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

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ the owner told her. He introduced himself as Guillem Sucarrats. ‘It was quite busy earlier. But, hey, Monday.’ He smiled, an open, expressive smile that involved not just his face but his shoulders and arms too, all the way down to his long, tapering fingers. It invited a smile in return from Elisenda, despite herself.

  Up close, she could see that he was older than she’d first thought, a life of sunlight and lotus flowers by the sea ageing the skin while keeping the eyes and all they saw young. His salt and pepper hair was brushed back in studied untidiness, his face and hands fine and neat, his heavy shirt and trousers a winter’s nod to careless fashion.

  ‘Llàtzer Bosch told me about your place,’ Elisenda told him after she’d tasted the wine.

  He nodded. ‘Llàtzer. He’s quite a regular visitor.’

  ‘Would you like to share some of this wine?’ She gestured to the bottle. ‘I can’t drink it all.’

  Shrugging assent, he fetched a glass and poured himself a measure. ‘Good to meet someone else who enjoys the finer things in life. Salut.’

  ‘He also told me about your shrine,’ Elisenda continued. ‘The Roman one in the cellar.’

  ‘Although he might no longer be welcome as a regular,’ Sucarrats replied, evidently annoyed at the archaeologist’s disclosure.

  Elisenda reached into her bag and pulled her ID out. ‘Elisenda Domènech. I’m with the Mossos. I’m investigating an old case nearby and Doctor Bosch was helping me. He simply mentioned the shrine in passing.’

  Sucarrats looked at Elisenda’s ID and took a moment to digest it. ‘The body found at El Crit?’ he finally asked. ‘I wondered what was happening about that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to go telling everyone about the shrine. I’m just interested in it.’

  ‘Professionally?’

  ‘And personally. I heard about the Indiketa practice of burying babies in the foundations of homes and I needed to understand it.’

  The chef called something from the kitchen and Sucarrats excused himself, coming back straight away with Elisenda’s first course. ‘Maybe I’ll show it to you after you’ve eaten,’ he told her.

  By the end of her meal, the owner’s irritation had dissipated, to be replaced by his earlier sure composure. Promising her coffee after the tour, he led her to a door to the rear of the dining room and unlocked it with a key on a small chain in his pocket.

  ‘The Romans did it too,’ he told her as they descended a steep flight of steps. ‘Buried babies in the foundations of buildings. And adults. Usually alive. Although none have ever been found anywhere in Catalonia or Spain that I know of.’

  At the bottom, past rows of boxes and bottles of wine stacked on shelves, he unlocked a second door and flicked a switch inside. Half a dozen lights embedded in the ceiling came on, casting a warm glow over old brick walls.

  ‘You know a lot about it?’

  He smiled again. It reminded her of Àlex. ‘When you have a piece of Rome under your feet, you tend to develop an interest in it.’

  He let her in first and she stopped immediately at the sight in front of her. Smaller than she’d expected, the shrine set into the far wall of the small room nonetheless dominated the tiny cell. A woman’s face carved in stone peered sightlessly from crumbling and ancient ashlars, the hewn stones in turn set into a modern plaster surround. Below the face were niches for incense or candles, the shadows from the lights in the ceiling creating an unnatural depth to them. Underneath, a small ledge, smooth and worn in the middle over the centuries, held a single red candle, unlit, the one point of colour in the room.

  ‘Minerva,’ Sucarrats told Elisenda in a hushed voice. ‘Goddess of wisdom, commerce, poetry and magic. And subsequently of war. I’m just her keeper.’

  As she stared at it, the shrine seemed to grow with every breath she took and creep towards her in the honeyed radiance of the cellar. She shivered.

  ‘It gets cold down here in the winter,’ Sucarrats said.

  Elisenda knew that wasn’t the reason.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  ‘I fucking hate February.’

  ‘You hate every month, Siset.’

  Wrapping his over-large coat around his skinny body more tightly, the front buttons reaching around to under his opposite arm, Siset shivered and sniffed loudly.

  ‘And it stinks in here.’

  Elena, Siset’s on-off partner paused in doing her make-up in front of the greasy mirror in the men’s toilets, moving her head up and down to avoid the crack across the bottom half of the glass. ‘Well, what do you know,’ she muttered absently.

  Siset looked up sharply at her. ‘I’ve never hit you once, have I, Elena? Not once.’

  ‘No, Siset, not once.’

  ‘Never even raised my hand to you,’ he went on. Of course not, he thought, she’s not going to earn much money covered in bruises, is she? And because her pimp would have beaten seven bells of crap out of him, he remembered with a gulp. ‘I’m good to you, aren’t I? So don’t start getting fucking lippy with me. I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘No, Siset.’

  ‘No, Siset,’ he repeated, his thin lips pulled back over yellowing teeth. He stared at her running her fingers over her eyebrows. ‘How much fucking longer are you going to be? I’ve got business to do.’

  Elena turned away from the mirror and looked around. ‘Nice office, Siset. You’re doing well for yourself.’

  He made a gesture as though he was about to slap her, but she stood her ground and stared back at him. She knew he’d never dare hit her, not just because her pimp would have battered him but because Siset knew that Elena would hit him back too. The one time he’d tried it, she’d knocked him out, his eye blackened for a fortnight.

  The door to the gloomy toilet in the crummy bar in the Font de la Pólvora part of town opened and a middle-aged man in stained trousers and a grubby nylon shirt came in, tugging at his flies and heading for the least encrusted urinal in the battery of three.

  ‘I’m off,’ Elena told Siset. She checked her clutch bag – condoms, tissues, mobile, mace – and walked out of the men’s toilets.

  ‘What you got for me?’ the man who’d entered the grim room asked Siset, his voice a forty-cigarettes-a-day-for-forty-years growl. Straggly grey and white hair clung damply to his skull, tied in an alopecic ponytail so small it sprouted vertically from halfway up the back of his head. He stood at the porcelain and peed loudly, splashing a fine spray on to his trousers, before zipping up and offering his hand to Siset to shake. Siset took it without a moment’s hesitation, his own sanitary regime knowing no better.

  Reaching into the battered old-fashioned postman’s satchel he’d found discarded on a tip years ago, Siset thrust a bony hand inside and pulled out a pile of DVDs, held together with an elastic band.

  ‘No animals,’ the man rumbled at him. ‘I don’t want animals. Or ladyboys.’

  His brows furrowed intently as he flipped through the discs. He had been deprived of cinema, and a great many other privileges, for lengthy periods when Hollywood was releasing its blockbusters, so he evidently had a fair bit of catching up to do.

  ‘Have you got Toy Story?’

  Before Siset could answer, both men were startled by shouts and a loud bang as the door crashed open and half a dozen figures in uniform suddenly filled the narrow toilets. Siset saw guns being pointed at him and quickly dropped his bag.

  ‘I want to speak to Domènech,’ he whispered to the Mosso who closed the cuffs around his scrawny wrists.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Elisenda parked in the garage under the house and climbed the steep stairs up into the kitchen, turning the dimmer switch up high and flooding the ground floor of the house in light. After seeing the shrine in the hotel in Palamós, she’d had an irrational urge to get out of the basement garage as quickly as she could, the memories of the sightless face in the little room and of babies buried in cellars preying on her.

  Sh
e looked around at the dazzling living room and finally laughed. She’d always teased Sergi about his dimmers and embedded sound systems and latest gadgets, all things she would never dream of having in her own home, but she was surprised at herself to find them oddly comforting since she’d been staying on the coast alone. Checking her phone for messages, she found there was no signal. She’d discovered these days that the mobile cover out here slipped in and out quite frequently. As it was a holiday home, her sister didn’t keep a landline in the house.

  ‘Sea,’ she decided, repelling the silence pervading the house, and walked out of the front door, on to the path that ran along the seafront.

  She stood there, letting a cold breeze force its way through her shirt to her skin. She shivered for a second time that evening, only this time it had a strangely warm feel, the sound of the midnight Mediterranean talking to her alone as it whispered back and forth over the stretches of shingle below. A shadow moving in a rectangle of light over to her right distracted her and she looked back to the other houses. The man she’d thought was burgling the next door home but one the other night was standing on his terrace, also looking out to sea.

  ‘Sorry,’ he called over to her. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  She clutched her arms around herself against the chill wind. ‘Not at all. I was just getting some air before bed.’

  ‘I keep forgetting I’m not on my own out here.’

  She nodded and tried to recall his name. Miquel Canals, she remembered. ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’ve just made cremat. There’s too much for one person. Would you like some?’

  For the first time, she noticed the sweet aroma of cinnamon washing past her, the scent drawing her in.

  ‘I’d love some.’

  She fetched a sweater and joined him on his terrace. On a low table between two solid wood chairs, the middle of the earthenware bowl was already alight. She sat down and watched in silence as the flames illuminated her host’s expression of concentration, his lean face calm and controlled in the shadows that flickered across it, his eyes gleaming dark. He slowly stirred the mix of rum, coffee, sugar and cinnamon, the fire burning off the alcohol and releasing the oily perfume from the large slices of lemon peel. Putting the ladle down, he let it burn for a few minutes, the flickering heat a welcome warmth in the cold night.

  ‘I’d never had this before coming to La Fosca,’ he told her. ‘We don’t have it in Barcelona.’

  ‘It was a fishermen’s drink,’ Elisenda explained, the glow from the flames warming her face. ‘To keep warm in the early mornings. It’s originally from this part of the coast.’

  He blew the flames out and served them both a cup from the ladle. Elisenda closed her hands around the thick porcelain, the heat almost too much to bear but painfully enjoyable. She took in a deep breath of the strong aroma before carefully sipping it.

  ‘It’s good,’ she told him.

  ‘What do I call you? Inspectora?’

  ‘Thanks for the promotion, but there’s no need. Elisenda will do.’ She remembered his refusal to answer her question the other night, so she asked him again. ‘So, what brings you here at this time of year?’

  ‘You reckon you get to ask me that now?’

  ‘We’re sharing cremat. That’s how it works round here.’

  He let out a little laugh and stared silently at his cup for a moment.

  ‘My father died. Just after Christmas.’

  Elisenda closed her eyes and cursed her police officer’s need to know. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I just needed some time on my own, so I came here. My mother died when I was a kid, and I’ve got no brothers or sisters, so it’s just me now. It feels so strange knowing I’m on my own. He and I were all we had, so we were very close.’ He laughed, a movement of his shoulders more than a sound. ‘So I came somewhere where I’d be even more on my own. That makes sense.’

  ‘I think it does. Only you got stuck with a nosey cop for a neighbour.’

  He held up the cup of cremat. ‘Now I get to ask you. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Not sure it works that way,’ Elisenda replied, taking another sip to stall.

  She thought of Lina, her daughter, and of the sleepless nights at home, woken by visions of her and the sound of her singing. And of how much she wanted to let go of her daughter and not be haunted by her and of how much guilt that released in her.

  ‘Just for work,’ she finally told him. ‘It’s convenient for an investigation.’

  * * *

  Forgoing her now usual habit of an early-morning kayaking out to sea or along the shoreline, Elisenda left the house early and drove the three sides of the square that would take her nearer to where she’d found the hut in the woods the previous day. She parked in a clearing and made her way through the dense trees. There was no smoke spiralling into the sky today to guide her, but she knew the direction to take, the small house two-thirds of the way between the track where she’d left her car and the sea.

  Through the thick foliage, she could see the sky was a rich winter blue, cloudless and pure, only a ghost of her breath visible as she walked. The air was much warmer than the previous night, when she and Miquel Canals had soon retreated into their separate homes after sharing cremat and confidences.

  ‘Or not, in my case,’ she murmured to herself.

  A twig snapped like a gunshot in front of her and she instantly ducked, looking keenly around her. Holding her breath to listen, in the distance she heard another sound. Someone or something moving quickly away from her towards the sea.

  ‘And trying not to be heard,’ she whispered to herself.

  Getting up, she began to run in the direction of the noise, stopping every now and again to get her bearings. The sound appeared to be heading for the little cove at Cala des Vedell, so she gave up listening out and quickened her pace through the trees to try and catch up. As she got closer, she heard the snarl of a motor being hauled into life.

  Emerging through the thick pines where they disappeared on to the rocks above the water’s edge, she was just in time to catch a glimpse of a boat vanishing around the headland, moving north. It was the one that belonged to the old man she’d met twice on the beach at El Crit. She stared at the wake rippling either side after the little craft had disappeared from view and coming to rest against the rocks.

  ‘So, you’re just cleaning the beach?’ she questioned in a low voice.

  Elisenda turned back from the shore and scraped through the pines inland in the direction of the jumbled house. She slowed down as she approached it and looked around. She heard a dog bark once.

  ‘You might as well come in again,’ a woman’s voice called out from inside the house. ‘You weren’t so shy at trespassing on my property yesterday.’

  A huge dog emerged from the ramshackle cabin and loped towards Elisenda. A Great Dane, its light grey body came as high as her hip. Wandering up to her, the dog looked up and allowed Elisenda to ruffle its head.

  The same voice rang out of the house. ‘She likes you. You might not be all bad. Come inside.’

  With the dog following her, Elisenda approached the strange building and climbed up on to the stoop running along the front. Stepping inside, she paused to let her eyes get accustomed to the gloom.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ the woman said. ‘The light. Humans can get used to anything if only we can be bothered. Let me look at you.’

  A figure came towards Elisenda and peered closely at her face.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Elisenda Domènech. I’m with the Mossos d’Esquadra.’

  Elisenda’s eyes got used to the dark and she could make out a woman in a flowing dress made of a sort of hessian material, held at the waist with an old-fashioned men’s fabric belt, fastened with a serpent clasp. The woman’s hair was short and grey and looked like she cut it herself, with little tufts sticking out at odd angles and softer locks hanging down at random.

  ‘A woman in the police? Would n
ever have happened in my day, we were too busy protesting against them. And you’re Catalan?’

  ‘We have our own police now,’ Elisenda answered with a slight smile. ‘You haven’t noticed?’

  The woman looked straight into Elisenda’s eyes and grunted. ‘You look intelligent. Things really must have changed if they allow that in the police nowadays.’

  ‘May I ask your name?’

  ‘You may, that doesn’t mean I’ll give it to you. Would you like a coffee? I’ve got some brewing on the stove. Sit down.’

  Elisenda sat at one of the two chairs by the table stove and immediately felt the heat from the firewood warm her knees in the way she remembered from childhood. The Great Dane came and stood next to her for a nuzzle before flopping down on an old wooden rocking chair Elisenda hadn’t noticed before. Two other dogs came up and sniffed around her feet, a cocker spaniel and another smaller breed that she didn’t recognise.

  The older woman returned from the kitchen, holding two mismatched cups without saucers. She nodded at the Great Dane enveloping the chair, which was far too small for it and creaking under its weight. Its front and back legs dangled over the arms either side, resting on a small rug underneath it.

  ‘And Flora seems to trust you,’ she said, putting the cups down on the table, ‘so you can’t be too god-awful. Stupid creature, she thinks she’s as small as my other dogs and doesn’t realise the chair’s not her size. She won’t let anyone else sit there.’

  ‘You have three dogs?’

  ‘About a dozen at the last count. I take them in. People abandon them and I look after them. I get the odd busybody thinking I want more, so they bring me any stray dog they find and expect me to feed it.’

  ‘Which you always do,’ Elisenda guessed.