City of Good Death: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A Detective Elisenda Domènech Investigation 1)

by Chris Lloyd

  'I take it the Sant Narcís legend doesn't contemplate teenagers,' Àlex commented, trying to lighten her mood.

  'Does anyone?' Elisenda dug the toe of her shoe under the fine coffee earth and shook her head. 'All we can do is try to predict where this person will go next.'

  'We predicted this one. We know what type of victim he's going for. People he thinks have it coming.'

  'And who half Girona thinks have it coming.'

  'Teenagers?'

  'Plenty of people who are scared of them,' Elisenda considered. 'But I don't see where it fits in with Sant Narcís.'

  A sergent in the Científica came over to them, holding something in his hand. All Elisenda could see of him under his white suit was dark brown eyes and an uneven, straggly moustache that made him look rather sleepy. She recognised him, though, and knew he was anything but.

  'We found this next to the bench where most of the victims were found, Sotsinspectora.' He held up a plastic evidence bag with an empty wine bottle in it.

  'How soon can you let me know what was in it?'

  The sergent shrugged, the white suit crinkling. 'It's Sant Narcís. Skeleton staff at the lab. I'll hurry it through, though.' He was not one of the Mossos who'd lost his day off thanks to Elisenda.

  Àlex watched him walk off. 'What's Pijaume doing about the drugs?'

  'Very little as far as I can see.' Elisenda rang Pijaume’s number but hung up when she got no reply. 'Voicemail again.'

  Standing by Riera and his assistant, Pau called them over. A Seguretat Ciutadana caporal was standing next to him.

  Riera turned at the sound of Elisenda and Àlex walking over. 'Sotsinspectora,' he acknowledged her. He turned back to the figure lying bewildered in front of him. 'Kindly keep the fucking noise down.'

  'This is Caporal Vinyamata,' Pau introduced the uniformed Mosso. 'She was first on the scene when the call came in.'

  Elisenda greeted Vinyamata and asked her what had happened.

  'A phone call from one of the victims, Sotsinspectora, on her mobile. Saying they'd drunk some wine and felt ill.'

  'Where did they get the wine?'

  'They found it. By the time I arrived, they were all at this end of the park. Two were sitting down, one was on the floor. The others were staggering about.'

  All awake, Elisenda thought, the drugs in the wine too diluted to knock all eight of them out.

  Àlex looked at the scene. 'Eight victims? How would that have worked?'

  She looked thoughtfully at him. 'It doesn't gel, does it?'

  Over Vinyamata's shoulder, she could see a man among the crowd of onlookers who appeared to be getting very agitated. He was waving his right arm insistently at them. There was something odd about the way it looked.

  'See what that's about, Pau,' she asked her caporal.

  Elisenda turned her attention back to Vinyamata as Pau walked over to the man, but she was immediately pulled up by Pau's reaction to something the man said. The caporal looked like he'd been stung. He quickly pulled the tape up to usher the man and a little girl through and signalled Elisenda to come over.

  'This gentleman is Foday Saio,' Pau told her. 'He has something I think you should hear.'

  Elisenda smiled at Foday and asked him over to a bench, away from the group of teenagers and the hustle of the Científica. The man's daughter held on to him by clutching the edge of his trouser pocket and walking alongside him

  'What exactly was it you saw, Foday?' Elisenda asked him once they'd sat down. Pau and Àlex stood nearby with Vinyamata, listening. The little girl was standing between her father's legs, holding on to his knees and staring wide-eyed at Elisenda. Her name was Patricia, Foday told her.

  'It was nothing I really saw,' he explained. He spoke good Catalan, but slowly, considering his words. 'I sensed a movement. Behind me.'

  'And where were you sitting?'

  Instinctively, he pointed with his arm. Elisenda saw that he had no hands. 'Over there. Near the archway. Patricia was playing on the bank and I was watching her.'

  'And then what happened?'

  'There was a bottle on the ground behind me. Someone must have left it there in a moment. But I don't drink, so I didn't touch it.'

  Elisenda looked at Foday and nodded. He was supposed to have been the victim, not the teenagers. Sant Narcís's besiegers. An immigrant, as Pau had predicted. As she had, too, but hadn't wanted to think it. She couldn't help looking at the ragged ends to his arms and wondering what he'd had to go through before coming to Catalonia. And now this. She asked if she could talk to Patricia and he consented.

  'Is this your favourite place, Lina?' she asked the little girl.

  'My name's Patricia.'

  Elisenda touched the girl's cheek. 'I'm sorry, sweetheart. Of course it is.' She held on to her hand. 'I bet you can see forever from up there, Patricia.'

  'I can see over papa's head.'

  'What could you see over his head when he was sitting on the bench?'

  Patricia thought for a moment before answering. 'A very old man.' She pointed to Pau. 'Like him.'

  Elisenda looked up at Pau and smiled at Patricia. 'That's really good, sweetheart.' Pau was in his mid-twenties. 'And how old am I?'

  'You're very old.'

  Elisenda laughed and squeezed the girl's hand. 'You should always be honest, Patricia.'

  Foday looked at Elisenda and half-shrugged. 'Even I'm very old,' he told her.

  Elisenda thanked them both. 'You've been extremely helpful. Thanks for coming forward.'

  They all stood up and Patricia jumped up into her father's arms. He caught her with his forearms and she slid down and caught hold of the flap of his trouser pocket again. The Mossos watched them go.

  'Imagine not being able to hold your own daughter's hand,' Vinyamata said in a low voice.

  'Imagine,' Elisenda echoed.

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Siset hated Sant Narcís.

  Everyone spending their money on funfairs and roast chestnuts and junk, so no one was spending their money on his dodgy DVDs.

  None of the piss-poor yokels from neighbouring villages he'd never heard of buying his hash.

  The city crawling with Mossos. Everywhere you looked. Stifling private enterprise. And no one nicking anything he could buy to sell on because of all the noise and light and fucking people everywhere.

  And now he was spitting a tooth out of his burst and swollen mouth.

  Gingerly, painfully he looked up. They'd gone. He slowly got to his feet and threw up immediately, spluttering the last bitter remnants of the thick red wine and thin red ham he'd cadged for breakfast down the narrow front of his ripped shirt. The bile stung his throat and tore savagely through his shattered nose and he was sick a second time. Kneeling down again, he steadied himself against a dry, stunted bush and waited until the pain settled down to a calmer, number ache. This wasn't his first time. He knew how to cope.

  He couldn't even blame that bitch policewoman Domènech.

  He thought at first it was something to do with her. With her making him look like a grass that time. But they didn't say a thing about that.

  'You give me sixty per cent of everything you make on your DVDs,' the man had said to him, 'to pay back the money you owe me.'

  'I don't owe you anything,' Siset had replied.

  It was the last thing he'd said for a while.

  When the other two had done, the man came back into his face. 'To pay back the money you owe me,' he repeated, 'because now you owe me.'

  'I've never owed you,' Siset said.

  Which is when they broke his nose.

  'And,' the man went on, 'you buy all hash to sell from me from now on. Clear?' The man kicked him in the knee to make sure it was clear. It was.

  A born pragmatist, Siset got to his feet again and looked at the rough track snaking back down the hill to the city. The three men in their car had long gone and he was left with the scrub and the cicadas and the heat. And the pain.

&n
bsp; So he had a new business partner, he thought to himself grandly.

  He'd never worked with the Masó family before, unless you counted him owing Daniel Masó money ever since he'd overstretched himself with the South American dealers. And even though it now appeared he owed even more money on that debt, perhaps working with Daniel's uncle Joaquim would be a step up, he thought, putting one foot painfully in front of the other along the dirty brown path leading back down the slope to the city.

  Chapter Forty Eight

  'Welcome to the modern world,' Elisenda muttered.

  Àlex grunted and watched as Pau scrolled down through the website.

  A tide mark was clearly visible where the news of a bunch of teenagers being found was swept away by the rumours of an immigrant being targeted. Comments about the young of today and their lack of respect and poor dress sense making them welcome victims were steadily superseded by views on what the politicians called 'the new Catalans', the unprecedented mass immigration the country had experienced in the last decade. Some, a minority but at least a sizeable one, criticising a racial attack. A smaller number, at the opposite end of the scale, demanding more savage acts. Appallingly, many more in between not outwardly applauding it but quietly condoning it under a falsely reluctant veil of justification.

  'That's what our man is feeding on,' Elisenda commented. 'The pettiness of people who'd describe themselves as normal.'

  'And this is the point,' Pau interrupted, 'where word gets out that Foday Saio doesn't have any hands.'

  The three of them read silently through the posts. The comments about immigrants being bad enough, why we had to put up with disabled ones. The strain on the health service. The blame for his disability evidently lying at the victim's door. The only thing worse being his willingness to come here and go on the dole. The miserable jokes about having no hands.

  'Turn it off,' Àlex told Pau. Elisenda turned to look at him and saw a nerve in his cheek fluttering. She could feel her own face flushing with anger.

  'Take your pick, then,' she said. 'What would we prefer our fellow humans to consider suitable targets? Immigrants or the disabled?'

  Pau switched to another screen. 'You need to see this, too.'

  Pijaume and one of his sergents came into the room and stood and watched with them.

  A number of strands had broken off from the main one. Two in particular were of interest. The first was a series of calls for direct action. Half-heartedly criticising the killings, most of the contributors then went on to urge others to take part in actions on the groups being voted for elsewhere on the site.

  'A Halal butcher's in Salt was attacked last night,' Pijaume informed them. 'Its windows smashed.'

  Elisenda shook her head and turned back to the computer. The second thread was more uplifting. A small band of people calling for each other to protect vulnerable groups from the first bunch. As they read, more contributors added themselves to the list of those wanting to help.

  'Some hope, then.'

  Elisenda's phone rang and she answered. 'Puigventós,' she mouthed to Àlex and Pau and went into her room, closing the door.

  He wanted a meeting. To discuss the racial angle.

  'I agree,' Elisenda replied. 'But I'm following something up right now. Can we make it later?'

  He agreed and she hung up. She couldn't face another meeting with him. Not right now. She wanted to get the latest attack clear in her own mind before another onslaught from the senior ranks tried to push her this way or that.

  Taking another look at the printout of the map of IP addresses that UCDI had sent Pau, she picked the phone up again and got through to Gispert in Sabadell.

  'I just wanted to know the latest developments on this website,' she told him. 'I've been looking at the map you sent my caporal.'

  'That's simply a snapshot of the relay at a given moment, Sotsinspectora,' Gispert explained. 'Whoever this guy is, he knows his stuff. He's using headless fast-flux DNS to hide his trail.'

  'Which means?'

  'Which means that he's swapping the IP addresses about every sixty seconds and that there's no single command centre at the top that we can shut down. The map you can see will change after sixty seconds, then again another sixty seconds later, and so on. It's going to be very hard to stop him, but we will be able to.'

  'How many days will that take?'

  'Days, Sotsinspectora? Try months. Weeks if we get lucky.'

  She asked him to keep Pau informed and hung up. 'He might understand what you're saying,' she muttered.

  She heard a knock on her office door. Through the glass panel, she could see a uniformed mosso. She called him in and he entered, nervously fingering a pair of evidence bags in his hand.

  'Sotsinspectora Domènech?' he said.

  Elisenda looked closely at him. 'Paredes,' she said. 'Francesc.'

  Paredes looked relieved she'd recognised him, although he carried on fiddling with the two plastic bags like an elderly lady with an unwieldy handbag. 'Do you have a moment, Sotsinspectora?'

  'Take a seat,' she invited him, intrigued.

  He sat down, placing the bags on his lap, and paused before speaking.

  'I've heard around the station that you were looking at the attacks that have been happening. About how they're supposed to be similar to some of the city's myths.'

  'Go on.'

  'Well, perhaps it's nothing, Sotsinspectora, but there have been a couple of incidents that I don't know if you've heard of. Involving the Verge de la Bona Mort. The little statue up above Sobreportes.' Paredes opened one of the bags on his lap and took out a doll. 'I found this hanging from the Verge on my morning shift a short while ago.'

  He handed the doll over to Elisenda, who turned it over and over, looking at it. It was of a matronly woman in simple medieval dress, the sort you could buy in souvenir shops. She understood the significance. 'The Majordoma. When did you find it?'

  'The day before Mònica Ferrer was found. I only kept it because of an earlier incident. I was walking through the arch when some guy from the Jewish museum pointed this out, hanging down from the figure.'

  The mosso opened the other evidence bag and pulled out a small black object before holding it up for Elisenda to see.

  'A joke bat?' she said. She recalled Pijaume showing her something about a bat.

  'It was just before Mossèn Viladrau was found. I didn't really think anything about it at the time, but when someone told me you were looking at a link with these myths, I wondered if it was significant. The priest found near the vampire and the critic found in all the rubbish in the market. So I checked in the records and I found that there'd been another one reported.'

  Elisenda leaned forward over her desk. 'What was it?'

  'Four rag dolls. The morning before the four muggers were attacked.'

  'Were there any others reported?' Elisenda asked him, her mind on Masó. And on Corominas, she thought, surprised that his name had sprung to mind.

  'None, Sotsinspectora. Just those three.'

  'Pity,' Elisenda muttered, disappointed.

  'I've got the name of the guy who reported the first incident, though. It was in the report. A street cleaner. He might be worth questioning.'

  'You could say that,' Elisenda agreed with him.

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Elisenda looked at the name appearing on her mobile screen and pressed the red button to reject the call. Inspector Puigventós again. She put the phone back in her bag. Standing next to her, Àlex got a call on his phone almost immediately. He looked at the name on the screen and held it up to show her. Puigventós. He shrugged and rejected the call.

  'I'm sure the Policia Municipal will take us on,' she reassured him.

  He grunted and turned back to look at Mosso Paredes gingerly climbing the ladder from the uneven cobbles to where it was lodged untidily below the little statue of the virgin.

  'If this person really has been leaving figurines on the Verge de la Bona Mort,' Elisenda had
reasoned to Àlex after speaking to Paredes, 'then why wasn't there one for Foday Saio?'

  Which was why a nervous Mosso Paredes was bleakly ascending the unsteady ladder, held absently in place by his partner. Shakily taking his latex-gloved right hand off the top of the ladder and gripping firmly with his left, Paredes carefully felt with his fingertips between the pigeon spikes.

  'There is something here, Sotsinspectora,' Paredes called, not looking down.

  Elisenda half-turned to Àlex. 'It'll be a fly,' she told him.

  Holding on to his find with his right hand, Paredes slowly shuffled back down the ladder with his left hand jerking from rung to rung. At the bottom, he walked over to them and held out his hand.

  It was a fly. A stuffed toy. Of a type sold by the souvenir shops in the city.

  'The wind must have blown it back on to the ledge,' Paredes said. 'It was caught on a spike.'

  'Well done, Francesc,' Elisenda told him, holding an evidence bag open for him to put the toy into. 'Thanks for coming to me with this.'

  She and Àlex left the two Seguretat Ciutadana to return the ladder to the elderly porter in the Audiència Provincial, who was fussing over its return like a prodigal son, and walked to where their unmarked car was parked at the foot of the cathedral steps.

  Elisenda placed the evidence bag in the boot and looked up, distracted for a moment by the sound of an engine. She watched a small plane stutter across the thick air of the sky and only looked down once it had passed from view. Àlex watched it too but turned away before she looked at him.

  'A fly?' he asked once they were in the car. He started the engine and slowly drove through the Portal de Sobreportes to turn sharp left down Pujada de Sant Feliu.

  'Sant Narcís,' Elisenda explained as they wound their way through the narrow streets towards the busy Pont de Pedret junction north of the old town. Her phone rang again but she ignored it. 'The legend says that when the French were besieging Girona in the thirteenth century, a swarm of flies emerged from Sant Narcís's tomb and warded them off, saving the city.'