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

by Chris Lloyd

The old woman grunted again and took a sip of her coffee. Elisenda did likewise. It was hot, black and strong, like her grandmother used to make. Another dog ran into the room from outside, its tail wagging eagerly. It was carrying a pine cone in its mouth, which it dropped at the woman’s feet. The woman stroked its ears and smiled for the first time, a gentle smile full of warmth, her eyes sparkling in the light cast in through the open door.

  ‘You have an interest in history,’ Elisenda commented, gesturing towards the books.

  The woman looked at the shelves for a moment. ‘I taught history. A long time ago. Before we all decided to abandon our history and revere commerce. That’s when I took my own decision that you could all do without my company. And I could do without yours.’

  ‘I have to ask you some questions.’

  ‘My house is legal, if that’s what you’re after. It’s not like other people’s houses, but it has more permits and pieces of paper than anyone would ever want or need.’

  Elisenda shook her head and looked around at the books and the dogs and felt the comfort of the table stove. ‘I’m really not worried about that. I think you have a lovely house, if you want to know. I’m here about a body that was found a short distance away.’

  The woman nodded her head slowly. ‘Ah, the body.’

  ‘You’ve heard about it?’

  ‘I might be cut off from society, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of it. I see what happens in these woods and on this coast, more than most people. So yes, I know about the body.’

  ‘It’s a body of a man,’ Elisenda explained. ‘You might also know that. We believe he was placed there in 1981, at the time of the last archaeological dig. Can I ask how long you’ve been living here?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t living here in 1981, I can tell you that. I was teaching in Barcelona. I bought this land in 1983. There was just an old hut on it then, which is now the kitchen, but I didn’t start living here for about ten years after that. That’s how long it took me to see your society wasn’t for me.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t have known this area at the time the man was buried here? Have you seen or heard anything unusual in the days since the body was found?’

  ‘Only police and archaeologists tramping everywhere, digging everything up.’

  Elisenda thought of the old man on the beach. ‘Anyone taking an unusual interest in the woods or in the area of the dig?’

  ‘All human interest here is unusual. Unnatural. There are always people spoiling the calm of this place, no more so now than normal.’

  ‘Have you seen an older man picking up litter on El Crit beach? He gets there by boat.’

  ‘Picking up litter?’ She finished her coffee and put the cup down. ‘He’s been around for years.’

  Elisenda drained her cup of thick coffee and stood up. She gave the woman her card. ‘If you do notice anything, please let me know.’

  The woman took the card and studied it before laying it face down on the table.

  ‘Maria,’ she said, gazing up at Elisenda. ‘My name’s Maria Pujol. You aren’t an entirely hopeless case, unlike most. You’re free to come back and see me any time you want.’

  ‘Thank you, Maria. I will.’

  Out of an impulsive need to check on the site, Elisenda made her way through the pines to the El Crit dig. There was no path to help her and her route along the uneven ground amid the dense trees and sliding carpet of pine needles took her over twenty minutes. Neither of the archaeologists was there when she got to the two trenches. She listened out but heard no movement from the woods around her. Looking closely at the twin excavation sites, she was satisfied that they appeared to be as tidy as she imagined Doctora Fradera would have left them the previous evening. Both were calm. No one seemed to have tampered with anything.

  Turning to head back for the long walk to the clearing where she’d parked her car, she stopped dead.

  There, facing the new trench and hidden from view as she’d walked down to it, the head of a thick metal spike jutted from an ancient pine. A dark stain of sap coursed down the deep grooves in the aged and peeling bark like dried blood.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  At Vista Alegre, Elisenda was interrupted as she prepared for her morning meeting with the rest of the unit by Puigventós calling a quick briefing on his low-level crime initiative.

  ‘Twenty-four arrests,’ he told her and Micaló. ‘From littering to graffiti by the river where the train comes in from the north. It reflects badly on the city, so it’s good that we’re tightening up in this area.’

  ‘That’s excellent, Xavier,’ Micaló congratulated him. Elisenda watched her counterpart in the Regional Investigation Unit out of the corner of her eye. The uneasy truce that had sprung up between her and Micaló after the events of the previous year was steadily eroding as Micaló’s confidence in the safety of his position slowly returned. It was he who spoke next.

  ‘And for my team’s part, we have been targeting petty criminals, primarily those dealing in stolen goods.’ He pulled some papers out of his document wallet. ‘This graph will show our objectives for this initiative compared with the arrests we’ve made thus far. You’ll see that we’re more than fourteen per cent over target.’

  Elisenda massaged her temples impatiently and forced herself not to let her head drop in frustration.

  ‘You seem agitated, Elisenda,’ Puigventós told her.

  ‘Not in the slightest. I still believe that it’s a good initiative. I’m just not sure how it applies to my unit, considering our purpose is to focus on serious crimes. I don’t quite see how I’m supposed to contribute to these meetings.’

  ‘We all need to be up to speed with everything that is happening in the city,’ Puigventós said, his voice terse.

  Micaló nodded in eager agreement.

  Elisenda knew when to let it go, particularly if she didn’t want to waste any more time on unnecessary lectures, so she acquiesced and let the two men run the clock down. Finally, the inspector called the meeting to a close and she hurried along the corridor to where her own unit was waiting for her. Quickly, she told them all of the spike at El Crit and that the Científica team from La Bisbal were searching the site now, before moving on to other matters.

  ‘Esteve Mascort,’ she said to the assembled team. ‘I know what the DNA says, but I still want us to consider him as the primary candidate for the El Crit victim.’

  ‘Even if the body is Mascort, do you believe that Esplugues and Barbena are guilty?’ Àlex asked.

  Elisenda considered for a moment. ‘I think they’re both still in the frame. Both for the Mascort killing and the Arbós one. But Jutge Rigau won’t let us pursue that angle while it’s not completely certain that Mascort is the victim. The problem being that we only have DNA from Mascort’s father, and we can’t simply assume that he was his biological father, in which case, the body at El Crit could still be Mascort. So we need another DNA sample from Mascort’s mother’s side of the family. Montse, can you get on to that, see if you can find a relative that fits the bill? And that also still leaves Esplugues and Barbena as suspects. I think either would be capable in their way under the right circumstances, but their stories do seem watertight. I’ve got to go to the Archaeology Service this morning, so I’m going to try and see if this report about Arbós that Martí Barbena claims to have written really exists.’

  ‘I also think that Esplugues’ argument about waiting until she could divorce Mascort rings true,’ Josep commented.

  ‘Not if she killed him in a moment of anger,’ Montse argued.

  ‘Why would she have been at the dig?’ he countered, a sniping edge to his tone. ‘She’s not an archaeologist, she’d have no need to be there.’

  ‘She killed him somewhere else and took the body to El Crit.’ Montse couldn’t hide her own irritation.

  Josep looked directly at her. ‘That distance through the woods? You know that’s impossible. I see her more as biding her time until she could get a di
vorce. She had no real motive to kill him.’

  Montse shook her head and looked away.

  Elisenda glanced at them both and carried on speaking. ‘Either way, we do need to consider the possibility of a different victim. Àlex, are there any students who worked on the dig the summer of 1981 who are unaccounted for?’

  Àlex shook his head. ‘Every one tagged and interviewed. And none of them has said anything to indicate that they’d be of interest as the perp either.’

  ‘So, besides Mascort, there’s no one we’ve got who could be the victim. Unless, of course, there was someone involved in dealing in the stolen artefacts who went missing at the time and who we haven’t come across yet. We’ve just been looking at archaeologists. We need to widen the net for possible victims. Museums, collectors, antiques dealers even.’

  Àlex groaned. ‘So the net just got bigger.’

  ‘And possible killers,’ Elisenda added. ‘Someone who worked with Arbós and whoever the El Crit victim is and who’s now spooked because the first body was found.’

  ‘We also have to consider the possibility that Esplugues or Barbena had nothing to do with either killing,’ Àlex argued. ‘And that the murders are connected to the trade in antiquities.’

  ‘Illicit trafficking,’ Elisenda said, deep in thought. ‘As the archaeologists seem to insist on calling it. But you’re right. Àlex, could you and Josep dig more into Arbós’s dealings, going back in time. See if there’s anyone who went missing who might have had dealings with him. And with Mascort, just in case he is our body at El Crit.’

  ‘And anyone who might still hold a grudge now,’ Montse added.

  ‘True,’ Elisenda agreed, signalling the end to the meeting. ‘As well as anyone else who might potentially be another victim.’

  With her last observation left hanging in the air, Elisenda let the other three take to their computers to get on with the tasks she’d given them while she picked up a pool car from the basement and headed north out of the city, soon getting caught up in the slow crawl of cars on the Rotonda del Rellotge.

  ‘Tuesday,’ she muttered through her teeth.

  Market day. She glanced to the Devesa park under the trees while she waited for the traffic lights to favour her part in the ill-tempered dance. Dozens of food and clothes stalls were all but hidden behind the throngs of browsers and buyers shuffling past the wares in their own version of the packed city waltz. They looked to her like a child’s model village, too small under the slender plane trees clinging to the height of the sky.

  The traffic’s slow embrace finally released her and she crossed the river, skirting the foot of Montjuïc, Girona’s little mountain outside the city walls, and drove the short distance along the Onyar to the Archaeology Service. The secondary school past the Archaeology Service building was on its break and the low walls along the road were dotted with small groups of teenagers eating baguette sandwiches out of tin foil and pretending not to be impressed by all the other groups similarly feigning boredom.

  ‘Remember doing that,’ Elisenda acknowledged under her breath.

  Her phone rang. Sergent Poch in La Bisbal telling her that the Científica had found no traces of anything at El Crit that might indicate who had hammered the spike into the tree, the layer of pine needles over winter-hard ground giving away no secrets, the spike itself clean of prints.

  ‘They’ll be checking for DNA back here, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.’

  She thanked him and hung up, sighing in agreement at his gloomy forecast, before entering the dark vestibule. Taking off her sunglasses after the bright blue sky of the morning, she nonetheless kept on her jacket, the inside of the old building as chill as the air outside. It was only once she was upstairs, in Doctora Fradera’s office, that she began to feel warm.

  ‘Your heating’s as good as ours,’ she commented to the archaeologist.

  Fradera looked around her absently. ‘Cutbacks,’ she finally decided.

  Elisenda paused before speaking, recalling the doubts that had kept coming back to her since learning of the DNA test on Mascort’s father. Although she’d asked Montse to look into finding a surviving relative on his mother’s side, there was nothing in their investigation to indicate such a person existed. She couldn’t help thinking it called for desperate measures.

  ‘I wanted to ask you a favour, Doctora Fradera,’ she finally said. ‘The facial reconstruction you showed me on Saturday. I would now be interested in seeing what modelling of the modern skull might throw up.’

  ‘I thought it was a last resort.’

  ‘It is. I would have to ask you to be discreet about it. I’d make the necessary arrangements with Doctor Riera, the forensic pathologist.’

  The archaeologist grunted. Elisenda took it as assent.

  ‘What’s in the box?’ she asked.

  Used by now to the other woman’s abruptness, Elisenda placed the display case that she’d taken from Ferran Arbós’s house on the desk and removed the lid.

  ‘Good grief,’ Fradera exclaimed, visibly taken aback. She took one of the coins out of its cotton-wool padded square. ‘This is Phoenician. Where did you find this?’

  The archaeologist turned the coin over delicately in her fingers, her expression one of an odd childlike wonder that took Elisenda by surprise. It was very different from her normal studious aloof.

  ‘It was in a drawer in Ferran Arbós’s house.’

  Fradera laid the Phoenician coin back and looked up and down the rows, occasionally turning a coin over or picking one up, all the while muttering. ‘Roman, Greek, beautiful, simply beautiful.’

  Elisenda almost felt reluctant to break the mood. ‘Would they be from an Indiketa site, do you think?’

  ‘Most definitely. These are the sort of coins we’re used to finding in Indiketa settlements.’ The archaeologist straightened the box in front of her but didn’t replace the lid, preferring instead to continue to gaze at the coins while she spoke to Elisenda. ‘Despite the Franco regime’s insistence that the various Iberian tribes spent all their time gloriously repelling invaders, they did in fact trade with other Mediterranean peoples for centuries and were colonised by the Greeks and Romans. We’re used to finding a great variety of artefacts from their trade with other Mediterranean cultures.’ She gestured at the box in front of her. ‘But this is a particularly fine collection of coins.’

  ‘Is there a legitimate reason that Ferran Arbós would have had these at his house?’

  Fradera tore her gaze away from the collection and looked directly at Elisenda. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but a collection of coins of this importance would be unlikely to be in the possession of someone in Ferran’s position unless it got to them by underhand means. The fact that he was a museum curator makes it doubly distressing.’

  ‘Distressing?’

  ‘We all had an idea that some of Ferran’s methods and procedures weren’t entirely rigorous. Museum acquisitions that later proved to have been looted. He was forced to leave his job because of a string of items that he’d acquired without due diligence. At the time, I preferred to think of it as incompetence, but keeping artefacts in this way for himself is another matter completely.’

  ‘Could he have been trading in them, do you think?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know. I know that some of my colleagues felt that he might have misappropriated some artefacts.’ Fradera absently picked up one of the coins from the box and gazed at it. ‘As the least of all evils, I would like to think that if he did take them, they were for his own use, not to sell on. Selfish rather than self-serving.’

  ‘Who would he sell them to if he did? A private buyer? We understand that some of the acquisitions made by museums based on his recommendation have turned out to have problems with provenance.’

  Fradera looked coldly at the coins and then at Elisenda. ‘I’m afraid you possibly have your answer there. Ferran’s links with numerous museums and the good reputation he had with other cu
rators and institutions before his fall from grace would suggest to me that he would most likely be selling them to museums.’

  ‘How would that happen? Surely he couldn’t approach a curator with a bag of coins and ask them to buy it.’

  The archaeologist shook her head. ‘I imagine he would be providing the provenance. Fake certificates, anything that would give the artefacts an air of respectability.’

  ‘Would a museum be convinced by that?’

  It was time for a withering Fradera look and Elisenda got one. ‘Some of the finest museums in the world have been taken in by looted artefacts. Others have turned a blind eye. Even today, there’s a culture in some museums of having the biggest and the best displays of material culture, no matter the cost to archaeology.’

  ‘Is it common?’

  ‘I’ve heard it said that around 80% of Roman and Etruscan artefacts that are on the market at any one time are looted or false. So I think you can say it’s common. Perhaps less so since the 1970 UN convention on illicit trafficking in cultural property, which forced museums to be more rigorous in their checks, but it still happens much more than we’d like to think.’ She paused for a moment, her face darkening. ‘The colonising countries have long had a culture of collecting through their museums that has always sought to justify the theft of artefacts from other cultures. Many of the objects in many museums all over the world have been acquired unethically. Despite everything, that continues to be the case.’

  ‘I thought we’d returned some items.’

  Fradera snorted. ‘The Peruvian amphorae from the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, you mean? Yes, they were returned, but others haven’t been. The courts here refused to return other artefacts because the original crime occurred outside the country, which is the most stupid argument they could ever have come up with for looting cultural goods from another country.’

  Elisenda let the older woman calm down a little before continuing. ‘Ferran Arbós?’

  The archaeologist sighed heavily and put the lid on the coin box. ‘I suppose if you wanted to give these curators the benefit of the doubt, what someone like Ferran, and whoever he was working with, would do is lay a trail of false certificates and a string of sales at successive auctions that would effectively confuse the provenance, so the curators would feel that they were buying a genuine item.’