City of Drowned Souls

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Do you think that might be why you had a vision of her when you were out? Because of your exhaustion?’

  I don’t know, Elisenda thought. Probably. She was already beginning to compose herself for work. If nothing else, the counselling sessions were acting as a decompression chamber between the dread of the night and the controlled mask of the day. Her eyes focused on the wall in front of her.

  ‘Why so many certificates?’ she asked, gesturing vaguely with one hand.

  ‘Because I can help in so many different ways,’ Puyals said after a pause. Elisenda imagined she heard the wry smile underpinning the counsellor’s comment.

  Needing to get off the lounger, she swivelled her legs to one side and stood up, the pins and needles instantly stinging her feet and calves like a column of red ants. Puyals made no move behind her and she walked forward to look more closely at the certificates on the wall. She turned and looked at Puyals, confident in her chair.

  ‘They’re bits of paper. And this is just talk. It’s not doing any good.’

  ‘Just talk? Have you talked to anyone else about your daughter before now, Elisenda?’

  ‘No. What good does it do? I’m seeing Lina more than ever. That’s why I’ve always kept it to myself. Telling someone about it just makes it worse for me.’

  Puyals wrote something down on her pad and tore the page off. ‘I’m setting you some homework that I want you to do.’

  ‘Homework? Are you serious?’

  The counsellor gave her the piece of paper. ‘Yes. Are you?’

  * * *

  In the street outside, Elisenda remembered for the first time that the dentist she’d gone to as a child used to have his practice in the building over the road from the counsellor’s. Another painful memory.

  ‘At least he never used to ask you to talk,’ she muttered angrily. She caught a man and a woman in summer office clothes looking at her talking to herself and pointed at her ear. ‘Bluetooth.’

  She hurried away from the Eixample and along Carrer Santa Clara, heading for the court buildings. Crossing Plaça Independència, she had to sidestep all the boxes and crates being delivered on unwieldy trolleys to the various bars and restaurants in their early-morning ritual of restocking for the day ahead. The clattering industry of the delivery lorries and of all the bleary people hurrying to work amid the enticing aromas emanating from the various doorways made her slow down momentarily. She looked longingly at a couple drinking huge cups of breakfast coffee on a café terrace and checked her watch. Not enough time. She had the pleasure of a morning appointment with Jutgessa Roca awaiting her. She expected the usual answer.

  ‘No, Sotsinspectora Domènech, I cannot agree to this.’

  Elisenda attempted not to roll her eyes in the judge’s modern office and tried again.

  ‘I think Francesc Bofarull could be of interest,’ she insisted.

  ‘Because he has a locked cellar in his house?’

  Elisenda tapped on the form lying on the judge’s desk requesting a warrant to search Bofarull’s house. ‘And because of everything we’ve set out here.’

  ‘No, Sotsinspectora Domènech, and that’s final.’

  Defeated, Elisenda went back outside and breathed in the air. It hadn’t rained so much in Girona the previous day, but the storm in the mountains outside had helped freshen the atmosphere in the city. It did little for her mood.

  ‘So much for talking and doing your homework,’ she muttered, crumpling the request for a warrant and stuffing it into her bag next to the piece of paper the counsellor had given her.

  Past the traffic on the busy roundabout between where she was standing and the Devesa park, she saw a lot of coming and going under the slender, towering plane trees. It was odd, she thought, as Thursday wasn’t market day, until she remembered the date. The coming weekend marked the commemoration of the sieges of Girona by the French in 1808 and 1809. First celebrated to mark the bicentenary, in recent years it had grown into a festival, with re-enactors doing battle through the streets of the old town and period tinkers and traders setting up shop in the park. It would all be kicking off tomorrow. Normally, she enjoyed it.

  Her phone rang and she was surprised to see it was her mother.

  ‘Elisenda, call your sister. She’s upset that you haven’t answered her calls.’

  ‘I will, mama. It’s just been a busy time.’

  ‘It’s as though you don’t want to see your new baby niece.’

  Elisenda promised she’d call and hung up, letting her breath out in a long sigh. A new pang hit her. Despite her resolve and all her arguments to the contrary, mostly to herself, she found seeing Catalina with her baby freshly harrowing every time, another reminder of her own loss. And the more she fought it, the more it hit her, a new splinter flaking off her brittle mask. She closed her eyes and quickly reopened them, filing the guilt away. Looking once more at all the activity under the trees, she turned away and hurried back towards the centre, past the jumble of posters freshly pasted the previous night clamouring for the city’s vote on Sunday. Susanna Miravent looked blindly out at her, seeking her trust.

  ‘We’re all under siege,’ Elisenda exhaled.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The sky was a deep summer blue unblemished by a single cloud after the violent downpour of the previous day. Àlex opened the side window a few centimetres and took a deep breath of the sharp, crisp air that blasted in. He glanced across at Manel, silent for once, driving fast along the road to Cassà de la Selva, and closed his eyes, enjoying the almost overpowering force of the fresh wind blowing into his nostrils and filling his lungs. He slowed his own breathing down accordingly, relaxed. Something in the investigation felt like it had turned a corner and was finally heading in the right direction.

  ‘Bollocks,’ muttered Manel. ‘Traffic lights.’

  The caporal’s voice and the rapid change down through gears brought Àlex out of his reverie. He opened his eyes and looked around. They were already in the small town on the main road from Girona to the southern end of its coast. Just a few minutes later, they reached their destination, the house that had been targeted on the Saturday night and that the two of them had checked out two days earlier. They parked by the side of the road where the drive led up to the house and began searching. Only this time, they were holding their gaze up, not scouring the ground.

  ‘Not a single tree,’ Manel said, frustration in his voice.

  Àlex knew how he felt. There was no tree anywhere near enough for a symbol to have been carved into it. After last night’s discovery of the markings on the pine by the house in the mountains not far from where they now were, it seemed like the whole theory was going to be blown out of the water at the first attempt to verify it.

  ‘Try down that way a bit,’ Àlex told Manel.

  He watched him walk away, looking for anything a symbol could have been left on. Giving up, Manel waited for a lull in the traffic and ran across the road in case there was anything to be found on the other side of the road. Àlex’s phone rang. It was Elisenda asking him how the search was going.

  ‘Nothing.’ He couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  Hanging up, he noted a change in the air, a small vortex. He looked up to see a bus pulling away at speed from the nearby stop. Àlex stared at it. With its own short piece of slip-road, the shelter stood some fifteen metres from the entrance to the drive leading up to the house.

  ‘Too far away?’ Àlex asked himself, but it was the only construction, natural or artificial, near the house, and the house was the nearest to it of any of the other buildings nearby.

  Walking quickly along the pavement towards it, he spotted Manel on the other side of the road waiting impatiently for a break in the traffic.

  Standing on a low concrete plinth, the bus stop was a three-sided glass shelter with four round aluminium pillars at each corner and a flat aluminium roof, with a metal bench on the back wall. Adver
tising posters obscured both ends and a panel with routes and timetables was fastened to the glass at the rear. A low wall circumvented the back, an embankment holding back a landscape of fields and distant trees and power lines. A grey plastic litter bin stood on a post outside the shelter.

  He quickly searched the construction, inside and out, looking for a symbol sprayed on or drawn in felt pen, but found nothing. Frustrated, he turned to see Manel finally crossing the road towards him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he told the caporal in annoyance before registering his expression.

  ‘Gotcha.’

  Manel was pointing at the strip of metal at the top of the stand, visible when you approached it in traffic if you knew what you were looking for. On the side nearest the road, someone had painted in black marker a triangle with two pins sticking out of the top and a horizontal line through the body of the figure.

  Àlex looked at Manel and grinned.

  ‘Gotcha.’

  * * *

  Àlex called Elisenda back to tell her about their find just as she was entering Vista Alegre. She hung up, happy at any small breakthrough with the house attacks, and hurried along the corridors to Puigventós’ office. Sotsinspector Armengol was already there when she arrived. For a brief moment, she was relieved that she wasn’t the last to show up, but then she remembered that Micaló wasn’t going to be at the morning meeting for the heads of the various investigation units. He was still off learning all manner of new things on his course. Not all bad, then, she thought.

  ‘I’ve got a warrant from Jutgessa Roca,’ Armengol told her and Puigventós.

  Scratch that, she amended.

  ‘She just gave you a warrant?’ she demanded.

  Armengol looked surprised. Both he and Elisenda had given progress reports on their various investigations and he had told her about the second sex offender questioned at the time of the first boy’s disappearance.

  ‘He’s since left Girona and is living in Celrà. I’ve got a warrant to question him and search his house.’

  ‘And Roca went along with it?’

  Armengol nodded, evidently mystified by Elisenda’s irritation. ‘I’ll let you know what we find,’ he told her uncertainly.

  She murmured a vague thank you.

  ‘Any other business?’ Puigventós interrupted them.

  ‘I’m concerned there’s been no demand made,’ Elisenda told him. ‘It worries me we’re not looking in the right place. We need more uniforms out; I want them to retrace the search around the school for anything they might have missed. Check up on Jaume’s favourite places, in case he’s the one that’s absconded.’

  Puigventós sighed. ‘Anything else, Elisenda?’

  ‘Yes, I want uniforms talking to people in the street, here and outside Girona. Someone must have seen something or thought something was unusual. We just need to trigger that memory.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ the inspector promised her.

  ‘I’ll keep on top of Sabadell,’ Armengol added. ‘They’re getting people sending them sightings. I’ve got my unit and Sotsinspector Micaló’s team looking into them, but there’s been nothing substantial yet.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Elisenda said. ‘Marc Comas’s mugging.’

  ‘You think it’s significant?’ Puigventós asked.

  ‘I think we have to regard it as significant. It’s quite a coincidence that he should be attacked just after his son has gone missing. I’ve spoken to him about the attack and I get the feeling that there is something he’s not saying. Again, I could do with help from the Local Investigation Unit with any known muggers, if only to rule them out.’

  ‘Only too happy,’ Armengol told her. ‘I’ll let you know what we turn up.’

  Elisenda thanked him again and Puigventós called the meeting to an end. He asked her to stay when the other sotsinspector left the room.

  ‘How’s the counselling going?’ the inspector asked her.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I’d sooner be getting on with my job, if that’s what you mean. Has Doctora Puyals said anything?’

  Puigventós smiled. ‘She said you were challenging. I think we can interpret that any way we want.’

  Elisenda left his office. ‘Challenging,’ she muttered. ‘Good.’

  Back in her own unit’s offices, she called Josep and Montse into her room and told them of Àlex’s phone call.

  ‘So he and Manel are checking up on other houses to make sure these symbols are real and to look for a pattern.’ She turned to Montse. ‘Did the victims’ statements throw up anything we don’t know?’

  Montse shook her head. ‘The husband’s injuries were so severe, he’s in an induced coma. The doctors couldn’t tell me how long for. I took a statement from the wife. She said the attackers had their faces covered at all times, two of them spoke Spanish in a South American accent, one in what she called a foreign accent and another one in a Spanish accent.’

  ‘So nothing we haven’t already heard. Where is she now?’

  ‘Still at the hospital. She refuses to leave until she knows her husband’s going to be all right.’

  Elisenda turned talk to the missing boy. She told them about her interview with Marc Comas after he was mugged and about Armengol’s unit looking at convicted muggers.

  ‘There’s something not right about it, so we’re going to be looking at the mugging from the point of view of his son’s disappearance. Josep, I want you to check up on anything in his professional life that would indicate that someone might abduct his son. This might not be to do with Susanna Miravent’s political career but with her husband’s work. David Costa from the newspaper told me something about his involvement in corruption. He didn’t seem to have much, but I’ll be talking to him again to find out more.’

  Josep nodded, but it was Montse that spoke. ‘I’ve got to go out to interview Narcís Pujol. He’s the second of Jaume’s friends that he fell out with. I spoke to the first one yesterday, but I didn’t get much from him. He was with his parents and didn’t say much. I’m seeing Pujol with his tutor at the school, so I’m hoping he might open up more.’

  Elisenda picked up her bag, noticing again Siset’s on the filing cabinet. ‘I’ll come with you. I want to see for myself how far the school or someone there might be involved.’

  ‘I’ll check up on Comas to see if there really is any suspicion of corruption,’ Josep told her.

  Elisenda sighed. ‘And then there’s still Miravent and the elections and Bofarull and his locked cellar. There are just so many strands to this and we don’t know which is the right one to pull.’ She looked at the two caporals. ‘So we might as well just pull the lot, see what falls out of the tree.’

  ‘Until we find another one we hadn’t seen,’ Josep muttered as he left the room, his head bowed.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘Of course, we still haven’t got a clue what they mean. Or where they’re going to happen next. Or when. Or how we’re going to catch the bastards who’re doing it.’

  Manel didn’t take his eyes off the road as he spoke. Àlex looked across at him, a half-smile of wonderment on his lips.

  ‘Do you know, Manel, I’m beginning to like you. You make Josep look like an optimist.’

  Manel shrugged, lifting his right thumb off the wheel while still looking straight in front. ‘That’s good.’

  Àlex turned back to face the road ahead and tried not to laugh. They were crossing the lowlands by Sant Pere Pescador. To their right, the Mediterranean lay hidden beyond a wetland reserve, saved from the depredations of an earlier construction boom. To their left, they were being shadowed by row upon row of apple orchards, stretching along the coast and inland for kilometres. After the house by Cassà de la Selva, they’d checked a second house, the one where the owner had installed cameras, fences and a panic room. The new guard dog had barked once when they’d pulled up.

  ‘He’s filled the gap in the fence,’ M
anel had commented, standing at the entrance, looking at the perimeter through binoculars at the perimeter.

  They hadn’t gone up to the house out of a desire not to spook the man even more. Instead, they’d stayed at the start of the drive, where they’d found the symbol almost immediately. It was on a cypress tree on the left-hand side of the drive. Carved into the bark at waist height was another triangle, this time with three pins sticking out of the top.

  ‘What’s the significance of the two or three sticks at the point of the pyramid?’ Àlex asked again as the orchards slipped by on both sides now. ‘Or triangle, or whatever it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘We don’t know that, either.’

  Àlex did let out a laugh this time. ‘Another thing we don’t know is why go to the bother of the symbols in the first place.’

  ‘They’re checking out places for future reference? Come back and rob them later?’

  ‘So why not just write down the address?’

  Manel shrugged. ‘They’ll have a reason.’

  Alex turned away. Out of his side window, he saw teams of workers picking the apples. Different groups in different fields working up and down the rows of trees. At the end, near the road, lorries waited to take away the tall stacks of wooden crates piled up at the start of alternate columns. It was a quietly industrious scene.

  ‘At least I’m getting to know the area,’ Manel suddenly said, gesturing with one hand at the orchards around them. Ahead of them, in the distance, the Pyrenees stood out bold against the blue sky. Àlex waited for the usual but-it’s-still-not-as-good-as-Lleida comment but none came. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Just past Sant Pere Pescador, in the Alt Empordà county,’ Àlex told him. ‘The first house was in La Selva county, the second was in the Baix Empordà county, and we’re now in the Alt Empordà, where the last house we’re checking out is.’