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

by Chris Lloyd

  Elisenda stifled a laugh. ‘Well, I’m not apologising, either.’ With which, she knew, they’d both apologised. ‘For your information, I didn’t sleep because I was trawling the internet until the wee small hours. Checking up on the Indiketa and these skulls with spikes.’

  ‘I saw a piece on the news a year or so ago how they’d reconstructed one of the faces. I checked it out again. It was fascinating. I take it that’s what we’re doing.’

  ‘Just to try and get some idea. See if it looks like the picture we’ve got of Mascort.’ She looked out of the side window, the undulating green of the Empordà hinterland blurring past them. ‘Fradera seems to be out of step with most of the theories I found. The general consensus seems to agree with Bosch. The skulls were trophies of war displayed to intimidate other tribes and invaders and show how great the Indiketa were. They talk of the skulls of ancestors or village elders possibly being used for veneration, but not necessarily in these cases.’

  ‘You find it odd that she should be going for the veneration idea?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. Or she’s just brilliant and sees what no one else does.’

  Àlex told her of his visit the previous afternoon to Palamós to question Canyellas’ widow.

  ‘She spoke of the man who worked with her husband the same way Clara Ferré described the man trying to sell dodgy artefacts to her boss. But no name anywhere. He hid himself well with his fake companies. And now he seems to have vanished. Just like Mascort and just like this new student.’

  ‘And Canyellas’ widow lives in Palamós,’ Elisenda muttered. ‘Do you notice how everything keeps coming back to there?’

  Àlex was silent for a moment before speaking. ‘And if this guy has vanished, maybe he just died. Which comes back to the theory of Arbós’ killer being the original murderer’s son or daughter.’

  Which also brought the sudden image to Elisenda of her temporary neighbour at La Fosca, Miquel Canals. Whose father died just the previous month and who came to stay on the coast at the same time the body was found at El Crit.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  ‘We’re not common thieves,’ the woman told Elisenda, her tone aggrieved.

  ‘We’re collectors,’ her husband told Àlex in the interview room next door.

  ‘They’re a waste of time,’ Elisenda muttered to her sergent as they swapped rooms to take a turn interviewing the other suspect.

  Àlex had to agree. ‘They’re not exactly what I had in mind when I thought of organised gangs stealing antiquities,’ he conceded with a faint grin.

  What they were was a couple in their mid-forties with a metal detector, a plastic shovel and a battered Seat Ibiza. They also had two cats at home that needed feeding, the husband had protested to Poch when he’d held them in separate cells overnight.

  ‘You’re collectors?’ Elisenda asked the husband when he repeated the claim he’d made to Àlex. ‘At night, when no one’s around, the other side of a fence on a protected heritage site.’

  ‘You are thieves,’ Àlex told the wife. ‘We will be charging you with theft.’

  She’d looked at him more in effrontery than fear when he gathered up his papers and left the interview room.

  ‘Except there is no theft,’ Elisenda reminded him in the corridor between the two doors.

  By the time the Mossos patrol car had turned up in the middle of the night at the corner of the Ullastret site to find the husband blissfully unaware under his earphones and the wife absently pointing her torch at the earth by his feet, the couple hadn’t yet found anything. They had no items in the bag slung over the wife’s shoulder or hidden in the large plastic DIY box in the boot of their car.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ the husband had complained to the Mossos who’d arrived at the scene. ‘We’ve got plenty of finds at home. There’s never been any problem.’

  He was now denying he’d said such a thing, and while Elisenda and Àlex were interviewing the couple at the station in La Bisbal, Poch and his team were searching their house in the neighbouring village of Cruïlles thanks to a warrant from Jutge Rigau.

  ‘The wife tried to justify it by telling me that these things they find belong to the nation,’ Àlex told Elisenda as they walked the short distance to the court buildings to see the judge, ‘and that as they are part of the nation, they’re only taking what’s rightly theirs. What an attitude.’

  Elisenda let out a small laugh. ‘When I was a kid, we heard a huge crash from the upstairs flat. It turned out it was a Romanesque statue that the man living there had simply taken from a church out in the sticks because he liked collecting them. It was so heavy, it had pulled the shelf down off the wall and broken. When my dad said it was a tragedy, the guy said not to worry, he could always go and get another one. He then complained bitterly when his flat got burgled a couple of years later and they were taken. Some people have an ambivalent idea of what property means.’

  They found Rigau appeared to have his hands tied by the same attitude.

  ‘They took nothing,’ he told them. ‘They were found with no stolen goods on them, so we can’t charge them with theft. Unless Poch turns up something out of the ordinary at their house, I’m going to have to order their release.’

  Elisenda was dumbstruck. ‘They were attempting to steal archaeological artefacts.’

  ‘That won’t stand up. Who says they were attempting to steal? Any half-decent lawyer would get that buried in five minutes.’

  ‘Trespass, then. Criminal damage. They can’t be allowed to get away with this.’

  ‘No criminal damage,’ Rigau told her. ‘Trespass, yes, but I for one don’t want to see my court clogged up with petty cases like that. I think you’ll just have to accept, Elisenda, that they’re small fry. I know they’re annoying, but they bear no relation to the illicit antiquities investigation, either in terms of a direct connection to it or of scale. I’ll get Sergent Poch to put the fear of god into them, that’s all I can promise.’

  Elisenda stood up to leave. ‘The fear of god? In Girona, we’re running a low-level crime initiative to stop offences like this, maybe you should consider it here too.’

  She calmed down on the way back to the car parked at the police station.

  ‘It’s not even like I particularly welcome the low-level initiative Puigventós is doing,’ she muttered to Àlex. ‘But we have to be able to do something about these two.’ She noticed him keeping silent. ‘What?’

  ‘Siset. You had him released. His crimes are no different. Or his attitude.’

  ‘I had him released for the greater good, Àlex.’

  ‘And what would charging these two with trespass do for the greater good when we’ve got someone running around sticking spikes through people’s heads?’

  ‘Hell, Àlex, you’re getting me to defend Puigventós’ petty crime campaign.’ She shook her head in anger. ‘Let’s take a drive out to Ullastret. If only to calm Fradera down. And me. I want to see the site, and I’d also like to see if other artefacts have been taken from there before now.’

  Retrieving their car from the side of the pavement, they left La Bisbal and drove across the plain, past idling crop fields and rambling farms either side of the fast minor road that stretched in a relentless straight line towards the Iberian site at Ullastret.

  ‘Wrong angle to see the pregnant woman from here,’ Elisenda broke the silence at one point.

  Àlex glanced at her as he drove. ‘The pregnant woman?’

  She pointed up ahead of them at the low-lying mountains in the distance.

  ‘Get those mountains at the right angle and it looks like a pregnant woman lying on her back. Other people see a bishop, but I prefer to think of them as a pregnant woman.’

  ‘You people in Girona really do have a lot of time on your hands.’

  Elisenda rang ahead as they passed the medieval upstart of the new town some two kilometres away from the ancient settlement. By the time they reached the car park, Fradera was waitin
g for them at the entrance. Walking towards them, she motioned them to stop and climbed into the back of the car.

  ‘We need to take this track here to the left, outside the settlement,’ she told them, slamming the door shut. ‘It’s the quickest way to get to where these people were digging.’

  Elisenda stole a look at Àlex, who seemed slightly fazed by the archaeologist’s dispensing with any greeting. For herself, she’d got used to the other woman’s ways and quite welcomed the lack of small talk. Equally to the point, she told her about Jutge Rigau’s argument and the probable release without charge of the couple.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Fradera replied. ‘How can we ever hope to know our history when it’s constantly being hijacked by a bureaucracy that works in its own favour, not that of the rest of us?’

  In silence as Àlex drove gingerly through the potholes of the dirt track, Elisenda had to agree with her. She allowed the archaeologist to continue her rant amid the car’s constant sliding and jarring on the worn surface.

  ‘While we’re kept waiting for funding, sites deteriorate and people like this have pilfered so many artefacts over the years that could have afforded us far greater knowledge of ourselves.’ She tapped Àlex on the shoulder. ‘You need to pull over here to the right and park where you can. We’ve got to walk the rest of the way.’

  She didn’t let up as they climbed over the low fence and trudged across the hard earth to the place where the couple were found detectoring.

  ‘But these people aren’t the real problem,’ she insisted to Elisenda. Despite herself, Elisenda found it fascinating, and she could see Àlex taking in every word. ‘Politicians and business have been the bane of our history. Officially, Franco’s lot never used archaeology to create national myths the way other fascist regimes did. They justified their centralist, authoritarian arguments on a perverse view of an imperial past that they chopped and changed to match the political situation that they were imposing on the rest of us. So at best, they simply didn’t bother funding archaeology in this country because it wasn’t expedient for their purposes. At worst, they swept any archaeology that didn’t fit in with their ideology under the carpet. In their view, Spain ceased to be a collection of tribes after the Roman conquest and became a single imperial entity, a vision of false unity that they tried to hold on to for forty years, and heaven help any piece of evidence that proved otherwise. God knows how many physical manifestations of our past were destroyed over the years. And even now, we’re constantly at the mercy of political and economic policies that see us as a luxury and that still determine how much of our heritage we’re allowed to unearth and so understand. And that’s why there are still people who think that this is acceptable.’

  She showed them to an area of dusty ground that had signs of footprints and scraping, but little more as evidence that anyone had been there. Elisenda had to admit that Rigau was right, it couldn’t be called criminal damage, despite Fradera’s anger and her own frustration.

  ‘You’re certain they took nothing?’ she asked the archaeologist. She was fighting an urge to confide in the other woman that new policing often felt the same. No matter how bad the past was, the lack of continuity with it made piecing together present crimes and their historic antecedents a constant struggle.

  ‘The Mossos found nothing on them, and looking at this, there doesn’t appear to be anything removed. Fortunately in this circumstance, these people were amateurish at best and didn’t do too much damage. That is not always the case.’

  ‘How much does go missing from here?’ Àlex asked.

  Fradera glanced at him and turned to Elisenda to reply, impervious to his dark charm. ‘Extremely rare. Any thief who knows what they’re doing thinks we’re more protected than we are because of our status as a heritage site. It’s the opportunists like these who tend to target us and even that’s very uncommon. It’s places like El Crit that suffer, isolated sites with no security of any sort. Fortunately for El Crit, it’s so isolated and so arduous to get to that it’s largely been left alone.’

  ‘Except for finds being added to the dig,’ Elisenda commented.

  Fradera snorted. ‘Doctor Bosch and his mysterious artefacts turning up. He claims another one appeared this morning.’

  ‘You don’t believe it to be genuine.’

  ‘Of course it’s genuine. But it’s probably just something he forgot to catalogue in the first place.’

  Elisenda recalled how clean the kylix that she saw with Bosch was and found herself disagreeing with Fradera. Again she thought how the ill-feeling between the two archaeologists diminished them both.

  ‘Do you think he could have been keeping them for himself and returning them now there’s so much scrutiny at the dig?’ Àlex asked her.

  Elisenda applauded her sergent’s question and studied Fradera’s face when she answered.

  ‘I am not suggesting that for one moment. Merely that he might not be as organised as he should be.’

  ‘You knew Ferran Arbós,’ Àlex persisted. ‘Do you know of anyone that he had dealings with in trading in the artefacts?’

  ‘If I had, Sergent Albiol, I would have told you before now. I knew him as a curator, my dealings with him, as you call them, began and ended there.’

  She had little more to tell them, so Elisenda and Àlex drove her back to the entrance to the settlement and headed back to the main road.

  ‘She’s got something to hide, or she thinks Bosch has?’ Àlex questioned out loud, accelerating on the old, straight roads that squared the triangle back towards Girona.

  ‘More pettiness than accusations,’ Elisenda mused. ‘Or absent-minded confessions. It’s hard to discern anything other than rivalry through their points-scoring off each other. Which just goes to show how easy I am to work with.’

  Àlex tugged his forelock. ‘Yes, Sotsinspectora.’

  ‘It’s in the papers,’ Elisenda said, changing the subject and telling him about the article she’d read in the previous day’s newspaper.

  ‘I saw. Do you think someone’s leaked it? Poch’s lot in La Bisbal, the courts, the Archaeology Service?’

  ‘It could have got out anyhow. Arbós’s cleaner could have told anyone in the village, any of the neighbours could have got hold of it. It’s the effect that worries me more than the cause. Who knows what it’ll flush out. The attack on Clara Ferré might even have been a result of it.’

  Her phone rang as they neared the last stretch of road leading to the city. She listened for a moment before answering.

  ‘No, best if you stay there and keep looking. We’re on our way back to Girona, we’ll go and see her.’

  She hung up and waited until a chime told her a text had come through.

  ‘Address in Girona,’ she told Àlex. ‘That was Josep. He’s found someone in Girona who was on the same university course as Ivan Morera, our missing student.’

  * * *

  Anna Espriu lived in one of the old apartment blocks in Santa Eugènia. Old in this case being from the 1970s, one of the frequent boom periods in the jagged timeline of construction in the city. It stood at the other end of the sprawling suburb from the modern block where Àlex lived, nearer the city centre, the relic of another vanished spike in confidence. Drab on the outside, the interior of the flat was furnished in blond wood and abstract paintings, a welcome light in the narrow streets of this part of the neighbourhood. Two walls in the small living room where Espriu had brought them coffee were filled with books.

  ‘Ivan Morera,’ she repeated. ‘He was a loner. I never really knew much about him, which was as much as any of us did. He was a mature student, about six or seven years older than the rest of us and he didn’t have anything in common with the other students. Or any desire to, from what I remember.’

  ‘Can you remember any friends he did have?’ Àlex asked her.

  ‘None. As I say, he was a complete loner. He was friendly enough, he wasn’t stand-offish or anything and he’d sit and have
a coffee with us, but that was as far as it went.’

  ‘And you didn’t think it odd that he didn’t return for the second year?’ Elisenda questioned.

  The woman, in her mid-fifties and dressed elegantly in black trousers and a ribbed sweater, looked to be casting her mind back to a time over thirty years ago. She spoke in what Elisenda’s mother would have called a forty-Ducados-a-day voice. A deep, rasping sound supposedly caused by the fashion when Anna Espriu was young of smoking black tobacco. It was a type of voice you rarely heard these days.

  ‘I think I was surprised he’d lasted the whole of the first year. Which was sad, because he was good, he was fascinated by Iberian history, he knew a lot more about them than the rest of us did. But he had issues. For one thing, he was obsessed with money and possessions. He always had to have the latest thing before anyone else. He had this saying that we all thought made him a bit odd. If there was someone who was a bit hard up, or even that he wanted to criticise, he’d say they were poorer than a beggar’s wallet. It sounded old-fashioned even then.’

  ‘Possessions,’ Elisenda commented. ‘Did he have a Walkman?’

  ‘I really don’t remember. Were they around then?’

  ‘What about his tastes in music? Any favourite band?’

  Espriu shook her head helplessly. ‘I really didn’t know him well enough. No one did. He never talked about things like that. He didn’t have small talk. If it wasn’t money or possessions, it was his other obsession. He’d been put up for adoption as a baby, but he always lived with a succession of foster families from what I could gather. The one thing about himself that he would talk about was that he wanted to find his real mother. There were rumours before the summer he left the course that he’d found her. He’d always said that if he did, he’d change his name and take hers.’