by Chris Lloyd
It was a different park. The unusual sight of tents and torches and stands in readiness for the morning’s festivities turned it into another beast, not one of painful memory, but a make-believe place where evil didn’t enter. Savouring the scent of the trees and the sounds of low laughter and conversation, she found herself walking lightly through the groups of people getting ready for the night. The pressure of the two investigations seemed to float away from her, up into the leaves overhead.
She was surprised by a figure walking among the stands, talking to people as he went. She caught up with him by a group of re-enactors in French military costume.
‘Sotsinspector Armengol?’ she called him.
He turned to face her. In his hand, he held a sheaf of papers, the photos of Jaume Comas Miravent that they’d been distributing. He looked almost guilty.
‘Elisenda.’
‘Are you on your own?’
He shook his head. ‘A few of my team are out, we’re asking the newcomers who’ve come for the siege celebrations if they’ve seen Jaume.’
‘Seguretat Ciutadana have already been here. You really don’t have to.’
‘There are more visitors here now. Most of them won’t have been asked if they’ve seen him.’ He paused for a moment, seemingly indecisive. ‘I was talking to missing persons in Sabadell earlier. They were saying the flow of calls and messages has slowed down.’
Elisenda led him away from the group of re-enactors. ‘Did they say why?’
‘It coincides with every time Susanna Miravent makes a public appearance. When she’s quiet, the public helps more. When she looks like she’s using it for political gain, people switch off. It’s upsetting. Naturally, the public wants to help when a child goes missing, but she puts so many backs up that everyone starts questioning the integrity of the whole thing. It’s hampering the search.’
‘And that’s why you’re out showing the photo?’ She looked at the tents and stands fading under the line of trees. ‘Here, give me some. I’ll take the other end of the park.’
He handed her half his pile. ‘One other thing,’ he added. ‘I’ve also been checking out the attack on Marc Comas. There’s no record of anyone trying to use the stolen bank cards, which is unusual. Normally, I’d expect them to be used in the first hour at least. And my team’s heard nothing about anyone trying to sell them on. The same with the mobile phone. It hasn’t been used and no one’s been caught trying to sell it. That’s not normal for this type of robbery.’
‘No word from any informants?’
Armengol gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘My team have found nothing. And I’m new to the city, so I’m still building up my contacts. That’s the problem of sending us all to different parts of Catalonia.’
‘It’ll come.’
Armengol smiled a second time as Elisenda turned to head off for the other end of the Devesa. ‘I’m sure it will. I just need people to understand that we’re all new at some point.’
Elisenda digested his last words as she made her way through the park, asking questions and handing out photos. She’d finished her stack of pictures towards the end of the Devesa furthest from the city centre when she found a figure standing in front of her. Staring into her eyes all the time, he bowed down low, the feathers in his cap brushing the ground at his feet. With another flourish, he stood up again and replaced his battered tricorne.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked her. ‘Food is on its way.’
‘I want to talk to you,’ she told the leader of the cercavila.
He turned and strode away, threatening to vanish into the shadows. ‘Follow me.’
He led and she followed to the camp where she’d seen him the previous evening. He took out a lace handkerchief and slapped it across a stool before inviting her to sit. The other members of his troupe were a short distance away, engrossed in their own conversations. Despite herself, she accepted his offer.
‘The story you were telling,’ she asked him immediately. ‘About a missing boy and a prisoner.’
He looked at her intently, his eyes glittering in the glow of the camping lamps. ‘Just a story. I see what’s happening around me and I turn it into a tale for people to feel self-righteous.’
‘What do you know about a missing prisoner?’
‘Ah, a police officer asking questions. That is always good to see. It makes me feel protected, wanted. Perhaps we should be more respectful in our depictions of you.’
‘It’s not so very long ago that you’d have been imprisoned for mocking a police officer,’ she told him, instantly regretting the words, which sounded officious even to her.
He laughed, but not cruelly. ‘Then we should all be grateful we live in a more enlightened age. One where we can tell our stories and not be worried about who’s listening. I promise you, it’s just a tale that I tell to entertain and send all good people to their homes certain of their own probity and morals. No one need take offence unless they have to. Why are you in the park at this time of night?’
Surprised at the change in direction, she didn’t know what to say.
‘Maybe you don’t want to go home,’ he continued.
Low in the darkness, his voice was more mesmerising still than it had been when it echoed in the narrow square of the old town. She felt herself being drawn in by its honeyed comfort.
He leaned back and studied her face, his gaze flickering from her one eye to the other and then back again. ‘No, it’s not that.’ Suddenly he stopped. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
He looked down and seemed to pause for an age before replying. ‘I had a wife and a son. I lost them.’ He looked up at her again. ‘I see it in you.’
A commotion nearby took away her need to answer. A sudden grin crossed his face.
‘Food. I told you it was on its way.’
Elisenda turned around to see a motorcycle courier delivering a pile of pizzas to the nineteenth-century camp under the trees and the spell was broken.
‘I can’t stay,’ she told him.
The wall behind him felt wetter.
He couldn’t see it, so he had to feel as far as he could with his left hand. What had been damp before, then a film of water on the coarse stone, had become a slow but steady trickle. He felt it build up against his fingertips and flow around them like tree branches in a swollen river. He tried to reach further to see how far it went, but the pain of the metal band cutting into his right wrist pulled him back.
He sat forward from the wall to avoid the wet. Another wave of pain hit him. Hunger. And thirst. Cautiously, he took a drink from the plastic water bottle. It tasted all right, so he drank some more. Unwrapping the tin foil package with his left hand, he took out the baguette and bit into it. The bread was stale, the crust flaking, but the inside was soaked. The tomato and oil had seeped into the white of the bread and turned it to mush. He felt nauseous but he ate it. He didn’t know when the next one would be coming.
Finishing the food, he instinctively turned to look at the plastic bucket standing within a short reach. His eyes prickled. He’d had to use it. The stench of his own faeces after the pulp of the sandwich almost made him retch the food back up. He’d put the bucket as far away from him as he could, but he still had to be able to reach it, so the smell was only ever an arm’s length distant.
The door above him opened. It all but blinded him, used as he was now to the dark of the cellar. The figure standing in the frame looked down at him but said nothing. The light behind him was weak, and he couldn’t see his face.
‘You don’t know what you’re going to do with me, do you?’ he called up to his captor.
Chapter Forty-Eight
‘You’ve done your homework.’
Elisenda stood on the landing. She hadn’t even crossed the threshold into the counsellor’s office. ‘How can you know?’
‘I told you I’d know.’
Puyals invited her in and tried to conceal a smile. The dark semi-circles that
were a constant under Elisenda’s eyes were in abeyance, her irises brighter than the counsellor had seen them all week.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she asked once they’d both taken up their positions on chair and recliner.
Elisenda closed her eyes and tried to order in her mind what had happened after she’d got home last night. After the discovery of Bofarull’s body, after breaking the news to his parents, after the disconcerting conversation with the leader of the cercavila, home was anything but a refuge. Giving up on bed, she’d wrapped herself in a sheet on the sofa and tried to blot out a lullaby curling misshapen through the corners of her flat. Shadows ghosted behind the paper screens and she’d felt for the first time that her redecoration had made the nights worse. She had nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the darkness that ran through the open rooms of her apartment. In desperation, she’d tipped her bag out onto the coffee table to look for an aspirin when she found the piece of paper that Puyals had given her two days earlier. She’d read it and thrown it down in disgust.
‘What a load of nonsense,’ she muttered out loud.
‘But you tried it?’ Puyals asked her now.
‘I tried it. I went and got paper and a pen and I wrote down a memory of Lina.’
What she’d written about was her daughter’s fourth birthday, when it was just the two of them living in Barcelona. She’d taken her to the zoo, expecting Lina to be overwhelmed by the animals and the sights and sounds of the park. Instead, she’d barely noticed the big cats and the penguins and the snakes that had enthralled all the other children. Her boredom had quickly turned to fractiousness. For Elisenda, it had been turning into another day of disappointment until she’d suddenly noticed Lina wasn’t next to her. She turned to see her on the path behind, calling Elisenda over urgently, her voice hoarse with excitement. She was looking down at the footpath.
‘Look, mama,’ she’d cried. ‘Ants.’
‘Ants?’ Elisenda had wept with laughter and gathered her daughter up for a hug until she’d struggled and demanded to be let down again.
‘I took her to a zoo,’ Elisenda told Puyals, ‘and all that interested her were the ants.’
‘And?’ Puyals prompted her.
‘And I don’t remember anything else until the sunlight coming in through the gaps in the shutters and waking me up. I’d slept through the night.’
She’d woken up to look at the notebook on the table. She was shocked to see she’d written pages and pages. She remembered nothing of the process.
‘We’ll be changing to weekly visits,’ Puyals told her at the end of the session.
‘Weekly?’ Elisenda couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
‘You can call me if you need to. But if you keep doing your homework, that won’t be necessary. We’ll set our day for Saturday morning and leave it at that for a few weeks.’
‘Saturday morning? What if I get lucky on Friday night?’
‘Then we’ll have something else to talk about on Saturday morning.’
* * *
Montse was waiting for Elisenda outside Susanna Miravent’s house in Palau. The number of journalists in the huddle hadn’t dwindled, despite the little news that the Mossos had been willing or able to release to them. The same reporter as before shouted out the same question about Jaume’s disappearance being the work of a sex offender. Elisenda didn’t bother replying this time.
‘We have to expect this sort of interest to increase today,’ she told Montse as they walked up the drive to the house. ‘Since they can’t report on the elections, the missing child of a controversial politician is the next best thing.’
It was Saturday, the day before the election, known as the day of reflection. Legally, parties weren’t allowed to canvas and the press couldn’t try to influence voters. Publishing the results of opinion polls had already been illegal for the last four days, although most of the papers got around it by reporting on polls shown in the foreign press.
‘About time we got rid of it,’ Montse commented. ‘Everyone talks about the elections on Twitter anyway.’
‘In theory, that’s illegal too today. If they ever try and enforce it, we’re going to need a lot more Mossos.’
Inside the house, Miravent was on her own in the living room. She was standing by the wall that stood at a right-angle to the glass doors leading out into the garden. It was covered in framed photos of the family and of her political career.
‘You might want to sit down,’ Elisenda told her.
‘I’m perfectly fine where I am, thank you,’ the politician replied.
Elisenda inhaled deeply without it showing, a trick she’d had to learn since joining the Mossos, and told Miravent that her campaign manager had been found dead the previous night. For once, there was a reaction of sorts, a muted shock that left her speechless and staring at Elisenda for a long moment.
‘How?’ was all she asked.
Elisenda explained the circumstances of Bofarull’s death in as little detail as was necessary. ‘It’s important that you answer me,’ she concluded. ‘Is there anyone that you think might be responsible for this?’
‘I presume you mean do I think that Pere Vergés would be capable?’ Miravent replied. Her aloof coldness was back in place, although her eyes betrayed that she was fighting back tears. Elisenda wanted to tell her that it was all right to cry, but she knew the woman wouldn’t appreciate it. ‘I wouldn’t have said so before his time in prison. Now, I really couldn’t say.’
‘And would he be capable of taking your son?’ Elisenda asked.
Unusually, Miravent didn’t reply immediately, looking instead at the wall of photos next to her. ‘I suppose my answer would be the same. I doubt that the Pere Vergés I knew would be capable of it. But after all that’s happened to him, I don’t know.’
‘I have to know if there is any reason he might blame you or your husband for what happened to him. If you haven’t told me before, I need you to tell me now.’
‘There really is nothing.’ Her voice sounded strained, the first time Elisenda had heard that.
‘We have to presume that he is involved,’ Elisenda continued. ‘Given what happened last night and that today is both the anniversary of the siege and the day of reflection, this might be the day that he makes his move. So I must insist that you accept protection from my team and from other Mossos. Are you or your husband planning on going out today? If you are, Montse here will be accompanying you. Is your husband here right now?’
‘He’s in his study. We will both be going into the city centre this morning to watch some of the re-enactments. As a candidate in the elections, I have to be there to show my face.’
She turned away to study the wall. Elisenda walked across to join her. She was gazing at pictures of Jaume at various sporting events and class graduations.
‘I’m not as cold as you think I am, Elisenda,’ she said in a low voice. ‘My faith is what brings me through all this.’
On the wall directly in front of her, Elisenda saw a photo of a much younger Jaume holding a small trophy.
‘What did he win the cup for?’ she asked.
Miravent laughed, a faint trace of bitterness in it. ‘Kayaking. It was one of the days I organise for members of our faith. We have a large picnic together and there are competitions for adults and children. Jaume won the kayaking competition. He was only ten at the time, the other children he raced against were a few years older.’
Elisenda peered at the photo, trying to place it. ‘Is that near Susqueda?’
Miravent nodded. ‘That is faith, Elisenda. I lost my older son to the water and I allowed my younger son to go back to the water.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
‘I think the time’s come to tell people what to look for.’
Àlex couldn’t contain his frustration. ‘We’ll be showing our hand. It’s the one thing we’ve got on this gang that they don’t know we’ve got.’
Elisenda was adamant. ‘We need to warn
home-owners. We have to tell them about the symbols and get them to look around their own homes in case they’ve been targeted. If we don’t, we’re going to see more victims.’
Her unit were gathered in her office, except for Montse, who had stayed in Palau with Miravent. Between them, the day’s copy of the local newspaper lay open on pages two and three. A double spread told of the religious pamphlets that had been found at the houses that had been attacked. Owners in isolated villages were being warned to report any religious callers to the police. It wasn’t an initiative that the Mossos had put out.
‘They’ll just change their MO and we’ll be back to square one,’ Àlex insisted. ‘We’d never be able to anticipate an attack.’
‘We can’t anticipate one now. You’ve seen that we couldn’t ever hope to check out all the homes in the Baix Empordà, let alone the whole of the Girona region. We have to rely on people looking for themselves and warning us.’
‘And warning the gang while they’re at it.’
‘It’s a risk we have to take, Àlex. We have to hope they don’t see the message, but we can’t simply allow them to keep up their attacks and not warn owners. That has to come first.’
She could see that his frustration was because he knew she was right. She also knew that he had a point. Tipping the attackers off that the Mossos knew of the symbols could easily make them change their way of going about the robberies and set her team’s investigation back.
Àlex pointed at the newspaper, his voice resigned. ‘For all we know, this has already done it. If they see this, they’ll change how they pick the houses. The paper probably found out about it because we’ve been asking owners if they’ve had a visit from these people. Any one of them could have told the press.’