City of Drowned Souls Page 5

  Gingerly, she put her hand to her cheek and winced, moving her jaw and face to test how it felt.

  ‘Nothing broken,’ Àlex assured her. ‘There’s one thing you should see, though. I noticed it when I was phoning.’

  Taking a pencil torch out of his pocket, he shone it at the ground to the left of the entrance to the drive. A small cairn of stones, barely ten centimetres high, appeared in the circle of light, placed there by a human hand. Protruding from the top were three short sticks, wedged in place among the pebbles.

  ‘What is it?’ Elisenda asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  Chapter Eight

  Evening shift on a Monday and the sergent manning the reception desk at Vista Alegre was happy for a quiet night. He and his teenage daughter had cycled one of the new trails running out towards the coast the previous day, an old railway track reclaimed for weekend warriors, and he was paying for it today. Under the desk, he’d surreptitiously put his right leg up to ease the pain in his calf and thigh. He was doing half an hour each leg and hoping the lactic acid would eventually work its way out. In the meantime, he worked on the computer in front of him and prayed that no one would want him to stand up for anything.

  He looked up as he heard the glass doors swing open in time to see three people, one woman and two men, walk in from the street. Surprised, he recognised the woman straight away and wondered what would bring her to the Mossos station at this time on a Monday evening. He’d have thought she’d have too many other things to be doing. He knew one of the men to be her husband, but he didn’t know who the second man was. Painfully swinging his leg off the stool as quickly as he could, he stood up stiffly and watched them approach the desk.

  The man he didn’t know spoke to him first.

  ‘We’d like to report a missing person.’

  But before he could continue, the woman held up a finger, signalling for him to stop. She turned away from her companions and faced the sergent full on.

  ‘My son has gone missing.’

  The sergent blinked a few times before he could think of what to say, his training momentarily flying out of the window.

  ‘Just one moment, please,’ he asked them, recovering his composure. ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you a few questions first.’

  ‘Please do.’

  He quickly went through all the relevant points with them: the boy’s name and ID, a detailed description of him and the clothes he was wearing when he went missing.

  ‘I’ve also brought a photograph of him,’ the woman said. ‘I know you need one.’

  She gestured to the second man, who produced a photo from a canvas satchel and gave it to the sergent.

  Going through the checklist, the sergent told them he’d need some information about the circumstances of the disappearance, looking up as soon as he said it. ‘I’ll find an officer to go through this with you,’ he added.

  He called through for a sergent from the Seguretat Ciutadana to come out to the foyer and accompany the three people to a quiet room. He also asked a detective with the Local Investigation Unit to join them. Watching them enter the corridor, he quickly opened an enquiry with the Missing Persons Family Care Unit in the central offices in Sabadell, which would be responsible for keeping the family informed of the progress of the investigation. Staring at the name on the screen, he wondered if that would be enough.

  Taking a decision, he called up a directory on the computer and checked a number. After a moment’s indecision, he made his mind up and dialled the number. It answered on the third ring.

  ‘Inspector Puigventós,’ he said into the phone, waiting for a reply before continuing. ‘I think you really need to come into the station.’

  The sound of the river returned as he climbed down the ladder.

  Upstairs, the torrent’s growl had been dampened by the thick stone walls of the abandoned farmhouse, its anger briefly entombed below the surface of the compacted earth floors, but down in the cellar, its impatient mutterings seeped once again through the floor and gathered, brooding in the dank corners.

  ‘What is it I’m supposed to be looking for?’ he asked the figure at the top of the ladder.

  ‘Over there in the corner.’ The figure pointed at the far wall.

  At the bottom of the ladder, he turned and looked to where his companion was pointing. Immediately in front of him was a curious plinth. Four solid stone steps reaching up out of the darkness towards the meagre light cast by the open door above. They were all that was left of the original stairs. The rest had crumbled with the damp years ago, the rubble strewn underfoot the telltale signs. That was the reason the other person had lowered the ladder into the underground room.

  Getting accustomed to the gloom, he gingerly picked a path through the debris, past the remnants of the cellar stairs. He had no idea what it was his travelling companion wanted to show him in the corner of the cellar. He looked up again.

  ‘Are you coming down too?’

  The figure nodded. ‘I’ll get a torch. I’ve left it in the car.’

  ‘Well, hurry.’

  He turned and approached the far wall, his eyes making out little in the darkness, his own shadow shielding the weak light from above and behind him.

  He heard a noise. A scraping.

  Turning, he saw the ladder being lifted quickly back up through the doorway. He turned to head towards it, but his only way out of the cellar was gone.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Without a word, the figure at the top of the stairs stared down at him for a moment. Silently, it turned away and closed the door, plunging the room into a greater darkness.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted.

  The river beneath his feet and beyond the cellar walls rumbled in reply.

  Tuesday

  Chapter Nine

  ‘You see your daughter.’

  It wasn’t a question. It was brutal.

  Elisenda flinched on the uncomfortable recliner, or the “rack” as she’d christened it on her punishing run through the quiet streets of the early-morning city. Coming up with the name was the one moment of pleasure she could recall having had all morning. Maybe Àlex was right, she wondered, suppressing a nervous laugh, maybe she was out of control. Snapping suddenly out of her daydream, she could sense Doctora Puyals intensely examining her reaction. So too was Elisenda. It was rare for her to have a problem concentrating.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  A knee-jerk reaction. Not entirely untrue.

  She thought she saw her daughter. A shadow moving behind a screen. A trail of long hair disappearing out of sight. The shape of a face reflected in a darkened window that vanished when she turned around.

  She’d returned home last night to her apartment on Carrer Ballesteries in the old town after leaving Àlex to deal with the aftermath of the failed attack on the architects’ country house.

  ‘You go,’ he’d insisted. ‘You’re not supposed to be here. I’ll sort it out.’

  She’d stopped on the drive back to Girona to check the bruise on her cheek. It was hard to see in the car mirror in the poor light cast by the vanity lamp, but it already looked to be turning a deep shade of purple. She’d also fished her personal mobile out of her bag and checked it for missed calls. Four, all from Àlex, plus one message. So used for so long to focusing her life on her job, she hadn’t thought for one minute to look at her non-work phone. Listening to the answering service, to Àlex telling her that he’d been put in charge of the investigation and that he’d keep her posted about developments until she got back, she remembered her words to him about loyalty and hung her head.

  Opening the front door to her flat on the top floor of one of the old buildings perched on the edge of the river dividing Girona’s compact old quarter from its billowing nineteenth-century expansion, she’d still got a shock at the change she saw in front of her. Not on the grand scale of the house she’d just left, her recent redecoration of
her home of less than two years had been to knock down all the walls she could and make what divisions she’d had to with Japanese wood and paper panels. It had been designed solely to exorcise the flat of the dark corners and quiet rooms where Elisenda was haunted by fleeting glimpses of her daughter.

  ‘I hear her singing.’

  The words were out before she’d had a chance to check herself, censor how much she would allow the counsellor to hear. She opened her eyes with a start, shocked to find herself still on Puyals’ rack. The doctor was relaxed in her straight-backed chair, her head to one side.

  ‘When I’m at home on my own, I hear Lina, my daughter singing. It keeps me awake. It kept me awake last night.’

  ‘You told me you redecorated your flat.’

  Elisenda had no recollection of having told the other woman that. ‘I don’t understand why I see Lina in my flat. She never lived here. I moved back to Girona after she and my ex died.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about that?’

  She was surprised to discover that she did want to tell Puyals about it. ‘They were flying to Mallorca for a summer holiday. I was still living in Barcelona at that time, after her father and I separated. Lina lived with me and saw her father at weekends. He had a pilot’s licence and a small plane. They just flew there and never came back. A summer storm. They didn’t reach the island and nothing was ever found. No wreckage. They were never found. I moved back to Girona because I couldn’t face staying in Barcelona where I’d lived with her. And now I’m back here and I still see her.’

  ‘Do you want to stop seeing her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Elisenda stopped speaking for a moment, her eyes screwed tightly shut. ‘I think I need to stop seeing her. For my own sake. And I can’t help feeling that that’s wrong.’

  ‘It’s not, Elisenda. What you see and hear isn’t your daughter. It’s your grief. That’s what’s haunting you, not Lina. You are.’

  ‘Can I change that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  After the session, Elisenda found the first café she could and ordered a black coffee, which was a rarity for her. Drinking the small cup in one gulp, she ordered her usual café amb llet and a glass of water straight after. She felt more drained after the hour spent with the counsellor than she had after a sleepless night and a gruelling run. Still shaking, she ordered two sugary donuts and wolfed them down. The woman behind the bar smiled at her. Elisenda wondered what she must have thought the need for so much sugar and caffeine was.

  By the time she left the café, the face she showed the world was back in place. Still feeling adrift at the lack of a job to do, she found herself wandering through the regimented patchwork of the Eixample, turning left and right at random. By the time she’d stared in the third shop window, she was happy to feel that the desperate unease she’d felt just a half hour earlier was giving way to irritable boredom with being suspended. Angrily, she checked her work mobile and was surprised to see that someone had left a message for her. Probably Àlex, she thought. Impatiently going through the sequence to retrieve it, she was surprised in the end to hear Puigventós’ voice. Telling her to call him or go to Vista Alegre the moment she got the message.

  She stopped in the middle of the pavement and pondered for a moment before moving on again. Uncertain of what was waiting for her at the station, her pace was nonetheless more purposeful than it had been at any point in the last twenty-four hours. It was only as she was crossing the footbridge to the east side of the river that she recalled the bruise on her cheek. She touched it once and winced.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘I don’t do missing children.’

  ‘You do now.’

  Elisenda and Puigventós faced each other off across his desk, equally defiant. She’d walked the ten minutes to the police station since getting Puigventós’ message preparing herself for best and worst case scenarios. At best, questions about how she got her bruise. At worst, a demand to know what she was doing at the farmhouse the previous night. Àlex was also in the inspector’s office, standing behind Elisenda. Unfortunately, his presence in the room seemed to indicate the second scenario was the one she’d find herself having to face.

  What she wasn’t prepared for was this.

  ‘This is the Serious Crime Unit,’ she repeated. ‘We don’t deal with missing persons. That’s a Local Investigation Unit case. They can take it. You can’t bring me back from suspension for this, Xavier.’

  With a sigh, Puigventós sat down and signalled for Elisenda and Àlex to do likewise. Stubbornly, Elisenda remained standing. The inspector took his new glasses off and polished them before speaking. When he put them back on, Elisenda decided reluctantly that they made his finely honed nose and cheekbones and his keen grey eyes look even more patrician. He looked up at her as he spoke, his voice strained.

  ‘The missing boy is Jaume Comas Miravent. His mother is Susanna Miravent.’

  ‘The politician?’ Elisenda finally sat down too, dropping heavily on the stiff chair. ‘Again.’

  She saw Àlex’s look of bewilderment at her last comment.

  ‘Precisely,’ Puigventós continued. ‘That family again. And that’s why we have to treat it as a serious crime. Because of who the mother is and because of the elections. And because of what happened four years ago. This is potentially much more than just a missing person case, Elisenda.’

  ‘I know who Susanna Miravent is,’ Àlex interrupted. ‘The anti-independence candidate for the elections.’

  ‘The anti-independence, pro-austerity, pro-privilege candidate,’ Elisenda added, ‘standing for a party that passes itself off as being of the left.’

  ‘The mother of a missing child,’ Puigventós corrected them both. He turned to face Àlex. ‘What you probably won’t know is that they have an older son. Had an older son. He went missing four years ago, when he was twelve, under similar circumstances. He’s never been found. This son, Jaume, was ten at the time. The family were on a day out when the older boy just vanished.’

  ‘And no trace of him since?’ Àlex asked the question, but glanced at Elisenda, uncomfortable at having to ask it.

  ‘Sightings all over Catalonia, Spain and Europe.’ It was Elisenda who answered him. ‘But none of them substantiated. And no body was ever found. No ransom demands, nothing.’

  ‘You will have to go back over the case files from that investigation,’ Puigventós told them. ‘Fortunately, it was after the Mossos took over from the Spanish police, so we’ll have the records. Technically, the case is still open, but the family has gone on record as saying that they regard him as being dead and that they’ll be applying for a declaration of death after ten years.’

  Àlex looked at Elisenda out of the corner of his eye. Her face was impassive.

  ‘And all of that is why I need your unit leading the investigation, Elisenda,’ Puigventós added.

  She nodded her head slowly. ‘So I’m no longer under suspension? Good.’

  Puigventós reached into a desk drawer and pulled out her ID card and pistol. ‘And nothing has gone on your record.’

  Elisenda stood up, with Àlex following suit. ‘I certainly won’t miss those awful counselling sessions.’

  ‘I said nothing about ending the counselling, Elisenda.’ Puigventós pulled up an email on his computer. ‘Doctora Puyals seems to think that you need to continue with that.’

  ‘Come on, Xavier. With the house robbery investigations and now this, I’m not going to have time to waste on talking about my childhood.’

  ‘The counsellor thinks otherwise, and I’m inclined to agree with her. That’s why Àlex is here. I want your unit to be in charge of both cases, but Àlex will be running the investigation into the house attacks, under your supervision, of course. You’ll be running the missing person case and overseeing both investigations. You can use Sotsinspector Armengol’s Local Investigation Unit for support if you need it. He’s aware of that. And Seguretat Ciutadana for house-to-house and searches evid
ently.’

  ‘As well as the counselling? Seriously?’

  Puigventós nodded. ‘Very much so. And the counselling will now include another session on Saturday morning. Doctora Puyals has suggested it and I’ve already agreed to it. We think you need it.’

  Elisenda’s head dropped slightly. ‘That’s the trade-off, I take it.’

  Puigventós smiled, the small wrinkles around his eyes magnified behind the glasses. ‘How did you get the bruise on your cheek, by the way?’

  About to leave the room, Elisenda turned back, avoiding Àlex’s gaze. ‘Running this morning. I stumbled and caught my face.’

  ‘Where was that?’ Àlex asked her, a grin lurking behind his eyes.

  She looked directly at him and back at the inspector. ‘By the Torre Gironella. The ground’s uneven there.’

  ‘Lot of sharp stones too,’ Àlex insisted. ‘Surprised it’s not worse. Anything could have happened.’

  Outside Puigventós’ room, she spoke to him over her shoulder as they walked along the corridor to their offices. ‘You will pay for that, Sergent Albiol.’

  * * *

  They drove through the quiet streets and swimming-pooled villas of the Palau district of Girona, south of the city, past the excluding shutters and yawning double garages of the great and the good. The scintillating green of the pines and tended hedges stood guard, shielding the privacy of the houses behind them rising a stark blue-white against the sky, like a morning storm awaiting.

  ‘I’ve never met her,’ Elisenda told Àlex as he wound the car up through the curving roads and gentle inclines towards the Comas Miravent home. ‘She’s got to be about ten years older than me. Around the time she was coming to prominence, I was living in Barcelona.’

  ‘You mean you don’t move in the same circles?’ Àlex teased her, waiting for a Mercedes sports car to glide left into an expansive drive.