City of Buried Ghosts (An Inspector Domènech Crime Thriller Book 2)

by Chris Lloyd

  Àlex and Montse looked at each other in surprise.

  ‘Did you believe the rumours?’ Àlex asked her.

  ‘I had no reason not to, but as I say, I never knew the whole story. Ricard was a bit clingy, so it might just have been that the girlfriend got fed up with that and dumped him. The abortion rumour could have been sour grapes on his part.’

  ‘Do you have a name for the girlfriend?’

  She cocked her head to one side in thought. ‘Dolors, I think. I don’t know her surname.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know where she is now?’

  ‘Not a clue, sorry. I’ve often thought since that that was one of the reasons why the dig didn’t ever really get off the ground. There was so much bad feeling and backstabbing, I think the government was reluctant to throw any money our way.’

  ‘Was that the only reason, do you think?’ Montse asked.

  ‘Well, there were the usual professional rivalries, I suppose. Apart from Ricard, the other three of us were at the start of our careers, trying to get a full-time contract. It wasn’t a harmonious dig.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ Àlex insisted.

  ‘You mean thefts,’ she guessed. ‘Ricard accused Esteve of stealing artefacts. I think the rest of us just thought it was part of the bad feeling. He desperately wanted Esteve off the project.’

  ‘So you don’t think the accusations were founded?’

  She began to pick at the stitching on her shirt, staring at the coffee table between her and the Mossos. ‘I know I never saw anything,’ she said slowly, ‘that’s a fact. But the notion of Esteve stealing artefacts is not something that would at all have surprised me. He was always on the lookout for anything that would give him an edge, either professionally or financially. He didn’t mind how he did it.’

  ‘Do you know if he knew Ferran Arbós?’ Àlex asked.

  ‘Oh, Christ, I read about that.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Not that I know of. I only met Arbós some years later, and both Esteve and I were at a similar stage in our careers, so I don’t believe that they would have come into contact with each other. I take it you’re asking because of Arbós’s dark dealings.’

  ‘He left under a cloud, we understand,’ Montse commented.

  She laughed. ‘He left under a force nine gale. They only had the courage to force him out when it became too obvious that he was up to something. People can make mistakes, but there were just too many in his case. No one’s that incompetent. He was lucky that that’s all that he got. He should have been investigated and charged. God only knows how many deals he did and how many finds have gone missing.’

  ‘Missing?’ Àlex asked. ‘I thought it was just provenance that was in doubt.’

  ‘None of us can know for sure, but I’m convinced he was selling to private buyers too. Collectors in this country and abroad.’

  They had no more questions, so Àlex and Montse left her to her unpacking and went back down the ornate marble and wrought-iron communal staircase and out into the street, both deep in thought. They had to walk on the road, the narrow pavements teeming with Saturday shoppers.

  ‘How many motives and suspects do we want?’ Montse asked, bemusement in her voice.

  ‘Take your pick.’

  They cut down past the bright windows of the shoe shops and tailor’s and the faded grey of the premises to let on the narrow Carrer Abeuradors and emerged on to the Rambla, teeming with shoppers and strollers idling at the flower stands in the sweet-scented Saturday morning market.

  ‘Any plans for the rest of the day?’ Àlex asked Montse.

  ‘Lunch, then haircut.’

  Àlex looked at her hair. It was already almost as short as his. ‘Not going running today?’

  ‘I ran 5K this morning.’

  ‘You did what?’ He stared at her in a mixture of scorn and respect. ‘Before meeting me?’

  ‘I’m going to get below twenty minutes this year,’ she told him. She tapped him on the stomach. ‘You could do with taking a run every now and then, Àlex, you’re going flabby.’

  ‘Bit of respect, Caporal.’ The grin was nearly there.

  She grinned back at him and walked off through the crowd.

  Àlex watched her go and turned to head for Santa Eugènia and home. On the big, modern square outside his apartment block, he looked up at the balcony on his flat for a moment and decided to sit for a while on a bench and watch his neighbours at play. Children ran tirelessly around the young trees planted in hollows in the grey paving, their parents deep in superficial weekend conversation with other parents. Elderly men and women sat in groups on benches and talked of age and change, theirs and the city’s.

  Registering none of the noise and movement around him, he thought about the others in the unit. He knew what they were doing. Elisenda wanted him angry and edgy and was constantly putting him on the spot where he’d react. Montse wanted to goad him through rivalry. And big, tall Josep wanted to look up to him as someone who was strong. All of it was designed to bring him back from the semi-death he’d experienced since his near death.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. In it was an invitation to apply for a new post. A desk job in Sabadell. Where no one would ever put a noose around his neck again.

  El Crit, 1981

  The light blue and white Sarfa bus he’d taken from Palamós dropped him off on the main road a few kilometres north of the town.

  ‘This is the nearest stop to El Crit,’ the driver told him, sweating in the sunlight coursing in through his window, his grey nylon shirt open to the waist, the greying hairs on his chest glistening. Hanging from a hook next to him a beige plastic transistor radio was bleating The Birdy Song.

  The student nodded and climbed down the three steps, grateful to be released from the same bloody tune he’d heard everywhere he went. He watched the bus trundle off into traffic, the cars punching the air in his ears every time they raced past. Smelling the sweet aroma of the asphalt melting in the hot summer air, the student took a deep breath and slowly set off along the small, pockmarked road that would eventually lead to the sea. No wind combed through the tall grass alongside where he walked and he was sweating within moments of getting off the bus.

  It was another two hours before he found the cove he was looking for, the path ill-defined through the pines to the headland overlooking the beach. When he got there, he saw two trenches cut into the hard brown earth, signs of trowels scraping across stone.

  But not one person was working there.

  Mystified, he walked through the archaeological dig. There were no tools, no boxes. In one trench he saw a shard of pottery half buried in the ground. He knelt down and prised it loose and picked it up to look at it. Indiketa, he saw, a thrill running through him despite the mystery of the abandoned site.

  From the direction of the beach, he heard voices. Walking to the edge of the headland, he looked down and saw people below, sunbathing or playing in the sea. He climbed down the winding steps to the bottom and walked up to a group of four people. It was only as he approached them that he realised that they were all naked. Looking around, he saw that he was the only one clothed. Unconcerned, he spoke to the four people.

  ‘Do you know anything about an archaeological dig up there?’ he asked them, pointing towards the headland.

  Equally unfazed, one of the two women in the group answered him. ‘There were some people working there a few days ago, but I haven’t seen anyone since then.’

  The student thanked them and made to leave.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the woman asked him.

  He told them he was going to Palamós and that he didn’t have transport, so one of the men offered to take him.

  ‘We came by boat,’ he told him, reaching for a pair of shorts. ‘It’ll take you hours to get back otherwise.’

  In the small Zodiac inflatable on the way to Palamós, the man tried to make conversation but eventually gave up. When he finally dropped the student o
ff at the beach where the fishermen had laid out their colourful nets to dry, he looked relieved to be heading back.

  In the town, the student tried ringing the number he had again, but there was still no reply. When that failed, he went to the telephone office and asked for a phone book. He found the numbers he wanted and was directed to one of the grey booths lining the wall of the small office. He picked up the phone and dialled the first of the numbers he’d just found.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked when someone at the other end answered.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was the perfect day for a dead village.

  Elisenda stood alone in the forlorn car park and looked about her. A single cypress stretched proud into the sky, a dark green totem to the past. Loosely swaying pines and stubborn olive trees provided an unnecessary shade from the winter afternoon sun. The bright green oily leaves of a carob heralded her with a lonely arch over the path into the main entrance to the settlement. There were no visitors on a February Saturday. Just a single figure standing between the honey-coloured remains of the walls leading into the ancient village.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ Elisenda told Doctora Fradera.

  The archaeologist turned and led the way on the steady climb past the initial walls that stood higher than the two women and on into a more open area, where the stones left intact marked out the ground layout of the original dwellings.

  ‘I was going to be here anyway,’ Fradera told her. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have seen me.’

  Elisenda stifled a laugh. She had to admit to liking the older woman’s blunt lack of social niceties. She’d called the archaeologist before leaving Vall-Llobrega as she wanted to get some thoughts straight in her mind. Fradera told her that she was at the Inidiketa settlement in Ullastret.

  ‘I must confess I haven’t been here for some years,’ Elisenda told her as the path wound up past the skeletons of buildings on either side, framed by a lush and dusty verdancy in contrast to the crystalline sky. Much of the area was excavated, but there was a great deal still to explore, with pieces of land fenced off or marked out.

  ‘Do you always work on a Saturday?’ Fradera asked her.

  ‘When an investigation calls for it. Do you?’

  ‘I never stop being an archaeologist,’ she replied gruffly. ‘The museum is up here. You remember that much?’

  They turned off the path to climb some steps, large uneven stones curving like a hillside terrace, leading to a small clearing of gravel and green shoots forcing their way through the dust. Ahead of them stood two tall outlines, timeless and contemporary in stark juxtaposition. The first was another cypress, slender and pointed, the foliage seeming to burst from the layers below like ancient lava. Beyond it, an ornamental lamppost, the two lights suspended from it like twin pearl earrings. Cypress and lamppost were separated by the gnarled form of an olive, the trunk low and clinging stubbornly to the earth, the branches and leaves reaching tentatively to the sky.

  Stopping at the top, outside the museum building, Elisenda took the opportunity to gaze out over the plain surrounding the hill on which the Indiketa settlement stood. Flat farmland sheltered by low hills, the knowledge of the sea beyond.

  ‘I’d forgotten how serene this place was,’ she said.

  ‘I feel it every time I stand here,’ Fradera answered, pausing by her side, her voice suddenly softer. ‘At times this would have been an island, the plain here covered in flood water. Perfect protection.’

  ‘That happened a few years ago, didn’t it?’ Elisenda recalled seeing pictures of the hill surrounded by water, the fields of crops below flooded.

  ‘What you’ll want to see is in here,’ Fradera said, turning sharply away, back to being bluff.

  Elisenda had to let her eyes accustom to the winter glow of the museum after the bright sky outside. The temperature was cool enough to need a coat, but she was instantly reminded of summer visits here, the golden stones and white walls a welcome respite from the hot sun on the exposed hill. They came across the display cases she wanted almost immediately.

  ‘You’re lucky there’s no school trip today,’ Fradera told her. ‘This is their favourite bit. We can never get them to move on.’

  Huddling close together in the unforgiving spotlight of the illuminated cabinet were two human skulls, a rusted spike thrust through the top of each forehead, seeming to pin them to the stand, redolent of how they might have looked either side of the gateway that Elisenda had walked through just a few minutes earlier. Oddly, Elisenda found them sadder than the Indiketa skull lying in the trench in El Crit. A display in the distant past becoming an exhibition in the present.

  ‘Display,’ Elisenda said. ‘You questioned Doctor Bosch’s idea that these were for display.’

  ‘I didn’t question it, actually. I do think they were primarily for display purposes, particularly if there was a spike through them, wouldn’t you say? Where I disagree with Doctor Bosch is that he takes a rather narrow view of the reason for the display and he regards the skulls as being solely for that purpose. I do not.’ She studied the two skulls for a moment before continuing. ‘The problem lies partly in that the most widely-known cases are these ones here with the spikes. They aren’t unique, but they are exceptional. We only know of five in Europe, four of which have been found here in Ullastret, these two in 1969, the other two just a couple of years ago.’

  Elisenda nodded. ‘I remember those ones being in the news.’

  ‘They will be displayed eventually. I’ll show you a reconstruction after. As I was saying, though, the problem is that they were found in proximity to the defensive walls or in public places, and that’s what’s led to their being seen as a token of intimidation. But we’ve also found fragments of other skulls, and some even intact, in other circumstances, with indications of other practices. The necropolis shows that the usual funeral rite was cremation, but we have also found human remains, predominantly skulls and jaws, in ritual buildings. They all show signs of burial and subsequent retrieval of the skull after skeletonisation. That has to lead us to believe that the answer isn’t quite so simple.’ She turned to look at Elisenda in the eyes. ‘And now, of course, that’s all been thrown up in the air yet again with this new find. My body, I mean, not yours. It’s the first time we’ve ever found a whole body intact with a spike through the skull. That has to change our understanding still further. I’m really not looking forward to the day we make this find public.’

  Both women turned to look at the two dead and silent faces in the cabinet.

  ‘Come with me,’ Fradera suddenly said. ‘I’ll show you this reconstruction.’

  In a calm, honey-coloured office away from the exhibits, the archaeologist pulled up a file on the computer and beckoned Elisenda to take a seat. A short video came up on screen of a three-dimensional computer modelling gradually building up the layers of a skull to recreate a face.

  ‘This was one of the two skulls found recently,’ Fradera explained. ‘The process goes from a CT scan of the skull, through depth markers showing how thick the layers of muscle and skin would be, to the finished face. But I suppose you know all this. The Mossos must use it.’

  ‘It’s extremely rare for us to use the technique, as the technology is still too open to interpretation. We would only use it as a last resort if we were unable to identify a victim by other means. I’ve never seen it used professionally.’

  The end of the video showed the face of a young man staring out at them. His eyes set wide apart, the nose flat, long hair hanging lank on his head and wispy down on his upper lip and jaw.

  ‘This is the first time we’ve ever seen what an Iberian might have looked like,’ Fradera said, a slight tinge of awe hiding beneath the bombast. ‘This is where we come from.’

  Despite herself, Elisenda was enthralled by the face, wanting it to be real. ‘What he might have looked like,’ she repeated. ‘That’s the issue for the forensic use of this. It only gives us an idea, it�
�s not infallible. It’s too open to interpretation by the modeller to be admissible in law.’

  ‘True,’ Fradera conceded, ‘but these computer models are becoming increasingly more accurate, more so than the old clay models.’

  Elisenda turned away from the young man’s face staring sightlessly out at her. ‘Coming back to the understanding of what the deaths meant, what might an archaeologist on the 1981 dig have thought?’ she asked

  Fradera turned the program off, her manner already reverting. ‘I couldn’t possibly say. There was perhaps a greater belief in the idea of trophy or deterrent in those days, as they would have had less evidence. The Puig de Serra necropolis, for instance, hadn’t been discovered back then. They might, perhaps, even have subscribed to the idea of this form of killing being part of a sacrificial rite, in the hope of improved crops or wealth for the village or good fortune in battle. Even now, we don’t entirely know, and I couldn’t say what an individual archaeologist might have thought in 1981. You’ve seen how we still disagree on the meaning today.’

  ‘But it’s feasible that someone from that team might have seen the ritual killing as an execution? Or as a sacrifice?’ Elisenda thought of Ferran Arbós in his villa. ‘Or as a warning?’

  Fradera tutted dramatically. ‘These people lived here for centuries, their society evolved. And with it, their rituals and traditions. We have to presume the rite of the skull evolved also. The common explanation for these practices was that they were intimidatory or religious, but some of us feel that we should also be looking at the possibility of the rites being carried out with both negative and positive intent.’

  ‘Positive?’

  ‘Where there is evidence of violence ante mortem, the skull would arguably be that of an enemy or a miscreant. A trophy or a deterrent, as Doctor Bosch says. There was also the practice of using the skull of an enemy for ceremonial purposes, for libations or offerings. But the fact of skulls being found in ritual buildings or in private dwellings, and not in public places, raises the question as to whether these were high-status individuals who were held in enough respect to warrant a different funeral rite from the usual one. Or they were individuals who were important to the family, and so a symbol of their life was kept in the home as veneration. Not at all as a punishment or a trophy.’