Margot's Secrets

by Don Boyd

  But this did not concern her now. She desperately needed to find a way to survive.

  “I have read everything he wrote. The manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom disappeared when he was moved from the Bastille at the time of the Terror and wasn’t rediscovered until 1900 or so.”

  Like an untimely death knell, the ‘phone in the office rang, interrupting his flow. The answering machine clicked into action. It was a very distraught Archie.

  “Darling, please ring me as soon as you can… Please come home. I know we have so much to talk about… Carlos has just rung me. He tried to reach you on your mobile. Do you remember that girl with the yellow dress at the funeral? The police have found the body of her husband in the wasteland above the Olympic stadium… he’s dead… battered… they think she has been murdered too, by Xavier. Please don’t walk home. Take a cab. Or ‘phone the police – Carlos offered when I told him where you were. Apparently her last call was to your office ‘phone… or ‘phone me. I can come with the car… I love you… Nothing you told me matters… I know you love me, too…”

  “What a great guy!”

  He mimicked Archie’s accent expertly; Xavier’s sarcasm was repugnant. Margot had always liked Archie’s voice – his peculiar heightened accent, an imperfect blend of well-enunciated Queen’s English with a light Scottish brogue and the languorous vowels of classical Venetian, was in such sharp contrast to the purring licentiousness of Xavier’s. She shivered. No wonder her new friend Isobel had let her down. She must have been followed by Xavier, no doubt manifesting the maniacal characteristics of de Sade’s warped, murderous heroes. She was obviously his next victim. Margot had one forlorn hope: if Archie knew that she was at the studio, he would know that she would normally pick up in the middle of the message, or ‘phone straight back. Perhaps, just perhaps, he would know that something was askew. It was a very remote possibility that he might decide to come down to fetch her now. Xavier left his chair and went into the office area of her studio to silence the answering machine, which was bleeping intermittently with its programmed alarm, signalling the terrifying warning from Archie. She heard him fasten the shutters. He walked back behind her. Her body tightened and her shoulders contracted. He enveloped her and sat on her lap. His breath was stale, and smelt of fish. He tried to kiss her on the lips. She bit his lip viciously. He laughed as he licked the slither of blood.

  “I met Isobel this morning, Xavier.”

  “I know you did.”

  “She was obsessed by you.”

  He moved off her knees and took up his position in her client’s armchair. His mood had changed, he seemed resigned.

  “I must tell you about Tilly and Paolo.”

  Margot knew that she might have made a mistake, but she had to keep him talking.

  “I loved them as much as you did.”

  “I loved Paolo, particularly… I always had a special relationship with him. And Paolo’s death was what he wanted. I know that you are going to find it difficult to believe me, but when the police finally see the footage, they will be able to confirm that. I wanted to allow him everything. Ecstatic experiences he wanted to have. I did not want to harm him. We were such good friends. He was one of my special friends. What we did together at first was just a bit of harmless fun…”

  “How old was he when you met him first, Xavier?” Margot tried to maintain the interrogatory tone. What she really wanted to say to this despicable paedophile was at odds with the tone she needed to preserve to keep him friendly. And she sensed that he expected her to play his game, his way.

  “I can’t really remember. He was a very mature young boy.”

  Margot shuddered as she remembered that Paolo had been twelve years old when ‘Guy’ had first abused him.

  “And did you fall in love with him then?”

  “Ancient Greece had an elegant system for the moral and sexual education of their youth. Plato describes it in The Symposium. Young boys were willingly initiated by older men. I had a mentor in that sense when I was a boy and was never harmed by his care and affection for me. Paolo and I had a very similar relationship… we would invent exotic games to play. Not unlike the games you and I have been enjoying this week.”

  Margot shivered again. Well-read paedophiles often evoke Plato’s dubious elitist and misogynist treatise about love and sexual initiation. She couldn’t help thinking about the agony Paolo must have been put through when he was being nailed to the cross in the horrendous re-enactment which formed part of Tilly’s DVD. Did this evil man really believe that he had not harmed him? That a crucifixion was part of a harmless exotic game?

  He sat back in the chair. Margot tried to engage his eyes, but he seemed a little drowsy. She remembered that on a couple of other occasions, in particularly intimate, psychosexual exchanges, her patients had unwittingly entered a trance, an almost subconscious psychological state, and then had fallen asleep. She realised that Xavier was beginning to show similar mannerisms. She remained calm.

  “And Tilly? Where did she fit in?”

  “I loved Tilly, too. In the way that I have loved all the women who are my special friends. Tilly had a delightful attitude to life. She adored you too, Margot. She told me that you had been so helpful and kind to her. When she arrived in Barcelona, Paolo became confused about our friendship and we stopped seeing each other for a while. But then he brought Tilly to my classes and I discovered that she and I shared a passion for paintings, and for video art. She was happy to become a character in the amusing diversions Paolo and I were devising. And then she began to make them part of her own work. She also shared in my theories of eroticism and about violence and the connections between death and sexual pleasure…”

  Xavier was struggling with his eyes, which were closing intermittently, as if he had been given a slow-acting sleeping draft.

  “…I am so sorry, Margot. I am fighting with a strange sort of drowsy feeling. I am so tired. I want you to challenge me. I want you to talk to me… I like taking to you…”

  The complexities of this sick man were completely outside the boundaries of the macabre situation, but Margot realised that Xavier had never talked to anyone about his experiences in this arena. He had obviously been able to separate and compartmentalise his relationships, and juggle them. He was obviously brilliant at controlling people’s emotions, manipulating them and, fatally, Paolo and Tilly must have enjoyed a privileged position in his life.

  “And Isobel?”

  He revived a little and straightened up.

  “My God, I was almost asleep! Do you have this effect on other patients, Margot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Margot continued to play along. She realised that she might have found her only escape route, but she had to disguise it; Xavier was very smart.

  “…How amazing… Isobel made the mistake of falling in love with me. I explained to her that I loved her too, but that I loved many people. Tilly and Paolo. She wouldn’t join in our games. She was under a spell… you enjoyed playing my games…”

  “I did, Xavier. You overwhelmed me. You have that power…”

  “Tilly wanted to die with Paolo. She and Paolo believed that they would achieve a romantic mythological immortality if they died together… Ecstasy… And agony… I encouraged it but when I realised that they were using the film they were making about St Eulalia’s martyrdom as the vehicle for these theories, I tried to talk them out of it. But they were determined. And when I realised that they were actually putting it into operation… Paolo, particularly Paolo, insisted on it all… The Cross… the Pain… the Blood… Tilly began to cut her arms and she went into a trance and lost consciousness. Almost as if she had taken drugs… It all got out of control when the night watchman found us.”

  Tilly’s trance was completely consistent with the behaviour of self-mutilators. Her suicidal tendencies blended with Paolo’s self-destructive euphoria were their horrifying, lethal concoction. Their choice. Their secret. And now M
argot’s most unwelcome secret. They had wanted to die and no one except Xavier had known. They chose to die.

  What sort of a man could be involved in such a satanic nightmare? Allow it to happen? Encourage it, enjoy it… This was not a religious ritual, this was the physical manifestation of three very sick minds. And Xavier was beyond any form of redemption, finally culpable. Margot battled against her instincts. She wanted to scream and protest, and she wanted to begin a powerful diatribe, destroying all his delusional fantasies about his behaviour. What she might have asked a client at this juncture seemed redundant. This man was a psychopath. Stick to known facts. Characters. Move the story on. The blood-stained shroud lying in the corner.

  “And the night watchman? And what is that in the sheet? Isobel?”

  “The night watchman gave me no alternative. I remember reading a description of a killing by Ian Fleming. He had found it very difficult to kill a man for the first time… this was during his wartime exploits in naval intelligence… In fact, I found it very easy. He made it easy for me.”

  He enjoyed it. He gave me no alternative… Margot repressed a gasp. I give him no alternative.

  “Did you find it easy enough to come to the opera to meet me, knowing the way I felt about Paolo and Domatilla?”

  “You had to become one of my special friends. I loved them as much as you did. And I trusted you when I met you. I trusted you, Margot… until I saw you with Isobel. I wanted to trust you… I wanted to love you in the way Paolo loved Tilly…”

  “Did you want me to die too, Xavier?”

  He was battling with his drowsiness again. Margot looked at the side table with its box of tissues, used by her clients. There was a dark, soft leather pouch next the box, with an elegant locking device in the style of an expensive cigar or pen wallet. Maybe he will fall asleep. His eyes were closing. She almost whispered, gently. Testing him. Another furtive glance over to the bloody shroud.

  “And Isobel?”

  “In Niger, where Isobel comes from, they kill women if they are caught being unfaithful to their husbands. She had to be punished. I did him a favour. It was very, very beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Paolo’s death. Tristan und Isolde. Yes, jouissance, if you like…”

  He hardly opened his eyes and his head was drooping; he was barely conscious.

  “Silence!” he said quietly.

  Is he asleep?

  Margot thought she heard a car pull up in the Plaça below. Unusual at this time of night, unless it was a taxi. No car doors. No voices. The shutters were closed.

  If this is by some tiny chance Archie, he will know that I always work at night with my shutters closed if I have a client and that I have a rule that he can never disturb me here. Did Xavier lock the door? Is Xavier really asleep? Does Archie know where to find the spare key?

  Footsteps. Brouhaha. And then Xavier’s eyes snapped open.

  “Paolo and Tilly? Tilly didn’t really want to die as much, but I insisted that we had to take it all to that extreme limit. That was the idea. That was their pact. St. Eulalia. The painting. The crucifix. The cords. That is what we had agreed to do – rather like that game of chicken in that James Dean movie… If there had been a priest here right now, I would have had too many sins to confess. You could have been my Mother Confessor. Paolo’s death pains… the most beautiful sight I have ever experienced.” He laughed quietly.

  “A priest?…”

  Xavier was slurring his words as if under the influence of some kind of narcotic.

  “You could have read me the last rites! A lustful man… a reasonable man… given the choice of ravishing the object of his powerful lust and going to the gallows, or controlling his passions and surviving… I choose to submit to my darkest desires. I have possessed the men and women of my dreams. I have savoured their bodies, living and dying… Paolo and Tilly were the most beautiful. Ecstatic, immortal… You would have been so lovely, too… blinded but alive… And so I must pay for the pleasure I have had in Hell, and maybe indulge in the ultimate pleasure like them and die on my own, rather sophisticated equivalent of the gallows… Jouissance…”

  He glanced at Margot and reached for the small leather wallet. He opened it quickly, efficiently and pulled out a surgical knife.

  “No! Xavier! No, no Xavier!”

  She shouted and then screamed.

  Xavier continued to watch her from the comfort of his armchair, smiled, and then without shifting his body, and with one smooth, uninterrupted gesture, cut his throat and neck from one side to the other. Each of the carotid arteries vomited blood like a fireworks display. His head slumped onto his chest. Margot’s hysterical screams matched the horror of what she had been so calculatedly forced to watch.

  Within seconds, Archie, Carlos and a handful of policemen had battered their way into the studio. Margot continued to scream as Archie and Carlos untied her from the chair and Archie cradled her in his arms. It took him about five minutes to calm her down enough to loosen her tight grip from his enveloping body. The policeman had unwrapped the shroud. Isobel’s beautiful body had been mutilated.

  Margot was still whimpering when Archie wrapped her in the winter coat he found in the studio closet, and with Carlos, led her downstairs and into the back of his car. A phalanx of police officers began to fill the room. A large crowd had gathered on the pavement outside, and were cordoned off behind a police ribbon.

  Chapter Thirty One

  Archie sat in the back of the car. He knew that there was absolutely nothing to say. They sat for about five minutes before a uniformed policeman offered to drive them home. It was the same officer who had shown Margot around the Las Ramblas headquarters that afternoon. Archie said thank you and gave him his car keys.

  “All that blood… He didn’t touch me again, Archie.”

  “I know, my sweet Margot… I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have left you.”

  “It was not your fault. I wanted to be on my own. I wonder how Xavier got in without a key?”

  A gurney was being wheeled out. Isobel’s body. Margot noticed a car parked in the corner of the Plaça, surrounded by white tape. The same black sedan that had been parked near the Santa Maria.

  Of course. This was no police car. It was Xavier’s old Citroën.

  Archie gave the police driver some concise directions in his fluent Catalan. It was after ten o’clock, and the streets seethed with Saturday night traffic. The policeman asked Archie in English if he would like him to arrange a doctor for his wife. Margot thanked him and very politely explained that she would be fine. They sat in silence, looking out of the side windows now spattered with rain. Blurred images.

  Red neon lights be damned… How did he get into my studio? All the blood. And that ghastly bundle in the corner – he must have dragged it up the stairs? I wish I could cry…

  Margot slowly closed her eyelids, welcoming the abstraction of that dark, unfathomable galaxy which confronts the mind when our eyes are closed.

  Blindness?

  The last time she remembered this kind of blindness had been during her last orgasm when she was blindfolded in Xavier’s apartment. She shivered, then began to shake.

  “I can hardly breathe!”

  “Stop the car! Aturi el cotxe immediatament!”

  Archie yelled at the driver, who pulled into the side of the steep road which wound up the Montjuic.

  “I can’t breathe. I feel so cold. I can’t stop shaking… My whole body is shaking. Cold. ”

  Margot was indeed shaking.

  Archie was dumbstruck and helpless. “Shall we go to a hospital?”

  “No! No! Please, Archie, no! I think am having a panic attack. I just wish I could stop shaking.”

  Archie put his arms around her and she gradually became still and quiet once more.

  “I think I am okay now. Thank you. We can go home now.”

  The driver asked Archie whether he should take her to the hospital, but Archie explained that she had been having a panic attack and tol
d him to drive on.

  When they arrived at the apartment, Archie ushered her in like an invalid and gently guided her into their bedroom. He then ran a hot bath. Margot changed into a large, woolly dressing gown and sat on the edge of the bed. And then she sobbed, quietly. Archie returned and led her towards the tub.

  “I’ll be back. We don’t need to talk.”

  “I can’t talk now. Too much to talk about. But I will in time… I love you, Archie.”

  Margot edged her way slowly into the warm water and lay there, absorbing the luxury of the huge tub and the lavender bath salts which Archie had sprinkled into the bath. She closed her eyes. She desperately needed a diversion.

  I wonder if Anthony can get another ticket for Archie and then he can come to the football game with us next week? He would love that, and so would I.

  Her mind went blank. Archie came back with a goblet of brandy for her and his own glass of wine. She smiled, gratefully.

  “Thank you, darling Archie… Will you stay and have a shave, and then you can have my bath. I need you here.”

  This was a familiar ritual they had established.

  “That’s what I had been planning.”

  The phone rang. “I’ll just go and unplug that ‘phone. I don’t care who it is!”

  Margot hoped that Archie wouldn’t put any music on. He didn’t. He came back to the bathroom, kissed her on the lips and on her eyes. He then began to lather his shaving bowl with the expensive badger hair brush she had given him last Christmas.

  One of the taps was dripping. Archie tightened it. Silence, except the excited, happy screams of children playing in the street.

  “It must be awful to be suspected of a crime you didn’t commit.”

  Archie’s face was covered with soap. He reached for his razor and started to shave, slowly and methodically.