Margot's Secrets

by Don Boyd

  “Buy the best; don’t skimp!”

  Not that she ever had much time for anything other than writing up notes and case studies. Margot was very popular and had reached her limit – four clients per weekday, five when a client was coming more than once a week. She never saw clients on Sundays but she was always available on call at anytime except during her ‘break’ periods, very rigidly applied holidays; one in the spring for two weeks over Easter, one during the summer for four weeks, and another two week break at Christmas. Even then there was a system to deal with emergencies.

  She walked home from FNAC through the back streets of the Raval. She could feel the ghosts from the world of Jean Genet in The Diary of A Thief which was written in the cafes and bars in this quarter. Some of them were shuttered up. Others had one or two lights on – it was dark from the almost black sky. Bar L’Angleterre, with its art deco, wrought iron and long, inviting bar, had one or two customers, soaked from the downpour with the perfect excuse for a glass of Cava or a beer. Those still in the streets were scurrying into other dingy, dark, dry havens. Thieves. Pimps. Pickpockets. Murderers. Male prostitutes. Hookers. Artists. Poets. Dali. Bunuel.

  In her heightened state of awareness, she indulged this heady atmosphere as much as she had ever done. She stumbled into a tiny bar with dark green walls and simple wooden bar stools. She ordered a large cognac from the rather attractive, English-speaking Dutch barman. She gulped it down and headed south; she was on a mission.

  It was still pouring with rain, so she bought a cheap umbrella from an old Algerian woman selling them on the street corner opposite the Sikh temple. There was a police car in front of the temple and a small crowd behind a cordon. Another murder? A family disagreement? Violence. Margot shivered. She trotted past without lingering and scurried down a tiny alley leading through to her beloved but now windswept, palm tree-lined avenue, Las Ramblas del Raval, which was totally deserted. She knew that at the end of the avenue, down the connecting street she used every morning, there was a Pakistani-owned barber-shop with a telephone booth and an internet facility – one of her clients had told her that you could make calls there which wouldn’t show up on any records. She needed to make an untraceable call to Xavier. She was relieved it was open; often they were shuttered in the rain. She headed straight to the booths which lined the tiled walls. The modern telephone had been neatly constructed above the old basin of what had once been part of the salon. Arabic graffiti littered the white walls along with a card advertising a prostitute.

  Margot dialled; he answered after two rings.

  “Xavier, I received your message. I need to see you, too.”

  “Come around tonight, Margot.”

  “I can’t tonight. Tomorrow morning? Early.”

  “Seven?”

  “Seven at your apartment… please!”

  “See you tomorrow. Je t’embrasse!”

  Without any hesitation, Margot replied, “Toi aussi!”

  She hung up, paused in the claustrophobia of the booth and began to cry uncontrollably. Apologising in Arabic, the Pakistani barber left his only client and helped Margot gently out of the booth. He apologised again, this time in English, and fetched her a glass of tea and also gave one to his young Spanish client, who nodded with a polite ‘Gracias’.

  “How can I help you, please? Don’t worry about him. He is an old school friend. I cut his hair for nothing. Free! I could cut your hair free too!” He smiled sensitively.

  “I am so, so sorry. I am okay. Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know why I am like this. Please don’t worry about me. I am okay. Really. Please, carry on. I am fine!”

  The kindness of strangers. Margot remembered the Tennessee Williams phrase, and wanted to kiss him. The Pakistani went back to cutting his friend’s long, dark hair. She drank her tea gratefully and left, promising to come back. She thrust a hundred Euros into his hands.

  “God bless you! Imshallah!” he shouted after her.

  She ran awkwardly down the wet cobbled streets with her FNAC bags. Once at her studio, she showered quickly and then went to the desk dressed only in her raincoat. The storm had taken the daylight away from the evening earlier than usual. Margot loved this kind of half-light. She shook with excitement as she took the new machinery and speakers out of their packaging. She didn’t need the instructions – the shop assistant had been right about how simple the system was to assemble – and within a minute or two, boxes sprawled over the desk, the blue glow of her Panasonic screen had become the only light in her studio.

  She scrambled for the DVD and inserted it quickly into the machine. The ‘phone rang again. Archie. She ignored it. Margot pressed the play button and when she had control of the machine she used the fast forward control to bring her to the moment she had left the DVD when Carlos had first shown it to her. Tilly was sitting on the floor and a voice was coaxing her, ‘off camera’. The rather tiny sound from the DVD player wasn’t good enough so, carefully and methodically following the simple instruction booklet, Margot placed the Bose speaker around the desk. She went back to the player and pressed. The voice was not Paolo’s voice. Paolo’s accent was unmistakeable. This voice was an older man’s, speaking in fluent Ancient Catalan. She increased the volume, reversed the images back to the beginning of the scene and again pressed play. She was now absolutely sure who owned this voice. Xavier had been the guiding mind behind Tilly’s film. She played it back repeatedly and memorised the phrases like an actress, practising for an important audition. Archie would translate it for her.

  Outside, it was still pouring with rain. Margot tidied her desk, putting the DVD together with the script in the envelope Carlos had given her. She called a cab and while she waited for it to arrive, she neatly dressed herself in the sombre black suit she had been wearing at the funeral. As she closed the shutters, she noticed a tall man sheltering in a doorway opposite her building. At first, she thought it looked a little like Robert. He seemed to be looking up at her studio, but almost as if he had seen her, he trotted away towards the small archway that led towards the port. He was caught in the lights of the cab as it came into the square, honking its horn at the man as he slipped between the car and the ancient wall.

  Margot took Carlos’s envelope from the desk, hurried out of the building and into the cab. Its windows were steamed up. She gave the driver her address and when she had settled in and he had reversed out of the small square, he remarked that he had nearly run over a man earlier, as he drove into the Plaça to pick her up. Margot asked him what he looked like. Bushy eyebrows were the only significant characteristics he had been able to pick out in the shadows. And tall. She shivered.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Archie was in a very strange mood; he was irritated with Margot.

  “Why are you so late? Your client must have left you hours ago.”

  He very rarely asked her to account for her time and he certainly never challenged her about it.

  “You don’t normally spend so much time writing up your notes. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Margot apologised and went into the kitchen. Archie had laid out the table for the supper he was preparing; sausages, fagioli beans with a simple green salad, followed by hard cheese and dates, along with a bottle of an unfamiliar Catalan red wine.

  Margot played with her food and, much to his annoyance put one of her sausages onto his plate. She left some of the beans but she drained the wine. “This is delicious wine. Is there another bottle?”

  “It’s a new one on me. As it happens, I bought a case of it.” He went towards his wine rack, pulled out another bottle, uncorked it and filled her glass.

  “What was the wake like?” Margot asked.

  “Awful. It was a very good thing you didn’t come. Tilly’s parents were more than a little upset. The funeral had been a bit too much for them. They knew that Paolo was a strange one but they had assumed you were keeping Tilly from any serious harm. Apparently, she had cast you in the role of being her pro
tector, her safe confidante. They think you let them down very badly. Especially Sabrina, who was drunk, as usual.”

  “They can’t blame me. I was her therapist, not her bodyguard.”

  “They thought that you had been her safety net. Tarquin was very angry and even he became very drunk. He started shouting at Eusebio at one stage. He wanted to know why Tilly couldn’t be buried next to Paolo. Something to do with her citizenship, apparently. Sabrina had to calm him down. It was very embarrassing. I left as soon as I could.”

  “Tilly and I had a great relationship. And Paolo. They loved me as much as I loved them. But I had no control over what they did.”

  Archie cleared the plates and began to eat some cheese. Margot poured another glass of wine, waiting for an opportunity to ask Archie about Xavier.

  “People always blame the shrink! I can just hear Sabrina… ‘They were shrunk,’ she will have told you. Well, I didn’t ‘shrink’ them. I gave them help. Help they didn’t find from anybody else. They so desperately needed it. And help they needed because they had such shitty parents! And she was just as bad as Tarquin. Tilly used to tell me… Fucking hypocrites! I hate all those trustafarians – stuck in the past of all that privilege and power their families used to have, and never been able to move on from it!”

  Margot very rarely swore and her emotional reactions were well outside the boundaries of her professional faculties which she had no intention of evoking. Archie continued to eat his cheese without flinching. Margot ate a date. She realised that she had so nearly broken her golden rule about client confidentiality. Holding her breath, and in a very casual, almost throwaway manner, she began to probe.

  “By the way, I saw you yesterday after our mediaeval history jaunt at the cathedral. With Robert’s friend. Xavier. I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “Xavier?” Archie hesitated. “Oh, that Xavier! The pallbearer at Paolo’s funeral? No. I hardly know the man.”

  “You were walking towards Las Ramblas. I am sure it was you.”

  “Not me. I went straight to the Metro… How do you know him? ”

  Margot was skating on very thin ice, but then Archie seemed to be equally cagey. She decided to deflect his lie with a convenient change of subject.

  “How strange. The man he was with was a spitting image. Xavier shared Robert’s box at the opera on Monday night. I didn’t take to him much, but I suppose he was charming enough.”

  Why is he lying? What is he hiding? Margot drained her glass and poured herself another.

  She continued almost too casually. “His eulogy seemed a little overheated,” and then conveniently changed the subject. “Much more to the point, who was that girl in the yellow dress who slapped him? And why, for God’s sake?”

  “She’s one of my students.”

  “No! Why was she there?”

  “She attended the same language classes as Paolo and Tilly.”

  “Really? Wow! Who is she? What was that all about?”

  “I don’t really know much about her. She comes from Niger in the Sahel, south of the Sahara. She is frightfully clever. She will almost certainly get a first.”

  “What is her name?”

  “She has an English name and an African Muslim surname. We all call her Isobel. Scottish name, really!”

  Archie left the table and began to clear up. “The police have been interviewing Robert, of all people! And they want to interview me.”

  “I’ll do the washing up, Archie.”

  She was becoming irritated.

  “I have no idea what I can tell them that they don’t already know.” Archie was now filling the basin and putting the dishes into the hot soapy water.

  “You can go to bed, if you like. I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight; I have to be up early.”

  He rather pointedly began to put on the yellow rubber gloves which were part of his ritual to establish what he called ‘domestic brownie points’.

  “I said I would do the fucking dishes, Archie!”

  Margot was almost shouting at him. Archie looked at her wild eyes, shrugged and left the room. This was their first serious marital fight, ever. Margot sat in the kitchen, fighting back her tears, determined to avoid any mawkish apology. Archie put some jazz on the hi-fi, aware that Oscar Peterson’s magical piano chords would percolate from the kitchen’s Bose speakers. Margot loved his music. She blew out the candles. It had finally stopped raining and a full moon bathed the kitchen in an eerie glow. She sat in the dark, trying to make some sense out of what she had learnt about Xavier since meeting him only three days before.

  What petrified her was that she was unable to rid herself of the overriding desire to allow him to sexually manipulate her. Remarkably, she was still prepared to allow him to treat her as badly as he had treated Laura. Rape her? Perhaps. Even that thought had begun to excite her again. She certainly didn’t feel any competitive jealousy about his other lovers, and she was prepared to extend her threshold for pain and humiliation if that was what it took to see him again. She trembled at the thought of the seductive smell of his skin, the bittersweet taste of his semen, and the electricity of his fingers, along with the mellow imperiousness of his rich voice.

  She went over it all again in her mind, turning it over and over and over. Her own extreme experiences, Paolo’s story of what can only be described as sexual abuse, whatever spin he might have preferred to put on his ‘romance’ with Xavier when he was a boy. The clear cut connection between the DVD and the cord bracelet, Laura’s description of her rape fantasies, and then the strange connection with Archie – all part of the accusatory ammunition she was determined to use to confront him when she saw him in the early morning. She needed to be purged of the fears she was nursing that Xavier, and now Archie, had in any way been involved in the murders. She had decided to delay any rational or logical reaction to his behaviour and was prepared to accept all his excuses and explanations. In that sense she had become his prey. He was, as ever, in complete control.

  Archie returned to the kitchen. “What’s going on my darling? I have never seen you like this.”

  Margot decided to change tack and be less defensive and less aggressive. She tried to sound as normal as possible under the circumstances.

  “I am so sorry. I am just a little bit drunk, Archie. I am fine. Really… The funeral upset me more than I thought it would. I have been thinking about Paolo and Tilly. I am angry at Tarquin and Sabrina, but I suppose they might have a point. I have wracked my brains trying to think of anything Tilly might have told me which could have been the vaguest of hints that she was up to something unusual. Perverted, perhaps. But there was nothing I could find which would indicate any fear or anxiety. I can understand how her parents feel, Tilly was a wonderful girl. But I am at a loss, as much as they are. What happened came completely out of the blue. For all of us. But then, we all have our secrets.”

  “I know. I feel bad too. I also felt that I had failed them. Look, I fucked up. I tried to apologise to Tarquin, then… well, Sabrina just resorted to the bottle.”

  Archie had joined her at the kitchen table. Margot was desperately trying to avoid breaking down and spilling out for Archie what was really troubling her. She deflected her thoughts.

  “I think I need to do my laps, get fit again. I am going to be there at dawn and swim for an hour or so in that Olympic pool at the top of the Montjuic. That pool is always empty when I like to go at first light. It’s too far away for the early morning businessmen.”

  Archie stood up to leave. “I love you, Margot… You really don’t have to sleep alone tonight. Come to bed… soon.”

  “As long as you don’t mind me slipping out before dawn…”

  “Have I ever before?”

  “I love you too, Archie!” and there was no question in her mind about that, whatsoever.

  She waited in the dark and listened while he opened the shutters in the drawing room, (they hated any fug and the storm had passed), turned off the jazz, brushed
his teeth and shuffled with his leather slippers into their bedroom. She had a quick shower to shake off the grime of the rainstorm, and joined him. He was snoring. She was careful to slide under the duvet so as to avoid touching him. He was a very light sleeper. A little woozy from the red wine, she dozed off thinking about Laura. There was something that had bothered her about her need to leave their session so quickly. Perhaps she had been planning a rendezvous with Xavier before catching her plane to London?

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Margot slept through the piercing, intermittent whines of her alarm clock. The dawn chorus of birds finally woke her and she leapt out of bed as if a snake had bitten her, but she soon recovered. Although her first thought had been of Xavier’s body, her stomach churned as she realised that what she was planning to do that morning might be the catalyst for disaster. She showered again but the excitement from the sexual anticipation of Xavier’s two previous encounters did not recur. She dabbed a simple daytime perfume on her shoulders and slipped into blue jeans and a black tee-shirt. She kissed Archie on the forehead, wound her hair under her yellow helmet and took her bicycle towards the front stairs. She was late and couldn’t afford the time to walk.