City of Good Death: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A Detective Elisenda Domènech Investigation 1) Read online

  City of Good Death

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Chapter Sixty Three

  Chapter Sixty Four

  Chapter Sixty Five

  Chapter Sixty Six

  Chapter Sixty Seven

  Chapter Sixty Eight

  Chapter Sixty Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy One

  Chapter Seventy Two

  Chapter Seventy Three

  Chapter Seventy Four

  Chapter Seventy Five

  Chapter Seventy Six

  Chapter Seventy Seven

  Chapter Seventy Eight

  Chapter Seventy Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty One

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Liz. For everything.

  Chapter One

  It began with the tiny effigy hanging from the Verge de la Bona Mort.

  No one knew its meaning.

  Not that first morning, anyway.

  And that was what proved to be the problem.

  The Verge de la Bona Mort. The Virgin of Good Death. Such an overwhelming name for such a small statue. Standing in her narrow niche between the ancient stone towers of the Portal de Sobreportes, high above the slender cobbled street below, she had in medieval times been the last sight that condemned prisoners had of the city. A final blessing before they were led beyond the city walls to die.

  That late summer morning no one knew what it meant. Least of all Andrés Soriano. An immigrant from Andalusia some thirty years earlier, he had cleaned the streets of the city for the last ten. That was after the factory where he'd first found work all those years ago had finally folded. No crisis, no great drama, just a victim of changing times. He didn't know the city's history. He barely spoke the language. Thirty years and proud not only to keep his strong Andalusian accent in Spanish, but prouder still he'd failed to master Catalan. They all speak Spanish, he'd argue to anyone who cared to hear, why should I learn Catalan? His children spoke it, though. Not at home. Never at home. But first at school and then at work. A boy and a girl, both doing well. Both more Catalan than Andalusian. Sourly, he spat a thick gobbet of phlegm at the ground and immediately hosed it away, the heavy pipe snaking from the little municipal cart with its pregnant metal tank of water.

  He only saw the figure suspended from the ancient statue because a pigeon resting in the niche shit over his uniform.

  'Hijo de puta,' he growled at the bird, instinctively pointing his jet of water upwards to give it a good drenching.

  And there above him was the little effigy, hanging down four metres or so above his head.

  'Hijo de puta,' he cursed again. This time in surprise. It was a saying he used often.

  Looking around him to make sure no one saw him disrespecting one of their wretched icons, he sent his powerful spray up again to dislodge the figure, letting it fall to the ground by his feet.

  'Ugly little bastard, aren't you,' he said, stooping down with difficulty to pick it up. Just a little wooden stick doll it was, with an oversized head carved out of soft wood fastened with twine to the top. Huge circles for the eyes on a moon face and big pointy ears going straight up. 'So what are you supposed to be?' he demanded, shaking his head. Looking around one more time, he tossed it into the thick plastic basket for rubbish hanging off the side of his vehicle and turned the water off.

  Spitting once more on to the grey cobbles, he coiled up the hosepipe and hurled it along with the coarse broom into the back of the little motorised cart. Cursing at the pigeon shit on his uniform, he trundled off under the Verge de la Bona Mort and out through the old city gate for the long hike back to the depot south of the city.

  He was the only one to see the effigy.

  Chapter Two

  Carrer Pla i Cargol was a narrow street in a city of narrow streets.

  Elisenda Domènech looked at it now.

  It had little to mark it out from many of the tiny alleyways around it, she thought. Worn cobbles stretched from the smartly renovated building on the left to the series of smaller, rougher houses on the right, still to be regentrified. On the left, a smart coat of paint on narrow blue balconies and old stone buffed and polished to a new glory. To the right, rusted iron balconies in crumbling stone. One house already under the care of a sympathetic builder, others to follow. Just like so many of the streets in the old city.

  Except for the body of the man swinging below one of the ancient windows. That was different, Elisenda decided. She looked back along the street to the crowd gathering on Carrer Ciutadans and back up to the figure above. His feet two metres above her upturned face, his arms tied above his head to a rope leading out of the glassless window, his nose gone. Cut off. Blood dried around his mouth like a once-fashionable goatee beard and down the front of his shirt and trousers, no longer dripping into the congealed and rusted pool on the stones below.

  Six members of the Policia Científica were still looking for his nose.

  'Sotsinspectora?'

  Elisenda turned on hearing the voice from behind her. A young mosso in the Seguretat Ciutadana, flecks of vomit streaking the front of his dark blue uniform and a dusty, light patch on his sleeve where he'd hastily tried to brush the stains away.

  'You were the one who found him?' Elisenda guessed.

  'Yes, Sotsinspectora,' he replied. 'On patrol.'

  Elisenda nodded. 'Wh
at is it?'

  'The judge is here, Sotsinspectora.'

  Elisenda looked over the mosso's shoulder to the end of the street and sighed. 'Jutgessa Roca. My day is complete. I take it the pathologist isn't here yet.'

  'He's already inside the building, Sotsinspectora,' the mosso informed her. He looked paler by the minute. 'Supervising.'

  'I'm sure he is,' Elisenda commented. The mosso stifled a smirk. 'What's your name, Mosso?' she added.

  The young man in front of her stiffened. 'Mosso Paredes, Sotsinspectora.'

  'Your first name.'

  'Francesc, Sotsinspectora.'

  'Well, Francesc, just for now, my name's Elisenda.' The mosso nodded, relaxing. 'And just round the corner from here there's a bar called El Cercle. Go in there and tell them Elisenda sent you, and get them to give you a brandy. You look like you need one.'

  'Yes, Sotsinspectora. Thank you.'

  They both turned as the judge and the far too expensively-dressed court secretary announced their regal passage along the narrow street, nosing haughtily through the lines of white-suited Policia Científica inching painfully along the cobbles on their knees.

  Elisenda sighed. 'And get one for me while you're at it.'

  *

  'Useless bloody judges,' Elisenda swore, kicking the door open and crashing through, a bundle of files in her left hand, a mobile phone in her right. She walked on through the outer office she shared with the Local Investigation Unit to her own department, the newly-formed experimental unit that worked exclusively on serious crimes throughout the whole of the Girona police region, and kicked a second door open. The room was empty, everyone either still at the Carrer Pla i Cargol scene, out at court or not on shift yet. Checking her watch, she went into her office, flopping all the files on to her desk and sitting down.

  'Bloody judges,' she muttered again, sifting through the paperwork that had already been generated by this morning's suspicious death. Suspicious death, she murmured, echoing the words of the judge.

  'I can confirm it as a suspicious death,' Jutgessa Roca had announced finally, the court secretary busily filling out forms, using the back of her briefcase as a rest.

  Elisenda had simply nodded her head. Man hanging by a rope tied to his wrists from the window of a derelict building, pool of blood on the ground below, man's nose a distant memory, and the judge had taken an hour to come to the conclusion that it was suspicious. 'I'll just write that down, shall I?' Elisenda had asked her. In the meantime, crowds of the curious had piled up at the end of the street, leaving a traffic tailback along Carrer Ciutadans that had ended up affecting half the city centre, and schoolchildren and office workers had started out from their homes, catching glimpses of the hanging man through the makeshift barrier put up by the Seguretat Ciutadana unit.

  The judge had turned on her. 'I don't like your tone.'

  'Don't worry,' Elisenda had reassured her, 'I'm sure I'll get over it.'

  Leafing through a copy of the court secretary's report in her office, Elisenda leant forward over her desk and took in the page after page of fluff and waffle needed before the judge finally declared that the body could be moved and the Mossos could get on with their job. In theory, whenever there was a suspicious death, a judge, the court secretary and the forensic doctor were all supposed to be present to authorise the removal of the body. In practice, many judges delegated this to the forensic doctor. Unfortunately, Jutgessa Roca wasn’t one of them.

  'New police, same old legal system,' Elisenda complained out loud to the empty office when she'd finished reading. What she found most galling was that the judge wasn't some ancient throwback to the bad old days before policing had been devolved from the old Spanish national police to the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan regional police force, but was only two years older than she was. Two years ahead of her all through school and then university, and they'd exchanged more words in the last year than they had throughout their entire education. Elisenda could see why.

  The phone on her desk rang.

  'Elisenda?' the voice on the other end said. 'Pep Boadas.' A sergent in the Policia Científica, two years below her at school. Small world, Girona, Elisenda thought. Very different from the days of her childhood, when all policemen were either Policia Nacional or Guardia Civil and were drafted in from other regions of Spain, arguably more willing to put down popular revolt than fellow Catalans would be in the days when that was deemed an infinitely more important aspect of policing than crime detection or prevention.

  'Got an ident for you,' he told her. 'You're going to love it. Daniel Masó.'

  Elisenda whistled. 'Daniel Masó? Are you sure?'

  'Positive.'

  'Well, well. I didn't recognise him without his nose on.'

  'You're heartbroken, aren't you?'

  'Devastated. Truly devastated.'

  'Me too.'

  'Not in the least bit surprised, mind.'

  'Is anyone? I'll get a preliminary report to you this morning. I imagine it'll be our number one priority.'

  He rang off as the outer door to the unit banged open and shut. Two caporals walked in, deep in discussion, and went to facing desks. Elisenda considered them. The woman, Montse, a Gironina like her, brought up knowing everyone and everything in the small city, their extensive network of acquaintances spreading vertically through family and laterally through peers. The man, Josep, posted to Girona from Hospitalet, the sprawling city sprouting from Barcelona's southern border, after passing his caporal's exams. Only been here a few months. Few friends outside the force, no local girlfriend, sharing a flat with a caporal in another unit, also from outside the city.

  Elisenda went to the door into the outer office. 'Montse, Josep,' she said, 'could you come through a moment?'

  'Sotsinspectora?' Josep questioned, closing the door behind them. Very tall, he had a habit of stooping to try to appear the same height as everyone else, which made him look rather gloomy. Elisenda always had to fight the urge to tell him to stand up straight.

  She motioned them to sit down. 'How would you like to solve the murder of a local entrepreneur?'

  Chapter Three

  'No, Sotsinspectora. I don't recognise the name.'

  'Good,' Elisenda replied. 'Now write his full name down, Daniel Masó Comas, and go and spend the morning looking him up on NIP.'

  'He's on NIP?' Josep asked her. 'What sort of things was he into, Sotsinspectora?'

  Elisenda considered that for a moment. 'He had a pretty varied portfolio, but where he made his millions was in loans to the poor and needy. The very poor and the desperately needy. With a pretty robust after-sales service if you didn't make the repayments. He will not be missed.'

  'Right, Sotsinspectora,' he said, closing his notebook.

  'And don't go listening to anyone else telling you stories about Daniel Masó. You don't have any prejudices against the victim. I need that. I want you to find out everything you can on NIP. Associates, rivals, most recent victims, any complaints in the system, anything. You have any questions, you ask me.'

  'Right, Sotsinspectora.'

  'And when you've done that, come back and I'll give you a copy of the judge's report and the Seguretat Ciutadana report and any other bit of unnecessary paper I can find, so you can enter it all into the records.'

  Elisenda turned to Montse, who shrugged in admission. Born and raised in Santa Eugènia, the suburb between Masó's home ground of Salt and the centre of Girona, Montse would already know more than enough about the loan shark as his claws had stretched well into the immediately neighbouring areas.

  'I do know Masó.'

  Elisenda nodded. 'I know. And I know you'll be just as prejudiced against the little bastard as I am. I want you to check out victims and victim's families. Anyone who seems to know more about things than they should. Anyone making noises, anyone with a particular grievance. Daniel Masó might have been a scumbag. But he's a murdered scumbag and he's a murdered scumbag on our watch. And I don't want anyone
accusing us of not pulling our fingers out on this one.'

  The two caporals stood up. A twice winner of the annual run to the top of the Els Àngels mountain, Montse looked slight next to the towering Josep.

  Elisenda watched them leave and picked up the judge's report. 'Suspicious death,' she muttered to herself, thrusting it in a buff folder.

  Checking her watch, she called Àlex, the only sergent at present in the nascent Serious Crime Unit, but his mobile was switched off. He'd arrived at the Carrer Pla i Cargol scene after her and had accompanied the body to the Institut de Medicina Legal once the judge had allowed it to be removed. She texted him to tell him to call her when he came out and picked up her things to leave.

  Across town, at the Fiscalia, the public prosecutor's office, on Avinguda Ramon Folch, she was told by Laura Puigmal that the Fiscalia wouldn't be directing the case as Elisenda had expected.

  'Jutgessa Roca will be in charge.'

  Elisenda just dropped her head. 'Give me strength.'

  In the same building, nearly an hour later and still waiting to see the judge, Elisenda thought that Roca must have seen some political weight to be gained by directing the investigation. She couldn't see what it might be, unless she had designs on bringing down the Masó clan.

  'How much longer will the judge be?' Elisenda asked the harridan in a dated plaid skirt sternly guarding the judge's door.

  'I have told Jutgessa Roca you're here, Sotsinspectora Domènech,' the woman told her, unhurriedly moving flimsy bits of paper from one side of her desk to the other. The woman took a phone call and went through a door behind her, to emerge ten minutes later. She sat down again and spoke to Elisenda. 'Jutgessa Roca has requested that you return on Friday. She has been called away.'

  'You must enjoy your job,' Elisenda told her, getting up to leave. She knew the pointlessness of arguing with this sort of good old-fashioned officialdom.

  Taking her jacket off in the heat outside, she saw that it was lunchtime. She called Josep. She knew where she would find someone nearby with much more of an idea of what was going on than the judge and with only marginally less of a moral compass.

  *

  The toasted slice of country bread was a bit overdone, Elisenda thought, but the escalivada was good, the red pepper, onion and aubergine baked, then allowed to cool slowly and smothered in olive oil. Even the wine was reputable, a red from a co-operative up in the mountains of the Alt Empordà, an hour or so north of Girona. Not bad at all, she decided.