Those of us in this room, the historians among us, know it not to be true. Which is by no means to say that it is false.'

  Marsans paused, his eyes flickering around the room, taking in every student.

  'I said that as historians we dealt in symbols. But what is a symbol? Yes, we know it comes from the Greek symbolon, which literally means "thrown together", but what exactly was it? The symbolon was a token, a means of identification, that was divided into parts, each one representing the greater whole. A certificate, if you like, that helped the holders of each part to recognise each other and be recognised. To the members of the group for whom it had a mea
ning, the symbol showed the presence of the larger context. In terms of national identity, it formed a bond between contemporaries and a link between generations, and it is precisely this power of symbols that was central in their construction of the national identity. Which is why we must never let anyone outside this room know the truth of the legend of the Catalan flag.' He scanned the rapt faces and grinned to make sure the room saw he was letting them in on the big joke.

  'Because if we lose the symbols,' he concluded, 'we lose what binds us. We lose what it is that makes us a nation. Our collective memory. And if we lose our collective memory, we lose our identity.'

  He looked around him. The students seemed unsure as to whether they were supposed to applaud or not, so they simply nodded. Even the wag at the back was silent.

  'I've spoken,' Octavi Marsans said.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Josep turned the car ignition on long enough to open his window. In the passenger seat, Elisenda opened hers.

  'It's stifling,' she commented, checking her watch. Nearly lunchtime. Ignasi Perafita, Mònica Ferrer's husband, had finally been located in Barcelona and was being driven to Girona by Mossos car. She and Josep were awaiting his arrival outside the couple's villa in Palau. The wealthy suburb was lifeless. Children at school, parents at work or lingering over the shops in town. Elisenda knew the husband would have been told the bare minimum. That his wife had died in suspicious circumstances. Little more.

  It was Pau who had known more about the story that Elisenda had only vaguely recalled.

  'The Majordoma,' he'd told the rest of the team a few hours ago. 'It's a newly-created legend. She was Sant Narcís's, Girona's patron saint's, housekeeper. She's supposed to have been an extraordinary cook, but also a terrible gossip and a show-off, which annoyed Sant Narcís, so he took her gifts away from her and she became the laughing stock of the city. She'd wander the streets in a daze and not react when people threw rotten food at her.'