by Don Boyd
“I was at the police office in Las Ramblas. This afternoon. I can’t keep this stuff to myself any longer but I didn’t want to have to go through it twice. I wanted you there. You will understand tonight why. Carlos has asked another policeman to be there. It’s odd but then this whole saga…”
She was about to ask him what he had been doing with Xavier but Elvira had switched off the main lights in the bar and only the toilet fluorescent gave any expression to Archie’s face in the half-light. Archie looked baffled. He was searching her frightened, vulnerable face. He trusted Margot’s judgement as much as she trusted his, but she knew that he was going to be very hurt.
“Would you like a drink before we go?” Elvira called up to them.
“No, we are coming.”
In the car they were silent and listened to one of Archie’s collection of jazz. The journey was uphill and long-winded through the rush hour in the gathering dusk.
Am I a coward? Surely the proper thing to do would be to tell Archie everything, privately. But I want to be just as honest with Carlos, and I want to make sure that I tell them exactly the same information. Carlos, in that sense, can be my filtering device or censor for Archie and Archie will be my witness for Carlos. I won’t have to repeat anything. And I won’t have to go into any graphic details about the sex.
When they arrived at the policeman’s home, they shuffled in awkwardly, almost reluctantly. Elvira defused the tensions by showing them all her son’s graduation album. Carlos was by turns both officious and charming but wanted to move onto the professional business. Luis hovered in the shadows of the living room like a predatory lion. Elvira finally insisted that they all sit outside on the terrace which looked down across the parallel ‘new city’ of Puig, and Montaner and Gaudi, the Barri Gotic glowing with the excitement of a city about to have dinner, and then towards the port – the twinkling gaudy luxury of floating gin palaces and the majesty of the floodlit Colom.
I love Barcelona so much.
Margot helped Carlos carry through the tapas he had been preparing from their small kitchen. Anchovies. Chorizo. Peppers. Cheese. And an assortment of grilled fish. Elvira was pointing out to Archie the house where she had been born and the Church where she and Carlos had married. Margot told Carlos that she needed to use the bathroom – her excuse. She needed to talk to him in a private space.
She whispered, “I am going to tell you a few stories tonight… now. About me. And about Tilly and Paolo.”
“In front of Archie?”
“I have to do it now. Here. Is that okay?”
“Of course. But Luis will have to use his tape recorder.”
“Okay.”
Carlos hugged her and went into his office. The old fox had been hoping for this.
When they returned to the terrace, Elvira and Archie were sitting quietly, looking out towards the city. Margot sat next to Archie and squeezed his hand. Carlos sat opposite her, while Luis positioned his small tape machine and checked that it was working properly. Carlos then delivered a small official speech, making Margot aware that what she was doing had official status, and that she was doing so voluntarily, in the relaxed arena of his home but that at some later stage, she may have to repeat all of her statement again for a judge. Archie snaffled an anchovy tapas and laughed nervously. Elvira smiled. Carlos and Luis were solemn.
And so she began her story again. There was no need to insist on any confidentiality at this stage. What she was about to divulge was so outside the bounds of any normal and rational behaviour. She understood the consequences, and had decided to accept them. She was emotionally exhausted and felt strangely comforted by the eccentric situation. The couple of hours she had spent on the ‘phone with Marie Christine had been an inadequate dress rehearsal – talking privately to a woman you trust about sex and eroticism had been so much easier. She spoke slowly, without interruption for an hour and chose her words very carefully. She avoided any explicit detail except when it was relevant. Of course, the details of the sex were vital for Carlos, the connections. She tried to modify the level of sexual excitement for Archie’s sake but to explain the degree of her obsession was impossible without revealing her emotional and physical hysteria. She used the days of the week as her chronological and technical staging posts. Robert. The opera. Tilly and Paolo. Xavier’s appeal. His apartment. The sex. Laura. And finally, the girl with the yellow dress. Isobel.
Carlos stopped her at that stage.
“Do you know where Isobel is?”
“No. Why?”
He went quickly to the ‘phone in his office. Luis switched off the tape recorder. Margot, Elvira and Archie sat silently. The food was cold, untouched. Archie was ashen-faced. When Carlos returned, his mood had changed. He was obviously distracted.
“I must go. I am so sorry. Please, can you come to see me again early tomorrow morning? I need a statement for the judge.”
Margot agreed immediately. She was shaking. Archie said that he had an early start and started to leave. Margot said a polite thank you to Elvira and Carlos. No hugs. They left immediately.
“In Barcelona, they need to persuade a judge to agree before they can make an arrest.”
This was Archie’s only comment for about ten minutes as he wound the car down the dark, narrow streets to the larger floodlit avenues in the Diagonal. His silence was violent. Brutal. Savage. The pain was excruciating. When they were close to the north end of the Plaça Catalunya, Margot asked Archie to drop her at the Corte Ingles department store corner. She said that she needed to have an hour or so on her own in the studio, but Archie begged her to come home.
“I need to tell you my story. Please!”
“I don’t think I can cope with it now.”
He ignored her and drove the car into a side street. His voice took on another, firmer tone. “You are going to fucking well sit here and listen to it!”
Margot turned on the inside passenger light. Archie spoke quietly, as he began his own story.
“At Strathalmond School in the seventies, and throughout the private educational community, homosexuality was rife – amongst boys, and teachers… During my own boarding school days, adolescent sexual desires had confused me. I was never really sure whether I preferred men or women. Repressed sexuality had been so part of everyone’s childhood in those days. When I left school, I had one or two encounters with men of my own age but unlike many other masters, I was never, ever attracted to young boys. And then I fell in love with the matron there. She and I had a fling and I knew then that I was definitely heterosexual. I have never looked at a man or boy since then with any form of homoerotic desire. But I was a very popular teacher, and I exploited that. The boys adored me. Callum, a sweet, but confused young man, fell prey to that. I was his hero. He worshipped me and developed a crush. When I rejected him, he was very angry and his scorn was my undoing. He disrupted my lessons. He was rude and he was soon to be seduced by a new arrival – a much younger master… This precipitated a disaster which I had no control over at all.
“During a visit to the sanatorium, the school doctor discovered that Callum had been abused, buggered, and reported it to the governors. In the investigation which followed, Callum pointed the finger at me. I was absolutely defenceless – no proof one way or another. Just his word against mine. I was forced to resign. I had to leave immediately. After ten years in the British public school system, notoriously protective, my career was in ruins – I decided to make a break and emigrate to the US and join academia. Just before I left for Chicago, Callum came to my home to apologise, telling me that he had been persuaded to lie to save the skin of his lover, also a teacher. He was terribly upset. He never recovered, emotionally, and some years later I learned that, towards the end of his school career, he had died. Suicide. I would never be able to prove my innocence… That new young master, a Spanish teacher, his lover, was your lover. Xavier.”
They sat in silence. A couple of football drunks performed a macabre little dance
for them in the street. Archie turned off the light.
“Why did you lie to me about seeing him the other morning? Twice?”
“I hadn’t seen him for years. I barely had known him at Strathalmond. He sought me out when he arrived in Barcelona and asked me to give him a reference for his job application at the language school. I sent him packing at first. But then I realised a bizarre, uncomfortable coincidence. Within months of all this, Paolo was sent to Strathalmond, too (his father had been there), and he became a junior contemporary of Callum’s. I hadn’t taught or met him, I had left before that. But this connection was rearing its ugly head again. I wanted to avoid any chance that this loathsome man could rake up any of the past – his distorted, dishonest version of the past. The ex-pats don’t necessarily all have to hang out together but as you know, the opportunities for horrible gossip always exist. And so I decided to meet Xavier again and we made a pact to avoid each other here in Barcelona in return for the good job reference I gave him. I didn’t want anything to do with him and didn’t want to risk stirring up the past. I think he had sensed that. And so we sort of avoided each other. I was appalled at his hypocritical speech at the funeral and then we’d bumped into each other in the street just after you and I had been at the Cathedral. Quite by chance. He was revoltingly over-friendly. I just walked away without saying anything…
“Why did I keep it from you when we met each other in Chicago? I had hidden the whole horrible secret for so long. I had no proof. It had been so much in my past, it seemed irrelevant. I never thought that I would come across him again. And there is always that fear that you might have thought that I had been covering up something more sinister…”
“Why did you see Xavier a third time?” Margot realised the irony of her question.
Archie looked at her quizzically and then realised that he would have to continue. No more lies. No point.
“He hunted me down when he heard that the police were going to interview me. He said that if I kept quiet about his past, he would about my own. I lost it and shouted at him. I went bonkers. I told him what Callum had confessed to me. This vile man had ruined my life in Scotland! He had abused a brilliant young pupil to the point of suicide, and now I began to suspect that he had been involved in Paolo’s death and the murder of my goddaughter. I was damned if this awful paedophile was going to get away with it anymore! I knew that I would have to tell you at some stage, but I wanted the police to know as soon as I could get to them. The trouble is, Xavier had got to them first and so my interview with Carlos was embarrassing. Rather predictably his assistant, the corporal, gave me a very hard time. ‘If all this is true, why didn’t you come to see us straight away?’ he bleated… I couldn’t give him a reasonable argument. He didn’t seem to accept my story about Callum. The cultural boundaries were being stretched. For all I know, you won’t believe me either. Oddly enough, I think that Carlos knew I was telling the truth.”
“Of course I would have believed you! Why didn’t you tell me?”
Another excruciating silence.
“If I had known that Xavier had also been fucking my wife, I would have been much less forthcoming with the police and would have planned to kill him!”
“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t have a violent bone in your body, Archie.”
Margot’s tender rebuke fell on stony ground.
“You fucking patronising bitch! You know so little about me! You have used me and abused my trust.”
There was hatred in his eyes.
Margot got out of the car. He rolled down the window and shouted after her.
“How will you get home?”
There was more than a hint of mistrust in his voice. Desperation and anger.
“I will call a cab, thank you, Archie… I am so, so sorry.”
She was disgusted with herself, ashamed. She hated herself.
I have betrayed Archie. I have betrayed my clients. I have betrayed my friends. I have betrayed myself.
Chapter Twenty Nine
Margot walked quickly down Las Ramblas, deliberately avoiding the central areas of the Barri Gotic. Plaça Joaquim Xirau was empty. Only the pulsating throb of techno music coming from one of the balconies echoed around the otherwise darkened apartments. She walked quickly up the stairs to the first floor of her building, fumbled for her keys and hurried into her studio. She opened the shutters and looked across the small square. No policeman.
And then a hand touched the nape of her neck, the fingers squeezed gently, and an arm firmly pulled her body around at the waist. She didn’t have to see his face. It was Xavier.
For a fleeting moment, Margot felt that same erotic desire which had so overwhelmed her in the opera house when she had first felt him behind her, but it almost simultaneously transformed, like metamorphosis, into terror and anguish. The very same sensations which had so seduced her were now repulsive and nauseous. The blade of his small, surgical knife rested on her throat. His voice was quiet and resolute. He was dressed in a policeman’s uniform.
“Don’t scream, Margot, please don’t scream or shout. If you do, I will have to kill you instantly. I have absolutely nothing to lose.”
“I promise I won’t scream.”
Margot had too much to lose.
He picked her up and carried her to the Eames chair in her consulting room. She tried to resist but he skilfully and forcefully tied her to it with four lengths of black and hooked elasticised binding ropes, those used by cyclists to tie luggage to the back of their bicycles. He cut every shred of clothing from her body with his knife and then sat in the patient’s chair. He methodically unbuttoned the tunic he was wearing, and removed the small helmet.
Margot’s mind focused immediately on detail. The buttons. The texture of the material. His vest. She knew instinctively that to react with any suggestion of the hysteria she was experiencing internally, would be fatal. She watched him calmly. He had been tracking her in the disguise of the uniform used by the city’s civil police, the Guardia Urbana, a completely separate policing organisation to the Mossos D’Esquadros, and not involved in criminal investigations. Of course, she had no reason to have particularly noticed this distinction until now because he had been the ‘policeman’ who had given her a false sense of security all week.
The floor of her studio had been covered with PVC sheets. She noticed a neat bundle in the corridor. It looked like a small body wrapped in a blood-soaked shroud. It reminded Margot of Saint Eulalia. Isobel?
Chapter Thirty
Xavier talked slowly and quietly, without any aggression.
“I am very, very tired. I haven’t slept this week. Patches. This is all finally catching up on me.”
Silence. He looked at her and smiled. “I don’t suppose you’ve read a collection of essays written by a relatively obscure French intellectual, Georges Bataille, called Eroticisme?”
Margot shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”
Even if she had, she had no desire to engage with him in any phoney academic discourse. She was numb with horror, yet she was also disarmed by his chatty, supercilious tone. She was much more concerned, however, with what he intended to do with her, and how she could prevent him.
“Bataille makes some very powerful arguments about the uneasy relationship that exists between animals and human beings, between taboos and transgression, between violence and sexuality. Murder and eroticism. Tout homme a dans son coeur un cochon qui sommeille. He believed that we rather conveniently suspend the taboos to do with death for spurious religious reasons, as part of the natural order of our patterns of behaviour. Human sacrifices, for example. Bataille’s theories about the reasons we go to war are fascinating. He writes about the laughable hypocrisies of Christianity’s acceptance of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill… He says that human violence is never cold calculation. It is the result of emotions – anger, fear and, of course, desire. A taboo exists so that it can be violated. Priests can bless armies chanting the Te Deum… He also h
as some interesting, and subversive theories about the Marquis de Sade. In de Sade’s books, pleasure is greater if it is criminal, and the worse the crime, the greater the pleasure. There is nothing that can set bounds to licentiousness. Bataille rationalises de Sade’s seemingly anti-social philosophy by arguing that if crime leads men to the pinnacle of sensual ecstasy, ‘the fulfilment of the most powerful desires’ then, in de Sade’s opinion, all efforts to prevent the enjoyment of such pleasure had to be resisted at all costs.”
He wasn’t going to let up on the intellectual tosh. Where was it leading? Margot was familiar with the long-winded, intellectual justifications her clients would use to try to rationalise their bad behaviour. Xavier was no exception in that sense, but he was using some powerful and grotesque logic to arrive at his theories. Margot employed all her emotional disciplines to counterbalance the terror she was experiencing, and tried to listen to him with a cold, calculating intellectuality. She wanted to know what was in the blood-soaked shroud. She could feel beads of sweat beginning to creep down her spine between her naked body and the leather of the chair. There was none of the sensuality of her previous encounters with him, just coldhearted revulsion. Did she need to talk to him in the way that she might if he had been a client?
“Do you recommend that I read him? I have read some of de Sade’s books. La nouvelle Justine and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom.”
Margot had been very wary of the fashionable theories about de Sade’s, that his demented posturing represented a useful research tool in the treatment of sexually disturbed psychopaths, for instance. She summoned as much of her academic dexterity as she could to find some instinctive way of deflecting Xavier. Who could possibly believe that the kind of violent depravity used by de Sade’s most monstrous of creations, in his lust for violent death and extreme sensuality, was somehow divine or sacred and somehow, therefore, representative of some deeply hidden, dark element in all of us? Ironically, this was probably at the root of Margot’s own psychological dilemmas – that nobody would deny the inevitable link that exists between intense sensuality and the desires to inflict pain or to kill or be the victim of torture and death.
