City of Drowned Souls Read online

  City of Drowned Souls

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  —

  Monday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  —

  Tuesday

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  —

  Wednesday

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  —

  Thursday

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  —

  Friday

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  —

  Saturday

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  —

  Sunday

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  —

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  City of Drowned Souls

  Chris Lloyd

  To the memory of my brother Dave.

  It begins and ends with a river.

  Always a river.

  He could hear it outside, louder and angrier than he’d ever heard it.

  He pulled on the iron ring until the metal clasp around his right wrist cut too far into his skin and his blood began to drip onto the cold stone floor. His left hand hadn’t been tethered so that he could eat and drink from the bottles of water and bags of food that his captor brought down to him. He tried once more to pick at the metal tie on his right wrist with his left hand, but his nails broke and he only drove the band further into his own skin until it became too painful and he had to give up. He leaned his head back against the rough-hewn stone of the ancient cellar wall and cried.

  He thought of his mother.

  Always his mother.

  And her disappointment.

  He could feel cold on the back of his head, different from usual. He leaned forward and twisted around, but it was too dark to see. He ran the fingers of his left hand down the stone. They were damp. He tasted it in case it was his blood, but it was water. Feeling a rising panic that was never far away, he placed the flat of his hand along the wall as far as he could go. There were places where water was running down over the surface. He called out.

  Above him, he heard the tugging of the door in its frame. It opened and a weak light filtered into the room. He waited for the ladder, but it didn’t appear. In the gloom, he could see the four stone steps that rose from the floor and abruptly ended, the rest of the flight to the door having crumbled away years ago. Still he waited for the ladder to be lowered, but nothing came. Silhouetted against the pale glow, his captor stood and stared down at him.

  ‘There’s water coming in,’ he shouted up.

  Without a word, the figure closed the door and the cellar was plunged into a blacker darkness than before. He screamed once more with fear and frustration and tugged again at the iron ring, but the metal tie cut into his flesh and he cried out in pain. With his left hand, he pulled back and forth at the ring set into the wall but it was solid. He banged again and again on the hard stone with his fist until it too was bleeding. Touching the wall, he had no idea if it was his blood or the water seeping in that he could feel.

  He heard another sound. A roaring. The river was growing in anger and coming nearer. Underneath it came a new noise. A sucking. He sat still to listen. His legs were wet. Jumping up to his feet and having to crouch because of his wrist shackled to the wall, he felt the ground beneath him with his fingertips. Water was coming in, bubbling up through the cracks in the stone slabs. Soon, the whole floor was covered. His hand laid flat on the ground was enveloped, the river rising up his wrist. He screamed and the door opened. Again, the figure stood in the gap and stared down.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  He could hear the panic in his own voice.

  ‘I have no choice.’

  Monday

  Chapter One

  ‘How does that make you feel?’

  Elisenda picked the third imagined piece of lint off her jeans in the last ten minutes and studied the woman seated in the earnest straight-backed chair opposite her. Elisenda herself was half-lying on a modern recliner which made her feel mildly discomforted, the static in the seat fabric clinging to the back of her shirt, tugging it out of her waistband. She felt a sheen of sweat in the small of her back soaking through the thin cotton. She also felt faintly ridiculous. It wasn’t solely the fault of the chair.

  ‘Uncomfortable.’

  Doctora Puyals leaned forward. ‘At being asked how you feel or at being here?’

  Elisenda shook her head irritably, her long hair catching painfully behind her shoulders. ‘With this bloody chair. It’s desperately difficult to sit on. I might consider using it to question suspects.’

  ‘Is that how you feel, Elisenda? Like you’re a suspect in some way?’

  Elisenda stifled a groan and squirmed on the recliner. There were no arms and she was forced to clasp her hands together on her lap to stop them from sliding down to the floor either side of her. She was conscious of the other woman staring at her fingers clutching tightly to each other, the knuckles white with the strain. She had to fight the temptation to tell her it was entirely because of the chair, not for anything else.

  ‘How do you want it to make me feel?’ she finally asked her.

  ‘Curious. You ask me how I want it to make you feel. That’s interesting.’

  It might be to you, Elisenda thought, glad that one of them at least was enjoying the experience. She sized the woman up without letting it show that she was doing it. The counsellor sat back on her own chair, her head to one side, studying her patient. The unbidden thought came to Elisenda that the good doctor wasn’t as good as Elisenda was at reading people’s faces without their knowing that that’s what she was doing. Behind a professional mask of attentive concern, which Elisenda already had no doubt Puyals genuinely felt, lay deep layers of strength and calculation. It was a powerful face, with inquisitive eyes and a defined jawline that many men would have longed for. Despite herself, Elisenda pull
ed her own overbite in, aware that it got more pronounced the more anxious she was.

  ‘You feel anxious?’ Puyals asked her.

  Elisenda could see the attempt to hide the intense scrutiny behind a casual gaze and couldn’t help experiencing a surge of irritation. ‘I feel it’s a waste of our time. Yours and mine. I don’t need to talk to anyone. You don’t need someone lying here resenting every minute of this.’

  Puyals laughed, a gentle sound like water on pebbles. ‘You aren’t the first person to resent being here, Elisenda. And you aren’t the first person who thinks they don’t need to talk. You think you’re here against your will, I see that. I’m here because I know you’re not.’

  For the first time, Elisenda looked uncertainly at the counsellor.

  ‘This is a waste of time,’ she insisted.

  Chapter Two

  Thirty-six hours earlier

  ‘This is a waste of time.’

  In the moonlit dark, Elisenda could sense Josep behind her bristle at Manel’s whispered comment. Before he could reply, the blackness was rent by the scream of a barn owl. Elisenda heard Josep’s involuntary gasp at the noise, the needles on the pine trees where they were standing rustling as he jumped slightly.

  ‘City boy,’ Manel snorted in a low voice.

  ‘Boys,’ Elisenda told them. ‘Play nicely.’

  Through the darkness, she heard the tortured squeak of a mouse being carried off through the night air along the edge of the dense woods. She also heard Josep mutter something under his breath for Manel’s benefit.

  ‘I won’t tell you again,’ she added quietly. ‘Either of you.’

  Her eyes had become adjusted to the dark after three hours of waiting, but she sensed rather than saw the two caporals mould into the wooded shadow. The tall and often lugubrious Josep melting into the towering pines, their bark brittle to the touch. The thickset and clumpy Manel fading into rambling gorse, the leaves rustling spikily at the slightest movement. Unlike the woods, their relationship wasn’t as symbiotic as Elisenda would have liked.

  It was a cloudless sky, a crescent moon washing the narrow track leading up to the converted farmhouse in front of them in a raw lapis lazuli colour, the shadows under the trees either side pools of black where the pale light couldn’t penetrate. Ahead of them stood the darkness of the farmhouse. No longer a farm, but a restyled country home for the short commute from Girona, barely twenty kilometres away. Impossible to see in this light, but Elisenda recalled the old stones buffed to an enticing honey glow, the palms in giant pots either side of the massive wooden double door, the mahogany surrounds of the triple-glazed windows set deep into the thick walls. Cooling in summer, warming in winter, bold in its affluent and splendid isolation.

  I wouldn’t live this far from the noise and warmth of others if you paid me, Elisenda thought for the dozenth time that night.

  She froze at a half-caught sound that came from the woods the other side of the track. A rustle of dead pine needles shifting as something glided over them. Unsure at first she’d heard it, she glanced at Josep’s shadow and saw him nod in the gloom. Someone was moving through the trees opposite them. She sensed Manel tense. It sounded like just one set of footsteps, which surprised her. She’d expected more, unless this was someone spying out the land first. Checking the pistol in her side holster and silently hefting the heavy armoured jacket to try and find a more comfortable position, she peered through the pines and dense clumps of holm oak leaves.

  She was distracted momentarily by the sound of scratching coming from above her and a gentle spattering of pine needles falling to the ground near her feet. She looked up involuntarily and held her breath. A squirrel or a bird, she decided, relieved, exhaling as silently as she could. Returning her gaze to the trees and undergrowth mirroring her own hiding place, she saw a shape in the dark shift. A slight movement on the edge of her vision. She tried looking at it directly but it disappeared. Instead, she had to look to the side of it to catch the slightest of changes in the night. She heard Manel slowly undo the flap on his holster but she could do nothing to shush him without alerting whoever it was coming towards them.

  Suddenly, a face appeared in the moonlight alongside a tree by the track.

  She felt herself shrink back. Next to her, she heard Josep let his breath out slowly. Her own reaction followed his instantly. To her ears, the sound of it was deafening in the darkness. In the fleeting moment the face was in view, she’d recognised it as Àlex’s. The one sergent in her team and her second-in-command, he was positioned in the facing woods. Briefly annoyed with him, she immediately wondered what it was that had made him decide to risk making a move.

  She stared closely but could see no more movement. She knew Àlex was on the other side of the track with Montse, the final member of her unit. Hidden in the bushes and rocks beyond and around them and her own small group were other Mossos d’Esquadra. A unit of uniformed patrol cops from the Seguretat Ciutadana and an ARRO team, the support unit that dealt with potentially more dangerous situations like riots, raids and roundups. She’d initially objected to their involvement, but Inspector Puigventós, her boss in the Regional Investigation Command in Girona, had insisted.

  ‘These are violent people we’re after,’ he’d told her. ‘I insist on ARRO support and that’s final.’

  She was almost grateful now that they were there.

  She felt the lightest of taps on her shoulder from Josep. She nodded. She’d heard it too. It explained why Àlex had made his way nearer to the edge of the track. Through the dark, she heard the sound of something sliding very slightly on the small stones of the densely-enclosed drive cutting through the trees. Someone was approaching the house and would soon be coming into their line of vision.

  Whoever it was had paused. Elisenda closed her eyes for a brief moment, concerned the person who was coming calling had heard something. A second noise from further away rustled in the night, a second person moving along the path. An aeon of held breath later, the first set of footsteps began to move again, cautiously approaching their position. The newcomer was hanging back, waiting while the leader tested the lie of the land. She felt her whole body tense once more and slowly took out her service pistol, the grip unsteady in the chill sweat of her hand. Josep and Manel strained forward in the shadows. The first of the interlopers stopped again and Elisenda caught her breath as they paused one more time before continuing, finally coming into view.

  Sniffing at the breeze, a fallow deer on the path looked directly at Elisenda, its eyes suddenly incandescent white, reflecting the moon. The pale spots on its back shone a tungsten blue, the rest of its coat vanishing into the dark. Elisenda returned the animal’s gaze and exhaled. Behind it, the second deer obviously sensed the humans and scampered away. The leader glanced back towards its retreating partner for a moment and looked again at Elisenda, holding eye contact. Staring at her for what seemed an age, it finally wheeled slowly about on its slender legs and gently loped off, away from the house. Elisenda felt her muscles relax and she let out a long breath, leaning her head against the tree next to her.

  Violent people, she wryly recalled the inspector’s words.

  Unusually, Inspector Puigventós himself was on the operation, with the head of the ARRO team, on the other side of the house, covering a footpath that led from a dirt track to the west. Their various vans and cars were pulled up half a kilometre away, off the main road to the east, with more back-up waiting if needed. In all, there were about two dozen Mossos staked out, there on the strength of Elisenda’s belief in a tipoff from one of her usual informants.

  The only problem was that the violent people they were waiting for hadn’t shown up.

  ‘Siset,’ Elisenda muttered the name of her grass to herself. ‘If you’ve screwed me over…’

  ‘This is a waste of time,’ Manel repeated sotto voce, the fingers on his left hand scratching impatiently at the deeply-scored bark of the holm oak sheltering him, his right hand snapping hi
s holster shut.

  Elisenda had to agree with him.

  ‘Quit that noise,’ Josep told him irritably, but Manel simply scratched harder with his thumbnail.

  ‘He’s right,’ Elisenda finally agreed. ‘No one’s coming.’

  She was on the point of breaking the agreed radio silence to speak to Puigventós, when he called through to her.

  ‘I’m standing the operation down, Elisenda,’ the inspector’s voice grated through the handset. He was no longer bothering to whisper.

  ‘With respect, Xavier, shouldn’t that be my decision?’ she asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

  ‘Not at this stage, Elisenda. We’ve had a report of an incident near Cassà de la Selva. I’m taking responsibility for standing the operation down.’

  The handset went dead in her hand and after a few moments, Elisenda heard a steady wave of soft noise rolling towards her as the order spread through the police officers in the woods and they slowly began to stamp their feet and move through the pine needles after hours of stiff inactivity. The low murmur of their voices echoed through the trees.

  The first of them appeared in the moonlight on the drive, walking away from the house. One or two turned on their torches to see their way more clearly, quickly followed by others. In the dancing light, the riot helmets of the ARRO team banged dully against their owners’ heavily-padded right thighs, where they hung on rings when not in use. Two uniformed Seguretat Ciutadana followed, deep in muted conversation, while a third caught them up on the drive. He said something and the other two laughed. Manel grunted something, a bass counterpoint to Josep’s stifled sigh.

  Leaving her post in the trees, Elisenda emerged onto the drive and shone her own torch at the faint tracks scuffed on the ground by the deer. Josep and Manel followed her and stopped either side. For the first time, she heard the rushing sound of distant water under the crunching footsteps of the retreating Mossos. While Girona and the outlying areas had remained dry throughout the first half of September, the mountains to the north and west had seen heavy rainfall on and off all month, filling the springs and swelling the rivers as they reached the city. She’d noticed the rushing white water of a brook near the house when she’d come to visit the owners earlier in the day, to explain to them that they had to leave their home for a few hours that evening.