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!’
Fifty-two
Tom’s first day at sailing school overran by quite a bit, and so it was almost three before we sat down to our light lunch. Happily, that’s not a problem at La Clota; it’s an all-day restaurant during the summer months. After we’d eaten, I had coffee and let him run through his morning. Actually he walked through it, step by step, knot by knot, tack by tack; the more he talked, the more I saw him as Johnny Depp, in his Jack Sparrow costume.
It was gone four by the time we climbed into the Jeep to go home, and I was hoping that Charlie hadn’t out-stayed his welcome with Ben. Still, a glance in the mirror as we pulled away, a glimpse of that Godawful hair, persuaded me that there was time for one last call, and so I stopped at the new Farmacia in Avinguda Girona and ploughed through its stock of hair tints, until I found the one that seemed to be most like I usually look.