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

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘All history, all archaeology, is written by the victors. Perpetrators become heroes, victims become villains.’

  All the way back to La Fosca, Elisenda felt punch-drunk. In the cabin in the pines with a woman who conversed almost exclusively with herself and with her dogs, Elisenda had felt more confounded than at any time during her career in the Mossos. The older woman had seemed able to predict Elisenda’s train of thought, shrugging off her revelations as though they were common knowledge, rebutting her theories with more feasible truths.

  She was still going over Maria’s words when she got back to the beach by her sister’s house. Canals’ kayak was pulled up onto the pebbles under the small cliff, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Trusting,’ she muttered to herself.

  Showering quickly, she drove inland towards Monells, stopping at Xidors to buy one of their chocolate and custard cakes. Once by the side of the road, the stylish patisserie now found itself tucked away behind the busy dual carriageway, although that never put off people in the know, as the Sunday morning queue she found herself in proved.

  The first thing she saw when she got to her parents’ house in the small village they’d moved to some years earlier, to the house once owned by her father’s parents, was an amphora standing in a rusted iron frame. It was Greek, from a wreck, and it had stood in the family home in Girona throughout Elisenda’s childhood. After kissing both her parents on the cheek and hugging them both warmly, she paused in the hall and let them go on into the kitchen. Not even the aroma of softly-remembered coffee was enough to move her. Instead, she stood and stared at the ancient amphora. Its cylindrical shape tapering at the bottom into a point, held in place by the simple stand, and at the top into a heavy lip for pouring, the harmony broken by a small circular handle. The whole of the body dark and stained and encrusted with the remains of sea creatures. She’d known it all her life, but it was the first time she’d properly seen it.

  ‘Where was this from?’ she called through to the kitchen. ‘This amphora. Where was it from?’

  Her father came back out into the hall. ‘We’ve had it for years, Elisenda, you’ve seen it thousands of times.’

  ‘I know. I want to know where it’s from.’

  Puzzled, he told her it had been a present from a client. ‘One Christmas years ago, when you were still a child. It was a company that was a regular client of the firm I worked for in those days, before starting my own practice. They gave us all one, all the lawyers in the team who’d worked on their affairs through the year.’

  ‘Where did they get it?’

  ‘The sea, Elisenda, how would I know? It was a gift.’

  ‘It’s theft.’ She reached out to touch it. ‘It’s our history, they had no right to give it to you.’

  Her mother came out to join them, to see what the fuss was about. Elisenda saw her father look quizzically at her mother. ‘They were different times,’ he told her.

  ‘How can we ever know our past?’ she demanded. ‘It’s criminal. It’s no different from ordinary people stealing from archaeological digs or petty criminals selling bootleg DVDs. Or Franco robbing us all of our history.’

  ‘It’s an amphora, Elisenda,’ her father argued. ‘They’re ten a penny. Hundreds turn up in the sea every year.’

  She looked at him. ‘Until they don’t. Until there are no more left to turn up. Then what happens?’

  Her mother came forward and took her hand. ‘Come and have a coffee, Eli, please, and tell us what you want us to do about it.’

  Elisenda allowed herself to be led into the warm of the kitchen. ‘I want you to give it back. To a museum.’

  ‘We will, Eli, I promise. Just come and sit down. You look tired.’

  ‘It’s this job,’ her father muttered.

  ‘Don’t start, Enric,’ her mother warned. ‘Leave her alone.’

  ‘You could have been a judge by now,’ he told Elisenda, unable to let it go. ‘If you’d worked in law.’

  ‘I’m a sotsinspectora,’ she told him. ‘One of the first women to get there. That should be enough for you.’

  ‘But you could have been a judge. Like this Rigau you’re working with now. He’s the same age as you and he’s a judge, one of the best we’ve got. And he didn’t have any of the privileges you did. He had to work for it all with no family to help him.’

  Elisenda stood up and put her coat back on. ‘And I’m having to work for it all to be a police officer, and I’ve got no family helping me.’ She walked to the front door, past the amphora on her way out. ‘I want you to give this to a museum. Or I will investigate its provenance.’

  ‘Eli, please,’ her mother called to her.

  Elisenda turned and hugged her mother before leaving the house. Closing the door behind her, she strode to her car and drove back to La Fosca.

  Chapter Forty Three

  ‘I’ve been arrested.’

  ‘I’ll be with you now.’

  Elisenda hung up her mobile and considered. For once it wasn’t Siset calling her, moaning about his latest skirmish with the Mossos. It was Maria, ringing from the police station in La Bisbal.

  ‘She was caught taking food from a waste bin belonging to a supermarket in Palamós,’ Sergent Poch explained to Elisenda when she turned up there half an hour later on Monday morning. He looked terrible, his voice heavy with a thick cold.

  ‘Belonging to a supermarket? A waste bin?’

  Poch took her to visit Maria in the cell where she was being held.

  ‘I was taking food from the rubbish bins,’ Maria said. ‘Like I told you I’ve done for years. Yesterday evening, when the shop was closed and no customers were around. I don’t see what harm I was doing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me sooner?’ Elisenda wanted to know.

  ‘I didn’t expect to be here this long. I didn’t think for one minute they’d arrest me and keep me overnight.’

  Elisenda got up. ‘I’ll go and see the judge. He’s normally amenable, he should be able to sort it out.’

  She walked the short distance to the court, where Rigau agreed to see her immediately. He had some notes in front of him.

  ‘The supermarket owners want to press charges,’ he told Elisenda, who was momentarily dumbstruck.

  ‘For taking food they’ve thrown away?’ she was finally able to say.

  ‘Trespass.’

  ‘Trespass? They’re rubbish bins at the back of the building.’

  ‘Legally, the bins are on land belonging to the supermarket. They have a case.’

  ‘Oh come on, Pere. They simply don’t want someone getting something for nothing. Even if it’s stuff they’ve discarded and that was heading for landfill anyway.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, Elisenda, but they have a right not to want the accused to get something for nothing. She’ll simply get a fine, I can promise you that. I’ll order her release now so that she can go home. She’ll be issued with a summons in due course.’

  Elisenda got up, exasperated. ‘So all she’ll get is a fine. That’s one fine more than people stealing from a heritage site got.’

  ‘They didn’t take anything,’ he called after her, but she was already out of the room.

  After all the paperwork at the police station had been sorted out, Elisenda drove Maria back to her home in the woods by El Crit. On the way, she vented her frustration and told the older woman of the detectorists who had been released without charge.

  ‘The wrong people always get caught for the wrong crimes,’ Maria told her. ‘No one cares about the past, anyone can alter that with impunity. But the twin idols of commerce and corporatism have to be protected by any means, no matter how amoral. And your Mossos haven’t made a blind bit of difference there.’

  Elisenda wanted to tell her that they were making a difference, but she was too pent-up to try to reason with her. Instead, she spoke of the shrine in the hotel in Palamós.

  ‘Not everyone is driven by greed,’ she concluded. �
��The owner could easily have chosen to use the room for something to make money, but he’s preserved the shrine intact.’

  Maria snorted. ‘And I thought you were brighter than the usual bunch of idiots running things, Elisenda. I know the hotel you mean. And I know the owner. Sucarrats. I also know that he was a town councillor for years, most of which he spent vetoing any proposals to renew work on the El Crit dig because he said the money could be better spent elsewhere to bring revenue into the town. That’s the extent of his altruism.’

  Shocked, Elisenda glanced over at her and back to the road. Processing what she’d just heard, she decided to change the subject. She asked Maria again about Mascort’s dealing in illicit antiquities.

  ‘You’re sure you never knew about it until after he disappeared?’

  ‘Not until after we’d separated,’ Maria corrected her. ‘By which time, I could do nothing about it.’

  ‘And you really have no idea who he was passing them on to? Do you know of any other archaeologists who you’d suspect could have been trading in artefacts?’

  ‘You forget I gave up archaeology to work as a teacher. I lost all touch with who was doing what in the profession. I found it too backbiting a world.’

  Elisenda drove as far into the woods as the track would allow and pulled over. ‘The present El Crit dig doesn’t appear to be the most fortunate work environment,’ she agreed.

  Maria snorted. ‘Fradera and Bosch. Each one wants to be the other’s iconoclast. Why? So they can become the icon instead. Such is the way of all self-appointed critics.’ She got out of the car. ‘I can find my way from here. No need to come with me.’

  Elisenda watched her disappear into the pines and began the laborious manoeuvring to turn the car to head back along the track.

  ‘So if you lost touch with archaeology,’ she muttered as she finally headed back to the main road, ‘how come you know who Fradera and Bosch are and how they get on?’

  She knew where she was heading next, and turned left for the short drive to Palamós, parking in front of the old harbour wall again. She could smell the salt in the air. The raucous clamour of seagulls told her that a tuna fishing boat had come into the port behind her. Hurrying into the old town, she had to blot out the squelching thud of the hooks being smashed into the flesh of the huge fish to lift them to the quayside.

  The hotel receptionist, a young guy with joyously unruly hair and a bright voice, told her that the owner had gone out but would be back shortly if she wanted to wait. He showed her to a table in the temporary extension, a stylishly decorated glass and white wood shell placed for the winter where the open-air summer terrace would be, and asked if she wanted a coffee.

  ‘Café amb llet,’ she requested. ‘And a small mineral water.’

  As she waited, she stared out at the tiny square and narrow streets running beyond it. Four people at another table in the corner, bathed in gentle sunlight, got up to leave, each one greeting her with an automatic Bon dia as they passed.

  Elisenda sat up with a start. Through the window, she saw Sucarrats walking towards the hotel and stop at the end of the square to shake hands in goodbye to the man walking alongside him. Miquel Canals smiled warmly at Sucarrats and hurried away along the street heading towards the port. Approaching, Sucarrats saw her through the window and waved.

  ‘You know Miquel Canals?’ she asked him when he came in to say hello.

  Surprised at the question, he nodded. ‘I’ve known him since he was a kid. He used to come and stay here with his father every year. The last time he was here was when his father was ill. One last time. Very sad.’

  He excused himself and went to fetch a round aluminium tray to clear the empty cups from the other table. When he’d done, he came back and stood over her, the full tray resting effortlessly on his left forearm.

  ‘I was talking to a woman called Maria Pujol this morning,’ she told him. He shook his head to show he didn’t recognise the name. ‘Dolors Quintí,’ she tried. She saw a faint flicker in his eyes before he again shook his head.

  ‘Two women?’ he asked her.

  ‘Same woman, two different names. She mentioned that you’d been a councillor and had regularly vetoed funding for the El Crit dig.’

  ‘I have no idea who she is, but she’s quite right, I did.’

  ‘She said you felt the money would be better spent on other ways of bringing revenue into the town.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s not entirely right. An archaeological site requires constant and steady funding. A town council simply wouldn’t be able to sustain that and maintain it to the standard it would require. Besides that, it’s potentially a major heritage site. Funding for that has to come centrally, from the Catalan government, as part of an overall strategy to protect our history. Otherwise, it becomes a mess. We’ve had enough of that in the past. That’s why I vetoed it.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know the name Dolors Quintí?’ she asked suddenly. She saw the same flicker in his eyes before the repeated denial. ‘One other thing, I hope you don’t mind, but I mentioned the shrine in the cellar to a colleague, Pere Rigau, he’s a judge in La Bisbal.’

  Staring out of the window, Sucarrats looked like he’d been stung. The tray fell from his arm with a clatter, the coffee cups crunching on the wooden floor, two glasses shattering loudly. Following his gaze, Elisenda looked across the square and saw the man that she’d seen picking up rubbish from the beach at El Crit. Jumping up from the table, she ran outside, but he’d seen her and had hurriedly turned away down one of the lanes leading past the church and away into the old town. She searched for him in the little streets around the church and the square but he was gone.

  Returning to the hotel, where Sucarrats was sweeping up the debris, she asked him who the man was.

  ‘What man?’ he insisted. ‘I didn’t see anyone. I just dropped the tray because it was heavy, that’s all.’

  He turned away from her to kneel down and began picking up the larger pieces of broken glass, placing them carefully on the tray.

  Chapter Forty Four

  Elisenda’s phone rang as she was getting back into her car. It was Albert Riera, telling her that the facial reconstruction was complete and that he would forward it to her by email.

  ‘That’s good time,’ she told him. ‘How’s it looking?’

  ‘Like some fucking serial killer who’s missing his mother. They always do.’

  She hung up and rang Àlex in Girona to tell him that she was on her way from Palamós.

  ‘Can you be there when I get back? Riera’s sending the file with the facial reconstruction. I want you to see it as well.’

  She drove to Vista Alegre, where she found not just Àlex, but the other three members of the unit waiting for her. Gathering them all into her office, she opened the file and turned the screen for them all to see. An image of a face came up and her heart sank. She could sense, too, the disappointment in the others. Used to the more creative productions for archaeology, the technician had added an impression of hair, which they couldn’t know from the skull, and left the face clean-shaven with full lips.

  ‘It’s impossible to tell,’ Àlex complained.

  ‘The hair is distracting,’ Elisenda agreed, framing the face with her hands to try to blot out the top of the head. ‘But at least the facial structure and features will be accurate, except for the lips and the ears.’

  Manel leaned forward and took the keyboard. ‘Can I?’

  Using a image editing program, he opened another file with the scanned photo of Esteve Mascort that Jordi Canudas had given Elisenda and Josep when they’d interviewed him in Barcelona, and created a similar 3D image to the reconstruction. Using the mouse to size the photo of Mascort to the right dimension and to rotate the two images, he slid the photo over the reconstruction, superimposing one over the other. Lining up the eyes, the nose and the mouth, Mascort’s hair now appeared over the image produced from the skull. Opening the original Mascort photo, he the
n lay them out on the screen side by side. The five of them leaned forward, rapt. The same face stared out at them. The same B-movie assuredness, the same slender nose, the same confident turn of the cheeks and jawline.

  ‘It is Mascort,’ Elisenda whispered.

  One by one, they all looked and considered and agreed. It could only be Mascort in the trench at El Crit.

  ‘So where’s Ivan Morera?’ Àlex asked.

  ‘And why did the killer bury Morera’s Walkman with Mascort?’ Montse added. ‘Was Morera the killer and he dropped the Walkman when he buried the body?’

  ‘It still doesn’t answer the question of what happened to him after,’ Àlex insisted.

  Sitting back, Elisenda gave them a quick rundown of what had happened that morning with Maria and her conversation with Sucarrats. ‘I don’t believe that Maria didn’t know anything about Mascort stealing from the dig,’ she concluded. ‘And she knows more about El Crit past and present than she lets on. Also, Sucarrats reacted when he saw the man from the beach outside his hotel. He knows who he is, even though he denied it. The question is, who is the man from the beach and where do Sucarrats and Maria fit into it all?’

  ‘Well, if Ivan Morera is still alive, I’d say the man you’ve seen on the beach has to be him,’ Àlex surmised. ‘He’s Morera, the missing student. He’s the one who killed Mascort.’

  ‘And Sucarrats?’

  Josep snapped his fingers. ‘Sucarrats was the dealer. He’s the one who was selling the artefacts.’

  ‘He’s had the hotel for about twenty-odd years,’ Elisenda argued. ‘The dealer appears to have stopped working six years ago.

  ‘He could have run both businesses alongside each other. He bought the hotel with the profits from the illicit antiquities and used it as the respectable front. He stopped the illegal side when the legal side made enough money for him to become completely above board.’

  Elisenda stood up and reached for her coat. ‘Either way,’ she told the others as she put it on, ‘we need to have another word with Sucarrats and we need to find the man from the beach, whether he really is Ivan Morera or not. Àlex, you come with me, the rest, look again and track down anything you can about Morera. Look for anywhere we might have missed him resurfacing.’