A Not So Perfect Crime

by Teresa Solana

  Mass was at five sharp, the bull-fighting hour. I ate lunch at home with Montse and the children, and my brother picked me up just before four. This time he wasn’t driving the Smart, as he didn’t think it was the car for a funeral.

  At four thirty, the square was a mass of umbrellas waiting for the priest to open the church doors. I’d followed Borja’s advice and wore a black tie. My suit was the usual dark grey Armani that I’d worn so much of late it needed dry-cleaning, and I had on some new shoes. My brother also wore a dark suit, a white shirt and black tie, a little over the top if you ask me. My sky blue shirt was quite restrained enough and thankfully didn’t jar with the sober dress of the mourners. Nonetheless, I did notice the quite extreme black numbers some bejewelled ladies were flaunting under their half unbuttoned mink coats.

  As it was Monday and the Christmas holidays, there was hardly any traffic for that time of day. My brother and I had opened our umbrellas, not so much to fend off the fine drizzle as to shield us from the curious gazes of the people there. At this kind of funeral, which involves a famous or public figure, one diversion people enjoy is watching and commenting on who has come and who hasn’t. That final farewell, in certain echelons of society, still indicates the relative importance of the deceased and the social position occupied by their nearest and dearest.

  Obviously it wasn’t a good day because it fell in the middle of the holidays, but I’m sure more than one person had driven down to Barcelona from a ski resort to be present at Lídia Font’s final rites. Our client was sufficiently important for some individuals to feel obliged to attend. The President of the Generalitat and the Mayor of the city, however, were not in the funeral cortège. They had sent apologies claiming they hadn’t wanted their institutional presence to disrupt the family nature of the ceremony, likewise the national leader of the MP’s party. This was clearly an excuse, because there were some three hundred people crowded into the square, and, as far as I know, only kings and sultans have that many relatives. I imagine that none of the distinguished absentees wanted to be in a photograph that might connect him, albeit indirectly, to the unresolved matter of the murder. Logically enough, there were lots of journalists.

  The ceremony, mass included, was moving, but above all it was drawn-out. As not everyone could find a seat in church, the ladies sat and the men stood. My new shoes were hurting and the funeral felt like an eternity. At the end, those in attendance filed past to give their condolences to the family, who stood in a row by the altar: the MP was first in the retinue with his daughter on his right. Next to her stood a cohort of relatives in mourning who all looked on impassively. I recognized Sílvia Vilalta, and didn’t think she looked exactly grief-stricken.

  I stayed the course rather well until I had to offer my hand to Núria Font, the daughter of the deceased. She was a fairhaired, scrawny fifteen year-old who kept drying her tears. She seemed very upset and leaned on her father, who was holding her arm. She was as pallid as her mother must have been, and although she wasn’t crying when I gave her my hand, her eyes and nose were red and sore. Her hand was icy, and when I offered her my condolences quite timidly she thanked me like a robot. She seemed about to faint and the sudden memory of my own parents’ death hit me like a lumbar punch and made my eyes moisten.

  I was thirteen years old and I didn’t go to the funeral. Borja was still in hospital recovering from concussion. Although I’d only a broken arm and a couple of cracked ribs, I was forced to stay at home with my relatives from Soria. Aunt Teresa, Uncle Faustino and I, dressed in obligatory black, waited sorrowfully for the other relatives who’d gone to the cemetery. My aunt sobbed silently and dried her tears on a cotton handkerchief, muttering from time to time between sobs: “It was God’s will.”

  He could stick his will you know where, I’d have retorted now, but at the time, obviously, I said nothing. Uncle Faustino, sturdy and taciturn, simply looked at his watch, stared at the ground and said nothing. He was my father’s brother and was completely distraught. I swallowed my tears, devastated and in a rage because I’d not been allowed to go to the cemetery and bid farewell to my parents. The hospitalized Borja was still unaware of what had happened.

  Uncle Faustino suddenly got up: “Fuck bloody God! ... If I catch the bastard driving that car, I’ll kill him!” he exclaimed in his Aragonese accent.

  He hid his head in his hands and began to cry disconsolately. After a while, he got up again and said: “It’s much better if things don’t stay pent up here,” he said tapping his chest. “You’ve got to get over these blows, what ever it takes ...” And he went straight to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of cognac and three small glasses.

  It was the first time I’d tasted real alcohol (wine and fizzy pop and the half a glass of champagne we were allowed to drink on special occasions hardly counted). I felt queasy and started to cry as disconsolately as Uncle Faustino had a few moments earlier. It was the first time I’d managed to cry like that from the time they told me in hospital that both parents had died instantaneously in the accident.

  In the months to come I spent each night trying to relive that funeral I hadn’t attended. I imagined the priest, the coffins, the people dressed in black and the laments. I saw my brother and myself receiving condolences, and also the biers being dropped deep inside the dark niche while we all wept miserably. Before falling asleep exhausted, I’d remember what Uncle Faustino had said – “You’ve got to get over these blows” – and cried and cried until I fell asleep. The idea of doing in the pisshead who’d forced my parents over a precipice on the Garraf corniche also went round my head. I ate almost nothing, refused to go to school and spent every day crying and sleeping.

  Once again it was my brother who took hold of the situation. Initially, when he recovered from concussion and was allowed home, he behaved the same way as me. He cried all the time, went round in a sleepwalking daze and wanted to be by himself. Seeing Pep in such a state upset me as much as remembering my parents were dead and would never come back. We were both distraught, but I knew that if my brother, who was the more resilient of the two of us, didn’t recover from this blow, I never would. Finally I fell ill and a raging temperature kept me delirious in bed for three days. When I came round, Pep was his old self and assumed, as usual, the role of elder brother. For a few months we dedicated body and soul to trying to find out – quite unsuccessfully – the identity of the drink driver so we could beat him up and return him to his Maker. I suppose that was our first job as detectives, although it was a disastrous failure. Over time my brother and I managed somehow to overcome the tragedy and get on with our lives, but I’ve always wondered if that concussion did any lasting damage and what went through Borja’s head the three days I was so ill.

  He never goes to funerals, he admitted to me one day. Apparently it’s the only thing he doesn’t feel able to face. This was why he stayed outside the church, a move no one could misinterpret because there simply wasn’t room for everyone inside and he wasn’t the only one stood in the square during the ceremony. Consequently, when I spotted the man with whom Lídia Font had conversed in the Zurich among the crowds filling the church, I couldn’t alert my brother.

  It happened right at the end, while I was queuing up to offer the family my condolences. When I spotted him, four or five people were in front of me and I could hardly rush off in hot pursuit in full view of everybody. I waited patiently and enacted the ritual handshake and condolences, hoping I’d be able to catch the man when I left the church. It was my bad luck that the person in front lingered at least a couple of minutes with the MP while I became increasingly agitated, as I saw the man I’d seen in the Zurich slip away into the crowd.

  When I emerged, the memory of my parents still churning round my brain, I tried unsuccessfully to locate him among the crowds packing the square. I walked despairingly over to where my brother stood. He was chatting in relaxed fashion to Mariona Castany, but I had no qualms about interrupting their conversation to tel
l Borja what had happened.

  “He’s here! I saw him in church!” I said excitedly.

  “Hello, Eduard. It’s such a tragedy, isn’t it? We were just saying to Borja ...” Mariona seemed put out by my impertinent interjection.

  I greeted her properly and apologized for my rudeness. Our little group was joined by another of the acquaintances of Mariona, who embarked on the introductions comme il faut while I got more and more stressed. In the meantime men in grey loaded the coffin and wreaths into the hearse. People started to drift off and the square soon emptied out.

  “But how could you let him get away!” Borja sighed angrily when I finally managed to explain whom I’d spotted. “He’s the only lead we have! ...”

  “It was just that I was in the queue, and thought it would look rude ...”

  “Lluís Font would have understood.”

  “Yes, but the other people ...”

  “What the hell! You don’t even know them! ...” And he was right.

  I don’t know why I was being such a stickler for decorum. I suppose it’s because when I’m in this kind of company I get nervous and try to imitate the way Borja behaves so as not to put my foot in it, which is far from easy when you consider the stacks of unspoken codes at play that are totally alien to me. But I can’t deny I’d let our only lead get away and I felt like a real dumbo.

  “Well, at least we know he came to the funeral. Someone here must know the guy!” said Borja.

  “I expect only Lídia Font knew him. He’s probably a nobody ...” I said half-heartedly.

  “If he were a nobody, Mrs Font wouldn’t have bothered to go down to the plaça de Catalunya to talk to him on a Friday evening, right?” he argued bad-temperedly.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I conceded. “I’m really sorry, you know.”

  “OK, let’s forget it. It’s history now. And we’ve got work to do.”

  My brother may not have any other virtues, but he never bears a grudge. When I make a mistake, which is more often than I would like, he’ll first react like a harpy but he doesn’t let it smoulder on. As far as I can recall, he’s never really rubbed my face in my mistakes, and some have been quite scandalous.

  While I’d been acting the fool in church and letting our main suspect escape, my brother hadn’t wasted his time. At nine, after we’d been home for a change of clothes, we met Mariona in Flash Flash, a laid-back restaurant that’s managed to retain its Seventies Pop-Art style without seeming old-fashioned. It’s near the centre of town and specializes in omelettes, hamburgers and salads. It’s a haunt of the well-heeled classes of Barcelona and has the advantage that you can’t book a table. Borja wasn’t sure whether Mariona had made an rendezvous with him there in order to confide some juicy titbit or to extract one from him, but he insisted I should accompany him and use the opportunity to give him a detailed description of the man I’d seen in the Zurich and now at the funeral.

  “Poor Lídia, what a coincidence!” Mariona opened fire. “It’s less than a month since we were talking about her. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, of course. A real coincidence! The world’s going from bad to worse ...” said Borja trying to handle the situation without showing his cards. “There are so many lunatics out there! ...”

  “She ate some poisoned sweets apparently ...” Mariona let slip casually.

  The police had told journalists they were sweets not marrons glacés.

  “So the newspapers said,” I said, knowing full well my brother’s tactics when he felt like taking people on a wild goose chase.

  “It’s rather strange, you know ...” continued Mariona. “I mean it must have been a lunatic ...” And she added sarcastically, “I didn’t know nutcases were that sophisticated.”

  “Yes, it is very peculiar,” Borja allowed.

  By that time there was only one table free in Flash Flash and it was quite noisy. Even so, Mariona lowered her voice.

  “So? How did it all turn out? Did or didn’t she have a lover-boy?”

  She’d finally decided to ask the question that was burning her lips.

  “You were right, Mariona,” said Borja as he tucked into an aubergine omelette. “Lídia had nothing going on. Her husband dreamt up that little drama all by himself.”

  “I reckon it wasn’t quite a drama, you know, more a ... I suppose you found out. As I see you’re on such good terms with Lluís ...”

  “What do you mean?” he asked feigning surprise.

  “Shall we ask for another bottle of wine?” suggested my brother’s friend rather than replying to his question. “I don’t know why,” she smiled regally, “but funerals always make me thirsty.”

  As the model gentleman, Borja asked the waiter to bring a second bottle of vintage wine with a price tag to stand your hair on end. It was delicious. My brother waited patiently for the wine to be poured before resuming the conversation. He didn’t want to appear impatient.

  “I don’t know what you meant by whether we knew ...” Borja returned gently to the matter in hand.

  “Well, just that Lluís is seeing Sílvia, his sister-in-law. But that’s not news to anyone, of course. It’s common knowledge.”

  This was totally unexpected. Our client’s confused confession had led us to think that the affair was still a well-kept secret and that, except for those involved (and obviously more recently the police) nobody was aware of the MP’s incestuous little fling. Mariona Castany’s revelation – a woman who never ceased to astonish – changed everything.

  “He doesn’t seem to think that,” Borja ventured boldly. “In fact, he’s convinced nobody knows he and his sister-in-law ...”

  “Poor Lluís is a little ingenuous at times! ...” she smiled. “Sílvia made sure she broadcast it to all and sundry. That’s why she fell in with him, so she could spread the good tidings and undermine Lídia. Sílvia knew full well what an interest Lídia took in her husband’s career.”

  When she saw the dumbfounded looks on our faces, she added: “Sílvia’s had it in for her sister for years. I reckon she’s never forgotten the nasty trick she played on her over Carlitos Carbonell. The poor girl must be very much in love, but fancy having the patience to wait all these years ...”

  “Now I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Mariona. I’ve been living abroad for so long ...” whispered Borja.

  “I’m referring to Sílvia and Carlitos, the heir to the Carbonells. Of course the Carbonells were practically bankrupt, so ‘heir’ is purely metaphorical. The fact is Sílvia Vilalta and Carlitos were about to get married. There’d not been any formal engagement, but everyone thought it was serious and they’d soon be officially betrothed. The Vilaltas were pleased enough, because although Carlitos wouldn’t come into money he was a nice young man and his family was still well connected, particularly in Madrid. And as Sílvia had always been a rather strange girl ...”

  “That’s right,” I said, remembering the incident with the Cuban.

  “Lídia carried on until silly Carlitos became completely besotted, broke up with Sílvia and began going out with her. Sílvia couldn’t compete with a stunningly beautiful woman like Lídia. Not that Sílvia was ugly, but, of course, Lídia was much cleverer and far more scheming.”

  “But that’s ancient history,” I said. “Besides, Mrs Font and this Carlitos never married.”

  “Of course they didn’t! They lasted a couple of months. She sent him packing without even a goodbye. But naturally after Carlitos had treated Sílvia so badly, it was impossible for them to get back on speaking terms.”

  “Sílvia must have really flipped,” Borja suggested.

  “Apparently,” she said almost whispering, “she tried to commit suicide by swallowing her mother’s sleeping pills. The family covered it up, of course, and she’s had it in for her sister ever since. I don’t suppose for one minute that she was the only one.”

  “In other words, Lídia Font has her enemies,” concluded Borja.

  “As
many as she has admirers.”

  When we were eating our desserts, Borja asked me to describe to Mariona the man I’d seen in the Zurich. I did as I was told, but she didn’t seem to recognize him. The initials “S.M.” didn’t mean anything to her either.

  “I’ll give it some thought. You two are obviously on to something, aren’t you,” she asked inviting us to let her in on our secrets.

  “I’ll let you know one of these days,” Borja replied with a wink, “but not right now. Trust me.”

  Mariona seemed disappointed but didn’t persist. She wasn’t the kind of woman who goes around prying into everyone’s secrets, although she made it known that we owed her a favour. We’d clearly aroused her curiosity.

  As it was getting late and we were tired, we asked for the bill. Mariona went as if to search her bag for her elegant Hermès wallet where she keeps a single exclusive card with no limit. Borja stopped her and quickly took out his wallet, which was thicker than usual that night.

  “No, no, Mariona. This one’s mine.” And he put several notes on the table. “And to change the subject to something that has nothing to do with your cousin, do you know a painter by the name of Pau Ferrer? I’ve been told his paintings are a good investment.”

  I assumed Borja wanted to find out if by any chance Mariona was up to speed on the portrait and the MP’s suspicions.