Autumn in Catalonia (21 page)

‘And no bad dreams?’

‘Not tonight! I’ve done with bad dreams. There’s too much going on in the present to worry about the past. Shall we leave the young men playing billiards?’

‘I think so – they’ll be playing for hours, especially if Luc decides he’s teaching Martin something. They’re just a couple of boys!’

‘Yes, just as you say, Carla,’ Joana said meditatively, and then gave a tired smile. ‘They’re just a couple of boys.’

It had taken all of their lawyer’s influence to get Joana into the men’s prison in the Salt district of Girona, outside visiting times and within not much more than twenty-four hours of Sergi’s arrest. The lawyer, Miquel Gibert, had looked after their affairs for many years, and he had received Joana with infinite courtesy on the Friday evening in his office in the old town, delicately making no reference to the very grave charges against Sergi, and talking only of the ‘misunderstanding’, which they were currently working to rectify.

‘So he hasn’t been allowed any visitors?’ she asked him.

‘No, my dear Señora, no visitors apart from myself. Normally newly arrested prisoners are not permitted to see family and friends. This, of course, is to allow time for the necessary interrogations to take place. However, your husband is a man of some importance in this city, and I have
been able to secure him better than usual accommodation, and hope to be successful also in arranging for you to visit. Not tonight – I’ve only just been allowed to see him myself, you know, and he was only arrested this morning.’

‘He has only been arrested, not charged?’

‘As of this evening no charges have been formally made. But I have had to advise Señor Olivera that he is likely to be charged before the morning.’

Joana accepted with demure gravity his expressions of concern. Yes, she was fine, she assured him, just disbelieving, and worried for her husband. He held her hand for longer than usual as she rose to leave. What mattered now was to keep her morale high, for her own sake and for Señor Olivera’s, he urged her. And meanwhile they were surrounded by friends and well-wishers, who would work tirelessly for Señor Olivera’s release. She nodded agreement at this polite lie, as he ushered her solicitously to the car.

She wondered whether Sergi would refuse to see her, but at nine o’clock on the Saturday morning she found herself walking along a dank, very smelly corridor in the dirty, disused convent that had served for years as the men’s prison in Girona. She was shown into a room, which had nothing but a bare table in the middle, and there on one side of it sat Sergi, looking a little dishevelled but still dressed in his own clothes. Another privilege, perhaps? She heard the door close behind her, and turned to see that the guard had taken up position just inside.

Sergi watched both the guard and her with a closed face, and Joana paused a second to gather herself for the part she had to play, before crossing the little space towards him. He
didn’t get up to greet her, and his expression was still quite unreadable. Controlling her nerves she took the initiative, pulling out the chair opposite him at the table, and speaking quickly before he could ask her how she came to be here.

‘My God, Sergi,’ she said, infusing her voice with concern. ‘What has happened to you? Toni came back as quickly as he could to the hill house yesterday to tell me you’d been arrested! I couldn’t believe it!’

‘You’ve seen Gibert?’ Sergi didn’t bother to give her a welcome, but his tone was not aggressive.

‘Your lawyer? Yes, of course, I went to him first thing, but he hasn’t told me anything! He just arranged for me to see you. Sergi what has happened? Is it something political?’

‘You might call it that. There’s some fabricated letter going around that says I was involved in the death of Ramón Candera. Preposterous, of course, and there’s not a shred of real evidence to hold me here. But someone has it in for me, to have dreamt up such a trumped-up bit of nonsense.’

There was a vindictive anger to his voice which boded ill for Carla should he ever catch up with her. He didn’t mention her name, though, and Joana thought he wouldn’t want his wife to know about that visit to him from Carla and Martin, any more than he would want her to know if he ever managed to take his revenge. He certainly seemed to have no suspicion whatsoever of herself, which was reassuring. He needed to trust her now.

She’d listened enough to the lawyer yesterday to know that the charges against Sergi weren’t as trivial as he would like her to believe. In the end, the lawyer had implied, the evidence in
those letters would not be strong enough to convict Sergi, just as they’d thought. Too much depended on the word of a dead man, but, nevertheless, Sergi wouldn’t want the authorities to dig too deeply into the affair, or into the later death of the driver. He would play the injured innocent with all his usual cool bravado, and work behind the scenes to bring himself clear. He sounded unnerved, though, in spite of himself – she’d never heard him sound so rattled.

‘I can’t believe it!’ she said, and the tremble in her voice was not entirely simulated. ‘Surely they can’t keep you? Is there anything I can do to help you? We need to get you out of this place!’ She gestured around the dirty room. Compared with what he had put Luc through this was surely luxury, but it was an intimidating place, nevertheless.

Sergi looked at her with calculation. ‘Oh, they’ll let me out. It may just take some time, that’s all, and that’s what I want to avoid. I have to prove that letter to be the falsehood it really is.’

‘How will you do that?’

‘Don’t you worry your head about that, Joana.’ He paused. ‘But actually there is something you can do to help.’

She nodded earnestly, but stayed silent. After a moment more of calculation he seemed to come to a decision. ‘I want you to go and see Francesco Montilla,’ he said.

‘Francesco? Your bank manager?’

‘Yes, I’ll give you a letter for him authorising you to take some cash from my account. You’ll need to take out 500,000 pesetas.’

‘500,000?’ It was an unbelievable sum to take out in one transaction.

‘Don’t interrupt, Joana! Just listen to me, and follow my instructions very carefully. Get the money, and come to see me again tomorrow morning.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Don’t bring it all here – it’s not safe. Just bring me 100,000 for now – it’ll do to get the ball rolling, and then I’ll tell you what to do with the rest. I may need you to pay some out directly, discreetly of course, but I’ll let you know.’

There was tension in the speed at which he spoke, but his voice challenged her to ask any questions, and as she sat in amazement he turned to the guard to say he needed paper and an envelope. The guard opened the door and called to a colleague, and while his head was out of the door, Sergi leant over to Joana.

‘Have you got any cash with you? It costs me a fortune to keep these guys happy so I get decent food and stupid things like paper!’

Joana pulled her purse from her handbag and passed over the small amount of cash she had.

‘It’s all I have. But tomorrow you’ll have the money from the bank.’

‘No! Put that in a plain envelope and seal it up. I need it intact. But I’ll give you the code for the safe and you can take some cash out of there for yourself and bring some to me tomorrow for my personal needs, and bring me some clothes as well. Tell me, has anyone visited the house at all?’

‘No, not that I know of. None of the servants has mentioned anything, and certainly nobody has come to the house since I arrived yesterday afternoon.’

He considered for a moment. ‘They might, though. I tell you what, Joana, when you go into the safe you need to
do something for me. There’s an envelope inside, marked Valls, and I want you to take it out of the safe and burn it, all right?’

Joana took care to sound completely bemused. ‘Burn it?’

He began to be impatient. ‘That’s what I said. Just light a match and burn it in the grate. It’s not too difficult, is it?’

She shook her head.

‘Well do it immediately you get home, and don’t go looking at it, do you understand me? I don’t think there’s anything else that would interest them in the house. Don’t put the money from the bank in the safe, just in case – it’ll be safer in the car, hidden somewhere. Just don’t tell Toni what’s inside.’

Someone knocked at the door and passed some sheets of paper to the guard, and Joana waited in silence while Sergi wrote his letter to the bank manager and gave it to the guard to check and approve. Then he sealed it in the envelope and gave it to her.

‘You did well coming down to Girona, Joana,’ he said to her as she got up to leave. ‘I couldn’t have trusted old Gibert with something like this. If you’re going to take some money from the safe you might as well use some of it to buy yourself a new outfit or two. But make sure you go to the bank first, before it closes.’

So that’s me both won over and dismissed, Joana thought, with a certain wry amusement. She looked at him for a moment. Did you really kill Alex yourself, she wanted to ask him, or just kind of fix him up, but of course it was an impossible question to ask. Maybe later, in a few days, if he was happy with what she’d done for him she could
negotiate with him a little, and ask him to let her go. While he was here in the prison he had to listen – he couldn’t do anything to her, no matter how much her propositions might rile him, and he couldn’t walk away.

But for now she thanked him, and pecked him on the cheek, and gave him her most docile, concerned smile as she left the room, clutching the envelope in her hand.

Toni was waiting for her outside in the car, and they drove straight to the bank. It would be open, but would the manager be there himself this Saturday morning? Joana hoped so, because otherwise she would have to track him down at home, and meanwhile Carla and Luc were waiting anxiously at the apartment for news, and for a lift to Terrassa.

There was a part of her that didn’t want to hand over any money to Sergi if it was going to bribe people and get him out of gaol more quickly, for after all, the goal was to keep him in there for as long as possible. Joana wasn’t quite as confident as she had made herself sound yesterday, to the young people, but her hope was that Sergi would be kept in custody for long enough for Carla’s baby to be born in Terrassa, with Luc’s father in attendance.

But Joana knew that she had to see through what Sergi had asked her to do. Her role must be to stay as close to Sergi as she could, and to make sure he didn’t turn to anyone else for help, so she must get the money and hand it over, just as he had asked. Get the money, then pass by home to raid that safe before going to the apartment to let them all know what was happening. The money Sergi had so dismissively
told her to spend on herself would put cash into Carla’s hands to take to Terrassa with her. Carla and Luc would need more cash later, to help them start out somewhere new, but to poach money from the safe to that extent would be very visible to Sergi if he got home. One thing at a time – that’s what she kept telling herself!

Her mind was racing as they headed to the bank, and she felt like action woman. It made a change from the enforced idle life she’d been living, and she felt as though she’d taken charge again, putting the past behind her and acting for the future. And the action helped to remove Martin from her head as well.

It had shaken her more than she could say to learn how young Martin was. She’d made him her confidant, allowed herself to lean on him as she hadn’t turned to anyone for over twenty years, and in her mind he’d been close to her in age – her first cousin, the son of her Uncle Luis. When she thought how closely they’d lain together in her bed it made cold shivers run through her. She’d known he loved her, beyond mere family closeness, and she thanked the heavens for the instinct that had just held her back from him.

She’d had trouble yesterday even speaking to him on the journey to Girona, and he’d obviously been aware of her sudden coldness. Her impulse was to lash out at him, but she knew he didn’t deserve it, and the hurt look in his eyes would have been enough anyway to stop her. He would be at the apartment too, with Carla and Luc, and she hoped that maybe all of them being together with Maria and Victor last night would have been of some comfort to him.

But the threat to Carla was more important than
anything that was happening to her, and she shook herself mentally and focused on the task in hand. The car drew up outside the bank, and with some hesitation she went inside. How ridiculous to live a life where she had so rarely even visited a bank! She knew the manager, though – Francesco Montilla and his wife had been regular dinner party guests over the years. How would he react to Sergi’s bizarre request?

He was in his office, she discovered. An aloof young clerk took her name through to him, and Francesco Montilla came surging out of his office to greet her and usher her into his sanctuary, calling for coffee as he did so.

‘Joana, my dear!’ he exclaimed, with a note of surprise he couldn’t disguise. ‘How are you, dear lady? And the family? Only the other day we were talking about you, Inez and myself, and saying what an age it is since we last saw you!’

He can’t have heard about Sergi’s arrest, she thought, or he wouldn’t be so welcoming. He would change his tune in a moment. And she was right. He read through the letter she gave him while she sipped the little cup of coffee brought by his assistant, and as he digested its contents his eyes flickered over her twice, guarded and measuring. He stayed silent, pretending he was still reading, but Joana thought he was just working out what to say. When he did speak, the gushing welcome had gone from his voice, and he had withdrawn into his official persona.

‘This is an unusual request, Señora. Your husband instructs me to give you access to his account, and to hand to you a great deal of money. I gather that he finds himself in some difficulty.’

It wasn’t a question – it was as though he didn’t actually want to know any more. She could understand why, but her role was to reassure him.

‘Sergi has been arrested, Francesco, but he is sure of securing his release before long. You know how the world of public government works. This is just some malicious political manoeuvring.’

The manager nodded, but he must suspect that even if he was released Sergi’s career might well be finished. He was no longer someone the Montillas would want to have dinner with, and therefore, neither was she!