by Chris Lloyd
Which is when Puigventós delivered his own killer verdict.
'So I'm giving the Masó case to Sotsinspector Micaló's team. You have more than enough on your plate with these other murders, Elisenda. I would sooner you concentrated all your unit's efforts on them.'
'I think that's quite sensible, Xavier,' Micaló commented. 'Thank you.'
Elisenda simply stared at Puigventós and nodded. She had no intention of looking at Micaló.
And neither did she have any intention of paying any attention whatsoever to Puigventós' instructions. As far as she was concerned, the Masó murder was very firmly a part of her investigation, whether Micaló's unit were supposed to be handling it or not.
'There's one other matter, Elisenda,' Puigventós continued. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Micaló sitting back, relaxing. 'Your relationship with David Costa.'
'Relationship? He's a childhood friend. Nothing more.'
'He's a journalist. The press has no place in a police investigation. I don't want to see you cosying up to the media any more.'
Elisenda was aghast. 'No place? We have a press office. We're supposing to be breaking with the image of the past. So we use the press when we need to.'
'I'm serious, Elisenda.' Puigventós shuffled his papers into order and stood, the discussion called to a close.
Micaló carefully placed his selection of buff folders into his leather document case and looked straight at Elisenda. The other two men had already got up and moved away from the table, their backs turned. 'I will fuck you,' he mouthed at her and stood up.
Elisenda watched him walk to the door. 'Sotsinspector Micaló,' she called to him. He turned. 'I doubt very much I'll notice.'
*
Outside Puigventós' office, Pijaume asked Elisenda if she would come with him. 'There's something I want you to see.'
Intrigued despite her annoyance, she followed him to his office.
'I do have to ask you about the drugs, though, Narcís. I'm sorry but I just can't see any progress being made.'
Pijaume put his hand to his temple. 'I'm doing everything I can, Elisenda. You must understand I have to prioritise.'
'Prioritise? You can see what's going on in the city. Do you want me to talk to Puigventós about taking it over?'
'No, Elisenda,' he snapped. 'I do not. Please can I just show you what I asked you in to see? I simply thought you might want to see this.' He turned his computer screen to face her. 'There's a young man called Toni Clavell who drives up and down the streets in Santa Eugènia, making a nuisance of himself.'
'Okay,' Elisenda said, unsure why she needed to see it.
'This surfaced on the internet yesterday.'
Pijaume clicked over an icon and heavily pixellated images came up on screen. Blurring in and out of focus and jumping a lot, they were evidently shot with the camera on a mobile phone. A group of people, of all ages by the look of them, even though their faces were partly hidden by scarves, were steadfastly striking a car with hammers.
'That's Clavell's car,' Pijaume explained.
They both watched as the crowd systematically beat dents into every part of the car's metalwork. Cheers went up when the remaining windows and lights were broken. None of it was done in anger, but in a joyous mood like a village celebration in the main square. Elisenda could see small children running gleefully in and out among groups of onlookers chatting over pushchairs and prams and elderly people laughing and clapping. By the end, the car had been systematically destroyed in calmness and delight.
A man walked up to the screen, his face masked by a scarf and sunglasses, and spoke quietly to the camera. 'This is justice now. If the Mossos and the courts and the politicians won't give us justice, we will get it for ourselves. This is what we have learned.'
The image froze there. The man staring out at Elisenda and Pijaume, who could do little more than stare back at his sightless dark glasses in silence.
'Nice to see a sense of community still alive,' Elisenda muttered. Not so nice to see how things were escalating, she thought to herself. 'As long as that's the extent of any copycat attacks, I suppose we should be grateful,' she added. She seriously doubted it would be.
'I just thought I should show you.'
Chapter Thirty Nine
Aurora Torrent scrolled through the social network website, dismayed to see her name appearing three times. She looked at the cryptic user names of the people proposing her as the next victim and was able to work out two of them: students on her second-year history course that she'd marked down. She couldn't work out who the third person was, but she had a rough idea of half a dozen or so she suspected.
She was at her desk in the faculty offices at the university, tidying up paperwork and idly surfing through the website that everyone was talking about. A chime on her computer announced an incoming e-mail, so she tore herself away from counting her colleagues up for opprobrium to check her inbox.
And cursed.
And read on.
And cursed and cursed and cursed again.
She turned to look out of the window over the rooftops of the old town and held back the tears. The vents of the air conditioning blew directly into her face, drying her moist eyes. The heat shimmer outside the window looked unreal in the damp cold of the forced air blowing through the office, as though it belonged to another world far distant from the one where she sat.
She looked back at her mail. It was from the publisher's in Barcelona, rejecting her proposed book on iconography and identity. The one for which she'd been in discussions for months. The one that had looked so certain just a day or two earlier, that had appeared to be drawing inevitably to acceptance. It was the second blow in almost as many days. The first being the organisers of a congress to be held the following spring in New York rejecting her paper on the same subject. She had planned it all so carefully, the one timed to aid the other.
The door banged open and she looked up to see the last figure she would want to see at a time like this strut into the room.
'Good morning, Aurora,' the figure said.
'Octavi,' she replied. She minimised her e-mail screen to make sure he saw nothing.
'Anything wrong?' Marsans asked her. 'You look like you have hay fever?'
'I'm fine,' Torrent answered, rather more forcefully than she intended.
Marsans shrugged and took his jacket, which he had been carrying slung over his shoulder in the damp heat outside, and put it on over his tightly-fitting pale yellow T-shirt as protection against the air conditioning inside. Sitting down, he switched his computer on and pulled a memory stick out of his battered leather satchel.
Aurora Torrent watched his fluid, confident movements. Barely surprising, she thought, that he had a reputation for having taken so many of his impressionable female students to bed with him. She watched him pick up the phone on his desk, his slender fingers beautifully manicured, and wanted to throw something heavy at him. He dialled an internal number.
'Enriqueta,' he said into the phone, 'Octavi here.' He laughed at the reply of the woman on the other end. Torrent sneered involuntarily. 'You couldn't possibly organise a plane and hotel for New York for next March, could you? That's right, the congress at Columbia. That's marvellous. Thank you so much.'
Torrent didn't trust herself to speak for a moment or two after Marsans hung up but simply stared at his profile hunched casually over his computer. Finally she spoke. 'You're going to Columbia?'
He turned in his seat to face her. 'That's right. You are as well, aren't you?'
'No. No, I'm not.'
'Really? I thought you were. Changed your mind?'
'Something like that.' She could fell her eyes pricking with tears. 'Are you giving a paper?'
'Yes. On symbology and collective identity.' She gasped but he didn't appear to register. 'I have a book coming out next year on the subject.'
'That's what I was going to do.'
'Is it? I didn't know.'
'Of
course you knew, Octavi. You knew perfectly well.'
'I'm sorry, Aurora. I know your field of research overlaps somewhat with mine, but I didn't know exactly what you were going to be doing in New York.'
'And a book. I was going to write a book on it. On iconography and identity.'
'My field is symbology,' Marsans said. 'It's a much broader canvas.'
The phone on his desk rang before Torrent could object any further. 'Enriqueta,' he said into the mouthpiece. 'My, that was quick.'
Torrent was about to turn away to her computer screen but Marsans suddenly flopped back heavily in his chair so she carried on watching him, intrigued. His left hand, resting on the desk, began to tremble slightly. 'The Mossos d'Esquadra?' he asked. 'Did they say what they wanted? Just that I'm to ring back. They didn't give you any idea what it was about? No. Thank you. Thank you, I will.'
He put the phone down and stared out of the window, running an elegant finger along his bottom lip.
'They've finally caught you out,' Torrent said to him with some glee.
'Yes,' Marsans replied absently, picking up the phone again.
Torrent turned back to her computer and the social network website. She was pleased at first to see that Marsans' name came up at least three times as many as hers did, but that quickly changed to dissatisfaction when she realised that that was simply because he was better known in the city than she was.
As Marsans slowly dialled the number he'd been given, Torrent added her own anonymous suggestion that her colleague be the city's next victim.
Chapter Forty
'I thought Puigventós wanted them kept separate,' Àlex said when Elisenda told him how she was going to organise the investigations.
'He does,' she replied. 'And we are. And if anyone says we're doing otherwise, I will teach them a marvellous new trick with a xuixo.'
Àlex grinned and changed down to overtake a foreign camper van struggling up an incline. They fell silent again and Elisenda watched the countryside slip by in a blur out of the passenger window. They had already skirted the lake at Banyoles and were taking the minor road to Santa Pau and the address given to Pau by Mossèn Arnau, climbing almost imperceptibly through the lush pastures and dense beech woods of the volcanic Garrotxa region. It really was very beautiful and bucolic, Elisenda thought. She was already missing the city.
'This is so green,' Àlex suddenly commented in awe, echoing her thoughts.
'Is that a good thing?'
'In small doses,' he finally decided, 'but you wouldn't want to live with it.'
'You're from Barcelona. You have an ambivalent relationship with scenery.'
'I ran into Senyor Casademont's son over the weekend,' Àlex told her. 'They'd been in Begur. The family has a house there. He says he and his wife took his mother with them to give her some time away.'
Elisenda sighed. 'I know the Casademont shop. We used to buy things there when I was a kid. You liked Senyor Casademont, didn't you?'
'Yes, I did. He'd worked hard all his life. I object to scum like Chema GM taking everything away from him. And I like his son, too. He's just an ordinary, honourable man who shouldn't have to cope with his father dying the way he did.'
'Do you get the feeling that whoever's doing all this is someone ordinary? Honourable even. Someone we don't want it to be.'
'You're not saying it's Casademont's son?'
'No, but it's not necessarily going to be a Daniel Masó or a Chema GM either. Or a Joaquim Masó.' Elisenda told Àlex about her conversation with Pijaume and about the incident with the dog that she and Catalina had witnessed. 'He asked me where I drew the line and I had to question what I thought. Everyone crossing the road that evening wanted someone else to have a go at the guy who hit his dog.'
Àlex shrugged. 'Why for a dog?'
'You're not sentimental about animals, are you?'
'No animal is as important as a human, if that's what you're asking. If he'd hit another person, maybe someone would have done something about it.'
'Maybe, maybe not. It's one thing to be outraged, it's another to do something about it. And who's to say you're right if you did do something? What would you have done in those circumstances? Hit him?'
'I don't know.'
'And if he'd emptied his ashtray on to the pavement? Would you have emptied a rubbish bin over his car?'
'No.'
'And would you applaud if someone else did it?'
Àlex glanced sideways at her. 'Probably.'
'So might I. Once. So, ultimately, we're saying we'd accept someone else doing what we wouldn't do.'
'These are all hypothetical, Elisenda.'
'Not any more. Not with what's happening in the city. What about a critic? Would we humiliate a critic?'
'Possibly.'
'But we wouldn't kill one. It becomes a question of degree. You can humiliate someone who deserves to be humiliated, but only up to a certain point. Punish someone who deserves to be punished. But only up to a certain point.'
'That's why we exist, Elisenda, the Mossos. And the courts and the prisons and the legal system.'
'Precisely. We get someone else to do it for us. That's what society is. The problem is that now someone else is deciding how it's done and who it's done to. Someone outside that society. And it questions everything we think we believe.'
'Viladrau,' Àlex said. 'We both know we find him reprehensible. Deep down, we would have welcomed his being found out.'
'Yes, but not his being killed. They're guilty, they should be brought to justice. They shouldn't be victims of another crime.'
'I agree with you, Elisenda.'
She sighed. 'Do you? I don't even know if I agree with myself anymore.'
'We all know where we draw the line.'
'I'm not sure we do. Not anymore. This person is challenging that. The problem is I have the feeling they're going to challenge it a great deal more before this is all over.'
She looked at the road ahead.
'You need to slow down here and start looking for a parking place. You can't take cars into the village unless you're a resident. We don't want to drive in and have to explain what we're doing.'
Àlex found a space to park on a road curling down along the side of the small valley. The village was a short walk through narrow streets over on the opposite slope. They crossed on foot and turned left, in among the brightly flowered balconies crowning the shaded porticoed arches of the main square. In a dark doorway, an elderly man in a black beret sat smoking a cigar on an ancient straight-backed chair, a grey-whiskered dog lying quietly at his feet. Àlex greeted him but he simply stared back at them. A party of green and brown hikers emerged wearily from the village shop-cum-café, wordlessly unwrapping huge baguette sandwiches. The crumbling castle loured silently over them all.
Elisenda led Àlex along a winding lane until she found a small doorway in among a row of narrow homes huddled together in the shadow of the steep stone fortress. The door itself was old but not original, going by its neighbours. No doubt salvaged from a grander building, Elisenda thought, looking at the fine tracery of the wrought-iron grille set into the dark and aged wood. It had the air of an expensive renovation.
Elisenda was about to use the imposing metal knocker in the shape of a hand clenching a ball when the door opened and a woman in a nylon housecoat came out carrying a bucket of grey, soapy water.
'All right if I go on in, senyora?' Elisenda asked. The woman simply looked at her and nodded before walking out into the middle of the cobbled lane to empty the bucket into a stone drain.
Elisenda glanced at Àlex and pushed the door open fully.
Inside was one large room, as she'd expected, with a stone staircase to the right leading upstairs and a door at the rear to further rooms at the back of the building. She trod lightly on the ornate glazed ceramic floor tiles, some of them brighter than the others, new casts of a traditional design to plug the gaps.
Àlex patted her on the shoulder and poi
nted to the stairs. She nodded and let him pass, watching him climb slowly. The original steps had been covered with La Bisbal green and yellow tiles and edged with mahogany. Viladrau had obviously not skimped on the details, she decided. She watched him pause for a moment and listen before carrying on his ascent.
There wasn't a sound in the house.
Moving quietly through the downstairs room, which was dark and furnished sparsely but expensively with a mahogany coffee table and two brown leather armchairs, she began crossing it towards the door at the rear. The room would have been where the animals were kept in times gone by and was now used as a cool atrium in the summer months. She shivered. The temperature was considerably lower than outside.
Silently, she turned the handle on the door and opened it slowly into a kitchen. Despite herself, she let out a low whistle. Everything in the kitchen was new, yet designed to look original in a way that original had never been in this sort of house. Light brown earthenware floor tiles, a central cooking island of ceramic and walnut with a double oven and eight gas rings, walnut cabinets around the walls. A Serrano ham hung from a small hook in the ceiling, the flesh a rich crimson where slices had been carved from it. The end of a baguette was sticking out of an old-fashioned cotton bread bag hanging on a hook. She felt it. A day old at most, the white flesh where a generous chunk had been ripped off still white and springy. Two plates, both used, stood next to the sink. A fine-stemmed wine glass stood alongside them, red flakes of dried wine peeling off inside the bottom of the bowl like sunburnt skin. An empty bottle of Vega Sicilia stood next to it. Vega Sicilia, she thought. Enough to feed all the beggars scrabbling for the faithful's change outside any church in the country for a week. It was a kitchen of firmly terrestrial delights.
Beyond the kitchen, she opened another door and walked quietly in.
