City of Drowned Souls Read online

  Something else that struck her as she walked without any real purpose through the clean streets of the understated affluence of this part of town were the posters pasted onto the billboards. The forthcoming elections for the Catalan government meant that every last free space – on walls and on TV and in your head – was given over to a succession of scrubbed and earnest faces telling you that they were your best bet for the future. But that wasn’t what had struck her. What she only now registered was that she’d seen none of these in Font de la Pólvora. None of the parties or politicians seemed too worried about what the people there had to say about their future. She had no doubt the message would be there somewhere, in public buildings and near the few shops that there were, but there wasn’t the overwhelming presence that you found everywhere else in the city. None of the mutual care shown between politics and community that you saw elsewhere. Marginalisation a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then she remembered her own relief at getting back to her Girona and felt a pang of guilt again.

  ‘You need to get back to work,’ she told herself, ‘or you’ll go up the wall.’

  She had a sudden vision of Elena alone and aimless again and reached into her bag. She looked one more time at her work mobile, but there were no messages and no missed calls.

  ‘Well, don’t think I’m going to be the one to give in,’ she mouthed at it, shoving it back in her bag out of sight.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Got your feet under the table pretty quick,’ Manel commented with a smirk as he, Montse and Josep filed into Elisenda’s office.

  Seated at Elisenda’s desk in her absence, Àlex pointed at the main room outside the glass partition wall. Most of the desks were taken up by officers in the Local Investigation Unit, the bunch that dealt with less serious crimes within the city. Space at Vista Alegre was tight, so Elisenda’s Serious Crime Unit, which tackled major investigations throughout the entire Girona police region, was forced to double up with the local team. The only exceptions were Elisenda’s office, a goldfish bowl at one end of the room, and another separate office at the other end for the head of the Local Investigation Unit.

  ‘You might have noticed, caporal,’ Àlex told Manel, his patience barely contained, ‘that the main room is full. We can hardly have a meeting with that lot milling around.’

  Montse looked to where Àlex was pointing and nodded her head in agreement. Manel grunted, not convinced.

  ‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Josep told Manel.

  Manel was about to reply but Àlex held a finger up and looked pointedly at him. ‘We’re discussing an ongoing investigation. We don’t need interruptions from out there. Or from in here.’

  The three caporals sat in varying degrees of reluctant silence and waited for Àlex to continue. It was towards the end of the afternoon and this was the first chance they’d had to come together properly since the failed stakeout on Saturday night and Elisenda had been relieved of her duties on Sunday morning. Most of Àlex’s Monday had been taken up with reporting to Puigventós and dealing with Micaló. Now he had to talk to the rest of the team about which way the investigation into the violent robberies at isolated houses was going to be heading.

  ‘Elisenda had been given wrong information,’ he told them all now. ‘We need to find out why: if it was a genuine mistake by her informant or if he was deliberately misleading her. We need to speak to him, but subtly. Montse, you take care of that, but first we’ll need to ask Elisenda if she’s all right with you speaking to him. Other than that, we’ll be taking witness statements from the family that was attacked on Saturday.’

  ‘Didn’t Micaló’s unit take statements?’ Montse asked him.

  Àlex looked frankly back at her. ‘We’ll be taking our own statements today.’

  ‘Useless tossers,’ Manel commented. ‘Micaló. The lot of them.’

  ‘Manel,’ Àlex told him, ‘I think we could all do with a coffee. Go and get us all one, would you?’

  Manel stared back at him for a few seconds before picking himself up out of the chair and walking out of the room. He left the door open, so Montse leaned across and pushed it gently shut as he lumbered off.

  Àlex watched him go. ‘Has either of you spoken to Elisenda?’ he asked the remaining two.

  ‘One of us should,’ Josep commented. ‘She’s not going to be taking any of this well. I don’t blame her.’

  ‘I’ll call her,’ Montse offered, but Àlex shook his head.

  ‘It should be me.’

  They spoke a little more about the events at the farmhouse on Saturday night, until Àlex suddenly waved his fingers at them to stop talking. Over their shoulders, he could see Manel walking back into the outer room, carrying four cups of coffee on a metal tray. The caporal kicked the door open and walked in, placing the tray down on some folders on the desk.

  ‘Coffee for the team,’ he announced.

  * * *

  In another office in another part of the city on the same Monday afternoon, another group of people was seated around another desk. Here, too, the man at the head of the table was equally unhappy at being there but making a show of confidence. He didn’t own the table or the office or the deep leather chair in which he was currently swivelling from side to side. They were owned by one of the three men seated opposite him.

  As, slowly but surely, was he.

  Despite his misgivings, the man in the chair felt some degree of his normal state of self-assurance return. ‘That’s it,’ he announced dramatically to the other three men. ‘The committee meets in an emergency session tomorrow morning. I’ve managed to swing it. I’ve got the quorum we need on board, only two dissenters left and they no longer matter. This time tomorrow, the licence will have been revoked. Wednesday at the latest.’

  Two of the other three men turned their heads almost imperceptibly to gauge the third man’s reaction. He simply sat and stared in silence, his right hand constantly upending a gold cigarette pocket lighter against the top of the desk and running the smooth metal through his fingers. It clicked softly every time he touched the end on the table to turn it over. It was the only sound in the room.

  The man in the borrowed seat was suddenly much less self-assured. ‘And,’ he finally continued, desperate to break the silence, ‘I foresee no problem with the whole matter of the maintenance contracts. I have no doubt the council will award them to your company.’

  The third man continued playing with his lighter for a few moments and then clasped it brusquely in his fist. ‘Good,’ he said. He put the slim lighter down on the table, on his table, next to an incongruous mangled packet of cheap Ducados cigarettes. He had kept them as a temptation to be fought ever since his doctor had finally plucked up the courage to tell him that it really was time to give up smoking or face the consequences. He had since changed his habits, and his doctor. ‘Thank you, Marc,’ he added. ‘I appreciate all your support.’

  Opposite him, Marc Comas, a councillor on the housing and planning committee with the city council, felt a teardrop of sweat run down his face.

  The man with the gold lighter got up, evidently calling the brief meeting to a close. Uncertainly, Comas stood up too, taking his lead from him. As the councillor was leaving the room, shown out by the larger of the other two men, the man with the gold lighter shook his hand, grasping it tightly in a fist that years in boardrooms had not shorn of the years before them spent working on building sites.

  ‘I trust your predictions about council meetings will be accurate, Marc.’

  ‘Yes, they will.’ Comas felt more sweat running down the nape of his neck on to his shirt collar. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘I know I do. And the other matter we’ve discussed.’

  Comas looked numbly at him for a moment, his mouth opening and closing. ‘I don’t know, that’s not so easy. It’s not for me to decide.’

  The other man looked intently into Comas’s eyes, his face pushed up more closely than was comfortable into the other man’s. ‘Who is it for t
o decide? Your wife? Are you sure you would want me to have to ask her at this stage?’

  Pulling his neck back as far as he dared, Comas quickly shook his head.

  ‘Good.’ The other man turned to one of his companions. ‘See the councillor out.’

  Outside the building, a dusty single-storey construction in the middle of an ageing industrial estate, it was all Comas could do not to break into a run to get to his car. Inside, he turned the air conditioning on full blast and drove off, his tyres skidding on the gravel of the forecourt. He drove straight to where the old hypermarket used to stand in Sant Ponç, before the new Carrefour was built, and parked, his BMW slewed across two parking spaces, before going into the self-service restaurant. He was shaking as he sat down at a table by the window overlooking the main road to France, needing a few moments with his eyes clamped tightly shut to calm himself down. On the table in front of him was a café americà – a double dose of black coffee – and a glass of Torres 10, the pungent aroma of the brandy almost making him nauseous.

  Taking a hefty draught of both, he glanced around and reached into the left-hand pocket of his lightweight jacket and pulled out his mobile phone. Checking first for any missed messages, he took an earpiece cable out of his other pocket and inserted the jack into the phone. His insurance, he thought. He listened to all that was discussed, turning the sound down as low as he could while still being able to hear everything. His own voice and that of the other man talking about the revocation of the existing licence originally granted to another construction company. The reclassification of the land as industrial in light of the financial crisis, which would be sold to the man with the gold lighter at a cut-down price and then later be changed back to land for housing use once the recession ended. The maintenance contracts for all public buildings, so that unnecessary repairs could be foisted on to the city’s finances. What wasn’t discussed was the fee that Comas would be getting for all this.

  At another table nearby was a fourth man, one that had never attended the meetings with Marc Comas or ever been present at the construction offices. Sipping from a glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice, he sat and glanced casually every now and then at the councillor listening intently to his phone.

  Chapter Five

  Elisenda finished her late lunch and waited until she was outside in the narrow streets before checking her work mobile again. Shielding the screen from the mottled sunlight filtering down through the layers of ancient buildings, she looked closely for any symbol in the top left corner that she might have missed, but there was nothing. She’d just had a set menu in a down-at-heel place in one of the few remaining less fashionable parts of the old town. It was one of her informant’s favourites.

  ‘Seen Siset lately?’ she’d asked the owner after he’d recited the short list of the day’s first courses, no doubt for the thirtieth time that day.

  A stooped and wiry man who could have been any age between forty-five and seventy and who wore the same bleached and faded apron every day, the owner had paused for breath and shaken his head. ‘He hasn’t been in for a week or so.’

  Putting her phone in her bag, Elisenda walked away from the café and back towards the heart of the old town, past the main university campus. The academic year had just started a week or so ago, and students with brand new folders and backpacks were sitting in excited groups on the steps of the arts faculty or among the rows of scooters parked opposite. Further down the hill, even more were milling around Plaça Sant Domènec, the square in front of the main campus. Walking aimlessly across the square towards her, a little hybrid dog trotting perkily at his feet, a slight figure saw Elisenda and smiled, a big, broad beam of a smile.

  ‘Hi, Xiscu,’ she greeted the young man. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Good, I think,’ he replied uncertainly.

  Elisenda smiled at him. ‘You’re looking all right.’ She knelt down and ruffled his little dog’s ears. ‘You looking after him, Pujol?’ she asked the dog. He was mainly Scottie, but there were other bits and pieces in there somewhere. Xiscu had named him after a diminutive former president of Catalonia because of his short legs. That was the way Xiscu’s mind worked. He was the younger brother of someone Elisenda had gone to school with and was one of life’s small victims, unable to cope with the world and perpetually out of step with most of what was going on. She felt a special affinity with him today, so she asked him if he wanted a coffee.

  ‘Do I have to pay?’ he asked her, a frown of worry across his face.

  She laughed and shook her head, steering him across the square. They sat at a table on the terrace of the student bar facing the main entrance and she ordered them both a coffee and a glass of water. She also asked for a cheese sandwich for Xiscu. He often forgot to eat. With their order, the waitress brought out a plastic bowl of water for Pujol, which she placed under the table, fussing over the small dog. Elisenda smiled a thank you at her.

  ‘You studying here, Elisenda?’ Xiscu asked her as they waited for their order.

  ‘I’m in the Mossos d’Esquadra, remember. The police.’

  Xiscu looked shocked. ‘The police? Like the Policia Nacional?’

  ‘They haven’t been the police here for a good ten years,’ she told him. A very good ten years, she added in her own mind.

  ‘Guardia Civil?’ he asked, horror in his voice.

  ‘No, Xiscu. They’ve pretty much gone too. We’ve got our own police now, for the whole of Catalonia. The Mossos d’Esquadra, we’ve taken over from the old Spanish police.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘It’s very good. Don’t you remember?’ she teased him. ‘The last time you got charged for possession of drugs, the policeman spoke to you in Catalan instead of in Spanish.’

  His face lit up, as did Elisenda’s mobile phone screen. ‘That’s much better,’ he decided. ‘I much prefer being arrested in my own language.’

  Elisenda gave him a broad grin before picking up her phone and looking at the name on the display.

  ‘I’m sorry, Xiscu, I have to take this.’

  She told the caller where she was and hung up, surprised.

  ‘So how come you’re a woman?’ Xiscu asked her. ‘In the police, I mean. I thought they didn’t allow that.’

  Elisenda turned her attention back to him, smiling as he concentrated on which end of his sandwich to start eating. ‘They always allowed it, even before, but it wasn’t a job most women wanted to do. Certainly not here in Catalonia. And we wouldn’t have had much of a chance of getting anywhere even if we’d wanted to. But now things are different. It’s our police force now, by us, for us. And they actually encourage women to join. Change, Xiscu, for the good.’

  He looked at her, waiting to finish his mouthful of sandwich. ‘This cheese is nice,’ he eventually managed, evincing a laugh from her.

  He was still slowly working his way through the baguette when Elisenda’s caller arrived. Rapt, Elisenda had watched Xiscu painstakingly replace the thick slices of cheese each time they slid out of the bread doused in tomato and olive oil every time he took a bite. She was only disturbed from the sight when the metal legs of one of the fake rattan chairs at their table scraped across the cobbled ground.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Manel demanded when he’d sat down.

  ‘Friend of mine,’ Elisenda told him, adopting the tone of patient indulgence she usually did with the newest member of her team. ‘Xiscu, meet Manel, another police officer.’

  ‘Making a hash of that sandwich,’ Manel commented.

  Xiscu looked uncertainly at him and put his unfinished food back on his plate. ‘Can I go, please, Elisenda?’ he pleaded, not taking his eyes off Manel. ‘I don’t like him.’

  Elisenda laughed. ‘We’ll talk another time, Xiscu.’ She watched him hurry off, Pujol trotting jauntily alongside him, and slowly shook her head.

  ‘He can’t quite keep up with life,’ Elisenda commented almost to herself. She turned to her new companion. ‘So what brings yo
u here, Manel?’

  The caporal finished ordering a coffee. She could see he was using the time to consider his answer.

  ‘Came to see how you are. I don’t think they should have suspended you. Stupid bloody idea.’

  ‘I messed up, Manel.’

  ‘Bad information, that’s all. Not your fault. Would’ve been worse if you’d done nothing about it and the information had been good. Then it would’ve been your fault.’

  Elisenda studied him and nodded. It was pretty much what she’d been thinking the last thirty-six hours or more, only with worse language. He was big and bluff and reminded her of a brown bear, especially when he wore his chunky dark leather sports jacket in the colder months. At this time of year, he lived in jeans and an open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms, neck and legs thick and powerful. His character was also like a bear, she thought, swatting about with unwieldy paws, upsetting everything around him. The waitress brought him the beer he’d ordered, and he thanked her, his voice suddenly gentle, a shy smile on his face momentarily revealing the gap between the persona he normally showed the world and the self-effacement that lurked beneath the surface. If only he could find a midpoint between the two, Elisenda thought to herself for the umpteenth time since he’d joined her team seven months earlier.

  ‘So what’s new?’ she asked him. ‘Any news on the robberies at the villas?’

  He took a sip of his beer and wiped his lips. ‘Nothing. We questioned the family who were robbed, but they couldn’t tell us anything. The attackers wore masks like they always do, same mix of accents and languages, Catalan and Spanish, same MO as always. We haven’t learned anything we didn’t already know.’

  Elisenda sighed, depressed by his words. Despite the number and nature of the attacks in recent months, the Mossos really had so little to go on. Looking at the caporal, a thought occurred to her, which she decided to keep to herself.