We walked towards the lift and the concierge was quick to peer out of her cubbyhole and eye us suspiciously, as she did whenever strangers passed through her lobby. Although it was a stylish old building, most of the flats had been split up, and their owners had converted them into offices or flats for visiting executives, which meant there were few long-standing occupants, lots of strange faces and, according to Paquita, the occasional tart who went up on the sly to service an executive. As most of the offices were usually empty, Borja and I suspected they were only used as fiscal addresses to receive correspondence and sidestep the claws of the Inland Revenue. As for our office, the owner was a friend of my brother’s, who owed him a favour and let us have it for a ridiculously low rent. Although I’d asked Borja more than once what kind of favour was involved, I’d never got a straight answer.
When we reached the landing, I rang the bell and Borja quickly opened the door and welcomed Teresa Solana with one of his seductive smiles.
“Mrs Solana. I am so pleased to meet you at last,” he gushed, shaking her hand. “I imagine my partner has told you about the little problem we have in our office this morning.” Borja signalled to her to come in. “Don’t you worry. This flat belongs to a friend who’s away for the moment. We can talk here. I assure you everything will be as confidential here as it would have been in our office.”
“Well, it’s not as if I’m going to tell you any state secrets,” she replied with a smile. “Although I expect you already know quite a few…”
“Yes, and will take them to the grave,” my brother assured her in his best jocular tone as he looked her up and down.
The three of us walked down the passage to the lounge, with Borja leading the way. Although the windows were wide open and there was a through breeze, I still caught a whiff of the stench that was now blending with the smell of our vomit and Mariajo’s sophisticated perfume.
“Would you mind closing the window?” asked Teresa Solana. “I know it’s hot, but I’ve got a cold, or perhaps it’s an allergy, I’m not sure. I’ve been sneezing the whole morning.”
The truth is that the breeze was quite unpleasant and Borja rushed to shut the dining-room window. Quite unconsciously, my eyes turned to the kitchen and the swarm of flies that was flying over our heads. For the moment, Teresa Solana didn’t seem to have noticed anything.
“I am really grateful you found the time to see me,” she began. “As I told Mr Masdéu on the phone,” she continued, staring at me, “I am off on my travels tomorrow and will be away for almost a month.”
“Holidays or promotional tour?” I asked, trying to ingratiate myself.
“A bit of everything. I’ll do a little tourism between talks,” she replied.
“And while you are away, there’s a little matter you’d like us to look into in Barcelona, I believe?” Borja prompted her.
“Yes. Last week a friend suggested I should contract your services,” she confessed, crossing her legs. “Frankly, the idea would never have occurred to me.”
“Well, be assured you have come to the right place,” said Borja with a knowing smile, egging her on.
“First of all, you should tell me your rates,” she sighed. “I don’t have limitless funds, unfortunately.”
“I am sure we can agree a fee, don’t worry on that front,” my brother replied, adopting the stance of a man without a financial care in the world. “Now do tell us what’s on your mind. And do rest assured: discretion is the hallmark of our company. Not a word will leave our lips.”
“Well, there’s nothing really top secret…” responded Teresa Solana, rather taken aback.
“You take your time. We know it’s not easy to explain whatever it might be to complete strangers. Might I enquire which friend of ours recommended us?”
“Inspector Badia, of course. You do know him, don’t you? We were shooting the breeze and he mentioned you, and said you could definitely help.”
Borja and I froze there and then. The last thing we could have imagined was Inspector Jaume Badia personally advising that writer of thrillers to have recourse to our services, a woman who didn’t at all look as if she was familiar with Barcelona’s criminal underworld. The Inspector knows perfectly well that we aren’t professional detectives and are unlicensed, and is too clever by half to think our kind of endeavours are at all legal.
“The Inspector is right,” Borja reacted after a short pause. “There are certain matters where it’s best to keep the police at arm’s length.”
“You’ll perhaps think what I’m after is rather strange. I mean, I don’t know if it is the kind of work you normally undertake,” said Teresa Solana, who, despite her apparently naive, innocuous manner, was making a mental note of everything around her, us included.
“I can vouch that my partner and I are extremely versatile and have tackled projects of all shapes and sizes,” Borja was quick to reassure her yet again.
“In any case, I want you to feel it is your kind of—”
“Absolutely. Besides, I think I know what we’re talking about,” Borja winked, sprawling, his arm round the back of his chair.
“Really?”
“It might be preferable to let Mrs Solana explain herself,” I interjected, trying to stop my brother from putting his foot in it. However, Borja adopted the pose of the experienced detective who is rather ragged at the edges and slouched even more in his chair.
“You want us to keep an eye on your husband. I assume that’s what this is about?” Borja glanced at the wedding ring Teresa Solana was wearing on the ring finger of her left hand.
“My husband? Why should I want you… Ah, I see now!” She burst out laughing. “No, it’s not that. I don’t think I’ve made myself clear. It is a professional, not a personal matter.”
“Oh!” was all Borja could manage by way of response.
“Excuse me,” Teresa Solana asked, looking at the ashtray on the coffee table out of the corner of her eye. “May I smoke?”
“Well, of course!” said Borja, quickly extracting a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offering her one. That’s a piece of luck, I thought; the smell of tobacco will help hide the stink from the kitchen.
“The fact is I am writing a novel about alternative therapies,” she continued, still amused by my brother’s wild assumption.
“What kind of therapies exactly?”
“Particularly ones based on homeopathy and Bach flower remedies,” she replied. “But also any that promise to bring happiness or cure illnesses via yoga, meditation or feng shui… I’ve visited centres to see the kind of services they offer, but would like to set some of my chapters in the higher reaches of the city. That is, north of the Diagonal. I envisage it as an exclusive, luxury alternative centre. And that’s where you come in.”
“Where we come in?” echoed Borja, who was still rather shamefaced.
“When I told Inspector Badia about the project I was working on, he told me that you, Mr Masdéu, have excellent contacts in the upper side of the city.”
“That’s true enough,” purred Borja.
“I need you to find me a centre that’s in fashion, north of the Diagonal, and go there for, say, a couple of weeks and then tell me all about it: how it works, the services they offer, the treatments, the kind of people that go there… I thought you might enrol on a short course and use that as an excuse to talk to clientele and staff. Then report back to me, naturally.”
“But wouldn’t it be better if you did that yourself?” I asked. “I mean, if you need the information to write a novel, you ought to have it first-hand.”
I saw Borja give me one of his looks that killed. And I shut up.
“My problem is I’m going on my travels today and will be out of Barcelona for almost a month. And when I get back, I’ve got to go into hiding and write a couple of keynote lectures. I really don’t have time to do my own fieldwork. And my publisher wants to bring the book out in October…”
“I understand.”
“On
the other hand, I have to say, I don’t feel at ease in such places,” she continued, smiling rather nervously.
I smiled too, and nodded vigorously. I perfectly understood what she meant because I have the same problem: the rich put me on edge and I never know how to behave.
“Well then? Will you give me a hand?”
“Of course. My partner and I are highly adaptable. Aren’t we, Eduard?”
Teresa Solana started smiling again and looked much more relaxed, and she said we should organize ourselves as we thought fit, that she had full confidence in our modus operandi. She had started her novel, she confessed, but needed that information to give the story a touch of realism. After we’d agreed our fee, she signed us a cheque that Borja quickly pocketed. She stayed a while and told us how she was angling her novel, until she looked at her watch at a quarter to two and leapt up from the sofa, looking alarmed.
“You must excuse me, but my plane leaves at five and I’ve still got to pack,” she said. And then she wrinkled her nose and asked, “Can you smell something peculiar?”
“It’s the burst pipes,” explained Borja, deadpan. “The stink comes from the courtyard.”
“Yes, that’s what it must be. Good, I’ll give you a ring as soon as I’m back in town. Good luck.”
“Don’t worry. Eduard, my partner, and I will find you material to write a first-rate novel.” And, as if he’d had a kind of premonition, he kissed her hand in his gallant style and added, “No need for any worries on that front.”
3
When Teresa Solana had disappeared, Borja loosened the knot of his tie and opened the window. He then took the bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the cocktail bar.
“If you ask me, Pep, I don’t think this is the time to get plastered,” I said, putting my hand over my glass to stop him filling it. “I’d like to remind you we are in the flat of an American who is prostrate on the floor of his kitchen, apparently murdered. And right now our fingerprints are everywhere.”
“I don’t want to get plastered,” he replied. “I just want us to calm down and think through what we should do.”
“Phone the police, I imagine? What else can we do?”
“And what will we tell them? That we came up here to water the plants and found a dead man in the kitchen? That, as our office had been burgled (an office we’ve never signed a rental contract for), we took advantage of the fact we had the keys in order to see a client there – even though there was a corpse in the kitchen that we suspect to be Brian – because we didn’t want her to see inside our office that’s more like the stage-set for a comic opera?”
“Well, if you put it like that…”
“They will question us about our company and our client. And when we tell them she writes crime fiction…”
“I suppose the plot will thicken.”
“Besides, when Teresa Solana finds out, I don’t think she will be at all amused to know we saw her in a flat where a guy had been shot in the head. She’ll think it some kind of macabre joke, or worse, will be furious. And she told us she was a friend of the Inspector, don’t you forget that.”
“You know, for someone who writes thrillers, Teresa Solana wasn’t what you’d call very perceptive. I don’t reckon she noticed a thing.”
“She said she had a cold,” said Borja, shrugging his shoulders. “I expect her nose was bunged up.”
“Well, I can still smell the stink.”
“So can I. And we’ve used up all our perfume,” grumbled my brother, holding the bottle up against the light to check that it was empty.
Borja was right. We had to find a way out of that mess without being implicated. I let him pour out shots of brandy that we drank in silence, aware that Brian Morgan was not going to go away and that we had to think up something so the police would have no reason to link us to his death. While I sipped my brandy, I saw how clean and tidy our neighbour’s flat was, compared to the chaos in our office. You’d never have dreamt someone had broken in or done him in. Brian Morgan’s death bore the mark of an execution, and the mere thought made me shudder. I told Borja what my fears were and asked him yet again why he kept a set of keys to the flat of a man who’d been shot in the head and murdered.
“I’ve told you already,” he insisted in a tone of voice that suggested I was being paranoid. “One day when you weren’t around he came down to our office and gave them to me…”
“Hey, come on… You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?”
“I swear it’s the truth. He said he was always travelling and wanted a neighbour to have a duplicate set of keys in case he lost his or there was some kind of problem, like burst pipes or a gas leak. He also said he didn’t trust the concierge, and that I seemed the ideal kind of person.”
“Fuck, the guy holed in one there!” I retorted sarcastically.
“I thought he seemed plausible and I agreed to take the keys. Obviously, after what’s happened…”
“Do you have any idea what he did? His line of business?”
“I think he worked as an executive for an American company. Something to do with electrical components…”
“Do you know the name of the company?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But, Pep, what if he was a crook? Or belonged to a gang of criminals?” I suddenly blurted out.
“Hey, don’t be stupid! I’m sure there must be a straightforward explanation. Besides, Brian was a handsome guy and the women must have been after him. It’s probably a crime of passion, you just see.”
All of a sudden my brother jumped up from the sofa as if he’d remembered something very important.
“I’ll be back in a minute. I must check something…” he said, rushing into the corridor.
Borja went into the spare bedroom and straight to the wardrobe. He opened one of the doors and took out a small package hidden behind a pile of sheets. He picked it up gingerly with both hands, unwrapped it and put the contents on the bed.
“My lucky morning!” he shouted, looking visibly relieved. “I’m what you call a lucky man!”
I’m no expert in antiques or works of art, but you didn’t need to be to realize that it was a very old sculpture, like the ones you see in museums. The piece, only a few centimetres high, was an anthropomorphic representation, perhaps of some deity, with an animal head and human body. I noticed that its hind legs were missing.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“An antique.”
“I can see that much. I don’t understand how you knew it was in the wardrobe.”
“That’s easy. I put it there.”
“You did?”
“I thought it was a good hiding place. As I had the keys to the flat…”
“You mean Brian didn’t know you’d hidden it in one of his wardrobes?”
“Of course he didn’t! That was the whole point. Nobody should know.”
I took a deep breath and shook my head. I understood nothing.
“Wait a minute, Borja,” I said a few seconds later. “What if they killed him because of this sculpture? If it’s an antique, it must be worth a packet…”
“Nah, it’s too small! You can fit it in the palm of your hand… And, besides, I told you Brian knew nothing about it. Whoever killed him didn’t even turn his flat over, that much is obvious.” And he then added, sounding convinced, “It’s altogether a highly unfortunate coincidence.”
“When did you hide it?”
“Last Monday, only a week ago. Do you remember that I went to Provence with Merche?”
“Yes, you told Lola it was a business trip, but kept to yourself the fact that Merche went with you…”
“Well, it was a business trip. As I had to go to Arles to pick up this sculpture, I decided to take Merche with me. She’s been quite irritable recently. We went in her Audi. Though she doesn’t know anything about the statue either.”
“So, now you are trafficking in antiques!” I said, with a deep s
igh.
“Well, if you put it that way…”
“You tell me how else I should put it…”
“I’m really doing someone a favour. Three weeks ago I had a call from that antique dealer in Amsterdam that I sold some of your mother-in-law’s paintings to.”
“Passing them off as fake Mirs, I presume…”
“He offered me an easy, well-paid assignment: I had to go to Arles, collect this sculpture, bring it to Barcelona, keep it here for a few days and hand it over to a person who would get in touch by phone. And that was it.”
“And you couldn’t think of anything better than to hide it in the American’s flat?”
“Well, as I was helping him out by holding on to a set of keys to his flat and he—”
“He was an accomplice, but didn’t know it!”
“Something of the sort,” he concurred, looking at the floor.
We stayed silent for a while, Borja with his head down and yours truly at a loss for words. Although I knew that when my brother was really broke he acted as a middleman for a smuggler of designer mobiles and shades in the Barceloneta, I suspected this small statue belonged to a rather more perilous category of shenanigans.
“Very well then, what do we do now? I hope you get one of your bright ideas before a neighbour notices the stench and tips off the mossos…” I rasped.
“The first thing we need to do is to clean everything and remove all traces of our fingerprints. Let’s look in the laundry room and see what cleaning materials there are.”
Luckily we found everything we needed. Borja slipped an apron and rubber gloves on and asked me not to move or touch anything. He painstakingly wiped all the surfaces we’d touched with a cloth soaked in window-cleaning liquid and told me that it contained alcohol and was the best thing there was for removing fingerprints. Although chemistry had never been his strong point, I imagined he’d heard that in one of the police series he liked to watch. Then he grabbed the mop and bucket to make sure none of our vomit was still on the kitchen floor, and finally washed out the brandy glasses with soap and water, dried them and returned them to the cocktail bar along with the bottle. As soon as he’d finished, he returned his arsenal of cleaning items to the laundry room and left everything exactly as he’d found it.
Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing Page 3