by Chris Lloyd
‘The nice one way up in the mountains? The proper mountains?’
‘That’s the one. They’re the three counties that follow the coast.’
Manel grunted at that, his interest in his new home over for the day. Past the lowlands, they climbed once again into the Albera mountains. A buzzard was perched on the same section of stone wall as two days earlier. Àlex was convinced it was the same bird. This time, knowing what to look for, he noticed more Neolithic burial chambers on the steep slopes rising above him. The last time they came, the slabs had blended in with the natural stones and he hadn’t spotted them. The same was true of the symbol by the house, he realised. With no trees nearby to check and without the distraction of focusing on looking for an artificial cairn of small stones, they looked instead at the rocks and boulders either side of the track leading to the house.
‘Got it,’ Àlex said.
It was painted in black on the side of a large mottled grey boulder, more visible from the other direction than from the way they came, but easy to find once they knew what they were looking for.
‘Just one stick this time,’ Manel said.
Sure enough, there was just one line protruding from the top of the triangle. As he had with the previous symbols, Àlex took photos of it on his mobile and they left.
‘Just satisfy my curiosity,’ he said to Manel when they were getting nearer Girona.
Taking a detour, they took a look at the house that they’d originally staked out on the Saturday. It seemed ages ago. By the look of it, the architect couple who owned it had still not moved back. They stopped and examined the ground. The cairn they’d found that night had gone.
‘They’ve removed it?’ Manel asked.
‘Or last night’s rain did. It’s impossible to tell.’
The downpour had opened up small channels in the earth on the track leading to the house where the rainwater had drained into the ditch by the main road. A trail of pebbles had been deposited on the asphalt, carried there by the localised flood. A couple of new potholes had been gouged into the ground too.
Àlex looked up and down the road. ‘No trees, no bus stops, no posts. That’s why they marked the symbol with a cairn. There’s nowhere else to leave it. It’s not how they normally do it.’
Manel followed his gaze and sniffed. ‘We still haven’t got a clue what they mean, though,’ he muttered. ‘Or what we’re going to do with it.’
* * *
‘They need to turn the air conditioning down,’ Elisenda complained. ‘It’s glacial in here.’
‘That’s not the air conditioning,’ Montse replied.
They were in the same interview room in Jaume’s school as Montse had been shown to the previous day. The same secretary had ushered them in with the words that Joaquim Benach, Jaume’s tutor, would be with them shortly. The head teacher, Father Besses, had greeted them aloofly when Montse had introduced him to Elisenda in the mock-ancient cloisters when they’d arrived. He seemed unhappy at their presence in his school, containing his emotions as a subdued line of children in over-large start-of-year uniforms shuffled past them. They’d watched him march off at the head of the little column.
‘Glad I went to a state school,’ Montse had muttered.
‘If only because of the clothes,’ Elisenda had agreed. Unlike most private schools, state secondary schools didn’t require students to wear a uniform.
The door to the rather ascetic interview room opened and Benach came in, carrying a tray with four cups and saucers on it. Steam coiled up from each cup, carrying a waft of coffee on the air.
‘I know, I know,’ he announced to them. ‘I spoil you.’
He was preceded into the room by a teenaged boy in the school uniform of powder blue polo shirt bearing the school’s crest and dark grey trousers, in his case long trousers, unlike the knee-length shorts the younger boys in the cloisters had been wearing. He walked in and sat down at one of the chairs, not waiting for Benach to take his place. He had fine dark brown hair over a savvy face, and black-rimmed glasses threatening to fall off a button nose that gave a child-like air to an otherwise confident expression. His naturally golden complexion was toasted after the long summer holiday, his parents evidently not of a new generation worried about the effects of the sun on young skin.
Benach busied himself handing out the cups of coffee and sat down. ‘This is Narcís Pujol,’ he introduced the boy. ‘His parents have consented to my being present while you ask him about Jaume.’
‘Thank you,’ Elisenda said, introducing herself to the tutor. She turned to the boy and thanked him too.
‘There’s very little I can tell you,’ Pujol told her. His voice was surprisingly deep, only adding to the aura of self-confidence he exuded. ‘I’ve had very little to do with Comas since the summer.’
‘Can I ask why you fell out with each other?’
The boy took a sip of his coffee. In that moment, Elisenda could see the adult he’d turn into, the unhurried entitlement in his attitude.
‘He changed friends. That’s all. He chose to sit with that little weed Pascual instead of with us.’
‘There must have been a reason,’ Montse insisted.
‘You’d have to ask him that. Or Pascual. We didn’t have an argument. He just came back after the summer holiday and started hanging out with Pascual instead of with his usual friends.’
‘Maybe he outgrew you,’ Elisenda said, pushing him a little bit.
He laughed. ‘Outgrew me? Hardly. If anything, it was the opposite. But he’ll come back with his tail between his legs as soon as he sees that no one likes Pascual.’
‘You seem more upset than you try to make out,’ Montse commented.
He turned his glance lazily towards her. ‘Not really. As I said, he’ll soon get sick of his new best friend.’
‘So why are you so worried he went off with another friend?’ Elisenda pushed him. ‘Were you bullying him because of it?’
Elisenda could sense Benach growing uncomfortable with the way her questions were going, but she ignored him.
Pujol’s eyes flickered briefly. ‘Bullying Comas? Have you ever met him? He’s the tallest boy in our year. No one bullied Jaume.’
‘Were you bullying Carles Pascual, then?’ Montse asked. ‘And Jaume didn’t like it?’
Elisenda knew the answer to that one. Not while Carles was Jaume’s friend, he wouldn’t dare. ‘Have we got this the wrong way around?’ she asked him. ‘Was he bullying you? Is that why you felt you had to bring him down a peg or two?’
The boy looked surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
Elisenda leaned across the table. ‘What do you know about his disappearance, Narcís? Was his changing friends part of bullying you? Were you forced to do something to defend yourself?’
‘I must say I’m not comfortable with this line of questioning,’ Benach suddenly spoke up. ‘Should Narcís’s parents be present?’
Elisenda studied the boy’s shocked expression and turned to smile at the tutor. ‘That’s really not necessary.’
‘I am able to answer questions,’ Pujol snapped at the teacher without looking at him.
Benach exchanged a look with Montse and rolled his eyes slightly.
‘What do you know about Jaume’s disappearance, Narcís?’ Elisenda asked again, her tone softer.
The boy looked back at her, his confidence only partially restored. ‘Nothing. I’ve barely spoken to him since the new year started.’
‘But you argued.’
‘Who told you that? It wasn’t an argument. We just had a bit of a go at each other playing basketball. It wasn’t anything serious. We were always arguing, but we always stayed friends. He just hangs out with Pascual because Pascual’s impressed by him. Jaume likes to be the centre of attention, so he sits with someone like Pascual because he’ll hang onto his every word.’
‘Has he always been like that?’
Opening up now, Pujol rolled his eyes. ‘Always. Especially since h
is brother died. His parents give him everything he wants so everyone wants to be his friend. And his mother’s on TV all the time.’
‘Where do you think Jaume is, Narcís?’ Elisenda asked him. ‘You’ve been a friend of his for a long time. Is there somewhere he’d go if he needed to?’
Pujol shook his head, thinking. ‘I can’t think of anywhere. They always go to La Fosca in the summer. They’ve got a house on the beach.’
Elisenda nodded. The house and the one owned by Carles Pascual’s family and the surrounding area had already been searched thoroughly. ‘Is your family in Opus Dei, Narcís?’
Benach took a deep intake of air at that but Elisenda waved a hand at him to calm him.
‘And Carles Pascual? Is his family Opus Dei? Is that why Jaume no longer sits with you.’
‘No, that’s not why,’ Pujol said.
Before he could say any more, Benach put both hands flat on the table. ‘I’m sorry, Sotsinspectora Domènech, but I think I’m going to have to terminate the interview here. This is irrelevant and beyond what I understood you were going to be asking.’
‘Are you?’ Elisenda asked again, looking at Pujol.
He nodded. ‘But Pascual isn’t.’
Benach stood up. ‘I must ask you to leave. If you wish to pursue this line of question, I think Narcís’s parents should be present to give their consent.’
Elisenda gathered her bag and stood up. ‘Thank you, Senyor Benach. And might I ask if you’re a member of Opus Dei?’
‘This is irrelevant.’
Elisenda stood in front of him as he tried to usher them out of the room. ‘I will decide what is relevant.’
She and Montse walked back in the warm sunshine to the pool car parked outside the school gates.
‘Do you think it is?’ Montse asked. ‘Relevant, I mean? The whole Opus Dei thing?’
Elisenda gazed out across the plain to the distant mountains. ‘I don’t know. Maybe not directly. But every now and then you have to shake a few branches to see what falls out of the tree. What I don’t see is that this is anything to do with a couple of schoolkids falling out with each other. There’s more to it than that.’
They were almost by the car when Elisenda’s phone rang. She looked at the screen and mouthed ‘Josep’ at Montse before answering. She listened to him speak for a few moments and then hung up.
‘You know we were complaining about so many strands to this investigation?’ she told Montse. ‘Well Josep’s just found another. Someone else we apparently need to talk to seems to have gone missing.’
Chapter Thirty
‘Pere Vergés Gumbau.’
Elisenda shook her head at the name Josep gave her. ‘Don’t know him.’
‘Convicted of fraud. Arrested just under four years ago, came to trial three years ago and came out of prison last Friday.’
They were standing in their unit’s outer office. Elisenda and Montse had gone straight to Vista Alegre from Jaume’s school once they’d got the phone call from Josep. The inside of the station felt cold and gloomy after the bright after-storm sunlight of the day outside.
‘Less than four years for fraud?’ Montse questioned.
‘Out on appeal,’ Josep told them. ‘He was retried last week and the conviction thrown out. Released on the Friday.’
‘So why’s he of interest to us?’ Elisenda asked.
Josep sat down at a desk and called up a screen on the computer to show them. ‘I’ve been checking anyone reported missing in the last week and his name came up, so I took a look at him. He worked for the IT department at the city council.’
‘The city council? Where Marc Comas works.’
‘A different department, but still a link of some sort,’ Josep agreed. ‘An external audit about four years ago turned up a fraud. Money was being paid to a series of providers that supposedly worked with the council, but the audit showed that although the providers existed, they’d never had any dealings with the council. There were invoices for services that had got through internal audits, but they turned out to be fake. And the amounts invoiced were only ever for small sums that individually wouldn’t have been questioned. It was only when they were taken as a whole by the external auditor that a pattern of fraud was noticed. They looked further and found that the accounts the money was paid into had nothing to do with the providers; instead they were temporary accounts each time in different banks and the money was then transferred onwards each time the account was closed. The second transfer was always offshore.’
‘And it was all traced back to this Pere Vergés?’
‘It was at the time. The fraud did seem to come from the IT department, and specifically from computers he had access to. But he always denied it. The thing is they’ve never been able to trace the trail of accounts beyond the second transfer and the missing money has never been recovered. Vergés has certainly never had any unexplained income traced to him. I’ve looked at the original trial and it really wasn’t a safe conviction. The evidence was so flimsy and circumstantial, I really don’t see how he was found guilty in the first place.’
‘Was it investigated by the Mossos?’
Josep pulled up another screen. ‘The Regional Investigation Unit investigated it.’
‘Micaló’s lot? Oh please let it be my lucky day.’
Josep smiled wryly and shook his head. He was sitting confident and tall in his chair, his head at the same height as Elisenda’s and Montse’s even though they were standing. ‘Sorry. This was under Sotsinspector Micaló’s predecessor, a couple of years before he took over.’
Elisenda sighed. ‘I knew that really, but a girl can dream.’
‘But as I said, Pere Vergés always denied any involvement in the fraud,’ Josep continued, ‘and he won a retrial last year, which has just been held. And that found no real evidence to link him to any of it, so his conviction was quashed.’
‘And you think he’s now out of prison, wanting to know who put him there,’ Elisenda surmised. ‘After waiting a year for the original hearing and the best part of a year for the retrial. It might fit.’
The time a defendant could wait until their case came to trial had improved a lot in recent years, but it was still a slow and laborious process. She recalled as a child a case that her father was involved in, when a man spent two years in prison awaiting a hearing for an offence that carried a one-year sentence. He was found guilty, sentenced and released all on the same day with no compensation for the extra year’s imprisonment.
‘What’s happening with the investigation into the missing money?’ Montse asked.
‘When Vergés was convicted, the Mossos continued to look but haven’t turned up anything, so it eventually became a cold case and slipped down the list of priorities. But you can be sure that with his release, it’ll come back to the fore again.’
Elisenda sighed. ‘I hope they give it to Micaló, not us.’
‘You said he’d gone missing,’ Montse prompted.
‘Apparently he saw his lawyer on Monday morning about an application for compensation. He was supposed to return the following day but didn’t. He was also supposed to see the judge with his lawyer yesterday about his release, but he didn’t show up to that either.’ Josep nodded at the computer screen. ‘That’s why he’s come up on the system. The court flagged up that he failed to show. Otherwise we wouldn’t have got to hear of it.’
‘Who’s his lawyer?’ Elisenda asked. ‘They may be worth talking to.’
Josep failed to hide a smile as he turned to face Elisenda. ‘Gerard Bellsolà.’
She hung her head. ‘Two Bellsolàs in one week. That’s just living the dream.’
‘I take it no one’s seen him at home?’ Montse asked.
‘That hasn’t been checked yet. The court hasn’t asked the Mossos to follow it up, so officially he’s not missing, and his name’s only just come up in our investigation. No one’s been to his house yet. I’ll get Seguretat Ciutadana to pay a call.’
Elisenda took a note of Vergés’s address. ‘Don’t. We’ll go. This might be nothing, but it’s at least worth ruling him in or out of the investigation. We could also go and see Marc Comas again. If he and Vergés did know each other, it’ll be interesting to hear what Comas has to say about it. Anyway, I want to ask him again about the attack on him. This guy Vergés might not turn out to be at all significant, but we need to check it out. Are Àlex and Manel back, by the way?’
‘Still out, checking up on the houses that have been attacked.’
‘Let me know when they get back.’
‘There’s one other thing about Vergés,’ Josep added. ‘Before his conviction, he lived with his mother. She died when he was in prison. Earlier this year. He wasn’t released for her funeral.’
Elisenda looked shocked. ‘Why wasn’t he released? Especially if his application for a retrial had been accepted.’
‘That’s one more reason for him to want to settle a score,’ Montse commented.
Elisenda considered everything they’d been looking at. ‘OK, let’s not get ahead of ourselves with this. But if he really is out to settle a score, it would be interesting to see who he blames.’
* * *
‘Driving in Girona,’ Elisenda muttered, a helpless mantra everyone in the city knew.
‘This part of town’s the worst,’ Montse agreed, pointing the car’s cold airflow at her face to stay cool.
They’d driven round the same block in the Eixample three times, looking for somewhere to park, before a spanking new white Mercedes left them a space outside a boutique bakery in the ever-expanding squares of the one-way system. Getting out, Elisenda sucked in a deep breath of the aromas of fresh, warm bread trying to entice her into the baker’s. She closed her eyes and pictured her apartment in winter, the new wood-burning fireplace she’d had installed and not yet used crackling as she crunched into a toasted slice of pa de pagès country bread.
‘Elisenda,’ Montse called, shaking her out of her daydream.
