City of Drowned Souls

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘You need me,’ he whined back at her.

  In reply, she just looked wryly at him. He’d been brought up from the cells to an interview room. Elisenda and Àlex were sitting across the bare table from him. Manel was sitting behind them, by the wall. Always hangdog, Siset looked even more hopeless than usual. His unwashed hair was sticking out at odd angles and his T-shirt could have done with freshening up. Elisenda doubted they’d be able to take the ripe atmosphere in the enclosed room for too long.

  ‘Tell him to stop staring at me,’ Siset moaned again, nodding at the caporal.

  ‘Answer a few questions and he will. And you’ll be able to go home.’

  Although his eyes were tired, the informant’s street cunning was never far away. ‘Been thinking, Elisenda,’ he told her. ‘I won’t complain about you planting that jewellery in my bag if you let me go. Deal?’

  Elisenda simply stared at him, not saying a word.

  ‘OK, OK, how about this?’ he said. ‘Maybe I do know something about the jewellery, so what I’ll do is return it to you so you can give it back to the owner and we’re all quits.’

  Elisenda leaned forward and whispered. ‘Siset, you know Àlex here, don’t you? You know he’s a pretty scary guy, no nonsense, you don’t mess with him.’

  Siset glanced at Àlex and back again, nodding his head nervously.

  ‘Well,’ she gestured over her shoulder, lowering her voice even more, ‘the guy behind me, that’s Manel. He’s from Lleida. Ever been there, Siset? No? Well, don’t. It’s a terrible place. So terrible, the people from there grow up bitter. Bitter and twisted and scary. They make Àlex here look good-natured. Now, I really need you to help me with what’s going on with these robberies, but I’ve got to go soon, so I’ll have to leave you alone with Àlex. And Manel.’

  Siset glanced over her shoulder and looked directly at her. ‘That’s bullshit, Elisenda.’

  She stared back at him. ‘I know it is, but if you don’t tell me what I need to know, you and I are at an end. I’ll throw you back out on the street and make sure everyone knows you’ve been passing me information for the last couple of years. You know I don’t need an Àlex or a Manel to put the fear of god into you, Siset, I’ve got me for that.’

  She held his gaze for what seemed like an age until he finally looked down at the table.

  ‘I don’t know who they are, Elisenda,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Really, I don’t. I just know they’re evil bastards. They pass on some stuff for me to sell, jewellery and watches and stuff, and I have to give them sixty per cent of what I get.’

  ‘Do you have any names?’

  ‘I don’t even know what they look like. They always wear those black masks, where you just see the eyes and the mouth.’ He shuddered. ‘They come to me and tell me what they want me to sell. That’s all I know.’

  ‘So how come you knew about the house they were targeting?’

  ‘One of them said something one time they came to see me. I went for a piss and they were talking. I heard them. They said the name of the place I told you about. I swear, Elisenda, I thought they said they were going to be raiding it last Saturday. I wouldn’t stitch you up.’

  ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘Something about someone finding the place for them to rob. Someone else who goes around looking for these places and then telling them about it.’

  Glancing sideways at Àlex, Elisenda opened a folder on front of her and took out a couple of photos of the symbols they’d found at two of the houses. ‘Do you know what these are?’

  Siset looked at them and shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen them.’

  She put them back in the folder. She could tell from his expression that they meant nothing to him.

  ‘They talk odd,’ he added. ‘Accents. Don’t know what they are. Some of them do, anyway. I think they’re foreign.’

  ‘Do you know anything else, Siset?’

  He shook his head vigorously. ‘Nothing, Elisenda, I swear.’

  She picked up the folder and stood up. He looked up at her hopefully.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Not yet, Siset. I think there might be more that you’re not telling me.’

  He looked crestfallen, but quickly perked up. ‘Well, can I have the jewellery back then? It’s good stuff. I could treat Elena to something tasty.’

  Elisenda had been sorry for him for a moment, but now she almost felt like laughing.

  ‘Nice try, Siset.’

  The three Mossos left and Manel arranged for a uniform to take Siset back to the cells.

  ‘Do you reckon he does know more than he’s saying?’ Àlex asked her on the way back to their unit’s offices.

  ‘You can never tell with Siset. You just have to make him sweat and see what he’s prepared to give up. Half the time he doesn’t know the importance of what he knows.’

  Josep was waiting for her in the outer office. He was holding a piece of paper.

  ‘Warrant,’ he announced. ‘To search Pere Vergés’s apartment. Jutgessa Roca had no problem with it. I’ve also discovered that he has a parking space in the same block. The warrant covers that too.’

  Elisenda looked at it.

  ‘That is really bloody annoying.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The elderly neighbours came to the door when they heard Elisenda and Josep trying to get into Pere Vergés’s apartment. A couple of Seguretat Ciutadana officers were on hand with a ram if needed, but Elisenda’s lock-picking skills were more than a match for the ageing lock set in the ornate door. She sent the two uniforms back downstairs to check the underground parking space to see if Vergés’s car was there just as the woman from across the landing opened her door.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Elisenda?’ the old lady asked. ‘And your nice young man?’

  Elisenda laughed gently, more at Josep’s rising blush and falling shoulders than at the invitation. ‘Thank you but no. I’m afraid we have to get on.’

  The husband appeared, slowly hobbling on his walking stick. ‘He hasn’t been back,’ he told them. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye out. Well, she has.’

  Elisenda thanked them and accompanied them back into their own flat and sat them down comfortably while Josep waited outside. She had to admit that she’d developed a soft spot for the couple, they were so similar to her grandparents, now both gone.

  ‘Just let me know if you do see him,’ she reminded them as she left.

  Her phone rang as she crossed the landing. It was one of the two uniformed Mossos calling to tell her that there was no car parked in the space downstairs. She thanked him and hung up.

  ‘So you’re using your car, wherever you are,’ she muttered to herself.

  Josep was waiting for her inside the hall to Pere Vergés’s flat. It smelled musty, but that was all.

  ‘No bodies waiting for us,’ Elisenda commented.

  Off the hall, the shutters in the living room were pulled down all the way to keep the sunlight out, not even the strings of small oblongs between the slats letting in any respite to the gloom. Elisenda switched the light on but nothing happened. She went back to the hall and clicked the light switch there a few times.

  ‘No electricity,’ she muttered.

  In the living room, Josep pulled the cord by the side of the window and the shutters concertinaed open with a loud scraping, disappearing into the housing above.

  ‘They haven’t been used much for months,’ he decided.

  Elisenda joined him in the room. With the shutters up, what little light from the enclosed courtyard outside filtered in and was diffused by the oppressive choice of decor. It was a dingy and old-fashioned room. A fussy chandelier hung from the ceiling, heavy furniture in dark wood made the side walls seem like they were closing in and a red leatherette sofa of a sort she hadn’t seen in years clung to the wall opposite an old square TV.

  There was an old Bakelite phone on a narrow console table. She picked
it up, but there was no dial tone. On the stained wood and tile coffee table in front of the sofa, a pile of letters stood in two piles, the envelopes on the right opened, the ones on the left not. Elisenda looked at them. Sitting down on the sofa, she stared at the lifeless television screen on the opposite wall and at the letters standing in a clearing in the dust on the table where an arm had evidently just swept months’ worth of emptiness to one side. She tried to imagine him there on the Friday night he came home, alone amid the darkness and the must. And then on the Saturday morning, using the light from outside the window to go through the mail until he couldn’t face it any more.

  ‘So you’ve come out of prison for a crime you didn’t commit,’ she murmured, ‘come home to a flat you shared with your mother, who disowned you, your electricity and phone have been cut off because the place has been empty since she died, your old friends don’t want to know you, you don’t have a job or an income.’ Her gaze scanned the room. ‘You might be our perp, Pere Vergés, I don’t know yet, but you’re definitely a victim.’

  Getting up, she went into the kitchen and tried the tap. The water had been cut off too. Checking the cupboards, she found the remains of a baguette and some tomatoes and olive oil sitting alone on a shelf, together with a half-finished supermarket pack of cured ham.

  ‘The question is,’ she continued to ask herself out loud, ‘why you had cold feet about going ahead with your claim for compensation. If anyone deserves it, you do. And why you didn’t turn up to see the judge.’

  Josep came to find her, his tall frame filling the doorway and blotting out the meagre light that found its way through. ‘He’s been using one of the bedrooms. There are sheets on the bed and some clothes in a wardrobe. The bed’s made, but it’s impossible to say when he last slept there. There’s also an old desktop computer in the bedroom, but without electricity, it’s useless.’

  Elisenda followed him through the rest of the rooms in the apartment. They gave nothing more away than the conclusions they’d both already shared.

  ‘We’d better get Científica in to go through all this,’ Elisenda decided, ‘but I don’t think they’re going to find anything. They can take the computer away, too, and see what’s on it.’

  Josep rang to make the request while Elisenda roamed once more through the apartment. When Vergés had first been discovered to have gone missing, Josep had checked the hospitals and Mossos stations in Girona and the towns in the region as a matter of course, but nothing had turned up. He hung up as she returned to the living room.

  ‘Check all the hotels,’ she told him. ‘And see if you can find out where he used to go in the summer holidays, places that meant something to him. This place is so depressing, for all we know, he’s just checked into a hotel to get away from it.’

  Josep made a note. ‘Do you really think that’s possible?’

  Elisenda took one last look around.

  ‘No, not for one minute.’

  Chapter Forty

  Elisenda left Josep at Pere Vergés’s flat waiting for the Científica team to arrive. She had another interview, one she’d arranged the previous evening. Taking a pool car, she drove past the Devesa. More sideshows were setting up for the weekend, brightly-coloured canvas flapping amid the green and silver trees and the harsh sound of mallets hitting metal pegs. A coach was parked near the traffic lights and was letting off a group of men of all ages chattering like schoolchildren out to play, their bags an assortment of curious shapes and sizes. They were re-enactors, Elisenda knew, ready to do battle to defend the city from Napoleon until Sunday evening came around and they’d go home to watch the football on television.

  She drove out of the city, skirting the western end of the park and crossing the Ter. Glancing left and right quickly, she saw that the river running below the new bridge was higher than normal, tumbling over itself in full flow, a roiling muddy brown capped with foaming white crests. It looked incongruous under such a benevolent sky. Turning left to find the shiny motorway exit that had only been opened recently as the city grew, she passed through the horizontal beehive of toll booths and put her foot down, heading for Figueres, three quarters of an hour north. She wished she were in her own car and could listen to music as she drove. She found she was better able to think laterally to the changing rhythms of a familiar soundtrack than to the monotonous beat of the asphalt under the wheels.

  With Figueres to her right, the second largest city in the Girona region, she came to the exit she wanted shortly after and turned off into a barren stretch of semi-occupied industrial land sporadically scattered with the odd prefabricated factory building. An island in the middle of the brown scrubland was home to another new construction, a sprawling complex of low-rise buildings that had never failed to depress Elisenda ever since it had been built. Parking in the visitors’ area, she nonetheless had to admit that it was still infinitely better than its predecessor, a hundred-year-old misery in one of Figueres’s suburbs that had finally been pulled down a few years previously.

  Breathing in the cool air coming down from the Pyrenees, she gazed at the new prison for the region and had to admit that her dislike stemmed from her own prejudices. Just as the replacement of the old police forces by the Mossos d’Esquadra had revolutionised policing in Catalonia, so the takeover by the Catalan government of the prison system thirty years ago had slowly dragged the service into the modern era. Like the police, the prison service had seen a change from the old ways of punishment and retribution to a new climate of reform and reintegration. In the past, prisoners of all ages and levels of offence had been shoved in together and left to their luck, now the wisdom was one of a second opportunity. The bag she was carrying had been designed and made by prisoners as part of the rehabilitation process and were sold throughout the country. It was just that she couldn’t help seeing prison as the sad and unfortunate result of the whole process of which she was a part. She knew that not many of her fellow officers would have shared her worries should she ever dare mention them. Looking once more at the multi-coloured wall strips, like a giant Neapolitan ice cream, she took in one more deep breath and entered the building.

  Inside, she told the man behind the front desk that she had an appointment and he asked her to take a seat. In the end, she’d barely sat down before the director came down to fetch her in person. About ten years older than Elisenda, the director walked with a quiet assurance and smiled when she saw her.

  ‘Anna,’ Elisenda greeted her. ‘Thanks for seeing me.’

  ‘Not a problem, Elisenda. We’ll just go to my office.’

  Elisenda had met Anna Casellas a few times since their first meeting, when the prison authorities had given senior Mossos a tour shortly after Elisenda had set up the Serious Crime Unit. Softly-spoken but confident, the director had an earnest face, tanned at the end of the summer and framed by mid-length dark blond hair. Her dark eyes were inquisitive, with tiny lines at the corners, and she had a habit of holding her head to one side when she was listening.

  ‘You wanted to ask me about Pere Vergés,’ Casellas said once they’d sat down in her office, a modern but fairly sparse room cooled just a bit too much by the air conditioning. Elisenda saw why the director continued to wear a jacket over her matching bright red skirt, despite the warmth of the day outside. Elisenda started to feel the cold in her short sleeves and thin cotton trousers.

  ‘He’s been missing since Monday afternoon and we think he might have some involvement in an ongoing case.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard he failed to show up at court. Can I ask what the case is?’

  Elisenda had no reservations about telling her about the missing boy and Vergés’s involvement with the family and with Opus Dei.

  ‘My honest opinion, Elisenda?’ Casellas continued when Elisenda had finished. ‘I really can’t see him as having any involvement. Pere was adamant that he was innocent, but there was a fatalism about him rather than any sense of grievance against anyone.’

  ‘But he mus
t have felt some sense of injustice at what had happened to him. Wouldn’t that have led him to want to blame someone?’

  ‘And punish them?’ Casellas shook her head. ‘Pere was a model prisoner. He just wanted to stay out of trouble until his case came to retrial or he’d served his time. He even helped teach computing to some of the other inmates on the courses we give here. I had recommended that he be transferred to the open prison in Girona, but then his retrial finally came through and he was found innocent.’

  Elisenda digested her words. Girona’s prison, in the Pedret part of town to the north, had once been as chaotic as pretty much every other prison in the country, but since the opening of the one in Figueres, the Catalan government had designated Girona’s an open prison. That meant it was reserved for low-risk inmates and those nearing the end of their sentence, who only went there to sleep.

  ‘So if you were recommending him for Girona,’ she asked, ‘would that mean there was nothing in his attitude that would make you think he’d be capable of revenge on the people he thought had put him in prison?’

  ‘I really can’t see it. He was determined to clear his name, but I would say that was the extent of it. In my conversations with him, I would say that he saw his situation as more of a fault of the investigation rather than anyone actively trying to set him up.’

  Elisenda found that odd. From what she’d seen of the original case, she felt that anyone would have felt they’d been set up. She couldn’t help doubting Vergés’s motives for being the model prisoner. Or, looking at things very differently, for something in him snapping the moment he got out and tried to return to an old life that was rejecting him.

  ‘And what about his old Opus Dei crowd?’ she continued. ‘Didn’t he feel any antipathy towards them for not supporting him?’

  Casellas gazed out of the window for a moment before replying. ‘I think it went deeper than that. Pere lost his faith in Opus Dei and the people he’d once known. He was given leave to go to his mother’s funeral, but he chose not to. He’d given up on people, on his past life. He had moments of severe depression, enough for me to refer him to the psychiatric services. It was a loss of faith in general, not an antipathy towards individual people, but despair with everything he’d thought. He didn’t only lose his faith in Opus, he lost his faith, full stop. His faith in Christianity, all his beliefs, had been taken away from him.’