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

by Chris Lloyd

  * * *

  Miquel Canals was in when Elisenda called on him at the beach house in La Fosca.

  ‘Lumumba,’ she told him, preparing two tall glasses. ‘Another fisherman’s drink from the region. Brandy with hot chocolate for the winter, like now, and with cold chocolate and ice for the summer. Either warming or refreshing.’

  ‘These fishermen knew how to look after themselves,’ Canals replied, gingerly holding onto the piping hot glass as they toasted on his terrace. Both were wrapped up warmly against the sea cold.

  ‘So how come you can take so much time off?’ she asked him. She knew the answer, she’d checked up on him.

  ‘Are you a cop now?’

  ‘I’m always a cop.’

  He laughed gently. ‘I sold my company last year. When my father was ill, I decided I’d had enough. I also had enough money and I felt it was time for a change. I’d started it when I was a student, and I’d done with it everything I’d wanted to.’

  ‘And do you have to work again?’ The idea of not needing to work both intrigued and disturbed her.

  ‘Depends what you mean. Financially, probably not. Mentally, yes. I’m starting to miss having a purpose.’

  ‘How did you manage to get the money to start it when you were a student?’

  ‘My father lent it to me. I told you we were very close. He told me he’d loan me the money as long as I paid it back inside five years. I did it in three. He knew business and expected the same of me.’

  Elisenda looked at him over the top of her glass and nodded. She realised as he was speaking about money and business that just as her interest in him as a man waned, her view of him as a potential suspect waxed. The moon disappeared behind a passing cloud, one of the few she’d seen in the sky for weeks, and his face was clothed in shadow for a brief moment.

  ‘What was the company?’

  He told her a name. It was one she’d recognised even before she’d checked him out. ‘We gave head massages to people on their lunch break or their way to or from work or when they were out shopping.’

  And very successfully too, Elisenda knew. She’d seen the franchises all over Barcelona. Small premises, each with ten or twelve ergonomic chairs and a team of young assistants giving ten-minute head massages in a fixed formula for thirty euros a shot. Not much for the customer to pay, low overheads and a steadily accumulating profit for the franchisees and for Miquel Canals, who’d thought of it. It was the perfect business idea for a pre-recession city. Even with the downturn, he’d sold it for millions.

  ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ he told her.

  Without giving her a chance to object, he got up and stood behind her chair, gently beginning to knead her scalp in light, circular movements. She had to admit to herself that she could see why someone would want to fit a sensation like this into a fraught day’s work. She might even have found the hypnotic effect of his fingers skilfully working her head relaxing were it not for the images she couldn’t shake out of her mind of the skulls at Ullastret, huddled together sightless under the shocked gaze of the people who paid to come to see them. And of a dead man lying forgotten in a trench and an ageing curator pinned to a wall in his house by the spike that someone had buried in his forehead.

  ‘Cold?’ he asked her when she shivered.

  Chapter Forty One

  El Crit.

  The scream.

  Only it was more of a yelp that Elisenda heard from the top of the headland. One of pain. And it was coming from the direction of the dig.

  Her feet still wet in her trainers and her body drenched in sweat from the Saturday morning kayaking, she skittered across the floor of dead pine wishbones towards the cry. Shouting a warning, she ducked and raced through the sharp points of the green needles on the trees that scratched her arms as she ran. Over the noise that she was making she could hear no other sound from ahead.

  Emerging into the small clearing, she saw a figure leaning back against the deeply-furrowed bark of a holm oak, its legs stretched out along the ground in front. Quickly looking around as she approached, she saw no one else nearby, no movement in the branches to betray someone fleeing.

  The figure groaned.

  Kneeling down, Elisenda saw that it was Doctora Fradera.

  ‘What happened?’ the archaeologist asked her, her voice slurred.

  ‘I was about to ask you that.’

  She tried to help Fradera to her feet, but the older woman cried out in pain and sat back down heavily again. She held her left hand to her right shoulder, by her neck and closed her eyes.

  ‘Something hit me,’ she told Elisenda. ‘Behind me. I was bending over to look at something in the trench. I heard something. And I stood up and I felt something hit me on the neck. That’s all. What happened?’

  Supporting the weight of the woman’s arm, Elisenda pulled back her collar to reveal a bruise already forming on the top of her shoulder.

  ‘The skin’s not broken,’ she told Fradera, who gingerly begin to rotate her arm. ‘Or the bone by the look of it.’

  Scanning the area around her, Elisenda spotted a glint on the ground from the sunlight filtered through the trees. Leaving the archaeologist for one moment, she went over to take a look. Lying on the pine needles was a metal spike, the tip covered in light brown dust where it had landed in the earth and fallen back out again. Someone had evidently dropped it, probably when they heard her running through the woods. Staring closely at it, she made her mind up and went back to where Fradera was lying.

  ‘Now you tell me what happened, Doctora Fradera. Why would this person attack you?’

  The archaeologist was silent for a long moment and Elisenda thought she wasn’t going to say anything. When she did speak, Elisenda couldn’t help feeling shocked.

  ‘Six years ago I agreed to give someone an artefact from a dig I was working on. I know, I’m vociferous about the theft of our culture, but he had something on me. An indiscretion from years before that would have damaged my reputation as an academic. It’s pointless you asking me what it was as I have no intention of telling you. Suffice to say that I’m not proud of any of it.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. A man but I never met him, I only ever spoke to him on the phone. I took the item, a votive statue, and waited for him where I was supposed to, but no one ever showed up. So I went home and waited for my career to end, but I heard nothing more, ever again. I felt I’d earned a reprieve. Until now.’

  Elisenda studied the archaeologist’s cold expression and thought. Six years ago. That was when the dealer, whoever he was, seemed to vanish without trace, when his heavily-cloaked business folded, when his victims and cohorts appeared to have been released from their servitude. She wondered if there was one more body buried in a shallow grave somewhere, or if the dealer had simply died a peaceful, anonymous death and his machinations had died with him. Until now, prompted by the discovery of Esteve Mascort at El Crit, and someone had taken over his mantle.

  She was interrupted by the sound of movement coming from a way to her right. She looked up to see Doctor Bosch appear along the faint path from where they always parked their cars.

  ‘Mireia,’ he worried. ‘What’s happened?’

  He rushed up to her and helped her get to her feet.

  ‘Did you see anyone on the path?’ Elisenda asked him, but he shook his head. She took her mobile out of the waterproof pouch slung around her neck, but there was no signal. She turned back to the two archaeologists. ‘You’re going to have to leave. This place isn’t safe.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Fradera told her, irritated. ‘No one’s going to come back now.’ Bosch was pouring her a cup of his execrable coffee from the flask. She took it and slowly drank, wrinkling her nose at the taste.

  ‘I have to insist.’

  ‘You can insist all you like, dear,’ Fradera told her, ‘but I’m staying here. I have work to do.’

  ‘Me too,’ Bosch added, his voice rather less certain.


  Giving up, Elisenda picked up the spike with a plastic bag folded inside-out that Bosch gave her and sealed the bag, tying it to her pouch. Leaving them, she retrieved her kayak and rowed north, deep in thought. She was still off the shore when she finally got a phone signal so, balancing on the gentle waves, she called Caporal Fabra in the station in Palafrugell and explained what had happened. She asked him to come down to meet her in Calella, one of Palafrugell’s beaches. When she got there, she beached the kayak to an audience of coffee-drinkers in overcoats and sunglasses watching her in idle curiosity from the café by the low sea wall. Fabra was waiting for her. She handed over the spike and told him to get it to Científica in La Bisbal.

  ‘And I want patrols out to El Crit as often as you can.’

  ‘I’ll check it out now,’ he promised, ‘but realistically we’ll only be able to get there once a day, twice at most.’

  Having to be satisfied with that, she refused his offer of a lift and paddled back out into the sea. Slowly, she rowed north along the edge of the coves for a short distance before turning to head back for La Fosca. She was looking for a little motor-boat and a middle-aged man supposedly picking up rubbish on a beach.

  Chapter Forty Two

  Canals was on the beach on Sunday morning when she was pushing the kayak out into the water. He was wearing a wetsuit and carrying a spanking new kayak of his own over his head.

  ‘Top of the range,’ Elisenda commented to him. ‘Have you met my brother-in-law? You’d get on.’

  ‘I’ve seen you doing this other mornings,’ he explained. ‘It looks fun. Can I join you?’

  Elisenda looked straight at him. ‘Yeah, why not?’

  She waited for him to get comfortable in his sleek new toy and they slowly paddled out into deeper water. He rolled precariously from side to side as he got used to the movement, and he had to grab hold of her kayak to steady himself.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ he asked to hide his embarrassment, nodding at a waterproof rucksack fastened in front of her.

  ‘Dog food. Don’t ask.’

  Without waiting for a reply, she dug her paddle into the water and led him at a leisurely stroke northwards to the neighbouring coves. He quickly found his balance and was able to keep up, providing she went slowly. She veered to the left into the small cove at the foot of the Castell headland and came to a halt in the clear blue water glittering over the rocks below. She spotted a colony of sea urchins clinging under the surface to the sides of the stone arch reaching out from the land.

  ‘Castell,’ she told him, pointing upwards.

  ‘Indiketa,’ he replied, looking at the bare rock of the settlement thrusting up out of the water, crowned by the concentric rings of a necropolis.

  ‘You know about the Indiketa?’

  He shrugged. ‘Only a layman’s interest.’ He turned away and rowed under the arch, emerging around the other side of the rock with a huge smile on his face. ‘I see the attraction.’

  ‘I’ve got to press on,’ she told him. ‘We’ll do this again another time.’

  ‘Sure. I don’t think I could go much further anyway, my shoulders are already aching.’

  Deep in thought, she shifted her position in her kayak and dug the paddle far into the water, gaining momentum immediately. She could feel the power in her shoulders and upper torso having strengthened over the last couple of weeks, despite not having gone out on the kayak for a few days. She made good time along the shore now she was on her own. In contrast to the denuded headland at Castell, the trees standing along the coastal footpath threw long, still shadows away from her as the sun steadily rose above the horizon to her right.

  Maria was in when she got to the cabin in the woods, a second cup of coffee waiting on the table as though she were expecting Elisenda.

  ‘You’d be surprised how far sounds travel through the trees,’ the older woman told her.

  Elisenda placed the waterproof bag she’d tied to the kayak for the journey on the table and pulled out two large bags of dried dog food. ‘I don’t know how easy it is for you to buy food for them,’ she explained. ‘Or for yourself.’

  ‘Supermarket bins,’ Maria told her. ‘They throw away enough waste to feed all the people forced into using food banks. Another system that has failed us. They’ve discarded it, so I take it. It’s no longer their property.’

  ‘I imagine the supermarkets may have a different view from yours.’

  ‘I imagine they would. Unfortunately for them I have little regard for their opinion.’ Getting up from her chair, she cut open one of the bags with a knife she fetched from the kitchen and poured it out into bowls for the dogs, which all ran skidding into the cabin, enticed by the smell. ‘But you didn’t come to bring me food for my dogs or ask about my dietary requirements.’

  Elisenda waited until she sat down again. ‘Why are you leaving artefacts at the El Crit dig? Where are they from?’

  Maria looked over to where Flora lay on the tatty old rug where the rocking chair usually stood. The chair had been pushed into a corner of the room. The Great Dane was moaning balefully and the woman beckoned her over, buying time. Flora looked up at her trustingly as she absently stroked her head. ‘Finds go missing from these places,’ she eventually said. ‘I find them, I return them.’

  Elisenda took a sip from the strong coffee and savoured it before continuing.

  ‘I have a new member of my team, Maria. His name’s Manel. His full name’s Joan Manel, to be precise, and he could have used any combination of those two names to present himself to the rest of us. Joan. Or Manel. Or Joan Manel. Or even Joanma. But he chose Manel.’

  ‘You’re rambling, Elisenda. Why should this interest me?’

  ‘It should interest you because by simply choosing which part of a name someone uses, it changes their identity. It can even change who they are. I’ve been told of a Dolors Quintí, an archaeologist on another site who was Ricard Soler’s girlfriend until she left him for Esteve Mascort.’

  She saw Maria sit rocking on her chair, looking intently back at her.

  ‘Dolors is part of another compound name,’ Elisenda continued. ‘Like Joan Manel, although women rarely use the two parts of that specific name together. Which is why it took a little time for it to click. Maria Dolors. That’s your full name. And Quintí Pujol are your two surnames. So the woman whose full name is Maria Dolors Quintí Pujol and who was once known to everyone as Dolors Quintí…’

  ‘…is now Maria Pujol. What of it?’

  ‘You were in a relationship with Esteve Mascort when he went missing. You had an abortion when he refused to recognise your child.’

  Maria looked at Elisenda before breaking suddenly into laughter. A full, round outburst of joy that ended as quickly as it began.

  ‘An abortion? Oh, that is rich. Were those the rumours? That I had an abortion?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I can assure you, Elisenda, that I have never ever had an abortion. Yes, my full name is as you say it is and I had an affair with Esteve Mascort, but it was over long before he disappeared. Those idiots on the El Crit dig had more time on their hands than the wit to know what to do with it. If they hadn’t been so busy bickering with each other and feathering their own career nests, they might have spent their time more profitably finding all the history there is to be told by this wonderful place rather than on making up stories about each other. And about me.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘An abortion? Simply wonderful.’

  Elisenda drank from her cup to gather her thoughts, considering where her questions were to go next. ‘Why did you keep who you were a secret from me?’

  ‘I didn’t. I am Maria Pujol. I am no longer the woman I was over thirty years ago. If you’d wanted to know my full name, I would have told you happily.’

  ‘When exactly did your relationship with Esteve Mascort end?’

  ‘He went missing in the summer of 1981. I broke off my relationship with him at the end of 1980, over six mont
hs before he disappeared. I was old enough to have seen through him by that time. Despite what the idiots he worked with might have told you.’

  ‘Did you know he was stealing artefacts?’

  ‘Not when I left him, no. But when I learned, it didn’t surprise me.’

  ‘I take it the pieces you’ve been returning to El Crit are ones he stole from there all those years ago. How come you have them?’

  ‘I found them. He’d left them in my apartment and I only discovered them after we’d split up.’

  ‘Why wait this long to return them?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I didn’t know what to do with them at the time. I knew they were stolen. I didn’t want to get into trouble. And by the time I’d found them, I couldn’t return them as the dig had been closed down. I’ve had to wait until now that they’ve started working on it again to give them back.’

  Elisenda studied the other woman’s face. She knew that something didn’t ring true with her story. ‘So if you knew nothing about it, you wouldn’t have known anyone he might have sold the artefacts to?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have the faintest idea. I tell you, when we separated, I had no idea of what he was up to.’ She got up and went into the kitchen to fetch the cafetera to refill the cups. ‘In your position, if I were trying to find who killed him, I would be more interested in the professional jealousy of the other archaeologists on the dig. Esteve might have been amoral, but he knew the Indiketa, he had a feeling for the history. The others were politicians, interested only in their reputation.’

  Unwillingly, Elisenda immediately recalled the report blowing the whistle on Ferran Arbós written by Martí Barbena. Maria’s final statement set it further on its way worming into her doubts.