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

by Chris Lloyd

  'I don't know about you, Elisenda,' Puigventós said once they got outside, 'but I need a coffee.'

  They went into an old neighbourhood café and sat at the pockmarked wooden counter with their own thoughts for a few moments. A slot machine in the corner of the bar played a tinny version of the birdie song on an endless loop over the low rumble of the TV news at the rear of the bar. Elisenda found it hypnotically comforting after the darkened hush of the two churches.

  'So that's that,' Puigventós finally stated.

  Elisenda watched the owner serve their coffee. 'Almost.'

  The inspector waited until the owner had added the hot milk to their cups from the metal jug and moved away before speaking again.

  'Did you know it was Pijaume?'

  Elisenda took a small sip of her coffee and considered her answer.

  'No. I didn't. But I realised that that wasn't the point. Just as I felt that the attacks were about the vehicle, not the victims, so I saw that the only way we were going to stop them was to see the attacker in the same way. I'd spent too much time focusing on who he might be that I was going around in circles. So I focused on the vehicle instead. On the symbol.'

  She took another sip of the coffee. It was piping hot, so she put the spoon in to conduct some of the heat away and nestled the cup between the fingertips of both hands. Puigventós said nothing, but simply stared at her reflection in the mirror on the wall behind the counter, waiting for her to carry on.

  'The attacker had used the city and its legends to turn them against us, and I realised that the only way I was ever going to stop him was by using his own weapon against him. The city and its history. Albert Riera said that what mattered was our victims, not our personalities. In this case, he was wrong. It wasn't the victims that mattered, not when it came to catching the person who had made them his victims. It was the personality of the attacker and the personality of the city. That's what put an end to all this.'

  She took the spoon out of her cup and took another sip.

  'Narcís told me before he died that he felt that Pau was closing in on him, but I don't think that was the case. I found nothing in Pau's notes to suggest it.'

  Puigventós let out a deep sigh. 'Which makes it even more senseless.'

  The car waiting for them outside took them back to the hill overlooking the city centre and a hotel where an informal lunch had been planned. Elisenda still wasn't sure how she felt about it. Pau deserved to be recognised, but she didn't know if any of them was ready for this.

  Puigventós looked out of the car window at various people climbing out of cars and taxis and making their way into the hotel. 'And so we create a legend.'

  Elisenda stared at the Mossos, the politicians and the great and the good of the city. 'We've got enough legends. He was just a man. That should be enough.'

  Inside, Elisenda found the members of her team and stood with them, facing out at the rest of the buffet diners like a circle of wagons in the old Western movies that always played on Sunday afternoon TV when she was a kid.

  'Is everyone all right?' she asked them.

  They all nodded and moved closer.

  'Good,' she said.

  She leaned into Montse and whispered something in her ear. Montse stared back at her, a look of surprise on her face, and nodded.

  Other Mossos came over to speak to her and her unit, and their little defensive circle fragmented as it became less necessary. Mosso Paredes offered his condolences formally to Elisenda and then went off, relieved after his duty, to talk to Montse and Josep. Elisenda watched them. Other younger Mossos went up and spoke to them, each evidently offering their support. The more senior officers did the same to Elisenda and Àlex, except for Micaló, who stayed close to the politicians and the money. He was studiously avoiding her, which suited her fine today of all days.

  'Catch you later,' she muttered in his direction as he jostled for position between Puigventós and a senior councillor.

  She turned to Àlex and chose her words. 'I'm sorry, Àlex, but I need to be able to trust you. You have to decide if you're going to carry on working with me. With my unit.' She looked away. 'I have to decide.'

  He looked at her profile and nodded, his face expressionless, his voice unhealed.

  Montse came to stand next to them. She looked exhausted.

  'I wish we could go now,' the caporal whispered to her. 'Half these people didn't even know Pau.'

  Josep joined them. 'And the half that did were baying for our blood.'

  Elisenda spied a little vignette across the room. 'Talking of which.'

  They looked over to where two figures were huddled in earnest conversation. David Costa, the newspaper editor, and Gerard Bellsolà, the third-generation lawyer. Each spoke to the other as though they were a slightly disreputable but necessary confederate. Elisenda had an instant image of the chain of information being quietly passed on. Micaló to Bellsolà to Costa.

  They watched in silence for a moment before Elisenda spoke again. 'We go out for a drink tonight. To celebrate Pau our way.'

  'El Cercle,' Montse agreed. 'That was his favourite bar.'

  'El Cercle,' Josep echoed. 'No one but us.'

  Elisenda signalled to Montse and they moved away from the group. El Cercle, she thought. The circle. The bar she'd told Mosso Paredes to go to for a brandy on that first morning, the day Daniel Masó was found hanging from a disused apartment balcony on Carrer Pla i Cargol.

  And now the circle was about to close.

  'You never met Pau Yáñez, did you, David?' she asked Costa. She'd backed him into a corner of the room after he'd finished his conversation with Bellsolà.

  He stared back at her in surprise. 'No, I didn't. I'm here representing my paper.'

  'Oh, I'm not questioning why you're here. I just wanted to talk to you about Pau. He was our colleague and we're here to celebrate him, so you should perhaps know a little bit about him.'

  Costa looked increasingly wary, but Elisenda was effectively boxing him in between the tables laid out with a depleted array of food and drink.

  'He had a remarkable mind,' Elisenda went on. 'He saw connections anyone else would miss. And he had a tenacity. He'd keep going until things would slot into place.'

  'What are you trying to say? I thought we'd said all we had to say the other day.'

  'No, I don't think so. I was asking you for help the other day. Perhaps I should have told you the tile in the museum was a fabrication but I don't suppose that really matters. No, David, I'm here to give you some help. I was telling you about Pau. I was going through some notes he'd made and I came across some interesting things. Take this website, for instance, the one that's turned this city on itself. Pau went through it, categorising postings and then cross-referencing them with articles in the local paper. Your paper, David. He also turned up a link between three computer hackers we were investigating and an article Carles Font wrote. Your journalist.'

  He looked calmly at her. 'You won't be able to prove anything.'

  'I won't have to. I'm telling you I know you're involved in the website and I'm telling you that it will shut down.' They stared at each other in silence for a moment. 'I won't tell you a second time.'

  A hushing noise came from the end of the room, telling everyone that the top table was about to make its speeches.

  'Catch you later,' Elisenda whispered to Costa and walked away to listen.

  She listened and forgot. There was a definite inverse proportion between the length and sentiment of the various eulogies and the contact the person giving them had ever had with Pau. She caught Àlex's eye at one point and looked away in sadness and anger.

  When they were finally over and everyone went back to their interrupted conversations, Elisenda sat down at a table and stared impassively at the people around her.

  'So how are you, Elisenda?' a man's voice asked her.

  She looked up to see Marsans pulling a chair nearer to her.

  'This is a sour victory,'
she told him.

  'Sour?'

  'I would willingly have let Narcís Pijaume pass into Girona myth if it meant Pau were still alive. And even Pijaume. And the reputation of the Mossos had remained intact.'

  She let out a huge sigh and looked at the professor.

  'I know,' she told him.

  'You know what, Elisenda?'

  'I know you killed Pere Corominas.'

  Marsans simply looked back at her. Elisenda could see Montse and Josep watching them from a few paces behind the lecturer's seat.

  'No,' Marsans said, shaking his head slowly. 'No, Elisenda.'

  'I read the abstract of your paper in Columbia, Professor Marsans. And Professora Torrent's. They were remarkably similar. As was the summary of your new book to the new research she was getting into. Whereas your last book was a rehash of your previous three. You needed something new.'

  'It was my research,' Marsans insisted.

  'No, it wasn't. Professora Torrent spoke of your acolytes around the city. That's what Corominas was. One of your favoured few, now working for the city archives. I think you inveigled him into stealing Professora Torrent's work for you. And I think he did and I think he regretted it. And I think he threatened to tell her about it. But I know you killed him. And do you know what? If you hadn't tried to cover up your crime by linking it to the other attacks, you'd probably have got away with it.'

  Marsans pinched the bridge of his nose and took a drink from the dregs of someone else's glass left on the table. 'My publisher was going to drop me. Unless I came up with something new. And then I saw what Aurora was doing.' He let out a dry laugh. 'Who would have thought that dear old Aurora would have come up with something so exciting.'

  Elisenda signalled to Montse and Josep to come closer.

  Marsans carried on speaking. 'Pere was one of the best pupils I've ever had. He would have been a fine lecturer himself. But he wanted to come clean about what he'd done. About what I'd done.' He looked at Elisenda. 'I couldn't allow that.'

  Elisenda leaned forward and stopped him as the two caporals approached.

  'Do you know what, Professor Marsans? I really don't care.'

  Chapter Eighty One

  Andrés Soriano pulled the zip on his fleece up tighter around his face and shivered. It wasn't so much the cold as the damp. Autumn was here with its dark mornings and thick air that got through to the bones and he was tired and angry.

  He'd bought the fleece just a week ago and it was good quality and kept the wet chill out. But that was when he'd had a bit of money to his name. Before Daniel Masó's uncle had taken over from his nephew and started claiming the money he reckoned was owed to him. And with those two brothers from Barcelona that went everywhere with him, Andrés Soriano was not going to argue. He was going to shut up and tighten his belt like he'd done before.

  'Hijo de puta,' he muttered at the thought.

  He threw his broom into the little cart after he'd finished sweeping the cobbles at the foot of the cathedral steps and looked up.

  And instantly staggered back.

  'Hijo de puta,' he muttered again.

  He looked again at the Verge de la Bona Mort in the gloom of the morning and saw it was nothing. He thought he'd seen something hanging from the foot of the statue with the impassive smiling face, but there was nothing there. Just a shadow in a niche.

  Crossing himself, he climbed into his little motorised cart and accelerated through the medieval gateway as the sun slowly rose to scatter the damp of a Girona autumn.

  Acknowledgements

  I'm very happy to have to say thank you to a lot of people, who made researching and writing this book a huge pleasure and who all gave me their help, time and consideration with tremendous good grace and patience. All factual accuracies are thanks to them, the inaccuracies are entirely my own doing.

  I was fortunate enough to spend time in Girona thanks to a Writer's Bursary from Literature Wales, which was invaluable as it gave me the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the city archives and wander the streets checking out locations and talking to people, and simply soaking up the atmosphere.

  The Àrea de Comunicació of the Mossos d'Esquadra were very patient and helpful, answering all of my questions, no matter how trivial or grisly, or how many times I came back for more.

  For the legends, I owe a big debt of gratitude to Pere Romans of the Girona Art Museum for going through sources with me and for hunting out numerous articles. I owe a similar debt to Elena Boix, conservator with the Art Museum, and Isabel Joan, curator of the Pharmacy Museum, for showing me around the seventeenth-century pharmacy in the Hospital de Santa Caterina and answering all my questions. I'd also like to thank the staff at both the City Archives and the Provincial Archives in Girona, who cheerfully found every single obscure article or book I asked them for. I would also simply like to thank the people of Girona for possessing such a beautiful and captivating city and for welcoming me back time and time again with such warmth.

  Phil Rickman, author of the Merrily Watkins crime series, was gracious enough to interview me on his radio book programme for BBC Radio Wales about the Elisenda Domènech series, which gave me the encouragement to keep writing.

  If you're going to get published, you can't go far wrong with my publishers Canelo and their extraordinary and uplifting blend of cutting-edge technology, talent and an old-fashioned desire for storytelling. They're also incredibly nice people, so I feel very lucky to work with Michael Bhaskar, Iain Millar and Nick Barreto, and with excellent copy-editor Helen Francis.

  And before that, you have to have a really good agent. I've got the best in Ella Kahn, whose belief in me and perseverance and ability to see the essence of what I'm trying to say simply bowl me over.

  And finally, I thank my wife Liz with everything I have for all her support, love and patience, and for knowing when wine was called for.

  First published in Great Britiain in 2015 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  173A Cavendish Road

  London SW12 0BW

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris Lloyd

  The moral right of Chris Lloyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781910859933

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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