City of Buried Ghosts (An Inspector Domènech Crime Thriller Book 2) Page 6

  ‘They’re trophies,’ Bosch interrupted. He sounded irritated. ‘Enemies killed in battle, their heads displayed.’

  ‘Displayed?’ Elisenda asked.

  ‘The spikes are inserted through the front of the skull and they emerge at the base of the neck. We’ve found them near walls. We think they were hung there, nailed to the settlement walls as trophies.’

  ‘We can’t say that with any certainty,’ Fradera objected. Bosch shook his head angrily. ‘They might be trophies, they might be deterrents. Enemies in battle, possibly. But maybe also criminals. Their heads displayed as a warning to the people of the settlement.’

  ‘They were a warrior people,’ Bosch insisted. ‘They fought a war against the Romans. These are trophies of enemy invaders.’

  Fradera looked at Elisenda and sighed. ‘And we now believe that there might be more to it still. Not a deterrent or a punishment, but a sign of veneration.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Mireia,’ Bosch argued. ‘A spike through the skull? Veneration? That is just not possible.’

  Elisenda realised she was walking into an argument that had no end, so she began to head the two archaeologists away from the trench and back towards the centre of the dig. As she left, Fradera slipped her a card.

  ‘I sometimes work at Ullastret. If you’d like to come and see me there one day, I could explain a bit more about what we think this ritual means.’ She cast a glance over to Bosch, who was packing his tools away and putting a small number of bagged items in a box, ready to leave while it was still light enough. ‘Without interruption.’

  Elisenda thanked her and walked off through the trees. Looking back, she saw Fradera go to the furthest part of the trench from Bosch and start to examine something on the ground, already engrossed. Neither of them spoke.

  Deciding not to wait for them, Elisenda set off inland towards the clearing where she’d left her car, regretting not having brought a torch. The wind had picked up and the needles on the trees pulled at her hair as she walked past, the dead ones on the ground curling under her feet. The sun had all but set in front of her, the dark coming in quiet waves from the sea behind her, forcing its way past, obscuring the path. Unwittingly, she quickened her pace when she heard a sound behind her. It caught her up.

  She turned to see a face up against hers. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I forgot my torch,’ Bosch told her, breathless from catching her up. ‘Sorry if I startled you.’

  Elisenda let her breath out in a long sigh. She moved to one side on the path and let the archaeologist walk alongside her. Her hands were shaking.

  ‘I usually bring one,’ he explained, ‘but I left it in my car. Gets quite spooky, this walk in the evening. I normally try and leave earlier but we got a bit caught up, didn’t we?’

  ‘Does Doctora Fradera normally leave after you?’ Elisenda could see her car up ahead in the gloom.

  ‘She has very little concept of time. She’s often leaving it until it’s dark before she comes away. There’s nothing I can say. But she doesn’t appear to have the same irrational fears as the rest of us. Too scientific.’

  Elisenda let him speak, suddenly aware that the discovery of the body in the second trench had frightened him.

  ‘Irrational fears,’ she agreed.

  ‘One can only hope they stay irrational.’

  ‘You were putting something in a box. Back at the dig.’

  ‘Just a couple of finds from today. Shards of pottery. I leave them with Doctora Fradera and she takes them back with her to Girona to leave at the Archaeology Service.’

  ‘You never leave any artefacts here?’

  Elisenda heard rather than saw him shake his head. ‘No way of keeping them safe. This is a more isolated site than most, but things can still go missing. Thieves sometimes target ongoing digs.’

  ‘You couldn’t put in a security guard overnight?’

  He laughed. ‘Budgets again. If we paid a security guard, there wouldn’t be enough money left for more than one archaeologist to work here.’

  Back at their cars, he offered to drive ahead as he knew the track better.

  ‘Follow my lights. I’ve done this route so many times, I’ve found the easiest way through.’

  Agreeing, she followed him and had to admit that the ride was far less bumpy and uncomfortable than going the other way had been.

  ‘No one’s ever entirely an arse,’ she said to the night as Bosch led her to the main junction where the asphalt started. Waving, he accelerated away on the same road towards Palamós.

  Turning off for La Fosca, to the north of the town, she drove through narrow streets equally as lonely as the path through the pines. Catalina’s house was at the end of a pockmarked road, the surface torn by tree roots and verges fraying into the dust. Unable to use the remotely-controlled garage doors and get into the house on the landward side because the electricity was turned off, she parked at the foot of the steps to the side of the building. Taking an overnight bag and a bag of shopping out of the boot, she climbed the stone flight, which led to the path running in front of the house. It was one of four on a low and rambling headland overlooking the sea, fifty metres inland from the old coastguards’ trail that now ran the length of the coast. She could hear the sea down below, see the phosphorescence on the small waves borne in by a more benevolent breeze than the one just a few coves to the north. A small path led through low palms and light gravel to the seaward door. Finding the right key, Elisenda opened the door and fumbled around in the hallway for the mains switch. Flicking it, she felt along the wall to the light switch and snapped it on.

  Turning to face the room, she let out a gasp at the sight of a roomful of huge white figures below, beyond the three tiled steps into the living room, facing her, marching slowly in time towards where she stood.

  El Crit, 1981

  It was a ghost town.

  The student had got off the coach in Palamós at Plaça Catalunya, near the seafront, but there’d been no one waiting there for him as planned. He hadn’t been surprised. The coach had got in nearly two hours late.

  He found a call box on a main road a short walk from the square, but there’d been no answer to the number on the letter. It was gone eight and all the shops away from the beach and the port were shut, but the cafés and restaurants were open. He could hear the sounds of life down by the sea, but he was hot and tired and his rucksack was heavy. Sweating in the hot evening air, he decided to walk. Checking a second letter in his bag, he went into a café to ask for directions. The Birdy Song was playing when he went in. Two small children, a boy and a girl, were frantically doing all the moves, their parents watching them indulgently. He was sick of it. It was the only song you’d heard all summer.

  He told the waiter the address he was looking for, and the man, an old-school type baking in white shirt and black waistcoat, went out on to the pavement with him to show him the way. The student thanked him and set off along the main road, heading away from the sea, looking for the turnoff to the right that the waiter had described. He had The Birdy Song in his head, so he hunted out his Walkman and put Orquesta Mondragón back on, a feeling of relief when the frenetic chorus of Caperucita Feroz filled his mind.

  It was when he found the road to the right that he was supposed to take that he stopped in his tracks. It was a ghost town. Used to Barcelona with its noise and movement, it was so odd to find himself just metres from cars and people and lights but engulfed in a bygone street of low buildings and village quiet.

  He walked on as instructed and found the crossroads. To the left, the hospital, looking rundown and disused in the humid evening. To the right, the strange ground-floor turrets with eye-level gun slits of the Guardia Civil barracks. He walked past it on the opposite side of the road, the only other person in sight a single guard standing on duty at the gate midway along the block. Counting off the numbers, he found the house he wanted. On the same side as the Guardia Civil but another street over was a row o
f tiny houses, an incongruous village street in a thriving beach town.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be coming,’ the elderly woman who opened the door to him said.

  ‘The coach was late. And there was no one to meet me.’

  ‘You’d better come in. I can warm your meal up.’

  After he’d eaten, a plate of boiled Swiss chard in olive oil and garlic followed by grilled hake, he paid the woman the first month’s rent.

  ‘I’ll be here until the end of September.’

  The woman didn’t have a phone in the house, so he walked down to the main road to ring again. She told him of a quicker route and it took him just a couple of minutes to get there, but there was still no reply.

  Going back to the elderly woman’s house, he went into the small living room at the front of the house to wish her goodnight.

  ‘I live alone,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been a widow for nearly twenty years. I like the company and I can do with the money.’

  So he stayed up with her for a time, watching an episode of Cervantes on a tinny-sounding black and white television in the corner of the room. When it finished, he went upstairs to the room he was renting and lay awake on the bed in the stifling heat until he finally found sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  After the first moment’s shock, Elisenda doubled up with laughter, a release of tension, the first deep laugh she’d given for months.

  Drying her eyes, she descended the three steps into the open living room and began removing the dust sheets from the army of furniture standing patiently in waiting. Carefully, knowing what was underneath, she pulled the cover from two huge terracotta vases either side of the short staircase, the rough surfaces of both stylishly held together by a straggling line of giant rusting staples. Then came two large bronze figurines on tall display tables. She examined the two statues, reproductions of Roman goddesses. Sergi’s taste, not hers, she hoped not Catalina’s.

  Turning lights on as she went, she went through the living room, kitchen and the bedroom she was going to be using, folding the protective sheets and storing them in the hall cupboard. When she’d finished, she turned to look at the result. The expensively-tiled floor could do with a polish after months of the house being empty, but the room looked welcoming, despite the taste in statues. It was bigger than her whole apartment, with three large cream leather sofas to accommodate the summer’s heat.

  ‘That’s going to be chilly now,’ she said out loud.

  They were arranged in a horseshoe around a wrought-iron and mahogany coffee table the size of a double bed. Elisenda knew the ornaments that would be placed on it when the house was in use were stored in another cupboard somewhere, as were many of the other trinkets from the half-empty shelves along one wall.

  ‘They can stay there.’

  There was an unused chill to the house. A fireplace was set into one wall in case Catalina and Sergi ever decided to use the place in the winter, which they rarely did, but there was plenty of wood and kindling stacked up to one side of it. Finding firelighters and matches in a kitchen drawer, Elisenda quickly had a fire going and stood warming herself in front of the warm radiance. Over the crackling of old logs, she could hear the sea outside the house, some fifteen metres below, the winter waves shushing in and out over smooth pebbles and sand. She found it soothing.

  ‘Food,’ she told the large room, which echoed back at her.

  She’d brought some dried pasta, tomatoes, garlic and olive oil, and she made a bowl of macaroni in the splendid kitchen. Coming back into the living room, she glanced at the huge dining table near the French windows leading out on to a terrace, but decided it would be too lonely. Instead, she ate supper standing by the window at the front of the house, looking out through the dark at the sea, occasionally focusing on her blurred reflection in the costly double-glazed expanse. She felt strangely less lonely and exposed in this empty house with just the sea for company than she’d felt lately in her small flat in the centre of Girona surrounded by people and noise.

  ‘Wonder if Sergi’d agree to a swap,’ she asked herself, laughing momentarily at the thought before giving a deep sigh. ‘Wonder if I would.’

  She loaded the bowl and pots and pans in the dishwasher but realised she had no tablets for it, so she turned the lights out on it all and made up her bed with the bedclothes in the wardrobe, switching off all the lights in the house as she retreated through the rooms.

  The alarm on her phone woke her the next morning. At first disoriented, she realised with a shock that that was simply because she’d slept through the night. She got up to open the shutters and then hopped back into bed for two minutes, gazing out at the sea in the distance. On the upper floor and at the front of the house, the bedroom had an unbroken view of the horizon. Two small fishing boats were anchored some distance out. She could see movement on each one, slow in the padded cold.

  Stretching slowly and enjoying the sensation of having slept through the night, she suddenly lost the moment. She hadn’t seen Lina in the dark. And she felt relaxed because of it, happier than she had done in years. But that immediately brought its attendant guilt flooding in and she quickly got out of bed and showered, unable to find tears in the scalding water coursing over her head and face.

  Checking on everything, she took the back stairs down to the large double garage, which was at a lower level than the seaward side of the house. Stacked along one wall, she found two bright yellow sea kayaks. She’d forgotten about them. They were Sergi’s fad of two years ago, used obsessively all that summer and left to gather dust the next. Checking her watch, she saw that she had two hours before she needed to be at Vista Alegre, so she carried one of the kayaks, along with all the accoutrements, outside the garage and along to the left of the house where the cliff dropped to the level of the sea and there was a path leading directly onto the beach.

  She soon found her stride, the years of hateful jogging through the stones of Girona having kept her muscles strong, and she rowed north from La Fosca. Her punishment for a night’s unbroken sleep. She glanced from time to time at the electric green and age-old grey of the shoreline swooping by to her left and saw that it was no punishment at all, so she quickened her pace, the sweat pouring from her head, soaking her face and neck. She could feel her T-shirt sticking to her shoulders.

  Finding the rocks at the entrance to El Crit, she slowed and steered for the beach. A small boat was moored beyond the rocks. Scraping the bottom a couple of times, she managed to reach the beach, pulling the kayak up out of the water.

  A man was watching her.

  He was in his sixties and wiry, with greying hair riding back from his tanned forehead in tight waves and fibrous skin pulled taut over his cheek bones. He was wearing a wetsuit and must have swum from the small boat anchored a short way out.

  ‘Good morning,’ Elisenda called to him.

  Without smiling, he grunted something back at her.

  ‘Your boat?’ she asked.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I thought I’d be the only one out so early,’ she persevered.

  ‘Cleaning the beach,’ he told her gruffly. In one hand, he was holding a spike from an underwater spear-gun, jabbing with it at a tangle of nylon netting on the beach until it caught. He showed her a sack with bits of plastic and ring-pulls in and scraped his trophy off into it. ‘They get washed up here.’

  She left him picking through the sand and stones and climbed the compacted earth steps up to the headland, walking the short distance to the dig. Neither of the archaeologists was there.

  Moving quietly through the site, her feet in trainers no longer leaving wet prints, she looked first at the original trench, which stretched from east to west through most of the clearing. An extension to it ran off at a right angle to the north. She could see that all the bones of the Indiketa body had been removed. She’d seen Doctor Bosch placing the last of them the previous afternoon in tissue paper in a couple of boxes.

  At the other end, wh
ere Doctora Fradera had been working, she saw a straight line of stones at the bottom of the trench, evidently once a wall. There were other darker stretches of earth that the archaeologist had obviously been working on, but she could see nothing to tell her of their significance. Crouching down, she saw something brightly-coloured emerging from the soil. She recognised it as a shard of pottery, its clean appearance incongruous amid all the brown dust. Not wishing to touch it, she thought it strange that Fradera wouldn’t have boxed it up with other finds the previous evening.

  From the beach, she heard a small engine start up. Hurrying to the headland, she saw the man she’d seen earlier, now back in his boat, slowly chug away, heading north towards the beaches of Palafrugell. The sound of the motor drifted in on the breeze, long after the boat had disappeared, but when the noise finally faded to nothing, a shock of silence overran the clearing. She went down to the newer trench. The trees were still, the light wind in the cove and on the headland somehow not falling again to the lower level further inland, where the forest was more dense. It was both numinous and unsettling, like an abandoned church.

  She roamed the paths and trees around the settlement, trying to get a picture of it in 1981, to work out what might have happened, and where the original dig fitted in with all of it. Finishing, she left and made her way back to the house in La Fosca for a second shower and a quick breakfast before the drive into Girona. She turned the car radio on and felt more awake than she had in months.

  ‘Any views on the list of candidates?’ Puigventós called through to her when he arrived.

  She looked at the closed drawer. ‘Narrowing the field down,’ she told him.

  Going out into the main office, she saw Àlex working on a computer.