by Chris Lloyd
‘Is there evidence for that?’
Fradera got up and led Elisenda back to the exhibition room, to another display case, bearing more human skulls, intact this time, and other bones alongside small beakers, miniature amphorae and pots, many with faces carved into them.
‘These finds were parts of votive shrines. We think most homes had them. It’s conceivable that the skulls were used as part of this rite. And besides these, we’ve also found similar objects buried in the foundations of family dwellings, indicative of other meanings. To bring luck on the household, perhaps, or the ancestor watching over the family.’ She turned away from the case and led Elisenda to the door out of the building into the pale sunlight. ‘And we’ve found newborn babies buried in the foundations too, possibly as an offering or a purification.’
Elisenda was speechless for a moment. ‘Newborn babies?’ she eventually uttered.
‘So your dead man at El Crit could, in most likelihood, have been an execution or even a sacrifice. He was buried, but it’s unlikely he was being venerated, wouldn’t you say? Or a deterrent or a warning, especially if there was no one to see him?’
The archaeologist turned abruptly and went back inside the dark of the museum.
No, Elisenda thought, but Ferran Arbós probably was.
Chapter Twenty One
‘Shortlist, Elisenda. This afternoon. The selection panel is on Wednesday.’
‘Wednesday?’
Puigventós looked frankly at her. ‘Yes, it says so in the candidate folder I gave you. Remember?’
‘Of course.’ She gazed back at him. ‘I want Francesc Paredes to be added to the list.’
‘Paredes?’ Puigventós had to recall the name. ‘He’s a mosso, isn’t he? The post is for a caporal.’
‘He’s eligible for the selection procedure next year. I’ve no doubt he’ll come out among the top candidates in his intake. He knows Girona, I think he’s shown himself to be intelligent and resourceful, he’s thorough and I believe he has the makings of a good detective. And more importantly, he gets on with the rest of my unit. I’m willing to wait until he qualifies.’
Puigventós shook his head. ‘You might be, Elisenda, but Sabadell isn’t. If your unit is to prosper, it needs to be brought up to strength. Otherwise I can’t ensure that you’ll escape scrutiny.’ He held his hand up as she was about to speak. ‘I’m sorry, Elisenda, but this is non-negotiable. I want the shortlist this afternoon. Without Mosso Paredes.’
Micaló remained silent throughout the exchange.
‘Has the composition of the selection panel been decided?’ he finally asked.
Puigventós nodded. ‘The three of us here and an inspectora from Barcelona. Save a space in your diary.’
At the end of the meeting, Elisenda sat in her office for a few minutes, letting the anger subside. The unusual calm she’d felt on arriving at Vista Alegre that Monday morning had dissipated completely after just fifteen minutes with Puigventós and Micaló.
What had become her morning ritual at La Fosca of a gruelling kayak ride along the coast as far as El Crit before driving to Girona had turned into an unusual moment of peace when she’d spotted a thin whisper of smoke rising into the sky through the pines. It had been coming from somewhere beyond the cove where the archaeological dig lay. On impulse, she’d rowed on and beached the bright yellow kayak on the forbidding grey rocks at Cala des Vedell, scrambling through the sliding stones up the steep face into the tree line. There were no paths worn through the woods here, so she’d had to writhe her way through the dense shade, further into the undergrowth.
Looking up occasionally, she caught brief glimpses of the smoke curling upwards, letting her get her bearings. Expecting to find someone camping in the woods, and to have to tell them to put the fire out because of the risk, she was surprised instead to come across a hut in a clearing. Walking quietly around it, she saw that it was in fact a collection of huts that looked like they’d been tacked on to each other to create a bigger dwelling.
‘Very Salvador Dalí,’ she muttered to herself, as the whole reminded her of the home the painter had built for himself over some thirty years out of a hotchpotch of fishermen’s huts further up the coast.
‘Hello,’ she called out, listening.
She heard nothing and approached the strange construction. The Mossos had checked out all the homes in the area but had found them all empty, assuming they were summer homes, shut up for the winter, but seeing the collection of old doors that made up one extension wall, Elisenda thought it didn’t have the feel of the usual holiday bolthole. It was strange, as she’d never heard of anyone living here.
Pushing against what she presumed was the front door, she let her eyes get accustomed to the dark interior and went in. It was empty, except for the sweet aroma of pine cones burning in an old-fashioned table stove in the centre of the room, the circle of wood with a hole cut in the centre for the stovepipe to emerge, two chairs placed around the table. The sight made her catch her breath. Her grandparents had had one, and she could remember winters in Monells, her knees and legs toasting in the heat that spread from under the table to fill the room with warmth.
Looking around the rooms, she realised that the walls were covered in bookshelves. In fact, the walls were bookshelves, thickly coated in old and fraying books, lined up in rows, with more volumes stacked up in front of them. She checked but there was no electricity in the room, just oil lamps, none of them alight. Without her torch, she couldn’t take a proper look at the books, but she could see in the light from the open door that they all seemed to be about history. With no exception, as far as she could tell.
Apart from the books and the table stove, the only other piece of furniture in the room was a battered old sofa resting under a window. An open door led into a small kitchen, where she saw a wood-burning stove, presumably for cooking. Her foot knocked into something on the floor. Bending down to take a closer look, she saw it was one of a battery of food bowls, which is when she registered the other scent pervading the room.
‘Dogs,’ she murmured. ‘This is no holiday home.’
No one had returned by the time she’d walked back out into the feeble sunlight filtering through the trees and she heard no dogs barking anywhere, so she’d made her way back to where she’d left the kayak, deciding to return in a more formal capacity later on. Rowing back, she recalled the table stove and remembered her grandparents, a rare feeling of composure accompanying her as she skimmed easily across the gentle surface of the water.
‘Elisenda,’ Àlex called from the doorway into her office.
Startled, she looked up to realise she’d been lost in thought, recalling the hut in the woods. She was surprised to feel calmer again after the annoyance with Puigventós. She called Àlex in.
‘How was Vall-Llobrega?’ he asked her.
She told him of the unsurprising lack of any witnesses or leads among Ferran Arbós’s neighbours. ‘But we did find a collection of coins that could be interesting, given what we’re hearing about his shady dealings. I’ll be taking them to the Archaeology Service to see if they can shed any light on where they might have come from or why Arbós would have had them in his possession.’
‘That is interesting.’ Àlex sat down. ‘From what Clara Ferré was saying, it seems he wasn’t just involved in questionable acquisitions for museums, but in actually selling stolen artefacts to private buyers here and abroad.’
‘We need to check up on that. Did you find any connection between Arbós and Mascort?’
‘None. Arbós appears to have been too senior to have had much to do with Mascort.’
‘I got the same impression.’ She checked her diary on her phone. ‘Arbós’s post mortem is at eleven. You want to take it?’
Àlex nodded. ‘How’s the shortlist going?’
‘Not you too. Puigventós wants it this afternoon.’
‘Let’s look at it now. I’ll help you. Otherwise it’ll be hanging over you all day.�
�
Elisenda considered Àlex’s words for a moment and reached for the drawer. ‘Why not?’
She pulled the folder out and dumped it on the table between them, not wanting to open it.
‘I really don’t want to do this,’ Àlex said slowly, echoing her thoughts, surprising her. ‘May I?’
With a deep sigh, he leaned over and opened the folder, snapping the elastic bands back on the two right-hand corners. The sound seemed to echo in the room.
‘There are ten, we have to get them down to five,’ Elisenda told him.
‘Did I have to go through the same before I got this job?’
‘Yeah, but we were a lot less stringent in those days. I pulled your name out of a hat.’
Àlex grinned at her.
‘So you were just born lucky.’
He pulled out a sheaf of papers, a thick pile for each candidate and split them into two halves, giving one to Elisenda and keeping the other for himself. The process for taking on a new member of the Serious Crime Unit was another level of selection after the normal lengthy procedure would-be caporals had to go through. To get this far, they’d already had to accumulate up to thirty-three points before they could even submit an application for promotion from mosso to caporal. There were a number of ways of earning points. Candidates got them for being a graduate, for their level of Catalan and for any foreign languages they spoke. They were also awarded half a point for every year they’d been in the Mossos and more points still if they’d received any distinctions or medals.
‘No kiddie courses,’ Elisenda commented. The more courses a candidate had taken, the more points they earned. ‘We want ones who’ve done investigation courses, not ones for writing press releases or saying their name without falling over.’
The two of them continued to read in silence. Once a candidate had got over the points hurdle, they then had to go on to take written and oral tests, a Catalan language test, physical tests and psychological tests. The moment they failed one stage, they weren’t allowed to go on to the next. All along the way, a qualifying tribunal, made up of an equal number of men and women, had the final say on who got to keep going, although candidates could appeal if they felt they’d been hard done by.
‘How much do they have to pay to apply now?’ Àlex asked.
‘Nearly thirty euros.’ That was the fee all mossos paid to submit an internal application for promotion. ‘What are the piles?’
Àlex had split his reports into three columns. He pointed at them in turn. ‘Probable. Possible. Over my dead body.’
Suddenly realising what he’d said, he hurriedly looked down at the next piece of paper and carried on reading. He was mortified, Elisenda could tell, but oddly she saw it as a minor triumph on the road to recovery.
‘I’ve got two piles,’ she said to soothe him. ‘Don’t want. Really don’t want.’
He looked up. ‘Do you get the feeling we’re not going about this with the right attitude?’ The grin was back.
After the points and the tests, when the tribunal published a list of the candidates in the order of how well they’d done, came the training course in Sabadell, followed by a three-month placement, working as an acting caporal. If the aspirants got through all that, the tribunal would announce a list of the ones who passed and they got the job, which meant they could be posted to anywhere in Catalonia where there was a vacancy. What was unusual in this case was the invitation to be part of Thursday’s selection panel for a place on Elisenda’s experimental Serious Crime Unit.
‘Any in Girona?’ Elisenda asked.
‘Not yet.’
They finished their probables piles and swapped them over.
‘But none of them appeals to me so far,’ Elisenda muttered.
Àlex was silent for a moment. ‘It’s a tough act to follow.’
They stared at each other across the desk, both of them thinking of Pau, the member they’d lost.
Josep knocked on the door and walked in.
‘Sotsinspectora, I’ve found the last of the 1981 archaeologists, Martí Barbena.’
‘Good work, Josep,’ she replied, glad of the interruption. ‘Where is he?’
‘Here in Girona. He’s married to Eulàlia Esplugues, Esteve Mascort’s widow.’
Chapter Twenty Two
‘I told you. We weren’t together in 1981.’
Eulàlia Esplugues sat forward on the plastic and metal chair, her arms lying heavily on the bare table, her fingers soundlessly and frenetically drumming centimetres above the wooden surface.
Àlex nodded and looked from her to Montse and back. ‘Why didn’t you tell my colleagues you’d married one of the other archaeologists who was on the El Crit dig at the time your husband went missing?’
Esplugues looked angrily at him and then at Montse. ‘Why should I? I didn’t think it was important.’
‘Your husband goes missing in 1981, now believed to have been murdered at that time, and you didn’t think it was important to tell us that you were having an affair with one of his colleagues?’ Montse asked.
‘Don’t you dare.’ Spittle from her mouth landed on the table between them. ‘It was my husband who had the affairs. I was the poor, dumb wife who sat at home while he got away with it. Don’t you dare tell me I was the one having the affair.’
Àlex studied her face as she answered Montse. Through her anger, he could see deep lines of injustice scored into her. It was his turn to speak. ‘Are you saying you began a relationship with Martí Barbena after your husband went missing?’
‘You’re damn right I am.’
* * *
In another room, Elisenda and Josep were interviewing Martí Barbena. He looked strangely like a computer reconstruction of how he might have aged based on the photo they saw in Jordi Canudas’ office. The gaunt cheeks more sunken as he’d grown more fibrous into his late fifties, the thin nose accentuated, the hair more sparse with flecks of grey but still with the same neat parting, the same cool expression on his face, the same slightly mocking tilt of the head.
Elisenda watched Josep as he questioned the man. The moment the caporal had told her about Barbena and Esplugues being married, she’d decided she wanted to speak to them both. She hadn’t asked Jutge Rigau for any warrants and the couple hadn’t been arrested, they were merely being interviewed. Depending on the Mossos’ judgement after this stage, Elisenda would arrest them or not and refer the case to the judge for him to instruct the investigation. It wouldn’t be until after this interview with the police that they’d be allowed to speak to their lawyer or be assigned a duty one. Things hadn’t got to that stage yet, Elisenda mused.
‘He was a shit,’ Barbena said of Mascort, ‘but I didn’t kill him. Even if I would ever contemplate taking another life, which I wouldn’t, I had no reason to.’
‘You were having an affair with his wife,’ Josep told him.
‘Not in 1981 I wasn’t.’
‘When did you begin an affair?’ Elisenda pushed him.
He turned to gaze at her. ‘I didn’t. Technically, it was never an affair. I’d met Eulàlia a couple of times socially before her husband went missing, but that was all. We didn’t begin seeing each other until more than four years after that, and we got married almost two years after he was declared dead.’
‘But you knew Eulàlia Esplugues at the time her husband went missing, now believed to have been murdered?’ Josep insisted.
‘Evidently. But that would have been some waiting game, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe it was.’
Elisenda watched Barbena as he spoke quietly with little emotion, his words considered. She could see he’d be difficult to push into admitting anything in the heat of anger. She wondered if he’d be capable of acting in anger.
* * *
‘You felt a sense of relief when your husband went missing?’
Eulàlia Esplugues sighed at Àlex’s question and looked at Montse. ‘I told you the other day. I felt anything but relief.
I was this close to being able to divorce him. The last thing I wanted was for him to run off and leave me in limbo. I wasn’t allowed to get on with my life as I was legally still married to him for another ten years until I could have him declared dead, and I could never fully move on at all because I was afraid he’d come back one day.’ She looked back to Àlex. ‘So, no, at no time did I ever feel a sense of relief.’
‘Did you do anything to find him?’ Àlex wanted to know.
‘The police did.’ She shrugged. ‘As much as they ever did back then. I was made to feel he was justified in leaving me the way he did because I’d not been a proper wife, not malleable enough. I told them everything I knew, but they didn’t break into a sweat looking for him. Neither did I.’
‘Where did you think he might have gone?’
‘With one of his other women, I presumed. The idea didn’t surprise me.’
‘Did he know your son wasn’t his?’
Esplugues laughed bitterly. ‘Good God no. He didn’t have the imagination to think I would ever cheat on him. Or the humility to believe I would want to. I can assure you, he had no doubts that our son was his.’
‘And you thought him capable of leaving you both so easily?’ Montse asked her.
She cocked her head at the caporala. ‘What do you think?’
‘Would there have been any other reason why you thought he might have left?’ Àlex asked. ‘Money problems? Anything to do with his work?’
‘Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean much. He kept most of his life outside our home to himself.’
