A Not So Perfect Crime

by Teresa Solana

  “Pau Ferrer? Well, naturally ... I was introduced to him once at an exhibition. But I didn’t buy anything. I suppose because I didn’t really like his work.”

  “And what’s your opinion of him?”

  “Ugh, middle class! ...”

  And she looked at me rather embarrassed, knowing she could never go back and amend that ever so sincere, spontaneous answer.

  19

  Eudald Masoliver, Lluís Font’s contact, was a Mosso d’Esquadra, one of our very own home-grown Catalan policemen. Borja had phoned him, and, after deliberating and trying to put him off, he’d finally agreed to meet us on Tuesday at 8 p.m. He didn’t seem overenthusiastic about spying for Lluís Font, and even less so about having to do so through us.

  Masoliver was waiting for us at the time agreed in the cafeteria in the Corte Inglés on the plaça de Catalunya. My brother had refused point blank to go in the Smart because it’s always impossible to park in the centre and so we’d taken a taxi. It was only three days to January 6 and that part of the city was crammed with people buying presents and with gawping tourists in shorts clogging up the pavements. There wasn’t room to swing a cat in the Corte Inglés and not a single empty table in the cafeteria on the top floor. A few years ago, while the champions of independence burned buses in the square and fought it out with the riot police, that cafeteria had turned into an improvised box at the opera from which bystanders – and I suppose the secret police – gazed down on the spectacle.

  As we didn’t know one another and we had no idea what Masoliver looked like, he’d agreed with Borja to put a copy of La plaça del diamant on his table. It was unlikely that two people would coincide on the same day at the same time with that novel in that big department store cafeteria. We saw lots of shopping bags around, but no books, except for the one our contact had brought with him. Borja reckoned that three men seated at a table amid the noise and bustle wouldn’t stand out if they didn’t stay too long.

  Thanks to the lack of interest people in this country have in reading books ever since the censors disappeared, we located him very easily. Masoliver must have been about thirty and was tall and broad, as befits a policeman, although he also looked as if he could be a university student. We were beginning to be shocked by the fact that all the policemen we came across looked like students rather than famous boxers.

  The young man appeared ill at ease, but he was handsome and all the girls looked at him out of the corner of their eyes. After we’d done the introductions, he took a black folder out of a plastic FNAC bag and asked us to open it. He said the file inside was for us. He immediately put the folder back into the bag.

  “I’ve photocopied the main documentation on the case,” he said rather brusquely. “You won’t find my fingerprints on any of these papers. And should you decide to start putting it around that I was the one who gave you this information ...”

  “No need to worry on that count. We’ll be most careful. Besides, we’re all in this together ...” said Borja putting him at his ease.

  The policeman sighed and glanced around.

  “I owed Mr Font this favour. As I expect you know, he gave me a hand when I needed one,” he said sounding rather embarrassed. He too seemed stressed.

  You could understand why. If his superiors found out what he was up to, Eudald Masoliver would have to face serious consequences. The other side of the coin was that they could accuse us of bribing a man of the law, even though we were doing so as intermediaries for a third party. Despite the risk we were running, we were thrilled to see such a fat dossier, the contents of which would reveal where the suspicions of the police were pointing.

  “Right, I must be off,” said Masoliver. “You have to keep these papers somewhere secure. Or better still: burn them once you’ve read them.” And he added, looking very worried, “My wife’s pregnant ... Please don’t get me into any trouble.”

  “You don’t need to worry in the slightest,” pronounced Borja in the confident tone of a man of integrity. “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked trying to be pleasant.

  “Goodbye, gentlemen.” Masoliver scarpered as quickly as he could.

  Borja and I decided to take a peek at the papers there and then. Surrounded as we were by tourists and teenagers licking ice creams and sending text messages, it certainly wasn’t prudent to start reading the police dossier in that busy cafeteria. However, neither my brother nor I could resist the temptation.

  We started on the autopsy report. It explained how Lídia Font had died from cardio-respiratory arrest after ingesting a poison made from Amanita phalloides, a highly poisonous variety of mushroom. The huge amount of poison in her blood had led the forensics to conclude that the mushrooms had been processed in such a way as to distil a high concentration of poison, the reason why death had been almost instantaneous. In its natural state, this kind of mushroom, although lethal, took several hours to make an impact and lead to a fatal outcome.

  The poison had been found in the marrons glacés and not in the bottle of cognac, as the MP had already revealed to us, but not all the titbits were poisoned. The forensic report included a sketch showing how the marrons glacés had been distributed in the box. Two places in the drawing contained question marks. We presumed that one belonged to the chestnut Mrs Font had eaten, and the other to the one my brother had swallowed shortly afterwards.

  “Don’t you remember which you chose?”

  “I think it was the one in the top row, but I’m not sure. You can appreciate I didn’t look too closely ...”

  “All right, in any case only five out of a box of fifteen were poisoned,” I continued. “That’s odd, isn’t it? Why not poison the lot?”

  “I expect the murderer didn’t have enough poison,” reflected Borja.

  “Maybe, but they don’t seem to have been placed randomly. The poisoned ones make a shape. If you ate the one at the top ...”

  “It’s in the form of a V,” observed Borja.

  “The murderer’s initial?” I suggested half-heartedly. “Perhaps he’s a Víctor, or a Valentín . . .”

  “Or a Valèria, or a Vicky ...” Borja continued.

  “Vicky sounds ridiculous for a murderer’s name. At the very least Victòria ...” I retorted.

  “Whatever,” he allowed. “And talking of initial letters, let’s see what’s in those compromising reports that the woman we’re concerned about commissioned!” he said, searching among the photocopies.

  Fortunately, Masoliver had photocopied the three documents that the police had requisitioned from the Fonts’ house. In fact, the three reports were very short, as if sparing us the detail. The one with the initials “L.F.” (Lluís Font) merely recounted that L.F. and S.V. (Sílvia Vilalta) met up repeatedly in a flat that L.F. owned above his office. It also said that they had once had dinner together in a restaurant in the Port Olímpic and that sometimes the woman left the flat with wet hair. There was no photograph or hypothesis, as if no further explanation were called for.

  The dossier with the initials “N.D.” (Nieves Dalmau) explained that N.D.’s mother was a single mother and had worked various Barcelona clip-joints in the Sixties and Seventies, including a very famous one on the carrer Ríos Rosas, and that nothing was known about her father. Nieves herself had worked some of those clubs, but only for a few months, before she married E.D. (Enrique Dalmau), who at the time fancied himself as a poet and was rather leftwing. The third dossier, with the mysterious initials “S.M.”, merely said that nothing abnormal or scandalous had been discovered in the subject’s behaviour or life, and gave no lead as to whether it was a man or a woman. None of the reports were dated.

  We then glanced at the statements made by witnesses: by Lluís Font, his daughter and Yanbin, their maid. The police had also taken statements from the staff in the Foix patisserie and from the relatives who came for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, nothing in those statements added anything to
what we already knew, but I was reassured to see that none contained any mention of the painting or of us, except for the brief note to the effect that one of Lluís Font’s consultants had accidentally eaten one of the titbits from the box. Borja gave a sigh of relief when he saw his name didn’t appear: he was worried that blunder might have thrown up his fake identity.

  Someone had handwritten a list of names and we presumed this was the provisional list of suspects. The order of appearance was as follows:• Lluís Font (the victim’s husband)

  • Sílvia Vilalta (the victim’s sister)

  • Carlos Carbonell (Sílvia Vilalta’s former fiancé)

  • Nieves Dalmau (née Gómez, Enrique Dalmau’s wife)

  • Enrique Dalmau (MP)

  • Mariona Castany

  “What the hell is Mariona’s name doing here?” asked Borja taken aback.

  We looked at the list again, in case we’d read it wrongly. But there it was, without any explanatory note next to it.

  “This is a turn up for the books ...” I whispered, smiling wanly. “Perhaps your friend had a reason to get rid of her cousin.”

  “Mariona is a real lady!” my brother protested.

  “So was Lucrezia, Borja,” I replied ironically.

  “Don’t be so stupid ...”

  But I realized the fact he’d found that name on the list had shocked and worried him.

  With the one exception of Mariona Castany, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the motives the other individuals had for eliminating the illustrious, if devious Mrs Font. I expect the MP had fallen in love with his sister-in-law and decided to remove his wife from the scene, whom he anyway suspected was carrying on with an eccentric artist. He’d told us “we do not divorce just like that” and perhaps he was right. Perhaps he found it easier to get rid of his wife than to send her packing, to endure an acceptable period of mourning and then discreetly marry his sister-in-law. On the other hand, perhaps Sílvia Vilalta was also in love with her brother-in-law (although the incident with the Cuban would belie that) and aspired to become the next Mrs Font. Or perhaps she’d simply poisoned her sister in order to take her revenge on the nasty trick Lídia had played on her years before when she’d stolen her boyfriend.

  As for Carlos Carbonell, who’d been Sílvia Vilalta’s boyfriend and then Lídia Font’s, he could have had the same motive: to take revenge on the woman who’d ruined any chance he ever had of marrying a wealthy heiress. As for Nieves and Enrique Dalmau it was obvious that if the news got around that the presidential candidate’s mother-in-law had been a prostitute and that Nieves herself had worked in a clip-joint as a young woman, the scandal would put an end to his political career. However, what Mrs Font – who was no fool – was really after wasn’t so much to drive Enrique Dalmau definitively out of politics as to force him to withdraw from the race to become secretary-general and back her husband one hundred percent. She had him by the scruff of his neck ...

  We were totally bemused to see Mariona Castany’s name on that list. The only evidence linking her to the whole malarkey was the fact we’d seen Enrique Dalmau leave her house a few weeks before the dismal deed was done.

  “It would hardly do for us to turn up at her house and ask her if she had any reason to get rid of her cousin,” I commented.

  “Hardly. But if her name appears in these police papers, there must be something in it,” said Borja anxiously.

  After scrutinizing every single one of the photocopies, we decided to see our client the following day and ask him about his friend’s possible implication in his wife’s murder. Borja suggested we should also talk to his daughter, if she felt strong enough to see us.

  “The girl probably knows something. Her mother may have confided in her,” said Borja.

  “I doubt it.”

  “We can’t lose anything by asking,” my brother insisted.

  “I’m not sure her father will agree. She’s only a girl ...” I objected.

  “A fifteen-year old, Eduard. Perhaps she’ll recognize the man in the Zurich.”

  “You’re right,” I said, less than convinced. “To change the subject, what are we going to do with these papers?” I asked as I put them away in the bag.

  I wasn’t at all happy about being in possession of those stolen photocopies. If the police happened to find them (a circumstance that might arise given that Borja had swallowed one of those marrons glacés, that they’d caught us in the MP’s office on Boxing Day and that the painting now in the hands of the police had been painted by my mother-in-law and not by a party loyalist), my brother and I could end up locked in the Modelo facing serious charges. Where could we hide them? At my place? At Borja’s where Lídia Font’s portrait was already tucked away? Given the way our client had reacted so gingerly to the no longer so mysterious picture, it was unlikely he’d be prepared to hide them in his house or office.

  I mentioned my worries to Borja and he immediately agreed it was a risk we couldn’t afford to run. He said he’d take the photocopies to his place, scrutinize them again in case we’d missed some detail and would then do exactly what the policeman had suggested.

  “By the way ... I ought tell you something about the painting by my mother-in-law we took from my place ...” I said as I was leaving.

  I explained the convoluted story about my mother-in-law being inspired by a Joaquim Mir painting and how she’d faithfully copied his signature. After listening to me attentively and looking rather shocked, my brother laughed it off. He said any expert would see the painting wasn’t genuine.

  “Don’t worry. It will soon all seem like one big joke,” he smiled reassuringly.

  A joke that would end up costing me 2,000 euros.

  20

  “I don’t understand, Montse. It’s not like Borja,” I fretted.

  “Perhaps he stayed with his girlfriend yesterday and slept in this morning,” Montse replied provocatively.

  “No, she’s off skiing with her husband in the Alps ...” I countered.

  “Well, well, so now we know! ...”

  I wasn’t in the mood for sly digs. I’d agreed with Borja that I’d pass by his place at around eleven and we’d go together to see the MP. It was gone twelve and Borja was giving no signs of life, so I was starting to get worried. I called him on his mobile several times, but he’d either switched it off or was out of range. No, it wasn’t at all like Borja. Lack of punctuality was not one of his shortcomings.

  “You know what? I might as well head over to his place.”

  “Will you be back for lunch today?” grunted Montse.

  “Hmm ... I’ll call you later.”

  I caught a taxi and when I arrived, my heart gave a turn. Two fire engines, a city police car and an ambulance were parked outside the entrance to the building where my brother lives. The street smelled vaguely of burning.

  I looked up and saw smoke coming out from one window and that some bits of the façade were sooty. The window belonged to Borja’s flat.

  “Take it easy, Eduard. It’s OK ...” he said putting his hand on my shoulder before I realized he was standing next to me.

  I felt relieved to see that my brother, although looking pallid, was safe and sound. He was in his dressing gown and slippers and also smelled of smoke. I hugged him, and began to calm down. My heart gradually resumed its normal rhythm.

  “God! What’s happened?” I whispered.

  “OK, all clear. We’re off,” said one of the firemen. “Wait for all the smoke to go, right? And next time be a bit more careful ... Tell your girlfriend to e-mail her letters to you. And then you won’t need to burn them ...”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. And many, many thanks!” exclaimed Borja shaking the fireman’s hand warmly.

  The ambulance and fire engines disappeared in a flash, unlike the small group of onlookers that had gathered around us. Smoke was no longer coming out of the window.

  “What the hell happened?” I repeated.

  “Let�
�s go for a coffee and I’ll tell all. You heard what the man said. We’ve got to wait a bit before going back up,” said Borja.

  “But you’re wearing your dressing-gown and slippers!”

  “So what, half the neighbourhood has seen me in this state,” he replied resignedly. “At least it’s all Calvin Klein!” he said as if that detail made all the difference.

  I said nothing and we went into the bar on the corner. Rather than straight espressos, we ordered two laced with cognac to help get us over our fright.

  “It was a stupid accident,” Borja started. “This morning I took the photocopies Masoliver gave us into the bathroom, to burn them, but when I lit them, the paper started shooting off in all directions, including into the wastepaper basket. The tissues and plastic bag there caught fire, then the curtain ... I tried to put the fire out, but only made it worse because I poured on the bottle of massage oils and the silk dressing gown hanging behind the door flared up ...” He sighed. “In the end, the firemen had to come to sort it out.”

  “But are you OK? You haven’t hurt yourself?”

  “I think I’ve singed a few hairs,” he said, touching his locks. “I’ll have to pay my hairdresser a visit.”

  “What about those papers? What did the firemen say?” I asked, rather alarmed. “Did they realize what you were up to?”

  “I told them I was getting rid of some very compromising private letters ... That my fiancée would be back in the morning, and that she’s very jealous, and as she’d not written them ...”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “The papers all went up in smoke. Besides, what else could I say?”

  “You tell me. The scrapes you get into ... You didn’t have to take Masoliver’s words so literally. You could just have torn the papers into little bits and thrown them in the rubbish,” I retorted.

  “Anyway, what’s done is done. It was nothing serious in the end ... Just a scare. Come on, drink up your coffee.”

  We waited a quarter of an hour before going to see what state the flat was in. Luckily only the bathroom had been ravaged. The rest of the flat was intact although the parquet floor was still swimming in the foam the firemen had used to put the fire out. Borja got dressed and, as it was lunchtime, I suggested he come to my place to have a shower and some lunch. We could see Lluís Font later.