by Chris Lloyd
Outside, the air was damp with moisture. Over to the west, she could see vertical wavering streams of lighter colour amid the black clouds, telling her that the mountains that way were getting a soaking. The rivers in Girona would be higher still when she got back.
‘I’ll see if there are any others where he could be kept,’ Josep told her in the car on the way to Vista Alegre. There was anger and frustration in his voice. ‘But of them all, these were the only really likely ones.’
‘Do what you can. We might be barking up the wrong tree with Canet, but he’s got some hold on Comas, so we need to be sure.’
‘I’ll keep digging. With Vergés too.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Have you seen this morning’s newspaper? It’s on the back seat.’
She turned and reached for it, scanning the front page and opening it to read inside. After just a few moments, she crushed it in her lap. ‘Bastard.’
Àlex and Manel were waiting for them at the station. Montse was with Miravent and Comas in the house in Palau. They’d be going out to vote in the elections, and Elisenda wanted someone from her team to be with them, both for their safety but also to keep a close watch on the couple.
‘Josep needs to be checking up on some things,’ she told Àlex. ‘We’ll have to interview our burglars between you, me and Manel. Apart from bringing down the rest of the gang, I want to make sure it was them who were involved in Bofarull’s murder so we can rule out any link to Jaume’s disappearance.’
She got a call on her internal phone. It was the officer in charge of the cells. Sighing, she hung up.
‘It’s Siset,’ she told Àlex. ‘Apparently he’s revolting. Give me five minutes and then we’ll start on the interviews.’
She collected her informant from the cells and took him to an interview room.
‘You’ve got to let me go, Elisenda,’ he complained.
‘Few more hours of your company yet, Siset. I wouldn’t want to miss you. You can go soon, but first, tell me what you know about Salvador Canet.’
His eyes flickered. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘Yes, you do. What do you know about him? And don’t piss me around anymore because my jaw is aching and I’m in a foul mood and you’re about to be on the receiving end of it.’
He looked at her to make sure she was being serious. ‘I know who he is, Elisenda, but I don’t know anything about him. I don’t do white-collar crime.’
Elisenda considered the glowering menace of the builder. ‘He’s hardly white-collar, Siset.’
‘He is compared to me.’ There was no irony in his voice. He looked doubtful about saying any more. ‘People talk about him like he’s part of the world, but I’ve never had anything to do with him. I know people who’ve worked for him, but they won’t say a thing about him or what they do for him. He’s mean.’
‘Mean,’ Elisenda repeated. That was about the most damning thing Siset could say about anyone as it meant he was scared of them. It also meant that he was unlikely to give anything away about Canet at this stage. ‘If you hear anything, you make sure you let me know.’
He pulled his face into a grimace, which she recognised as Siset’s attempt at a smile. ‘I can’t find anything out when I’m in here.’
She sighed and stood up. ‘All right, you can go.’
He almost whooped in joy and made to get up. She put her hand on his shoulder forcing him back down.
‘There’s just one more thing I need you to do.’
Chapter Fifty-Seven
‘Do you know any of them?’
Siset stood next to Elisenda peering through a grille near the cells. Four men were being taken out of a cell one at a time and made to stand in view of Siset for a moment. They couldn’t see him.
‘I don’t know any of them,’ he whispered to her.
‘Are you telling me the truth, Siset? Because I can hold you for a few more hours.’
Siset looked panicked. ‘I swear it, Elisenda. I don’t know any of them.’
‘These aren’t the ones who sold you the goods from the robberies? Or who told you when to expect them?’
He shrank back into the small room and whispered even lower. ‘Is that them?’ He stared at the last one in awe. ‘No, it was only ever two who came to see me. An older one and a younger one. But their faces were always hidden.’
She believed him. He was too scared to be lying. ‘The two you met? Where were they from?’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Here. Well, Spain anyway. They spoke Spanish. Why?’
She considered that for a moment. ‘No reason. Come on, you can go now.’
They waited until two of the men had been led upstairs to the interview rooms and the other two put back in separate cells. Siset walked with Elisenda nervously to the sergent in charge of the cells to be discharged.
‘They can’t see me, can they?’ he asked her.
‘Not at all.’
He only began to cheer up when the sergent handed his leather satchel back to him, and he started rummaging through it.
‘It’s a bit lighter,’ Elisenda told him. ‘We’ve taken out anything we think was stolen, which was pretty much everything. You’ll be hearing about that when I can be bothered with you. Now go and vote. There’s an election today.’
‘Is there?’ He shook his head. ‘I never vote. Politicians, load of crooks if you ask me.’
She rolled her eyes at the sergent behind the desk and accompanied Siset to the door leading out of the police station. He’d no doubt be back before long, she thought.
* * *
‘Venezuelan.’
The man in the first interview room patted himself on the chest and repeated the word for the seventh time.
‘No, you’re not,’ Elisenda told him, her voice tired.
‘Venezuelan.’
‘So how come you claim you don’t speak Spanish?’
‘Don’t speak Spanish. Speak Venezuelan.’
Elisenda looked at Manel and shook her head in disbelief.
‘Say something in Venezuelan then,’ Manel told him.
Muscular and tanned and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, the man looked insolently at Manel and began to speak in a language that most certainly wasn’t Spanish. The first time he’d tried speaking it half an hour ago, Elisenda had thought she’d recognised it, so she’d called for an interpreter from the pool that the Mossos had in Girona. The woman was sitting in a corner of the room now, having entered a short while ago without saying a word. After the man had been speaking for a few moments, she replied to him, her voice calm. He blanched and stared at her.
‘Thank you,’ Elisenda told the woman. She turned back to the man. ‘So you speak Romanian in Venezuela, I take it.’ She paused the interview for a moment and left the room with Manel and the interpreter.
Two of the other three would-be robbers that the Mossos had caught the previous night were also claiming to be Venezuelan.
‘They at least speak Spanish,’ Elisenda told Àlex outside in the corridor. ‘Although their accent doesn’t sound Venezuelan to me.’
‘I’d say Peruvian,’ Àlex agreed.
‘Why are they claiming to be Venezuelan?’ Manel asked, puzzled.
Àlex grinned at him. ‘Country boy.’
‘Because Venezuela and Spain don’t have an extradition treaty,’ Elisenda explained to him. ‘A lot of crooks from Latin America buy fake Venezuelan IDs, so that if they’re caught, they can’t be sent back to their own countries after serving their sentences here.’ She grinned too. ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever seen a European trying that one on.’
Elisenda went into the other interview room, where the fourth suspect was slumped on an upright chair. Thin and with vulpine eyes that glowed with malice, he folded his arms and sat up straight when she walked in. His nose was heavily plastered from where Elisenda had hit him during the attack on the house. She felt a pulse of pain in her own jaw and couldn’t help feeling satisfied at the bruising around the man
’s nose and cheeks. His lip was swollen, but that hadn’t stopped him from snarling threats at her and Àlex on and off for the last hour. He was the one Spaniard among the gang.
‘I’m not saying a fucking word,’ he repeated to Elisenda now.
‘No need,’ she told him. ‘You see, I know how your operation works. You have three teams, each one allocated a house to rob. Yours is team number two, so it’s obviously not the best.’
He leered at her. ‘That won’t work on me, girlie.’
‘And you have a couple of people who check out the houses and tell you which ones to rob,’ she carried on regardless. ‘Now, what I reckon is that each team has a leader who’s more senior in the setup. You’re the leader of your merry little bunch. And you will be the ones to get the longer sentences when we put you all away. Unless you decide to be a little more helpful than you have been and give me some names.’
He leaned forward and peered at her. ‘You are fucking joking, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am. One of your friends has already told us.’
He smirked and sat back. ‘You really think so? They couldn’t even if they wanted to.’
‘And why’s that?’
Leering at her, he shook his head and kept quiet.
Telling Manel to come in and sit with the man, Elisenda joined Àlex in the first interview room. She shook her head at his silent question about how things had gone with the other suspect. Àlex had sent the Romanian back to the cells and was questioning one of the two non-Venezuelan Latin Americans. Elisenda recognised him as the one she’d punched in the stomach. She was struck again by how ordinary he looked without the balaclava. A short, wiry man in his thirties, he was all fibre, the veins standing out like thin rope on his tanned forearms, his dark hair thinning on top. He appeared to be more forthcoming than his friends.
‘We don’t know who the others are,’ he was telling Àlex in Spanish. ‘We’re told where to go. We just do as we’re told to do.’
‘You must meet the others when you pass on the goods you steal,’ Àlex demanded.
He shook his head. ‘Only Esteban does that.’ Esteban was the Spanish gang member. ‘And he only knows two others. He used to take the stuff to them. But he doesn’t know who’s in the other gangs. None of us do. They’re nothing to do with us.’
‘One of your gangs murdered someone on Friday night,’ Elisenda interrupted. ‘You will all be charged as accessories.’
The man looked shocked. ‘We never killed anyone. That’s nothing to do with us.’
‘It will go easier on you if you give us some names,’ Àlex told him. ‘You must have heard names at least.’
He was frightened but insistent. ‘I don’t know anyone. They did that deliberately so we wouldn’t all go down if one of us got caught.’
Elisenda called a pause and she and Àlex went outside.
‘I don’t see how we’re going to get to the other parts of this gang,’ Àlex muttered. ‘They’ve done a good job in keeping them all separate.’
Elisenda swore under her breath. ‘We can get these four put away without any problem, but I don’t see how we’re going to get to the others. I’ve got to see how Josep is doing with Jaume, but you keep at it with these. See if you can find any way in.’
* * *
‘I was just about to come and get you,’ Josep told Elisenda, opening the door to her office.
He stopped talking when he saw she was on the phone. In front of her was the newspaper he’d shown her, open on the article that David Costa had written, questioning Susanna Miravent’s attitude to her two missing children.
‘I trusted you, David,’ she was saying into her mobile. She slapped her hand on the page open on her desk. ‘This is every bit as bad as Miravent’s electioneering. I dislike her politics as much as you do, but that’s no excuse to come down to her level and use it for the same purposes. You’ve used her missing child to rubbish her election chances.’
‘It’s in the public interest, Elisenda. How can the electorate trust a woman like that?’
‘That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re pandering to your readers.’ She looked at a line that mentioned how the politician’s attitude was hampering the police investigation, and her anger peaked. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself this time, David. I didn’t think even you would be so underhand. I trusted you.’
She stabbed at the off button on the screen before he had a chance to reply. Putting the phone down on the desk, she took a few deep breaths before looking up at Josep. ‘Bring me good news, Josep, I’m warning you.’
He looked uncertainly at the bundle he was holding. In one hand was a printed report while the other held his laptop. He placed the computer on Elisenda’s desk. ‘Científica have given us Pere Vergés’s desktop computer back. They found nothing on it to suggest any wrongdoing. Crucially, there’s nothing on it that would suggest any involvement in the fraud he was convicted of either.’
‘I said good news.’ She looked at the laptop. ‘I’m convinced that Francesc Bofarull was behind that, but we’ve no way of knowing for certain as we can’t check his computers. This is turning out to be one hell of a shitty Sunday.’
‘There is one thing. Científica retrieved all the files that Vergés deleted. There was nothing too sinister about them, otherwise he’d have known enough to wipe them completely. But there are a number of emails that he sent to Susanna Miravent.’
He gestured at the laptop, and Elisenda turned it to face her. ‘Miravent?’
Josep leaned down next to her and opened a file with a string of emails. ‘He sent them between the time that he was being investigated for fraud and when he was arrested and held in custody until his trial and conviction.’
Elisenda quickly scanned them. ‘That is one angry man.’
‘All his Opus Dei friends were shutting him out. He complains here how no one would help him and how he felt he’d become an outcast.’
‘And he blames Susanna Miravent for it,’ she commented, looking through the mails he’d sent her. ‘She doesn’t reply to any of these?’
‘Just two, one telling him that she’ll get an injunction if he continues to harass her. And the other one to tell him that he is now dead to her and to their faith.’
‘Very Christian.’
‘If you look, his mails get increasingly more threatening. He tells her he’ll haunt them if he’s convicted. He also talks about a get-together that she was organising. He was told he wasn’t welcome.’
Elisenda found the email Josep was referring to. She let out a low whistle. ‘And he wasn’t happy about it, was he?’
The final email told Miravent that he would find a way to make her pay for her treatment of him. Elisenda sat back thoughtfully.
‘So why hasn’t Susanna Miravent mentioned this?’
* * *
The politician looked at the printout that Elisenda had given to her.
‘Why haven’t I mentioned it?’ She riffled through the papers. ‘Look at it. They’re the outpourings of a bitter man. I didn’t take them seriously at the time. I haven’t mentioned it simply because I’d forgotten about them. I deleted them straight after he sent them.’
Elisenda glanced at Montse, who was standing by the window in Miravent’s house in Palau. The three of them were by the table overlooking the garden, in front of the wall of family photos. When she’d arrived, the politician and her husband had just been getting ready to go and place their vote and then they were going on into the city centre to see more of the siege re-enactments.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Miravent had said, ‘but in my position as a political candidate, I have to.’
Her face was looking drawn for the first time. Montse had told Elisenda that she’d been staring at the pictures on the wall. It was the only semblance of an emotion she’d shown about her missing son.
‘I just don’t get her,’ Montse had muttered.
Elisenda joined the politician at the wall and looked at the pic
tures. She found again the one of Jaume with his kayaking trophy.
‘That was four years ago today,’ Miravent told her. ‘Near the reservoir in Susqueda.’
‘Today?’
She nodded. ‘I always used to organise one this weekend. That’s why we’ve never seen the re-enactments in the past. It always clashed with our autumn outing.’
‘And you did this every year?’
‘Every year. For the association. Jaume used to love it.’ For a moment, Elisenda thought that some facade was about to come down, the faith failing to keep emotion back, but Miravent held herself in check. She corrected herself. ‘Jaume loves it. I only didn’t organise one for this year because of the elections. With what’s happened, that’s been a blessing.’
Elisenda turned to face her. ‘Is this the get-together that Pere Vergés talks about in his emails?’
‘I have no idea.’
Elisenda grabbed the printouts back and looked at the dates. ‘It was this outing four years ago that you banned him from going to. It would have been this weekend. Today.’
Miravent tore her eyes away from the wall and glanced at the sheets of paper. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so.’ She pulled her mobile out and dialled while still speaking to Miravent. ‘Where exactly was that picture taken?’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
They were thirty minutes out of the city when they hit a wall of rain. Thunderous black clouds writhed and twisted above them and a roar of water pummelled the roof of the car, beating a clamorous counterpoint to their urgency. Instinctively, the driver of the four-by-four quickened her pace in time with the anger of the skies. Taking a sweeping corner to the left, the patrol car aquaplaned, gliding ominously towards the middle of the road and an oncoming lorry. Calmly, she pulled it back under control without skipping a beat and accelerated after the curve along one of the few straight stretches. In the passenger seat, Elisenda closed her eyes for a moment, but quickly opened them again when she realised that that was worse.