Without more ado, we confirmed we were unofficially investigating Lídia Font’s death on instructions from her husband, as she’d suspected the night we’d had dinner together at Flash Flash. Although we’d no idea as to what had really happened, we’d been shocked to discover she was one of those suspected by the police, even though, Borja added prudently, her name wasn’t among the first on the list.
Mariona Castany didn’t flinch. What’s more, she smiled half coquettishly and half mischievously like the self confident, self-possessed woman she was. In fact, she seemed to find it amusing, as if at heart she was flattered by the idea she might be suspected of murdering her cousin.
“And you’d like me to tell you why I’m on that list? ...” she responded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, while savouring a generous gulp of scotch.
“Well, sooner or later we’re bound to find out,” said Borja. “We only want to help as much as we can. The police are a bit slow on the uptake, obviously. We thought it better you knew, and that if there is anything that justifies their suspicions . . .”
“I see now. You’ve come to give me a helping hand,” her tone couldn’t have been more ironic.
“It’s the least we could do,” I interjected playing her at her own game.
She lit a cigarette and sat back. She was dressed in white, which made her eyes seem an even deeper shade of blue.
“Well, if someone has told the police (I can imagine who it may have been), it’s of no matter. It’s hardly a secret. Half Barcelona must be in the know.”
The half of Barcelona that is north of the Diagonal, I thought, because once you cross that frontier I don’t think many people are aware of the subtle scheming the city’s wealthy ladies are so fond of. In fact, I doubt most of my fellow citizens have even heard of Mariona Castany.
“There was an incident in the club,” Mariona began, “about a year ago. Lídia was annoyed with me because I didn’t commission her to refurbish my house in the Empordá. Only a few small changes ... She was furious because everybody had assumed that she’d redecorated my country house, and naturally when someone congratulated her, she was forced to admit it wasn’t her work ...” She failed to suppress a catty grin.
“I understand,” said Borja.
“So, we were in the club one day and Lídia started to make uncalled for remarks about my friendship with Isidre Vidal in front of other members, without mentioning his name, naturally.” She was referring to the well-known architect who’d been Mariona’s lover for years. “Isidre’s wife, who was with another little group, heard what she said, because Lídia made sure she did. That would have been the end of the matter if that dimwit Sonsoles Pallarés, who never remembers the gossip she hears or considers who’s in the vicinity, hadn’t started to crack jokes about him. Roser, Isidre’s wife (with whom, by the way, I’d always been on the best of terms), got up and strode out in a huff, hugely insulted. Lídia and silly Sonsoles had humiliated her. There are things nobody likes having rubbed in their faces. I was livid and I warned Lídia that a fellow from Marseille might come knocking on her door. And added, for good measure, that Marseille was a fascinating place where I had several good friends.”
I didn’t have a clue what she meant but my brother got it straight away.
“My God! ... You publicly threatened her with murder!” he exclaimed.
Apparently, the reference to the “fellow from Marseille” was a euphemism for a contract killer.
“Bah, I heard that in a film! Obviously everybody knows that if I wanted to ... But I only said it for the sake of it.”
“The police must have taken you at your word, although apparently you aren’t the only person who wanted to take revenge on your cousin,” Borja went on. “People were queuing up.”
“I’d told you so. Although, in fact,” she purred mysteriously, “I’d already had the pleasure.”
“You’re not suggesting ...” he said rather taken aback.
All we needed was for the mighty Mariona Castany to confess she was involved in Lídia Font’s death.
“That I sent her a box of poisoned sweeties! For Christ’s sake, of course not! What happened was that after the episode in the club that day, poor Lídia got very few commissions.” Out slipped another self-satisfied feline smile. “Lots of my very rich, very close friends decided to go elsewhere to contract their interior designers ... and she suddenly dropped out of fashion. In the end she was forced stoop to the middle classes. Can you imagine?”
“She bloody deserved it,” said Borja, ever the gentleman.
“And, obviously she didn’t get an invite to the Prince’s wedding either. Although she and Lluís were originally on the list ...”
“You are devious, Aunt Mariona,” quipped Borja in the most fawning of tones.
You don’t play around with a woman like Mariona Castany. Borja and I were confident after that exchange that it was highly unlikely Mariona would have bothered to take Lídia Font out of circulation. If what she wanted was revenge, Mariona had no need to go to Marseille for a solution. She only had to trip her up from time to time and shut a few doors in her face. Mariona held lots of keys and she used them at will.
“What about Enrique Dalmau? Are you very close friends?” Borja asked, remembering we’d seen him leaving her house just before Mrs Font was murdered.
“So you know about that too? Well, well ...” Mariona replied clearly taken aback.
“Lídia was blackmailing him so he would support her husband,” my brother blurted out rather rashly. “He’s on the police list of suspects as well.”
“He came to me for advice,” Mariona acknowledged, rather averse to having to tell us so much. “I told him that the best he could do would be to find another hobby away from the world of politics. It could have turned into rather a nasty scandal.”
“Thanks again and sorry we barged in so,” said Borja as we bid her goodbye.
“You’re always welcome here. Goodbye, my friends. I do hope one of these days you’ll fill me in ...”
As we were leaving we saw it was starting to drizzle. It had been a long day and we were tired. We needed time to digest all we’d found out, so we decided to have the rest of the day off and go home. Borja had to clean the parquet and sort out the bathroom, and I’d agreed to run a few errands for Montse, not to mention buying the presents for the Day of the Kings. Besides, I was beginning to be rather sick of the woes of the wealthy and needed to disconnect, even if only for a few hours. The 3,000 euros in the envelope allowed me to forget about my bank account for a while, which was comforting after so many months of financial penury. It was January 4, very cold and, despite the flocks of urbanites off skiing, the city raced along at its usual noisy pace. They were getting the streets in the centre ready for Their Majesties from the Orient, who, according to the locals, always got a much warmer, more magnificent welcome in Barcelona than they did in Madrid.
22
We made little, that is to say, no headway in our investigations over the next few days. Nobody knew who the mysterious man in the Zurich was, though one of the girls in the Foix patisserie, the source of the marrons glacés, did tell us rather nervously that she thought she remembered selling a box of something to a helmeted motorcyclist in dark glasses one day when the shop was packed. According to this sales assistant, the man didn’t remove his helmet at any point, so she wouldn’t be able to identify him, if the occasion ever arose.
Lluís Font had to go to the police station a couple of times to answer questions. In the meantime, the newspapers were full of speculation as to the hand lurking behind this elegant crime. Some, particularly those on the left, pointed to her husband, while feminists licked their lips over the prospect of a case of male violence in the city’s upper reaches; others favoured personal revenge or a calculated mistake made by the would-be murderer. One paper signalled the possibility it might be a classic suicide, and another even championed the hypothesis that the murder was part of a ma
cabre roleplay exercise.
Thanks to the information provided by Eudald Masoliver we learned that Carlos Carbonell had been living in Brussels for years. He worked as an interpreter for the European Commission and was married to a Belgian woman from a highly respected family who also toiled at the Commission. He’d not been to Spain for years, and at this point it was unlikely he could be at all interested in taking revenge on his old girlfriend. And it didn’t make much sense for the Dalmaus to get rid of Lídia Font. It was reasonable for them to suspect someone else might be aware of the information that Lídia possessed, so the most prudent path for them to take, as Mariona had suggested, would seem to be to retreat gracefully and accept defeat.
All in all, Borja and I were stumped about how to proceed. If the police, with all the latest forensic techniques at their disposal, weren’t able to find an obvious suspect, what could we hope to do? On the off chance, after the school term had restarted, we decided to pursue our “Oxford trail” as Borja had baptised it, and we arranged to meet Núria Font’s tutor. What we were really after was an exchange with Elisenda Rourell, Núria’s old philosophy teacher. If they’d been close friends, my brother thought, perhaps in a moment of weakness Mrs Font had let her in on a secret or two that could cast some light on her death. We were so in the dark that any small clue would be welcome.
Núria Font was a pupil at one of those exclusive all-girl schools on Barcelona’s Upper Side that are expensive, prestigious and ideologically conservative, though not necessarily Catholic. This home of juvenile learning occupied a splendid mansion looking down on the Bonanova and was surrounded by a garden that gave it the air of a miniuniversity campus. Around midday, once classes had finished, we showed up at the school and asked to see Assumpta Vilardell. The teacher received us in her office as if the Pope himself were deigning to grant us an audience. As well as being Núria Font’s tutor, Miss Vilardell was also the director of studies, and the first thing she told us was how much work she had and that she could only see us for a few minutes. She was stiff, efficient and unpleasant and didn’t wear her fifty-plus years at all gracefully – perhaps she was embittered by work, like so many teachers. She became very uptight when we showed an interest in her tutee’s academic profile and the parental plan to send her to Oxford.
“This is a very proper school,” she assured us, grimacing in disgust, “and I can tell you that the social or economic position of parents has no influence whatsoever on pupils’ marks.”
She said this so emphatically that the phrase excusatio non petita immediately came to mind ... When we hinted at the rumour that Lídia Font had tried to influence her daughter’s teachers into giving her high marks, she threw us out of her office.
Our exchange with Elisenda, Núria’s philosophy teacher, wasn’t any more enlightening, although we saw at once why there’d been an affinity between her and Lídia Font. She was in her forties, blonde thanks to her hairstylist, and wore pearl necklaces and countless little gilt chains round her neck and wrists. Her tan was care of ultra-violet rays and her attire was the snobs’ uniform: designer jeans, and a sky-blue blouse under a navy blue sweater. The last thing she resembled was a philosopher, but then I remembered from my student days that although Pythagoras was a longhaired eccentric, Aristotle was definitely a Greek who liked the good life.
Nor was it difficult to imagine the scenario in which the philosopher and the MP’s wife had become the bosom friends Núria had described to us. I expect Lídia Font had whetted the teacher’s appetite by opening the doors to her exclusive world, and, once she’d got the A star for her daughter, lost interest in her new friend. Elisenda Rourell didn’t give us any useful information, but we deduced that she was sufficiently annoyed with her former friend not to defend her against our insinuations. It was clear our conversation had put her on edge and that she was afraid a parent or an inspector would denounce her for that fraudulent A star. As we weren’t policemen, we couldn’t ask directly whether she’d sent a box of marrons glacés to Lídia Font, which anyway didn’t make much sense given that Mrs Font had already got what she wanted from her. The “Oxford trail” seemed to have dried up so we called it a day.
Disappointed by our fruitless morning we decided to head off to eat in the Vell de Sarrià and draw up a balance sheet of the progress of our investigations. We were just getting into the Smart when I saw a man carrying a motorcyclist’s helmet leave the school buildings. It was a black helmet.
“Borja, that’s him!” I exclaimed nervously. “It’s the man from the Zurich!”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I’m one hundred percent sure it’s him,” I replied excitedly.
The stranger stared at the ground as he walked and seemed totally self-engrossed. He didn’t notice us. Suddenly, he frowned, swung round and went back into the school as if he’d just realized he’d forgotten something. Borja reacted quickly and accosted a huddle of four pupils who were chatting and laughing next to the wrought-iron fence that separated the school from the street.
“Hey, girls! Do you know that man with the black helmet who just went back into school?” he asked, smiling as seductively as he knew how.
“You mean Messegué?” replied one of the girls, who seemed decidedly unimpressed by my brother’s charm. Although the pupils in that school wore a uniform, their manner betrayed the exclusive world to which they belonged.
“He’s a Latin teacher,” said another pupil who was the most Lolita-ish. “He’s an oddball.”
“Do you know what his Christian name is?” I asked in a flash.
His surname matched one of the initials in the files found at Lídia Font’s place.
“How should I know!” the girl replied scornfully. Another shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s Segimon,” said the one wearing glasses.
She was the only one who looked like a student.
“In other words, Segimon Messegué,” summed up Borja.
“We call him ...”
“Shut up, dude!” her friend interrupted. “Who are you gentlemen exactly? Are you selling encyclopaedias?” she added sarcastically looking us up and down.
“We work for a production company,” said a deadpan Borja. “We’re recce-ing scenarios for some American filmmakers.” The attitude of the four adolescents changed radically. “As a matter of interest, would you be prepared to work as extras if we shot some scenes in this school?”
“A film?!” all four chorused. “I want to be in it! I want to be in it!” And they all began to jump up and down, visibly thrilled.
“Well, we’ll have to see what the producer thinks of this place,” Borja went on. “You see the film is set in a school.”
“Is it a horror film? Who’s in it? Anyone famous?” asked one of the girls, getting all hot and bothered.
“Well, that’s top secret and confidential. We can’t spread it around ... But if you promise not to tell anyone ...” said Borja, who’d got them eating out of his hand.
“We promise! We promise!” the quartet pledged in unison, still jumping up and down, their eyes glittering.
“I can’t tell you his name ...” He paused, “But I will tell you that the lead actor was also the hero in Titanic.” And he winked at them.
“Di Caprio! Di Caprio!”
They started to hi-five each other, clapping their hands ecstatically.
“Hey, it’s a secret, right?” added Borja putting a finger on his lips.
The girls looked beside themselves. They couldn’t stop grinning.
“Why did you say that your Latin teacher is an odd-ball?” I asked. “We thought we recognized him ...”
“Last year he got into big trouble because he made us translate some dirty poem about a guy sucking off somebody or other ...” one of them answered very matter-of-fact.
“It was Virgil,” said the girl in glasses.
“I expect you mean Catullus,” I corrected her hesitantly.
“No, because he writes
in Latin,” confirmed her friend knowingly. The other three nodded.
“So what happened?” interjected Borja.
“They were going to sack him, but he said sorry and they let him stay.”
“Besides that,” chimed in the girl in glasses very secretively, “he’s not married and lives with his mother, who’s handicapped. He’s a real weirdo.”
“You’re not kidding,” chimed in her mates.
Borja looked at me questioningly.
“I’ll tell you later,” I mumbled.
One of the advantages of living with two adolescents is that it keeps you a bit abreast of the language young people use.
“He’s a perve,” asserted the local Lolita. “He’s always looking down my top.”
It was really very hard not to stare at that girl’s swooping neckline, as she wore her blouse unbuttoned down to her navel and had no need to envy the busty charms of a Marilyn Monroe, for example. Naturally, she didn’t look a sweet sixteen.
The man with the helmet, whom we now knew was called Segimon Messegué, came back out of the building as self-engrossed as before carrying a sheaf of papers under his arm. He walked over to a motorbike, a rather battered old Vespa, and before he could put his helmet on Borja went over and accosted him.
“Mr Messegué? Segimon Messegué?” He nodded. “We’d like to talk to you for a moment. It’s about Lídia Font.”
When he heard that name, our suspect blanched and started to stammer. It looked like we’d hit the right trail this time.
“I ... I don’t ... I have to ...” was all he could mouth.
“Listen,” said Borja not batting an eyelid. “We must speak to you right away. We know what happened to Lídia Font.”
“My God!” he piped.
Borja had taken a shot in the dark and, apparently, hit the bull’s eye. What that man didn’t know is that we were as surprised as he was.
“You’re policemen, aren’t you?” he said shaking all over.
“No,” Borja shook his head. “We aren’t police. That’s why we need to talk to you immediately.”
A Not So Perfect Crime Page 21