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

by Chris Lloyd

  She placed the single sheet on the table in front of him. It was a printout from the website of a legal journal. An article with his name in the heading that made reference to the spate of attacks in Girona. Elisenda pointed to a sentence that Pau had highlighted in yellow marker pen.

  'How did you know that the attacker left figures on the Verge de la Bona Mort to announce the attacks? None of that had been made public.'

  Bellsolà looked up at her and down at the paper again. 'I'm a lawyer. It's my job to know.'

  'Try again.'

  'I will not, Sotsinspectora Domènech. But I will have your job, I promise you that.'

  'And what do you know about the tiles?'

  Before Bellsolà could reply, a figure rushed around the end of the bar and approached their table. 'I'm sorry I'm late, Gerard,' he said, pausing when he saw who was seated opposite the lawyer.

  Elisenda looked up.

  'Sotsinspector Micaló.' She looked back at Bellsolà. 'So that's how you knew.'

  *

  Elisenda paid at the bar for her coffee and glanced at the two men. They were studiously avoiding returning her look.

  Micaló and Bellsolà. That explained a lot.

  Outside, she was surprised to find cars with their lights on, breathing heavily in the glow of the traffic lights. The clocks had only just gone back the previous weekend, over the Sant Narcís festivities, and she was still getting used to the change of light in the early evening. She walked along Carrer Migdia back towards the city and turned right to head for Vista Alegre. Darkness was already beginning to fall over the river. A light switch had been thrown, ending summer, starting autumn.

  Her phone rang.

  She looked at the screen and was surprised to see Riera's name on it.

  'I have some more details for you, Elisenda.' He spoke as though the altercation of the previous day hadn't happened. 'From what I can ascertain, Corominas died of a blow to the back of the skull.'

  'Thank you, Albert. Do you know what with?'

  'There are small fragments of stone in the wound. They're being examined now, but my feeling is that they're from a building in the old town. The colour and the composition seem to indicate that.'

  'Could it have been an accident?'

  'I couldn't say. It would appear that he either fell or was pushed against a wall or a step.'

  Elisenda thanked him and hung up. Walking back to Vista Alegre, she turned her thoughts to everything people were telling her. A lot of them had their own agendas. The question was which ones were just the small confusion of life and which ones actually meant anything. She was also reminded of something Albert Riera had said to her. About how our victims come before our personalities.

  At the station, Àlex was waiting for her. 'Elisenda . . .' he began.

  'I know how to catch this person,' she told him.

  He was stopped in his tracks by her statement.

  'You know who it is?'

  'No. But I know how to catch them.'

  He simply looked back at her. 'Elisenda, I couldn't get hold of you. Another tile's been found.' Her head dropped but Àlex continued before she could say anything. 'He's written your name on the back of it.'

  'My name? Where was the tile?'

  'On Carrer Figuerola, by the overhead railway lines. It's on the modern Rosa Serra statue.'

  Elisenda's head snapped up. 'The one of the pregnant woman?' She caught her breath, able only to say one word.

  'Catalina.'

  Chapter Seventy Five

  Elisenda's personal mobile rang.

  She checked the caller ID. Her parents.

  Her father told her that they'd rung around everyone but none of them had heard from Catalina. She could hear the quiver in his voice. She tried to make her own stronger not to upset him.

  'Thanks, Papa. If you think of anyone else, try them. I'll call you the minute I know anything.'

  She hung up and shook her head at Sergi, who turned back to his own mobile and stared at it blankly. Elisenda spoke to Montse and left them in the flat in Parc del Migdia. Outside in the park, she spoke to two members of Pijaume's team, who were watching the small artificial lakes and the pathways. Pijaume himself was in an unmarked car, roaming the city, the rest of his team assisting Elisenda's. Micaló hadn't offered to help search for Elisenda's sister.

  The problem was Catalina hadn't been seen anywhere all day. She hadn't called anyone. They had no steps to trace back. Her car had gone from its parking space in the basement of the building where she lived, and there was no sign of where she'd gone.

  Elisenda left the park in another unmarked car, a Seguretat Ciutadana sergent driving. She checked her mobile. She'd set off an expanding chain of phone calls. Friends, relatives and colleagues ringing on through the web, trying to track Catalina down, trying to trace her movements. But nothing was coming up. Just a couple of friends saying she'd seemed depressed. Right now, Elisenda would have taken that. It was better than the alternative. But then the guilt set in that she hadn't picked up on the depression. She knew her sister wasn't entirely happy. But depressed? And she felt guiltier still that Catalina hadn't confided in her.

  Elisenda closed her eyes, knowing she had to change focus. Why Catalina? Why a pregnant woman? She couldn't see what it was that Catalina represented. The statue was merely a statue, not a depiction of a tale or legend relevant to the city.

  Unless it was her. Elisenda. The attacker's real victim was Elisenda. Through her sister. She opened her eyes.

  She thought of her own Girona. So different from her sister's. Catalina was married mothers in the newest part of town, the entrepreneur's wife, the woman who'd forgone her studies to marry. The woman who'd chosen that way to rebel against her upbringing. Elisenda was vocation. Her own choice of career. Liberated and single in her guilt. Another form of rebellion. Elisenda was old town.

  She dialled her mobile. To tell the patrols to switch to La Terra, to the streets of the old town, to the sites of the now-disappeared bars for the bohemian and trendy she'd known in her youth.

  To Elisenda's city.

  Both new and what was left of the old.

  *

  'That's that fucking lawyer.'

  'Shut the fuck up.'

  'It is. It's that fucking lawyer. That Bell-something. The one who got us off that last time.'

  'Bellsolà? No way. Where?' Manuel PM tentatively stuck his head up from behind the thick bush under the slender plane trees vanishing up into the night.

  'Over there, by the trees.'

  'We're in a fucking park. Which fucking trees?'

  Cristobal HP unbent his knees and stood up straight, peering over the green wall. 'There. Where that path stops.'

  They both ducked back down again and looked at each other, as much as they could see in the dark, and started to snigger uncontrollably.

  'Bellsolà,' Manuel PM said, gasping for breath. 'A bender.'

  That started them off again, the joint they'd shared and the beers they'd been drinking all evening playing their part in the hilarity.

  'I told you,' Cristobal HP said between wheezing. 'Queers. They're loaded with money. And they're all too fucking ashamed at being filthy bastards to go to the police.'

  They were in the Devesa, watching the single men drift silently into the bushes, listening to the muted noises coming from the undergrowth, clocking the burning tips of cigarette ends beckoning the initiates.

  'So, do we do him? Bell-thing?' Cristobal HP asked.

  'Are you fucking stupid? He's our lawyer.'

  'Might recognise us?'

  'Fuck that. We'll need him to get us off again some time.'

  The two young men sank down further, racked by more induced laughter.

  *

  Àlex ended the call from Elisenda telling him to switch to the old town, unable to stop herself from asking if he had any news.

  He had nothing to tell her. He looked over from his place in the shadows to where Josep was parked, w
atching the approach roads to the little traffic island in the dark where the statue of the pregnant woman stood, but no one had come near. He didn't expect them to. The attacker had not yet carried out his punishments anywhere near where he'd left his calling card, so there was nothing to suggest he'd do so tonight. The problem was they had no other specific site that had occurred to them. He knew the frustration that Elisenda felt at that. She'd thought she could see into the attacker's mind.

  Àlex left the spot where he was standing and went back to his car. He was roving through the city, ghosting through the few places they'd thought of trying, checking up with the Seguretat Ciutadana cars patrolling the streets, letting the members of his unit know he was there. He drove off, heading for the Pont de Pedret and the area around Sant Feliu. Elisenda's town. He knew it was pointless.

  At the traffic lights, his phone screen lit up, a text coming in. He read the pre-set message, sent with just one touch, and swore.

  He'd forgotten all about that.

  *

  'What we got?'

  'Gimme a fucking minute.' Huddled up against the window in the back of the taxi to catch the street lights, Cristobal HP opened up the first of the two wallets they'd taken. 'Credit cards. All fucking credit cards. No fucker uses money any more. We should've taken them to a cashpoint. I said we should.'

  In the middle of the back seat, Manuel GM was leaning forward between the front seats holding a thin-bladed knife to the driver's neck as he drove away from the Devesa. 'You find a fucking cashpoint round here, we'll take them to it.'

  'Thirty fucking euros, a couple of watches and a necklace. And a joint.' He sounded happier at his last find.

  Manuel GM faced forward again. 'You keep your eyes on the fucking road, granddad,' he growled at the driver. He caught the driver's reflection in the mirror. 'Hey, we've done you before.'

  Cristobal HP peered forward to take a look and they both started laughing.

  'Fucking moron, man,' Manuel GM went on. 'You never fucking learn, do you. We've done you before and you never fucking learn.'

  Manuel GM told the driver to go to the same piece of wasteland to the north of the city where they'd made him go the last time they mugged him. He carried on laughing, the beer and the joint still working their magic.

  'You never fucking learn.'

  *

  Pau stared at his mobile screen, trying to work out its meaning. He suddenly tapped the dashboard and made a phone call. Then he made a second one, this time to Elisenda.

  'He's in the Devesa,' he told her. 'It's just come to me. Get as many people there as quickly as you can.'

  Not giving her time to reply, he hung up and gunned the car engine, tearing through the quiet city streets to the darkened park. No other Mossos cars were there when he got out. Taking a torch, he entered the towering plane trees, heading for the undergrowth near the river. Shadows vanished in front of him, the men cruising the park quickly melting away from the light.

  Except one.

  An illusory figure emerged from the gloom and put a finger to his lips.

  He beckoned Pau over.

  *

  Àlex continued to curse as he drove up the road winding past the archaeology museum. He had his duty to Elisenda, but he also had another duty. One he'd forgotten with the search for Elisenda's sister. One he couldn't ignore.

  Up ahead, as the asphalt ended and the road gave way to track, he saw the lights from inside the car, its headlights still on, casting an eerie reflected glow back at it from the low scrub. He'd switched his own headlights off before turning the last bend in the road, guided now by the small beacon of a taxi's courtesy light. He hoped he wasn't too late.

  He brought his car to a halt next to the taxi, slewing sideways, kicking up a spray of small stones that rattled against the windows and rattled the two occupants of the back seat, giving the driver the chance to get out of the front seat and slam the door shut behind him before they could react.

  'Are you all right, Senyor Pere?' Àlex asked, getting quickly out of his own car and taking a look at the taxi driver in the light thrown back at him. He was shaken but unhurt. Frightened but slowly exhilarant.

  Àlex pulled out the police-issue Walther P99 pistol from his shoulder holster and got into the front of the car, kneeling on the passenger seat and pointing it through the gap in the headrests at the two muggers behind.

  'Hello boys. You probably should have thought of taking your victim somewhere different this time.'

  Manuel GM was the first to react. 'You can't arrest us for this. This is a trap.'

  Àlex looked into his eyes, swapping the gun from right hand to left, and crushed the mugger's nose with a short, skilful jab of his fist. He immediately slapped the same fist sideways into Cristobal HP's slack, drooping jaw, breaking the bone.

  'Who said anything about arresting you?'

  *

  Two other cars were at the borders of the Devesa when Elisenda got there, their headlights shining into the park. Another turned up as she got out, and she could hear more coming, their urgent sirens splitting the night. Steadily, more and more Mossos spread through the trees on foot, hurriedly searching. Many were anticipated by rustles in the bushes as the park's more zealous occupants finally drifted away. Shouts, becoming louder, reverberated through the slender trunks, an echo of the vanished funfair waltzers, now gone for the year.

  Another more ghostly murmur brushed the leaves on the low undergrowth, its direction constantly changing, evaporating here and reforming there. The light cast from Elisenda's torch caught a glimpse of controlled flight, a spirit floating away from her, always out of reach.

  More calls came from behind her, more shocked, more anguished. Elisenda shone her torch back to the quivering bushes in front of her as they slowly came to rest. Seeing nothing, she forced herself to turn back to the shouts. The torches were converging on a cluster of bushes towards the river. Walking out of darkness into a semicircle of hushed light shining on a tree, Elisenda stopped, the breath catching in her throat.

  'Please, no.'

  Montse came over to her and held her.

  Another voice rose. Àlex, arriving through the trees. Anger and despair in his voice.

  The wall of torchlight shone on a tree.

  Held against its slender trunk, supported only by the thick rope that had garrotted him, was Pau, his head bent forward, his limbs loose, his chest unmoving.

  Elisenda's phone rang out in the night.

  Chapter Seventy Six

  The members of her unit sat in silence in their office in Vista Alegre. They were all there. Denial, anger, shock, disbelief.

  As morning broke, Àlex had gone with Pau once the judge had finally allowed the body to be removed. Elisenda hadn't wanted him to be taken to the mortuary alone. Neither had Àlex. He would stay with Pau as long as he felt was necessary. She was of more use back at the police station, with the members of her team who still needed her. Who wanted more than ever to find who had done this.

  Puigventós came into the room while she, Montse and Josep sat in numbed horror. He was there to give them his condolences. 'And you have my support,' he concluded before leaving. 'All of you.'

  'I should have seen the other angle,' Elisenda said once he'd gone.

  'It's not your fault, Elisenda,' Josep spoke up. The first words he had uttered since coming in. And the first time he had ever called her Elisenda. 'You're not to blame. There's only one person responsible for all this. Not any of us.'

  Montse nodded in agreement. Elisenda wished she felt she could entirely agree with them.

  The other angle.

  Before Pau's body had been removed, she'd asked Àlex to go with her to the statue of the pregnant woman. They'd driven the short distance to the little roundabout and pulled up on to the pavement by the overhead railway lines. She'd looked up at the unsightly concrete track, a relic of less demanding days, her mind oddly distracted by the thought that for the first time she appreciated the cons
truction work carving up the south side of the city so that the new lines would come in underground.

  'I got so obsessed with worrying that the attacker was singling me out, singling my family out, that I didn't think of all the angles.' She led him to the front view of the statue, their backs to the short road leading to Gran Via. 'Quite literally, all the angles. Look at this.'

  He looked at the squat, white statue. It was a modern depiction of a headless, armless pregnant woman, standing in the middle of a flowerbed, the flowers now all gone with the summer.

  'A pregnant woman,' he said. 'Understandable. It's what I would have thought.'

  'Now look at this.'

  She led him to the side, directly under the railway, to a point some ninety degrees from where they had been standing a moment ago. Àlex looked at the statue and his shoulders sank.

  'I just didn't think,' she said.

  Àlex looked up again. The view they both got from this side was the trick the statue played. From the front, a pregnant woman, from the side the figure that was represented was a phallus.

  'The victim was never going to be a woman,' Elisenda went on. 'It was never going to be Catalina. He just used the statue to goad us.'

  Àlex looked at her. 'You couldn't have known.' He gestured at the statue. 'That's exactly what he's playing on. Everyone's fears. We saw what he wanted us to see.'

  'I got distracted.'

  Elisenda shook the memory from her head and began to think straight, attributing tasks to Montse and Josep, listening to their voices, using the structure of investigation to overcome the grief and anger. To focus.

  She left them silently and determinedly sifting through all the evidence they had and went into her office. On the way, she picked up Pau's folders of notes and then accessed his files from her computer once she'd sat down. She skimmed through some of the collated facts and suppositions on screen and was instantly struck by the thought that she was going to miss Pau's analytical mind. That hit her like a punch in the stomach. It was the man she would miss. She rubbed her eyes for a moment and went back to trawling through his handwritten and onscreen notes.