by Chris Lloyd
‘I’m quite happy on my own, thanks, David.’
Surprisingly, he didn’t put on his hurt puppy look. Instead, he looked frankly back at her. ‘I have something on Marc Comas.’
Nodding slowly, she pushed out the other chair at her table. He sat down and asked the waiter for a glass of white wine and the grilled salmon.
‘So what have you got?’ Elisenda demanded. She still didn’t entirely trust him.
‘Have you seen the house where they live? Comas and Miravent? He’s a city councillor, she’s a journalist who was freelance for years before becoming a member of the Catalan government. How can they afford a house like that in Palau? And send their son to one of the most expensive private schools in Girona?’
‘Miravent comes from money.’
‘No, she doesn’t, Elisenda. Her family isn’t that wealthy and certainly can’t afford to be subsidising them to that tune. I know where their money comes from. Comas is one of the councillors on the housing and planning committee. I have a file of what you might call strange decisions that the committee has taken over the last few years. Land reclassification, tenders that have gone to not the most obvious bidders. I think he’s involved with companies that have seen their profits grow over the same period. All this at a time when construction has been in the doldrums ever since the recession began.’
‘Do you have evidence of any wrongdoing?’
‘Not yet. But I strongly suspect that he’s up to his ears in corrupt practices.’
Elisenda sighed heavily. ‘I’m not a journalist, David. I need evidence before I start accusing anyone of corruption. They have a big house and he’s on committees. That’s not enough. Do you actually have anything I can use?’
‘No. Not yet, but I’m convinced that something is going on. You in the Mossos would be in a position to find out more.’
‘How? If there’s nothing I can show to a judge for them to sanction an investigation, I can’t get access to Comas’s affairs. You know that, David.’
Their food arrived and Elisenda’s heart sank, realising she now had to sit through a meal with him in exchange for no tangible information that was of any use to her.
‘They’re Opus Dei,’ he suddenly added when the waiter had gone.
‘Oh, for goodness sake. You’re not going to give me some conspiracy theory now.’
His face hardened. ‘You know perfectly well I’m not. What I mean is how Opus members tend to look out for each other. The classic old-boy network.’
‘And you think Comas is helping other Opus members through the committee’s decisions? That’s a hard one to prove. I’m sorry, David, but you need to give me something more concrete.’
He put his knife and fork down and stared hard at her. ‘I will. I know he’s corrupt.’
‘Change the subject, David.’
He chuckled artificially to lighten the atmosphere. ‘Miravent’s politics are something to behold, don’t you think? At least that’s something we can agree on.’
‘I couldn’t possibly say. Your politics have always been more radical than mine.’
He laughed again, more genuinely this time. ‘Come on, Elisenda, I know you. Miravent is just carrying on a long tradition of throwing in your lot with the colonial power.’
‘That’s a bit strong, David.’ Her food wasn’t settling well as she was eating too quickly.
‘You know what she reminds me of? The Catalan bourgeoisie under Franco who made a point of speaking Spanish and rejecting Catalan, just to be able to ally themselves with power and get on. Miravent’s the post-democracy version of that. A desire to sit at the big table, no matter how unpalatable the menu.’
‘Maybe change the subject again, David.’ What irritated her was that her own beliefs were probably a more tempered version of the stuff David was spouting, but as a Mosso leading an investigation, she had to retain impartiality.
‘Come on, you’re not going to tell me the Mossos share her politics.’
‘It’s a broad church, David, with broad beliefs.’
He smirked at that, which annoyed her all the more. What he knew was that the Mossos owed their current existence to autonomy. They were employed by the Catalan government. Inevitably, the motivation of so many like her who’d joined the Mossos but wouldn’t have dreamt of entering the old Spanish police was a desire for a break with the past, a desire to be part of Catalonia as a nation. That meant many of her colleagues were at least pro-autonomy, others pro-independence, including an association of officers who campaigned for just that. She looked at her dinner companion and said nothing of what she felt.
At the end of the meal, one of the most hurried meals that Elisenda could recall and that left her feeling bloated, she didn’t lean forward for the usual kiss on each cheek and he didn’t attempt to do so either. Watching him go, she sat back down again at the same table and asked for a coffee, which she’d reluctantly forgone in her eagerness to get supper over with. The waiter gave her a knowing smile and came back with a tallat, a small white coffee, and a licor de café in a shot glass.
Opus Dei, she considered, wondering if they really were members. She remembered the reference to family values in Miravent’s appeal. But more than anything, the we-feel-no-grief comment now began to make some sense. She’d get Josep to check up on it in the morning, as far as that were possible. If not the secretive and sinister organisation that Hollywood liked to portray, they still liked to be a closed book to non-members.
Climbing the stairs to her apartment, next to the river, she opened the door and switched the light on. A small child was standing in front of her. In her fright, she dropped her keys. Bending down to pick them up, she turned back to look and the child was still there, standing in what used to be the small hall until she knocked all the interior walls through. It was a girl of about six. Motionless, wordless, expressionless. Elisenda looked at her and felt tears sting her eyes.
‘You have to go now, Lina,’ she told the vision of her daughter. ‘Mama needs you to go.’
‘What do you want with me?’ he shouted at the door above his head.
He could see it now, a rectangle of black in the darkness. A deeper hue of bleakness that danced into the edges of his vision when he looked to one side of it.
He picked up another rock from the rubble strewn around his feet and threw it. It banged against the damp wood with an angry thud and bounced back down to the cellar floor. He could just see it fall in the gloom a metre or so in front of him.
He refused to cry.
Instead, he climbed to the top of the worm plinth of crumbled steps and launched himself into the black one more time. Coiling his legs as tightly as possible, he sprang and reached with his fingertips for the bottom of the door frame, but he still couldn’t find a handhold. He had the measure of the space now and was getting nearer each time he jumped, but so far hadn’t found anything on which to gain purchase. He landed back on the ground, in the small area he’d cleared of rocks so he wouldn’t injure himself when he fell, and swore. A deep, irreligious curse his mother would have scolded him for.
Giving up for the moment, he inched his way back to the spot where he had the best view of the door and waited to get his breath back. He shouted to his captor again.
‘I’m cold.’
He looked up expectantly. The sliver of light around the door seemed weaker, the visibility less. He had no idea how long he’d been there. At least a night, he thought, and another day.
‘I’m hungry,’ he called again. ‘I want something to eat.’
He heard movement at the door and it opened. The figure gestured to him to stand up and threw something down. It was a sleeping bag. The slippery nylon felt like the most luxurious thing he’d ever known.
Something else was thrown down. He picked it up to find a long, thin package in silver foil. He opened it to find a sandwich. Tender ham in a long baguette, the inside of the bread dowsed in tomato, oil and salt. He breathed in the aroma and felt almost sick w
ith hunger.
‘Catch this,’ the figure above said.
He looked up in time to see a plastic bottle of water arcing down at him from above. Dropping the sandwich onto the sleeping bag at his feet, he caught it in time before it could crack open on the hard floor.
‘What do you want with me?’ he demanded again.
The figure stared at him in silence for a moment and retreated, shutting the door, plunging the cellar in shadows again.
He sat down with his treasure and resisted the urge to cry.
Outside the walls, he heard the river whisper in the dark.
Wednesday
Chapter Eighteen
‘She’s six.’
‘And how old was Lina when you last saw her?’
Elisenda sighed impatiently. Unlike the previous morning, when she didn’t have the inclination to go through with counselling, now she felt she didn’t have the time either.
‘I’ve got two investigations to keep on top of,’ she’d argued with Puigventós on the phone that morning, trying to get out of going.
‘You’re on a knife edge, Elisenda,’ he reminded her. ‘In more ways than one.’
She found herself breaking out into a nervous sweat now, lying on Doctora Puyals’ uncomfortable recliner. After another sleepless night, she’d punished herself on her morning run, leaving herself retching with pain at the end of her sixth ascent of the cathedral steps. She realised she was still overheating because of her exertions, despite a cool shower at home before walking as calmly as she could to the Eixample and the counsellor’s office. Her gentle walk through the morning streets had turned into a frenetic quickstep somewhere along the way in an irrational impatience to get it over and done with so she could start the day properly.
‘How old was your daughter when you last saw her?’ the counsellor repeated.
‘When she died?’ Elisenda replied brutally. ‘She was six.’
Puyals straightened her jacket lapel. ‘And that was six years ago. So she’d be twelve now. I can’t help you until you see that this isn’t your daughter you’re seeing. This is a projection of her. Your projection of her. Of your guilt.’
‘My guilt? I wasn’t the one who flew her into a storm.’ Elisenda opened her eyes. She was wary of making any more admissions like yesterday’s. ‘Anyway, I thought this was supposed to make me feel better. Shouldn’t this be non-confrontational and non-threatening?’
‘Normally it would be, Elisenda. But you thrive on confrontation and threat. If not to yourself, then to the people you try to help. So maybe that’s the only way you’re going to feel you’re making any progress.’
‘The only way I’m going to make any progress is by finding a missing teenager and stopping more people being terrorised in their own homes. That’s what I should be doing.’
‘I agree.’
‘You do?’ Elisenda made to get up but Puyals signalled her to stay where she was.
‘Yes, I do. If all you had to worry about was your job. But it’s not. You have a ghost to exorcise, Elisenda, and it’s not your daughter.’
‘I’ll call a priest,’ Elisenda said, instantly regretting her flippancy. It was born of anger.
‘No need. The visions will end when you’re ready for them to end.’
* * *
The man standing under a young plane tree outside the court buildings was familiar in a younger, friendlier and more attractive sort of a way. Seeing him turn as she approached, Elisenda did a double-take, her nerves on edge after the session with Doctora Puyals. She wondered if she was going to need yet more counselling to cope with this bout of counselling and decided it was best not to say that even in jest to Puigventós. Shaking off the thought, she looked up at the spanking new court complex, tacked on to the Institut de Medicina Legal and covering the block between the post office and the old overhead railway line from France, and was struck as always by the current obsession with horizontal slit windows on public buildings. She felt they had to say something about our view of the world outside our own. Her daydreaming was disturbed by the clanking of a local train trundling along the track opposite, slowing down as it headed for the station a few streets away.
She greeted the man and introduced herself.
‘Joan Bellsolà,’ he replied, handing her a card. It had a Barcelona address on it.
She looked at it and him. ‘So what relation to Gerard Bellsolà are you?’
‘He’s my uncle. I didn’t want to go into the family firm here, so I moved to Barcelona.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘You can have too much family.’
She was surprised to find herself liking a member of the Bellsolà legal dynasty, at least three generations of which had smarmed their way through Girona’s courts. Joan’s uncle Gerard was Elisenda’s current nemesis, seeming to defend every one of the city’s worst white-collar criminals.
‘Shall we go in?’ she suggested.
Their appointment with the judge who’d be instructing the investigation, insofar as the search for the missing boy was deemed to be a criminal investigation, was at nine thirty. They were a few minutes early. Reporting to the front desk, they were given a room number and a name. Elisenda stifled a sigh. The misery of the morning run and the counselling that followed were like hot ice cream muffins at Rocambolesc compared with the stultifying nausea of working with Jutgessa Roca.
‘I’ve never had dealings with her,’ Joan said innocently.
‘A pleasure all to come.’
Despite only being a couple of years older than Elisenda, Jutgessa Roca more closely resembled a throwback to the unresponsive authoritarianism of the courts in Franco’s day than the sort of judge that democracy was supposed to provide. A stickler for form and procedure at the expense of common sense, she was able to veto even the most reasonable request of the Mossos if it wasn’t fully covered by jurisprudence. A pity, then, as far as Elisenda was concerned, that the Catalan and Spanish legal systems required an examining judge to dictate how a police investigation was to be conducted.
As it turned out, the judge proved to be more amenable than usual. At least at first.
‘This is a simple case of abduction,’ she decided five minutes later after Elisenda had put forward the facts as they knew them.
Elisenda questioned the use of the word simple but let it ride. ‘It is most probably a case of abduction,’ she said in a measured voice, ‘but there are avenues within that supposition that we need to explore.’
Roca considered that for a moment and turned to Joan. ‘What is the family’s view of this?’
He smoothed his already perfect hair before replying and turned on a tentative smile. Still a Bellsolà, Elisenda reminded herself.
‘We agree with the Mossos d’Esquadra that there is probably a political motive behind this. Or at least some sort of attack on the Comas Miravent family because of Susanna Miravent’s political profile. Because of that, we would welcome the focus of the investigation centring on that.’
‘Sotsinspectora Domènech?’ the judge asked Elisenda.
‘While we agree that that is the probable main focus, as I said, we need to consider other possible motives. We would want to look at an abduction not only for political motives but also for financial ones. There haven’t been any ransom demands as yet, but we can’t rule that out. Neither can we rule out the possibility of the boy’s identity being random and that these are the actions of a sexual predator. I’d request the investigation to be open enough to allow us to explore those avenues.’
The judge looked down at the notes in front of her and agreed to their requests. Dumbfounded by a minor victory, Elisenda asked for a further moment alone with her.
‘There are other matters we need to consider,’ she explained to both Roca and Joan.
Waiting for the lawyer to leave, the judge turned to Elisenda, her voice a few degrees cooler now that Joan had left the room. ‘Well, Sotsinspectora Domènech?’
Elisenda chose her words carefully, trying not to anta
gonise. ‘We also want to look at the possibility of the family’s involvement in this matter. This is the second child of this couple that has gone missing. We have to consider that their actions might not be as innocent as might appear. I want to request the right to look into the family’s affairs, if only to rule them out as being above suspicion.’
Which is when the Jutgessa Roca that Elisenda knew reappeared. ‘No. This is a family that has suffered more than any family should. They are pillars of the community. I refuse to allow you to put them through further tribulations.’
Elisenda stared back at her and thought quickly. She could probably investigate what she needed to assess the parents’ possible implication through the channels open to her from the other strands that the judge had sanctioned, without worrying too much about the niceties of her ruling. As Puigventós had warned her, she would observe the judge’s decision. From afar. And get on with finding the missing child without the help or hindrance of the court’s blessing.
‘Of course,’ was all she replied.
Joan was waiting for her in the foyer.
‘Not such a dragon,’ he commented, a smile on his face. Elisenda thought it strange how the same smile on his uncle’s face looked vulpine. On his, it was charming.
‘A real charmer.’
He left her outside the court and went off in search of his car to go and see Miravent and Comas at their house. She watched him go and turned back to look at the court towering over her, blotting out the morning sun.
‘New police, new courts,’ she murmured, setting off briskly back into the centre towards Vista Alegre, ‘same old useless Jutgessa bloody Roca.’
Chapter Nineteen
Marc Comas took a huge bite out of his Serrano sandwich and chewed steadfastly through the gristle and fat, savouring the tomato and olive oil with which the inside of the long, crunchy baguette was liberally coated. His second breakfast. A big, milky café amb llet, awash with three sachets of sugar, and a glass of Torres 10 brandy stood on the bar counter in front of him. His first breakfast had been the same since his childhood, a glass of cold milk sweetened with sugar and three dry Maria biscuits, taken standing in the kitchen. Unfortunately, Susanna’s retrograde political stance didn’t stretch to what they should eat for breakfast. She insisted on muesli and fruit. Wholesome, healthy fare as befitting a champion of family values. It tasted to him like something you scraped off a dusty farmyard.
