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

by Chris Lloyd

  'So the fly symbolises protecting the city from attack.'

  'Precisely. That's why you see these toys and chocolates in the shape of flies everywhere. And given the time of year, it was inevitable that the attacker should use the legend. We're just lucky it didn't come off.'

  'Why an immigrant? Why not a French target? A French company? Just someone French?'

  Elisenda considered that for a moment. 'Our man sees the influx of immigrants as the city under siege, I suppose. One that we need protecting from.'

  'He calls this protecting? God help us.'

  They drove across the Pont de Pedret and passed the evidence of the patron saint's day celebrations: empty barraques to the left, roadies working on the stage, the beer huts all shut up until the evening. Ahead of them, the sound of the funfair filtered through the trees as they passed a short queue of people buying roast chestnuts at a makeshift stand. They drove on in silence past the Devesa and its hardcore daytime funfair-lovers and cut along Carrer Ferran Puig to head for the stop-start grind of Carretera de Barcelona. Àlex spoke first.

  'Is there any significance to his disability? The hands?'

  'I don't think so. There's nothing in the legend that I can think of, but we can always ask Professor Marsans. As far as I know, it's entirely to do with the city under siege.'

  'Pity. It would almost be better if it weren't about invaders. About immigrants. Less contentious. Fewer headaches for us.'

  'He's making us choose our victims again.' She stared out at the traffic. Her phone rang. She sighed and checked the screen absently, but then answered once she saw the caller's name.

  Àlex listened in silence until she ended the call and switched her mobile to vibrate before putting it back in her bag.

  'News?' he asked.

  'Pau. He's outside the bishopric. Mossèn Arnau, the priest who gave him the address in Santa Pau. It appears he's on holiday. In Santiago de Compostela.' Over on the other side of the country, she might have added.

  'Great,' Àlex commented. 'When's he back?'

  'That's the rub. He's not. He'll be going straight from there to his new posting. In Rome.'

  'Is there anyone in this city who actually wants us to find this killer?'

  'Not yet.'

  Àlex pulled off the main road and drove into a characterless complex in the industrial estate to the south of the city. They went inside the low, modern building they'd come to visit, both of them gladdened by how much the air conditioning was turned up after the cloying humidity of the day outside.

  A receptionist showed them to a small meeting room and asked them to wait. The walls were decorated with glossy blow-up photos of waste treatment plants and refuse lorries and cheerful men and women in protective clothing sorting through conveyor belts of junk. A pitcher of water and half a dozen glasses stood on the table, and Elisenda poured a glass for herself and another for Àlex. They both swallowed them down in one gulp and Elisenda poured them a second glass each. The door opened and the receptionist came back in followed by a short, sulky-looking man in sweat-stained corporate overalls.

  'Andrés Soriano,' the receptionist announced, backing out of the room, leaving Soriano standing undecided just inside the doorway.

  Both Elisenda and Àlex stood up.

  'Thank you for seeing us, Senyor Soriano,' Elisenda said to him in Catalan.

  'I don't know what they expect me to tell you,' Soriano complained in Spanish.

  'I'm sure you'll be of great assistance,' Elisenda told him, switching into Spanish. 'It's good of you to offer us your help in this matter.'

  'Well . . .,' Soriano replied, shrugging nervously and pulling himself up to his full height.

  'If you'd care to take a seat,' Elisenda invited him.

  The three of them sat down at the table and Elisenda poured Soriano a glass of water.

  'In your own words, Andrés,' Elisenda continued in a low voice. 'We'd just like to hear what exactly it was you found on the Verge de la Bona Mort that morning.'

  'I reported it.'

  'Yes, and we're glad you did. We just need you to tell us what you remember.'

  Soriano shrugged and hawked noisily to clear his throat. 'It was a pigeon.'

  'A pigeon?'

  'Yeah, it took a shit on my overall so I looked up and saw it.'

  'The pigeon?'

  'The dummy. On the statue.'

  Elisenda looked uncertainly at him. 'I understood you found four dolls on the statue.'

  'That's right, but that was when the water wasn't working. The tank was empty and I had to come back here and fill up.'

  Elisenda and Àlex exchanged looks, confused by the street cleaner's meandering account.

  'Tell me about the four dolls,' Elisenda persevered.

  'They were four dolls,' Soriano said with a shrug, 'hanging down from the statue. Rag dolls like when you were a kid, that's all.'

  'What did you do with them?'

  'Threw them away. I reported it to you lot because that lawyer was there, miserable bastard, but I just chucked the dolls in my bag. Went out with the rest of the rubbish. Like I said, rag dolls. Nothing special.'

  Elisenda started to rise out of her chair, realising they weren't going to get much more out of him. 'Well, thank you, Andrés,' she said.

  'Pity you threw them away,' Àlex commented.

  Soriano shrugged. 'Yeah. Didn't think they were important. Just like the other one.'

  Elisenda looked straight at him and sat back down. 'Other one?'

  'I told you. When the pigeon took a dump on me.'

  'There was a second incident?'

  'No. Those four were the second incident. The one with the pigeon came first.'

  'When exactly was this?' Elisenda asked him patiently.

  Soriano sucked his teeth, thinking. 'Middle of September? Somewhere round there.'

  Elisenda looked at Àlex and back at Soriano. 'And it was a pigeon you saw on the statue?'

  'No, the pigeon shit on me. It was a face I saw.'

  'A face? Can you describe it?'

  Soriano leaned over and took a piece of paper from a pile in the middle of the table and a pen from a holder next to it.

  'I can draw it for you.'

  'And this was in mid-September, you say?' Elisenda insisted.

  Soriano nodded, concentrating on his picture. 'I remember now. It was the day before we had the fiesta in the street where I live.' He looked up at Àlex, who he imagined would be more sympathetic. 'I got plastered. Celebrating. It was when that bastard Daniel Masó got carved up. Some night.' He looked at Elisenda. 'Excuse the language.'

  Both Elisenda and Àlex craned forward and watched as he clumsily sketched a crude moon-shaped face. They looked at each other as the big, staring eyes and tall, pointed ears took shape in the drawing. When he'd done, he proudly held it up and showed it to them.

  'En Banyeta,' Àlex murmured.

  'Daniel Masó,' Elisenda added.

  Chapter Fifty

  Àlex turned the siren on and headed right for Salt instead of left for Girona.

  Pau had called the moment they left the industrial estate. 'There's a standoff outside an Arabic baker's in Salt,' he told Elisenda.

  Heading straight there, they found a short section of road in the brittle honeycomb of streets near the town hall cut off at either end by Mossos cars and vans. A steady swell of noise seeped around the blue and white vehicles blocking the view, pulling Elisenda and Àlex in. The uniformed mosso at the channel funnelling Mossos in and out recognised them and let them through.

  'Two groups,' the uniformed officer, who'd introduced himself as Sotsinspector Pascal, told them. He pointed to a string of three shops in a row, all of them foreign-owned. Between the baker's and a Bangladeshi restaurant was a Halal butcher's, its windows boarded up. 'The people outside the shops are there to protect them. The other group over there,' he pointed to a crowd gathering at a corner where a lane led into the street, 'are what they're trying to protect them
from. And we're trying to protect them from each other.'

  Elisenda thanked him and walked over to the group of people outside the shops. It was made up of local people and immigrants, mothers with small children and blue-collar workers standing in calm defiance next to students and pensioners. She couldn't help feeling heartened at the sight despite the situation.

  'We're taking a stand,' a Catalan woman told her. Clutching her hand, a small boy was holding a placard almost as big as he was, calling for respect between races. Other children and adults were holding similar hurriedly-made signs. 'We won't allow this to go on.'

  'Neither will we,' Elisenda assured her. 'Please try to remain calm, even if you're provoked. And please leave the Mossos to find a solution to this.'

  Some of the crowd standing vigil grumbled at Elisenda's words, but most acquiesced. She went back to where Àlex was standing next to uniformed Mossos watching the mob on the corner.

  'There's more of them gathering,' he told her.

  A stone rose in a high parabola from the heart of the mob and thumped against the plywood covering the butcher's damaged shop front, narrowly missing an elderly man. A cheer went up from the mob and the crowd holding vigil parted for a panicked moment to come back together in a tighter group.

  Sotsinspector Pascal and half a dozen of his officers approached the gang on the corner and ordered them to disperse. Voices from behind the front row jeered and swore. A second stone was thrown, landing harmlessly in the street. Pascal sent his Mossos in to look for the stone thrower but they were pushed back by the crowd. He appealed for calm, but pulled his Mossos back when the jostling became more aggressive.

  Elisenda looked back at the shops and saw that the crowd outside them was swelling in a larger proportion to the stone-throwing mob. She wasn't sure that was necessarily a good thing.

  The sotsinspector spoke to a sergent, and two of the Mossos vehicles at one end of the street moved aside and two vans came through. They pulled over and a group from the regional support unit in riot uniforms slowly emerged to form up. Not carrying shields or batons yet. The mob jeered more.

  'Please, not this,' Elisenda muttered.

  She and Àlex made a move to go back to speak to the people standing vigil, but Pascal came over to them holding his phone out to her, an apologetic look on his face.

  'Inspector Puigventós is on the line,' he told Elisenda. 'He wants to talk to you.'

  Elisenda took the mobile and explained where she was, but Puigventós cut her short.

  'I don't care, Elisenda. I want you back at Vista Alegre immediately.'

  She handed the phone back to Pascal and shrugged.

  'Sorry.' She gestured to the gathering storm. 'Good luck.'

  Chapter Fifty One

  'I'm not happy with this, Elisenda, not happy at all.'

  Elisenda sat in Puigventós' office and let the bluster wash over her. At least she had something she could offer him, regardless of whether he was going to like it or not.

  'I asked you for a meeting hours ago,' he went on, 'and you have completely ignored all my phone calls. We need to discuss this new racial angle before it really gets out of hand. We cannot allow racial tension to take hold. Especially now with events in Salt and the Sant Narcís celebrations at their height.'

  'I couldn't answer your calls, Xavier, because I was in the middle of interviews which have cast substantial new light on the attacks.'

  She placed four evidence bags on his desk. The joke bat, the figure of the Majordoma and the fly were in three of them. The fourth contained a sheet of paper. Puigventós sighed and looked at the bags, his interest piqued, but not enough to be swayed quite yet.

  'The racial angle, Elisenda,' he reminded her. 'We can't sweep it under the carpet.'

  'We're not going to. But neither are we going to focus solely on it.'

  Puigventós snorted. 'You might not. But you'll be the only one if you do. We need to speak to the community leaders. Calm things down before there's any retaliation by one of the immigrant groups. We're only lucky the intended victim wasn't the one that got hurt.'

  'Good job it was only teenagers, in other words.'

  Puigventós looked straight at her. 'An attack on young people or a race crime, Elisenda. Which would you rather see the city facing?'

  'I'm sure the young people now in hospital see it the same way.'

  'You feel no sympathy for the intended victim?'

  'Of course I do. Enormous sympathy. He lived through a civil war, his family was killed, he was mutilated. He had to leave his home and start again in a completely different culture in a completely different language. And then this is the way he's treated. And I shudder to think what the killer had planned for him. And what would have happened to his little girl. I feel far more sympathy for him than for any of the other victims. And that's what galls me. I'm doing exactly what the attacker wants me to do. I'd prefer the victim to be a young person rather than an immigrant. A fit person rather than a disabled one. I resent being forced to question everything that makes me human.'

  She looked at the evidence bags on the table and realised she had to forget about them for the moment. 'I understand we have to tread carefully with this, Xavier, and we have to make sure no one in the city sees it as open day on immigrants. This website is already doing enough to stir up trouble without that. But I think we also have to be careful not to go too far the other way. We have to focus on the attacks as a whole, not on the racial aspect of one of them. Not if we don't want to give someone the excuse to make it worse. Or if we want to come out of this undamaged. Evil as this last attack is in every single way I can think of, it is not an isolated racially-motivated crime. It's part of some awful bigger picture that the perpetrator is trying to tell us.'

  Puigventós rubbed his forehead and exhaled deeply. 'Possibly it is, Elisenda, but is that going to help us keep control of it all?'

  Elisenda stretched her back on the uncomfortable chair and looked back at him. 'If it's any consolation, there will be a new attack that will target another group or another individual and all the ghouls and twitters and rants will move on to the next one.'

  'We just have to hope for that to happen soon,' Puigventós replied. 'And yes, I do know what I'm saying.'

  Elisenda kept quiet. She couldn't swear in all honesty that she entirely disagreed. She picked up the first of the evidence bags on the inspector's desk and showed it to him.

  'The developments I was telling you about.'

  She showed him the bat first and then the figure of the Majordoma, explaining the visit to her office by Mosso Paredes and when each one had been found. She then showed him the fly through the clear plastic of the bag.

  'We found this one this morning. On the statue of the Verge de la Bona Mort like the other two.'

  Puigventós took the bag from Elisenda and turned it over and over, peering at the giant stuffed toy fly inside. 'Sant Narcís.'

  'Precisely. It was announcing the attack on Foday Saio. An invader in the perpetrator's eyes.'

  Puigventós dropped the bag back on the desk. 'And the piece of paper?'

  Elisenda looked at it but left it lying close to her, away from the inspector. 'Mosso Paredes also told me of another find that had been reported. Unfortunately, we don't have the evidence but we've been able to speak to the man who found it. He's a street cleaner. The morning of the attack on the four muggers, he found four dolls hanging from the statue. He threw them away, but it's clear to us that they'd been put there to announce the attack on the gang of muggers.'

  'Pity we don't have the dolls,' Puigventós said absently. He looked in turn at the three evidence bags that Elisenda had already shown him and spoke quietly, almost to himself. 'So this latest attack can't really be seen as racial, but as another incident motivated by other reasons.' It seemed to please him. 'And the four dolls equating to the four muggers was the first sign, followed by these three?'

  'No.' Elisenda pushed the final bag towards him. 'This was
the first one. The street cleaner found this in mid-September. He also threw it away but he was able to do this drawing.'

  Puigventós flattened the plastic across the piece of A4 paper and looked at the sketch. 'What is it?'

  'En Banyeta. A moneylender. There's a carving of this face on the corner of Carrer Ciutadans with Plaça del Vi. The legend goes that if you rub your nose against his, you'll be excused all your debts.'

  The inspector looked up at her sharply.

  'It was found on the morning that Daniel Masó was found dead. A moneylender who bled to death with his nose cut off.'

  Elisenda sat back in her chair, surprised at how shaky she felt, and watched Puigventós. He looked from bag to bag, coming back each time to the fly. The announcement of the attack on an immigrant. She felt she could see the connections being made in his mind. And more importantly, the acceptance of Daniel Masó as part of a horrific series of killings being weighed up against the dread of Foday Saio being targeted solely for his race. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if she'd ever become politician enough to make the rank of inspector.

  'The Masó case is part of your investigation,' he finally judged. 'I'll inform Sotsinspector Micaló.'

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Elisenda left Puigventós' office and crossed the front desk to find Gerard Bellsolà and Ignasi Perafita waiting. The critic's husband didn't seem any more distraught than he had the day his wife was found.

  'Can I help you?' she asked them.

  'No thank you, Sotsinspectora Domènech,' Bellsolà told her, turning away. 'We're here to see someone rather more senior.'

  'May I ask in relation to what?'

  Perafita looked at her in disdain. 'In relation to my wife's murder, evidently.'

  'My client doesn't want a failed attack diverting attention from the pursuit of his wife's assailant.'

  'I can assure you that is not the case,' Elisenda told them.

  'And you can rest assured it won't be the case,' Perafita answered. 'I will not allow a so-called attack on an immigrant to take precedence over finding the murderer of a local woman from the higher spheres of our society. Which is why I would sooner see a more senior officer than yourself leading the investigation. A male officer.'