by Chris Lloyd
Without questioning, he began to dust the top layer of earth with a brush. Most of it had been removed anyway when the Científica had conducted their own search, so he only had to work with his trowel for a brief time before coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t there.
‘Nothing,’ he confirmed, standing up. ‘But I’d like to check the other trench for tampering.’
‘Is there really no way you could have security here?’ she asked him as they walked up the incline to the original trench.
He laughed. ‘That really would be the end of the dig if we had to pay for that. And the government can’t afford to pay for the Mossos to guard it either. Not until we can prove that it’s a site of national interest. We’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, I’m afraid.’
They got to the part of the site where Bosch usually worked and stopped to look down into the pit. ‘Well, I can tell you now, that this one’s been disturbed. Those scrape marks there and over there are new. I’m the only one who works on this part and I didn’t make them. They’re not entirely amateur by the looks of them.’
‘You wouldn’t know if anything’s been taken?’
Frowning, he crouched down for a closer look. ‘Quite the opposite.’ With a puzzled expression, he cleared away some powdery earth that looked like it had been hurriedly thrown over whatever was lying underneath and he picked up a small black bowl with a handle on either side. ‘This has been left here since last night.’
Elisenda squatted down to take a closer look. A faint decoration of ivy leaves ran around the edge of the dish, encircling a figure of a man drinking from a goblet at the centre. ‘Is it genuine?’
Bosch examined it. ‘Oh, it’s genuine, all right. But it’s not recently excavated. It’s been cleaned, for one thing. It’s a kylix, by the way, a drinking cup. As you drank, the figure of Dionysos gradually appeared. Sometimes the figures were humorous or erotic. This one would have been traded with the Indiketa by the Greeks in exchange for crops like barley or lentils. I’d say it’s fifth century BC, which means it’s earlier than the body that was found here. It’s completely incongruous time-wise, but I would say it’s possible that it could once have come from this site. We’ve found others here and elsewhere locally.’
‘Could it date from the 1981 dig?’
He considered for a moment before climbing out of the trench. ‘Possibly. But impossible to say with any certainty.’
‘When I was here the other day,’ Elisenda recalled, ‘I found a piece of pottery that Doctora Fradera hadn’t boxed up the evening before. I thought it seemed odd.’
‘There was a shard one morning. I did think it strange that she would forget. But I have no idea why anyone would return an artefact to a site.’
‘Guilty conscience? Something they took in the past and decided to give back?’
Elisenda stared at the kylix and tried to see how and why someone would be leaving artefacts at the dig. She knew it was significant. She stepped back to let Bosch climb out of the trench.
‘Would you care for a coffee?’ he asked her, dusting himself down. ‘Flask, I’m afraid, which is fairly hideous, but it wakes me up.’
They sat on a large rock near the trench and took turns to sip from the cup.
‘You’re right,’ Elisenda told him. ‘It’s awful.’
‘Pilfering from digs is a problem,’ he said, returning to the subject. ‘Amateurs visit sites at night, sometimes with metal detectors, and if they don’t actually find and take anything that we then lose forever, they can often simply destroy the site through not knowing what they’re doing.’
Elisenda wondered at how he could be so different when not around Doctora Fradera. How he could be so forthcoming and pleasant here alone with her in the wood but how the petty jealousy between the two archaeologists could diminish them both, make the pair of them behave like spoilt children. She had seen so often in her job how a bad feeling between two people could make one or both of them act in a way that was so hugely out of character as to lead them to do desperate and appalling things.
‘Have you heard of archaeologists stealing artefacts from digs?’
He sighed and screwed the cup back on the flask. ‘You do hear of it. There was one a few years ago who was caught trying to sell Roman coins on the internet. But I must say, I’ve never come across it personally. It would rankle if I ever did.’
‘Have you ever had any dealings with Ferran Arbós?’
‘Ah, yes, I read about that. Murdered in his own home, wasn’t he?’
Elisenda nodded, but didn’t offer any more information. The nature of the curator’s death had been kept out of the newspapers so far.
‘I knew him a bit, but I never worked with him. He took early retirement while I was still doing my doctorate in Barcelona, so I never really coincided. Doctora Fradera knew him more.’
‘You and she don’t really see eye to eye, do you?’ Elisenda tried a direct approach.
He paused some while before answering. ‘I suppose it’s more of a generational thing than anything personal. I’m younger than she is, I took my doctorate in a less politically emotive age and I was possibly less drawn to the more revolutionary theories that inspired people like Doctora Fradera who studied in the immediate post-Franco era. Archaeology itself evolves, and that’s not always such a good thing. We don’t always have to embrace the latest thinking as being omniscient.’
‘You belong to different schools, in other words?’
‘In a very simplistic way, yes. I would probably describe myself as more of a processual archaeologist. Doctora Fradera, on the other hand, is more keen on adopting a cognitive view.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, very crudely, that when I discover an artefact, I look scientifically at its function in terms of the way the user of it might have lived. Doctora Fradera believes that when she discovers an artefact, she is looking at the way the user thought.’ He pointed at the trench nearby. ‘So, when I see a skull severed from the body with a spike through the forehead and I ally that with the history that we know of the peoples who lived here, my interpretation is that it was a trophy of conflict, or a deterrent. All of that is borne out by contemporaneous observers. Posidonius of Apamea and Diodorus of Sicily commented on how the Celts used to display the heads of defeated enemies. So too did Livy. The evidence is too substantial to think otherwise. Doctora Fradera, on the other hand, will try to impose a way of thinking on it, such as the idea of its being a form of veneration or part of a system of beliefs, that we cannot possibly know.’ He laughed. ‘That is probably the most rough and ready way of describing our ideas that I could have come up with.’
‘I’m a very rough and ready thinker.’
‘I doubt that very much. You’re a detective, you deal in evidence, like a scientist.’
‘But as a detective, I also have to try and place a mindset on that evidence.’ She looked at her watch and stood up. ‘Thank you for the conversation, Llàtzer. And the coffee. But I really have to be going.’
They said goodbye and she set off back towards the beach.
‘Haven’t you come by car?’ he asked her, surprised.
‘Kayak. I’m staying in La Fosca for a few days. I might try and get in a visit to the Castell settlement while I’m here.’
‘Do, it’ll give you a clearer idea of what this village might have been like. And if you’re interested in archaeology and you’re in Palamós these days, there’s an interesting hotel in the old town. When it was being built in the 1960s, they discovered a Roman shrine in what’s now the basement. Luckily, they left it intact and the present owner has been very good in showing it due respect. If you tell him I sent you, he would probably agree to letting you see it. Very few people know about it, and it really is worth seeing something so unique outside a museum setting. It gives you a much clearer idea of how a private shrine might have been when it was originally in use.’
‘That sounds fascinating. I’ll look it
up.’
‘You should,’ he said, turning back to his own temple of veneration.
Chapter Nineteen
‘There’s little veneration here,’ Elisenda muttered after the door closed behind them on the fourth visit.
‘Pardon?’ Josep asked her.
She explained about her conversation with Doctor Bosch earlier at El Crit. The two Mossos were in Vall-Llobrega, going door to door among the houses neighbouring Ferran Arbós’s scruffy villa. Elisenda had driven to the village from the coast, meeting Josep, who had come from Girona.
‘They don’t come right out and say it,’ Elisenda went on, ‘but none of them has shown any great affection for Arbós. Or any concern.’
‘They’re more worried about their own safety,’ Josep agreed. ‘But he doesn’t seem to have been very popular.’
‘What would you say, Josep? Do you think any of them’s got anything to hide?’
Josep pulled his shoulders back, unfolding to his full height, and sucked in a deep breath of the crisp village air. Elisenda was learning that he did that when he was feeling relaxed and confident. Like most of her team, that had become too much of a rarity in recent months. ‘No, I don’t. There’s no love lost, but not enough to drive a chisel through his head. That takes real anger.’
‘Or real coldness.’ Elisenda looked at the distant mountains and exhaled. There was the slightest of mists from her breath, ghostly in the rich blue air. ‘I agree with you.’
‘And they would all have been out when the attack happened, anyway,’ Josep added. ‘Do you want me to check up on them at the time of the murder?’
‘Yes, but don’t take too long over it. I don’t think we’ll find our killer among the neighbours, but best to make sure they really were where they say they were.’
After they’d knocked on the last of the fruitless doors, they went to Arbós’s house. Elisenda had called the Mossos station in La Bisbal to tell them she’d be in Vall-Llobrega, and Sergent Poch had sent a Seguretat Ciutadana patrol car with the keys to let her in. The two officers waited outside as Elisenda and Josep entered.
The sculptor’s studio was covered in two layers of white dust, a coarser ground layer that had coated the floor and the surfaces near where Arbós had worked for years, with pieces of stone that crunched underfoot and that had steadfastly pockmarked the tiles. The second layer covered any feasible surfaces and handles and was much finer and more temporary, the powder used by the Científica team to search for fingerprints. The forensic team in La Bisbal had already told Elisenda that they’d found nothing of interest.
‘Anyone calculating enough to kill someone like this is not going to forget to wear gloves,’ the sergent in the unit had commented.
Elisenda and Josep pulled on their own blue gloves and studied the room, dust motes dancing spectrally in the sunlight. Neither of them could help looking at the far wall, crimson bleeding into the plaster and a dried rust tide at the foot of it. Elisenda pulled her gaze away.
‘Someone of Arbós’s generation is going to have photos,’ she explained to Josep as they began to search. ‘Especially from that time. We’re looking for photos of Mascort with Arbós or any document that would link the two of them. Keep an eye out too for any reference to Ricard Soler. He’s gone missing for a reason.’
Shelves lined two of the walls and they took one each, working back and forth along the rows, pulling out folders and dusting off files of correspondence, replacing them when they bore no fruit. There was little from his time as a curator, they both noticed.
‘Destroying the evidence?’ Josep asked.
‘Does it look to you like there are any missing?’
Elisenda stared at a section of ring binders in a row and at what appeared to be gaps between some of them, hastily closed up as though to look like nothing had been removed. Perhaps it was nothing, but she sent Poch a text asking him to send her any photos of the shelves taken by Científica on Thursday for her to check. Renewing her search, she found two binders full of photographs, reminiscent of the one Jordi Canudas kept in his office. She recalled her parents keeping their photos in something similar for years, before everything was kept on a computer. Hunting through them page by page, she was disappointed to see that they both appeared to be for family, with pictures of weddings and first communions, dinners and days out. Stopping at one that looked a more formal affair, she came across a young Fradera in a group around a dinner table.
‘Did you miss that one?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘Got something, I think,’ she heard Josep say.
She looked up to see him leaning in the door frame. He led her out of the studio into the living room. She’d been so intent on her own search that she hadn’t registered him leaving. Standing in the corner was an old-fashioned bureau that Arbós had evidently used as a desk. The computer that had been there had been taken by Científica, again with nothing of interest being found on it.
Lifting the pull-down flap on which the desktop had stood, Josep pulled out a drawer concealed underneath it. Inside was a flat wooden box with a lid. He took it out of the drawer and replaced the flap so he could place the box on top of it and remove the cover. It was a coin display case, the interior divided into small square compartments, each lined with cotton wool and housing an ancient-looking coin.
‘Please tell me the St. Christopher is there,’ Elisenda murmured.
‘Afraid not.’ Josep had already told her that Científica hadn’t found the medallion in the trench at El Crit. ‘Now, they could be an innocent hobby, but knowing the stories about Arbós, they might not be.’
‘We’ll take the box to the Archaeology Service, see if they know anything about them.’
‘They obviously weren’t the motive for his murder,’ Josep said. ‘Or they wouldn’t still be here.’
‘No, I think his murder has a far deeper reason.’
Her phone beeped. Poch had sent her two photos taken of the scene on the Thursday. The same gaps she had just found between the photo albums were there already, so at least nothing had vanished since the body had been found. Dissatisfied despite that, she showed them to Josep.
‘Inconclusive,’ she decided. ‘Either it means absolutely nothing or it means that the killer had been looking for something in them and found it.’
Finding nothing more, they took the box away with them and closed up the house, thanking the two uniforms for their time.
‘Time for a Saturday, now, I think,’ Elisenda told Josep as they each retrieved their cars. ‘Anything planned?’
‘Lunch with my girlfriend,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘Late lunch.’
Elisenda watched as his shoulders slowly hunched and his head stooped.
* * *
‘He was a bit of a bastard.’ The woman laughed. ‘But a charming one.’
‘And were you charmed?’ Montse asked her.
‘Good God, no. I was far too sensible to have a fling with Esteve Mascort.’
Clara Ferré had opened the door to Àlex and Montse, a quizzical expression on her face when they showed her their ID, but had been happy to invite them into her chaotic apartment. One of the grand old buildings on Carrer Ciutadans, it had high vaulted ceilings and mahogany panelling to halfway up the walls. The worn but expensive furniture was strewn with clothes from a suitcase lying in the middle of the floor, which looked as though it had exploded in relief, hurling all its contents onto every possible surface in a home already cluttered with books and papers.
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she’d told them. ‘I got back from Paris late last night, I’m rather exhausted and I haven’t finished unpacking yet.’
‘No, you haven’t, have you?’ Àlex commented with a small grin.
Ferré turned and smiled full-face at him, her eyes glinting. Àlex’s grin turned into a self-conscious smile and he looked away. Slightly puzzled at his sudden loss of confidence, she cleared a space on the two sofas and invited them to sit down.
Àlex thanked her for seeing them. ‘We understand you worked on the El Crit archaeological site in the 1980s with Esteve Mascort.’
She’d sat back in surprise at his words.
‘Esteve Mascort. I haven’t heard that name in years. He went missing.’
‘Yes, in 1981. That’s why we’ve come to see you, Senyora Ferré. We think we may have found his body, so we’re now reopening his disappearance as a murder investigation.’
Her mouth dropped open in shock.
‘We all just thought he’d run off with some poor woman,’ she’d commented.
‘Why was that?’ Montse had asked.
Which was when Ferré made her comment about Mascort being a charming bastard.
‘He tried it on a few times,’ she elaborated, ‘but that was nothing to feel flattered by. He tried it on with just about every woman within a certain age range.’
‘With much success,’ Montse pursued.
‘Lord, yes. Alarmingly so. He had the looks.’ She shot a glance at Àlex as she said it.
As Montse interviewed Ferré, Àlex studied the archaeologist. Her hair was grey, almost white, and worn long, wrapped around her head in a plait, framing an inquisitive face that looked like it was never far from breaking into a laugh. Her eyes, dipping between the two Mossos, were both interested and interesting, Àlex thought. She wore a baggy shirt and faded jeans with an effortless and probably unwitting style.
A key sounded in the front door and it opened. A young man in his early twenties walked in, who Ferré introduced as her son.
‘Can you wait in the kitchen, darling?’ she asked him. ‘I’ll be with you soon. The police are asking me about someone who went missing ages ago.’
The son nodded without a word and left them.
Àlex leaned forward. ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm Mascort?’
‘Plenty of people, I should imagine. One of the other archaeologists on the dig, Ricard Soler, hated him. Esteve stole his girlfriend from him and Soler never forgave him. I didn’t ever meet her, so I don’t know the whole story, but there were rumours at the time that Esteve had got her pregnant and that she’d gone to London for an abortion.’
