City of Drowned Souls Read online

  ‘We have reliable reports,’ she’d told the couple, architects from Girona, both of them around her own age, ‘that the gang that’s been targeting houses like yours in recent months is planning a burglary here tonight.’

  The couple had been more than willing to pack a hurried bag and go to the wife’s parents’ house in the wealthy Palau district of Girona. The newspapers had been joyously full all summer of tales of the violence meted out by the gang that had been operating in the area, terrorising any home-owners unlucky enough to be in when they carried out one of their raids.

  ‘Reliable reports,’ Elisenda muttered to herself now, caught in the moonlight.

  Josep gave a little cough to warn her of something. Looking up, she saw Inspector Puigventós walking along the path towards her, his tall figure in shadow against the negative silhouette of the house. The moon glinted on his glasses, a new addition he still felt self-conscious about, choosing to wear rimless ones to fool himself into thinking they didn’t show so much. Subirana, the head of the ARRO unit, strode alongside him, a shorter, stockier, more brooding shadow. Neither of the men spoke.

  Sensing a change in the air around her, Elisenda turned to see Àlex emerge from the trees to stand next to her. He was unfastening his armoured jacket, taut anger brooding in his every movement. Montse, a caporala, the same rank as Josep and Manel, had come with him and now stood by Josep, barely a metre away. The calmest in the team, she waited with a controlled athletic grace. Elisenda couldn’t see where Manel, the newest member of her team, was.

  Puigventós stopped in front of Elisenda and aimed his torch beam at the ground. Elisenda did likewise. The reflected light from below threw dark shadows on their faces, hunting out the ridges and hollows in harsh relief. The barn owl screeched again in the distance, the scene instantly reminding Elisenda of an old Bela Lugosi movie. She had to resist an entirely inappropriate urge to laugh and was momentarily shocked at how close she’d come to really doing it.

  Pausing only for a moment, Subirana nodded once to Puigventós and made eye contact with Elisenda, a fleeting smile of support crossing his wide face before he carried on along the path to join the rest of his team. Puigventós waited for him to go before he spoke.

  ‘Would you like your unit to stand some distance away, Elisenda?’ His voice was quiet.

  She looked straight at him and shook her head. ‘They can stay.’

  Staring intently into her eyes, he brandished his mobile phone.

  ‘Cassà de la Selva, Elisenda. Three generations of the same family badly beaten. Two parents, a teenage boy and the husband’s eighty-year-old father. All four are being taken to hospital now. Their home ransacked, their bank cards taken, their car stolen. While you had your unit, an ARRO unit and Seguretat Ciutadana wasting our time and resources here on the say-so of a petty criminal and drug-pusher.’

  Elisenda could feel Àlex next to her tense at Puigventós’ words. Silently, she willed her sergent to keep quiet.

  ‘Siset’s information has always been good in the past,’ Elisenda objected, her voice calm.

  ‘Always, Elisenda? He’s a liability, and he’s turning you into a liability as well.’

  Elisenda couldn’t have been more stunned if the inspector had hit her in the face. Before she could reply, Àlex spoke up.

  ‘With respect, Inspector Puigventós, that is uncalled for.’

  ‘I will decide what is called for and what isn’t, sergent,’ the inspector told him, his anger barely contained. ‘And right now, your opinion is anything but welcome.’

  Elisenda signalled to Àlex to keep quiet, but was fighting a losing battle with her own temper.

  ‘Liability?’ she said, her voice as quiet as Puigventós’. ‘In what way am I a liability?’

  ‘Your judgement is impaired, Elisenda. You’re letting your personal life mar your professional decisions.’

  Elisenda took a step forward, her face centimetres from Puigventós’, who recoiled in surprise but stood his ground. Àlex tried to pull her back by the arm, but she waved his hand away.

  ‘My personal life?’ In her anger, she saw tiny beads of spittle spatter on the inspector’s face as she spoke. ‘Not once has my private life affected my work. If others weren’t so caught up in their political lives, they’d know that. You’d know that.’

  ‘Elisenda,’ Àlex pleaded, but she held her hand up behind her back to warn him to keep quiet.

  ‘Political lives, Elisenda?’ Puigventós demanded.

  ‘Political lives. Cronies. The right corporate clones helping each other up the ladder, stopping the rest of us from doing our jobs properly. Those are the ones whose judgement is impaired and who serve no one but themselves. Not me. And not my personal life.’

  ‘And you include me in that, do you, Elisenda? A politician?’

  The calm in the inspector’s voice had an effect on Elisenda, instantly taking the sting out of her anger. Uncertainly, she took a step back.

  ‘Now isn’t the time for this,’ she told him. ‘I need to get my team to Cassà de la Selva.’

  Puigventós shook his head and turned to Àlex. ‘Sergent Albiol, you will take Caporals Capdevila and Moliné to the real crime scene.’ He beckoned Montse forward. ‘Caporala Cornellà, you will drive Sotsinspectora Domènech to her home.’

  ‘A senior officer is needed at the scene,’ Elisenda objected.

  ‘There is a senior officer there already,’ the inspector told her. ‘Sotsinspector Micaló. Sergent Albiol, you will report to him. You, Elisenda will go home and you will come to my office tomorrow morning at eight.’ He looked again at Àlex, who hadn’t yet moved. ‘What are you waiting for, Sergent Albiol?’

  Shooting a glance at Elisenda, Àlex exhaled slowly to calm himself and led Josep and Manel away. She watched them go. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Montse staring at the ground, picking at the loose stones with her right foot.

  Puigventós made to leave, but paused as he walked past her.

  ‘And bring your ID card and your service pistol with you,’ he told her.

  Chapter Three

  Elisenda walked out of the apartment block on Ronda Sant Antoni Maria Claret and took a deep breath. Narrow and shaded, the street was in the Eixample part of town, the twentieth-century southern extension of the city, the criss-cross of roads like a minuscule take on Barcelona’s rambling gridiron pattern. Taking a second and deeper breath after the tension of the session with the counsellor, she was struck at the difference between here and the old town. Just a short distance from the river, the canyons of modern buildings were less humid but the heat of the brick and asphalt felt more stultifying than the ancient and greying stone of Elisenda’s side of the Onyar.

  ‘How does that make you feel?’ she muttered wryly, repeating the question that the counsellor had asked at least half a dozen times in the last hour.

  A woman with a buggy smiled at her, wanting to get past her into the building. Apologising, Elisenda stood aside and watched the thirty-something mother disappear into the chasm of the smart block where the counsellor had her office on the gloomy mezzanine floor. The other apartment on the same floor was home to a gestor, one of the very many throughout the land whose well-paid job it was to smooth the path of the country’s love of bureaucracy and forms and documentation. The business on the ground floor of the apartment block was a shop selling designer baby clothes. Elisenda glimpsed the price of a pair of cotton mittens and laughed to herself. Her new niece was going to have to make do with more functional gifts from this aunt. Her laugh was short-lived, turning immediately to guilt. Her sister’s baby daughter was over five months old now, and Elisenda had seen her barely a handful of times. She glanced at the doorway to the counsellor’s building.

  ‘Wonder why that is,’ she muttered to herself.

  Shaking that thought off, she instinctively reached into her bag for her mobile to check in with Àlex at the Mossos police station at Vista Alegre, but suddenly had to check herself
. She still had her work phone on her, but she’d had to surrender her police ID and gun to Inspector Puigventós the previous morning, a semi-deserted and muggy Sunday at the station.

  ‘You need help, Elisenda,’ he’d told her in his stuffy office.

  She’d simply nodded. Braced for a shouting match, she’d been thrown by his concern for her. She hadn't been aware she warranted it.

  ‘I know you have visions of your daughter,’ he’d added.

  ‘How do you know?’ she’d asked, briefly angered.

  ‘Your whole unit sees it, Elisenda. It’s undermining your authority with them. And it’s undermining your judgement.’

  ‘Are you suspending me?’

  He’d looked at her ID and pistol lying in surrender on his desk and shook his head. ‘No, I’m not, Elisenda, because that would go on your record. I could even have you on a charge for insubordination, but I won’t. What I am insisting on is that you take compassionate leave.’

  ‘With these attacks on farmhouses going on?’

  ‘That’s covered, Elisenda. They don’t concern you for now. Please don’t argue. This could quite easily become more of an issue if you don’t work with me on it.’

  Reluctantly, she’d agreed, but Puigventós had one more demand.

  ‘Counselling?’ she’d argued. ‘That’s the last thing I need.’

  ‘No, it’s not, Elisenda, it’s the first thing you should have done after you lost your daughter.’

  ‘I lost my daughter six years ago, Xavier.’

  Puigventós held his head to one side and examined her. ‘And you think matters are improving? When the new law comes in, Elisenda, all Mossos are going to have to undergo compulsory psychological testing every year.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘You will fail it.’ His words had knocked the breath out of her. ‘I insist you accept counselling now to avoid greater problems down the line. Every day this week, to be precise.’

  She’d jumped up from her chair. ‘Every day? You can’t. Once a week is more normal.’

  He’d motioned her to sit down again. ‘Your decision, Elisenda, but I want you to have five sessions before you return to work. Five days or five weeks, the choice is yours.’

  On that Monday morning on the pavement outside the counsellor’s building, she felt a sudden surge of the same anger she’d felt the previous morning at his words. He’d painted her into a corner. Forced to accept compassionate leave and counselling if she didn’t want a greater stain on her record.

  Turning right from the doorway and then right again, she walked slowly, unsure of what to do now that her usual routine of solving the world’s problems from a police station had been taken from her. She checked her work mobile, which she’d managed to sneak past Puigventós, but she had no messages.

  ‘You’d better not be managing without me,’ she muttered out loud as she walked along the narrow pavement, dodging the slender trees in their shallow square beds and the iron posts built to stop cars parking half off the road.

  The younger schoolchildren had just started back at school after the end of the summer holidays and they were finishing their morning session now at noon. A small boy holding the hand of an older one as they walked home, both of them in their uniform of a blue and white check knee-length smock over their ordinary clothes, stared at her as she walked past.

  ‘Is that your grandmother?’ he asked the older child.

  You are so lucky I can’t arrest you right now, kid, Elisenda thought. She smiled at him while he waited for an answer.

  Considering stopping for a coffee on the open square in front of the swanky hotel that took up two sides of it, she changed her mind and carried on walking, in the opposite direction from the old town and her apartment. She headed instead for the river, crossing it after the road that led the short distance to Vista Alegre so she wouldn’t be likely to be seen, and carried on along the east bank away from the centre. Entering the other world contained on the hill that rose steeply to the left of the main road, Elisenda felt the Girona that most people knew fading behind her with the sound of the traffic. She climbed steeply, deep into the poor-quality apartment blocks that had been thrown up in the 1960s to house immigrants from other parts of Spain, encouraged to come to Catalonia by the Franco regime to look for work. Near a primary school, she passed a couple of small children, their smocks not as pristine as the two in the Eixample, the collars patched and sewn. She winked at the smaller of the two and he grinned back at her. A skinny young mother with a drawn face pushing a faded buggy smiled back at her as their paths crossed. The reputation this part of town had wasn’t always earned, Elisenda reflected.

  ‘Hey, girlie,’ a voice in the shadows to her right called out to her. ‘Come and see what I’ve got for you.’

  Stopping, she turned to face the speaker, her gaze directly meeting his. Tanned and muscled, in a tight red T-shirt and even tighter trousers that strained against his crotch, the young man wore his jet black hair swept back in a style that was old enough to be his father’s. He blanched when he saw her.

  ‘Sorry, Elisenda,’ he said. ‘Didn’t recognise you.’

  Next to him, an obese man, old before his time, was perched on a rickety stool, his belly in a brown nylon shirt overhanging his thighs. He wore old-fashioned lattice summer shoes of a type that Elisenda hadn’t seen for years. Gesturing for the younger man to lean down, he waited until he was within reach and quickly slapped him across the head, the sound harsh amid the bleak buildings.

  ‘Show some respect,’ the older man told him. ‘Now fuck off.’

  Cowed, the young guy shot Elisenda a sheepish look and strode quickly away, back into the maze of apartment blocks behind the old man’s seat.

  ‘Excuse him,’ the older man said. ‘He doesn’t know any better.’

  ‘Just this once, Tío Juan,’ she told him, using the term of deference.

  She left him and carried on her way, not a doubt in her mind that he’d sent his younger companion off to spread the word through the neighbourhood that the Mossos had come calling. Instinctively, she quickened her pace until she got to a nondescript block no different from many in this part of the city. The downstairs door was open, so she pushed on in and climbed to the fourth floor.

  ‘He’s not in,’ the woman told her after Elisenda had been banging on the door for five minutes. She was wearing nothing but a loose and greying vest and baggy gym shorts that seemed to drag her downwards. She looked like she’d only just woken up.

  ‘Mind if I check, Elena?’ Elisenda asked.

  The woman shrugged and turned away, leaving the door open behind her.

  ‘What’s he done this time?’ Elena asked, sitting down at a bare wooden table in the living room and reaching for a packet of cigarettes. ‘Want a coffee?’

  ‘No, you’re all right, thanks,’ Elisenda told her. She’d just checked the kitchen and seen the cafetera sitting in a sink filled with week-old water, rainbow colours of grease swirling in and out of the spout.

  Siset was nowhere to be found in the tiny flat. Just to make sure, she left Elena alone for a minute to go back out on to the landing and climb to the top floor and the communal roof, but he wasn’t there either, hiding among the unused stone sinks and clutter of rubbish strewn everywhere.

  ‘So where is he?’ she asked Elena when she’d gone back down the one flight of stairs to the grim apartment.

  Elena shrugged. ‘Let me know when you find him. I haven’t seen him for a week.’

  Elisenda studied the young woman. She could see that the thin scabs of needle tracks on her arms were drying out. Leaning forward, she glanced at her right foot, crossed over the left knee and sticking out from the table at an angle. There were no new puncture marks around the ankles or on her toes.

  ‘You seem to be doing all right, Elena,’ she told her.

  ‘Just a bit of weed, Elisenda.’ She sat and nodded her head for a while, staring out of the open window on to the block of flats op
posite, lost in her own thoughts.

  ‘Have you really not seen Siset? He’s not in trouble.’ Elena snorted at that, and Elisenda had to laugh with her. ‘Well, no more than usual. I just want a word with him.’

  ‘Really, I haven’t seen him since last week. If you find him, tell the little bastard to come home.’

  Elisenda laughed again and got up to go. ‘I say the same to you. When he does come back, tell him I want to see him. He’s not in trouble.’

  He bloody well is in trouble, Elisenda corrected herself on the walk back down the hill, recalling the duff information he’d given her. ‘I’ll crucify the little sod when I see him,’ she cursed under her breath.

  ‘Found Siset, Elisenda?’ Tío Juan asked her when she passed his vantage point on her way back out of the neighbourhood.

  ‘Who says that’s who I’m looking for?’

  ‘Word travels fast.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  The man chuckled, revealing two rows of teeth stained brown. ‘You know I wouldn’t tell you where he was. Even if I knew.’

  ‘He’s not your family, Tío Juan.’

  ‘He is where the Mossos are concerned. What do you want him for?’

  Elisenda gazed back at the man, and saw in his keen eyes a search for any giveaway sign about why she was really looking for Siset. Despite her annoyance with him right now, she had to protect him as an informant. ‘Oh, you know, things go missing, Siset’s usually nearby when they do. I just want to appeal to his better nature and ask him where they are.’

  Tío Juan snorted with laughter, the stool creaking ominously under him. Elisenda nodded at him once and turned away, carrying on along the dusty pavement down the hill. Leaving the Font de la Pólvora neighbourhood behind her and walking back into the Eixample, Elisenda couldn’t help feeling like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was followed immediately by a sense of guilt. The memory of Elena waiting for Siset in a no-hope apartment in the poorest part of town was the most utterly desolate picture of despair imaginable.