by Chris Lloyd
‘Whoever he was working with,’ Elisenda commented, voicing her own thoughts rather than asking Fradera’s opinion. ‘Are we looking for a third person? Someone between the archaeologist or whoever stole the artefacts and Arbós, who provided the respectability for the item to be accepted? A dealer, someone who was actually the person who traded in the artefacts, who dealt with the museums and the auction houses?’
Fradera shrugged. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know, but I imagine it would make sense.’ She pulled the box of coins towards her. ‘I should probably keep these.’
Elisenda leaned forward and retrieved the collection. ‘Yes, you probably should, but not just yet. We still need them as evidence.’
The archaeologist grunted in annoyance and watched as Elisenda picked up the box and walked out of the office. Downstairs, in the entrance hall, Elisenda ran into Gemma.
‘I’m still looking for more documents from the El Crit site,’ Gemma told her, her voice not quite as thick with her cold, but her eyes still red. ‘It’s ever so exciting.’
‘Thank you. There is something else I’d like you to look for. A report by Martí Barbena about Ferran Arbós. Do you think you’d be able to find it if it existed?’
‘I can look into it,’ the younger woman promised eagerly.
Elisenda thanked her but was cut short by her phone ringing. It was Jordi Canudas in Barcelona, the archaeologist on the 1981 dig that she and Josep had interviewed. He was calling to tell her that someone had broken into his office.
‘Anything taken?’
‘Just some photo albums.’
* * *
Elisenda scanned the shelves in the lecturer’s office. Jordi Canudas stood next to her, the greying circle of surprise around his mouth accentuating his consternation.
‘I didn’t expect you to come,’ he’d told her when she’d turned up at the university in Barcelona an hour or so after his phone call. ‘I just thought I should let you know what had happened.’
‘Do you know exactly what’s been taken?’
Canudas pointed to a gap in the folders. ‘Just the albums I showed you the other day and a couple of others. Nothing I would’ve thought would be of any importance to anyone.’
Elisenda looked back at the empty spaces and thought he was probably wrong. Something he had was obviously important to someone. Or they thought it was.
‘You mentioned the other day that you suspected Esteve Mascort of stealing artefacts. Were there any other archaeologists you worked with that you also suspected of doing the same?’
Surprised at the question, Canudas had to stop and think. ‘No, not at all. Since that time, I’ve worked mainly as a lecturer. I go on digs with my students, so it’s not really something that’s ever been an issue. They’re still too idealistic,’ he concluded with a wry smile.
Thanking him, Elisenda left the university and on impulse drove through the slow traffic to Ricard Soler’s apartment block on her way back to the ring road. The missing archaeologist’s trendy neighbour wasn’t in and there was no porter in the building to open the door for her. She considered for less than ten seconds.
‘I’m pretty certain you don’t need a warrant for breaking and entering,’ she muttered to herself, thinking of Jutge Rigau’s words and working at the locks with two picks that Siset, one of her informants, had taught her how to use.
The door opened surprisingly easily. The lock was one of the old ones where you normally had to turn the key three times to secure it, but it clicked open quickly, as though the last person to close it had simply pulled it shut behind them and failed to lock it completely with their key. Elisenda was sure that Soler would have closed it more thoroughly if he’d been going away for a few days.
‘Which I would say means he wasn’t the last person to leave this flat,’ she murmured. She knew that when she left, she’d also simply be pulling the door closed behind her as she didn’t have a key to lock it properly.
Opening it, she looked up and down the staircase before going into Soler’s flat. It smelt musty and had the clutter she’d expect of an academic who lived alone. The small, dark square of a tiny hallway led into a narrow kitchen, its walls tiled in greasy white squares. She checked the room, but nothing looked like it had been used in some days. Opening the fridge, she sniffed at an open carton of milk and recoiled at the smell. Soler evidently hadn’t been back at all.
In the bedroom, his bed was made, old-fashioned sheets and blankets spread over it like a rumpled tent. The living room revealed little more. Divided by a faded sofa, it had a small dining table and two chairs on one side and a coffee table and ancient TV on dark wood shelves on the other. There were no books on the shelf. They were all in the study, the only room with any hint of a personality. An untidy and seemingly chaotic one but that no doubt meant something to its creator. All four walls were covered in shelves, in turn covered in books, standing precariously in rows and stacks, some of them holding loose pages and bulging files in place, others failing, as a white flood of paper attested. Stacks of books stood in ranks on the floor like the stones in a hypocaust.
Elisenda stood and stared intently at the four walls in turn, trying to decipher the mess, until she recognised a similar shape emerging on the shelves to the one she found at Ferran Arbós’s house. Gaps here and there where something looked like it had been taken, the spaces closed up. Impossible to say with any certainty that anything had been removed but she knew deep down that someone had been here and taken folders.
‘More photo albums,’ she said to herself. ‘Someone looking for someone.’
She also looked, but failed to find any files with snapshots in, either on the shelves or in the drawers of the large and ancient desk that stood next to a shuttered window. There was no computer either, just the small lozenges on the leather desktop where a laptop’s pads would normally have stood. Whether Soler took that with him or whether the other visitor stole it, she had no way of knowing.
Roaming through the flat again, she found nothing to identify Soler, no photos, no documents with his picture on, just two faded oblongs in the living room wall where pictures normally hung. Elisenda had a fleeting moment where she doubted his existence and had to shake the thought out of her head.
‘Another buried ghost,’ she muttered.
Her phone rang, breaking the cold silence of the empty flat. It almost felt like a relief. Answering, she heard the whine in the other person’s voice before he got his first word out, an odd synchronicity given how she’d got into the apartment.
‘Elisenda, I’ve been arrested.’
‘You’re a petty criminal, Siset. It’s what happens.’
She pressed disconnect and put the phone back in her bag, taking one last look around her and pulling the door closed as she left.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Like most victims, Raimon Boldú had soon become invisible.
Glancing up briefly, he saw that it was unlikely to rain today. It was a relief, although the February cold had long since seeped through his suit and cut into his skin with the insistence of a thousand needles. His legs felt it the most, protected only by the thin material of his once-smart trousers, now fraying at the heels where they’d slipped, loosened by the weight he was losing, the cloth over his knees and thighs shiny with age.
A council employee left the Town Hall, one of his former colleagues, and hurried past, unwilling to make eye contact. The same as every day, Raimon Boldú didn’t say a word, but simply watched the younger worker walk past. In a reflex action, he hefted the banner he was holding, the words painted thickly in black paint on a large piece of brown cardboard from an old packing box.
Standing between the wrought-iron gates of the small side entrance and the larger archway into the Town Hall, he watched and hefted his sign as two other employees left on their morning coffee break. Neither stopped or paused to acknowledge him. He was invisible to them. They merely walked straight past under the stone arch leading past the tiny Les
Voltes bookshop that only sold books in Catalan towards the coffee and xuixo aroma of La Vienesa. He could remember quite clearly the last time he tasted one of their long, custard-filled doughnuts and sat in the window with a large café amb llet and without a care. It was exactly one hour before he’d been called into his superior’s office and told that he was now part of the recession.
‘We just can’t afford to keep you on,’ his manager had told him, his thick salt-and-pepper moustache shielding his mouth.
Had Raimon Boldú’s former colleagues stopped to read his notice, they would have seen a tidy, well-ordered list of figures. The years of experience of all the other people like him who’d been made redundant, the difference in salaries of the younger, cheaper people kept on, the price of the contracts awarded to a handful of businesses, the costs cut on other services and the pay rise given to himself by the superior who had let Raimon Boldú go. No one looked at them anymore.
A car drove slowly towards the archway. A new one, one he hadn’t seen before. It stopped to let two pedestrians walk past, a couple deep in conversation, taking books they’d just bought in Les Voltes out of a bag to look at them. The car revved, the driver impatient. Raimon Boldú crouched slightly to look through the passenger window and saw his old boss in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead to the haven of the courtyard past the gateway.
‘You,’ he said.
His boss didn’t turn to look at him, so he leant forward and tapped on the window. Still he got no acknowledgement from the other man, so he knocked again, harder this time. And again. And again. Until he finally took a step back and kicked out at the side door, the metal folding luxuriously under his foot.
Chapter Twenty Eight
‘Haven’t any of your clients ever heard of the internet?’
Elisenda examined the scrawny figure sitting opposite her. Looking deeply sorry for himself, Siset was one of her main informants, regularly swapping tales of the big boys in the playground for small change and minor tolerances. Staring back at her, he shrugged and sniffed back a pearl of mucus that had been dangling from his nose. Elisenda fished out a paper tissue and gave it to him. Looking uncertainly at it, he used it to wipe the corners of his mouth and made to hand it back to her.
‘You can keep it, Siset, I’ve got plenty more.’
He nodded, staring at the strange item one more time, and put it in his trouser pocket. A second tear of snot dribbled on to his upper lip and he sniffed it back up once more. She closed her eyes and tried not to laugh. He looked as empty, grey and miserable as the interview room they were sharing in Vista Alegre.
‘I’ve been arrested, Elisenda,’ he told her for the third time, his voice metamorphosing progressively from self-pity to petulant umbrage. ‘Arrested.’
‘You were selling bootleg DVDs, Siset. It’s illegal. The city’s trying to clamp down on petty crime and you got caught.’
She had to admit, she was enjoying herself.
He pointed a chewed and grubby finger at her. ‘I’ve got protection, Elisenda. I tell you things, you don’t let them arrest me.’ A thought struck him, his eyebrows creasing in indignation. ‘What do you mean, petty?’
Elisenda stood up. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Siset. You’ll be my number one priority. In the meantime, have you got anything for me? Something that might work in your favour?’
She watched his mouth turn upwards and his eyes frown as he racked his brains to think of something. Reluctantly, he shook his head. ‘Nothing. Quiet right now, what with your lot busting everyone.’
‘Ah, you see, Siset. You want protection, you tell me things. That’s how it works, you said so yourself.’
‘Petty,’ he grumbled as she went to the door. ‘Pity I wasn’t selling drugs when they caught me. Then who’d be laughing?’
‘Who indeed?’ Elisenda replied, shaking her head and leaving him alone in the bare room.
Outside, she spoke to the sergent in charge of the custody cells.
‘Take him back to a cell and keep him there. Let him sweat a bit.’
The sergent grinned. ‘Always a pleasure.’
A uniformed mosso held the door to the staircase leading up to the offices open for her and glanced down bashfully as she walked through. He looked about fourteen years old, she thought, the fine, downy hairs on his chin a contradiction with the subtle scent of after shave. She thanked him with a smile and climbed the stairs to Puigventós’ office.
‘I have an informant who’s been arrested,’ she explained to the inspector when she got there. ‘He’s been caught selling bootleg DVDs as part of the low-level crime initiative. He’s more use to me out in the street than cluttering up a cell.’
Puigventós held both hands up in front of him. ‘Sotsinspector Micaló’s arrest, I’m afraid. You’ll have to speak to him.’
‘But it’s part of your drive against petty crime, Xavier.’
Puigventós looked at his watch. ‘Roger is actually on his way here now on a disciplinary matter. I’m sure you could raise it with him. Briefly.’
‘Disciplinary? What’s he done?’
‘Not Roger, one of the uniformed Mossos.’
Elisenda had to hide a smile. She’d been under no illusion it was Micaló on a charge, he was more usually on the giving end, but she could always dream. She watched Puigventós sort a few papers out on his desk while they waited for the other sotsinspector to come along.
‘Any news on the Arbós murder?’ the inspector suddenly asked without looking up, his voice too casual for Elisenda’s liking. She’d learned to be wary of the question in passing.
‘Two angles,’ she told him, choosing her words. ‘We’re looking into the possibility of a connection with Eulàlia Esplugues, Mascort’s widow, and Martí Barbena. And we’re also pursuing a connection with a trade in illicit antiquities. Both are feasible at this stage, and possibly connected.’
He looked up and gazed at her. ‘Good. Keep me up to speed.’
She steeled herself. She’d called in on Riera at the Institut de Medicina Legal on the way back to Vista Alegre.
‘Facial reconstruction?’ the pathologist had blurted. ‘Fucking useless.’
‘Doctora Fradera feels it might help.’
‘A fine woman.’
Leaving him after he’d promised to get the skull to the university for the CT scan and modelling, she’d asked him to keep quiet about it for the time being.
‘Budgets, eh?’ he’d commented. ‘I do so love insubordination.’
For her part, she felt, she couldn’t help herself. She looked at Puigventós now and spoke.
‘I want to order a digital facial reconstruction of the skull at El Crit. I know it’s a last resort but the DNA test seems to show that the body isn’t Mascort, and I think it’s flawed. If we’re unable to find another relative, I think we need to find another way of trying to identify the victim.’
Puigventós let his pen drop onto the desk with a clatter and began to shake his head. Elisenda could see the refusal forming, but before he could speak, there was a knock on the door and Micaló entered, telling someone to stay outside until called. A genuine first, Elisenda thought, relief on seeing Micaló not an emotion she often felt. He in turn looked surprised to see Elisenda waiting in Puigventós’ office.
‘You’re holding one of Elisenda’s informants,’ the inspector explained to him.
‘Siset,’ she added, turning to face Micaló.
‘Siset,’ Micaló repeated, nodding slowly, an unpleasant knowing smirk turning the edges of his mouth down. Everyone knew Siset by his street name, so much so that only the Mossos who filled out the occasional charge sheets for him ever remembered what he was really called. ‘And what do you want me to do about it?’
‘He’s more use to me on the outside, telling me what’s happening. I want the charges against him dropped.’
Micaló sat down on a chair and looked Elisenda up and down. ‘So you disagree with the initiative to nip low-level crime in
the bud, Sotsinspectora Domènech?’
Elisenda stifled a sigh. ‘Not in the slightest. I just agree more with an initiative that also prevents serious crime. I need people like Siset to help make sure that happens.’
Micaló shook his head rather too dramatically to be sincere. ‘Ah, another one who knows best how the law is served,’ he commented cryptically. ‘We have to be seen to be tackling anti-social crime, Sotsinspectora. I’m sure the people of Girona wouldn’t be happy to know that the Mossos are releasing petty criminals simply because you believe you and your pet informants are above the law.’
‘He’s been caught selling bootleg DVDs,’ she argued, her voice calm, the anger kept in check, ‘which is infinitely less of a crime than the ones he helps prevent or clear up. Arresting and sentencing him will serve no purpose to anyone.’
‘So you decide what is and what isn’t important enough a crime. Wasn’t that the problem in the first place? Didn’t you lose an officer precisely because of that?’
Momentarily stunned, Elisenda leaned towards him to speak, her breath measured, her knuckles clenching as she struggled to stay in control, but before she could say anything, she heard a loud crack and saw Puigventós out of the corner of her eye slamming a folder down on his desk.
‘Roger, that’s enough,’ he interrupted before Elisenda could continue, taking her by surprise. ‘Do not push my patience. You are not immune.’
Elisenda could see the shock on Micaló’s face, his newly-rediscovered confidence wilting. The room was silent, waiting for Puigventós to calm down before continuing.
‘This is not about being above the law,’ the inspector finally carried on. ‘It’s about best serving the community. I’m inclined to agree that Elisenda has a point. Combating low-level crime is very important, but we mustn’t lose sight of policing the city as a whole.’
