City of Drowned Souls

by Chris Lloyd

  Both parents were there. The mother was a dentist, her private practice on the mezzanine, one floor below them in the same building. The father was a doctor at the large Hospital Doctor Trueta, on the northern edge of the city. Montse put them both in their mid-forties, both dressed casually but expensively, her with glasses and an inquisitive expression, he with a round face and a gap between his front teeth. Montse couldn’t help finding that odd in a dentist’s spouse. A grandmother was in the kitchen, getting tea ready for a younger child. The older one was on one of the sofas, sitting between his parents. Montse was on the other sofa.

  ‘I just want to ask you some questions about Jaume Comas,’ Montse said, speaking directly to the boy. At just fourteen, he was as tall as her, his limbs still long and ungainly from childhood but his voice firm, no longer a little boy’s. He was wearing his school tracksuit, his hair sweaty but freshly combed, just about sticking in place. She could see he’d been crying but was trying to hide it.

  He was Carles Pascual, the friend Jaume was supposed to have been doing his homework with the previous evening. His parents had consented without any hesitation to Montse interviewing him about Jaume’s disappearance.

  ‘Terrible news,’ the mother had said when Montse had phoned her earlier, after getting the details from Elisenda. She had the names of two other boys in her notebook and had arranged to see one of them the following day.

  ‘Terrible news,’ the mother repeated now. Her eyes were red and she was holding a crushed paper tissue in her fist. ‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.’

  Montse nodded in silent agreement and quickly studied the family. Carles was sandwiched on the sofa between his parents, both of them pressed tightly up against him, their closeness a protection for him and a comfort for them. With the hand not clutching the tissue, the mother was squeezing her son’s hand. The father had his arm around the boy’s shoulder and was holding him tightly. Their reaction looked natural to Montse. A sudden and unbidden image of Elisenda trying to remain objective jumped into her mind and she felt a momentary pang of guilt at her own difficulty in discussing the case with her boss.

  ‘Have you and Jaume been friends for long?’ she asked Carles now after putting him at ease with a few general questions about school.

  ‘Only since the summer.’ The boy’s voice was strained and he looked at one or the other parent before answering each time. Montse had to coax him a little to get more complete answers from him. ‘We’re in the same class at school, but we didn’t sit together last year.’

  ‘We have a holiday home in La Fosca,’ the mother explained. ‘Near Palamós. So does Jaume’s family.’

  Montse turned her attention back to Carles, interrupting the mother. ‘So you became friends over the summer holiday?’

  The boy nodded. ‘We used to go swimming together every day. And just hanging on the beach. We decided we’d sit together when we were back at school.’

  ‘Did you mix much with his parents?’ Montse now asked the mother and father.

  The couple looked uncomfortably at each other before answering.

  ‘Not really,’ the father replied, pulling a slight face. ‘The boys got on well, but the parents aren’t really our sort. I think we’d have ended up arguing with Susanna about politics.’

  ‘That’s not to say we don’t feel so sorry for them now,’ the mother interjected.

  ‘Of course not,’ the father added. ‘We can only imagine what they’re going through.’ Instinctively, both parents held onto their son even more tightly.

  ‘And Marc Comas?’ Montse asked.

  ‘He tried a bit. Invited us to a barbecue at their house. Luckily we’d already arranged to go out with some other friends for dinner.’ The father instantly looked guilty after his words.

  Montse wrote it all down and questioned Carles again. ‘So, Jaume coming here to do his homework was a new thing?’

  ‘Yes, we only started last week. He came here last Thursday.’

  ‘Did you go to his house at all?’

  ‘Not yet. He said it was easier for him to come to my house as it’s on the way home from school to his house. He said I’d have to get a bus to his house, and then another one back here after we’d finished.’

  ‘So why didn’t he come here last night after school?’

  Again, Carles looked from one of his parents to the other for reassurance before answering. ‘He said he was going out with his parents for dinner. So he couldn’t come to my house.’

  ‘Do you know why he might lie about that?’

  A small shrug. ‘I don’t know. He seemed excited. I thought it was because he was going out with his parents. He told me over the summer that they didn’t go out together much. He was a bit nervous.’

  Montse changed tack. ‘Do you know if he was being bullied at all?’

  Without looking at his parents, Carles told her that that wasn’t likely, his voice assured. ‘He was taller than anyone else in our class. He told me he did weights in his bedroom to build up his muscles. No one would bully Jaume.’

  ‘And would Jaume bully other boys?’

  Again, the nervous look to both parents before replying. ‘He’d stand up for himself if he had to.’

  * * *

  Manel drove quickly, with all the self-assuredness that Àlex would have expected of him. He also knew his way around Girona and the surrounding area reasonably well now, even though he took every piece of time off to go back to his beloved Lleida, some two and a half hours’ drive west.

  ‘Got a house in the mountains,’ he’d once told Àlex in a less guarded moment. ‘My grandparents’ old house. Beautiful. Nothing like it anywhere else in Catalonia.’

  ‘Or the world,’ Àlex had said at the time, poking fun at him to avoid becoming irritated.

  ‘Probably,’ Manel had replied, with no hint of sarcasm.

  They’d left the owner of the previous house steadfastly putting all the locks and bolts back in place and were now heading for another house. More isolated this time, in the Albera mountains, near the border with France. They’d steadily risen through lush green hills and emerged into a scarred landscape of giant boulders and harsh peaks. Perched on an old stone wall, a huge buzzard watched them drive past, its neck bent, its collar ruffled by the low wind circling. Àlex stared back at it. The perfect predator. Beyond the bird, further up the mountain, he could see an arrangement of granite slabs, a Neolithic burial chamber. This part of the region was scattered with them. Breathing in the ancient moment, he didn’t point it out to Manel, not wanting the homesick caporal to spoil it.

  ‘This isn’t so bad,’ Manel commented at one point as the Mediterranean suddenly came into view in the distance to their right. A deep and unhurried blue soothing the twisted savagery of the mountains.

  The house was empty, although there was evidence of its still being occupied, the owners evidently out. It had been targeted the previous month, the height of summer, the attackers arriving one lazy evening when the couple who lived there were watching the sun set over the distant Pyrenees, a bottle of wine on a stone table. Rich Barcelona exiles seeking the good life. Their ordeal hadn’t been as violent as others, but equally frightening. Because there was no internet connection up here, the husband had been driven to the nearest town, to an internet café, to empty their bank account and to a cashpoint to do likewise to their credit cards. Two other gang members had stayed at the house with the wife as collateral to make sure the husband did as he was told. The wife wasn’t touched by either of the men holding her, but the threat had been there. Àlex felt a muscle in his cheek twitch as he recalled it now. He’d interviewed the husband, Elisenda and Montse the wife. Both more heartbroken that their idyll had been invaded than at any loss of money.

  Parking in front of the house, they took a tour around the property, looking in through the windows to make sure that there was no one inside and checking a small stone construction that housed a generator. Seeing nothing of concern, Àlex and
Manel walked the short distance from the house to the road. Feeling that its isolation might mean that any mound of stones would be less likely to have been disturbed in the intervening time, Àlex had hoped to find something remaining to bear out their theory of symbols at the crime scenes.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Manel announced.

  Àlex had to admit that it was hopeless. The ground either side of the track leading to the house was so strewn with small rocks that it was impossible to discern anything out of place. Animal droppings also showed that there was so much movement about the area that anything left there would have been obliterated before long.

  ‘So how would they leave a symbol here?’ Àlex asked himself.

  ‘If that’s what they do,’ Manel replied. ‘Doesn’t look that likely to me.’

  Disheartened, they left, stopping for a quick lunch in a down-to-earth restaurant in the tiny hamlet of Rabós, where the owner didn’t have a menu but recited the day’s food in a luxurious litany. Àlex had discovered it in his first month in Girona and he still loved the hearty mountain food and no-nonsense atmosphere. In the winter, there was always a fire crackling in the hearth.

  ‘Get bigger portions than this in the mountains back home,’ Manel commented at one point between mouthfuls of rabbit.

  As revenge, Àlex insisted they get back to work before the desserts. Manel had a sweet tooth and the crema catalana here was perfect, the egg custard with cinnamon firm but melting under its coating of burnt sugar.

  ‘See what you get for moaning all the time,’ he told the caporal.

  They tried one more place, the site of the most recent attack. The house on the fast road past Cassà de la Selva that had been targeted while their unit had been staking out a house to the other side of Girona. The family had moved back there already as they had nowhere else to go, although they were all out when Àlex and Manel arrived. The parents were at work and the son at school. The grandfather was still under observation in hospital, largely until the family decided what they were going to do with him during the day from now on when they were all out.

  The track from the road to the house was short and straight, the house in clear view from the fast two-lane highway heading southeast from Girona. Manel pulled off at the side and the two Mossos sat in the car and looked out, increasingly despondent. They got out and began searching, but the side of the road was paved, the house lying on the edge of a small urbanisation of modern houses. Any cairn of rocks would have been toppled over by anyone out walking.

  ‘There’s nowhere to leave anything,’ Àlex muttered.

  A rush of air behind him made him step involuntarily nearer the side of the road. He turned around to see a Sarfa bus go past, on the route between Girona and the coast. It was picking up speed after pulling away from a bus stop further back along the road.

  ‘This is pointless,’ Manel complained after the noise had receded.

  Àlex sighed, too fed up to lose his temper with the caporal, and climbed back into the car.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Seguretat Ciutadana car dropped Elisenda off on Gran Via, by the ornate central post office, and she watched it glide off along the curving avenue that traced the part of the medieval walls that had existed on this side of the river until the 1930s. The city council back then had pulled them down to modernise the city, which had probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Luckily the walls were still intact on the east bank, the old town, where Elisenda lived.

  She’d spent an hour with one of the teams searching the vicinity of Jaume’s school in Montjuïc. Others were trying to trace the boy’s way home, following any permutations of the bus routes spreading out from the mountain, but there were too many to follow quickly. As night was falling, some patrols were out as usual with instructions to be watchful, but the search as such was being scaled down for the night. It would start again at six o’clock the following morning.

  On the other side of the road, a trim young guy with a long body and a short beard pulled up on a battered, old moped and got off. A large pannier on the back was filled with rolled-up lengths of paper and a pot. He pulled out a handful and began pasting them to a triangle of wooden panels on the edge of the pavement. They were posters for one of the parties in the elections that were scheduled for the following Sunday. The man was covering up the posters for another party that were already there, adding another layer to the papier mâché politics on the ever-thickening panels. Someone else would have put up another coating of candidates before the night was out, and so on until Sunday’s decision. Even with dealing with Susanna Miravent and seeing her touting for votes, Elisenda had almost lost sight that the new government for Catalonia would be decided by the end of the week. Or not, if the Spanish elections were anything to go by. So far, the seemingly endless dance of hung parliaments and horse-trading that had hamstrung Madrid for years hadn’t yet blighted Catalonia, but now it was their turn to vote for a governing party for the Generalitat, the Catalan government, in Barcelona. Despite more and more parties springing up in recent years, the election four years earlier had been relatively clear-cut, albeit not as much as in the past, but there were even more parties and alliances now.

  Crossing the lights of the café terraces of Plaça Independència, alone among the few groups of local people and tourists eating out on a Tuesday in September, she caught up with the bill-poster on the other side of the square. This time, he was covering up the patrician face of Susanna Miravent, glue tears running down her cheeks as he swabbed his brush over the old posters, replacing them with the new, even if only for an hour or two.

  Miravent would not be getting her vote, Elisenda knew that, even with a changing political landscape ever since the recession that had seemed to alter everyone’s desires for Catalonia. For a brief time, independence from Spain had fallen down the wish list of a lot of the electorate, to be replaced by a romance with the new parties offering an end to austerity and the crippling financial burdens placed on ordinary people. They hadn’t been responsible for the crash, so they’d been wooed away from the traditional parties by newer alliances taking a stance against the old politics that everyone now blamed for getting them all into this mess. She watched the man slapping on a poster promoting one of the pro-independence parties, aiming to win back the middle ground of lapsed separatists with a promise to get Catalonia out of Spain’s mess.

  Miravent’s party was an anomaly even by current standards. They espoused continued union with Spain and argued that the country had to tighten its belt, austerity for a supposed common good that still hadn’t come bounding over the horizon. A party to the right that claimed to be of the left. She’d won her seat in the Catalan government in Barcelona in the last elections, one of only three members of her party to do so, but the landscape had changed again and it was looking increasingly unlikely that she’d repeat the surprise success of four years ago.

  Crossing the footbridge connecting the square with the old town, Elisenda looked up to the left at the floodlit cathedral towering above the city. It always gave her a sense of calm, not for any religious reason but because it symbolised her home, a return to her roots. Mundanely, it also made her realise that she was approaching her flat and she couldn’t recall having any food in the apartment. Certainly nothing she actually felt like eating. She considered for a moment retracing her steps and eating at one of the terraces on Plaça Independència, but changed her mind and headed instead for Plaça de l’Oli, behind the Rambla. On the steep steps that rose above the tiny square, once the oil market, another terrace sprawled anarchically between the separate flights, the tables at El Bistrot occupying any flat piece of ground to be found.

  Sitting down at a table that commanded a view down to the square, she ordered veal and a jug of red wine and took out the text of the appeal that Bofarull had been handing out to the media earlier that evening. Her mobile sounded. Another message from Catalina, her sister. Staring at the screen for a moment, deciding, she sighed and put
the phone away. Another time, she thought. She had work to do, she argued, looking at the two photos at the top of the piece of paper.

  She couldn’t see any great resemblance between Jaume Comas Miravent and either of his parents. In the portrait shot, he was looking frankly at the camera, his expression confident. Brown hair neatly brushed on top of a face growing into being classically good looking. More like the mother than the father in that sense. Eyes firm but the mouth still a child’s, tending to weak like the father’s, but with the cheeks and jaw well defined. In the other picture, she could see that he was growing out of being a child and into adolescence. At what looked like a sporting event in the bright summer sun, his stance was easy, his arms and chest filling out, a tall grown-up figure taking shape.

  Looking at the two photos, she recalled the mother’s comment about not feeling grief. Puigventós had hurried Elisenda away before she could ask Miravent what she meant. And before she could lose her temper. He’d reminded her of her counselling, as though she needed reminding, and that she was on thin ice. She didn’t need to be reminded of that either. She thought of the words again, the pitying tone. We feel no grief. It felt like a rebuke aimed at Elisenda, at how the loss of her own daughter was leading her down a path that was ultimately self-destructive. Quickly, she put the paper away, feeling the anger in her rising.

  ‘Did you know that this has been voted the most romantic restaurant terrace in Spain?’ a voice from below said.

  She looked up. ‘Not for me, it hasn’t.’

  It was David Costa. They were the first words they’d exchanged in nearly a year. He’d had a crush on her since school and his romantic comment had irritated her already. He looked the same as he’d always looked, rather bookish, with thick-rimmed glasses and a haircut his mother would like.

  ‘Can I join you?’