When Teresa Solana had disappeared, Borja loosened the knot of his tie and opened the window. He then took the bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the cocktail bar.
“If you ask me, Pep, I don’t think this is the time to get plastered,” I said, putting my hand over my glass to stop him filling it. “I’d like to remind you we are in the flat of an American who is prostrate on the floor of his kitchen, apparently murdered. And right now our fingerprints are everywhere.”
“I don’t want to get plastered,” he replied. “I just want us to calm down and think through what we should do.”
“Phone the police, I imagine? What else can we do?”
“And what will we tell them? That we came up here to water the plants and found a dead man in the kitchen? That, as our office had been burgled (an office we’ve never signed a rental contract for), we took advantage of the fact we had the keys in order to see a client there – even though there was a corpse in the kitchen that we suspect to be Brian – because we didn’t want her to see inside our office that’s more like the stage-set for a comic opera?”
“Well, if you put it like that…”
“They will question us about our company and our client. And when we tell them she writes crime fiction…”
“I suppose the plot will thicken.”
“Besides, when Teresa Solana finds out, I don’t think she will be at all amused to know we saw her in a flat where a guy had been shot in the head. She’ll think it some kind of macabre joke, or worse, will be furious. And she told us she was a friend of the Inspector, don’t you forget that.”
“You know, for someone who writes thrillers, Teresa Solana wasn’t what you’d call very perceptive. I don’t reckon she noticed a thing.”
“She said she had a cold,” said Borja, shrugging his shoulders. “I expect her nose was bunged up.”
“Well, I can still smell the stink.”
“So can I. And we’ve used up all our perfume,” grumbled my brother, holding the bottle up against the light to check that it was empty.
Borja was right. We had to find a way out of that mess without being implicated. I let him pour out shots of brandy that we drank in silence, aware that Brian Morgan was not going to go away and that we had to think up something so the police would have no reason to link us to his death. While I sipped my brandy, I saw how clean and tidy our neighbour’s flat was, compared to the chaos in our office. You’d never have dreamt someone had broken in or done him in. Brian Morgan’s death bore the mark of an execution, and the mere thought made me shudder. I told Borja what my fears were and asked him yet again why he kept a set of keys to the flat of a man who’d been shot in the head and murdered.
“I’ve told you already,” he insisted in a tone of voice that suggested I was being paranoid. “One day when you weren’t around he came down to our office and gave them to me…”
“Hey, come on… You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?”
“I swear it’s the truth. He said he was always travelling and wanted a neighbour to have a duplicate set of keys in case he lost his or there was some kind of problem, like burst pipes or a gas leak. He also said he didn’t trust the concierge, and that I seemed the ideal kind of person.”
“Fuck, the guy holed in one there!” I retorted sarcastically.
“I thought he seemed plausible and I agreed to take the keys. Obviously, after what’s happened…”
“Do you have any idea what he did? His line of business?”
“I think he worked as an executive for an American company. Something to do with electrical components…”
“Do you know the name of the company?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But, Pep, what if he was a crook? Or belonged to a gang of criminals?” I suddenly blurted out.
“Hey, don’t be stupid! I’m sure there must be a straightforward explanation. Besides, Brian was a handsome guy and the women must have been after him. It’s probably a crime of passion, you just see.”
All of a sudden my brother jumped up from the sofa as if he’d remembered something very important.
“I’ll be back in a minute. I must check something…” he said, rushing into the corridor.
Borja went into the spare bedroom and straight to the wardrobe. He opened one of the doors and took out a small package hidden behind a pile of sheets. He picked it up gingerly with both hands, unwrapped it and put the contents on the bed.
“My lucky morning!” he shouted, looking visibly relieved. “I’m what you call a lucky man!”
I’m no expert in antiques or works of art, but you didn’t need to be to realize that it was a very old sculpture, like the ones you see in museums. The piece, only a few centimetres high, was an anthropomorphic representation, perhaps of some deity, with an animal head and human body. I noticed that its hind legs were missing.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“An antique.”
“I can see that much. I don’t understand how you knew it was in the wardrobe.”
“That’s easy. I put it there.”
“You did?”
“I thought it was a good hiding place. As I had the keys to the flat…”
“You mean Brian didn’t know you’d hidden it in one of his wardrobes?”
“Of course he didn’t! That was the whole point. Nobody should know.”
I took a deep breath and shook my head. I understood nothing.
“Wait a minute, Borja,” I said a few seconds later. “What if they killed him because of this sculpture? If it’s an antique, it must be worth a packet…”
“Nah, it’s too small! You can fit it in the palm of your hand… And, besides, I told you Brian knew nothing about it. Whoever killed him didn’t even turn his flat over, that much is obvious.” And he then added, sounding convinced, “It’s altogether a highly unfortunate coincidence.”
“When did you hide it?”
“Last Monday, only a week ago. Do you remember that I went to Provence with Merche?”
“Yes, you told Lola it was a business trip, but kept to yourself the fact that Merche went with you…”
“Well, it was a business trip. As I had to go to Arles to pick up this sculpture, I decided to take Merche with me. She’s been quite irritable recently. We went in her Audi. Though she doesn’t know anything about the statue either.”
“So, now you are trafficking in antiques!” I said, with a deep sigh.
“Well, if you put it that way…”
“You tell me how else I should put it…”
“I’m really doing someone a favour. Three weeks ago I had a call from that antique dealer in Amsterdam that I sold some of your mother-in-law’s paintings to.”
“Passing them off as fake Mirs, I presume…”
“He offered me an easy, well-paid assignment: I had to go to Arles, collect this sculpture, bring it to Barcelona, keep it here for a few days and hand it over to a person who would get in touch by phone. And that was it.”
“And you couldn’t think of anything better than to hide it in the American’s flat?”
“Well, as I was helping him out by holding on to a set of keys to his flat and he—”
“He was an accomplice, but didn’t know it!”
“Something of the sort,” he concurred, looking at the floor.
We stayed silent for a while, Borja with his head down and yours truly at a loss for words. Although I knew that when my brother was really broke he acted as a middleman for a smuggler of designer mobiles and shades in the Barceloneta, I suspected this small statue belonged to a rather more perilous category of shenanigans.
“Very well then, what do we do now? I hope you get one of your bright ideas before a neighbour notices the stench and tips off the mossos…” I rasped.
“The first thing we need to do is to clean everything and remove all traces of our fingerprints. Let’s look in the laundry room and see what cleaning materials there are.”
Luckily we found everything we needed. Borja slipped an apron and rubber gloves on and asked me not to move or touch anything. He painstakingly wiped all the surfaces we’d touched with a cloth soaked in window-cleaning liquid and told me that it contained alcohol and was the best thing there was for removing fingerprints. Although chemistry had never been his strong point, I imagined he’d heard that in one of the police series he liked to watch. Then he grabbed the mop and bucket to make sure none of our vomit was still on the kitchen floor, and finally washed out the brandy glasses with soap and water, dried them and returned them to the cocktail bar along with the bottle. As soon as he’d finished, he returned his arsenal of cleaning items to the laundry room and left everything exactly as he’d found it.
“We can go now,” he said, using one of his cotton handkerchiefs to open the flat door.
“Aren’t you going to shut the door?” I asked when I saw he’d left it wide open.
“No, I also left the kitchen door open. That way, the stench will spread downstairs and the neighbours or concierge will ring the police.”
“But, when the mossos walk up, because you can be sure they will come up the stairs, and not in the lift, they will see that our door has been broken into and will take a look at what’s inside. Or rather, at what isn’t.”
“Blast, you’re quite right! Change of plan.”
Borja shut the door to Brian Morgan’s flat, took out his mobile and rang a locksmith. While we were waiting for him to arrive, we gave our office a bit of a tidy. An hour and a half later, our door had a new lock and we had two hundred euros less in our pockets. Before we left the building, Borja went back to the American’s flat and left the front door wide open.
“The concierge gets here at five,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Do you think she’ll go upstairs and have a look?”
“I’m sure she will. I bet you anything we’ll have a visit from the cops this evening.”
What with one thing and another, it was now four p.m. We still hadn’t had any lunch. I suggested going to our place for a bite to eat.
“Joana will be the only person there at this time of day. She goes to collect Arnau from school at half past four, so we will have the place to ourselves.”
“What about the twins?” asked Borja.
“They’re into romance and spend every free moment with their girlfriends. I don’t think we’ll see any sign of them before eight.”
We went off to get the Smart that was parked halfway between the office and Borja’s flat and drove to our place. Fortunately, my mother-in-law wasn’t around. I prepared chorizo rolls in the kitchen, and took a couple of beers from the fridge. As it’s a small kitchen and only fits a tiny table, we chomped our rolls in the dining room. We had yoghurt for afters and, now that Borja had got over the fright provoked by his macabre discovery, he ate two, lemon and strawberry flavours, like when he was a kid.
After we’d finished, I boiled up some coffee in the kitchen. While we were savouring our coffees in the dining room, I opened the window so we could enjoy a clandestine smoke. Better if the twins didn’t suspect somebody had smoked in our flat, or else Montse or I would have to endure one of their enlightening sermons on the drawbacks of nicotine-addicted parents.
“I wanted to ask you something,” said Borja as he extinguished his cigarette.
“Fire away.”
“I’d like you to keep the statue here,” he said, taking it from his pocket and putting it on the table.
“Well, after what happened to the American…”
“I told you that it was pure coincidence. Brian’s murder has nothing to do with this statue. The people who did him in weren’t looking for anything. They didn’t even search his flat.”
“So why don’t you hide it in your flat? That would seem the most sensible…”
“It will be safer here. You know how Merche and Lola like to turn my drawers inside out.”
“Is it very valuable?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I suppose so. They are paying me twenty thousand to do this job.”
“Fucking hell!”
“Ten for you and ten for me. You know, it will only be for a few days, a fortnight at most.”
“But it’s got to be stolen goods. Or smuggled.”
“Well, I couldn’t give a monkey’s,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. But the second he saw the little light of my moral scruples start to flicker, he added, “Look, it’s only a small piece of stone. It’s not drugs, or arms, or anything dicey like that. We’re not hurting anyone.”
“Hey, if it’s stolen, I don’t think the owner would agree…”
“Bah, you can be sure he’s some rich guy who will have it insured and is going to collect the insurance payment, don’t you worry. That is, supposing it is stolen. Perhaps all they’re after is tax avoidance,” he added, as if that didn’t matter.
“And it’s our taxes that pay for schools and hospitals, in case you didn’t know,” I retorted sarcastically.
“Look at it from another point of view: the twenty thousand euros they’re paying me must be black money that’s been kept for years in some safe. We’ll put it back into circulation and help reactivate the country’s economy.”
“True enough,” I was forced to admit.
“What’s more, as we will have to spend the money, we will pay taxes to the state in the shape of VAT.”
“When you put it like that…”
“So, there you are,” he said, getting up. “Think where we can hide it so the girls don’t find it.”
We decided the best place to hide the statue would be the trunk in the double room where Montse keeps our thick winter wear. I think the twins and Arnau creep in there from time to time and rummage through the drawers – and perhaps my mother-in-law does, too, as she spends a lot of time by herself in the flat and has discovered the pleasures of poking your nose everywhere. That trunk only had cold-weather items, and I was sure nobody would pry there. I very carefully removed a stack of jerseys, wrapped the statue in one of my woolly jumpers and returned it to the bottom of the pile.
“It’ll be safe enough there,” I said.
“Thanks so much, kid.”
“It’s almost half past six,” I said, looking at my watch. “Do you reckon the concierge will have rung the police?”
“We can drive by and take a look to see if the filth’s cars are around,” he said. But the second he saw the alarm on my face, he added, “Don’t worry. We’ll take the Smart. And we won’t stop.”
We saw a fire engine, an ambulance and a couple of patrol cars parked in front of the block that housed our office. The mossos had cordoned off the entrance to the building with tape and a crowd of onlookers had gathered round who didn’t want to miss the spectacle of the male nurses carrying a corpse in a black sack to the ambulance. Paquita was standing next to the ambulance, replying to questions she was being asked by a plain-clothes policeman who was taking notes.
“Poor woman! She must have had the fright of her life!” I said. Deep down I felt guilty for preparing the terrain that meant she was the one to find poor Brian in his kitchen.
“I wouldn’t be too upset if I were you. You can bet she’s enjoying every minute.”
“Hey, you know, coming across a stinking corpse is hardly fun. We’ve probably traumatized her for life.”
“Traumatized her? For Christ’s sake, this is Paquita!” rasped Borja. “Finding a murdered tenant in her building must be the best thing that has happened to her in years! This will allow her to queen it over the neighbourhood for weeks, and you just see how that rejuvenates her.”
“If you say so…”
A depressed, angry Montse was waiting for me at home. She was angry because she’d been ringing me all morning, and, for a change, my mobile was flat. She was depressed because the bank manager had told her and her partners there was not a cat in hell’s chance of getting a loan.
“Don’t you worry, we’ve got a good job on,” I said to cheer her up. “On top of that, Borja and I are dealing with a little matter that will save our bacon, if it turns out right.” And I tried to sound convincing when I added, “I expect things will sort themselves out in the end.”