A Coffin For Two

4

Finding a body in St Marti is not, actually, all that uncommon an occurrence.

The village has renewed itself time and time again, on the same site, over the last couple of millennia. Even the church isn’t any more than a few centuries old … or most of it, since there is a stone over the door which dates back over a thousand years.

People have lived there pretty well continuously all that time, and nature being what it is they’ve died there too. All that history is lying there in layers beneath the surface, and you don’t have to scratch too deep before you begin to find it. Every time the locals dig up a drain or lay a cable there’s a fair chance they’ll find an ancestor.

During the previous few weeks the town council of L’Escala, which is responsible for the village, had put men to work on the area in front of and alongside the Casa Forestals, the foresters’ house, clearing and levelling the site, making it ready to be transformed into a paved public viewpoint.

I could see Miguel pacing about restlessly in front of the church as I stepped out of our yellow front door, back into the sunshine in my shorts, sandals and Runrig T-shirt. To my surprise, he was smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen him do before. Yet the Minana family had been in St Marti for as long as their records went back, so I guessed that it was the possibility that young Jordi’s find might have been his great-great-great-great-great granny that was making him so twitchy. Something else surprised me. In the bright light of day, he was carrying a black, rubber-bound Ever Ready torch.

He turned as I approached. ‘Ahh, Oz. Thank you for coming. I am sorry if I interrupted your siesta. You do not bring Senora Prim? No. Is good.’

I smiled at his concern for my beloved. After the year she had spent as a nurse in an African war zone, not to mention our escapade in Switzerland, I was pretty certain that there was nothing beneath the soil of St Marti to make her bat an eyelid.

‘No problem, Miguel. So, where’s your old Roman warrior?’

He gave me a strange look. ‘Over here, come on.’ He led the way across the crown of the square, towards the excavations around the foresters’ house. It was late afternoon on a Monday in late September, one of the very few occasions on which the hub of St Marti is likely to be completely deserted.

‘When did Jordi do his digging?’ I asked.

‘This afternoon, once the men had finished work for the day. He likes the archaeology. He says that he wants to go to study it at university. My father says that like us he should work in the bar and on our farm, but I say, we’ll see.’

He beckoned me on, round to the side of the tall house, to the narrow area which lay between it and the church. The ground was uneven, littered with stones and clumps of dried yellow soil, with the remnants of vegetation wound through it. The workers had marked the walls of the church and the house to show where, eventually, the line of the new viewpoint would be.

Miguel pointed to a patch of ground in the shadow of the house, almost against the wall. ‘There it is. Look.’ I followed his pointing finger, bending to see better.

It lay just below the level to which the men had been digging. I could see what young Jordi’s sharp eye had picked up, and how he had gone about exposing it handful by handful. It was the lid of a stone coffin. It had been pulled aside, exposing about half of the width of the chamber, but not recently, for despite young Jordi’s excavation I could see that it was still partly full of soil.

The body was there all right. The skull grinned up at me, its big teeth standing out and its eye sockets full of dry yellow earth. It was a big skull, and the bones of the shoulders seemed wide. I guessed that this had been a man, and probably an important one at that, to have merited a coffin, since most of the early inhabitants of St Marti had been buried in shrouds. I looked down the length of the skeleton, as the boy had exposed it. All the bits seemed to be there as it lay stretched out on its bed of clay. Something on the left wrist caught my eye. I leaned a bit closer. It was a bracelet, about an inch and a half wide, with a finely worked design showing where Jordi had rubbed away the dirt.

I stood up and looked at Miguel. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘You were right. It’s a body. Now what do you want me to witness?’

He looked at me still frowning. ‘Eventually, I want you to say that there was nothing there but the bracelet when we find him. The archaeologists are very suspicious. They may say that there was something else and that Jordi took it.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I trus’ you, that’s why.’

I smiled at the compliment. Then an idea struck me. ‘I’ll get my camera and take a photo. That should satisfy them.’

A look of horror flashed across his face. ‘No, no! You must not. There is something else. Look again.’ Hesitantly he handed me the torch.

I took it and knelt down beside the stone coffin, noticing for the first time how deep it was. I shone the torch inside, looking more closely at the centuries-old skeleton, beginning to feel a wee bit ghoulish.

For an instant, a strange flash caught my eye; it could have been gold or silver. I couldn’t be sure, for the stone lid cast a dark shadow. I swung the torch back slowly until its beam found the bright metal once more. My stomach turned over. The torch-light shone full on a man’s wristwatch. It had a black face with gold hands, and gold roman numerals and a stainless steel back, with what looked like 18-carat gold plate around the edge of the face. Its strap was black leather, and looked as if it was partly rotted.

A sudden wave of fear swept over me. It might have got out of control had I not realised almost at once what had made it spring up. The watch was an identical model to one which I had given my dad nine months before, as a Christmas present: Giorgio of Beverley Hills, Swiss made, water resistant to three atmospheres. I was pretty sure that Giorgio didn’t have a branch in Catalunya … or at least that he didn’t in the days when they were still burying people in stone chests.

My grip on myself didn’t last long. The sound of your own scream confined and magnified within a stone coffin is — Oh God, how I hope it is — a once in a lifetime experience. I just couldn’t help it. I jumped up, banging the side of my head on the edge of the lid, rolled over and scrambled away from the thing, looking, I suspect, like the old film of Jackie K ‘hauling ass’ out of that limo in Dallas.

I lay on the ground, staring up at Miguel, aware that my mouth was hanging open, but unable to do anything about it … like speak.

He looked at me, with scant sympathy, I have to say. Alongside my reaction, his earlier agitation was stoic by comparison. He didn’t say a word, but I knew that there was face to be lost in the situation, so finally I gave him what I hoped was a wicked smile, and rolled back towards the open grave. In my hurried withdrawal I had dropped the torch. I reached down and picked it up, then lowered myself once more through the opening.

Imagine the worst morning you’ve ever had after the night before. The wildest stag party — and let’s not be sexist about this — or hen night, you could ever imagine, when things have got really out of control, you’ve ended up guttered in some disco, and, as you wake up, you really can’t remember a thing about the person next to you, the face you see on the pillow next to yours. Go on, give free rein to your worst nightmare.

Nothing like it.

Inside the coffin, a second skull grinned at me, eye to eye, no more than a foot away, like that face on the other pillow. Unlike the original tenant, yellowed with age, this one was still more or less shining white. The beam of the torch reflected off a gold filling in one of the back teeth, and off the steel of a bridge set on the lower jaw. I forced myself to stare at it dispassionately, fighting hard to master my horror. I succeeded, and at last I was able to play the torch down the rest of the body. It lay on its side, pressed against the coffin wall. It was clean, if you could use that word for something that was well down the descent into corruption, because the earth which had spilled in through the open lid, covering most of the original skeleton, had not piled up beyond its right limb. Relics of clothing, unspeakably stained, still hung on the bones. There were strands of a shirt that had probably been blue, and trousers that might once have been cream. A black leather belt was still looped around the waist, the weight of its heavy, rusted metal buckle pulling it down against the bony spine. There seemed to be no jewellery, other than that Giorgio watch. I shone the beam on and around the hands, looking for a wedding ring but seeing none.

I looked back up at the skull. A few wisps of fair hair still clung to its dome. ‘Afternoon,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disturb you. I’ll be off now.’

I hauled myself out of the coffin for a second time, under control this time, and stood up beside Miguel, with a quick glance over my shoulder to confirm that the square was still empty.

‘I see.’ I didn’t think there was much more to be said.

‘Yes,’ said Miguel. ‘Is terrible. What are we going to do?’

I looked at him in surprise, my eyebrows shooting half-way up my forehead. ‘I reckon that “Call the police”, sounds like a pretty good answer to that one.’

He gasped, and his face became a mask of fright. ‘Ah no, not that. That would be terrible. The tourists would not come any more. All the families in the village need them for the money, for the businesses.’

‘Come on, man,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be that bad.’

He nodded his head violently. ‘Oh yes it would. This is a quiet place, a peaceful place. Most of our tourists come every year, from all over Spain, and Europe. Many of them have children. Others are old. They will not come back to a place where something like this can happen. Where people can be killed and buried.’

‘How will they know about it?’

He looked at me as if I was daft. ‘From the newspapers, the television … and not only in Spain.’

He had me there. I could see the headlines. ‘Fresh Stiff in Pre-historic Coffin.’ Yes, even the Lothian Herald and Post would run that one. But even at that … ‘Listen, Miguel,’ I insisted, ‘the season’s almost over. It’ll all have been forgotten by next summer.’

A very obvious question struck me suddenly, right in the teeth. ‘Eh, you don’t know who that is down there, do you?’

He shook his head this time, and so violently that I thought it might come off. ‘No, no, no! But the Guardia Civil, they will find out, then they will find out who did it, and there will be a trial. In Spain that takes a long time, and all that time there will be periodistas here, asking questions, taking pictures. The families, they will go away, and the wrong sort of people will come instead.’

He paused, chewing his lip nervously. ‘The Guardia Civil, they will investigate everyone in the village. They will ask questions and they will find things out that maybe some will not want found out.’

I pointed to the coffin. ‘You mean someone here might have …’

‘Oh no, I know everyone in this village, and around it. I promise you, no one who lives here would have done that. No, I mean that they will find things out about our businesses, that maybe someone no pay as much tax as he should, that maybe someone no pay any tax at all.’

As a self-employed person, I understood that concern. ‘Ahh. I’m with you,’ I said. ‘But even at that, Miguel man. This is murder we’re talking about. That bloke didn’t climb in there himself. He was put there.

‘This ground used to be hidden from the village by a thick hedge, until the workmen took it down to prepare for the viewpoint. I’d guess that someone killed him up here, went to dig a grave, then hit the stone coffin by accident and had the bright idea of shoving him inside.

‘Almost certainly that guy down there has a family. They deserve to be put out of their misery. And whoever murdered him deserves to be caught. What if he’s killed more than one, and uses St Marti as a graveyard? Tax man or no tax man, we can’t just cover the thing up and pretend that it isn’t there.’

Miguel looked at me, slightly shocked. ‘Oh no, of course not. I do not mean that we should do that. Is not possibly anyway. It was Jordi who found this, remember. Even if I told him not to do it, he could not stop himself telling his friends at school about what he had found.’

‘Does he know what’s inside?’

‘No, he did not see the other body. Only the old one. But that is enough. He is very proud of being an archaeologist. Also, is the law that when you find something like this, you must report it.’

I turned and took a few steps away from the coffin, until I could see down the square. A waiter had appeared outside the Esculapi and was busying himself pulling his tables to the side and hosing the gravel underneath, to keep down the dust.

‘So what do you want to do?’ I asked Miguel, quietly, over my shoulder.

‘I want to move the other body. Tonight. Out of here, away from St Marti, somewhere else, where it will be found.’

‘You’re crackers, man!’ I tapped the side of my head.

‘Maybe. But will you help me?’

I gave it a couple of seconds’ thought. ‘Of course I will. No one ever accused me of being sensible either.’