Margot's Secrets

by Don Boyd

  “One day, you will see. All of my digital dexterity will pay off with a case which will be solved with my equipment!”

  Elvira ignored him.

  At last a case was providing him with an unusually rich opportunity to justify this indulgence, and his visit to Margot was to be the trial-run for the opening salvo in a display of technological prowess unrivalled in the annals of Barcelona’s famously efficient and modernised police force. Elvira had provided him with some background about Margot without stepping outside the boundaries of her friendship with her American friend. Although they had never met, Carlos had a strong idea of her character but very little idea of the life and the world she inhabited. He had discovered from his inevitably limited police enquiries within the Spanish psychotherapy hierarchy that she was a brilliant and highly qualified psychologist and he knew that she had considerable experience treating patients in extreme forms of sexual behaviour.

  When he arrived, he apologised. He hoped that his appearance had not in any way disturbed her working day. Margot found him to be as delightful as Elvira had described.

  “Absolutely not, it is my pleasure. I think of Elvira like a sister. She has told me what a special man you are!”

  “I wish she would tell me that one day!” he chuckled, and politely asked Margot to pull down the blinds. Then, on all fours, he negotiated her room with at least half a dozen wires.

  “What on earth are you doing down there, Señor Mendoza?”

  “I need you to see something. In the best way, as it was intended. And call me Carlos, please,” he mumbled from below the table.

  “Why me in particular, Carlos?”

  Carlos didn’t answer and went about setting up a couple of monitoring screens, a quartet of speakers and a computer. Margot was baffled. She didn’t really understand why Carlos hadn’t asked her to come to his office in the police headquarters which were five minutes away, just off Las Ramblas. And he was behaving a little like an amateur projectionist in a cinema club with a new toy.

  “Please, sit down,” he asked her, and then pressed a button or two on the console in his hand and all the screens exploded with a set of brightly coloured bars, and the speakers screeched with a long, penetrating sound tone.

  “Pardon me, señora!”

  The tone disappeared, and the coloured bars faded into black. Carlos smiled sheepishly.

  The film began with one long, uninterrupted shot of the great Gothic Cathedral of Santa Maria in the centre of town, as if someone were entering the church. The camera finally settled, looking up at an effigy of a saint. A hand came out in front of the lens and lit three votive candles, placing them neatly to illuminate the effigy: a woman. The camera moved to an inscription in Spanish, “St Eulalia, martyred for her beliefs, 12th February 304 AD.”

  The voice on the soundtrack was Tilly’s. Margot knew very little about this Catalan saint but she remembered something about the local legend connected with her pallbearers – they had apparently struggled with her coffin as they bore her remains to a new prized spot in the Santa Maria. When they investigated, it turned out that her heart had turned to concrete. Why had Tilly not told her about this film? Let alone mention the saint who was so obviously the object of an obsession.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “This is the film we found on a back-up file on the disc drive of the computer next to their bodies. We also suspect that it has been posted on an Internet website.”

  The effigy of Saint Eulalia faded away and a black title card came onto the screen.

  “This film is dedicated to Margot, the only woman who might be able to understand it!”

  Margot was aghast.

  “I am not sure I do understand. Is this me?”

  “There are very few Margot’s in Barcelona and as far as I know you are the only Margot known by Señora Milliken. Domatilla Milliken… The film is a replica of the script we also found at the crime scene.”

  The policeman’s English was much better than he pretended. Margot felt that she understood him; Elvira was right to be proud and protective.

  But Margot was also transfixed by what she was looking at, and as Tilly began to take her through the life of her saintly heroine, she wondered if the entire exercise had been mounted for her benefit. Perhaps Tilly knew that she was going to die when she began to make her videogram. Perhaps the film is a cipher, a cri du coeur, or some sort of weird electronic suicide note… Carlos lit a cigarette and then realised that this was probably a no-smoking room and put it out. Margot smiled and continued to watch.

  Paolo was now digging a hole in the sand on the Barcelona beach. This was very cleverly staged: poetic landscape shots, intercut with mini-sequences of Tilly as if she was a Saint in a painting by Fra Angelico. Vivid turquoise featured heavily, as did The Cross of St. George. Altars. Angels. Monks. Monasteries… these were all visualised without, as if in a very accurately-designed period film – no cars, satellite dishes, modern buildings. She was preaching, kneeling, reading, sleeping, eating, praying and in the last of these paintings she seemed to be in a jail.

  “This is so strange… weird. It’s also very unsettling, Inspector. It’s difficult to believe that she didn’t mention any of this to me. I thought I knew her so well. She was so open.”

  “I am so sorry it is upsetting you…”

  The next image was a sustained shot of MACBA, Barcelona’s celebrated museum of modern art. Tilly’s voice began to describe a recent visit there and then explained her enthusiasm for an artist called Günter Brus. Tilly’s voice:

  “How can we possibly come close to understanding the agonies that martyrs like St Eulalia were put through during their trials, torture sessions and eventual crucifixion? Clues might come from the experiences chronicled by an Austrian artist called Günter Brus. He was one of the most important artists working in Europe during the early sixties. His vibrant early paintings were macabre self-portraits whose roots lay in both Goya’s darkest work, the work of Antonin Artaud, known as Theatre of Cruelty, and the work of some of the American abstract impressionists of the 1950’s. He began to develop the notion that pictures should no longer be simply two-dimensional objects executed objectively by an artist, but that they should become ‘events’, and should be kinetic. Rather than be in any way representational and just show the world, the work of art should be part of the living world. He soon became one of the most influential pioneers of an art form popular then, known as ‘happenings’ or ‘Action Painting’. After some experiments with his wife – she became a living painting – he produced his most revolutionary works in 1964 and 1965, Selbstbemalung 1, Self-Painting 1 and Sebstverstummelung, Self-Mutilation 2. Brus announced that his own body was the sole source of artistic expression and he presented it, like a still life, along with piercing and cutting objects to highlight its fragility. In time this led to his two greatest challenges to conventional art – Sheer Madness and Breaking Test. His public performances and the films he made from them provoked such a furore that he was arrested, tried and imprisoned.”

  During this period of commentary the film showed a series of simple pictures of what was presumably examples of the illustrative work – a photograph of the artist in some sort of plaster caste with what appeared to be a large bloody scar stretching from the back of his bald head, down through his face, and ending on his throat. Adjacent to this image was an axe. But at no stage in this section were there any moving images, movies. After this, a long, very smooth tracking shot into an image which was clearly supposed to represent St. Eulalia. Tilly’s voice began to take on an almost supernatural texture, speaking in another language.

  “This is ancient Catalan. She is saying that she is becoming St. Eulalia!”

  “Thank you, Carlos.”

  Margot was now transfixed but her engagement with the film turned to semi-hysteria during the next sequence, heralded with a stark title in black and white that read:

  This is my story. This is the story of Eulalia.
She is my spirit. She was I and I am she. I live through her and she lived in the certain knowledge that within centuries she would live through me. She died for me and I will die for her…

  A large white space. Tilly, sitting cross-legged on the floor, naked. Various objects scattered around the floor: a large pair of surgical scissors; a pint-sized beer mug; a bucket; a chisel – again gleaming like a surgical instrument. Off camera, a male voice then gave a command in what seemed again to be ancient Catalan. There was an English subtitle for this command. Tilly reacted to the command obediently and slowly took a knife and began to quite literally mutilate her body with light lacerations to her skin…

  “I can’t take this anymore, Carlos…”

  Something about the voice disturbed Margot more than the fact that someone else had been involved in their exploits. Its tone was familiar but she was at a loss to work out why. Had she heard this voice before?

  Margot rushed from the room, projecting herself onto the floor of the adjacent bathroom. She threw up, violently. Pale-faced, she returned to her room and sat in the chair usually reserved for her patients. Carlos had switched off the DVD machine and was standing at the window with his back to the room. Silence between them. A child was laughing in the communal courtyard below. A bicycle bell.

  “I have done some research into the work of Señor Brus. There is even some of his work at MACBA now. He did indeed spend time in a prison in Vienna. I will spare you the rest of Tilly’s film but I must tell you that at one of his performances in 1965 he openly defecated and smeared faeces all over his naked body, and masturbated while howling out stanzas from the Austrian National Anthem. In another performance which became a much celebrated underground film from that period, Brus donned women’s underwear, cut himself with razors, danced around as if in some mad trance, urinated into a watering can and then drank his urine. Tilly’s performance is almost identical.”

  “Carlos, I just cannot square what you have shown me with the girl I was sure had begun to sort herself out.”

  Every shot of the film she had just viewed contained elements which renewed all her intense feelings about Tilly’s predicament at the time when she had first met her. Had Tilly tricked her into a false sense of security? She had also sensed, with some unease, that some of the rituals and atmosphere of the entire film had an altogether different resonance, but she was unable identify the reason. That off-camera voice still bothered her but again, she couldn’t place it.

  “The DVD corresponds to the script we found but they had filmed only half of the story. St Eulalia believed, apparently, that she was the female embodiment, or the re-incarnation, of Christ. In the script, Christ becomes Eulalia at the moment of his crucifixion.”

  Margot shook her head in disbelief, although Tilly’s last visit to see her in Elvira’s café now took on another dimension.

  “I can’t believe they didn’t share all this with me! I was seeing them at least twice a week. And I just find it impossible to accept that I could have been so wide of the mark about Tilly and Paolo, so out of the loop from their reality. Paolo was strange and damaged, sure. They both were.”

  “I think that both your clients were being manipulated. I don’t think that they came to all this independently. I think they were being encouraged.”

  “Encouraged! Manipulated, abused? But by whom…?”

  Margot’s mind baulked at the idea that anyone could have encouraged them to perform these awful acts. For a moment, she trailed off into the darker areas of her mind.

  “Someone they must have trusted. Someone who knows a lot about art. Someone who speaks ancient Catalan – the voice on the film, the one that gives the commands, is the voice of a man in his forties. I need you to help me.”

  “I am not a policewoman.”

  “You know more about this group than anyone else in Barcelona and according to Elvira you saw Domatilla Milliken on the morning of the day she died.”

  Margot was taken aback. His voice had become as hard as nails. She became very defensive.

  “I am just not qualified,” Margot raised her voice, as Carlos began to pack up his home cinema equipment, “and I have a professional conflict of interest. You know that, Carlos.”

  He shrugged and smiled.

  “If you won’t co-operate, I will have to insist that we interview you at headquarters. And I will have to interview your husband.”

  “My husband. Why? He was Tilly’s godfather.” Margot was genuinely shocked.

  “What is your English for this? – No stones unturned? - Adios, gracias, Señora. My wife sends her compliments. It has been a great pleasure to meet you finally.”

  Margot had decided that she didn’t like him as much in his official capacity as she might have in a social sphere.

  “Adios, Carlos! I will try to help as much as I can. But only within the strict boundaries of my professional ethics.”

  Margot waited for him to come out into the courtyard and cross it to the vaulted arch leading out into the front of her building. A police siren rang out, but Margot knew that Carlos was walking back to his office at police headquarters building, a stone’s throw away. She also knew that Carlos had sensed that there was more to learn from Margot about Paolo and Domatilla. He knew that she was almost certainly harbouring something significant about the victims’ lives, something which might prove useful to his investigation. But had he sensed anything else? Her feelings of guilt about her behaviour with Xavier, perhaps?

  I can’t talk to anyone about this, which makes me so uncomfortable! Oddly enough, in this situation, I don’t think that I have broken any of the rules I try so rigorously to apply to my work. No names. No pack drill. No gossip. And certainly no police informing. I never talk about my clients and would not have told Carlos anything he couldn’t have found out himself. I suppose my reactions were enough. He was lucky I didn’t vomit all over his DVD player!

  Tilly was trying to tell me something I didn’t know. She was unusually anxious. More like the vulnerable girl I first met. What was she trying to tell me about Paolo?

  And Xavier? Why am I at this time going along this primrose path to that everlasting bonfire? He has pierced the armour of my well-protected psyche. What is happening to me? Have I been protecting myself from my own problems with all these years of professional prurience? Am I a sexual deviant, a victim like my clients, and is Xavier a manifestation of this?

  And then there is Robert’s peculiar behaviour… does he speak good Catalan? Archie? That Archie could have anything to do with this, is surely too preposterous, even if he is an art expert and does indeed speak Catalan…

  Chapter Twelve

  That night was very hot. There was a trace of a Mediterranean breeze blowing gently through the open windows of their perfectly proportioned, nineteenth century apartment in the El Parallel district on the foothills of the Montjuic. Margot, perversely perhaps, cooked paella for Archie. Like their Sunday brunches with Robert and his wife Stella when she came to Barcelona, this was another favourite ritual that they normally indulged alone, and in the first years of their life in the city it had led to an hour or two of very sensual and romantic sex. More often, nowadays, Archie would play some music and Margot would read a book he had given her. The ingredients of the paella, even the tomatoes, had to be bought from exactly the right stall in the Boqueria. The shellfish ingredients had to be very carefully prepared before going anywhere near the rice. The olive oil and garlic had to be local. And then every prawn, each piece of fish was individually cooked with the kind of care and attention a master chef might give to his favourite dish. And Archie always bought the same wine – a very expensive Catalan white wine from his friend who owned a small vineyard near the coast. Archie had picked up some rather pedantic cooking techniques from a brilliant Catalan philosophy professor he had bonded with in a bar one evening – Archie loved to engage with people everywhere, often to Margot’s irritation. She had always been more private.

  Margot did
n’t eat much that evening but she sat quietly, twiddling her fork and sipping the delicious, slightly chilled wine while he talked about his latest enthusiasm – the music of Purcell. They had avoided talking about Domatilla until Archie brought it up. He had always been particularly fond of her. He had been a conscientious godfather and had agreed to deal with the formalities of the process to send her body back to London after the inevitable autopsy.

  “There was a very polite and slightly over-friendly policeman in charge of the investigation. Eccentric. A sort of Catalan Poirot… Complicated here, because Catalan law is different to Spanish law, which in turn is different to British law. He told me that he had to persuade a judge to agree to his investigation before beginning any surveillance and making any arrests. And he needed a ‘victim’ to begin the process. Someone who was alive. And so he has roped poor Hugo into it again.”

  Archie tossed up some banana fritters. Margot stared at hers. He wolfed down one of his, greedily, almost as if he had something uncomfortable on his mind. Nervous eating.

  “I haven’t really known Hugo so well, but of course he must have suffered from those loopy parents as much as Tilly. Hugo and I had lunch together after he had formally identified the body. He is as baffled as we all are. He thought that Robert might have been involved somehow – apparently Carlos is going to pull him for questioning. Ridiculous. Batty. He then rang Tilly’s mother, his mother, and passed the mobile to me. She was drunk and railed on. She accused us, you in particular, of ‘shrinking’ Tilly. I passed the mobile back to Hugo when she started shrieking but she had hung up. Silly woman. I never did understand why Tarquin married her.”