by Chris Lloyd
‘Stuff that,’ he muttered out loud between mouthfuls.
And stuff that idiot Bofarull too, he thought. His wife’s campaign manager had turned up for breakfast empty-handed and helped himself to his coffee and his cereal, he recalled, forgetting for one righteous moment that he hated the foul stuff. Susanna and Bofarull had discussed his missing son like he was another election to be won. A campaign based on personality and percentage shares, public profile and popularity. Ignoring any thoughts or feelings that Comas might have had on the matter. The overwhelming worry and dread at the idea of their son missing subsumed by a cold strategy of political logic.
And none of it had removed any of the everyday worries that were left up to him to manage, he mused now at the bar, not his wife and her genius campaign manager. He was the one to sort out their finances. The school fees, keeping up appearances, mixing with the right people, the summer home, holidaying in the right winter resorts. He and his wife came from old families. Sadly, that didn’t equate to old money. And what money they did have was gobbled up by his wife and son, although he’d never dare say that to Susanna. What he forgot for the moment were his own hugely expensive hunting trips to Soria twice a year, his own expansive generosity to all the right people in Girona’s finest restaurants, the accumulated cost of breakfasts and lunches and snacks such as this and his insistence on buying a new and increasingly more impressive car every year.
Alone in a small bar off Carrer Sant Josep, enjoying a brief respite from home and the search for his son that he felt he deserved, he figured their money worries were behind them. But it hadn’t come without an entirely new sense of unease, tainting the taste of the brandy burning his throat and gullet down to his stomach, where he was convinced he had ulcers. Like everything in his political career, this semblance of financial stability had come at a cost, he realised, checking yet again that his phone, with its recording of his recent dealings with the owner of one of the province’s largest construction and property management companies, was still in his jacket pocket. His light summer coat was slung over a hook on the underside of the bar and hanging securely between his tightly-clamped knees.
He’d only recently taken to using this bar for his breakfast, previously preferring one of the ones on Plaça del Vi, the square in front of the Town Hall, where he had his office. But ever since his first meeting with his new and rather informal business partner, he’d taken to parking on Plaça de Sant Josep, through the warren of streets behind the Town Hall, to stop putting in a daily bill for parking in his usual and expensive underground car park, wrongly believing that it would prevent any suspicion arising about his expenses and stop any further investigation of his finances. It was a change of pattern that had also led to a change of route from his car to his office, where he’d discovered this unassuming old bar, which served up a much more traditional breakfast that reminded him of happier times.
‘Hala,’ the bar owner suddenly exhaled in surprise. An unshaven, grizzled old guy, he could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty and normally limited himself to serving up food and drink and criticising the modern world. Comas jumped too. Not so much because of the car alarm that had just begun blaring out somewhere in the streets outside but because of the bar owner’s instant and unusual reaction to the intrusion of the real world.
Like many people, Comas had never heard his own car alarm and had no idea what sound it made.
The bar owner’s constant grumbling about the keening alarm spoiled what was left of Comas’s breakfast and he wolfed his sandwich down quicker than he should have, exacerbating his inevitable indigestion with a hasty gulp to polish off the brandy. He paid and left the small bar, his head spinning slightly. Outside, he let out a long, low belch and noticed for the first time that the sound of the alarm seemed to be coming from where he’d parked his car. When he’d been inside the bar, the distortion from the echoing little streets had made him think the sound was coming from another direction entirely, but out here, the noise was funnelled along the narrow dogleg lane from the tiny Plaça de Sant Josep.
Rounding the corner to investigate, he saw his car in the distance, its indicators flashing and what looked like a broken rear side window. An elderly man was staring in curiosity at the car. Two old ladies dragging wheeled shopping baskets walked by, oblivious in their discussion. For the first time, Comas heard the sound of his car alarm.
‘Merda,’ he muttered, reaching for his phone to call the police.
What he didn’t hear were the footsteps behind him. Or the whistle of the extendable metal baton before it hit him between the shoulder blades, knocking him to the ground. He did see the expensive black leather shoes in front of his face, and the cobbles lying harshly against his cheek that fanned out before him. He also saw the hand reach down towards his right hand, the one in which he was clutching his mobile. Instinctively, he held on, but another crack of the baton broke the bones in two of his fingers and he released his grip. The phone was taken from him, along with all the damning evidence it contained. He watched the fine footwear recede quietly back down the lane, tears brimming in his eyes as he slowly began to get to his knees.
He had no doubt who was responsible.
Chapter Twenty
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing,’ Àlex confirmed. ‘We tried four houses in all, over the whole of the region in four different counties, and we found nothing. No symbols, no stone circles, no markings on the ground, nothing at all.’
Elisenda muttered a curse. ‘It looked promising.’
Àlex raised his arms in frustration. ‘We’re always going to be chasing this gang. If the symbols thing had been real, we might have been able to anticipate them, without having to rely on dodgy information from people like Siset.’
Elisenda looked guiltily at the satchel on top of the filing cabinet and pulled it down, placing it on her desk so she wouldn’t forget to check its contents. Probably his usual smutty DVDs, she imagined.
‘Six counties,’ Àlex reminded her. ‘These people are covering a wide area. Even if we had found that the symbols meant anything, no matter how much we tell the various stations to keep an eye open, that’s just too large an area to control.’
‘Look for patterns. If the symbols aren’t what we thought they might be, look for patterns in their past attacks. See if there’s anything there that would help us anticipate their next move.’
Àlex sighed. ‘We’ve looked, Elisenda. You know we have. We’re back to square one.’
‘We have more to go on now. Every time they target a house, they give a bit more away. A pattern might emerge that we haven’t seen.’ She looked out at the big office and saw Josep and Manel at separate computers. Montse had already gone out. ‘I’ll ask Josep to look for anything, but he’s pretty much tied up with the missing boy. Do what you can.’
As always, Elisenda felt hamstrung by the lack of funding for her unit while it was still regarded as experimental. They were seriously understaffed. She worried it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: don’t throw money at it until it fully proves its worth, but until it has the resources it needs, it’s unlikely ever to be able to do that.
‘To cheer you up,’ she carried on, ‘I saw the wonderful Jutgessa Roca this morning. She’s been assigned to instruct us in the missing child investigation.’
Àlex groaned. Elisenda told him about the meeting with the judge and the Comas Miravent family lawyer.
‘The one thing she wouldn’t consider was that the parents might be implicated in the boy’s disappearance. Which of course we should, so we’re ignoring her on that. I’ve also got Josep checking up on anyone connected with the parents who we need to look at. It could turn up something. One other thing is that David Costa came to see me last night.’
Àlex whistled. ‘I’ll look for a truthful report of it in today’s paper.’
‘Don’t hold your breath. He told me he suspects Marc Comas of corruption. He didn’t seem to have any concrete proof and
I’m not sure how far I want to trust him, but it’s still something we should be considering when we look into the parents.’
‘Against the judge’s orders.’
The grin was back, Elisenda was pleased to see. Less than a year ago, Àlex had nearly been killed in the line of duty and it had left him for the best part of the intervening period racked with self-doubt. Someone had tried to hang him, and his voice had lost its strength for several months, a reflection of his lost confidence. But now his vocal cords were fully recovered and he seemed stronger than ever, the frustration he felt at his symbols theory not panning out simply further evidence that the old Àlex who took policing as seriously as any Mosso she’d ever met had returned. She filed those thoughts away.
‘He also said that they were Opus Dei,’ she continued.
‘Only in Girona,’ Àlex muttered.
‘A bit less of your Barcelona cockiness, if you don’t mind. Were you never wooed at school?’
He laughed. ‘Wooed? You evidently moved in different circles, Elisenda. Opus never troubled me.’
‘I was. A girl in my school who’d never bothered talking to me before suddenly wanted to become my best friend once her family found out my mum was a teacher and my dad a lawyer. She kept inviting me to picnics by the river and days out with right-minded, God-fearing people. She even asked me once to the family’s beach house.’
‘I thought Opus Dei was all shadowy figures wielding power behind the scenes and secret handshakes.’
‘Everyone does now, thanks to books and films. But it’s much more mundane than that, I’m afraid. Certainly here. For some it’s spiritual, but for a lot, it’s just the local big fish wanting to join a club with some of the other local big fish. Help for the boys. Just another ladder for social climbers to jump on. A sort of Catholic country club. I told her to sod off.’
Àlex got up to leave. ‘So you were already like this as a kid, then.’
She watched him go with a stern look on her face and turned her attention to Siset’s battered leather satchel.
‘Gross insubordination,’ she muttered, pleased that at least one of her team was in a good mood these days. As a reflex, she glanced up to see Josep and Manel continuing to ignore each other and wondered for a moment what she was going to have to do to pull the various strings together.
The top layer of Siset’s bag was a couple of scruffy T-shirts, stiff with dried sweat and with logos that had long since faded. They were there to cover from a casual observer what lay underneath, she imagined. Sure enough, she pulled out several piles of bootleg DVDs held together with elastic bands, some with black and white photocopied covers of blockbuster movies, others with lurid lettering and pictures of large swathes of flesh that were anything but Hollywood classics.
‘You really are a piece of work, Siset,’ she commented. In an age when everyone got their entertainment of this sort from the internet, her grass still clung to a dying technology.
Underneath was an assortment of old dross, possibly stolen, possibly not, but that would have been no good to anyone. It was little wonder he needed to supplement his income by selling her information; he was never going to become Mister Big from passing on this rubbish. Looking through, she felt relieved not to find any drugs. That would have been harder for her to overlook. At the bottom, she found a small fabric drawstring bag. Opening it, she tipped the contents out on to her desk.
‘Oh, Siset,’ she muttered.
It was a matching necklace and bracelet. Silver and stylish with inset turquoise stones, it chimed with her. Logging into the computer system, she searched through the records until she found what she was after. There on screen was a photograph of the same matching set of jewellery, the picture taken by the owners as an insurance record. They’d been stolen from a house in the Albera mountains, one of the ones Àlex had told her that he and Manel had visited the previous day looking for stone symbols. It linked Siset to the raids on isolated houses. She called Àlex in to take a look.
‘It probably explains why he gave me false information,’ she told him. ‘The little bastard’s playing both sides against the middle.’
‘Dangerous game to be playing with these people,’ Àlex replied.
‘I really need to find him now.’
Elisenda reached for her bag at the sound of her mobile ringing. Answering it, she was shocked to hear the news relayed to her by a sergent in Seguretat Ciutadana.
‘Thanks for letting me know.’ She hung up and looked at Àlex.
‘Marc Comas. He’s been mugged, his phone stolen.’
Àlex looked as shocked as she felt. ‘Want me to go and interview him?’
‘No. I’d better go. You go and look for Siset, you know where he normally hangs out.’ She glanced at the two caporals in the outer office. ‘You’d better go on your own. If you take Manel into Font de la Pólvora, he’ll start a riot.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The mountains in the distance were shrouded in dark cloud. From the movement of the light between the sky and the land, Montse could see that it must be raining heavily up in the mountains. The rivers that fed into the Ter, which brushed the northern edge of the city and eventually gobbled up the Onyar past the Devesa park, would be filling, getting wilder. South and east of the city, so many streams fed into the Onyar, she wondered when they’d see a difference in its flow through the city. Despite the storm protection in the river course as it entered Girona, the water could still run wild under the bridges connecting the old town with the new. She turned away from the view and entered the school. Here in Girona, there was no rain, but there was a humidity curling into the air down in the city centre that had been enervating. Up on Montjuïc, she was making the most of the cooler, dryer air that blew gently on the back of her neck.
Father Besses didn’t come to meet her today. Instead, a secretary in a tartan kilt and thin sweater that looked ideal for the air conditioned environment of the school offices but would have been a millstone in the outside world showed her to a small interview room. A table and four chairs and posters on the walls showing children happily learning religion and sports told Montse that this was one of the rooms where tutors would meet parents to discuss their child’s progress. After a short while, a man in his thirties came into the room and sat down. He was carrying a cup of coffee in each hand.
‘Milk, no sugar,’ he announced. ‘Hope that’s how you like it. I’ll get sugar if you want it.’
‘That’ll be fine,’ she told him.
He put the cups down and took a seat on the side of the table at a right-angle to her.
‘Joaquim Benach,’ he introduced himself, shaking her hand and pushing one of the cups across the table in front of her. ‘I teach French and I’m also Jaume’s tutor. Neither monk nor priest.’
Montse smiled, deciding she liked the man. Seeing him closer up, she revised his age upwards to early forties, but well preserved, with laughter wrinkles around dark eyes and flecks of grey through neatly cut black hair. His movements were easy and he looked like a runner, although she would most probably have known him from the circuit if he had been.
‘You know I’m here about Jaume Comas Miravent,’ she began, turning the handle of the coffee cup to face her but not taking a sip. ‘Really, I want to ask you if you’ve noticed anything in his behaviour that might explain his disappearance.’
Benach idly stirred his coffee even though Montse suspected there was no sugar in it. He was evidently giving himself time to gather his thoughts.
‘I was Jaume’s tutor last year too,’ he told her, ‘which is helpful from your point of view as I can see a progression from one year to the next. If this had been my first year as his tutor, it would have been much too soon in the term to be able to tell you anything of any use.’
He stopped stirring and gently touched the bowl of the spoon against the inside lip of the cup, watching as the capillary action drained the liquid from the spoon. Despite his outward friendliness, he seemed su
ddenly reticent.
‘Did you go to a religious school, Caporal Cornellà?’ he asked her.
‘Please, call me Montse.’ She realised she had to put him at his ease. ‘No, I went to a state school in Santa Eugènia.’
‘So did I. Not in Santa Eugènia, I mean, but here in Girona.’ He looked up from his cup. ‘They’re different beasts, these schools. The parents are the clients, the children the product, the priests and the directors the gatekeepers. And as teachers, you can often feel caught in the middle. I owe a loyalty to the children in my care, but my employment to the clients and the gatekeepers.’
‘I appreciate that you have to be considered in what you tell me, but I do need to know everything possible to be able to find out what’s happened to Jaume. As far as I can promise it, I will be discreet about any information you can give me.’
He smiled and took a sip of coffee. ‘Nice to meet another state school kid.’ He paused before continuing. ‘There are a couple of issues that I see. There has been some change in Jaume from the summer term. Very much for the good, I might add, which makes his disappearance all the more distressing, if that’s possible. All last year, Jaume hung out with two boys in his class, but after the summer holiday, it was evident that they’d fallen out.’
‘Could I meet these two boys?’
‘You’d really have to go through Father Besses for that. And I know that he’ll insist on getting consent from the parents first. I can give you their names, but I’m afraid it’ll be up to you to work out how you speak to them.’