by Chris Lloyd
‘Hi,’ she said, her smile warm.
‘Hi.’ His smile was less certain.
Chapter Eight
‘You look dreadful, Eli.’
‘So good to see you, too, Catalina.’
Elisenda stirred her large white café amb llet with one hand, taking a sip of water with the other. Enriqueta brought her and her sister another xuixo each, still warm from the morning’s delivery, the confectioner’s custard oozing richly out over their fingers already coated with oil from the sugared surface of the doughnut-like sweet. The owner stopped to fuss over Catalina.
‘How long to go is it now?’ she asked.
‘Three more weeks yet.’
‘And she’ll be two weeks overdue,’ Elisenda commented. ‘I was. Our mother was. Now it’s your go.’
‘I only said you looked dreadful, Eli.’
‘Big mistake.’
Elisenda recalled another night searching through her flat, pulled out of bed by the spectral sound of a lullaby floating in and out of her mind, teasing her from one room to the next. Another uneaten meal in the kitchen bin and another morning punishing herself running through the dust and stones outside the city walls. The one moment of happiness was now, meeting her younger sister for breakfast. She could see her sister wasn’t satisfied with her answer.
‘I’m OK, Catalina. I just didn’t sleep too well.’
But even Elisenda had to admit that Catalina’s long brown hair looked fine and glossy, whereas her own, worn equally long, had suddenly gone straggly. Her sister’s dark eyes weren’t underpinned by the bruised tiredness shadowing her own. Her face was slender where her own had become gaunt. She’s eight months pregnant and she looks less wrung out than I do, Elisenda was shocked to realise.
The day’s newspaper was on the next table over from them. Catalina had been reading it when Elisenda had turned up. She gestured to it now, affording her older sister some relief.
‘That thing out on the coast is grisly, isn’t it? We used to go to El Crit when we were kids. You still go sometimes, don’t you? In the summer?’
‘It’s in the papers already.’ Elisenda sighed. She picked the paper up and quickly scanned the story. The bare facts as they knew them, little more. ‘It’s my investigation. I’ll be going back out there later today.’
‘Is that right?’ Catalina scanned her sister’s face, her eyes red and puffy, her cheeks pinched. A thought occurred to her. ‘Why don’t you stay at the beach house? It’s not far from El Crit. It’s nearer than Girona, anyway. Stay there the nights you need to. It would be good to have someone there at this time of year.’
‘Wouldn’t Sergi mind?’
Catalina’s plush holiday home overlooking the sea was one of Catalina’s husband’s greatest joys, the proof when he’d bought it that he’d made it.
‘It’s not his to mind. It’s mine too. I’ll bring you the keys later today. It’ll do you good, Eli. You need to get away from Girona for a bit.’
Elisenda looked back at her sister. She could see the worry in her face and was alarmed for the first time.
‘All right, Catalina, I’ll do it. Thank you.’
After walking with her sister to the bus stop, Elisenda showered and dressed at home and went to Vista Alegre, where she was immediately waylaid by a request from Puigventós for her to go and see him. When she got to his office, he handed her a large pocket folder.
‘Candidates,’ he told her. ‘For the new caporal in your unit.’
She looked at it, not wanting to open it to see inside.
‘They’re the top ten selection procedure passes for caporal,’ he continued. ‘Go through them and bring it down to a shortlist of five, which we’ll discuss.’
‘Right,’ she replied. She took the folder back to her own room and put it away in a drawer without opening it. ‘But just not now,’ she muttered to her empty office.
Before she could do anything else, her mobile rang. It was Gemma Cardoner from the Archaeology Service, telling her she’d found the boxes with the records for the 1981 dig.
‘That was quick,’ Elisenda told her when she got to the Archaeology Service on Carrer Pedret.
Gemma led her into the new wing to where a large cardboard box was sitting on a table. ‘It’s like a mystery,’ the young woman replied, her voice thicker with cold than the previous day. ‘I love puzzles. I wouldn’t have stayed away today for the world.’
‘Well, thank you, but you really probably should go home now. You sound terrible.’
‘It’s the dust.’ Gemma gestured to the store rooms beyond the anteroom where they were standing. ‘It gets everywhere. Luckily, it was easy to find in the end. Everything’s stored chronologically, so it only took me a few minutes yesterday to locate all the boxes and a quarter of an hour this morning to separate it.’
‘Separate it?’
Gemma lifted the lid on the box. A stack of folders like the one Elisenda had just hidden away in a drawer came almost all the way to the top. ‘These are the daybook of the dig and the written reports of the findings, along with forms and details about the project. Staff, timetables, funding, that sort of thing. All the artefacts that were found are in a couple of dozen other boxes, which I’ve put to one side in the store room. If you need to see them, let me know.’
Elisenda stared into the box for a moment, considering. Logically, anything removed from the dig would have been prior to the body being buried there. ‘We shouldn’t need to see the artefacts, I wouldn’t have thought. It’s the records of the dig itself that are important. Can I take this away?’
‘Of course. You’ll have to sign for them, but I’ve already got clearance.’
‘Great. If I find we do need to look at any of the finds, I’ll call you. Thanks again for your help.’
‘I enjoyed it.’
‘Now go home.’
Carrying the large cardboard box into Vista Alegre from the car park below ground, Elisenda ran into Mosso Paredes walking along the corridor. He offered to help carry it for her.
‘No, it’s fine, thanks, Francesc. How are you getting on?’ She’d first met Paredes at the time of the killings shocking the city the previous autumn.
‘Getting the feel of Girona, thank you, Sotsinspectora.’
‘I hear you went walking all over the city when you first got here.’
‘Wanted to get to know my new home,’ he told her. ‘The good bits and the bad.’
From the tabs on his uniform, she could see that he was still at the rank of mosso. ‘When are you due to take your caporal’s exams?’
‘Next year would be my first opportunity.’
‘OK.’ She studied him walk off and carried on her own way to her office. The other three were in the outer room, each working on a computer. She asked Montse and Josep for their impressions of the crime scene.
‘There’s no love lost between the two archaeologists,’ Montse commented. ‘Doctor Bosch, the one we spoke to, didn’t seem to agree with Doctora Fradera’s extending the area of the dig.’
‘Did Doctora Fradera have anything to say to that?’
‘She wasn’t there,’ Josep told her.
‘She was at the post mortem,’ Àlex explained. ‘Riera invited her. For her expertise.’
Elisenda looked surprised. ‘Unusual. What did their joint expertise find?’
Àlex told the other three members of the unit of the conclusions reached by the pathologist and the archaeologist at the previous afternoon’s examination.
‘And did Riera behave?’ Elisenda asked him when he’d finished.
‘Like a prick. Nothing new. Nothing I can’t handle.’
‘Good,’ she replied, taking a surreptitious look at him. Therapy by Riera, she thought, having to restrain a laugh, instantly feeling alarmed by that, the same way Catalina’s concerned look earlier had shocked her. She gathered herself quickly. ‘OK. Initially, I don’t see that either Fradera or Bosch would necessarily be involved in the killing, but we’
ll need to check them out. Bosch would be too young, I’d reckon, but Fradera would roughly be the right age.’
‘But why she’d start digging precisely there if she had any involvement is doubtful,’ Àlex argued.
‘There’s involvement and there’s involvement. Was she specifically looking for our guy for some reason? We’ll keep an open mind.’
‘One thing struck me as odd,’ Montse said. ‘The distance to the new trench from the old one.’
‘Fradera said that they now thought the site was more extensive than they’d initially presumed, but that had occurred to me too,’ Elisenda agreed. ‘Either Fradera was looking for the body, or she was genuinely wanting to extend the site and came across it by chance. That also raises the question of why the killer buried the body there. If it was at the same time as the archaeological dig, there would have been a lot of activity going on. Burying the body would have been risky, unless it was someone on the team who thought at that time that the dig wouldn’t ever extend that far. First of all, we need to find out who was on the team working there in 1981, and we need to check up on missing persons from that time.’ She hefted the box she was holding. ‘This might help with some of that. They’re the records of the 1981 dig.’
Leaving the two caporals in the outer room, she asked Àlex to come with her into her room to start looking through the folders. They’d only been going for ten minutes, when Àlex suddenly exclaimed.
‘Got it.’ He showed a file to Elisenda. ‘Personnel list. Names and dates of archaeologists and volunteers who worked on the dig between May 1980 and June 1981. Including addresses. This is exactly what we were after.’
Elisenda took a look at it. The list ran over two pages. ‘Just over a year, then. Quite a few more people working on it than the one now, though.’
‘Yeah, but only four full-time archaeologists on the project. The rest were students who worked on the site for short periods, mostly the two summers and Easter 1981.’
‘We split them into the archaeologists and the students?’ Elisenda suggested. ‘Of the archaeologists, three were men. That narrows it down slightly.’
Àlex took the pages back and counted. ‘And eleven male students.’
‘The man in the trench could be either or neither, but I would say that there must be some connection with the dig. It’s too much of a coincidence, otherwise, that someone should randomly choose that spot to bury a body killed in that way. Also, with this number of people working on it, say a quarter of them at any one time, there’d also have been a lot of activity. Someone from outside the dig would never have chosen that as the ideal spot to bury a secret.’
‘They found an open trench and took advantage of it? That doesn’t work, as the body would have been found during the dig, and the dig didn’t extend that far then, anyway.’
Elisenda rummaged through the contents. ‘We’ll need to check the exact location of the trenches in the 1981 dig. We only have Doctora Fradera’s perception for that.’
Àlex laughed wryly. ‘Doctora Fradera’s perception.’
They were startled by a knock on the door. Josep walked in, stooping his head instinctively but needlessly under the door frame. Montse followed him in.
‘Newspaper from June 1981,’ he announced. ‘An Esteve Mascort went missing. An archaeologist from Girona.’
Àlex turned the list in his hand back to the front page. ‘Esteve Mascort. Worked on the site from September 1980 to June 1981. We have our man in the trench.’
‘Or the man who put him there,’ Elisenda countered.
Chapter Nine
Elisenda drove along the dirt track through the woods. Caporal Fabra from Palafrugell had told her that the council had cleared most of the blockage away and the route was passable, but the road was still pitted with holes and crumbling in parts. Crossing a slippery patch of shale that sent the wheels spinning helplessly if she drove at anything above ten kilometres an hour, she now found the path gave way to a section where the grooves made by vehicle wheels had worn the track down so much she was having to fight to balance the car between the central ridge and the verge on the left-hand side.
‘Next time I’m taking the boat,’ she muttered.
She passed where the track had evidently been damaged by the storm and saw an uprooted tree dragged to the side, clean cuts made by a chainsaw through the slender trunk to be able to move it. The compacted earth of the repair to the surface was a different colour, lighter and with more loose gravel, its texture more mobile under the car until it settled. Large rocks had been stacked up to one side, ready she imagined to be taken away.
She hoped her meeting with Doctora Fradera would be quick so she could negotiate the return journey in daylight. Looking up, peering through the thick trees, she could see the light in the sky was already getting weaker. There were no clouds, just a blue winter sky descending through the spectrum as the afternoon wore on. She knew the track, had taken it many times on hot summer’s days, but the fading light and the changes since the storm had turned it from a road of familiar anticipation to one of snarling challenge.
She’d been reliably informed by someone at the Archaeology Service that the archaeologist would be here all day. After Josep’s news of the missing archaeologist in 1981, she’d asked him to find out what he could of the other members of the team at the time.
‘Many of these addresses will be out of date by now,’ she’d told him. ‘Find out where they are now. Arrange interviews with each of them.’
She’d got Àlex to chase up the students. ‘That’ll be harder as they seem to be more of a fluid population. In those days, students would have had to study archaeology in Barcelona, not Girona. You might find some of them are from Girona, working on the dig back home as a summer job, but others might be from Barcelona or elsewhere. It might take some tracking down.’
‘If they were students at the time,’ Àlex had pointed out, ‘the addresses we have might be their parents’. It’s possible the families are still there.’
Montse had been looking at the personnel list. ‘It says here that Esteve Mascort lived here in Girona. In Sant Narcís.’
‘Yes, I’d like you to check up on him. See if there’s any family surviving. Wife, children, parents. This list doesn’t give ages, so we’ve no idea what we’re looking for.’
Elisenda felt a thud on the underside of the car, bringing her back to the moment. In the side mirror she saw a large stone tumble away into the trees.
‘I’m definitely coming by boat next time,’ she said, swearing. It was her own car she was using, not a pool one, as she’d be spending the night away. Catalina had dropped off the keys at Vista Alegre, which had decided Elisenda to sleep at her sister’s beach house in La Fosca.
The track came to an end and she left her car in a small turning area cleared of trees and stones. Two other cars were parked there at an oblique angle to each other, a blue Seat and a silver Peugeot. She recorded both registration numbers just in case.
The walk to the headland overlooking El Crit was as she remembered it from cicada-serenaded summers, although now in February the sunlight searching through the pines wasn’t the crystal white and cerulean of August but a thin shroud of cobalt deepening into an overwhelming Prussian blue. A light wind blew through the long fingers of the pine needles, which flexed softly at her as she passed.
The second car evidently belonged to Doctor Bosch, as both archaeologists were at the site when she emerged into the clearing. She introduced herself to Bosch and asked them if either of them had known anyone who had worked on the dig in 1980 or 1981.
It was Bosch who answered first, with a shake of his head. ‘I was still at school then. I didn’t know anyone.’
‘And you, Doctora Fradera?’
‘That was my first year at Barcelona University. I knew of some students in the years above me who worked here in the summer, but I didn’t know them. As far as I know, no one in my year did.’
‘And you didn’t, even
though it was close to home?’
‘I helped out at the Ullastret settlement.’ She gave a wry laugh. ‘It was easier to get to.’
‘Did either of you know of an archaeologist called Esteve Mascort?’
Both archaeologists shook their head. ‘He’s had nothing published that I know of,’ Fradera replied. ‘I don’t know the name.’
‘Did he work on the dig back then?’ Bosch asked. He waved generally towards the second trench. ‘Do you think that he’s…?’
‘We’re looking at various possibilities at the moment,’ Elisenda told them. ‘Has the trench there been left undisturbed?’
She began walking in the direction of the cordoned-off area where the body was found, the two archaeologists tagging along with her. When they got there, they both looked carefully at it. Elisenda had asked for a pair of Mossos to be put on guard duty for the night, but Puigventós had vetoed it on budgetary grounds. And because he felt that the scene had been fully inspected and cleared. Elisenda still wasn’t happy with that.
‘No,’ Fradera finally answered. ‘It all looks as it was. Neither of us has touched it.’
Elisenda heard a very faint snort from Bosch. She looked at him but he had recomposed his expression.
‘You have something to say?’
An unfriendly smile floated across Bosch’s face. ‘Only that I would be very unlikely to touch it. It’s entirely Doctora Fradera’s domain.’
‘And I haven’t set foot in it since yesterday,’ Fradera rejoined.
All the while she listened, Elisenda scanned the trench, the imprint where the body lay curled up still visible.
‘Can you tell me the significance of the spike? Is it punishment? Ritual?’
Again, Elisenda heard a low noise from Bosch as Fradera began to speak.
‘That’s something of a problem, Sotsinspectora Domènech. The more we find, the less of a pattern we can establish. It was once thought that they were ritual killings. That is possibly how the 1981 team might have construed them. But subsequent investigation has shown that the spikes were administered post mortem, with the head severed from the body.’