We spent the whole of Friday morning with Deputy Inspector Alsina-Graells, fine-tuning the details of Operation Buddha, as the Inspector had dubbed it. We’d arranged to meet Sònia in her deceased husband’s flat at five, and the plan was for Borja and I to carry hidden microphones so the Deputy Inspector and her men could overhear and record the conversation. As we had no other evidence, we had to try to get a confession out of her, which seemed easy enough on paper, but less so in reality.
“Above all, don’t get nervous or forget you’ve got the microphones on you. Remember, she must confess to killing her husband,” the Deputy Inspector pleaded.
“Don’t worry, Deputy Inspector!” Borja said soothingly. “It will all turn out fine, you just see. Won’t it, Eduard?”
I’m not so good at lying as Borja, and was as agitated as the Deputy Inspector. We left her office at two and went for lunch with her and a couple of sergeants in a bar full of mossos and, as soon as we finished, we went back to the station to go over the plan for the nth time. At half past four, after checking that the microphones Borja and I had hidden under our clothes were working properly, we climbed into a taxi driven by a policeman in plain clothes. Behind us came three Ford Escorts incognito, full of police: Deputy Inspector Alsina-Graells was in the first.
When we reached Zen Moments, we saw what Cecília had told us was true: they were refurbishing. The centre was closed to the public and the Eastern-style garden that surrounded it was full of sacks of rubble and building materials. Workers were constantly going in and out and, as the door was open, Borja and I walked in without asking permission from anyone or being stopped by anyone. Once we were inside, we went straight to Horaci’s office and knocked on the door. The sign with his name had gone.
Sònia Claramunt opened the door.
“Good afternoon,” Borja greeted her.
“You’re very punctual,” she replied frostily, as she gestured to us to come in.
She looked daggers at us, but that was hardly strange, I reflected, as Borja and I had come – at least in theory – to blackmail her and she was about to hand over thirty thousand euros to buy our silence. Her jeans and tight-fitting white T-shirt emphasized how svelte she was, and her necklaces, bracelets, earrings and paste rings on her fingers added the finishing touches to her informal, if not entirely casual, style of dress. I stared at her shoes, which were flat and dark blue, and the little toes she’d amputated for the sake of fashion came to mind.
“Have you got the video?” she asked.
“That depends,” replied my brother with a smile. “Have you got the money?”
“Yes,” she rasped.
“The thirty thousand euros we agreed for the tape where you can be seen entering the meditation centre the night they killed your husband?”
I thought Borja was spreading it on too thickly, and that Sònia might sense this was a trap.
“Here’s your thirty thousand,” she said, pointing to the plastic bag on top of the desk.
“May I?” Borja pointed to the bag. “I don’t want to seem rude, but you must understand I can hardly trust a woman who killed her husband in cold blood,” he continued, smiling away.
“I didn’t kill him in cold blood,” retorted a weary-sounding Sònia. “In any case, that’s none of your business. Take your money and leave me in peace.”
Borja glanced inside the bag and gave her the empty tape.
“By the way, I am intrigued,” added Borja. “Was it an attack of jealousy? You did know your hubby was no saint, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t have a clue,” she replied wearily.
“Obviously you must have inherited insurance money. I saw the building workers outside…”
“I thought we’d come to an agreement, Mr Masdéu. I give you the money and you give me the tape. Our professional relationship ends there.” She walked over to the door. “And don’t try coming back to ask for more, because then we will all end up in the slammer. I’ll get put down for a number of years but you’ll lose your thirty thousand and will be inside for a time too,” she warned threateningly.
“I told you when we spoke on the phone that we are real gentlemen and, if we hold on to anything, it is our word,” replied Borja, as if she’d insulted him. “The truth is, my brother and I would find it much easier to forget this business if you told us why you killed your husband,” insisted Borja, determined not to leave that office until he’d extracted the confession the Deputy Inspector needed.
“Why do you need to know?”
“Simply out of curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed the cat, Mr Masdéu.”
“Is that a threat? Are you going to liquidate us as you did your husband?” retorted Borja.
“Hey, I didn’t… liquidate him. I told you it wasn’t premeditated.”
“So what did happen then?” insisted Borja.
“Very well…” she started as if she’d not the energy to argue any more. She walked away from the door and sat down on the sofa; we followed suit and sat in the armchairs. “If you must know, it was no sudden attack of jealousy. I’d known for some time that Horaci was carrying on with that artist, Edith.”
“And it was all the same to you?” I asked.
Sònia Claramunt shrugged her shoulders.
“Horaci and I weren’t just a married couple: we were a business,” she went on. “When I first met him, he’d just graduated and didn’t know what to do with himself. He’d fallen out with his father, didn’t get on with his brother, and, after spending eight years studying medicine, had discovered he didn’t like the idea of being a doctor. I was working as a highly paid economist at the time. I had some savings and I suggested he should do a crash course in homeopathic medicine and open a consultancy in this part of the city. Homeopathy was starting to become fashionable, and could be highly profitable if it was done properly.”
“And how right you were.”
“Then Horaci met Bernat and Cecília. She was broke, but was really into yoga and meditation, and she was very knowledgeable; Bernat, on the other hand, comes from a good family and managed to persuade his father to be a backer so he could get a loan to establish Zen Moments. Indeed it was his idea to knock down his grandparents’ mansion and build the meditation centre. The project was for all four of us – Bernat, Cecília, Horaci and me – to become wealthy by offering alternative therapies to the residents of the Sarrià and Bonanova districts.”
“And business was booming, wasn’t it?” asked Borja, who by this point had probably forgotten he’d a microphone hidden somewhere on his person: he was genuinely intrigued.
“The fact is it could have worked much better if we’d made the changes we are introducing now,” continued Sònia, smiling sadly. “By incorporating a spa, beauticians’ studios, a restaurant and a decent menu… People don’t just want yoga and meditation, or prescriptions for pills to cure their colds. They want to drink juice with their girlfriends on a terrace, and, after their meditation session, they want their body hair shaved off, facial treatments, manicures…”
“So I suppose the issue was getting the necessary capital together…” I commented. “But with the proceeds from the insurance policy your husband must have contracted…”
“Ah, you really don’t get it, do you?” exclaimed Sònia even more wearily. “The real issue was that Horaci ended up believing all this tosh about meditation, feng shui, Bach flower remedies and homeopathy. He suddenly lost all interest in money. He was convinced this nonsense really worked and didn’t want to change anything. He’d even started giving sessions gratis.”
“So was the decision to remove him from the scene yours alone, or was Dr Comes involved?”
“I told you it wasn’t premeditated,” replied Sònia, shaking her head. Bernat and I, and Cecília for that matter, had often talked about the changes we wanted to introduce at the centre, but we never contemplated a solution of this nature… It never occurred to us.”
“So how were you hoping to persuade him?” I asked.
“We wanted Horaci to sell his shares to Bernat and me. Cecília had almost persuaded him that if he wanted to make progress on the path to complete spiritual purification he ought to sell his shares and free himself of all material worries and ties.”
“That Cecília is another fine specimen,” muttered Borja.
Sònia Claramunt shrugged her shoulders.
“Nobody likes to be poor, Mr Masdéu. Apart from Horaci, who’d evidently gone round the bend.”
“So what did happen then?”
“We’d agreed that he’d come home last Saturday after dinner with the residents, and we’d talk it through. But he phoned me at around eleven to say he wasn’t coming home to sleep, that he was staying at the centre to meditate because he’d had a vision.”
“So you jumped into your car and drove here.”
“Yes. I simply wanted to talk to him and bring him to his senses. But when I found him sitting on the floor and he came out with all that nonsense about how we should leave everything and go off to India flat broke, I got so angry I just grabbed the Buddha from his desk and crowned him with it.”
“And then were cold-blooded enough to complete the deed and wipe off your fingerprints…” I chipped in.
“Won’t you ever understand? Horaci had gone stark raving mad!” she exclaimed. “This is just a business. A business, period. That’s why we set it up!”
At that precise moment the mossos burst into the office and arrested her. Sònia immediately realized we’d set a trap for her and stared at us with hate-filled eyes. While they were handcuffing her, she started shouting, “Nothing I’ve said is true! I was making it up! Do you hear? It’s not true! I’m not the person you can see on this tape! It’s not me!”
Back at the station, Inspector Badia thanked and congratulated us. When we thought that was the end of that and we could go home, he asked us to step into his office for a moment. He said he wanted a word in private.
“I’ve come up against a snag in the Brian Harris case,” he snapped.
“A snag?” asked Borja, instinctively leaning backwards.
“Well, maybe not a snag, more a question of detail,” smiled the Inspector.
“So what’s it all about?” asked Borja, trying to stay deadpan.
“Well, it’s like this, Mr Masdéu, we know who killed Brian Harris because we found him with the pistol that was used to shoot him.”
“Oh, really, who was it?” I asked, relieved.
“One of the Russian mafia who died in the shoot-out in Poblenou,” declared the Inspector.
Borja didn’t react, and let the Inspector continue.
“Somebody cleaned the flat when Brian was already dead,” he revealed. “And we think they did so wearing the gloves that were in the laundry room.”
“The Russian who killed him, I imagine?” asked Borja.
“That is precisely the snag, Mr Masdéu. We’ve found fingerprints and traces of DNA in the gloves, that were new according to the scientific chaps, and they don’t belong to the assassin or to Mr Harris,” said the Inspector, lolling back on his chair and rubbing his hands together.
“Good heavens…” I thought I heard Borja swallow.
“We’ve checked them against our database, but they don’t match anyone on our files,” the Inspector went on.
“Perhaps they belong to the cleaning lady,” I whined.
“No, Mr Harris didn’t have a cleaning lady, according to the concierge.”
“In any case, if you’ve caught the assassin, I don’t see what difference it makes…” Borja wasn’t able to finish his sentence.
“You know, Mr Masdéu, I’ve had a sudden intuition. Naturally, I can’t compare the prints and DNA with those of all the inhabitants of Barcelona,” he said with a cunning smile, “but I could ask the judge to authorize me to compare them with those of the other people living on the staircase.”
Borja and the Inspector stared at each other for a few seconds.
“I believe that would be a waste of time and a waste of the taxpayers’ money, Inspector,” Borja finally said, recovering his usual sangfroid. “Frankly, I thought you had enough real problems to deal with, Inspector.”
“Well, that is all I was after. I only wanted your opinion,” countered the Inspector.
“Well if I were you, I’d leave things as they are,” replied Borja defiantly.
“Now, if we did a check of that nature, we wouldn’t find your prints on those gloves, would we, Mr Masdéu?”
Borja said nothing for a few moments and looked the Inspector up and down. He finally burst out laughing as if the Inspector had cracked a joke he’d only just understood.
“Inspector, your sense of humour shows how intelligent you are,” he said. “Just listen to me and let sleeping dogs lie.” He strode towards the door and added, “There’s no point pouring oil on waters that are no longer troubled.”