A Not So Perfect Crime

by Teresa Solana

  Borja lives in a tiny attic in the upper part of Balmes that I think belongs to Merche. Although it’s a small flat, it’s decorated with expensive, exquisite good taste and a woman’s hand is in evidence. My brother, who’s a real fusspot, usually keeps everything spotlessly clean and tidy. I imagine he’s not paying any rent, because this kind of flat in that lordly part of Barcelona costs an arm and a leg.

  The flu kept him in bed for several days so we were forced to abandon any idea of going to Paris before Christmas. We decided to defer the trip to after the holidays as I refused to go by myself. All I’d do in Paris would be to have a miserable time and act the fool and that’s exactly what I told Borja. He used his convalescence to rest and recoup his energies (something he really needed to do what with Merche, Lola and this case), and I made Montse happy by helping with the Christmas preparations and with Arnau. I can’t deny that that year Montse and I were in very high spirits. Thanks to the MP, seasonal prospects looked better than we’d predicted, for the first time in many years. Moreover, Montse had decided against turning vegetarian, Lola had left us alone for a few days and the twins’ school marks weren’t as bad as we’d feared. Everything seemed to be going full steam ahead, so I allowed myself the luxury of relaxing a little and took advantage of Borja’s flu and the Fonts’ holidays in Baqueira to lose myself in a thriller Montse had given me as a St George’s Day present and that I’d yet to open.

  10

  Christmas Day was almost over when the telephone rang. Although it was nine o’clock, I was still in bed trying to sleep off my lunch because, as happens every year, I’d wolfed down too much Catalan stew, capon, turrón, vermouth, wine and cava, not to mention the liqueurs. The girls were watching television and Montse, who’d just got up, was tidying the kitchen. Arnau was sleeping like an angel, oblivious to parental stomach upsets and hangovers. I couldn’t remember how I’d made it to our bed. All I do know is that when my mother-in-law gave me the usual two farewell smackers to the cheek at around seven, the smell of cognac from her stale breath blotted out the wave of cheap perfume she’d been giving off since she arrived.

  “It’s Borja,” announced a surprised Montse. “He’s seems to be in a bit of a state. I think something’s up.”

  I got up reluctantly, with a thick head and furry mouth. Borja would be coming to lunch tomorrow, as it was Boxing Day. Montse had insisted on inviting him, I expect Lola played a hand in that, and his call was most likely to be an advance apology to spare himself that squirming experience.

  “Get ready. I’ll be round in twenty minutes to pick you up,” he muttered down the phone.

  “What the hell do you mean? It’s Christmas Day!” I protested. “Do you want Montse on my back? Besides, I’ve got a hangover ...”

  “Eduard, it’s urgent,” he said unabashed.

  “There can’t be anything that urgent today!” I repeated. “Get yourself to bed. See you tomorrow.”

  “It’s Lídia Font. She’s not with us any more,” he said before I managed to hang up. “It looks like she’s been murdered. In her own home.”

  “Good God!”

  “The MP called me and asked us to come straight away. They’re still waiting for the judge to arrive.”

  “And what the fuck are we supposed to do?” I started to get as alarmed as him. “I mean that painting is one thing: a murder is quite something else.”

  My wife, who was standing next to me, gave a start when she heard the word “murder” and listened hard. When I did hang up, I’d have some explaining to do. I needed to think of something credible.

  “Get a move on,” my brother insisted. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” And he hung up on me.

  As I had no time to invent an explanation, I decided to tell Montse the truth. MP Lluís Font had contracted us to make some enquiries into a painting he’d bought in Paris, and, as my partner had just told me on the phone, his wife had been murdered and he wanted us go to his house as quickly as possible. I didn’t tell her that the painting in question was a portrait of his wife.

  “What kind of enquiry?” she asked. Her tone was half anxious, half curious. “I thought you and Borja were financial advisers?”

  “That’s right, but paintings and works of art are also investments, as you know ...”

  “Well I don’t understand how the hell your line of business can involve a murder,” she argued. “Was it a break and entry? Or perhaps he did it? Yes, that must be it! ... It’s yet another case of domestic violence!”

  “I really don’t think so, love ...” I responded as I started to get dressed. I was praying Borja would come quickly and spare me this interrogation. “It’s probably a burglary, as you—”

  “I don’t know why you have to get involved in some thing like this ...” she grumbled. “On Christmas Day! ... You’d better go carefully, particularly if politicians are mixed up in it. We know what lengths they can ...” She arched her eyebrows and looked dead serious. “Listen to me and keep your distance, Eduard. I’ve a funny feeling, a kind of presentiment here in my tummy.”

  “No, you’ve got a bad case of seasonal indigestion, like me. Besides, I can’t leave Borja in the thick of it.”

  “You say it’s to do with an MP?” she asked, her curiosity well and truly aroused. “Which party? Is he right wing or left wing?”

  “It just so happens,” I had to confess, “that he’s on the right.”

  “So you work for them now ...”

  Montse made me feel as if I’d sold my soul to a group of extra-terrestrials set on exterminating the planet.

  “So do you ask your customers which party they vote for?” I asked as if shocked. “Beggars can’t be choosers nowadays, Montse. You know that only too well.”

  “I reckon this is all very strange.”

  And then, in that icy tone that only women can muster, she pronounced those terrible words that somebody should erase from the dictionary.

  “We need to talk.”

  We were beginning to have a problem. Until now Montse had swallowed the brief explanations I’d given her about my work, but it now looked like she’d be giving me the third-degree treatment. I’d be forced to tell more and more lies and, knowing my poor memory, would soon give myself away. A little red light started to flash in some corner of my brain.

  “Come on, darling, they probably stole the painting as well ...” I insisted. I knew, however, that Lluís Font had that safely tucked away in his office. “Borja said he’d tell me all on the way. Do me a favour and rustle up a coffee while I have a wash and finish getting dressed. My belly’s about to explode ...”

  “I told you you were eating too much turrón. You lot scoffed every bit of the chocolate one.”

  “Your mother outdid me, she soaked up a bottle of Torres 10 single-handed.”

  “Don’t exaggerate!” she smiled, putting the coffee on to heat up.

  Fortunately, the girls as well as being glued to the telly, had their earphones in and didn’t hear a thing. And if that wasn’t enough, they were amusing themselves sending text messages on the mobiles we’d given them for Christmas. (Thanks to Borja, these had come at a bargain price.) I’d just downed a cup of hot coffee when the doorbell rang downstairs. I breathed a sigh of relief. It had only taken him fifteen minutes.

  “I’ll be down straight away,” I said over the intercom as I hurriedly put my coat on.

  I kissed Montse and ran downstairs without waiting for the lift: when I went out into the street, another surprise awaited me. It was snowing, apparently had been for some time, and a very fine layer of white powder was forming on cars and pavements. As it was night-time and curtains were drawn, we’d not noticed the snow falling. I tried to tell Montse over the entryphone, because snow is headline news in Barcelona.

  “Montse, look out of the window! It’s snowing!” I shouted without a response. The system doesn’t work very well but we unneighbourly neighbours can’t reach an agreement to get it changed.

 
“Come on, hurry up!” exclaimed Borja impatiently.

  My brother was waiting in a taxi whose engine was running and I had to get in quickly. He looked exhausted but seemed to have recovered from his bout of flu. He also seemed pretty excited.

  “What a business! On Christmas Day as well!” I said as I settled down next to him. “Did he push her?”

  “Shush! Not so loud!” he warned lifting a finger to his lips.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “But did he?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I mean ... I don’t really think so.”

  “Perhaps he had a bad turn. He told his wife about the painting, they rowed and ...” I whispered so the taxi driver couldn’t hear.

  “It’s not this kind of person’s style,” Borja shook his head. “Men like Lluís Font don’t kill their wives when they discover they’re having a bit on the side. They ring their lawyers or find solace with their secretary,” he pontificated.

  “In a nutshell, you haven’t got a clue,” I concluded.

  As it happened, Lluís Font had phoned Borja and merely asked him to go round to his house because something terrible had happened. On the other hand, our taxi driver, who looked intrigued, was more attentive to our whispers than to his driving. My brother signalled to me to pipe down.

  “When we get there, let me do the talking.”

  In fact, I always did, but I was bemused to know how Borja would justify our sudden appearance at the Font household to the police or the judge. I thought of our company that didn’t exist and the taxes we didn’t pay, I imagined the forensic crew checking out our office and discovering there was only brick and plaster behind the flash mahogany doors ... and felt a lump in my stomach. I also remembered that the only dead I’d ever seen were peacefully tucked into a coffin in the morgue, surrounded by flowers, their faces polished, and the mere thought I might soon be in the presence of a bloody corpse, possibly disfigured or mutilated to boot made me go weak at the knees. I felt my stomach begin to go queasy and was afraid I’d be sick there and then. I desperately needed a cigarette but it’s been years since you could smoke in a taxi.

  As we drew nearer the upper reaches of the city, Barcelona was slowly transforming as the flurries of snowflakes got bigger and whiter. There wasn’t a soul in the streets, which were eerily silent and phantasmagorical under the Christmas lights. What a cruel paradox – amid the peace of that white Christmas we were heading to the scene of a crime.

  In front of Lluís Font’s house we saw an ambulance, a fire engine, three police cars and people who looked like journalists. Apparently, the police were expecting us, because they let us straight through when we gave them our names and explained the MP was waiting for us. For obvious reasons, Borja told them he’d left his documentation at home and they were content just to inspect my ID. The journalists warmed towards us when we got out of the taxi, but we were canny and our lips remained sealed.

  An Oriental-looking slip of a girl opened the door to us, in a black satin uniform with white pinafore and cap. She was frightened.

  “Sir in drawing room, with poleece. Lots of poleece,” she said waving her hands wildly. “Ladee dead suddenlee. Sir come now. Wait him here!”

  Lluís Font took less than a minute to come and welcome us. He looked concerned but seemed to be in control of the situation.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” he said, looking serious as he held out a hand to Borja. “Something terrible has happened.”

  Borja hugged him and gave him his deeply felt condolences, as if they were lifelong friends. I merely shook his hand and said how sorry I was.

  “The judge hasn’t come yet,” he informed us. “They can’t locate him, apparently. The police have photographed everything, but I’d like you to take a discreet look. They won’t try to stop you.”

  “Naturally,” replied Borja, assuming a very professional air, heaven knows on what basis. I just followed behind, praying I wouldn’t make a fool of myself and faint if there was blood all around.

  We accompanied the MP down a spacious passageway full of paintings by famous artists (including, of course, a couple of Tàpies), until we reached a reception room that was as big as my flat. I was very struck by the fact that everything inside was white: the walls, the furniture, the settees, the carpets, the ashtrays, the porcelain vases, the flowers ... Even the decorations on the huge Christmas tree, standing in a corner by the fireplace, were silvery. All the lines in that interior design magazine idyll converged on Lídia Font’s lifeless body that, dressed in red, was lying theatrically on one of the carpets.

  Both her long elegant party dress and her high-heeled shoes were a bright fiery red. The shoes reminded me of the ones she wore in the painting reproduced in the catalogue her husband had showed us a few days ago, although they weren’t the same ones. I looked at her, looked at Borja, and scratched my nose as decorously as I could so my brother realized the deceased was wearing one of the two colours he cannot see. It seemed as if Lídia had been placed there to give the room a touch of colour, and I thought how she had class even in death. Her eyes were wide open and her face was contracted in a horrible grimace of pain, but there were no bloodstains and she didn’t appear to have any wounds. A thread of saliva and blood dribbled almost imperceptibly from her lips.

  “God!” I muttered, feeling my legs giving way.

  “Everything seems to indicate that death was instantaneous,” the MP explained, as if that made the scene somehow less horrific. I noticed our client’s face was tense but that his eyes remained dry.

  I wouldn’t have been at all shocked if at that moment I’d just woken up half-frozen in bed next to Montse, because she always eases the bedspread her way and leaves my body exposed to the elements. There are experiences you live in the middle of a hangover that blur into a dreamy haze. That huge white room, the white snow falling outside and Lídia Font’s corpse wrapped in a spectacular red dress seemed more a figment of a film director’s hallucinations than a scene from the real world.

  “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?” shouted one of the policemen.

  That brought me back to earth. I’d gone into a complete daydream contemplating the scene of the disaster (and embarrassingly, in a way enjoying an experience one might describe as aesthetic) and had ignored my brother’s antics.

  “Hey, this man’s eaten one of those sweets! ...” said the policeman. “Do you feel OK, sir?”

  Borja was by the piano at the other end of the room, and had just wolfed down a sweet from the box open on its top.

  “What do you mean?” Borja went pale.

  The police observed him for a few seconds, not sure what to do, and finally one of them said: “Well, it’s really not the sweets, sergeant ...”

  “It’s really not what?” Borja asked faintly.

  “Fucking hell! What the hell are we going to tell the judge now?” roared the policeman who seemed to be in charge. “You’ve eaten just our evidence under our bloody noses. Some fucking Christmas! (If you’ll forgive my French). All we needed! ...”

  “Calm down, sergeant ...”

  “Calm down, you’re bloody joking ...” The policeman was beginning to sweat, clearly nervous. “We shouldn’t have let anyone in here. And you should have been more on the ball, Capdemuny!”

  “Casademunt, sergeant. My name is Casademunt,” the man being spoken to had a strong Catalan accent.

  “Are you sure you feel all right?” asked the MP, looking genuinely concerned.

  “I don’t know, I think so ... I’m sorry, it was a reflex action. I have a great weakness for marrons glacés.” He explained to the police. “And they’re not sweets by the way ...” Borja suddenly understood what had happened and was frightened. “What do you mean by ‘evidence’? Do you think there’s something wrong with them?”

  “These gentlemen believe they may have a case of poisoning on their hands ...” the MP whispered.

  “I need a cognac,” said Borja sounding faint
as he reached for the bottle of French cognac on the coffee table next to the body.

  “Noooo!” we all chorused.

  Apparently, just before she’d dropped dead, Lídia Font had poured herself a glass of cognac and opened the box of titbits. The Christmas wrapping paper was still there, and I noted how the box and the paper came from the renowned Foix de Sarrià patisserie. Only two marrons glacés were missing. The one swallowed by Borja and the other, presumably, by the woman stretched out on the floor.

  “My wife also had a weak spot for marrons glacés,” the MP explained. “She was fanatical about them in fact. They’re the only thing she wouldn’t do without, although she was always on a diet. She could eat them by the plateful.”

  On this occasion, it was obvious that glamorous Mrs Font had only had time to eat one. The judge still hadn’t showed up (the turmoil had begun in the Font household after seven, but it was now gone ten o’clock and the police were still trying to locate the relevant judge). In the mean time, the three policemen in the drawing room, now clearly at their wits’ end, didn’t take their eyes off us.

  The MP took a deep breath and started to tell us what had happened.

  “It must have been about seven thirty and everybody had left. We were having a family meal, and had invited our closest relatives as we do every year: my parents, my in-laws, my brother Xavier, his wife and three children, Lídia’s sister and ourselves. When they left, I shut myself up in my office to make a few calls and Lídia stayed in the drawing room leafing through a magazine.” He paused, as if needing to recover his aplomb. “The girl” – he meant the Philippine in her immaculate uniform who’d opened the door to us – “was tidying up in here. Apparently, Lídia started to scream and writhe in pain, and collapsed. The girl came and told me at once but by the time I got here she already seemed to be dead. She was as you see her now. I couldn’t feel any pulse. I ran and called an ambulance, thinking she must have had a heart attack,” he said, head lowered.