by Chris Lloyd
'Hence the food from the stolen rubbish bins and the way she was posed in the market,' added Elisenda.
Pau had also shown them the latest developments on the website, which was going more and more into overdrive with rumours and speculation about the latest victim.
'There's the odd one or two saying that what this person's doing is not right,' Pau had commented, 'but the vast majority are applauding the attacks still.'
Elisenda scrolled down the page, scanning comment after comment, some congratulating the attacker on his choice of victim, others joining in with more suggestions both of victims and of what should be done to them, others sarcastically thanking the Mossos for doing nothing about it all. She only found two that criticised the attacks, and their posts were shot down by other contributors in very blunt terms.
'Makes you proud to be a member of the human race, doesn't it?' she muttered to Pau.
'Doesn't it just? I'm afraid you come up a few more times.'
She shrugged. 'To be expected. So what else do you have to show me?'
He clicked on a hyperlink that she'd seen added to a few of the posts and the screen instantly showed the top of a photo. Pau had to scroll the page down to bring the whole of the image into view, but Elisenda knew immediately what she was going to see.
'Great,' she said when it finally filled the screen.
In front of her was a photo that had evidently been taken of Mònica Ferrer in the market before the Mossos had got there. The lurid colours of the flash photo, probably from a mobile phone, looked almost as distressing as the actual scene had been. The victim was in the same position as when Elisenda and Àlex had arrived in the market, but the starkness of the image seemed to accentuate the way her face had been frozen as in a scream and her hair and clothes filthy from the rubbish that had been dumped over her. Pau clicked another link to show three more pictures, two of them the same shot from the slightly different angle afforded by the narrow entrance to the stand, the third a close-up of her face.
Worse still were the metres and metres of savage and mocking comments unwinding down the screen and the rash of glib and easy jokes that always erupted at times like these.
'Okay,' Elisenda said. 'I've seen enough. Have you heard from UCDI?'
'I’ve got an e-mail here,' Pau told her. He switched to his account on the computer and showed her. 'We've been assigned a team to investigate the site.'
Elisenda quickly read the e-mail from a Sergent Gispert in the Computer Crime Unit in Sabadell telling Pau of the steps he’d be taking. 'Good,' she commented. 'Keep on top of it.'
'They're here,' Josep suddenly said, breaking her reverie. 'Not a Mossos car, though.'
Elisenda looked up to see a red Audi Roadster turning into the palm-lined drive, the electronic gates opening to allow it through. An unmarked Mossos Seat followed it and parked at the kerb behind Elisenda and Josep.
She and Josep exchanged a look and got out of the car. A sergent from their station got out of the Seat and explained that Perafita hadn't wanted to leave his car in Barcelona. 'Caporal Escofet accompanied him to Girona.'
The three of them walked up the steep drive to where Mònica Ferrer's husband was climbing out of the driver's seat. Escofet was already out of the car. She rolled her eyes at the other three Mossos. Perafita strode up the steps to the front porch without waiting for them and opened the door, quickly turning off the intruder alarm. Elisenda told the two Mossos that they could go back to the station and she and Josep followed Perafita into the house. They went through a vestibule dominated by a huge sculpture of a pair of clasped hands in dissonance with gilt-framed watercolours on the walls and into a living room that displayed an impersonal moneyed comfort.
They found Perafita pouring himself a brandy into a large balloon from a bottle of Torres 10 on a marble-topped sideboard.
'We're very sorry for your loss,' Elisenda told him.
'What are you doing about it?' He sat down on a spotless cream leather sofa and took a sip of his brandy, staring frankly at her. Elisenda and Josep sat on an identical sofa opposite him.
'We have a specialist unit investigating the case,' she told him. She began to explain something of the circumstances in which his wife was found, but his mobile rang and he held his finger up at her for silence before answering it. As the call dragged on, a lengthy discussion about his business interests, Elisenda caught Josep's look of disbelief.
When Perafita hung up, Elisenda asked him about his movements the previous night. 'Purely routine,' she assured him when he asked her why.
'I caught the redeye from Madrid to Barcelona,' he told them. 'I got into the airport too late to drive home, so I stayed at a friend's flat in Barcelona.'
'Will they be able to corroborate that?'
He gave them the name and details of the friend, when Josep asked him for the exact time of the plane he caught from Madrid.
'I told you. The redeye. In the end, it didn't leave until gone midnight.'
Josep nodded. 'We have confirmation from the airline that you were, in fact, on the shuttle flight that left at eighteen fifty-five.'
Perafita spluttered for a moment and insisted the airline had got it wrong.
'More than enough time to get to Girona, in fact,' Josep pressed home.
'Where were you between midnight and four a.m.?' Elisenda asked him.
He sighed and took a long sip of brandy. He finally looked at Josep for sympathy. 'We're all adults. I returned to Barcelona early to spend the night with a friend.'
'I take it not the friend you stated earlier,' Elisenda said.
'A lady friend.'
'And will she be able to corroborate that?' Josep asked.
'I imagine she will, caporal, but I would appreciate your discretion in this matter.'
'I'm sure you would, Senyor Perafita,' Josep replied, closing his notebook.
They left him to his brandy and cream leather wealth and walked down the drive to their car.
'Not exactly the grieving husband,' commented Josep.
'I see why everything Mònica Ferrer ate left such a bad taste in her mouth,' Elisenda agreed, sliding through the gate that was already closing on them. 'Follow up everything he told us. Make sure it ties in.'
Chapter Thirty Five
The restaurant owner brought over a small earthenware dish of cod with honey and romesco to the table in the corner.
'It's a new dish I'm trying out,' she explained.
Àlex tried a mouthful and looked at her. 'It's beautiful.'
She stared into his eyes. 'Thank you.' She picked up a fork and tore off a small piece from the same dish and tasted it. 'It's not bad.'
Àlex put his fork down and thanked her for seeing him. 'I appreciate you're very busy, Anna.' Most of the tables were occupied in the small restaurant that appeared to be hewn out of the city's rock, the thick stone walls of the centuries-old building effectively shielding them from the unwonted heat outside.
'You were asking about Mònica Ferrer,' Anna said. She pushed her long brown curls away from her face.
'She was here last night.'
Anna laughed. 'Like I'd miss her. She came to see if we'd improved since the last time she came to point out where we were going wrong. Her words.'
'Do you remember anyone approaching her table?'
Anna thought back, absently tearing off another piece of cod. 'No. I don't remember anyone talking to her. People tend to steer clear of her.' She put her hand to her mouth, suddenly looking guilty. 'What a terrible thing to say. I'm sorry.' She called over a waiter and asked him if he remembered anyone talking to the critic. He thought and shook his head.
'Was she behaving peculiarly in any way?' Àlex asked them, but they both said that she wasn't. The kitchen bell rang and the waiter left to serve a table.
'She usually sits … sat at a table,' Anna told him, 'and made notes on a pad next to her when she ate. She didn't really engage with anyone.'
'Can you remember what time sh
e left?'
'Just a second.' Anna went over to a concertina file behind the bar and checked through some papers. She brought back the credit card receipt to show Àlex. 'She paid at eleven seventeen last night. She left pretty much straight after that.'
Àlex made a note and handed the receipt back to her. 'I'm surprised restaurants kept letting her in.'
Anna shrugged. 'We were all over a barrel. Looking like you're afraid to let her in is worse than a bad review. We live in a strange world.'
Àlex closed his notebook and thanked her for her help. 'Call me if anything else occurs to you.'
'I'll be sure to call you.'
*
'Follow it,' Elisenda told Josep.
They'd driven back into the city after seeing Mònica Ferrer's husband and had just joined the traffic on Avinguda Pericot when a Seguretat Ciutadana car ripped past them with its lights and sirens on. They'd already heard a commotion somewhere ahead of them. The patrol car led them along Pericot past Carrer Emili Grahit and turned into the gridiron streets of the Eixample, zig-zagging to the heart of the district, where they found one of the side roads cordoned off.
Josep pulled up amid a slew of police vehicles and they got out. Elisenda could see Pijaume in the midst of uniformed and plain-clothes Mossos, directing their movements with an orchestral calm. She sometimes forgot how good an organiser he was. He was having to shout to make himself heard above the multi-toned keening of several shop alarms.
On the ground near Pijaume, restrained by two Seguretat Ciutadana, a man was lying face down, his face pressed sideways into the asphalt, his hands cuffed behind his back. A metre or so away from him, a sledgehammer lay untouched on the ground like a malevolent icon.
'How can I help?' Elisenda asked Pijaume.
The other sotsinspector looked around. 'Thank you, Elisenda. Can you ensure that the suspect is duly processed and placed in a van, please? Uniforms are checking all the buildings and looking for any victims inside.' He had to shout above the whoops and whistles emanating from the shops along the street. 'My unit is trying to find the keyholders so we can turn these alarms off.'
Elisenda and Josep helped with the suspect and oversaw the sledgehammer being bagged, as the sound of the sirens steadily subsided with the arrival of owners and employees of the various businesses. In a lull, Elisenda was able to see that a number of them, seemingly taken at random, had had their display windows smashed.
'What happened, Narcís?' she asked when the scene was slowly coming back to normal and all the alarms had been silenced. The audience of onlookers started to fade away.
He straightened his tie and brushed his hand over his hair. 'It appears that the suspect went along the street breaking the windows of certain businesses.'
Elisenda looked more closely. She saw a bank, an estate agent and a chain café with their windows caved in. Then two local shops untouched, followed by another bank, its plate glass front shattered. The other side of the street showed the same pattern.
'Banks, property and multinationals,' she muttered.
'Precisely. It appears there was talk of it on the internet earlier this morning, so he seems to have taken it into his head to carry it out.'
'This website,' Elisenda mused out loud. This is where it was leading.
'Apparently, the majority of people simply watched him do it.'
'Man with a sledgehammer. Who wouldn't?'
'Many applauded.'
Elisenda nodded, picturing the scene. It didn't surprise her. The new villains of the age taken to task by an individual. 'Just what's happening to this city.'
Pijaume looked at her. The street was back to normal, most of the Mossos cars gone, cleaners already starting to put everything back in place, workers shoring up the gaps with plywood. 'Have you got time for a coffee?'
'Of course.' Curious, she told Josep to go on to the station without her and led the way round the corner to a small, old-fashioned café with melamine tables along one wall and a zinc bar along the other. The top of the bar was illuminated by the lighting inside a row of aluminium and glass food displays holding metal trays of meatballs, potatoes, Russian salad, kidneys and every other dish the two of them had ever grown up with. Every available piece of wall space was covered in Barça posters and team calendars dating back years. The owner, an ageing beach Lothario with slick hair and a trim moustache eyed Elisenda in open appreciation while taking their order for coffees. Elisenda decided he'd been conditioned to do that since some time in the early 1970s. Or condemned.
'You were on the scene quickly,' Elisenda commented, explaining why she'd turned up.
'I was in the clinic a couple of streets over. More drugs supposedly gone missing, but it turned out to be nothing more than a clerical error.'
'Can I ask how far you've got with the drugs, by the way? We need to know.'
'Little progress, I'm afraid.'
Elisenda simply nodded.
'These are strange times,' Pijaume continued, watching the owner vigorously polishing the milk spout on the coffee machine while their coffees were being made. 'There's something I've been wanting to say to you, Elisenda.'
The café owner brought them their coffees and Pijaume waited while he filled up their cups with steaming milk from the stainless steel jug. Elisenda kept quiet, wondering what was on Pijaume's mind.
'I think they've given you a poisoned chalice,' he explained. 'With this investigation. It could go the wrong way for you, Elisenda, however it turns out.'
'Damned if I do, damned if I don't, you mean?'
'Precisely. I just think you should be careful. Whatever you achieve with it, you're going to tread on someone's toes.'
'Catch the bad guy, half the public won't like it?'
'And half the Mossos.'
Elisenda looked surprised at his comment. 'Don't catch the bad guy and the other half of the public won't like it.'
'Or the other half of the Mossos.'
'And the press won't like it either way,' Elisenda concluded.
Pijaume sat in silence for a moment and sipped at the hot coffee. 'Still, this person's certainly made our job easier,' he commented, looking closely at Elisenda.
Elisenda looked up at him from her coffee cup. 'He's killed four people.'
'Yes, but what four people. A moneylender, a hooligan, a hypocrite and a destroyer of reputations. The courts haven't been able to hand out justice to any of them for years. And neither have we.'
'Narcís, I don't believe you're saying this.'
He shrugged. 'These people have ridden roughshod over us all for years. Now they're finally getting caught out.'
'So you excuse him his crimes? Would you be as happy for Viladrau to get away with his crimes? And Masó?'
'I'm not saying that.'
'Viladrau, Masó and the muggers should go down for what they've done,' Elisenda went on, 'but so should whoever it is who's killed them. One man's crimes can never justify another's. And now there's Mònica Ferrer. Are you saying she did enough to warrant what happened to her?'
'Are you saying she didn't? Compared with the other victims? A violent criminal dies violently. A hypocritical priest gets shown for what he is. A critic who does nothing but humiliate is humiliated in death. Where do you draw the line?'
'I know where I draw the line, Narcís. I draw the line the moment anyone becomes a victim. It's where others draw the line that worries me.'
'Can you honestly say that? Can you honestly say you don't feel more sympathy for the critic than the priest?'
Elisenda's mobile phone rang, buzzing angrily across the table top. She and Pijaume both looked relieved.
'I have to take this,' she said.
Pijaume looked at his watch. 'I should be getting away. Please don't take what I said the wrong way, Elisenda. I can't condone any of this, but I do think you need to be careful.'
Elisenda nodded as they separated outside on the pavement. 'I know you do, Narcís, thank you.' She sighed. 'And you're right
to raise these questions. I know I do every day. It's becoming increasingly hard to know where each of us stands on this.'
She watched him go and went back to her phone call. 'News, Montse?' she asked.
'We've found something,' Montse told her. 'A guy called Pere Corominas. He went missing a month ago.'
Chapter Thirty Six
'Where are you now?' Elisenda asked Montse, moving out of the way of an elderly couple moving slowly along the narrow pavement.
'I'm at Vista Alegre,' the caporal replied. She explained about Corominas' being reported missing by his flatmate. 'He works as a researcher at the university foundation on Plaça Jordi de Sant Jordi. I'm on my way there now to talk to him.'
Elisenda looked at her watch. 'I'm about five minutes away from there. I'll meet you outside.'
She hung up and walked briskly through the Eixample back towards the centre. Crossing Gran Via, she thought of her conversation with Pijaume and was reminded of the incident she and Catalina had witnessed of the man hitting his dog. It brought to mind something that had happened years earlier and that she'd forgotten. A car on Plaça Catalunya had been left parked straddling two spaces and Elisenda had silently applauded a guy ringing the police to have it towed. When she'd walked back some time later, though, it was still there and someone had scored a number of deep scratches down the side of the car. She'd been horrified, but when she'd told her friends about it at the time, they'd all laughed and said the driver had deserved it for being inconsiderate. It struck her now how everyone was capable of welcoming someone else taking revenge, or justice, on everyone else's behalf. It simply differed in the degree.
She suddenly realised that Montse was standing next to her, saying her name, as she stood outside the smooth walls of the university foundation building. She'd been miles away. She wasn't sure if she'd even registered walking along Carrer Santa Clara to get there.
'Sorry, Montse,' she said. 'I was just going over the attacks in my head.'
'No problem, Sotsinspectora,' the younger woman replied. It was another hot day but she looked cool despite that. It was one of those rare occasions when Elisenda envied Montse her short hairstyle. Elisenda held her own hair up against the back of her head for a moment to let what little air there was cool her neck.
