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

by Chris Lloyd

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? So, go. What are you doing here if it’s not money you want? Go, tell everyone what we’re doing.’

  The student knew he’d lost and bent down again to carry on digging. Mascort looked scornfully at him and went back to his part of the trench, both of them wordlessly scraping away at the earth beneath them.

  ‘Want to make some real money?’ Mascort had told him when the student had phoned him the other night.

  The student was grateful at first that Mascort had been the first name on the list of archaeologists he’d tried phoning.

  ‘They’ve cut the funding for the dig,’ Mascort had told him. ‘But that doesn’t mean they’ve cut my funding. I could do with a hand from a kindred spirit.’

  The student wasn’t sure how he felt at being described a kindred spirit by someone like Mascort, but he’d listened to what the archaeologist had had to say and he’d gone along with it. It was better than the thought of going back to his course in Barcelona and scrimping and saving for every last thing.

  Feeling something under his mattock in the carbon light of their illegal dig on the secluded headland in the deep of night, the student leaned forward to see what it was. It wasn’t the skull with a spike through it that had fuelled his childhood desire to become an archaeologist. He was almost relieved.

  He was yet to see the real money that Esteve Mascort had promised him.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Elisenda recalled a time not so many years earlier, when she was living in Barcelona, before she joined the police, or indeed had any inkling that she ever would. The Mossos d’Esquadra had taken over policing in Girona and a number of other areas as part of the piecemeal handover of powers, but not yet in the Catalan capital, where the old Spanish Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil were still running things.

  Someone had stolen her ex-husband’s car number plates and they’d had to report it to the Policía Nacional before he could apply for replacement plates at the traffic department and get them made at one of the official centres. She recalled going to the small police station in a leafy street of fine houses and affluently ageing apartment blocks in Sant Gervasi, the district of Barcelona where she and her ex were living at the time. The cop on duty, a wheezing bureaucrat who only spoke Spanish, laboriously typed everything out on an ancient typewriter, which he clunked around unhurried on a huge metal trolley. She’d watched impatiently as he’d slowly loaded a piece of carbon paper sandwiched between two printed forms and steadfastly tried to type his report in the spaces provided. Her undying image of pre-Mossos bureaucracy was carbon paper and corrector fluid, neither of which served a purpose other than to add to the sea of paperwork that inexorably drowned the country.

  She thought of it again now.

  ‘Have you seen Àlex?’ she asked Josep when she got to the unit’s offices. She’d been told that the inspectora from Barcelona had arrived in Girona and was on her way to Vista Alegre, so she had to sort things out quickly.

  ‘I haven’t seen him, Sotsinspectora,’ Josep told her.

  ‘OK, I’ve had a call from Gemma Cardoner at the Archaeology Service offices, out on the Pedret road towards the prison.’

  ‘The one who found all the documents for the first El Crit dig?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, she’s just called me to say that she’s found some more documents in another box that should have been holding artefacts. They’re all carbon copies of other documents, so we might find we’ve got them all anyway, but we need to check through them. Can you go to the Archaeology Service now and pick them up, then start checking them against the documents you’ve already looked at. See if anything new turns up in them. I don’t hold out much hope. Carbon copies never did anyone any good, but we have to be sure.’

  Josep nodded his head. ‘I’ll do that.’ He sounded more eager than Elisenda felt.

  She thanked him and made her way to the meeting rooms where the selection panel interviews were to be held.

  * * *

  Martí Barbena opened his front door in jeans and a floppy sweater. Àlex had stood waiting at the front door for some time, listening to the sounds inside. A man’s voice, Barbena’s, had called to say he’d only be a minute. Àlex had absently pushed the dead leaves that had wedged themselves against the front step of the house with his feet, first one way, then the other, clearing a small path through the middle. They left a damp stain on the toes of his shoes. Barbena finally opened the door, evidently without bothering to look through the spyhole.

  ‘Sorry about that, I was showering,’ he began, but the look of expectation on the thin lines of his taut face quickly gave way to a mocking smile. ‘You?’ he finished.

  ‘Expecting someone else?’ Àlex asked him.

  ‘A colleague, if you must know. We’re working here today on a paper for a journal. Am I being harassed again today? Only I’d like your name first, if you don’t mind.’ His mouth curled in a vulpine grin. ‘I don’t believe we were properly introduced the last time we met.’

  ‘Sergent Àlex Albiol. May I come in? I’m here to ask you some questions about Ferran Arbós. You’re not under suspicion in any way.’ Not now while it suits me, Àlex failed to add.

  Barbena looked doubtful for a moment, but curiosity appeared to overtake him and he beckoned Àlex inside.

  ‘I can’t give you long,’ the archaeologist told him. ‘As I said, I’m expecting someone.’

  He led Àlex through to the kitchen, where small logs were spitting in the fire burning blue and green on the water pipes in the grate. The room was soporifically warm after the chill wind of the street.

  Àlex explained that they’d read Barbena’s report on his suspicions of Arbós’s illicit activities. ‘Do you have any ideas how he might have traded in the artefacts?’

  Barbena sat down at the kitchen table in the window and invited Àlex to take the chair opposite. ‘I think it was there in my report. It’s so long since I wrote it, I really can’t remember everything I said. I recall that two museums I worked with had acquired items on Arbós’s recommendation, which were purportedly found at sites where I’d worked. I catalogued or saw the catalogue records of every artefact that was discovered at those digs, and I knew for a fact that the items simply weren’t from those sites.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘I can only surmise that they were taken either from the sites secretly, which would have involved an archaeologist stealing them without cataloguing them, or they were from other sites altogether. The items in themselves were genuine, their provenance wasn’t. I had good cause to suspect that it was Arbós who was faking the provenance to secure their sale to the museums.’

  ‘Would Arbós have been the one to sell the artefacts to the museums? Or to other buyers?’

  Barbena shook his head. ‘Extremely unlikely. That really would have aroused suspicion. No, they would have been presented through other channels, either already with Arbós’s recommendation or his support of the provenance or through his subsequent approval. Both of the museums I worked with acquired the pieces at auction, which effectively muddies the route they took to get to that stage.’

  ‘Do you know of anyone that Arbós worked with for that purpose? Any dealers?’

  ‘No. I was always pretty certain that Mascort was stealing for him from the digs he worked on, but I don’t know of any other archaeologists after Mascort’s death that Arbós might have worked with, although there must have been someone. And I don’t know of anyone else he might have worked with to sell them on. That wasn’t what I was interested in, to be honest. I thought I had enough to get Arbós removed from his post just through the fake provenances and the artefacts stolen from digs. I didn’t look into how they were sold.’

  ‘Does the name Serveis Art mean anything to you?’

  Barbena thought for a moment but shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  They were disturbed by the door bell ringing. Barbena got up to answer, leaving
Àlex with his disappointment that the archaeologist knew nothing more than what he’d already said in his report. Barbena returned into the room with his colleague. Àlex looked up at her in surprise. Looking much more composed than she had the last time he’d seen her, she was back to wearing her hair in the same grey, twisted plait as she had the first time, a smarter pair of jeans under a long woollen coat that looked expensively warm.

  ‘Sergent Albiol,’ Clara Ferré commented. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘Àlex, please. Actually, I was just on my way to see you.’

  She took her coat off and sat down. ‘That would have been a pleasure.’ The smile that had been missing the previous night now gleamed mischievously in the kitchen’s warmth. As Elisenda had predicted, she was much calmer and more willing to talk, a quiet resilience firmly back in place. Àlex asked her the same questions about Arbós that he’d put to Barbena.

  ‘Years ago, my predecessor at the history museum was offered an artefact that we both had a bad feeling about,’ she told him after a moment’s thought. ‘I was a junior curator at the time.’

  ‘Was this through Arbós?’

  ‘No, there was no mention of Arbós, and my boss told the guy that he wasn’t interested long before it even got to the provenance stage. Something wasn’t right, so we got rid of him as soon as we could.’

  ‘Do you have a name for the man who tried to sell the item?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. This was some years ago and most of his dealings were with my boss. I’ve never seen him since. Creepy, though, I remember that. He had a baby face but dangerous eyes, not someone I’d want to meet in a dark alley.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Not really. I only recall his eyes being cold, calculating. Otherwise, slim, normal height, balding, nothing special. I suppose he’d be in his sixties now. He was about ten years older than I was. But that’s all I remember. Sorry.’

  ‘Might your old boss remember him?’

  ‘I’m afraid he died some years ago. He was already ancient when I started working with him.’

  Àlex thanked them both and drove moodily back to Vista Alegre, his knowledge no more complete than it was before talking to the two archaeologists. He recalled Elisenda’s words about the investigation moving in and out of focus. He disagreed. To him, it was constantly out of focus, something indiscernible just beyond their field of vision that no matter who they talked to or what they found refused to mould itself into a distinct shape.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’

  Most probably on a charge for punching you to the ground, Elisenda thought, the first time she heard the inspectora from Barcelona ask the question.

  The woman had wafted into the interview suite, borne in on a sea of self-confidence that threatened to drown everyone else in the room. Elisenda had caught Puigventós looking aghast at her air of entitlement at one point, but then hurriedly try to hide it when he’d glanced over at Elisenda. Micaló looked like a puppy with a new owner.

  ‘Alícia Comas,’ she’d introduced herself, holding her hand out limply and looking at the next person in the meet and greet chain. Elisenda had been tempted to withdraw her hand until the woman made eye contact with her.

  The same age as Elisenda, Comas was of the type that was always going to prosper in any organisation more than Elisenda ever would. With short brown hair and sharp black eyes and a grey suit that was straight out of the corporate manual, she asked the candidates questions that were an inconsistent mix of textbook cliché and jargon clique. Oddly, Elisenda found the interviewees’ reactions to the questions telling of their characters, although probably not in the way Comas might have imagined. In a moment’s irreverence, Elisenda had decided she was going to wait for the first one to show irritation and offer them the job. Neither of the two they’d interviewed so far had.

  ‘I think we’ll call a break now,’ Puigventós suggested wearily after the second candidate had left the room, ‘and reconvene back here in half an hour.’

  Elisenda could have kissed him.

  * * *

  ‘Anything?’ Elisenda asked, walking into her unit’s outer office, temporarily sloughing off the lethargy the selection panel had nourished in her.

  Josep sat and stared at the flaky mountain of wafer-thin papers in front of him and shook his head. To Elisenda’s eyes, the bruised blue lettering that had bled into the flimsy carbon copy paper over the years was already dancing giddily in front of her eyes. Josep must have been well on the way to a bureaucracy migraine.

  ‘Nothing yet.’ His earlier eagerness was evidently wearing off. He gestured to the sturdy cardboard box from the Archaeology Service sitting on his desk. ‘It was full to the brim with papers, and they’re so thin, there are so many of them.’

  ‘Àlex in?’

  ‘He went out to see Martí Barbena and Clara Ferré to ask them if they knew anything about the antiquities dealer.’

  Josep looked in dismay at another, smaller pile of documents on the table opposite him, the one that Montse used to use but that she’d now swapped with Àlex. They were the files in the paper chase for the company that used to make payments to Ferran Arbós.

  ‘Enjoy,’ Elisenda told him. ‘Get Montse to help you if you need to.’

  He shot her a glance that told her he wouldn’t be doing either.

  Elisenda’s half-hour respite immediately vanished when a call came in from the sergent in charge of the cells, telling her they were just discharging Siset.

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have kept him in a bit longer?’ she asked the sergent when she got there.

  He looked at her over half-rim glasses. ‘Not if the whining little shit wanted to live another day.’

  Elisenda nodded, a smile on her face. ‘He’s a challenging taste, isn’t he?’

  Siset slouched in front of a caporal through the two sets of doors to where Elisenda was standing. He was fighting his usual hopeless battle of tucking his shirt into his trousers and moaning something incomprehensible.

  ‘I don’t want to be arrested again, Elisenda,’ he told her. ‘It’s not right. I’ve got immunity. I’m a public service.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bear that in mind, Siset,’ she replied, trying not to notice the other two Mossos smirking. She walked with him out of the cell area. ‘And your next public service is to find out what you can about someone selling fake antiquities.’

  ‘Antiques?’

  ‘Antiquities. Things people find at archaeological sites. Old coins, pottery, bones. I want to know who’s selling them on the sly.’

  He snorted and looked scornfully at her. ‘Blue-collar shit. Nothing to do with me. I’m street.’

  Elisenda nodded meaningfully at the door to the cells. ‘Public service, Siset. Find out what you can.’

  She watched him go, knowing he was unlikely to come across anything that would be of use to her. ‘Hopeless,’ she muttered.

  Checking the time, she saw the half-hour was up and so she quickly made her way back to the interview suite, where she waited while Comas finished a call. The inspectora from Barcelona had applied a fresh layer of deep red lipstick like an angry wound and was pursing her mouth in irritation at whoever was on the other end of the phone. She hung up and shot a politician’s smile at the other three members of the panel, who were sitting in silence. Some of the lipstick had come off on her teeth.

  ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’ Comas eventually asked the next candidate, a thickset guy who was currently posted to the Ebro Delta region, the wetlands at the southern tip of Catalonia.

  Elisenda watched him try but not fully succeed in hiding a look that was a blend of disbelief and disdain before he replied. Covering her smile, she glanced down at his file and checked his name. Manel Moliné. Originally from Lleida, she read, the provincial capital some two hours west of Barcelona. She watched him
and listened to what he had to say in the deliberate, almost Spanish-sounding vowels of his accent.

  * * *

  After lunch, Àlex sat down opposite Josep and took over the files dealing with the bonded warehouse. But not for long.

  ‘Any news from the selection panel?’ he asked Josep.

  The caporal looked up briefly from the wall of thin papers either side of him and shook his head. ‘They broke for lunch over an hour ago. Elisenda had to go with them. She didn’t look too pleased.’

  Àlex grunted. ‘She didn’t say anything about how the interviews were going?’

  ‘Nothing. She just told me that there were still two more left to do.’

  Montse came in, shaking her heavy coat down off over her arms, and looked at the two men working through the papers. She pulled up a chair between the two of them, where their desks met, and sat down. ‘How can I help?’

  Àlex looked up and gestured to the piles of documents stacked up around Josep. ‘His need is greater than mine.’

  Montse nodded, not making eye contact with Josep. ‘Okay, what do you want me to do?’

  Josep pointed at a pile to his left. ‘You take these. Most of them are copies of what we’ve already got, but some are new. We’re looking for anything we haven’t seen yet that might be important for the Mascort killing.’

  ‘Or for Arbós,’ Àlex added. ‘Or the trafficking. There could be anything.’

  Montse gazed at the tower of flimsy and yellowing paper and took a deep breath before picking up a small wad from the top and scanning through the first one.

  Àlex’s phone rang. He answered it absently, but sat up sharply after the person on the other end began speaking, his free hand flexing as he searched for pen and paper. Montse and Josep couldn’t help exchanging a look before both hurriedly turned back to face him. While he was talking, Àlex wrote something down and went searching on his computer screen. Thanking the other person, he hung up and made another phone call, introducing himself to the person on the other end and arranging to meet them.