Unearthing the Bones (2 page)

This was the Mama Gala who had wheedled her way into the community; the woman who had proved herself a good friend, a gentle neighbour; a woman so loved it took a while for people to begin to whisper against her and longer for the rumours to start. Even more time for people to hurry past the shop to escape her gaze following them from the window.

Because she
did
have tricks from the Old Country. Mama Gala had tricks from hell. Some she inherited, some she stole, some worked like worms in the pus of her mind. Potions from the night-time
Mama Gala, the ones she sold under the counter when the shop was closed. When the neighbourhood children no longer needed babysitting, and the health-food customers had all gone home. When the iron shutters came down on the windows, the doors were barred and the shop alarm went on. As though there were something in a health shop other than the meagre takings worth
stealing.

But there had been no rumours fifteen years ago. Not when Mama Gala first opened the shop and Emile Dwappa was a teenage boy. She rolled down the street smiling, rocking her girth through the market and joking like a jester. She collected friends like fresh eggs, drawing them out of the nest of their families. Children too – all came to Mama Gala’s when the shop sign turned to OPEN.

But when more than a year had passed, another kind of person visited after the sign turned to CLOSED. They weren’t children or shoppers. They were furtive, coming in at the back door, skirting the shop that smelt of spices and herbs, making instead for the cordoned-off area. Separated behind a locked door, any sounds muffled behind thick drapes suspended from a metal rod.

To the left of this unwelcoming space stood a massive fish tank, the water milky, an ailing turtle banging wretchedly against its glass confines. Opposite the tank were cages in which monkeys crouched disconsolately, the ammonia smell of their urine catching at the throat. And under the arch of the stairs, glass tanks writhed with snakes, the artificial sunshine of the lighting casting gloomy shadows on the wall behind.

As Mama Gala’s son grew into a vicious and determined thug, many people began to avoid the shop altogether. Others asked how Emile Dwappa, who had been a sickly child, had developed a cruelty which was fast becoming notorious. What had happened to change a nervous boy into a man who tortured men and women alike?

Among the underworld, rumours began to circulate. Dwappa had knocked over a man who owed him money, and then reversed the car over his legs. Dwappa had poisoned a rival, the man suffering a lingering death, the skin of his scrotum peeling away with an infection resistant to anything a hospital could prescribe. Soon Dwappa had a reputation: he was dangerous, he was ungovernable, he was fearless.

Only one person controlled Emile Dwappa: his mother.

The worst of his excesses were as nothing to her cruelties. The widow Gala
had raised her poisonous offspring single-handedly. As an only child, Dwappa had had her
full attention, which had proved to be his downfall. To outsiders they seemed a unit,
but inside the hermetically sealed confines of the shop, their hatred festered. She
despised him for being handsome, slight of build and a homosexual – a fact hidden from
the world, a fact with which she taunted her son and blackmailed him. Her suffocating
attention and demands had stunted his emotions, his resentment had made a killer of him, and yet –
for all this – Emile Dwappa could not break free from her. And, God forbid, he needed
her.

Mama Gala didn’t care for her son, she
owned
him.

She owned him with her potions and her threats. And as he grew older, Dwappa was hired out to relatives to toughen him up. There were dozens in the Dwappa clan who had him inflict petty tortures on slow payers. And as he hardened up, Dwappa began to flex his own muscles and challenge his uncles, to the point that one left London after his betting shop was torched. Then gradually the crude dealings in racing and dogfighting gave way to Dwappa’s personal preferences, and as he cultivated his appearance he drifted towards two dissimilar – but very lucrative – worlds: child trafficking and art theft.

Which was why Emile Dwappa was now lying on the sofa with one arm over his eyes, plotting. He could never escape his mother; she had an emotional stranglehold on him. He had even considered killing her, but was afraid that she would have yet more power when dead. A vengeful, sinister ghost bent on retribution. His only option was to make money, so much money that he could buy her a house big enough to keep her at one end and him at the other. A house with space to divide their festering hatred. The house Mama Gala had always wanted.

‘You’re useless! My useless, pretty boy,’ she had sneered earlier. ‘Queer baby, no good at nothing.’

‘I’m working on something—’

‘You’re always working on something,’ she replied, her head on one side, picking at the matter in the corner of her left eye. ‘Working on
something
that never comes to
nothing
. Working on something big, that just gets smaller.’ She laughed, the sound hateful.

‘This time I’m going to make a fortune.’

She spun round, fast for such a heavy woman.

‘A fucking fortune! Well, you make it, boy, You make it. ’Cos I want it. I
want that house you promised me. I want out of here. Remember, you owe me. You owe me
for raising you, for looking after you. It’s your turn now. Now you look after
me.
’

She could see the flicker in his eyes and leaned towards him, her tone threatening.

‘Mama Gala protects her baby. Always has, always will. Just think of what would happen if people knew about you and your tastes.’ She flicked his crotch with her fingers, laughing, and then gripping his arm. ‘You pay me back, you hear? You pay me back good.’

And he intended to.

Because Emile Dwappa had heard about something so extraordinary, so valuable, that people would go to any lengths to own it. All he had to do was to get hold of it first. Beat his rivals to the chase. Make sure he was the one –
the only one
– to triumph.

There was no limit to his longing for the relic – and no limit to the depths he would sink to to get hold of it.

Madrid
,
Spain

Diego Martinez could remember everything, every detail, with absolute accuracy. The sweating heat of the afternoon, the scent of dry earth and the judder of his spade as it hit something unexpected, hard. Surprised, he had stared at the exposed ground, the concrete floor broken up and put to one side, the centuries-blackened soil exposed – and something else. Something white and rounded peeking out from the dark.

A thrill tingled through him as he remembered.

If only he had known then, at that moment, what he had found … But
instead Diego had bent down and touched the white orb, brushing away the dirt until two
eyes' sockets appeared, staring full at him. Startled, he had almost fallen back, but
righted himself and – for some reason he would never fully understand – had thrown his
jacket over the skull to hide it.

It had been an instinctive gesture and soon Diego finished for the night. He could remember everything so clearly. Each action highlighted, intensified, as though strobe-lit, demanding attention. Much later – before dawn the following morning – he had returned to the boarded-up house in Madrid and unlocked the cellar door, walking down into the darkness and shining his torch beam around.

He had been terrified. Not that the skull would have been stolen, but that he had been mistaken. That some trick of malignant light had coaxed a vision out of dead earth. Slowly he had walked towards the hump in the floor, the rounded lump covered by his jacket, and then, holding his breath, he had pulled it away. At once the skull had been exposed, looking up at him. Unblinking, eerie, pale as a church candle. Spooked, Diego had turned to look over his shoulder to make sure he was alone. But there had been no one there. No other builders. Not even a city cat watching as he had wrapped up the skull in his jacket, picked up the torch and clambered out of the cellar …

‘Diego?’

He looked up as his name was spoken, smiling at the familiar man who was beckoning for him to approach. With the package tucked under his arm, Diego Martinez entered the study of Leon Golding.

*

He had known the Golding family since he was a child. His father had worked for them, doing repairs and maintenance on the old farmhouse. The farmhouse across the river from Madrid, in a place close to where Spain’s most famous painter, Francisco Goya, had once lived. And despite the fact that Diego was not so well educated, and only the builder’s boy, he had been treated as an equal.

The two Golding brothers had both been gifted and articulate, especially the fragile Leon, and when his father retired and Diego took over the business, he had continued to work at the farmhouse. Patching up, repairing, keeping the worn house upright. A worn house with only one eccentric occupant.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Leon said, sitting behind his desk. Fair-haired, pale – even in Spain. He had never been robust. ‘Are you working nearby?’

‘I’m working in Madrid,’ Diego said shyly, because although Leon Golding was an old friend, he was also brilliant, his reputation intimidating. ‘I found … I found … something.’ He stalled on the words. Was he being an ass? What was he doing here? Bringing a lump of bone to Leon Golding? What the hell was he doing? ‘You know all about him … I mean, you write about him. Don’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Goya.’

‘Yes, I write about him,’ Leon replied, hands clasped, fingers interlaced, holding on to himself. ‘Have you something to tell me about Goya?’

‘He stayed in the house,’ Diego continued. ‘I know about it, because I was told as a boy. Well, it’s common knowledge, I think … Anyway, they told me to redo the floor, the people who’ve bought the house. It’s to be offices … offices now.’

‘Diego, take your time,’ Leon reassured him. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

Diego controlled himself, talking more slowly.

‘I was hired to work on a building in Madrid. It was a private house, but it’s going to be made into offices. It was owned by the same family for generations, and it’s falling apart. It needs a lot of work, but first we have to clear the rubbish.’ He paused, remembering to breathe. ‘It was once Goya’s home. For a while. In Madrid. He lived there.’

Leon’s back was to the light. Hot Spanish sunlight, making his silhouette wraithlike.

‘Go on.’

‘A long time ago the cellar floor was covered with flagstones.’ Diego pushed back his hair, noticing with embarrassment that his hands were dusty as he unwrapped the skull. ‘Then later it was cemented over. The concrete stayed there for decades – until we broke it up. Yesterday.’

Leon’s gaze moved to the skull, his eyes fixing on it.

‘And you … you found this?’

Diego nodded. ‘It’s been there – I don’t know how long – a long, long time. And I remembered how your mother told me about Goya’s head being missing. And then I found this skull, and I thought … Well, the painter
did
live in that house.’

He stopped, startled, as Leon jumped up. His hands went to the skull and he touched it with the tips of his fingers, holding his breath. The sun was crawling through the window, hoarding dust mites, Leon’s shadow falling across the desk and throwing the skull into darkness.

‘Go on …’ he said quietly. ‘Go on.’

Diego hesitated for a moment before continuing.

‘I thought that
if
it was Goya’s skull, if it
was,
then you should have it. You know all about him, you’ve always been interested in him …’ He paused, staring at Leon, who had now lifted the skull and was staring into the open eye sockets. ‘It was meant to come to you.’

‘You’ve told no one else?’

‘No, no one,’ Diego assured him, hurrying on. ‘Of course, I could be wrong. It could just be any skull. But Goya
did
live there, and his head
is
missing …’

Curious, Diego Martinez trailed off, staring at the man in front of him. Leon had now regained his seat and had the skull in front of him, his hands cupped around it as a child would cup a bowl of hot chocolate. He seemed unnervingly close to tears.

In that instant the years fell away. They were children again, and Diego had been temporarily banished from the Golding farmhouse. Not because of anything he had done, but because Leon was seriously ill. He had had a fall, they said, a bad fall, and it would take a while for him to recover.

All that long, protracted, eerie summer, Leon stayed in the hospital in Madrid. And Diego wrote him a few badly spelled letters, but never asked
how
Leon had fallen. It was the summer that changed them all. The Goldings, the Martinezes, even the farmhouse. And within a year, the Golding parents were killed in a plane crash and the two brothers closed ranks against the world.

But for some reason, as he looked at Leon now, all Diego could remember was the summer of his fall …

‘Did I do the right thing, bringing it to you? I wondered—’

Leon cut him off. ‘Are you sure that no one else knows about this?’

Diego shook his head. ‘No one. I found it and I brought it here—’

‘And you had it with you last night?’

Diego faltered momentarily. ‘No, I left it where I found it.’ He could see the anxiety in Leon’s face. ‘But the house was locked up all night—’

‘You were the only man working there?’

‘No, there are two others.’

‘With keys?’

‘No one came back,’ Diego said firmly. ‘I found the skull, I covered it,
and I locked up the house when I left. I was the last man there. When I went back early
this morning, the skull hadn’t been touched.’ He paused, confused. ‘Why would someone
take it anyway? It might not even be important—’

‘Goya’s skull, not important?’

‘But it might not
be
his skull.’

Frowning, Leon’s tone became curt. ‘It is his skull.
It is
.’ He sighed, controlling himself. ‘I’ll have it checked, dated. Authenticated. I’ll have it proved—’