City of Buried Ghosts (An Inspector Domènech Crime Thriller Book 2) Page 9

  ‘I’m glad we all agree.’

  The meeting over, Elisenda went to her office to call Jutge Rigau to tell him the leads in the investigation as she saw them.

  ‘You’re running the two cases parallel to each other?’ the judge considered. ‘That would make sense. I would want you to focus on suspects capable of committing both murders.’

  ‘That’s one of the avenues. It would put our killer at the age of at least mid-fifties now. The other option is for two killers, the second exacting revenge for the first murder now it’s come to light.’

  ‘Which would probably still put them in the same age range. Keep me in the loop, and let me know what warrants you’re going to need. I’ll tell you what I need as I need it.’

  Elisenda thought of her constant battles with the fetish Jutgessa Roca in Girona had for petty bureaucracy and form for form’s sake.

  ‘You wouldn’t consider moving to Girona, would you, Pere? I’m sure you’d be happy here.’

  ‘Is that an improper proposition, Sotsinspectora Domènech?’

  ‘Entirely honourable. I’m attracted solely to your willingness to sign endless bits of paper.’

  He laughed and they rang off.

  Elisenda thought for a moment and called Àlex into her office as she gathered her bag together.

  ‘Josep and I are off to Barcelona soon,’ she told him, ‘but something the judge has said has reminded me. If one of our alternatives is that the Arbós murder is revenge for the Mascort murder, we need to question Eulàlia Esplugues’ son. Find out if he might be someone that would interest us.’

  ‘I’ll get on to that. I’ve started looking for links between Mascort and Arbós, but nothing’s come up yet.’

  Elisenda explained the situation of Mascort not being the father. ‘The son doesn’t know, so you’ll need to tread carefully for the time being. It will only have to come out by our doing if it becomes necessary for the investigation.’

  Josep knocked and came in.

  ‘Ready for the big city?’ Elisenda asked him, standing up.

  ‘I’ve found the second man,’ he told her. ‘He’s also in Barcelona, at the central university. I thought we could see them both today.’

  ‘Good news. Well done, Josep.’

  ‘If you’re going to Barcelona,’ Àlex said, ‘there are two of the students from the 1981 dig we could do with interviewing if you have time. It would save another trip. One of them’s also at the central university, the other teaches in a secondary school. They were both there in June 1981 according to the personnel list.’

  Elisenda read through all the notes in the car as Josep drove fast along the motorway south towards Barcelona.

  ‘We’ll try the retired man first,’ Elisenda decided, looking at his name. ‘Ricard Soler. Formerly an archaeologist with Barcelona provincial council. He was in his mid-thirties in 1981, he’s seventy-odd now.’ She looked up thoughtfully. ‘Would that make him too old to have committed the Arbós killing? It would have taken quite a blow to penetrate the skull and pin him to a wall.’

  ‘Or several smaller blows,’ Josep offered, overtaking a string of lorries. ‘If the victim was already subdued in some way. Or if someone else was holding them down.’

  ‘Two people? We’ll know more when Riera does the post mortem.’

  The pathologist had scheduled the examination for Monday.

  ‘Then we’ll go to the university. See the second archaeologist, Jordi Canudas, late-twenties then, so getting on for sixty now. And we can see Àlex’s student at the same time. After that, the other student at their school.’ She let the folders drop into her lap. ‘So nice to get away from it all, don’t you find, Josep?’

  Her caporal had to glance sideways at her to make sure she wasn’t being serious.

  Eventually, the motorway bled slowly into the ring road around Barcelona, the traffic dropping in speed to a grudging and fractured flow. Josep jockeyed for position to cut across the three lanes to take the inland section of the road, hugging the hills to the north and west of the city, until they found the junction they wanted, leading down into the Sant Gervasi district and the Parc del Putget.

  ‘I used to come here when I was a student,’ Elisenda told Josep. She’d enjoyed the hilly green park above the smog with a view of the Mediterranean in the distance. The temperature in summer was usually a degree or two lower than it was in the city centre, the breeze blowing the humidity away. ‘I even lived here for a short time.’

  ‘Very posh,’ he said, with a rare smile.

  ‘You’re from Hospitalet. Anywhere’s posh.’

  ‘True,’ he admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

  They parked after a couple of turns of the block and found the building they were after, a typical brick and render 1960s low-rise apartment block on a steep road running down in the direction of the sea. There was no answer on the entryphone downstairs, so they rang a couple of the other apartments until someone pressed the buzzer to let them in. Josep checked the battery of post boxes on the wall to the right of the street door.

  ‘Ricard Soler,’ he read to confirm. ‘Second floor, second flat.’

  He peered through the dusty plastic window at the bottom of the box and saw that there was mail waiting to be collected, more than in the others.

  ‘Looking at the other boxes,’ he told Elisenda, ‘it seems like today’s post hasn’t come yet. But there’s mail in Ricard Soler’s. Probably a day or two’s worth.’

  They climbed up to the second floor, but there was no reply when they rang the bell. Elisenda tried the other apartment on the landing and eventually heard footsteps approaching the door from the inside. A young guy opened, wearing jogging trousers and a thick pullover, fashionably thick-rimmed glasses holding his floppy hair in place behind his ears. She showed him her ID.

  ‘Your neighbour,’ she asked him. ‘Do you know if he’s away?’

  ‘Um, yeah. Night before last. Wednesday.’

  ‘Any idea where he was going?’

  ‘No. I was coming back up the stairs at about six o’clock. I work from home and I’d had to go out to get some printer ink. He was just coming out with a suitcase. Said he was going away for a few days.’

  ‘Did he seem agitated in any way? Was there anything different about him?’

  The man considered for a moment. ‘No, not really. It was a bit unusual, I suppose. I’d been talking to him over the weekend and he hadn’t mentioned anything about going away. He’s retired, he doesn’t really do anything out of his routine.’

  Elisenda gave the man her card and asked him to call her if his neighbour returned home.

  ‘He’s not in any trouble, is he?’

  ‘We just want to talk to him, that’s all.’

  From Sant Gervasi, Josep drove down into the city centre, crossing Gran Via and immersing them in the twisting one-way system of the old Raval district, once a run-down part of town, now home to the contemporary art museum and yet more young men and women in thick-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Is Ricard Soler running scared?’ Elisenda had asked Josep as they drove.

  The story of the body being found at El Crit had appeared on the TV news on Tuesday and come out in Wednesday’s newspapers. There hadn’t been much more about the story. For the time being, it was a gruesome curiosity that had little staying power for the press. And no details had been released about how Ferran Arbós had been killed, so the media hadn’t stumbled upon a connection. Yet.

  ‘Or is he looking for Arbós?’ Josep replied.

  On the narrow street, they passed the museum and turned right into the nondescript modern faculty of geography and history building, opposite the salmon and white finery of the centre for contemporary culture.

  ‘This area’s changed since I was a student,’ Elisenda muttered.

  ‘They have buildings now?’

  Elisenda looked sharply at him. ‘Very good, Josep, you’re learning. You just need to be taken out of your discomfort zone.’
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br />   Don’t we all, she added for her own benefit.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jordi Canudas also went in for the thick-rimmed glasses look, no doubt to appear on-trend to his students, but it was irretrievably hindered by his lack of hair, floppy or otherwise. Instead, he had a salt and pepper goatee and moustache, forming an ‘O’ around his mouth, which Elisenda thought made him look perpetually surprised.

  ‘Esteve Mascort,’ he repeated in wonder. ‘I haven’t heard that name in years.’

  Elisenda and Josep had met the archaeologist, now a lecturer, in his office, but he’d insisted on getting a coffee in the refectory between tutorials. They were sitting there now, each with a large cup of white coffee, surrounded by students who all seemed to be carrying scooter helmets and distinctive folders with the letters ‘U’ and ‘B’ in white in separate blue circles. The sight took Elisenda back to her own time in the Barcelona University law faculty, in a different part of the city, the folders having changed little in design.

  ‘He was a complete bastard,’ Canudas went on. ‘Dreadful man.’

  His calm conviction took Elisenda aback. ‘Can you think of anyone who would have held a grudge with him?’

  ‘To the extent of killing him, you mean? Most of us who ever worked with him, I’d reckon. I think it would be quicker if you were to draw up a list of the people who couldn’t quite happily have throttled him.’

  ‘Why?’ Josep asked. ‘What was the problem people had with him?’

  Canudas thought for a moment before answering. ‘I don’t quite know where to begin. He was a caricature. He had matinee idol looks, but he should have worn the villain’s black hat. Men instantly trusted him, he cultivated a man’s man image, but then he’d use your trust against you, steal your research, do anything to further his own career. He’d tread on anyone to get on, he really had no qualms who he hurt.’

  ‘You said “men”?’ Elisenda asked.

  ‘He worked women differently. With his looks, and he had an undoubted charm when he wanted, they found him attractive and he used that. They trusted him too, until they found out for themselves what a bastard he was. He’d persuade women colleagues he had their best interests at heart, but he’d simply use their position or knowledge any way that was necessary to feather his own nest. We all pitied his poor wife, he led her a hell of a dance. He made no bones to us about the women he was screwing.’

  ‘Did no one say anything?’ Elisenda asked.

  ‘We all occasionally had an argument with him, but he was so thick-skinned, it never affected him. I had a stand-up row with him once, and I was shaking for ages after, but he just carried on as normal, dusting earth off a piece of pottery with a perfectly steady hand, still boasting about his many conquests. He was a complete sociopath.’

  ‘Do you know much about his relationship with his wife?’

  ‘I only met her once. We had a Christmas lunch one year and she came along. She was very quiet, you could see she wasn’t happy. I tried talking to her but she was difficult to engage with.’

  ‘Could she have had anything to do with his death?’ Josep asked bluntly.

  ‘No one would blame her if she did.’ He thought for a moment longer. ‘Not the woman I saw, I would say. She seemed resigned to her lot, but you never know what someone would be capable of in a moment of anger or after the years of abuse he must have put her through.’

  ‘Could you have had anything to do with his death?’ Elisenda asked, watching his reaction.

  ‘Yes, it was me. I killed him and now I’m confessing.’ He laughed. ‘As I said, anyone he worked with could conceivably have lost their temper with him. Did I or anyone I know do it? No. Until you told me his name now, I just thought he’d disappeared in search of a main chance. We’d stopped working together anyway as the dig had been called to a halt and were all so happy to see the back of him, no one really thought much more of it.’

  ‘You didn’t think he might have met his death?’

  Canudas shook his head. ‘Not really. He was always going on about some great plan or other to make his fortune and get away from everything that tied him down. I just thought that that was what he’d done. And to be quite honest, I didn’t at all care.’

  They finished their coffees and Elisenda asked if he had any photos of Mascort and the rest of the team from that time.

  ‘I have in my office,’ he told her, checking his watch. ‘I can hunt them out for you now, if you want.’

  Elisenda and Josep followed him to his room, where he found a ring binder on a shelf, the photos faded and held in place with old-fashioned peel-off sticky plastic.

  ‘That’s Mascort,’ he said, pulling the film back and removing the photo. ‘On the right.’

  Elisenda studied the picture. She could see what Canudas meant by matinee idol looks. Mascort had thick black hair, combed with a neat parting on the right and a thin moustache under an aquiline nose and knowing eyes. His lips were parted to reveal perfect white teeth in a smile that, with what she’d heard of him, she now took to be planned to the precise centimetre. Charm with no warmth. He wore a medallion on a chain around his neck.

  ‘A St. Christopher,’ Canudas explained. ‘He never took it off.’

  There were two other men in the picture, which had been taken in a restaurant at the height of summer, judging by the glowing cheeks and open-necked shirts of the three subjects. Mascort was on his own on the right of the table, the other two were opposite him, but both smiling faintly at the camera.

  ‘Who are the other two?’ Elisenda asked him.

  He pointed to the one on the left at the back, his smile forced, a gentle face and fine, downy brown hair to his shoulders. ‘Well, that’s me. In the days when I had hair. The other one is Martí Barbena.’

  ‘Martí Barbena?’ Josep asked, studying the picture of a young man with gaunt cheeks and a thin nose, his neat, dark hair parted on the right. He was the third man on their list. ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  Canudas shook his head. ‘I lost touch with him years ago. It wasn’t a happy dig, I didn’t stay in contact with any of them. Mascort had a lot to do with that, but there was a lot of rivalry between the others as well, everyone wanting to make their own name. We were all roughly the same age, towards the start of our careers.’

  ‘Do you know a Ricard Soler?’ Elisenda asked him.

  ‘He’s the one who took the picture.’

  Pity, Elisenda thought. ‘You don’t have any other pictures with him in?’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’ He looked through the ring binder but found nothing, so he went back to the photo that Elisenda was holding. ‘Soler only got up to take the photo because if he’d stayed sitting any longer, he would probably have taken a swing at Mascort. He hated him.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  Canudas gave a wry laugh. ‘This is Mascort we’re talking about. A woman, of course. Soler was the oldest by about ten years and the leader of the project. Mascort didn’t do anything to challenge him professionally because he’d have been on a hiding to nothing. Soler knew far more about his subject than Mascort did. But Soler was seeing a woman, they were serious, I think. So Mascort set out to seduce her, and he succeeded. It was his only way of scoring points off someone who knew more than he did.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, she left Soler for Mascort, and then Mascort seemed to have dumped her once he’d done what he set out to do.’

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘Dolors something. I only met her a few times. Dolors Quintí, that was it. Another archaeologist, although she didn’t ever work on the El Crit site. Soler would have taken her back like a shot, but she obviously didn’t want to. I remember he was very cut up about it.’

  ‘Do you know where she works now? If she’s an archaeologist, you must know of her work.’

  ‘She dropped out. Gave up archaeology. I don’t know what she did after that.’

  ‘Do you think Ricard Soler
could be behind Mascort’s death?’ Josep asked.

  Canudas seemed to consider it a possibility for a moment. ‘I don’t know. What is any of us capable of doing? He certainly would have had a reason to, I suppose, but I don’t see it somehow. He was quite a gentle man, thoughtful.’

  ‘Have you ever worked with a man called Ferran Arbós?’ Elisenda asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘He’s a curator. I switched to lecturing years ago, I’ve never had any dealings with him.’

  Elisenda noted the present tense. He seemed unaware of Arbós’s death, news from a village near Girona not filtering to his world in Barcelona.

  A student knocked on the door and came in, apologising and backing out when he saw the three of them talking.

  ‘I have a tutorial,’ Canudas explained.

  Elisenda thanked him and gave him her card, eliciting a promise to call her if anything occurred to him.

  ‘One other thing,’ the archaeologist said. ‘Soler once accused Mascort of stealing artefacts from the dig. We all thought it was because of the bad feeling between them, but Barbena brought it up a short while after that. He reckoned he’d seen Mascort uncover a brooch, but there was no find like it ever catalogued. I never saw anything I could say made me think he was pocketing the finds, but Barbena reckoned that Soler might have been right.’

  Elisenda thanked him and she and Josep went in search of the former student.

  ‘Also working as a lecturer in the archaeology department, according to Àlex’s notes,’ Josep informed her.

  They found him in a hurry between lectures.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t talk,’ he told them. ‘I’m already late.’

  ‘You worked on an archaeological dig in June 1981,’ Elisenda insisted.

  The lecturer shook his head. ‘I was supposed to be there all summer, but we were sent home at the start of June.’

  ‘What was the reason you were given?’

  ‘None. I’m sorry, I really can’t help.’

  The secondary school teacher, Àlex’s other student from 1981, told them the same thing when they pulled him out of the staffroom at the school where he worked, not far from the ring road.