by Chris Lloyd
The road followed the valley carved out of the mountains by the Ter to the east of Girona where it flowed westwards from the mountains and the reservoir at Susqueda. The river was over their right shoulder all the way, a boiling mass of brown and white rising up to meet the rain falling down it, swelling it as it ran. As they drove, they crossed several small tributaries in turmoil, each one tumbling eagerly to the chaos of their wayward offspring.
‘Both the places we want are before we get to the reservoir,’ Josep said from the rear seats. He had to shout over the uproar of the rain and the keening of the sirens.
Sitting next to him were Susanna Miravent and Marc Comas. They’d insisted on coming with the Mossos after Elisenda had thought there was a possibility that Vergés was holding Jaume somewhere near the site of the autumn outing he’d been banned from going to.
‘I know the way better than you do,’ Miravent had argued.
Elisenda had had to admit that she was right, but it also meant that she couldn’t voice her concerns to Josep as they drove. She knew there was a good chance that Vergés had taken Jaume, and that if he had, it was a likely place to exact any revenge that he sought, but she had to accept that it was still a long shot.
‘One of the houses is occupied,’ Josep continued, ‘but the other one’s abandoned. I think that has to be the better bet.’
‘We always have the picnic near the abandoned house,’ Miravent added. ‘It’s a short drive from the river where we do the kayaking. The one by the house is too small but it’s good for the children to splash about in.’
Elisenda turned around in her seat. ‘There’s a river by the house?’
Josep checked his maps. ‘A tributary of the Ter.’
Elisenda faced forward again to hide her concerns from the couple in the back seat. They were in the lead car. Behind them, Àlex, Montse and Manel were in the first of three more four-by-fours speeding along the fast new road as it temporarily left the river before crossing over the Ter and taking the tortuous route that clung to the side of the valley. Normally used to seeing it tranquil, she was shocked at the violence of the river beneath them, now over to her left. She hoped the level wouldn’t rise as high as the road they were on. Turning off onto a smaller track still, they climbed steadily.
‘That’s the way to the occupied house,’ Josep suddenly called. He was pointing to a muddy path to the left. ‘The one we want is another kilometre on the right.’
Elisenda turned again to see Miravent nodding at Josep’s directions. Comas sat in silence, his head staring down at his lap. The kilometre seemed to take forever, progress slow and uncomfortable across the bumps and potholes of the track.
‘Over there,’ Josep called.
They turned off the track onto a smaller one still. She peered through the water washing down the windscreen, the wipers barely forging a path through the torrents before thick new raindrops instantly merged to form a new prism of blurred colours. She could just make out a small patch of grey ahead of them, an artificial geometric shape against the swirling ground of green, melting from view in time with the swish of the blades. The car slowed almost to walking pace and finally stopped.
‘This is as far as we can go,’ the driver told them.
Elisenda could see the house in front of them, drifting in and out of vision through the rolling curtain of rain. Two empty windows and a doorless frame downstairs looked like an uneven row of cracked teeth, the apertures upstairs like empty eye sockets. A sightless home crumbling and decaying under the relentless oblivion of sun, wind and rain.
The car door was almost blown out of her hand when she opened it. Telling Miravent and Comas to stay inside, she struggled out. Josep joined her, but Elisenda turned to see Miravent following him.
‘I’m coming,’ the politician shouted above the roar.
It was when they got out of the car that another sound had risen up. The thundering of water, not from above, but from somewhere beyond the house. A mountain stream swollen with weeks of rain and released bucking from its gentle servitude.
Elisenda decided not to waste time arguing with Miravent. They were joined by the rest of her unit and the teams from the other cars. Shouting instructions, she headed the trudge along the treacherous path. The mud was superficial, a thin layer crusting decades of compacted earth. It didn’t suck them down into the ground and hamper their progress, instead, it sent their boots slithering across a thin icing of rust-coloured slush. They soon found that the edge between the worn track now in disuse and the natural tangle of stubby grasses encroaching on it was an easier line to follow.
Concentrating on keeping her feet, Elisenda nearly missed the figure emerging from the house, but a colourful blur of movement in the misting grey air caught her eye and she looked up in time. Someone was running out of the front door. Not along the path towards them, but away from the house at an angle.
‘Àlex and Josep,’ she shouted, turning and pointing at the figure.
They immediately set off across the grass and low brush in slow pursuit, all three figures in exaggerated motion. Two other Mossos went with them. Elisenda and the rest continued towards the house, picking up speed as best they could. They were drawing near. The sound of the wind and the water diminished slightly in the lee of the old building. To the right of the house, a blue Renault was parked under a tree, facing away from them.
Elisenda told Montse to make sure that Miravent stayed outside. She noticed that Comas hadn’t followed them out of the car. Inside the house, a tiny room with bare earth and rain blowing in through the glassless windows revealed nothing more than an interior door. Once painted brown and now flaked and warped, it stood open, held in place on the ground. A swathe of flat earth showed where it had been opened and closed recently.
She went through it into a second room, her caution mixed with an impatient urgency. The one window, on a wall giving onto the side of the house, was still glazed. The temperature was instantly a little higher, the damp not so cloying. In a corner was a sleeping bag, spread over a second one acting as a mattress. A battery lantern stood on a little camping table and plastic supermarket bags looked to be stuffed with food. Empty ones lay strewn on the floor.
Another door gave off this, also open, and she went through. An old stone sink and ancient cupboards told her it was once the kitchen. Parts of the rear wall around the windows were gone and the view gave onto the river. The sound of it returned, a roar bellowing along its course, just metres beyond the house. As she watched, an uprooted tree was borne past, rotating helplessly in the river. She could see how the level had risen, the water just a couple of metres below the room where she stood, bursting its banks on both sides.
She turned to see another door and her heart missed a beat.
It was a cellar door. Closed.
Rushing over, she tugged to open it and looked in.
It was dark, and she called for a torch. Shining it in, she saw a room, its bottom couple of metres filled with water tumbling over and over itself. The sound of its rushing was deafening. Most of the original old steps had evidently crumbled away years ago, leaving just a few at the bottom, rising out of the muddy flood that had invaded the cellar. A gap too large to climb down remained between the top step and the door where she was kneeling. She leaned down to see if she could reach, but it was impossible. In the murk, she spotted a ladder being turned over in the water, dragged under to be released again moments later.
She saw something else given up by the flood.
Turning, she saw Miravent at the door into the kitchen. Montse was barring her way.
Elisenda turned back to peer into the cellar.
She saw it again and closed her eyes.
‘Please, not that,’ she whispered.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Elisenda watched Albert Riera working.
She had asked if she could be present and Jaume’s parents had had no objection.
For once Riera was silent. His hands moved gently
over the boy’s body. Systematically, he checked his face and head, his hands and arms. Centimetre by centimetre, he looked at the boy’s torso, looking for abrasions or contusions. He opened his mouth and checked inside, peering at his teeth and gums. He shone a torch into his eyes to examine them closely. He examined his lower limbs and feet, looking for bruising or injuries, any marks that had been inflicted deliberately or by accident. Elisenda had had to turn away at some points. Riera checked the boy’s genitals.
Elisenda turned back and looked again at Riera’s smooth, economic movements. He wasn’t just a pathologist. His proper title was forensic doctor. As such, his task was not only to conduct post-mortems on the bodies of suspicious deaths, but to examine the living victims of crimes.
He stepped back and took another look at Jaume.
‘You’re perfectly all right, young man,’ Riera told him. ‘You can put your things back on now.’
Next to her, Elisenda heard Miravent let out a long, low sigh. She rushed forward and embraced her son. Embarrassed, the boy brushed her away and began to put on the spare clothes that his father had brought from home on the way to the Institut de Medicina Legal.
‘Is he really all right?’ Miravent asked Riera.
The pathologist frowned at her. ‘You heard my opinion. There’s nothing wrong with him that a hot meal and night in a warm bed won’t cure.’
Like Elisenda, his mother hadn’t left his side from the moment Àlex and Josep had wrestled him to the ground as he’d fled the abandoned house. She’d returned to Girona with the mother, father and son and left Àlex in charge at the house by the river.
‘Why were you running away from the house?’ Elisenda asked Jaume once they’d all moved into a more comfortable room with sofas in the forensic institute.
Someone had brought him a hot cup of chocolate milk at his mother’s request. He held it in his hands, warming up in the cool of the air-conditioned office, and took small sips.
‘I thought he was behind me,’ the boy said. ‘I just saw people running towards the house and I didn’t know who you were. I wanted to get away.’
Elisenda asked Miravent if she could continue to question the boy, and the politician agreed. Marc Comas was sitting on another sofa and had barely said a word since coming with the clothes. All the way back from the house, he’d wept openly and tried to hug his son, but now he was more reserved. He looked across at Jaume every so often and smiled encouragement at him, but the boy scarcely reacted.
‘Tell me what happened, Jaume,’ Elisenda told the boy. ‘In your own time. There’s no hurry.’
Without looking at either of his parents, the boy began to speak.
‘I was in the cellar. I couldn’t get out because the steps didn’t go all the way. Every time he came to bring me food, he put a ladder down so he could get in.’
‘Did he say why he was keeping you there?’
He shook his head and took a sip of chocolate. ‘He didn’t talk much.’
‘How did you get to the house, Jaume?’ Elisenda asked him.
‘He drove us there.’
‘You got into his car. Why was that?’
‘He offered me a lift. When I got off the bus in the centre. He was driving past and I knew who he was. He said he was going to see my parents to talk to them about something. And then he just kept driving and he took us out to the Susqueda reservoir, where we always went on picnics. He told me not to worry as he just had to pick some things up and then we’d be going home.’
‘Why didn’t you try ringing us?’ Miravent asked. Elisenda looked at her and signalled that she should be quiet for a moment.
‘I tried. But he told me there was no signal. He took my phone from me in the car and wouldn’t give it back. That’s when I got frightened, but I couldn’t get out, because he was going too fast.’
‘Why did you tell Carles Pascual that you were going out for dinner with your parents?’ Elisenda asked him.
The boy shrugged. ‘Pascual’s such a dweeb. I didn’t want to go around to his house anymore.’
A budding friendship dismissed in a thoughtless second, Elisenda thought. It occurred to her that Jaume was more like his mother than his father and she glanced over at Comas, sitting apart from his wife and son, largely ignored by them both.
‘How did he treat you, Jaume?’ she continued.
‘He was nice. He gave me food and made sure I was all right at night. It was a bit scary down there in the dark, and he brought me a lamp.’
His answer surprised Elisenda. ‘So what happened today, when it was raining?’
‘The water started coming in through the floor and the walls. I shouted to him. But he didn’t come for ages. I don’t know where he was. Then he saw the water coming in and it was up to my chest, so he put the ladder down and came down to let me out. He used to tie my hands to the wall, so he cut the bits of metal and helped me up the ladder.’ The boy started to cry. Tears ran down his downy cheeks and he suddenly seemed the young boy that he was, despite his height. ‘When I got up to the top, I just wanted to run away. I heard him shout, and I turned. He was climbing up the ladder behind me and he fell off into the water. And the ladder slipped and fell back into the cellar. I didn’t do anything. I ran away.’
He was crying more forcefully now, racking sobs that shook his body.
‘You’ve done nothing wrong, Jaume,’ his mother told him.
For the first time, the boy allowed her to comfort him. Comas remained where he was and made no attempt to sit with his wife and son.
‘I’ll have to ask you some more questions another time, Jaume,’ Elisenda told him.
She went outside, where Riera was waiting.
‘I’ve got a body on the way, I take it,’ he told her.
‘I’m afraid you have, Albert,’ she replied. ‘Pere Vergés.’
She described a little of the scene at the abandoned house.
‘He was trapped in the cellar,’ she told him. ‘The flood water was coming in too quickly and he couldn’t get out. When I left, a couple of Científica were going down to try and retrieve the body. Àlex has told me that they found metal ties down there, cut with a pair of pliers, and that there are old metal rings set into the wall. They also found some pliers and empty food containers and water bottles.’
Riera shook his head. ‘Poor kid. What makes a man do that?’
The door opened and the small family came out.
‘We’re going to go home,’ Miravent told them.
‘I’ll come by later, Jaume,’ Elisenda said, ‘to make sure you’re all right and to ask you a few more questions.’
The boy nodded and gave her a small smile.
‘But first,’ his mother said, ‘we’ve got to go and vote. We can all go together and the city can see that I’ve got my son back.’
They walked off down the corridor. Elisenda watched them go.
‘Another one prepared to use a child for their own ends,’ Riera muttered bitterly. ‘Even her own child.’
Elisenda took her leave and walked out into the surprisingly mild weather of the city. There was a scent of moisture in the air, the only hint to the rain pounding down on the reservoir just an hour away. A breeze blew through the trees and she held her head back to breathe in deeply. Opening her eyes, she saw a figure walking away from her, heading for the shelter of the towering trees in the Devesa.
Watching him, she made up her mind and set off after him.
Chapter Sixty
‘We should go and question these house attackers some more,’ Àlex told Manel. ‘The clock’s ticking.’
Manel nodded his head and sighed deeply. The two of them were sitting with Josep and Montse in the unit’s outer office. All four had showered and were dry and in clean clothes, but they were exhausted, their energy sapped after the events at the abandoned house in the country. None of them was talking.
‘I really didn’t think it was going to be Vergés,’ Josep suddenly said.
‘Doe
sn’t always go the way you think,’ Manel replied.
‘You don’t have to have an answer for everything, for Christ’s sake,’ Josep snapped.
Àlex stood up and signalled to Manel before he had the chance to say anything in reply. ‘With me. We’ve got interviews.’ He turned to Josep. ‘Can you check the social media? See if there’s anything new about the attacks. We’ll be winding down the missing persons investigation, but we need to keep on top of everything else.’
He knew how the anti-climax of an unexpected result could drain the energy from a team, so it was important that they should have something to focus on. Josep nodded and turned straight to his computer. He looked up almost immediately but Àlex and Manel were gone. Seeing the expression on his face, Montse got up and went out into the corridor to call them back.
‘What is it?’ Àlex asked when they came back in.
Josep pointed to the screen. He had a map of the Gironès region showing.
‘The couple calling with the religious pamphlets. We’ve got messages coming in right now that they’re knocking on doors.’ He pointed at the map. ‘Forty-five minutes ago here, twenty minutes ago here. And just over five minutes ago here. They’re following the Sant Adri road.’
Manel peered at it. ‘It’s a route. We can see the trace of where they’ve been.’
‘Better than that,’ Àlex told them. ‘We can see where they’re going.’
* * *
Elisenda walked through the crowds in the park, shadowing the figure that bobbed in and out of view ahead of her. Judging by the numbers of people, she realised that the city had just fallen in the third and final siege. After seven months of bombardment and starvation by Napoleon’s troops, the defenders besieged inside the city had capitulated. The food had gone and they’d eaten all the rats and mice, dogs and cats, living among the decomposing bodies of their fellow citizens and dying in their droves from disease and it was time to give up. The Spanish soldiers had been led out of the Portal de Sant Pere to captivity and the half of the city’s population that had survived was preparing itself for occupation by the French.
