City of Buried Ghosts (An Inspector Domènech Crime Thriller Book 2)

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘We’ll have to stop in La Bisbal,’ Elisenda decided, calling the station there to tell them to expect them. ‘This is an old case. It will come under their local investigation team’s jurisdiction.’

  ‘You don’t think it’ll be given to us?’

  ‘It shouldn’t. Is it a serious crime, do you think?’

  ‘Is anything?’ Àlex replied, the dark fog evidently back in place.

  Elisenda watched him drive. The shell was there. The lean face and dark, probing eyes, the powerful body kept in reserve under layers of tended clothes. But the spirit and the humanity, what it was that made him Àlex, was no longer shining through. He was anger without a just outlet. Wounded, she thought to herself again. My whole team is wounded and I’ve got to hold it together. And what’s worse is that we’re seen to be wounded.

  ‘Who knew a judge born after 1980 would like Orquesta Mondragón?’ she finally commented, breaking the silence of the lonely road they were on.

  ‘Who knew Albert Riera would?’

  Àlex laughed for a brief moment, then fell silent again, concentrating on the road. They passed empty crop fields and darkened woods and drove through quiet villages, the lights on in the houses behind shuttered windows, the main streets devoid of people, unknown lives come and gone in the trace of a headlamp.

  A sergent met them at the station in La Bisbal, a purpose-built and angular smoked glass and concrete construction on the edge of the town, built when the country had money for such things and the newly-formed Catalan police force was striving every way it could to present a modern image, a break from the policing of the past. When the Mossos d’Esquadra had progressively taken over functions from the old Spanish police forces, they’d been determined not to use any of the vacated stations, setting themselves up instead in temporary or semi-permanent homes or building new ones.

  ‘They get a nice new station,’ Elisenda had commented to Àlex as they’d parked outside. ‘We’re still stuck in Vista Alegre.’

  Àlex had simply grunted. The Mossos in Girona had been supposed to be moving to a spanking new building on the border with the town of Salt, but the recession had hit and the plan had been shelved indefinitely, the new station unbuilt.

  The sergent introduced himself as Jaume Poch.

  ‘I’m the head of the Local Investigation Unit.’

  Elisenda explained about the body at the scene at El Crit beach. ‘It’s a cold case, well over thirty years old. We were called as they didn’t know what they were dealing with when the message came through, but your team will be in charge of the investigation. If there’s anything we can do to help, just call.’

  ‘Thirty years old?’ Poch commented. ‘I’ll check missing persons from that time.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Elisenda told him. The perception of policing at that time and the not always happy changeover from the Spanish police to the Mossos meant they were always battling against a void of information.

  He gave a wry laugh. ‘If we can find an identity and if there’s family still alive, then we can pursue it, but I might not be able to give it top priority. Not initially, at least. Budgets.’

  Elisenda nodded. ‘As I say, if you need any more information from us, let me know. Your Científica team here will be handling that side of it.’

  Poch checked his watch. ‘They’re still not back from the scene.’

  ‘The track was blocked,’ Elisenda explained. ‘They had to leave the vans a long distance from it.’

  They took their leave and continued the journey to Girona, driving into the city alongside the Ter river through the Pedret part of town. As they crawled in the evening traffic, Elisenda watched the lights come on as the restaurants and bars on the pavement opposite the river began gearing up for a quiet midweek evening. In her youth, there’d been just one disco and one late-night bar stuck out in what seemed the darkness on the edge of town. The first time she’d gone to the bar, she’d been startled as her friends knocked on a grim and battered door until a face appeared at an iron grille before letting them into a wondrous cavern of shattered tiles, jazz and liberation. It was still there, but sanitised, no longer mock-forbidden and no longer alone. Other bars had come in its wake, restaurants too, some of them in buildings that had been around at the time the cathedral was built, one even involved in its construction, the lime kiln used to make the mortar hidden quietly proud among the cocktail movers and shakers.

  She turned to look at Àlex. He’d remained taciturn for most of the drive.

  ‘If you want to get a bite to eat, Àlex,’ Elisenda suggested, gesturing at the restaurants to their left. ‘Chat.’

  ‘If it’s all right with you, Elisenda, I’d like to get home. See my boys before they go to bed.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He dropped her off on Plaça Independència and she watched him drive away along Carrer Santa Clara to take the car back to the pool at Vista Alegre. The shops on the narrow street were closing, owners and employees gathering outside, lowering the shutters and talking in that way of people who spend all day together but barely know each other.

  ‘Wounded,’ she muttered to herself, crossing the square and heading for the Pont de Sant Agustí, the footbridge leading over to the old town and home.

  On the other side, she turned left at the small crossroads everyone called the Quatre Cantons, the four corners, and glanced as she often did at the ornate iron and copper outline of the four rivers that met in Girona sunk into the road surface. It was modern, not from her childhood, but from her daughter’s. Lina had loved running her feet along the contours every time Elisenda had brought her to Girona to visit her parents. She still found it odd that her daughter had been more Barcelona than Girona, her accent like her father’s, not her mother’s. Elisenda had sometimes felt with guilt that she didn’t belong in her married family, perhaps why she and her husband had divorced, why her daughter used to look forward so much to holidays with her father after they had. And why her daughter had died in her father’s plane five summers ago, Elisenda thought with a start. She slowed her pace along the narrow Carrer Ballesteries, where she lived. It curved gently to the right, following the line of one of the earliest city walls, part of which still stood further along on the opposite side. Her road was essentially without the true city, the narrowest of strips trapped between the original town and the river. Always an outsider.

  Inside the deeper gloom of her building, she punched the timer switch on the landing lights and climbed the stairs to the top floor, the loud ticking counting down the seconds until the staircase would be pitched into blackness again, growing heavier and more insistent as she trudged the last flight to her apartment.

  She went into her flat, dropping her keys on the small hall table, and leaned heavily back against the door, pushing it shut. Without taking her jacket off, she dropped to her haunches, slowly slipping to sit on the floor, barely inside her apartment.

  ‘Home,’ she whispered.

  Exhaling deeply, she pulled her knees up to her chest and folded her arms over them, using the cradle she’d formed as a rest for her head. She clenched her teeth to make sure she wouldn’t cry and dug her nails into the scuffed and faded leather of her jacket sleeves. The day’s mask had finally fallen.

  Awaking with a start, she saw that over an hour had passed. She was ravenously hungry. Standing up stiffly, she arched her back and stretched her arms, then walked though her flat, turning on all the lights. In silence, without music on as she usually would, she fried a piece of frozen fish and served it with some salad. Half an hour later, she hadn’t touched it. She had sat at her kitchen table and stared at the lives being lived in the flats and restaurants on the opposite bank of the Onyar; people talking and children being read to, waiters and chefs clearing up in weary conversation, televisions flickering in the dark and lights coming on in kitchens as dishwashers were loaded before bed. The buildings slowly being turned off for the night, the reflections dying in the river.

&n
bsp; Picking up her plate, she scraped the cold food into the recycling bin and turned the light out, for once not taking it downstairs for the nightly collection.

  Chapter Five

  Elisenda could feel her body temperature rising for the third time since the small hours of the morning.

  She’d had a nightmare. She’d fallen asleep quickly but had woken before the dawn, her sheets soaked in sweat, her face burning. Kicking the covers off in fright, she’d scrabbled to find the switch on the bedside lamp, her breath in short panics. There’d been a woman in her dream. Standing in the middle of a lonely beach. She was crying out. Elisenda had recognised the beach as El Crit. The Scream. At first, she hadn’t known who the woman was until she’d turned to face the headland up above her and the moonlight had illuminated her face. It was Elisenda, but different. Shaking, she knew with horror that it was how she would have pictured Lina as an adult. Ripping the thin material of the sheet in her need to get out of bed, but refusing once again to allow tears to come, she’d got up and hurried through the apartment, turning all the lights on. The fish from the previous night was beginning to smell of decay.

  The sun hadn’t risen high enough to break over the top of her building and shine on the opposite bank, but the river was reflecting growing pinpoints of light as the lives on the other side began to wake up. In the fake electric glow of her own gloom, she’d heard singing. Gentle enough for her to turn her head to listen for the source. She’d opened the French window onto the balcony, but the voice wasn’t from outside. Drawn back in by the sound of a lullaby she’d sung to her daughter as a baby, she’d roamed her apartment, but Lina was nowhere in sight, not even a shadow of her dancing in the light unfolding like a morning flower outside the kitchen window.

  Defeated, she’d thrown on her running clothes and had followed the sunrise around the city walls, totally alone, working her lungs and legs harder and faster. It was her punishment. She’d run among the strewn boulders of the Torre Gironella, where she’d watched Àlex almost die, and clung to the base of the medieval stone as it curved around the old town. Where the walls ended, near the river, she finally stopped, her heart racing, her calves and shoulders on fire, and lay down heavily on the grass slopes of the small Foramuralles park. Rolling over and on to her knees and hands, she was sick, but there was little food to come up and her throat burned with the dry pain.

  A café was open on Plaça Vern as she walked past, pulling air into her lungs, and on impulse she went inside and took a seat at the polished zinc counter.

  ‘You don’t look so good, Elisenda,’ the owner, a slight woman who’d gone to school with Elisenda’s mother, told her.

  ‘I hate running, Enriqueta, that’s all.’

  While Enriqueta quietly served other early risers and set about preparing dishes for the day, Elisenda wolfed a Manchego baguette, the bread liberally smeared with tomato and doused in olive oil, the semi-cured cheese cut thickly and layered generously between the soft morning bread. Enriqueta gave her a couple of doughnuts on the house to go with her coffee.

  ‘You spoil me,’ Elisenda told her.

  But it was at the third time of her body suddenly rising in temperature that Elisenda felt anxious. She’d gone home from Enriqueta’s café and showered and was now at Vista Alegre. At the morning meeting with Inspector Puigventós and Sotsinspector Micaló, the first the head of the Regional Investigation Command and her immediate boss, the second her equal, and head of the Regional Investigation Unit, which dealt with the crimes in the Girona region that Elisenda’s unit didn’t cover. In theory, at least. She was having to keep her anger in check.

  ‘It’s a cold case, Xavier,’ she argued one more time to Puigventós. ‘La Bisbal is perfectly capable of taking it on.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ Puigventós replied, ‘but I’ve decided that your team is going to be in charge of it. You and Sergent Albiol attended the crime scene yesterday, you are already up to speed with the case.’

  ‘We attended the scene because the station in Palafrugell thought it was serious. It’s a cold case, Xavier, not the sort of investigation my team was set up for.’

  Puigventós considered his words before answering. ‘Elisenda, a lot of things have happened that your unit was not prepared for. One of our own, someone we sat with every day, killed a fellow police officer, and we didn’t see it coming. This is a way back. This is a murder investigation. It might be over thirty years old, but it’s still a murder. Still a serious crime. Exactly what your unit was set up for.’

  Elisenda sat back, deflated. ‘I’m not happy with this. We need a real investigation to ensure the survival of the unit.’

  ‘There’s no doubt about the continued existence of your unit, Elisenda. You must be aware of that. You have all the proof you need.’

  I do, Elisenda thought, and it doesn’t make me any happier.

  ‘We’re all under scrutiny,’ Micaló finally said. ‘Not just your team, but all of us. It’s in everyone’s interest for your unit to take on this investigation, get a result.’

  ‘With none of the media harassment we’ve had lately,’ Puigventós added. ‘I agree with Roger, we are all in the spotlight. And not just with the media, but with the Mossos and with the whole of Girona. If we get a result on this, with none of the pressure of a live threat to the public, we will be restoring so much confidence in the Mossos, in us.’ He looked at his watch before continuing, the meeting running over its normal fifteen minutes. ‘Which brings us neatly to the next point. Low-level crime. We’re in an unusual situation since the killings of the autumn. The public has lost a lot of confidence in us, and the degree of petty incidents that the whole matter caused has not diminished entirely. As I’ve been taking over a lot of the work that would normally be done by the head of the Local Investigation Unit, I’ve decided to go after minor crimes to make sure we nip in the bud a lot of the sort of offences that are an issue with the public.’

  ‘Is Intendent Moner in agreement with this?’ Micaló asked him.

  ‘I’ve spoken to him and he accepts my arguments.’

  Intendent Moner was in charge of the Girona station of the Mossos. Normally, the head of the Local Investigation Unit would report to him and merely coordinate with Puigventós, who ran the Regional Investigation Command and reported to the Criminal Investigation Division in Sabadell rather than to Moner. Under usual circumstances, Puigventós dealt with criminal cases for the whole of the Girona police region, but the vacuum left by not having someone in charge of the local unit for the city meant that Puigventós had been forced to go outside his remit and take on much of this work.

  ‘It’s an unusual situation, I know,’ Puigventós continued, ‘but until a replacement is found, it’s how we’ll have to carry on for the time being. This low-level crime initiative shouldn’t affect your unit so much, Elisenda, but I wanted you to be aware of it. Roger will be much more closely involved.’

  Elisenda nodded her agreement thoughtfully. Amidst the complicated hierarchy of the various departments, her own Serious Crime Unit still often seemed to be the dog in the manger, a misunderstood outsider both within Vista Alegre and within the Criminal Investigation Division. She watched Puigventós shuffle papers on his desk, his usual unwitting signal that matters were at an end. Low-level crime, she mused, standing up. She followed Micaló out of the room and along the corridor, knowing she now had to convince her increasingly disenchanted team that they would be taking on a case from over thirty years ago.

  Chapter Six

  ‘They’ve given us the cold case, haven’t they?’ Àlex asked her.

  Elisenda signalled for him to come into her office and close the door.

  ‘I’m going to need your help on this,’ she told him. ‘Montse and Josep are not going to take it well. I need you to be upbeat about it.’

  Àlex flung his arms out wide. ‘Upbeat? They’re killing us.’

  Behind Àlex, beyond the interior window occupying the top half of the wall
separating her fish bowl from the main room, Elisenda could see the two caporals seated either side of a desk. The only other two members of her team, they were pretending not to be paying attention to what was going on in Elisenda’s office.

  ‘Be with me on this, Àlex.’

  He looked at her and sighed. ‘All right. But how much longer can we go on?’

  Privately, she had to agree with him. Privately, too, she was disappointed. Her Àlex would have kicked and railed at the latest order from above and done as he’d pleased regardless. This Àlex went along too willingly. He was easy, but she liked him edgy. It made him a better sergent to her sotsinspectora.

  He opened the door and beckoned Montse and Josep in. They entered without a word and took a seat each. Àlex leaned against the wall, his arms folded, a tic in his cheek giving away how much he was having to hold his frustration in. More tentative signs of the old Àlex fighting his way back, Elisenda thought.

  ‘The death at El Crit beach,’ Elisenda began. ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Àlex told us, Elisenda,’ Montse replied. ‘We’re happy to take the investigation on.’

  ‘We thought it would be assigned to us,’ Josep added. ‘We’re okay with it.’

  Elisenda looked from one to the other. Josep towering over Montse, despite hunching his shoulders, his mousy hair again wilfully losing its battle with a comb. Montse seated lightly on her chair, compact and strong, fibre and muscle relaxed. Elisenda caught a slight downward movement in Josep’s eyes. Not so okay with it, she realised. That was as good as it got lately, she knew, but she also knew that they would do everything they could to solve it. For themselves and for their dead colleague. On that score, she had other news to break to them later. She was dreading it.