Blood Red

Fifty-one

There wasn’t a cat’s chance of that, and I knew it; still, I persuaded Alex to make his call from my house, so that I could be on hand to defend him if the intendant blew a gasket over our search of the Planas place, and threatened to send him on night patrol in the no-go areas of Barcelona. . and there are some, trust me on that.

But Gomez took the news calmly; I know this for sure because we used the office phone, which has a hands-free facility, and so I could hear him. ‘You know, Alex,’ he said, when the story was told, ‘I always thought the Michels investigation was irregular. I was going to take it on myself, but Javier Fumado brushed me off. His angle was that it was a family tragedy and should be handled quietly for the sake of his sister, and his nieces. I fell for it too. Christ, if I had known this stuff about Planas. .’

‘There’s no evidence that Fumado knew either,’ I pointed out.

‘You’re right, Primavera, there isn’t. But it’s come to light now, and it’s put the power in my hands. Thanks to you two, I can walk into his office tomorrow with this new evidence about Dolores and reopen the investigation.’

‘Even though both she and Planas are dead?’

‘Henri Michels doesn’t know that, though. If his death wasn’t accidental, and wasn’t caused by a heart attack, he deserves justice. This too,’ he added. ‘I’ve never liked that little bastard Fumado and I’ve never trusted him. Over the years he’s taken a few decisions against prosecution that have struck me as odd. So we’ll pay him a visit.’ He paused, and then he surprised me, totally. ‘Would you like to come, Primavera? You’ve earned it, I reckon. If it wasn’t for you we’d never have established that Michels knew about this triangle. And there’s a second reason: you being there will unsettle him, make him uncertain.’

‘But how will you explain me?’

‘I’ll tell him that our regular secretary’s on vacation and that we’ve taken you on as a temp. You take the note of the meeting.’

‘I don’t know shorthand,’ I said, lamely. (I had to use the English word.)

‘What’s shorthand?’ he replied. ‘You know how to switch on a recorder, don’t you? Come to Girona, tomorrow morning, ten. We’ll go to his office from there.’

‘How do you know he’ll be there?’

‘I have an appointment with him already, to discuss another case. He’ll find that the agenda’s been changed.’

As it happened, Tom had an appointment of his own next morning. One of Ben’s neighbours was running a summer sailing school for kids, and I’d enrolled him. I dropped him off at the marina, in front of Café Navili, with instructions to meet me when the session finished, at two o’clock, at a restaurant called La Clota, just around the corner, then I headed off for Girona.

My mood was far different from what it had been two days before. I was still worried about Gerard, of course, deeply worried, but I felt that at least I was doing something. It might not have had anything to do with the two murders of which he was accused. . okay, Primavera; to which he’d confessed. . but then again. It was a can of worms, and if our visit to the public prosecutor’s office tipped it up and sent them crawling all over his desk, who knew where they might take us?

I’d even taken my own recorder with me for the meeting, but Gomez gave me a small minidisc machine, like the one. . maybe the same one, for all I knew. . that Valdes had used to let me hear Gerard’s confession. He said that it was better if I was seen to be using official issue, for the sake of propriety. That made me smile.

The office of the public prosecutor isn’t far from the Mossos building. The morning was dry and not too hot, so the three of us walked there. His secretary was at her post in the main reception area when we arrived. I expected Gomez to wait to be shown in, but he simply said, ‘Meeting with your boss,’ and headed for an unmarked door behind her, with Alex and me trailing along behind. The woman, mid-twenties, white shirt, tight grey skirt, enhanced blonde. . another reminder to do something about my chestnut hair. . rose to her feet, open mouthed, but we were past her before she could say a word.

Javier Fumado stayed in his seat as the intendant stepped unannounced into his office. He looked mildly annoyed, and more so as his gaze took in Alex. When it got to me it reached angry, and bewildered.

‘What is this, Gomez?’ he exclaimed. ‘What has Guinart got to do with the Iniesta investigation. . and what the hell is this woman doing here?’

‘Iniesta can wait. We’re here to talk about something else. As for the lady,’ he stressed the word, ‘she’s working for me while my regular clerk is on vacation.’

‘And she can leave right now!’ Fumado snapped. He was an unpleasant little man, with a sharp face, pointy enough to have played a villain in Wind in the Willows.

Gomez shook his head. ‘She stays. We may need to take a formal statement later; that’s her job.’

‘Statement? From whom?’

‘From you, Javier.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘We’re here to reopen the investigation into the death of Henri Michels.’

‘That file is closed.’

‘Wrong. It was closed; now it’s open again. We have new evidence in the case, and so I need to look at your records.’

‘It’s been two years, man!’

‘So?’

‘It was misfortune, that’s all; Henri was in poor health, he went on a walk that was too strenuous for him, had a heart seizure and fell to his death.’

‘Henri Michels was as strong as an ox,’ Alex Guinart intervened. ‘I worked out with him in the gym in Riells about a month before he died. He was bench-pressing his age in kilograms, fifteen repetitions at a time; as you’ll know, he was sixty-four years old. When he’d finished that, he did ten kilometres on the exercise bicycle.’

‘The file, please, Javier,’ said Gomez.

The public prosecutor locked eyes with him. I thought he was going to refuse, but he blinked first. ‘Okay,’ he said, with a huge sigh. ‘I’ll get it.’ He made to rise.

‘No,’ said the intendant, briskly, ‘we’ll do that. I need be sure that all of it arrives. Inspector, please.’

‘What the hell. .’ Fumado exclaimed, but Gomez cut him off.

‘When were you first aware that your sister was in an adulterous relationship with José-Luis Planas?’

The little man frowned. ‘When I received the lab comparison between samples taken from her body and from his,’ he replied.

‘Not before?’

‘No.’

‘Then why didn’t you question my use of the word “adulterous”? Dolores and Planas were both single.’

‘A simple oversight.’

‘You’re a very precise man with words, Javier. Now, would you like to have another shot at answering my question as it was originally put?’ He paused, and looked at me. ‘Primavera, we’ve reached the point at which this interview should be recorded. If you would, please.’

I produced the machine he had given me, switched it on, checked that the battery had plenty of life in it, inserted a disc and pressed ‘Record’. As I set it on the desk between the two men, I felt strangely proud to be playing an active part, however small, and even if I was under orders to keep my mouth shut.

Formally, as he had done once with me across the table, Gomez stated his name for the tape, then added mine and Fumado’s. Just as he finished, Alex came back into the room carrying a slim folder, and so he completed the set.

‘So, Senor Fumado,’ he continued, then repeated his question, word for word. Alex paid no attention; he sat beside me, with the file on his knees, going through it page by page.

‘I may have been aware of it,’ the prosecutor admitted.

‘May have?’ the intendant laughed. ‘Your sister was fucking a pillar of the L’Escala community. That’s not something you would have forgotten. You either knew or you didn’t.’

‘Very well, I knew.’

‘From when?’

‘From fifteen years ago. That’s when it started.’

‘How did you come to learn of it?’

‘From Dolores; she told me about it. She said that she and Henri had. . fallen out of love, was how she put it. She said that she would leave him for José-Luis if he asked her. I told her flat out that he never would, for he was very aware of what he saw as his position in the town. Maybe things have changed now, but back then. . you’ll know as well as I, Gomez. . different standards applied. A man could do what he liked, and as long as it was not admitted, it would be overlooked, but a woman would always be a whore. I said also that if she was thinking of divorcing Henri, she should do it anyway. He was not a man to be cuckolded, I told her. She should be very careful.’

‘But she ignored your advice?’

‘Most of it, but not the part about discretion.’

‘Did Henri ever mention it to you? Did he ever voice any suspicions?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well. . Henri was a big man, good looking, with an ego to match. It would have taken a lot for him to even consider that Dolores might be playing away. But he did once say something that made alarm bells ring with me. He told me that he’d found an envelope in the house. . nothing in it, just an envelope. . that was addressed to Flora; no surname, just Flora. “Wonder who the hell Flora is?” he said. But I knew.’

‘It was your sister’s nickname, when she was younger.’ Fumado nodded. ‘He must have had a feeling that something wasn’t right, though, when he moved house? When it was likely that Planas’s wife was going to die.’

The prosecutor looked at him blankly. ‘That had nothing to do with it, as far as I know.’

‘But he did find out,’ the intendant said. ‘We know for sure that he did. We have a witness who says that he found them together. Two days before that, he and Planas had a meeting in a backwoods bar. We reckon that Henri confronted him and warned him off. We know that he followed them to a restaurant across in Palau Saverdera, knocked Planas flat on his back, and took Dolores away with him. Two days after that he had his supposed heart attack and went over the edge. Did you know about that incident, Javier? Did your sister tell you about it?’

The little man shook his head, vigorously.

‘Are you certain?’ I knew that the question was fully loaded. If he had been aware of the fight, then he’d have been duty bound to investigate, or pass the case to another prosecutor. ‘I need you to answer, for the recording.’

‘No, she did not,’ he declared.

‘Did she call you on the night that Henri died?’

‘Yes. She rang me quite late, to tell me that he had gone for a walk on the cliffs and hadn’t come back. She was worried about him.’

‘How late?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it was some time after ten.’

‘That’s late?’

‘For some.’

‘Not for Henri. Inspector Guinart did some asking around yesterday. It seems he was a regular in a bar on the crest of Avinguda Montgo. He dropped in there often, after he’d been on the cliff walk; never left much before twelve. But on this night, of all nights,’ he went on, ‘your sister was worried, so what did you tell her to do?’

‘To call the police,’ he replied at once. ‘Sure, I knew he was probably in a bar somewhere,’ to my ear that was too glib, too quick to grab hold of what Gomez had told him, ‘but it was late and I couldn’t be bothered.’

‘I’m sure,’ said the intendant. ‘One last question; when did you first learn that Henri was dead?’

‘When you told me.’

‘And that was the same time as you advised me you would handle the investigation yourself, out of consideration for your sister, although you knew that she’d been cheating on the dead man for fifteen years.’

‘I. .’ Fumado spluttered.

‘A simple yes or no, please, for the record.’

‘Yes!’

‘Thank you.’ Gomez reached across, stopped the machine. I checked the last few seconds on the disc to make sure that it was in order. When I was satisfied, I put it away in my bag. Our leader rose to his feet; Alex and I followed suit.

‘Hey,’ Fumado yelped, holding out a hand, ‘my file, please.’

‘It’s our file for the moment,’ Alex told him.

‘It can’t leave this office,’ the little man protested.

‘You can come with it, if you wish,’ said Gomez, ominously. There was no reply. We headed for the door.

‘What’s in it?’ the intendant asked, as soon as we were out in the open.

‘Not as much as there should be,’ Alex replied. ‘There’s a note of the original police call, a couple of pretty poor photos of the body where it landed, there’s the post-mortem report, and there’s a statement from Dolores. That’s it; almost. No interview with Planas, or with any witnesses. No public appeal for sightings of Michels either. These were all things we’d do automatically. Fumado must have been shitting himself until he got the post-mortem report and saw the reference to a heart attack. As soon as he saw that, he wound the investigation up as quickly as he could, only. . the report isn’t original.’

‘How come?’ I asked.

‘The autopsy was done in Figueras, as normal. The pathologist sent his findings as an attachment to an email. It was printed out in the public prosecutor’s office, which means it could have been edited.’

‘Then let’s find out whether it was,’ said Gomez. ‘Find the pathologist who opened up Michels and get hold of his original report, for comparison. Then call our best contact in Telefonica; Inez Medel, as I recall. Ask her to go back two years and to check all the calls made from the number registered to Henri Michels, on May the twenty-seventh, then to go a week forward and see how many calls were made to the same number, either from Javier Fumado’s home phone or from the prosecutor’s office.’

Alex nodded. ‘Now do you want to know what else was in the file. . by mistake, I am pretty certain?’

‘Out with it,’ I exclaimed, forgetting my place in the hierarchy.

‘There’s a note of a call made by a lady, Senora Hernandez, to our office in L’Escala on May thirtieth, two days after the body was found and passed on by them to Fumado, in accordance with his instruction. She said that she had information for the police. Her address is in Carrer Muga, same as Henri and Dolores, and although the house has a name and not a number, I’m pretty sure she was their immediate neighbour. The note is there, but there’s no sign of any statement. Either our friend didn’t follow it up, or he didn’t like what he heard.’

‘We better go see her,’ Gomez declared, ‘and hope her memory’s still good.’ Then he looked at me. Before I even had a chance to open my mouth, he said, ‘No!’