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

  ‘A dig in the 1980s?’

  She carried on walking. ‘There’ve been several over the years. The first one in 1908, another one in the 1930s before the Civil War, then nothing until the 1980s. They pulled the plug on that one because of funding. And other issues, as far as I’ve heard. And now us, going the same way unless we can prove greater cultural significance.’ She suddenly stopped on the edge of a much smaller trench cut through the dry earth, the pine needles swept up into a high pile a few metres away from it. ‘Here’s your man. Mind you don’t fall in.’

  Elisenda looked down at a straggle of bones, lying sad at the bottom of the pit. From the size and shape of the pelvis, clearly visible in the light brown soil, even she could see that it was a man. Years of attending post mortem examinations had taught her that. Otherwise, she felt it looked similar to the first body, except that it wasn’t fully exposed, as though it had only been half excavated. Àlex came alongside her and looked down into the trench.

  ‘What makes you say we’re dealing with a modern body?’ Elisenda asked. She noticed that Doctora Fradera didn’t step down into the trench this time.

  ‘Without a proper examination, I can’t know for certain, but the colour and texture of the bone is different. And I found fragments of fabric. They’re badly decomposed, but they look to me to be non-natural, not the weave we get from natural fabrics.’

  ‘You haven’t cleared all the earth away, I see.’

  The archaeologist nodded. ‘The moment I suspected it wasn’t as it should be, I stopped.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctora Fradera, you were quite right to stop.’

  ‘Who else has seen this?’ Àlex asked.

  ‘My colleague. He stayed here while I went along the cliff path to get a phone signal. You can’t get one here. There’s a house just a few hundred metres to the southwest, you can get a signal near there.’

  ‘Is there anyone living in the house?’ Elisenda asked her.

  Fradera considered that for a moment and shook her head. ‘Empty for the winter, I think.’

  ‘Did your colleague touch the body while you were phoning?’ Àlex added.

  She looked down at the trench, scanning. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. It certainly doesn’t look like he did.’

  ‘The bones look like they’ve been pushed together,’ he insisted.

  ‘No, the body was probably placed here curled up.’

  ‘Was that usual practice among the original people? The Iberians?’

  ‘Indiketa,’ Fradera specified. ‘We don’t know. We’ve found bodies buried in all sorts of different ways, so I couldn’t say if this was unusual. But this is.’

  Carefully, she finally stepped down into the pit, pulling a brush from her jacket pocket.

  ‘If I may?’ she asked, looking up.

  Elisenda nodded at her to go ahead. The archaeologist brushed some of the dry earth away from the skull. Elisenda and Àlex had to walk round to the other side to get a better view.

  ‘I’d only just started removing the soil here when I noticed it. It’s why I stopped.’

  She took the brush away and the two Mossos saw the beginnings of a spike emerging from the skull. As the body was on its side, they hadn’t seen it before.

  ‘A spike like the first one,’ Elisenda murmured.

  Fradera shook her head. ‘The first one, along with all the other skulls like this that we’ve found, has a round-headed spike, like a giant nail. Look at this.’

  Elisenda and Àlex peered in. Through the dirt, what appeared to be a hole was visible in the spike.

  ‘I’d say it was a mattock, wouldn’t you?’ the archaeologist asked. ‘A modern one.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’m not fucking going back in that sick bucket bobbing about on the fucking ocean. Tell them to clear the fucking road by the time I finish.’

  ‘Have you worked with Albert Riera before?’ Elisenda asked the judge.

  ‘More times than I care to remember. One day I hope to be good enough at my job to be that rude.’

  Elisenda decided she liked the court official, an earnest young man with dark-rimmed spectacles that looked too big for him, like adults’ glasses on a child’s face. They were standing to one side of the clearing where the second trench lay, watching the spectacle of the pathologist’s arrival through the pines from the beach below.

  ‘Jutge Rigau,’ the judge had introduced himself when he’d arrived, shaking the dust from his neatly-pressed trousers. ‘Please call me Pere.’

  ‘I can tell you’re a judge,’ she’d replied. ‘The bottoms of your trousers aren’t wet.’

  He’d had the grace to look sheepish, which had endeared him immediately to Elisenda.

  ‘I drove. I didn’t know about the land slippage on the track here. That’s why it took me so long. I’ve had to walk through the woods for the best part of an hour.’

  ‘Have you come from La Bisbal?’

  Rigau nodded. ‘This comes under our judicial area, so we’re dealing with it, not a judge from Girona.’

  Elisenda smiled to herself and thought of Jutgessa Roca, one of the Girona judges that she usually had to contend with, a stickler for form and oblivious to suggestion. ‘I’m sure I’ll get over it. No court secretary?’

  ‘No need for us both to come all the way out here. I’m just present because I’ll be instructing the investigation, so I want to get an idea of the scene.’

  Elisenda nodded and liked him even more. When a body was found under suspicious circumstances, protocol had it that the judge, the court secretary and the pathologist had to be present to permit it to be removed. In practice, it was usually done by just one of them, usually the pathologist. The judge being there without the other court official showed an interest in the content, not the form.

  As it happened, Jutge Rigau had only turned up a few moments before Albert Riera and his shell-shocked entourage had arrived from Girona, by sea as Elisenda had done.

  The whole of the machinery had been set in motion the moment Doctora Fradera had shown them the mattock embedded in the skull.

  ‘It’s a common tool,’ she’d explained to Elisenda when Àlex and Caporal Fabra had gone off in search of a phone signal, ‘but they’re also used by archaeologists. From the size of this, it looks like a hand mattock, a smaller one.’

  ‘So a tool that would have been ready to hand during a dig?’

  ‘Very much so. But nowadays the handles are made of fibre glass. This looks like an old-fashioned wooden one. The handle’s gone, but you can see the hole where it should be. There are fragments that look like they could be wood.’

  ‘In which case, a tool that could have been in use in the 1980s dig.’

  ‘Or even earlier, the 1930s. We won’t know until we can date the skeleton properly.’

  Elisenda had waited deep in thought until Àlex had come back to tell her that he’d spoken to the forensic medicine service in Girona and the judicial service in La Bisbal.

  ‘But it’s going to be some time before they get here,’ he commented. ‘Caporal Fabra has called the Policia Científica in La Bisbal. They’re sending a team.’

  ‘So we wait,’ Elisenda had replied.

  In the meantime, Fabra had climbed down to the beach to let Senyor Ferran know that they were going to be some time.

  ‘He wanted to come up to see for himself,’ Fabra told them when he returned. ‘I said he should go back to Palamós and we’d call him when we were ready. I’ve arranged for him to bring the pathologist from Girona when he gets here.’

  ‘Wise move,’ Elisenda replied.

  Àlex quickly grew restless and began to search the area around the earlier trench. He knew not to contaminate the murder scene, but was impatient to get on with the investigation.

  ‘Not that there’ll be much left uncontaminated,’ Elisenda commented.

  Fabra went with him, while Elisenda stayed near the second trench. Doctora Fradera brought out a couple of battered folding canv
as chairs and she and Elisenda took one each.

  ‘This would be the Indiketa tribe, wouldn’t it?’ Elisenda asked. ‘The settlement? I heard of them at school, but I know very little about them.’

  ‘None of us knows a great deal about them.’ Fradera sighed and gestured around her. ‘This rather sums up our relationship with so much of our past. This dig has been started and stopped three times before we got here. The way things are going, it will soon be stopped for a fourth time. If it’s not a lack of funding, it’s a lack of political will that has constantly hamstrung research.’

  Elisenda nodded. She felt this conversation was for another moment. For the present, she simply wanted more of an idea of the context. ‘Can you give me some idea of the Indiketa, Doctora Fradera? I need to have some idea why a thirty- or eighty-year-old murder would have happened precisely in this place, especially when there are such similarities between the victims.’

  ‘In a nutshell,’ Fradera said, taking a deep breath, ‘the Indiketa were an Iberian Celtic tribe, we think stretching from what is now Tarragona and northwards along the coast as far as here and up into the Pyrenees. You’re from Girona, I take it. We think they may have inhabited that area too, along with the Ausetans. They are your ancestors.’

  ‘This is pre-Roman, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed. Our earliest records are from the sixth century BC up until about the first century BC. They traded with the Greeks and then the Romans. They were eventually subjugated by the Romans in 218 BC but rebelled in 195 BC. That was put down by Cato the Elder as part of his campaign in Hispania. With the customary cruelty we expect of Cato.’

  ‘War feeds itself.’

  Fradera looked surprised. ‘Very good. Yes, that was Cato the Elder who said that. It was to justify the severity of his repression. And it’s been used as justification ever since. He also said that he had destroyed more towns in Hispania than he’d spent days in the country.’

  ‘Could the original killing in the first trench have been Roman doing?’

  ‘Unlikely. The Indiketa weren’t averse to a spot of cruelty themselves, both on the battlefield and to their prisoners. Anyway, I’m certain that that killing pre-dates the Romans. No, I think we can assume that it’s entirely in the family.’

  Elisenda turned to look at the second trench. She could just see part of the bones over the lip of the pit. ‘So, I wonder if this one is, too.’

  She was aware of Àlex approaching where they sat. He was accompanied by a man wearing glasses that crowded his face. She stood up as the man shook the dust from the bottoms of his trousers. He looked hot and was carrying his coat over his shoulder.

  ‘Jutge Rigau,’ he told her. ‘Please call me Pere.’

  He was quickly followed by the Científica forensic investigation team from La Bisbal and a few moments later by Albert Riera. With his soft, white hair and neat goatee beard, his bird-like hands and his waspish manner, the pathologist most resembled an avuncular demon. Elisenda and Jutge Rigau watched him now as he finished his tirade against the sea and set to work in the trench.

  ‘You, archaeologist,’ he barked. ‘Come here. I’ll need your expertise.’

  Doctora Fradera had looked dumbstruck at Elisenda.

  ‘He’s recognised your expertise, Doctora Fradera,’ Elisenda reasoned. ‘I’d say you were winning.’

  Two of the Científica team, anonymous in their forensic whites, began their visual search in the area around the trench, while the other two assisted Riera and Fradera in gently scraping the earth from the bones. They looked at their colleagues like they’d drawn the short straw.

  ‘Carefully with that brush, you numskull,’ Riera told one of them. ‘You’re not scratching your balls.’

  They had.

  ‘I have to agree with your opinion, Doctora Fradera,’ Riera finally grumbled after much of the bones had been revealed. ‘This is modern.’

  Fradera picked up a piece of fabric that had been hidden under the earth. ‘And this is man-made.’

  ‘You’re very skilful, Doctora Fradera.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That amounts to flirting in Albert’s book,’ Elisenda whispered to the judge, who stifled a laugh.

  ‘I’d like to start moving the body,’ Riera told Rigau. ‘Do I have your consent?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Not that I give a fuck. I’m moving it anyway.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ the judge replied, a grin on his lips. Riera looked up at him nonplussed.

  ‘You learn fast,’ Elisenda told him, impressed. Being overly polite was often one of the ways to take the wind out of the pathologist’s sails.

  Riera called for a box and the team in the trench began to lift the bones carefully out and place them inside. As they removed the parts of the rib cage, he and Fradera suddenly stopped.

  ‘Well, that settles that,’ Riera said, carefully picking up an item. He showed it to Elisenda. ‘A Sony Walkman, if I’m not mistaken. With a cassette still in it.’

  ‘So, not the 1930s then,’ Elisenda replied.

  El Crit, 1981

  Everyone on the coach craned their neck to see what the hold-up was. Noticing the movement, the student took off his earphones and looked out through the windows on the other side of the aisle.

  A dog was lying on the road, where the dozen or so lanes after the toll booths merged into the three lanes of the motorway. Blood was pouring from its mouth, but when a man from a car tried to approach it, it growled and he had to back off.

  ‘Abandoned,’ the student heard one of the other passengers decide. ‘Someone must have dumped it there and another car’s hit it.’

  ‘Some people,’ someone else commented.

  His neighbours started telling each other stories of people abandoning dogs on main roads and in the woods, but the student didn’t join in. He looked at his watch and wondered how late this was going to make him. Tugging at his shirt front to fan himself in the June heat, he took the letter out of his rucksack and read it through again, even though he knew what it said by heart.

  He was disturbed again by someone in the coach quietly jeering. He looked up to see a green and white Guardia Civil car draw up and two cops trying to shoo the dog to the side of the motorway.

  ‘Bastard Guardia Civil,’ a young man said.

  ‘Occupying troops,’ his girlfriend added, an epithet often applied indiscriminately to both the Guardia Civil and the Policía Nacional.

  ‘Lock them all up with Tejero and throw away the key,’ an elderly woman chipped in.

  Others joined in, talking heatedly about the attempted coup the previous February, when Tejero and other Guardias Civiles stormed the parliament in Madrid, although they all made sure that the two policemen outside the coach couldn’t discern any gesture or look that would be likely to antagonise them. They spoke in low voices, not willing to close the sliding panels at the top of the windows in the hot summer sun.

  The student sighed and looked at his watch again. The coach had already been late leaving Barcelona. At this rate, it was going to reach Palamós at least an hour after it should do.

  Putting the letter back in the rucksack, he searched through one of the pockets for a moment before finding what he wanted. Taking out the most recent album by Orquesta Mondragón, he swapped over cassettes and put his earphones back on, closing his eyes and turning the volume on his Walkman up as loud as it would go.

  Chapter Four

  ‘That’s the one with Caperucita Feroz, isn’t it?’ one of the Científica from La Bisbal had asked. ‘That’s one of my mum’s favourites.’

  ‘Oh, do fuck off,’ Riera had replied.

  ‘Orquesta Mondragón,’ Elisenda explained to Jutge Rigau.

  ‘I know, I’m a fan.’

  ‘Very retro.’

  After the Walkman had been found in the trench, the senior Científica officer had opened the device and taken out the cassette that was still inside it. Holding it gently in his gloved hand, he’d
announced the name of the band.

  ‘And the album is called Bon Voyage,’ he’d added.

  ‘That came out in 1980,’ Rigau had announced, impressing everyone.

  Elisenda turned to Doctora Fradera. ‘Do you know the dates of the dig in the 1980s?’

  ‘I know it closed down in 1981, in June or July I think. As far as I’m aware, it had only been in operation for less than a year.’

  ‘That gives us a time frame,’ Elisenda replied.

  It was late afternoon by the time the last of the teams had left the scene. Jutge Rigau had signed the order for the body to be removed from the scene, and four porters from the Institut de Medicina Legal in Girona had carried the man from the second trench in a box past a silent assembly through the trees to their van.

  Satisfied they’d completed their inspection of the scene, the Científica team had also returned to the clearing beyond the blockage on the track to retrieve their vehicle for the drive back to La Bisbal. Albert Riera had refused point-blank to return by boat and had tramped through the darkening pine trails with Jutge Rigau and Doctora Fradera. The archaeologist had left her car a short distance from where the judge had parked, she said, to the side of the track near the blockage.

  ‘Good,’ Riera had replied. ‘We can talk old bodies.’ He turned to Rigau. ‘And you can drive me on to Girona from La Bisbal, young man. The round trip won’t take you long. And you might learn something.’

  ‘I’m sure I would,’ Rigau had replied, ‘but I have no intention of driving you to Girona.’

  ‘I do like that judge,’ Elisenda whispered to Àlex.

  In the end, Doctora Fradera offered Riera a lift. ‘I live in Girona,’ she explained. ‘It’s no trouble.’

  Elisenda decided to return by sea, so Caporal Fabra had gone to call Senyor Ferran, who’d returned in his boat to take them back to where she and Àlex had left the pool car in Llafranch. Back on dry land after the short journey along the coast in the deepening gloom, Elisenda and Àlex found the car and headed for Girona, with Àlex at the wheel.