by Chris Lloyd
‘How’s everyone getting on reporting to Sotsinspector Micaló?’ she asked instead. ‘I can’t imagine Àlex is too pleased with that.’
Manel looked at her and shook his head. ‘Micaló? He’s not in charge. Àlex is. Inspector Puigventós has put Àlex in charge of the investigation.’
Chapter Six
‘Right now, Siset, this feels like the only thing of value you’ve sold me.’
The front door opened after less than five minutes working on the lock and Elisenda stood up straight again, stretching her back. Silently, she put the picks she’d bought ages ago from Siset back in her bag and decided to take one last look around outside before going into the house.
‘And I wish I knew where you’d got to,’ she added in the lonely silence.
She walked away from the renovated house to where she’d pulled her car up, on the gravel in the middle of the turning circle between the building and the long drive through the trees from the road. Scanning the woods to either side of the path, she could see nothing, the only sound the incessant chirruping of the cicadas in the heat. There was still half an hour of daylight left before night would come in a rush, pushing the old farmhouse into even more isolated solitude. Looking back towards the house, she couldn’t help the breath catching in her throat again at the serene beauty of the jumble of mauve and cerise bougainvillea that covered the whole of the right side of the building. Long tendrils of green and purple reached down over the edge of the arched porch sheltering the door she’d just opened. Where the stone of the walls showed, it shone peach in the falling sun. The twin palms in their giant pots rustled to each other in the soft breeze that had sprung up in the last few minutes. Beyond the noise, Elisenda heard the stream behind the house again, its waters still roiling with the flood water from higher up the valley.
‘And I still wouldn’t live here if you paid me,’ she muttered.
After speaking to Manel in Girona, she’d made sure that the architect couple who lived here were still staying with the wife’s parents in the Palau part of town.
‘Maybe another day or two,’ the woman had told her on the phone.
Elisenda had been tempted to ask if she could borrow a key to check up on the house, but had decided against it. News might have got back to Puigventós. And she was supposedly suspended for the week. Instead, she’d driven the twenty minutes or so to the house that the Mossos had staked out the previous Saturday night and broken in using skills taught to her by Siset.
Satisfied that there was no one about in the woods outside the house, Elisenda walked back to the building and in through the door. She’d opened the left-hand side of the splendid double door and stopped to take a look at it. Mahogany, it wasn’t original or an antique salvaged from another site, but new and expensive and designed to look grand and ancient. Swinging it back and forth, she found the door was heavy, lined with steel, she imagined, and with round bolts running side-to-side and top-to-bottom inside the wood and into housings in the frame and floor for extra security.
‘For all the good that’s done you,’ she commented.
Inside, she went through all the rooms, turning the lights on in most of them. They made little effect as yet, but they would shine like a beacon in just a short time, once the sun finally disappeared behind the trees to the rear of the house. With that job done, she returned to the living room to see the effect. There was just one main, open-plan room downstairs, which rose unimpeded through both storeys to the ceiling. The centre of the living area was dominated by a quadrant of huge brown leather sofas arranged around a mahogany and wrought-iron table. The owners had had huge skylight funnels put in to channel natural light into what would otherwise have been a dark and dingy space. Between the sofas and the wall farthest from the door, an open hearth, now dark and cold in the summer, divided the room from a small vestibule leading to the kitchen and a bathroom. Stairs rose along most of the length of the wall to the left and emerged onto a gallery that overlooked the living space on all four sides. The upstairs rooms all radiated off this, three big and airy bedrooms, a wet room and a large shared study with framed newspaper articles about their practice and their renovated home.
‘Puts my redecorating to shame.’
Finding a remote, Elisenda turned the sound system on, clicking on the button to have the music piped into all the rooms. The song that came through was from some cheesy stage show, and she quickly looked for something else to play, settling on an old Companyia Elèctrica Dharma anthem before turning the volume up. Pouring herself a glass of water from a bottle in the kitchen fridge, she checked the windows and made sure the back door was securely locked. A plastic box on the work surface next to the door held some paper for recycling, junk mail, a religious pamphlet and an empty milk carton. Taking one last look downstairs, she climbed the stairs and went into one of the rooms she’d left dark. Looking out of the window, she could see across the path that led from the rear of the house down towards the brook, but was certain she couldn’t be seen. Leaving there, she went into the study at the front of the house and scanned the drive and the woods either side of it. Her car was still alone on the gravel, no other lights coming along the road. The sun had already fallen and she had to strain to see into the growing gloom of the trees.
‘So now we wait,’ she told the empty house.
Leaning still against the window frame, she dreaded to think what Puigventós would say if he found out what she was doing. Which he would, if things went how she thought they might. The gang they were after didn’t burgle empty houses. The pickings weren’t rich enough. Instead, they’d developed a fine trade in targeting isolated and restored farmhouses when the owners were at home. Once they got in, they’d terrorise the occupants, threatening one of the members until the others logged into their online bank accounts and transferred money to a temporary account. The beneficiary account was always with an overseas money transfer company and changed each time. After they’d cleared the bank and credit card accounts out, the gang would then turn to any other easily cashable items, usually jewellery and electronic goods. Finally, they’d turn the computer off that had been used to transfer the money and take that too, along with the car keys. Loading the owner’s car with their takings, the gang would make their getaway in it, leaving a battered and traumatised family in their wake. The problem had been compounded lately by the gang becoming increasingly more violent in their treatment of their victims. And by the victims’ reports being widely disparate in their descriptions of the attackers. Always with their faces and heads covered with black balaclavas, the perpetrators didn’t seem to have any fixed description. Sometimes they spoke Spanish, sometimes Catalan, sometimes with a foreign accent and other times speaking a foreign language that none of the families they’d attacked had recognised. Sometimes they were tall and thin, at others they were short and stocky. Sometimes quicker to violence than others, sometimes burning slow and menacing.
Sighing, Elisenda shifted as she grew stiff and went to the rear bedroom to take a look out of there, shaking life back into her limbs as she walked. She’d already decided that the most likely approach to the house would be from the front, as the back was too far from the main road, so she roamed the upstairs a moment before taking up her post again by the front window. She’d left an upstairs window open in the next-door bedroom at the front to allow the sound of the music to tumble out of the house into the darkness, an open invitation to would-be attackers, but she’d left the window in the study closed, worried that a shift in the light would allow her to be seen from outside. The problem was that it meant she couldn’t hear any sounds from the road or path through the trees because of the expensive triple-glazing the architect owners had put in.
‘At least I can’t hear that bloody barn owl,’ she mused.
She heard the noise over an hour later, when she went downstairs to fetch another glass of water from the kitchen fridge. Because of the volume of the music emerging from the music system, she hadn’t r
egistered a sound until footsteps scraped on the tile floor in the porch, the other side of the front door. Cursing that she hadn’t given herself enough time, she ducked back behind the fireplace, standing in the lee of one of the sloping stone sides, which rose to a vent underneath the gallery. Carefully, she put the glass down on the low hearth and frantically looked for something she could use as a weapon.
Expecting to hear either the door battered open immediately or a short wait while whoever it was outside teased the lock open the way she had, she was surprised to hear a key being inserted instead. She couldn’t hear the door open above the music, but she heard it slam shut with a decisive crunch of the locks and bars. Footsteps came slowly towards the centre of the room, still about seven or eight metres from where she was hiding, her fingers folding and unfolding in readiness on the hard stone. The sound stopped, only one set of feet as far as she could hear, which surprised her.
Someone spoke. A man’s voice.
‘Will you turn this hippie fucking racket off?’
Chapter Seven
Letting her breath out in a long feather of relief, Elisenda unpicked herself from the side of the hearth and emerged slowly into the opening between where she’d been hiding and the sofas. On the other side of the leather quadrangle, Àlex had picked up the remote for the sound system and was angrily stabbing his finger at the controls until the music was muted. Throwing the gizmo down onto the nearest sofa, he looked up at her and shook his head in disbelief. The sudden silence throughout the house almost drove her to her knees.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Elisenda?’
Elisenda let a brief flicker of anger after the rush of fear subside before replying.
‘More to the point, Àlex, what are you doing here?’
‘Investigating the case, Elisenda, because I haven’t been suspended. I spoke to the owners of this place to ask them when they planned to come back and if they wanted the Mossos to come with them when they did. Only they told me that someone from the police had already called them. You, Elisenda. What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I know what I’m doing, Àlex. It was my information that failed, it’s my job to put it right.’
‘You’re unarmed, you’re alone. What do you think you could have done had it been this gang instead of me? You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake, what do you think they would have done to you? You’re out of control, Elisenda. You’ve left Puigventós without any option but to suspend you. And he’d scalp you if he found out you’d come here.’
Elisenda paused and studied him, calming down before answering. The anger at the ills of the world that always seethed under the surface of his angular face and that made him such a good cop now irritated her. His loose shirt and jeans over his powerful frame annoyed her.
‘How’s he going to find out, Àlex? Unless someone in my team tells him. The way he knew about…’
Àlex watched her falter over her words. ‘The way he knew you saw your daughter, you mean?’
‘It is not for you to talk about my daughter, Àlex. That is my business, no one else’s.’
‘I’m sorry, Elisenda, but it is everyone else’s. It’s not just our team that sees it. And if you really want to know, we’re the ones telling other Mossos to shut up about it.’
Elisenda took a step back from him and looked directly at his face. She was shocked to see something in his dark eyes beyond momentary anger. There was genuine concern in his expression. It made her feel more defensive. ‘Well, thank you for that. My daughter died six years ago, Àlex, I’m dealing with it. I don’t need you or anyone else in the unit to stand up for me or explain my actions to anyone.’
‘It’s called loyalty, Elisenda. You see visions of Lina, we know you do. We’ve all tried to help, but you won’t let us. So if you won’t accept it from us, now you need someone else’s help. You’re not over her death.’
‘Not over my daughter’s death.’ Her voice was measured, far calmer than she felt. ‘Well, terrible me.’
‘I’m sorry, Elisenda, I didn’t mean it that way. I just mean you need help to deal with it. That’s natural, no one’s judging you because of it. Just let us help.’ He balled his fists against his thighs in frustration.
She looked coldly at him. ‘I don’t need help.’
His gaze was equally direct. ‘You do, Elisenda. Puigventós won’t put up with much more. I’m talking to you as a friend, not as a colleague.’
‘You aren’t a friend, Àlex, you’re my subordinate. You haven’t earned the right to talk to me like this.’
He looked defeated and simply nodded at her. ‘Fine. But you need friends right now, Elisenda. No one else is fighting your corner. Just us.’
‘Friends, Àlex? So when were you going to tell me about you taking over the investigation? That Micaló wasn’t in charge?’
‘Look at your phone, Elisenda.’
‘I have been.’ She reached into her pocket and pulled out her mobile.
‘Your personal phone. And Micaló’s not in charge because he’s away on a course. We’ve known that for four weeks. He left for Sabadell at lunchtime today. Puigventós has only put me in charge because there’s no one else to do it.’
Elisenda looked at her work mobile with no missed calls showing and back to Àlex. She hung her head, tired. ‘I forgot he was going on a course.’
Àlex finally smiled at her, on the edge of a grin. ‘He’s building up credits. He’ll be applying for promotion soon, once he gets enough. Then he’ll be our boss instead of Puigventós.’
Elisenda shuddered, her body relaxing after. ‘Please don’t say that. What course is he doing? How to tell your arse from your elbow?’
‘Yeah, but with a grander title.’
Àlex gave one of his full-blown grins. Elisenda watched him and gave a small, wry laugh. He was almost back to the Àlex she’d always known, his voice strong again now, nearly a year since someone had placed a noose around his neck and tried to hang him, his charming rogue character pretty much up to full strength.
‘There’s water in the fridge,’ she invited him. ‘Want to hang about, see if the bad guys turn up?’
She got the feeling that he’d acquiesced to humour her, but it was Àlex, less than half an hour later, who suddenly looked up and cocked his head to one side, listening. Then she heard what had disturbed him. The sound of a car driving in a low gear up the drive. She jumped up from the sofas, where they’d been sitting, and ran to the door. She looked through the spyhole but couldn’t make out anything moving. Certainly no headlights approaching the house despite the growing sound of tyres crunching slowly over gravel.
Handing her an iron poker he’d picked up from the fireplace, Àlex joined her at the door, his service Walther P99 already in his right hand. The sound from outside stopped and Elisenda whispered to him to check the back door that led from the kitchen into the garden. She watched him hurry across the living room and past the hearth and turned back to listen for movement from outside, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw a change in the shadows by the window at the foot of the staircase leading up to the gallery. With the lights on in the living room, whoever was standing outside was going to get a much clearer view of the people inside than she would of them, but for a fleeting moment, she just made out three orbits through the dark glass, the gaps for the eyes and mouth of a balaclava. The figure was gone in a fraction of a second. She was sure that they would have seen Àlex cross the room and the gun he was holding.
‘Àlex, at the front,’ she called behind her, pulling the front door open and charging out into the night.
The figure she’d seen at the side window was sprinting towards a car idling on the gravel, past her own and Àlex’s cars, parked facing away from the house. Chasing after him, she lunged forward with the poker and caught her prey with a glancing blow to his trailing left arm. A man’s voice cried out in pain and the running figure slowed. Trying to catch him up, Elisenda made to swing agai
n, but suddenly felt a searing pain in her left cheek as a second figure emerged from the darkness and landed a punch to her face. She could see his fist being raised again when the sound of a gunshot erupted behind her. She ducked instinctively but realised immediately that it was Àlex firing a warning from outside the front door of the house. Glancing back, she saw that he’d run through the house to emerge onto the porch.
She turned in time to see the two assailants bundle themselves into the car that was waiting for them. The driver gunned the engine and she had to cover her face to protect it from the sharp stones shot up by the wheels spinning on the gravel before they gained traction and the car sped off along the drive. The headlamps came on, reflecting eerily against the curtain of trees either side of the path, and she watched the car pick up speed to take the smooth curve that led to the main road. She felt a rush of noise as Àlex ran past her, following the car. He levelled his pistol at the retreating lights and fired off one shot, but the car kept going. Elisenda heard him swear as he ran after it to the main road, out of sight of where she was crouching, but there were no more shots fired. She ran down the drive and joined him by the side of the road, where she found him talking into his mobile, calling for a patrol car on the road heading northwest from where they were. He hung up and stared hopelessly at the road heading into the mountains, away from Girona.
‘I didn’t dare fire once they were on the main road,’ he told her. As he said it, a small lorry followed by two cars looking for somewhere to overtake it drove past them in the other direction, the lorry driver staring idly at them as he went by.
‘Damn,’ Elisenda swore. ‘We nearly had them.’
Àlex turned to look at her. ‘You didn’t. You’re not here.’ He peered at her cheek. ‘Better stay out of Puigventós’ way for a bit, too, or you’ll have some explaining to do about that bruise.’