by Chris Lloyd
Àlex looked at the two of them and tutted. ‘Typical Girona.’
He nodded at Manel and the two of them stood up. Elisenda watched them go, Àlex patting Manel on the shoulder as they walked out of the door. She allowed herself a half-smile.
Her smile vanished when the phone in her office rang. Shaking off her weariness, she got up and went into her room to answer it. It was Puigventós, asking her to go and see him.
‘There have been a lot of complaints, Elisenda,’ he told her when she got there. ‘With this siege re-enactment going on this weekend, there’s a cercavila parading around the city and they’re upsetting people.’
‘A cercavila?’
‘I don’t mean the main procession through the streets,’ Puigventós explained. ‘Storytellers. There’s one of the usual groups wandering about the city stopping every now and then to act out a story.’
‘Why should that concern me?’
‘They’re telling stories about a child that’s gone missing.’
Chapter Forty-Three
Two gunshots rang out loud on Plaça de l’Oli, the echo washing back and forth, trapped among the ancient buildings. The noise was deafening and left Elisenda’s ears muted with an underwater numbness. She looked around her, gauging the people’s faces.
A third shot rang out, moments later, and the crowd laughed. The hapless shooter shrugged in exaggerated embarrassment to his two companions and the audience laughed some more. All three were dressed in tattered clothing, scruffy uniforms caricaturing the city’s defenders of two hundred years previously, their cheeks rouged, their noses prosthetically elongated. Their weapons were blunderbusses and they were reloading them now with gunpowder and blanks, the third one as always lagging behind and suffering the expansively wagging fingers of the other two.
Taking her eyes off the leader of the cercavila troupe for one moment, Elisenda glanced around at the audience packing the small dog-legged square. The children stood with their eyes and mouths wide open, some of them tucked into their parents’ legs for protection. The adults were expectant, some of them awaiting an amusing story, others aware of the minor scandal of the leader’s words and hoping to be shocked.
One of the other members of the troupe banged on a drum, while the remaining two blew into bombards, the shrill reeds keening around the little square as deafening as the sound of the blunderbusses. The music suddenly stopped and Elisenda looked back at the leader. He spotted her for the first time and bowed down low, doffing his hat with a flourish and replacing it, pulling himself up once again to his full height.
He was the man she’d spoken to in the Devesa the previous night. The matinee idol with a flowing black wig and comically extravagant nineteenth-century finery.
Taking one last look at her, he turned back to the crowd and cleared his voice, his forefinger on his lip, his little finger cocked, the faded lace of his cuffs cascading down around his hand. The audience hushed.
Out of a wheeled trunk next to him, he pulled out the lifelike figure of a small boy and held it up to the crowd.
‘Nice, Rich Boy,’ he pronounced, his voice already resonating rich and hypnotic in just those few words. ‘He always cleans his teeth and says goodnight to his parents and goes to bed when they tell him and his room is always tidy.’
The leader looked around at the crowd. ‘And he’s rich.’ He bellowed the last word, drawing out the syllable until it was all you could hear in the square.
‘Rich and from a good family and we all have to care about him.’
He set the figure down and pulled a second one out of the trunk. Another small boy, but this time dirty and unkempt, the hair a spiky wig, the clothes grey rags.
‘Horrid, Poor Boy.’
The troupe behind him moved forward and whipped the audience up into a loud booing and baying.
‘He eats dung for his supper and sleeps in the pigs’ trough.’
The crowd laughed and booed some more as the other players went among them.
‘He picks his nose and farts into his sister’s pillowcase. He licks the sweat off stray dogs and pops their fleas.’
The drummer banged her drum once loudly and the crowd gasped in shock and then burst into embarrassed laughter.
As he held a figure in each hand, two troupe members ran up to him, one on either side, and stuffed the two dolls into a sack each and ran off with them.
‘And then they were gone. Missing. Where they went, no one knows. Poor Nice, Rich Boy. And the Mossos went searching for him and they hunted high and low and they turned the city upside down.’
Other troupe members had put comedy police caps on and ran along the front of the crowd pretending to lay into the people with toy batons, gesticulating at them and demanding to know what they’d done with Nice, Rich Boy. The drummer had put her drum down and now walked forward, placing a small podium on the ground and miming a speech, reminiscent of a politician. Every now and then, she sobbed her eyes out for a few seconds and then her expression stiffened and she went straight back to her mimed speech.
‘And his parents did all they could to keep reminding everyone of how important Nice, Rich Boy is and how we have to do everything to find him.’
The leader turned his face and spoke in an aside. ‘And by the way, vote for me.’
Another of the troupe had thrown a striped shirt on over his head like a silent-movie prison uniform and wandered past the leader.
‘So there you are,’ the leader said. ‘We all thought you’d gone missing. Not that anyone cares.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘You are the right sort, after all.’
Elisenda couldn’t help gasping at the obvious reference to Pere Vergés.
The drummer went back to her drum and the first two members came back with the two sacks. The leader emptied the first one and Nice, Rich Boy fell out. He held the figure aloft and the musicians started a screeching celebration while the other three danced wildly in joy around the square.
The music stopped as suddenly as it had started and the leader held his hands up for silence. Lifting the second sack, he shook it, but it was empty. He tried some more, but there was nothing, so he threw the bag over his shoulder, to be caught by one of the players behind him.
‘And horrid, poor boy?’ he asked.
The fake cops stood still and looked bored, filing their nails and whistling to themselves.
The leader stayed silent for an age, the crowd leaning forwards, waiting for his next words. Slowly he raised his arms to the sky, and with one final flourish, he shrugged.
‘Fuck him.’
To a stunned silence followed by a loud gasp, the troupe quickly turned and melted through the thinner crowd behind them and up into the tiny streets rising from the square.
Elisenda struggled her way through the audience, but it was dense and excitable and by the time she’d made it to the foot of the steps leading up into the heart of the old town, the troupe had gone, just the echo of shock lingering behind them. She stood at the bottom and looked up, the steps bifurcating halfway up, the alleyways beyond twisting and multiplying. She would never find them.
‘And what would you say to them if you did?’ she asked herself.
Chapter Forty-Four
Montse knew that her face rarely gave away any emotions, but she was finding it hard to keep up an impassive expression, especially when Bofarull caught her eye and smiled at her in some sort of imagined triumphant collusion, evidently delighted with the reception he felt they were getting. Glad not to have to respond with the valid reason that she was working, Montse turned away to scan the large factory floor once more.
To her right, Susanna Miravent was standing on a pile of three pallets with her back to a tall scaffolding of storage shelves stacked with large cardboard boxes. In front of the politician, a smattering of workers in the plastic moulding works, an old family business on the edge of Salt near the motorway, were listening, to a greater or lesser extent, to her words. Six reporters and a televisi
on crew were recording the event, a last-ditch attempt to win votes in one of the more marginal and marginalised districts. Montse reckoned that was five more reporters and one more television crew than she would have got had it not been for the disappearance of her son.
Despite the campaign manager’s optimism, the day had not gone well. Bofarull and Miravent had obviously targeted Salt as it had a high percentage of immigrants, both from other areas of Spain and from outside the country. Evidently, they felt that offered easy votes for Miravent’s brand of centralism. The responses they were getting were proving them wrong.
‘We pay much more in taxes in Catalonia,’ a young woman in the heart of the small throng now called to the politician, ‘than the central government spends on Catalonia. It’s the highest tax deficit in Europe, higher than what Germany gets back from the EU compared with what it pays.’
Other workers turned around to look at her, some of them nodding.
‘We make the money, Madrid spends it,’ someone else added. ‘And it’s never on us.’
Miravent raised both her hands to placate them. ‘I hear what you’re saying. But at the moment, you pay to support two governments, one in Barcelona and one in Madrid. It’s inefficient. You’d all be better off if you only had to pay for the one in Madrid, which would then be able to fund Catalonia properly, as it deserves.’
The young woman laughed bitterly. ‘Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.’ It drew similar laughs from the people around her.
‘Why should we vote for you in Barcelona if you don’t believe in the Catalan government?’ another voice shouted. ‘If you don’t think it should exist, you shouldn’t be standing for election to it.’
Miravent hushed them again with her hands. ‘Because all the people who disagree with the Catalan government as an institution deserve a voice in it, to overturn the excesses of those who would split this great country up and lead us out of a union that has served Catalonia well for three centuries.’
Montse had to give Miravent credit for remaining calm in the face of such little acceptance of her views at best, a mocking of them at worst. Hers was a blind and all-encompassing faith, the caporal decided.
At the end of the one-sided rally, as the workers drifted away back to their workplaces, ignoring Bofarull and his pile of glossy leaflets, Montse kept a firm eye on Miravent, but no one approached her, either to threaten her or to engage in discussion. Studying her, Montse realised that the politician had little concern for whether they did or not, her faith in her beliefs outweighing any sort of empathy.
The room emptied and Bofarull rejoined them. His phone rang as he was about to say something to Miravent. Answering it, he suddenly looked concerned and hung up.
‘I have to go,’ he told Miravent. ‘I’ll only be an hour or so.’
‘What is it?’ Montse asked him.
‘My home might be flooded. There’s been a burst pipe in the village. The water company’s just called to say they need to get into my house in case it’s been affected.’
‘Can’t one of your neighbours see to it?’ Miravent asked him. ‘Or your parents?’
‘My neighbours don’t have keys and my parents are elderly. They’d panic.’
‘Go on then,’ she told him. ‘I’ll manage on my own.’
Montse studied the concern on his face. ‘Do you want a Mossos car to take you?’
‘No, really, it’s not a problem. I’ll take my car. If you could drive Susanna home, I’d be grateful. This was the last place on today’s itinerary, so it hasn’t messed up the schedule.’
‘You might need our help,’ Montse insisted.
‘No, really, please. It’s not important.’
‘I’ll see you back at the house later,’ Miravent interrupted, looking to Montse for her lift home.
Montse watched Bofarull hurry off.
‘One moment,’ she told Miravent.
Moving a discreet distance away, she rang Josep at Vista Alegre to tell him to send a Seguretat Ciutadana car to Bofarull’s house to check up.
‘Shall we go?’ she asked the politician once she’d hung up.
* * *
‘What a cold fish,’ Montse complained to Josep.
She’d left Miravent in Palau with Seguretat Ciutadana watching the house and had gone back to Vista Alegre. Comas had been sitting with a whisky in the living room, looking pale and sorry for himself. The couple had barely greeted each other. Before leaving, Montse had checked with the two techies in the spare bedroom, but they’d told her there’d been nothing of interest.
‘If my kid was missing,’ she carried on telling Josep, ‘I’d be kicking up a shitstorm to find him. I’d make a complete pain of myself. All she does is look martyred and hide behind her religion.’
Josep looked up from the computer he was working on. ‘Had a good day?’
‘It’s her own son, for Christ’s sake.’ Montse wasn’t to be deterred. ‘What sort of a mother just accepts they’ve gone missing and they’ll be back if it’s God’s will? And the husband’s worse. He just goes along with it.’
She was about to say more, but Josep was in time to signal to her with a glance to keep quiet. Looking quizzically at him, she heard the outer door open and turned to see Elisenda come into the room. She turned quickly back to Josep and mouthed a thank you.
‘Please tell me something of interest,’ Elisenda asked them.
She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily in the outer room with them. Before either of them could reply, she told them quickly about the cercavila.
‘They haven’t done anything illegal,’ she concluded, ‘and it would be heavy-handed of us to stop them, but I’d like a word with them to find out what they’re about. Especially the bit about the prisoner going missing.’
‘Pere Vergés?’ Josep asked. ‘Just got this in the last ten five minutes. I was about to call you.’
He turned his screen to face Elisenda and Montse. It was a group photo of about a dozen people that looked to be taken from an academic yearbook. He pointed to a man on the left of the picture.
‘That’s Francesc Bofarull. This is his class at business school in Barcelona.’ He pointed to a second man nearer the centre of the group. ‘And that…’
Elisenda peered closely at the figure.
‘That is Pere Vergés,’ she said. ‘Bofarull said he didn’t know Vergés.’
‘I haven’t got much more,’ Josep told her. ‘Just the names of the class and where they were working at the time. Vergés was with an IT company in Barcelona, and Bofarull was with an agency that took care of all of its marketing.’
‘So conceivably they knew each other from the course and through work. So why did Bofarull lie about knowing Vergés?’
Montse spoke up. ‘Bofarull got a call about an hour ago, saying he had to go home. His house was flooded.’
‘I asked the La Bisbal station to check it out,’ Josep added. ‘They said they were busy, but that they’d get on to it when they could.’
Elisenda stood up, the weariness gone. ‘Àlex and Manel are in the area. Get hold of them and tell them to get out there. And ring La Bisbal again, get them to send a car.’
‘You think it’s significant?’ Josep asked.
‘I think Bofarull has had more questions to answer all along. He could just be sheltering Vergés, or he could be holding him against his will if there’s something more sinister about their relationship.’
‘You think he framed Vergés for the IT fraud?’ Montse asked.
‘He lied about knowing him,’ Elisenda explained. ‘Judging by the equipment in his house, he’d know enough about computing to do the fraud. It’s more than possible.’
‘It could be the other way around,’ Montse argued. ‘Vergés is a threat to Bofarull. If he thinks Bofarull framed him, he’d be out for revenge.’
‘Then why take the boy? Either way, we need to get into Bofarull’s place. Josep, get a warrant to search his house and join us there. Montse and I
will go on ahead. I want to see what really is in that cellar he keeps locked.’
Chapter Forty-Five
Elisenda hung up her mobile with her left hand and clung to the strap above the car door with her right.
‘Water company,’ she told Montse. ‘There’ve been no burst pipes in Vulpellac today.’
‘Damn,’ Montse muttered and put her foot down perceptibly harder on the accelerator.
The car bucked forward, bouncing on the endless ups and downs of the road. Elisenda clung more tightly to the strap and decided that the colour of hell was blue. Through the side window, the car’s flashing light reflected against the night-time fields and streets zipping by in a blur, the icy flare crowding the trees and buildings towards her in frightening relief. At least by looking to the front, the sensation of rushing dread was lessened, replaced by a more considered onrush of nerve-jangling awareness of what lay ahead. She also reckoned that the fast road had sprouted a few more roundabouts in the last twenty-four hours.
‘You’ve done nothing wrong,’ Elisenda told her, closing her eyes for a second as they passed a lorry. ‘Although, get us killed and I’ll be a bit pissed off.’
Montse managed a small laugh, but didn’t slow down.
With one hand, Elisenda tried ringing both Àlex and Josep again, but was sent to voicemail both times. To take her mind off the drive, she voiced the questions that came to her now it had been confirmed that the water company hadn’t been whoever it was that had called Bofarull.
‘Either Bofarull lied to you and Miravent,’ she said. ‘Or the person that called lied to him. Either way, could it have been Vergés?’ She glanced over at Montse, concentrating firmly on the road. She had to slow down to go through the centre of La Bisbal, putting the siren on to ignore the traffic lights. Even the noise echoing harshly back at them in the narrow main street was a relief after the white-knuckle terror of the open road. ‘And did Bofarull really go home, or is this just a wild goose chase and he’s somewhere else entirely?’