by Chris Lloyd
She’d given the unit the rest of the afternoon off. They were drained and the house robbers could wait until Monday. Her team had more of a chance of breaking the gang now and she’d decided that their need for some time to themselves was more pressing right now than any urgency in questioning the gang members.
She’d taken the chance to go and vote and had then called her sister and suggested a walk through the park to catch the last of the weekend’s festivities. Catalina was talking now to someone she knew at a stand selling decorated ceramic tiles and Elisenda was under the trees, holding her niece. She looked at her reacting to the lights and sounds in the park. A modern lullaby came on over the loudspeakers, Bona Nit by Els Pets, a rock band. Elisenda started dancing gently to it, bouncing Enriqueta lightly up and down and watching her gurgle in enjoyment.
‘You hear this, kid,’ she told her niece. ‘This is proper music. You stick with this and you can’t go wrong. Forget that twinkly crap your parents like.’
She laughed back at her and danced some more to the rich acoustic guitar sound. In her mouth, Enriqueta was chewing on the end of a stuffed toy that Elisenda had just bought for her at another stand. It was an El Tarlà doll, the medieval clown in the city’s legends who’d entertained the people when they were quarantined during the plague. Enriqueta just knew it felt comfortable in her mouth and she liked the sound of the rattle in the doll’s cap.
‘That’s the way to go,’ Elisenda encouraged her. She wandered along the path through the stalls, breathing in the cool evening air. ‘You know what, kid? Adults are funny creatures. We always want there to be a connection between everything. But sometimes the connections just aren’t there, and that’s what makes you go chasing after the wrong things. We had a kid who went missing, a man who got out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit, a politician no one likes, a supposedly corrupt councillor, a murdered campaign manager, a social-climbing businessman and a load of houses getting robbed. And you know what? They weren’t at all connected in the way we thought they were.
‘The kid did a wrong thing because he thought he’d done something else wrong when he hadn’t really. And that’s the thing with kids. They don’t see connections. They just see themselves, and they think everyone thinks they’ve done something wrong when the adults are really just thinking about themselves as well anyway. So the kid tried to hide something he’d done in the past that made him feel guilty and unloved by doing something even worse.
‘And the man who got out of prison, the one the kid thought was going to tell on him. He never would have. He’d done something far worse and got away with it but then got punished for something he didn’t do. And we saw the wrong connection. We thought he was after Jaume because of something Jaume’s mother or father might have done, or that the businessman was involved, or there was some strange Opus Dei conspiracy. And we thought he’d got to know the robbers in prison and got them to get revenge for him on Bofarull when in fact nothing of the sort had happened.’
Enriqueta tried to force the stuffed toy into Elisenda’s mouth.
‘Not now, kid, I’m in full flow. There were no connections. Not in the way we’d seen them. There were people who were connected to each other who’d committed isolated acts and we’d kidded ourselves into thinking they had to be part of some bigger picture. Miravent wasn’t targeted because of her politics, Comas wasn’t being punished for his part in a fraud. There was no shadowy Opus Dei shenanigans going on, no revenge for past slights or extortion. Just random acts by individuals who knew each other.’
She stopped walking for a moment and pulled her niece closer. ‘Do you know what, though, kid?’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes there still are connections. Bofarull. His part in the fraud that got Vergés put away, that became obvious. We couldn’t punish him for it, but we now know what happened. The robbers. They’re all connected to each other, the various teams and leaders. And that connection’s what’s going to help us bring them down. And Marc Comas and Salvador Canet. Thanks to all of this, we’ve got a good idea that there is something going on, so that’s what your dear old aunt is going to be looking at first thing tomorrow morning.’
She looked down. Enriqueta was asleep.
‘You sleep, kid. The bad guys don’t get away with it.’
Elisenda danced slowly back to where she’d been as the music was fading out of earshot. In her arms, her niece had woken up again and felt Elisenda’s face where one of the bad guys had hit her. Elisenda winced and smiled. She found herself by a tree and she looked at the little row of tiny black figures tracing a path up and down the two-tone bark, carrying on with what they had to do no matter what. She pointed at them and moved Enriqueta closer to them.
‘Look, kid. Ants.’
Elisenda watched the industry on the tree and smiled at her memory.
After an early dinner, she left Catalina and Enriqueta and went home to her empty flat. She checked the television news for any election results. Susanna Miravent had stepped down from her party list, not that it appeared she would have won a seat anyway. Elisenda turned it off and took out a notepad and pen. She sat down on the sofa and wrote some more about her daughter, filling page after page of the squared paper as the lights across the river slowly went out.
Closing the book, she placed it on the coffee table and listened. She heard no lullabies, no singing floating through the paper screens. No shadows flitted across the walls.
‘Good night, Lina,’ she whispered.
She turned the lamp off in the living room and went to her bedroom, where she slept a night filled with joyful dreams of her daughter.
‘Your dad’s accent is just so cool.’
‘No way.’
‘It so is,’ the third young teenaged girl said.
The three of them were walking the short distance home from school. They turned off the wide avenue into a leafy side street, chatting as they crossed the affluent Altamira neighbourhood of Caracas.
‘I’ll tell you what isn’t cool,’ the second girl said. ‘History. I hate it.’
The first girl laughed. ‘You hate La Vieja.’ La Vieja. The Old Fogey. Their name for their history teacher.
‘That’s because she always marks you down,’ the third girl said.
The second girl sucked her lips in and impersonated their teacher. ‘That’s because you don’t know anything about the history of Venezuela, girl. You’re not a part of it.’
Her two friends laughed. She let her mouth fall back to its normal shape, the slight overbite that she hated showing again.
‘Too right I’m not,’ she carried on. ‘It’s my history I want to know about.’
Her friends laughed again. Suddenly they stopped.
‘It’s your dad,’ the first girl said. ‘He’s so cute.’
‘Ew, he’s my dad,’ the second girl said.
Her father approached them and said hello to her two friends before kissing his daughter on the cheek.
He spoke to her in his accent that sounded so strange to her Venezuelan friends.
‘Hi, Lina. Did you have a good day?’
Acknowledgements
As always, there are so many people to thank for their help and support with this book. I’ve been bowled over by the generous response to the Elisenda Domènech series, and I’d like to thank all the wonderful readers and reviewers who have left such kind reviews and sent me such positive messages. The books have also been well received by readers from Girona, which is particularly gratifying. Special thanks here go to Jordi Serra-Mestres and Jordi Camps.
I’d like to thank the lovely people at Canelo for their vision and for their faith in Elisenda and in me: Michael Bhaskar, Iain Millar, Nick Barreto, Simon Collinson and Louise Cullen. Thank you also to Elodie Olson-Coons for her insightful copy-editing and to Chris Shamwana for the haunting cover designs for my books. Thank you as well to Faye Rogers for all her hard work in organising a great blog tour and her help in promoting the series.
I know I
keep harping on about my agent, the brilliant Ella Kahn, but she really is the best you could ever wish for. Thanks as always to her for all her hard work, support, encouragement and belief in me.
And finally, and as always, I want to thank my wonderful wife Liz for everything. She’s kept the wine flowing.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Chris Lloyd, 2017
The moral right of Chris Lloyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781910859858
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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