City of Drowned Souls

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘We’re going to the mountains,’ Elisenda told him.

  ‘Right.’

  He waited for her to elaborate, but she put her sunglasses on and stared out of her window, deep in thought. They drove through Celrà, stopping and starting at the traffic lights and skating round the roundabouts, past the low skyline of old stone houses and new industrial buildings. They drove in silence for ten minutes before Josep tried engaging with her again.

  ‘How are the family taking it?’ He glanced across at her, but she didn’t react. ‘Their press conference has had a mixed reception,’ he persevered. ‘The public are always sympathetic in these cases, but Sotsinspector Armengol told me this morning that the flow of calls had reduced, whereas the media seem to be taking more interest.’

  ‘We’ll be turning right up here soon,’ Elisenda suddenly told him as though she hadn’t heard what he’d been saying. She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. ‘I want to see where Albert went missing.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We need to get a feel for it. It might help give us some idea of what’s going on now.’

  Josep turned right where she indicated and followed the smaller road past stone farmhouses and wheat fields, the landscape either side raw from where the crops had been harvested. ‘Seguretat Ciutadana and the local stations are still here,’ he told her. ‘They’ve been checking this area closely in case Jaume returned for some reason.’

  ‘No ransom note,’ Elisenda muttered. ‘Forty-eight hours and we’ve got no one claiming they’ve got Jaume or demanding something for his return.’

  ‘Letting the family suffer to up the ante?’ Josep suggested.

  ‘Or he’s left under his own steam.’

  ‘And he’s gone back to somewhere safe to him. Or meaningful. Like this place.’

  ‘Or this is something else entirely. Either way, it means we can’t gauge exactly how much of a risk the clock ticking is.’ Watching the scenery change as they slowly climbed, Elisenda brushed her top teeth back and forth over her bottom lip. ‘They’ve found nothing,’ she muttered, ‘but it’s still worth looking. Them and us.’

  The road narrowed and began to wind more, through a dappled shade of holm oaks and pines. Josep turned left off onto a smaller road, a raised wall of greenery one side, the mountains a short distance across more wheat fields to the other. He’d scrutinised enough maps and files over the past twenty-four hours to know the route to take. A short distance from the stretch of the stream they were heading for, they came to a Seguretat Ciutadana patrol car. Stopping, Josep showed his ID to the mosso standing by the car.

  ‘Serious Crime Unit,’ he told the younger guy, who was almost as lanky as Josep was. He stood with the same stoop. ‘We’re on the missing boy case, checking the area where the older brother went missing.’

  The mosso signalled them through. ‘We’ve got teams searching through the woods up ahead,’ he informed them, his strong accent almost a caricature of Barcelona’s flat vowels.

  Sure enough, they passed Seguretat Ciutadana and support officers drafted in especially, scouring the forest in a straggling line on both sides of the narrow road. For a brief moment as they drove by, Elisenda watched the rows of officers in blue fatigues patiently scanning the ground ahead of them, and then they were gone, taken from sight at a bend in the road. Reaching their destination, Elisenda and Josep got out of the car and breathed in the quiet air. Elisenda filled her lungs and wondered at its crisp cleanness. It had none of the humidity of Girona of the past few days.

  ‘We don’t get air like this in Girona,’ she commented.

  ‘We really don’t in Hospitalet,’ Josep replied, mentioning his home town, the sprawling industrial city sprouting to Barcelona’s south. He laughed. ‘Or this quiet.’

  It seemed unnaturally still, even the sound of cicadas hushed for the moment, scant wind blowing through the trees. They both watched as a hoopoe flew across the path in front of them in its curious dipping flight, its black and copper comb fanned out on top of its head, its dark brown and white striped wings vivid under its auburn mantle.

  Josep broke the silence. ‘It’s this way.’

  As they walked across a field into the shade of a gnarled cork wood, a sound began to grow in the hush. Running water. Louder than Elisenda would have expected it normally.

  ‘The rain they’ve been getting higher up,’ she commented. ‘The rivers are fuller.’

  ‘The files say it was the same when the older brother went missing,’ Josep told her.

  They passed a spot in a clearing the other side of the wood where an ancient holm oak tree stood. Josep told her it was where the family had been picnicking on that day four years earlier. Beyond it, the noise steadily grew and they emerged by a river bank.

  ‘Well, I didn’t expect that,’ Elisenda muttered.

  Below them, the water was calm, a clear blue mere with roots and branches tumbling down gentle, dusty banks to the edge of the stream. It was about the width of a swimming pool. The noise was further away, to their left. As they stared, a sudden eddy appeared near the bank where they stood and vanished just as rapidly. Josep picked up a leafy branch lying nearby and threw it into the water. It floated gently for a moment, scarcely moving from where it had entered, until another eddy emerged and pushed it to the middle. There, it was quickly snatched, borne away downstream by an invisible current, swirling as it was dragged towards the source of the noise, the smaller offshoots shaking their leaves against the main branch until they were sucked under the surface. Within a moment, it was gone, tumbling out of sight beyond a turn in the river.

  ‘And then it was gone,’ Elisenda said.

  ‘Undercurrents,’ Josep agreed. ‘It could easily carry a small kid away. Albert was supposed to be pretty slight.’

  ‘But Jaume isn’t. He’d probably be strong enough.’

  They quickly followed the route of the stream and came out where it met a larger river. The water bucked and foamed as the two sources merged and whirled away towards a bigger and faster flow of water further down the valley.

  ‘Easy to see how a swimmer could get into trouble,’ Josep said. ‘I wouldn’t attempt it when it’s like this.’

  Elisenda shook her head in agreement. ‘And it’s deceptive, too.’

  Over the other side, she saw a track, wide enough for a car to negotiate. Looking either way, she couldn’t see anywhere to cross. She asked Josep if there were any bridges nearby. He looked at the map of the region that he’d been carrying but shook his head.

  ‘Nowhere. Fords higher upstream, but they’re probably impassable when it’s in flood.’

  ‘So, if Jaume was telling the truth and he did see a car over there, he couldn’t have got over to it and the driver couldn’t have crossed over to here.’

  ‘But the driver might have been able to get to Albert if he was in the water.’

  ‘In which case, why did no one come forward to say they’d seen the boy or tried to save him? It also hasn’t told us anything about whether Jaume’s come back here.’

  Retracing their steps, they searched the area where Jaume had gone swimming at the time Albert disappeared and all along the bank upstream but found nothing. There was no evidence of Jaume or of anyone having been there recently.

  ‘Seguretat Ciutadana have already searched here,’ Josep told her, ‘and they came up with nothing.’

  ‘Any houses?’

  ‘Just the one we passed on the road here, and the owners have been questioned. Apart from that, there’s an abandoned house the other side of the river, heading north. We’d have to get back to the road and drive three sides of a square to get there.’

  Elisenda looked at the treacherously calm river and at the trees and fields opposite.

  ‘We’ll try it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was a regular noise. Like ticking slowed down through a mist.

  The abandoned house stood derelict at the end of an overgrown and potted
track that had gouged and kicked at the underside of the car as they’d laboriously bounced towards it. The stream where Albert had disappeared had vanished behind them as quickly as it had re-emerged after their cross-country trek to get to the other side. As they stopped the car, Elisenda heard another river beyond the old building, stronger and more forceful. Through the windscreen, she saw that most of the roof was still intact, apart from a few pantiles that had slithered to the ground on the right-hand side, where they lay in a broken pile. The exposed roof timbers were dank and rotting. The first metre of stone walls above the foundations were green with damp, moss growing in the cracks and rough hollows, more extensive on the right than the left.

  ‘You can see why they abandoned it,’ she muttered.

  ‘It was already derelict at the time Albert went missing,’ Josep told her. ‘It was searched at the time, and it’s been checked again now.’

  They got out of the car. What the Basques called a txirimiri was falling, a spectral drizzle that felt like a soft mist caressing your face but that would soak you to the core in ten minutes. Josep fetched two waterproof coats from the boot and gave one to Elisenda.

  ‘Still a surprise no one’s bought it,’ she commented, putting it on. She looked around at the tranquil setting. Even in the mizzle, the scenery was enchanting, with distant mountains a rolling backdrop to the green scented pines and holm oaks surrounding the house. ‘It’s just the sort of place people are buying to do up these days. And getting attacked in.’

  Josep grunted a laugh. ‘Too damp.’

  She looked at the green walls as they walked towards the house. ‘Bet you it’s got an earth floor. That’s easy to cure, you just put in a proper one.’

  She forced the rickety wooden door inwards and saw that she was right. The house was very old, no doubt long abandoned by a smallholder, their children unwilling to live the harsh life all the way out here. The ground inside was compacted earth, the building blessed with none of the fineries of life of even sixty years ago. It was exactly the type of property that people from Girona and Barcelona had been picking up for a song before the recession and restoring to an unprecedented state of luxury. The smell of damp and mud pervaded the house. She rubbed at a piece of the door between her thumb and finger and the wood crumbled away.

  Scraping the rotting door further over the earth to get in, she heard a sound from above and saw a sudden movement out of the corner of her eye. Ducking and reaching instinctively for her holster, she quickly looked up. A dove was fluttering its wings in panic, their underside a storm white against the dark of the roof beams as it darted back and forth looking for a way out. After a few attempts, it finally found a small window at the front of the house, the glass long gone, and darted out into the wet air. Elisenda let out a deep breath and pulled her hand away from her holster, slowly going further into the old house with Josep at her heels.

  Together, they searched the ground floor, what there was of it, but there were no signs of anyone having camped there. Not recently, anyway. The remnants of an open fire in the middle of the main downstairs room bore witness to someone having taken shelter there once, but it looked to have been some time ago. To the rear of the house, the sound of the river stormed wildly over the rocks in its course. The upstairs floor was easier to search. They simply looked up where the ceiling had gone. The sky was visible in the front corner where the tiles had fallen, the txirimiri gently enveloping the two Mossos.

  Josep stopped and cocked his head to one side, pulling the hood of his waterproof down. He signalled to Elisenda to listen. She heard it too. A knocking. It seemed to be coming from the rear of the house, but neither of them could make out its exact source.

  In what had been the kitchen, Elisenda found a door near the back that she’d assumed led into the main room, closing a circle with a twin door near the front of the building, but she now realised by the layout that there had to be a gap between the two rooms. Pulling it open, having to force it against the rusted hinges, she saw it gave directly on to a narrow flight of stone steps leading down into the damp darkness. The ticking was louder now she’d opened the door, and more insistent. It was coming from beneath their feet.

  ‘I’m so glad we found that,’ she whispered to Josep, taking a deep breath.

  She shone her torch down the steps and began the steep descent, but as she progressed, she was puzzled to see that there was a source of light somewhere below. Josep followed her down, also sweeping ahead with the beam of his torch. The stones to her right ran with water, the outside wall she guessed, and she avoided brushing up against it. Listening all the while, she realised that the regular sound, which had speeded up when they’d opened the door, had calmed down now to its previous rhythm. Reaching quietly for her holster again, she took out her pistol and hefted the grip in her right hand, holding it against the torch so both barrel and light followed the same course. She heard Josep behind her do the same.

  The source of light was coming from what would be the left-hand side of the house. With it came a steady stream of air, the moisture from the drizzle borne on it. Reaching the foot of the steps and turning, she saw a window cut into the back wall of the house. She hadn’t realised from the front of the house that the rear of the building was a storey lower, the house built on a slope. Looking out of the window while Josep went deeper into the basement room, she saw how the land fell away to the river, now visible behind the old house. Another door set into the back wall opened onto a stone stoop overlooking the riverbank, with the mountains beyond. She had the unbidden thought that the house and setting were just ripe for someone with money to turn into a creation for the new age. And for someone else to come along and take it from them.

  ‘Elisenda,’ Josep called from behind her.

  She turned and went back in. The knocking sound was still going, she realised. She’d become lulled by its insistence. He beckoned her over to a rusted iron frame leaning against the wall. It looked like an old bedstead. He pointed at it.

  Part of a small skeleton hung down from the top of it, the tiny skull tapping at the hollow frame in the breeze blown in through the broken window. Other bones, darkened by mud and time, lay scattered on the earth floor. Elisenda looked up at the window just a metre or so away and then back at the skull. It was caught on one of the curling shapes of the bedstead, lodged upside-down, the base of it still tapping against the cold metal, the sound chiming through the room.

  ‘It’s a deer,’ she told Josep. ‘It must have got trapped on the bedstead.’

  * * *

  Her phone rang as they bumped their way back along the track towards the narrow lane that would lead to the main road. It was Armengol, calling from Vista Alegre to tell her that of the two sex offenders he was checking up on, one of them couldn’t have been involved with Jaume’s disappearance.

  ‘He’s in hospital after an operation on his knee. There are complications so he’s been there for nearly two weeks. We’re still looking for the other suspect. I’ll keep you posted.’

  Elisenda thanked him and hung up, telling Josep what Armengol had said.

  ‘I don’t think they’re where we should be looking,’ he told her.

  ‘Neither do I. That’s why we’ve got Armengol looking into it instead of us. But we still have to be sure.’

  ‘I was going through more of the notes on Albert’s disappearance when you came in this morning. I found that Francesc Bofarull was questioned at the time.’

  ‘How significant is that?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not very. He was already Susanna Miravent’s campaign manager back then. All the family’s friends and colleagues were questioned eventually, after the investigation started going nowhere.’

  ‘I thought as much.’ Her voice was glum, but she suddenly signalled him to stop before the track joined the small lane. ‘Just to satisfy my curiosity, I want to see if there are any symbols marking out the house.’

  ‘The ones Àlex is looking for? I thought he wasn’
t having any luck with that.’

  ‘No harm in checking. If they are staking out their targets, I also want to see if they’re leaving symbols for houses that aren’t worth bothering with.’

  Josep pulled over and they both got out to look. The txirimiri was turning into full-blown drizzle, a steady fall spattering the hoods over their heads. They found nothing.

  ‘Which,’ Elisenda commented with a sigh as they climbed back into the car, ‘means nothing. The pile of rocks and twigs at the architects’ house was too deliberate for us to disregard it, so I think Àlex is right. They must have a meaning.’

  They set off along the lane, eventually heading for Girona, when Elisenda asked again about Miravent’s campaign manager.

  ‘Do you remember anything the first investigation said about Bofarull?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. He’d got his MBA in Barcelona the year earlier and had moved back to the Girona area when he got the job with Miravent in time for the last elections. He was interviewed twice, but I think the second time was when the investigation was getting desperate.’

  ‘Is he Opus Dei?’

  Josep looked surprised. ‘I haven’t found anything. I’ll check.’

  ‘He possibly is if he’s working with Miravent’s political campaign. I can’t imagine her employing the wrong type of person.’ She looked out of the window as they approached the main road. ‘There’s something about him that I can’t put my finger on.’

  ‘He lives not far from here.’

  Elisenda sat up. ‘He doesn’t live in Girona?’

  ‘No, his family’s from the Baix Empordà and he’s got a house there. Just past La Bisbal, in Vulpellac.’

  Not far from Elisenda’s own parents in Monells, this side of La Bisbal, she thought. She didn’t know the Bofarull family, but then she’d grown up in Girona, the Monells house being her grandparents’ home when they were alive.

  ‘Turn right at the main road,’ she told Josep. ‘Let’s go and check it out.’