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

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘Ivan Morera,’ the husband had repeated slowly, dredging up a memory from a tangled web. ‘Was he the one who wet the bed?’

  ‘No, he was the one with all those toy spaceships,’ his wife corrected him. ‘He grew up and worked in a bank.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he told her, tucking a blanket under her, down the sides of an armchair, its design so faded that Àlex and Montse couldn’t tell what the original colour might once have been. The whole apartment was glacial. There were no radiators anywhere, just a single old butane heater in the middle of the dark room. It was switched off, the ceramic elements grey and cold.

  ‘Do you have any records of that time?’ Àlex asked them. ‘Any letters?’

  The husband brightened up. ‘We’ve got photos.’

  He led Àlex to a box room down a dark corridor that held a wall of ancient picture albums. No dates on the outside, Àlex noticed, pulling one at random off a shelf. He scanned through it to find a selection of photos of days out and school portraits with various children of all ages. None of them had a name on it.

  ‘Can you remember who this boy is?’ he asked the elderly man, pointing to a sepia-faded photo of a child that must have dated from the 1960s.

  ‘Is that Ivan?’ the man asked him.

  Àlex flicked through a few more albums, but saw that it was pointless. None of them had names or dates or any information written anywhere. They returned to the living room to find Montse asking the wife if she remembered any of the children they fostered coming back as adults. Montse looked up at Àlex and shook her head slightly.

  When they left, Àlex thanked them, letting Montse go first. When no one was looking, he took out his wallet and left a fifty euro note on the flaking wood of an old sideboard. He knew they’d find it and think they’d forgotten leaving it there.

  In the milk bar, sipping at the childhood memory of piping hot chocolate, he decided he’d visit his parents one weekend soon. He thought again of the desk job with the Mossos. It would be much nearer their home, he knew, even if he didn’t particularly like Sabadell.

  ‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’ Montse interrupted his thoughts. ‘The new guy. Manel.’

  Gathering himself, Àlex considered her words. ‘He’s new. He’s seeing how the land lies. Give him time.’ A ghost of a grin crossed his face. ‘You didn’t talk much when you first started. Now look at you.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Talking of talking much, you and Josep seem to have sorted out your problem.’

  She looked up, surprised. ‘Problem?’

  ‘You think no one noticed?’

  Montse ran her spoon back and for through the thick chocolate, staring at the wake it left. ‘It never quite happened after Pau died. Probably no bad thing.’ She glanced up at Àlex. ‘Did Elisenda know?’

  ‘One of the best detectives you know? What do you think?’

  ‘What would she have done about it if Josep and I had…?’

  ‘Who knows? As long as it doesn’t affect your work, which it has done lately, she would probably have let it ride.’

  She took a long sip of her drink. ‘Well, we’ll never know now.’

  Àlex looked at her, a wry smile on his lips. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  * * *

  On the way back from Palamós, Elisenda stopped at the Institut de Medicina Legal and introduced Manel to Albert Riera.

  ‘Ugly place, Lleida,’ Riera told the new recruit. ‘People talk in a strange accent.’

  ‘We at least talk with our mouths open,’ Manel countered, ‘unlike the Gironins.’

  ‘We talk with our mouths closed?’ Elisenda asked him, her voice fizzing.

  ‘Everyone knows that. Gironins talk with their mouths shut, can’t understand a word they’re saying.’

  Riera looked from him to Elisenda. ‘See someone’s going to make themselves popular here. What was it you wanted?’

  Secretly pleased that Manel wasn’t intimidated by the pathologist, although not entirely happy with the reasons why, Elisenda asked Riera how the facial reconstruction was progressing.

  ‘I’ll call the university for you.’ He looked at Manel. ‘Out of the way, young man, I have to use the full force of my lips to talk on the telephone, otherwise I imagine the person at the other end won’t know what I’m asking them.’

  Enunciating more carefully than usual, all the while staring at Manel, he spoke to the technician at the university and hung up.

  ‘She’s sending a video through now. The reconstruction’s still at the depth marker stage, apparently, but she says she’ll be working over the weekend and should get it to us by early next week.’

  After a few minutes, Riera’s computer bonged to tell him an email had arrived. Opening the attachment, he showed the two Mossos a 3D image of as much of the model that had been created so far. He turned his screen towards them and a raw face stared out at them, coloured markers where the cheeks should be and around the nose and mouth showing the calculated depth of where the skin would come to. Layers of muscle had been superimposed on the upper part of the face, and blindly staring eyes filled the sockets. The hole where the mattock had been embedded was now covered in blood-coloured tissue, but it was still a stark portrait of a dead face yet to come back to virtual life.

  ‘Far too early to make any assumptions,’ Riera announced, closing the file.

  He was right, Elisenda knew, but she also knew what she wanted to see.

  ‘Thanks, Albert,’ she told him, signalling to Manel that they were leaving. ‘Keep me posted.’

  * * *

  ‘God, does he ever stop talking?’ Josep demanded, wide-eyed.

  ‘Who?’ Àlex asked him. He and Montse had returned from Barcelona just a few minutes earlier and were getting warm by a radiator.

  ‘Manel. The new guy. He doesn’t shut up.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Montse asked him. She was hanging her coat up next to Manel’s leather sports coat. He’d gone to the toilet just before the other two had arrived, giving Josep the chance to let off steam. ‘He barely opened his mouth this morning.’

  ‘Elisenda’s had me showing him the systems all afternoon. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.’

  Elisenda came out of the room and the three of them immediately stopped talking. She eyed them all in turn. ‘Any joy in Barcelona?’ she finally asked Àlex and Montse.

  ‘Nothing.’ Àlex explained a little of the couple they’d been to see.

  She turned to Josep. ‘How about Barbena?’

  ‘I went to see him at his home this morning. Eulàlia Esplugues was with him. Neither of them reacted when I mentioned the name Ivan Morera. Barbena said he didn’t know him and that there was no one of that name among the students he’d worked with on the dig. It seemed genuine.’

  ‘OK. When Manel returns, can you all come in?’

  Once the fifth member was back and all her team were seated in her room, Elisenda told them of what they’d learned from the landlady’s granddaughter.

  ‘He had a Walkman?’ Àlex repeated. ‘In that case, we’ve really got to consider that Ivan Morera’s the body at El Crit.’

  ‘So where’s Mascort?’ Montse demanded. ‘Did they both die and we’ve only found one of them? Or Mascort just ran off, like everyone thought he did.’

  ‘If the body is Morera,’ Josep asked, ‘how come he packed his things and told the landlady he was leaving?’

  ‘That’s if it is Morera at El Crit,’ Elisenda commented. ‘I’m keeping an open mind until we see the reconstruction. There’s still a possibility that it was Mascort buried there. Either way, we’ve just posed ourselves yet more questions.’

  ‘If it’s Mascort buried there, why’s the Walkman there and why haven’t we found the St. Christopher medallion?’ Àlex asked. ‘Hell, Elisenda, it’s like nailing a shadow to the ground.’

  ‘The dealer,’ Manel piped up. The others stopped talking. ‘We still don’t know who he is. Could he be whichever of the t
wo is not the body at El Crit? My money would be on Mascort being the body and Morera being the dealer. We’ve been told he loved money and possessions.’

  Elisenda stared at him, slowly nodding her head. ‘So, instead of digging up artefacts for a living, he trades in them to make the money he was obsessed with. Good possibility.’

  ‘If either of them was the dealer, he also seems to have vanished,’ Montse commented. ‘Or died. So did either of them have a son or daughter?’

  ‘Or partner of some sort?’ Elisenda asked.

  ‘More people,’ Àlex muttered. ‘Because it wasn’t complicated enough.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Llàtzer, how are you?’

  ‘Good evening, Elisenda. Would you care to join me?’

  She hesitated the merest fraction before replying. ‘I’d love to.’

  She looked around the hotel restaurant, busy on a Friday night in the second half of the month. With what everyone traditionally called the ‘January climb’ now over, the Christmas bills paid, bank balances topped up with a month’s salary, and a week still to go to Carnaval, which was normally the starting pistol for renewed frivolity in the new year, people were tentatively starting to go out again.

  Sucarrats pushed the chair back under the table he’d originally shown Elisenda to and laid another place at Doctor Bosch’s table. In tribute to the changing spirit of the month, the hotel owner was wearing a brighter winter wardrobe than the other day, his hair more studiedly casual, his eyes gleaming more brightly.

  ‘I’m honoured,’ Sucarrats told her. ‘Palamós is a long way to come from Girona for dinner.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to confess that I’m staying in La Fosca, at my sister’s house. It’s more convenient for the current investigation. But you can be sure I will be making the trip especially when I’m back in Girona.’

  He gave a half-bow. ‘Thank you. We have sea urchins as seasonal specials today, by the way, caught by my own fair hands between here and Palafrugell.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going for,’ Bosch interjected.

  ‘I’ll stick to good Girona veal,’ Elisenda told him.

  ‘I’m with you,’ Sucarrats agreed. ‘I’m not a sea urchin fan. You’ve got to respect an animal that has five gonads, but I’m not sure I want to eat them.’ He wafted off to another table to attend a moneyed party of four local couples.

  ‘Follow that,’ Elisenda told Bosch with a smile. She was already enjoying herself, the enforced socialising probably better for her than the thoughtful isolation she’d had in mind.

  ‘Are you here to see the shrine?’ Bosch wanted to know. His voice was hoarse and he also seemed to be struggling with the flu bug that was laying everyone low these days.

  ‘I saw it last week, after you told me about it.’

  ‘It’s quite haunting, isn’t it? And quite amazing it survived, when so many other pieces were destroyed.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The tourist boom. Ancient sites up and down the coast were bulldozed to build hotels and apartments in the sixties and seventies. Yet one more thing for which we have Franco to thank. When he and his minister of information and tourism, propaganda and tourism as we all called it, decided to boost tourism in the country, they didn’t bother to put any controls in place, so anyone could throw up hideous building after hideous building with no regard whatsoever for what lay beneath. So it’s remarkable that whoever built this place back then had the foresight to save the shrine, and subsequent owners have had the ability to respect and preserve it.’

  Sucarrats returned with their bottle of wine, the same Raimat red that Elisenda had ordered before. He replied to Bosch with a mock self-deprecating smile. ‘Thank you for the part of that praise that relates to me. It’s fully deserved.’

  ‘I have to agree,’ Bosch told him, his expression more serious. ‘Many wouldn’t have kept it intact. Many haven’t.’

  Sucarrats shrugged. Bosch’s words had got through to a more sober side to him. ‘We all owe a debt to the past. My repayment is to continue what others before me started.’ He glided away to another table, his movements effortless.

  ‘Was so much really destroyed at that time?’ Elisenda asked Bosch. ‘I know about all the stories of the Franco regime wanting to cover up anything that disagreed with their view of Spain’s past, but were there really so many artefacts destroyed because of the tourist boom?’

  Bosch took a sip of his wine and nodded thoughtfully. ‘I would say that the uncontrolled construction boom of that time wreaked more damage than any ideology of Franco’s. So much so that we can’t begin to imagine what was lost. I’m sure Doctora Fradera would disagree, but Spain was so poor by then, after the Civil War and isolation, that the regime desperately needed to make money from tourism, which it did any way it could, so it simply turned a blind eye to the excesses of commerce. There was a wholesale practice of throwing away archaeological finds and hiding discoveries to ensure that nothing stood in the way of making money. When I was a teenager, I heard of a necropolis near Lloret that was completely destroyed, burials of children and adults simply thrown into a skip, the entire site flattened and built on. Our history lost forever, our ancestors held in disdain.’

  ‘Is that why you studied archaeology?’

  ‘Partly. My parents both had a passion for ignoring the official history to which we’re all subjected and getting through to the real story. I imagine that rubbed off onto me.’

  Between dessert and coffees, Sucarrats led them both down to the cellar on Bosch’s urging for another look at the shrine. Elisenda saw it as small this time, a more private being that no longer threatened. She was struck by its simple and timeless beauty in a way she hadn’t the first time she’d seen it.

  ‘Have you been to see the Indiketa settlement at Castell?’ Bosch asked her. ‘It’s not far from you in La Fosca.’

  ‘Not this time, but I have visited it in the past. I know the importance of the site, but I find the loss of the trees there so sad.’

  Pragmatic as always, Sucarrats shrugged off her words. ‘They’ll grow back. You’re probably too young to remember, but Platja Castell was one of the first triumphs of local democracy after Franco died. The whole area was about to be developed and turned into a holiday marina, which would have destroyed not just the trees and the ecology supported by them, but the settlement as well. But the local council held a popular referendum and the people voted to save it. It’s thanks to that that the archaeology is still intact.’

  ‘And the beach,’ Bosch added. ‘And the wetlands sanctuary.’

  ‘That’s why all this is important,’ Sucarrats murmured thoughtfully, gesturing towards the stone face at the end of the small room. ‘It’s how we right the wrongs of the past.’

  * * *

  In Girona, Manel was eating dinner alone at a restaurant near the hostal where he was staying in the old town until he found somewhere more permanent to live.

  ‘The artichokes we have in Lleida are much bigger,’ he told the waiter. ‘More succulent.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  After dinner, he walked back to the hostal and rang a friend in Lleida, who could barely hear him over the music in the bar where he was with all the people he and Manel grew up with.

  He hung up and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling until he turned the light out.

  * * *

  Across the river, in the new town, at the café where Josep had met his girlfriend the last time, he sat on the same stool, his legs cramped under the counter, and stared at the half-empty glass of beer in front of him.

  The door opened, letting a rush of cooler air in past the fan blowing hot air down over the entrance. He turned to look, but it was a couple, no one he knew. He sighed and took a drink of his beer. He wondered if his girlfriend was going to come back in. It was now quarter of an hour since she’d gone.

  ‘This isn’t working, Josep,’ she’d told him, her voice calm but insistent below the t
hrum of the other drinkers. ‘And it’s not me, it’s you.’

  She’d picked up her coat and bag and walked out, leaving behind her the glass of beer that now stood untouched next to his. He hadn’t followed her or even watched her go.

  The door opened again and he turned, hoping it wasn’t her.

  * * *

  Montse watched the herb-infused ice slowly melt in her gin and tonic and listened to the guy sitting beside her. He’d told her about his work and was now on to his moisturising routine. Fortunately, she hadn’t yet been asked to elaborate her lie of the previous week of working in an office. She had a feeling she wasn’t going to have to.

  The lights in the bar were low, perfect for a small winter city, and the music was loud enough to melt into the warmth of the hubbub rising from the other drinkers.

  When he asked her if she wanted to go for dinner, she reached for her coat and went with him, texting her mother that she’d met a friend and would be late home.

  * * *

  Àlex stood outside the bar on the new side of town near the river and watched.

  Two toughs walked past him, the usual wildlife to be found at that particular bar on a Friday night. They recognised him and nudged each other as they went past. One of them spat on the ground near Àlex’s feet and looked him in the eyes. Àlex looked back but said nothing. Getting the reaction they’d learned to expect these past few months, the toughs leered at him and muttered something, turning to walk across the cold square into the bar. Loud music and low laughter burst out for a brief moment as they opened and closed the door.

  Debating, Àlex stood there for a few moments longer, clenching and unclenching his fists, waiting for the anger to come. His cheeks ached from the muscles twitching closer and closer to the surface.

  Turning, he walked back to Gran Via and to one of the old burger bars, still open and serving food. Sitting alone at a table with a beer, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out the letter with the form for the desk job in Sabadell. A formality, the letter told him. Wiping food crumbs off the table with his hand, he spread the form out and reached into his pocket again for a pen, studying the first question to be filled in.