Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing

by Teresa Solana

  Just like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, the fifth Lord Ashtray had inherited the first lord’s fondness for banquets, a propensity to develop gout, and the habit of ignoring his doctor’s advice. So much so that when his faithful butler, George, entered the library, Lord Ashtray had just poured himself a second cognac that was so generous poor George had to strive to stop raising an eyebrow in an imperceptible sign of disapproval. Even though it was almost the merry month of May, the English countryside was still cold, and Lord Ashtray, like almost all of his forebears, preferred to have recourse to cognac for a little heat rather than to those simply dreadful jerseys that winter after winter his wife knitted him from the wool of the sheep that grazed in his meadows.

  “Milord, your secretary has arrived. He’s just parking the car,” his butler announced, rescuing him from his flow of thoughts.

  “Thank you, George. Tell him to report here immediately.”

  Lord Ashtray put the book down on the small table, sipped his cognac and smiled. The big moment had come at last. Thirty-five years after his father had lost it in a poker game, the Baghdad Lioness would be back with the family. The fourth Lord Ashtray, now deceased, had always cursed and sworn he’d lost the Lioness because Lord Marlowe had cheated, whereas Lord Marlowe, for his part, had been telling anyone who wanted to listen for the past thirty years that the night when Lord Ashtray lost the Lioness he was so drunk he’d have bet anything in order to carry on gambling. In fact, the fourth Lord Ashtray had gone so far as to stake his wife, but as Lady Ashtray’s beauty was wholly internal and not even the gamekeeper wanted a piece, Lord Marlowe had refused to accept her and had challenged Lord Ashtray by saying he hadn’t the spunk to bet the Baghdad Lioness. Lord Ashtray wasn’t short of spunk after the pints he’d sunk; what he didn’t have, however, was an ounce of nous.

  The lioness with the rippling muscles was a unique item, and when the first Lord Ashtray had purchased it from a tinker for a few shillings it was already missing its hind legs. When he returned to England, the small statue had continued to gather dust in the attics of Lifestyle Ends for years, relegated to the bottom of the trunk where the first Lord Ashtray kept his military kit and souvenirs from his time in Iraq. The first Lord Ashtray only discovered the real value of the sculpture many years later, when a young archaeologist from the British Museum was naive enough to tell him it was unique rather than offer to buy it from him for the few pounds he would readily have accepted. The archaeologist’s naïveté and the first Lord Ashtray’s greed prevented the British Museum from exhibiting that wonder in its display cases, and from that day onwards the statue became part of the collection of oriental junk – as the first Lady Ashtray called it – initiated by the first lord and continued by his descendants.

  Mr Charles Slothman, Lord Ashtray’s secretary, knocked timidly on the door and walked into the library. He had only been in his service for eight months, after the sudden death of his predecessor in circumstances that, given his age and fondness for a little S&M, weren’t as strange as some tried to make out. Charles was still scared of putting a foot wrong.

  “Come over here, Slothman. Don’t stand there like an Aunt Sally!” roared Lord Ashtray from his armchair. “You’ve got the package, I trust?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Slothman, coming over and placing a poorly gift-wrapped package next to the ashtray and balloon of brandy.

  “No mishaps?”

  “None whatsoever, sir. All concluded most satisfactorily.”

  “Thank you, Slothman. Go and ask them to make you a cup of tea in the kitchen. Oh, and do tell George I don’t want anyone bothering me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lord Ashtray’s private secretary silently left the library, his cheeks flushing a deep red. Fancy sending him off to the kitchen like the errand boy! He was a man with two degrees, a doctorate and a master’s from Cambridge! And all because his brilliant future had been suddenly curtailed by a clutch of unfortunate incidents sparked by his students at Eton, who’d continuously teased him with their adolescent bodies and bulging Calvin Klein crotches. His devastating dismissal had forced him to enter the service of an ignorant, despotic millionaire who took advantage of that shameful stain on his CV to treat him like soiled linen, but one day his luck would change. The downcast Mr Slothman sloped off to the kitchen, swearing that one day he would wreak revenge on Lord Ashtray for the humiliations he had inflicted on him from his lofty position as a fat, self-satisfied aristocrat.

  In the meantime, Lord Ashtray had picked up the package and started to unwrap it. As he trusted no one (especially after he’d discovered his own sister had walked through the countryside emulating Lady Godiva in protest against fox-hunting), Lord Ashtray had personally organized the theft. The fifth Lord Ashtray considered the recovery of the Baghdad Lioness a matter of honour, and, as Lord Marlowe wasn’t prepared to relinquish it, not even for a sum that had been calculated it would fetch at a Sotheby’s auction, Lord Ashtray had decided to take action and hire an experienced gang of crooks to steal the statue. That gambit had cost him the earth, but money was no problem for the lord. Unlike other tawdry, blue-blooded aristocrats with empty coffers who’d been forced to marry off their daughters to foreign magnates or open their mansions to the public in exchange for paltry tax relief, Lord Ashtray was proud that he didn’t have to sell off his title or change his Lifestyle Ends estate into a Victorian theme park for Japanese and superannuated tourists. As long as he lived, foreigners or middle-class snobs wouldn’t be poking their noses into his house and photographing it with their digital cameras. And if Lord Ashtray had one thing, apart from two useless sons and the gout that also gave him pain day in, day out, it was money. And if one had money, they had taught him at the select boarding school where he had studied, there was nothing in this world one could not do.

  Twenty years ago Lord Marlowe, who was now in his nineties, had moved to Provence in search of bluer skies, less primitive cooking and, above all, proximity to the casino in Monte Carlo. Lord Marlowe had left his wife in England and brought with him his butler, his collection of pornographic magazines and his antiques. The Baghdad Lioness was, needless to say, the apple of his eye, not for its monetary or archaeological value, which he didn’t care a fig about, but for what it symbolized: his victory over his eternal rival.

  As neighbours, the respective families of Lord Ashtray and Lord Marlowe had been enemies for more than a century, despite the fact that at this point in history neither of the two lineages could recall what had sparked the original quarrel. The house Lord Marlowe owned near Arles was a fortress, but the eight million euros Lord Ashtray had offered a band of crooks to get him the Lioness meant the brains of that gang of thieves had worked overtime until they’d thought of a way to steal the statue without killing anyone, let alone Lord Marlowe, a requisite Lord Ashtray had laid down as non-negotiable, because he wanted to see the foolish look on his old neighbour’s face when he realized his sculpture had been stolen. In the event, Lord Marlowe’s ancient butler, James, took two days to realize that the Lioness had fled its case, since he always refused to have an operation on his cataracts and was as blind as a bat. By the time the police came to the Marlowe estate, the statue was already out of the country.

  The plan was perfect and its execution superb. The mercenaries stole the statue and gave it to the man who spoke French, though one thief thought he might be Spanish. The man, who’d been recommended to Lord Ashtray by a Dutch antiquarian fond of high jinks, transported it to Barcelona in an Audi driven by a woman. In Barcelona the man was to hold on to the antique until things calmed down and Lord Ashtray’s secretary contacted him.

  In principle, Mr Charles Slothman was personally going to travel to Barcelona to pick up the statue. Mr Slothman and the man acting as postman didn’t know each other and neither knew what the package contained. “That is confidential information” was all Lord Ashtray would let on. Mr Slothman, whose alternative job of
fers had included home deliverer of pizzas or call-centre operator in India, had decided to ask no questions and obediently do as he was told.

  However, a few hours before boarding his flight, an untimely attack of gastroenteritis had left Mr Slothman a prisoner of his toilet bowl. Even so, Mr Slothman was nothing if not resourceful, and, when he saw he couldn’t go to Barcelona in person to pick up the package, he grabbed his mobile, and, without budging from that bowl, rang Emily, an old girlfriend who’d yet to hear about the miserable episode in Eton, and invited her to spend the weekend with him in London. The girl worked for a translation and English-teaching agency in Barcelona and earned a pittance giving classes to executives with no gift for languages, and as she had discovered it wasn’t as easy as she had imagined to get off with the city’s footballers or famous architects, she accepted his invitation straightaway. And she would also be very happy to transport a small package that, according to Mr Slothman, was a present for his mother. The butler’s mother had passed away a year ago: the young woman wasn’t to know that.

  Mr Slothman went to Gatwick to welcome Emily and drove her back to a hotel in Bloomsbury with the promise of an unforgettable weekend. As soon as they reached the hotel, he pretended to get a call on his mobile and apologized, saying that Lord Ashtray needed to see him urgently. Emily in fact felt relieved to see him disappear because Charlie wasn’t what he used to be and she happily bid farewell to her ex-boyfriend as he grabbed the package, got into the car and disappeared down the streets of London on his way back to Lifestyle Ends.

  While Mr Slothman was eating an egg sandwich and drinking a cup of tea in the kitchen, listening absent-mindedly to the cook’s interminable complaints about the ridiculous diets Lady Ashtray forced her to prepare on behalf of her quest for weight loss, Lord Ashtray was in the library opening the sealed envelope and smiling contentedly. However, his smile soon changed to a grimace of disbelief and then rage: all there was inside the envelope was a chrome-metal keyring that had been poorly gift-wrapped. Lord Ashtray’s face went as red as the velvet curtains that draped the library’s picture windows, and Lady Ashtray, who at that precise moment had come into the room to complain of the way the gardener had fiddled with her roses, reacted with extreme alarm.

  “What’s this? We’re back on the brandy, are we?” she snapped. “For Christ’s sake, one of these days you’ll have a stroke that will reduce you to a gibbering idiot!” She turned round and went off to the kitchen to prepare him an infusion of chestnut buds. The fourth Lady Ashtray’s grandmother, who was Welsh, had learnt from Dr Bach in person how to prepare his floral cures and had spent half her life pouring these infusions into her husband.

  While his wife stirred in the kitchen, Lord Ashtray’s brain slowly flickered back to life. That pathetic Slothman couldn’t possibly have betrayed him, he decided: in the first place, because he thought he was a fool, and, in the second, because Lord Ashtray knew his secretary was a coward and wouldn’t have dared disobey his instructions. As Lord Ashtray was unaware of Emily’s existence because Mr Slothman had failed to mention the fact he personally hadn’t gone to Barcelona to collect the package, Lord Ashtray’s thoughts turned to the gang of mercenaries he’d contracted to carry out the theft. Those men, nevertheless, were professionals and must be aware that it would be impossible to place such a valuable statue on the black market without him finding out sooner or later. Besides, they knew who they were dealing with, and eight million euros was too much money to risk being chased by another gang of hit men hired by a furious English aristocrat. No, he could swear they weren’t behind this. There could be only one other possibility: the man who had transported the statue from Arles to Barcelona and had had it in his possession for three weeks. What was his name now? No matter, he would ask his antiquarian friend in Amsterdam and would have him dealt with.

  While he pondered his plan to wreak revenge and recover the Lioness, Lord Ashtray started playing with the keyring and found the small spring. He was intrigued, pressed it and the ring opened halfway down. Lord Ashtray found a tiny metal object inside he was hard-put to identify. Finally, after taking a long look, he realized it was a memory stick and went straight to his computer. Perhaps it wasn’t a theft, but a case of kidnapping, Lord Ashtray ruminated, and he would find instructions in the stick on how to salvage his lioness.

  Lord Ashtray opened the only document it held and understood nothing. No rescue message showed on the screen, only a series of numbers and peculiar letters that made no sense at all. In a fury, Lord Ashtray extracted the memory stick and threw it furiously at the waste-paper basket along with the keyring, letting out blood-curdling curses and profanities that must have made the cheeks of Lord Ashtray in the portrait blush. The fifth lord didn’t like computers or mobiles, or the Internet for that matter; he reckoned all that technology made life far too complicated. Computers also left traces on the net that it was best to avoid in his line of business. Grim-faced, he selected another cigar, poured himself a third balloon of brandy, lolled back in his wing armchair and fumed.

  His wife walked into the library with his chestnut-bud tisane, but, when she saw the murderous look her husband gave her, she opted to make a discreet exit and retrace her steps without saying a word. Lord Ashtray didn’t budge. An imbecile had enjoyed a laugh at his expense and now possessed a small stone statue that was five thousand years old and didn’t belong to him. Under the severe gaze of his great-great-grandfather, Lord Ashtray took another swig of brandy and swore he would not rest until the item was restored to his family. Yes, Lord Ashtray speculated with an evil grin, he would recover the Baghdad Lioness, and, as soon as it was back in his grasp, he would ensure that the fool who had dared to steal what was rightfully his suffered a death as slow as it was painful.

  All the situations and characters in this novel are fictitious.

  The “Baghdad Lioness” is inspired by the small sculpture known as the “Guennol Lioness” that was discovered in the 1920s by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley while excavating near Baghdad. It bears that name after the name of the mansion, Guennol, the property of its last owner, the American collector Alastair Bradley Martin. “Guennol” is Welsh for “martin” in English. Sotheby’s auctioned it at the end of 2007 and the statue was purchased by an English collector, who remains anonymous, for the sum of $57.16 million, a figure that was, at the time, the highest sum ever paid for a sculpture at auction.

  A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

  Teresa Solana

  Murder and Mayhem in Barcelona

  Another day in Barcelona, another politician’s wife is

  suspected of infidelity. A portrait of his wife in an exhibition

  leads Lluís Font to conclude he is being cuckolded by the artist.

  Concerned only about the potential political fallout, he hires

  twins Eduard and Borja, private detectives with a knack for

  helping the wealthy with their “dirty laundry”. Their office is

  adorned with false doors leading to non-existent private rooms

  and a mysterious secretary who is always away. The case turns

  ugly when Font’s wife is found poisoned by a marron glacé

  from a box of sweets delivered anonymously.

  PRAISE FOR A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

  “The Catalan novelist Teresa Solana has come up

  with a delightful mystery set in Barcelona…

  Clever, funny and utterly unpretentious.” Sunday Times

  “Solana’s stylish and witty debut makes entertaining reading, and

  her two characters, the suave, quick-thinking Borja and anxious,

  law-abiding Eduard, make a good contrast as they weave their

  way through an increasingly murky mystery.” The Telegraph

  “She paints a glorious picture of an urbane and lubricious

  Hispanic lifestyle as the brothers gumshoe their way through

  cocktail bars and tapas joints.” Times Literary Supplementr />
  This deftly plotted, bitingly funny mystery novel and satire

  of Catalan politics won the 2007 Brigada 21 Prize.

  £8.99/$14.95

  Crime Paperback Original

  ISBN 978-1904738-343

  eBook

  ISBN 978-1904738-787

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  A SHORTCUT TO PARADISE

  Teresa Solana

  The shady, accident-prone private detective twins

  Eduard Martínez and Borja “Pep” Masdéu are back.

  Another murder beckons, and this time the victim

  is one of Barcelona’s literary glitterati.

  Marina Dolç, media figure and writer of bestsellers, is murdered

  in the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona on the night she wins an important

  literary prize. The killer has battered her to death with the

  trophy she has just won, an end identical to that of the heroine

  in her prize-winning novel.

  The same night the Catalan police arrest their chief suspect,

  Amadeu Cabestany, runner-up for the prize. Borja and Eduard

  are hired to prove his innocence. The unlikely duo is plunged

  into the murky waters of the Barcelona publishing scene and

  need all their wit and skills of improvisation to solve this case of

  truncated literary lives.