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

by Chris Lloyd

  'At least today,' she'd argued. 'All Saints' Eve. We have to expect another attack between today and tomorrow.'

  'The attack on Foday Saio was only yesterday.'

  'Failed attack. That's why he'll try again today. He won't want to let All Saints go by. We need the surveillance tonight on the statue.'

  Puigventós' reply was one word. 'Budgets.'

  He had also drawn a line at setting up CCTV. It was the one time in her life Elisenda regretted not having cameras plastered all over the city like they had in some other countries. What he had agreed to was for patrols to pass by the Verge de la Bona Mort every fifteen minutes through the night to check on her.

  'It's not much but it's something,' Elisenda had told Àlex when they'd left the station.

  In theory, they were both off duty, but they had wordlessly come together in walking from Vista Alegre through the old town to the foot of the cathedral and the virgin's niche. It was All Saints' Eve, and the city was wearily heaving at the tail-end of the Sant Narcís celebrations, due to go out to fireworks and wondrous exhaustion on Sunday. They'd had to dodge the throngs taking advantage of the open-doors evening at the city's museums. Elisenda had to admit that it was unlikely anyone would dare try to get something on to the statue with half the city milling around.

  'I still don't see how he gets the figures up there,' Àlex commented, looking up at the statue. They were standing outside the front door to L'Arc, opposite the Portal de Sobreportes, the music from the bar tumbling out on to the street every time the door opened.

  'Like a lasso, I'd say. To catch on the pigeon spikes. That's why the fly didn't land the way he wanted. He doesn't get a second chance once it's caught.' She stared at the Verge. 'Would we have been able to stop Mònica Ferrer's murder had we known of the effigy, do you think?'

  Àlex paused before replying. 'Possibly. But you can't think that way, Elisenda. We have to use it now to stop another killing.'

  They watched a group of families standing by the stone gateway immediately under the Verge, the younger children running round and round the cluster of two generations of adults. The older children wanting away to the funfair, wheedling at parents and grandparents to be allowed.

  'Nothing's going to happen any time soon, is it?' Àlex muttered. 'You hungry?'

  Some of the fast food restaurants in town had come under fire on the website. Two had closed for the evening and others had hired security, and all the other restaurants in town would be full, so they cut through the darkened alleys to find somewhere Elisenda knew that was more down to earth. Far from the light and noise of the area around the cathedral, they came to a darkened door in an anonymous old building. The street lights were fainter here, separated from one another by a more distant void. Nonetheless, there were still plenty of diners in the know buzzing around the faded wood and iron entrance to the small restaurant. Elisenda invited Àlex to enter first and he shoved against the stiff door and went in.

  'For Christ's sake,' Elisenda heard him curse the moment she shut the door behind them. There was barely enough room to squeeze in through the entrance and she had to wait while a young couple went past before she could see what had annoyed him.

  It was the photo of Mònica Ferrer. The one taken on someone's mobile phone in the market. A printout of it on cheap paper had been pinned up on the wall behind the counter, the legend "ha ha ha" scrawled across the bottom in red felt-tip.

  'Take that down,' Àlex told the owner, a grizzled old guy who Elisenda knew rarely smiled or even spoke with any civility as he served up huge and tasty meals at ancient prices. People came for the food, not the charm.

  The owner carried on pulling a bottle of white wine out of a fridge to give to the waiter, his middle son, and shrugged. 'She had it coming.'

  'No one has that coming to them,' Àlex continued, leaning forward over the counter, unwilling to let it go.

  The owner looked directly back at him. 'Ferrer did. My daughter's restaurant went out of business thanks to her. She deserved everything she got and more.'

  Àlex leaned across the counter. 'You are no different from the person who did this.'

  'Get out.'

  'I will. But you will take that picture down first or I will arrest you.'

  'Take it down,' Elisenda told him quietly.

  Outside, Àlex apologised to Elisenda.

  'No need to,' she told him. 'You were right to say something.'

  They walked back through the streets and passed through the crowds at the foot of the cathedral steps and out underneath the Verge de la Bona Mort.

  'I'm still hungry, mind,' Elisenda complained.

  In the end, they stood among the throng on Elisenda's street and ate a savoury pancake from the stand a few doors down from her building that sold crepes through its front window. They stood in the middle of the cobbles away from the other groups of standing diners so they could speak. Elisenda told Àlex of the search at Corominas' flat and the discussion about the stand-up.

  'I don't find them that funny, either,' he told her. 'Same old rubbish under another name. But I don't see why people get so worked up about it.'

  'I think they see it as a foreign culture creeping in and taking over.'

  He gestured with his crepe at the crowd around them. 'So what is it that makes a crepe acceptable and a burger not? They're both foreign. Everyone's selective when it comes to deciding what's allowed and what's not.' He took another mouthful. 'Did the kids at the Foday Saio scene tell us much?'

  Elisenda shook her head as she tried to push the smoked salmon back into her crepe. 'They're teenagers. Too many hormones to see anyone else. The only half-decent sighting is by Foday's daughter and she thinks anyone over the age of twelve is very old.'

  'Even so, this guy's good at going unnoticed.'

  'Visually and forensically,' Elisenda agreed. 'The Científica have found nothing at any of the sites.'

  'Like he's part of the legends himself.'

  Elisenda shuddered. 'I refuse to see him that way.'

  Àlex took Elisenda's finished serviette from her to throw in the bin. 'We will catch him, Elisenda.'

  She just nodded, staring at the smiling people around them. Everyone was tired at the end of a hotter Sant Narcís than anyone had ever known and they were all moving with a partied-out slowness through the cloying streets. She realised she was sweating in the night air and she could see Àlex's face glistening with perspiration.

  'This weather's ridiculous,' she told him.

  'Girona. When it's not humid, it's raining.'

  Elisenda grimaced at him and looked up at the tramway of sky she could see through the narrow buildings either side. The night was blackening and closing in on them by the minute, feeling its way down the ancient walls. The air was thick in her nostrils.

  'There's a storm coming.'

  Àlex looked at his watch. 'Time for me to go home, then. Before it breaks.'

  Elisenda wished him goodnight and watched him head off for the footbridge across the river to the new town before she turned away and walked towards her apartment.

  'No, can't face it,' she muttered to herself outside the front door to her building.

  La Terra was packed, so she carried on to Carrer de la Força and up the steep road to the bottom of the cathedral. Some people were seated at the tables outside L'Arc, making the most of a warm evening, but most of the tables were empty as others started moving inside, all of them with one eye on the heavy, descending sky. Elisenda chose a table on the edge of the terrace and sat down with a licor de café to watch the Verge de la Bona Mort.

  'Cigarette?' a man's voice asked.

  A young guy in dirty jeans and a stained T shirt was moving from table to table trying to cadge a cigarette. He came to Elisenda and stopped in front of her, blocking her view of the statue. His eyes were glazed and he was unsteady on the uneven ground.

  'Cigarette?' he asked her.

  'Sorry, I don't smoke.'

  She watched his ey
es flicker from her to the ten-euro note she'd placed in the red saucer the waiter had left with her bill. She caught his eye and shook her head very slightly. Unfazed, he walked off to the table behind her to ask for a cigarette. He was having no luck.

  Elisenda looked back at the statue in her niche.

  There was nothing hanging from it.

  The first rain drop landed thickly on her table, quickly followed by another, then more, reverberating on the aluminium, throwing up dust and oil from the cobbles in a sweet haze. The crowds walking up and down the cathedral steps scattered, some climbing, some descending, all heading for the nearest shelter. The first dull thud of distant thunder rolled slowly in from the mountains west of the city.

  She grabbed her drink and the saucer with the note and followed everyone else running in from the terrace through the crowded doorway into the bar, her hair and arms already soaked, her shirt and trousers sticking to her body. Inside, she turned back but couldn't see through the hordes at the door. She was the only one in the bar not laughing at the sudden downpour.

  *

  Àlex stood alone at the hostile bar and looked around.

  He hadn't gone home, either.

  He examined his fellow patrons. Evidently, most of Girona's lowlifes enjoyed a funfair, too. Just four cloned yobs playing table football noisily, slamming the small wooden footballs on to the centre of the table in nervous, self-aware bravado.

  He finished his orange juice. Too quiet tonight, he decided, the adrenaline not rising, so he paid up and left.

  Outside, the storm had hit. Sant Narcís's revellers had scattered and the streets were all but empty. Just the sorry sound of the last-gasp waltzers and ignored dodgem klaxon in the park underpinned the thudding of heavy raindrops on the soaked streets and sizzling of car tyres. Thick black water ran in torrents along the gutters, collecting a summer of oil and grease and dust from the road and funnelling it down storm drains and up and over the pavements where the gratings backed up.

  Making his mind up, Àlex ran for the arches of Plaça Independència, along the river. This was where the city was, he discovered. Drenched partygoers were resolutely shaking out their soaked hair and laughing under the stone porticoes of the square, the steam rising in a swirling haze from their heads. Others stood in the doorways of the welcome dry of the bars or were already seated with a drink at the covered terraces, staring pleasurably out at the rainstorm.

  Àlex stood with the rest of the crowd for a while, but it was obvious the rain wasn't going to let up any time soon, so he wound his way through the damp throng to a solitary taxi at the rank outside the ornately ineffectual post office building. He ran for it and climbed in. It was a driver he recognised, a dignified, greying man who'd taken up driving a taxi after forced retirement and the lonely boredom of living alone.

  'I haven't seen you for a time, Senyor Pere,' Àlex said. 'Sorry for jumping in like that.'

  The driver turned round in the front seat before pulling out on to Gran Via and looked at Àlex, who gasped. The centre of his face was marked with the X of a heavy white plaster holding his nose in place. His right eye was bruised, a cut below it healing.

  'I've only just started working again,' Pere told him, his voice thick. 'My insurance won't pay for me to be off any longer and I need the money.'

  'What happened?' Àlex asked him.

  Pere turned back and edged out into traffic through the rain-sodden stalemate, looking at Àlex in the rear-view mirror as he spoke. 'Couple of yobs. They got in before I knew what was happening. They held a knife to me, made me take them up to Sant Daniel, out at the end of the valley, and did this to me.'

  Àlex couldn't think of anything to say, but simply looked at Pere's eyes in the mirror and turned away to look out at the shop window lights reflected on the wet pavements, his lips tight in anger.

  'Who was it?'

  Pere stopped at a red light and looked up into the mirror. 'We both know who it was.'

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  One of the things Octavi Marsans loved the most was the feel of his black silk kimono on his bare legs in the morning. And the soft noise it made, like the susurration of an ambitious door sliding open just for him.

  Going into the trim kitchen, he switched the designer espresso machine on and pulled two pods out of a drawer and two cups and saucers from a cupboard. That was another of the things he loved the most. The morning after bedding one of his students. Clearing away the detritus of the meal he had expertly whipped together the night before, in carefully planned spontaneity after an evening spent late going over her course work and the suggestion that he cook for her. Listening to her take a shower, recalling the shape of her body and the compliance of her moans, waiting for her to appear in his kitchen wearing one of the oversized man's shirts he put out for her, just enough of her slim legs revealed to him. Rituals and traditions, tradition and ritual. We are nothing without that, Octavi Marsans thought to himself. He looked out of the kitchen window in his steep, rambling house at the top of the old town. A dense curtain of grey had descended over the city, not as savage as the previous night's deluge, but relentless in its steady insistence.

  He prepared the DVD he'd left to record the previous night in the player in the kitchen. Last month's recording. Now even more topical than ever. He remembered he'd been superb, putting down his opponent effortlessly, playing on the spectres of the past to score easy points. His image came up on screen now, in his usual linen suit and pastel T-shirt, looking much calmer and cooler under the moody lights of the city station's one TV studio than his adversary, a sweating and spluttering Mossèn Eduard Viladrau. Now more famous than ever since his bizarrely-staged murder. Fame that would only do Marsans' own reputation good. Marsans looked at the priest now, rabidly defending the indefensible, calling for increasingly wilder and more regressive reforms, setting himself up like the cheapest of stooges for Marsans' withering putdowns. Marsans couldn't help smiling at the display. If the city were talking about what had happened to the priest before, they'd be talking about it even more now. And about Marsans' performance.

  'Is that coffee?' a voice said behind him. 'Smells good.'

  He turned to see Roser Caselles come in, wearing the shirt, her exquisite moneyed legs tapering down to the cold marble floor. Without a word, he poured her a coffee and placed it on the kitchen bar for her in good view of the screen.

  'Thanks,' she said. She looked at the TV. Marsans was going in for the kill, pummelling the hapless priest with his usual argument that tradition did not mean conservatism, ritual was not rite, collective identity was not selective memory.

  'I recorded this, too,' Roser added. 'I imagine the whole city did.' She knew how to play the game by Marsans' rules. He nodded, as though it was only right that she should, his gaze turning irrevocably away from her and back to his own image on the small screen.

  His mobile rang. A number he didn't recognise. He picked it up and walked towards the door into the living room with it.

  'Would you excuse me, my dear?' he asked Roser, not waiting for a reply.

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Stabbing with a fork at her breakfast bowl of pineapple and strawberries, Elisenda closed the door to the smaller of the two bedrooms with her foot and wandered back past her own solitary tousled bedroom to the living room. Overlooking the large terrace that had a view out over the river and beyond to the Devesa and the mountains, the living room was separated from the small kitchen by an open archway. She sat down at the wooden table by the French windows in the kitchen and looked out. The apartment was empty. She thought of Pere Corominas' parents and how calm they seemed at the disappearance of their son and she thought of herself. She put her fruit down unfinished.

  Outside on the terrace, her begonias in a medley of ceramic pots that had been tricked into constant flowering by the never-ending summer were wilting under the incessant rain. Craning her neck to one side, she could see down to the river below. The level had risen and the wat
er was flowing more loosely than usual. The river had been widened years ago as far as the other side of Plaça Catalunya to prevent the flooding that used to see water over a metre high in the old town, but heavy rain could still surge under the Pont de Pedra and between the houses on either side of the Onyar where the river narrowed through the city. As a child, she'd once seen a whole tree, uprooted kilometres away upriver, trapped and flailing under the old stone bridge. She'd stared at it for ages from under her mother's umbrella, wondering why the adults wouldn't free it.

  For once, the rain had charmed the city. She'd checked with Vista Alegre first thing, to be told that the downpour had kept the mob in Salt indoors. The racial tension hadn't gone away, but it hadn't been allowed to flourish either.

  Her work mobile, on the table in front of her, rang and she picked it up.

  'Sotsinspectora? It's Josep. I've just had a message forwarded to me from Sotsinspector Pijaume. Someone's reported a tile left in the city history museum.'

  'Why's he told us that?'

  'The tile's of the Verge de la Bona Mort. The curator found it this morning. She thought it was just vandalism, but Sotsinspector Pijaume felt it might be worth informing us. It was on El Tarlà.'

  Elisenda stood up quickly.

  'Thanks, Josep. Can you get hold of Àlex and tell him to meet me at the museum?'

  She turned to look at the rain falling over the river.

  'Got you, you bastard.'

  *

  'It's him,' she told Àlex twenty minutes later. She'd made another phone call of her own in the meantime. 'With all the activity around the statue, he's changed how he announces his attacks. If he can't take the sign to the Verge de la Bona Mort, he'll take the Verge de la Bona Mort to the sign.'