Blood Red

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘How is Jonny? I haven’t seen him since he was a lad.’

  ‘He’s no lad now. Six foot two, golfer’s shoulders, hands like mine,’ he held up a great paw, ‘and a look of his uncle about him.’ Suddenly Mac’s face darkened. ‘After . . . after what happened,’ he said quietly, ‘given that it seems to be hereditary, Ellie and I both insisted that he and Colin had complete cardiac examinations. Jonny’s all clear, but they want another look at Colin when he’s finished growing.’ He gave a very small sideways nod in Tom’s direction, accompanied by a look that was an unspoken question. Tom was oblivious to the conversation; he had just received a text and was replying to it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was still . . . away, at the time, but you know Susie.’ For a troubled period in my life, Tom was raised by his father and his eventual widow, the former Susie Gantry. ‘She didn’t waste a second having him checked, along with her two. They’re all absolutely normal, but they’ll be monitored as they grow, to be sure.’ A thought struck me, about Oz’s sister. ‘How about Ellie?’

  Mac nodded. ‘Clear,’ he murmured, then sighed. ‘You know, Primavera, I try not to think about it, but I can’t help it. If Oz had had an examination like that after I had my valve malfunction . . .’

  I laid a hand on his. ‘You think I don’t have the same thought? Do you think Susie doesn’t? We’ve all got to live with it, and that’s the bottom line.’

  Happily, a young waiter appeared with our starter, and three plates, just at that moment, to break the mood. I shared the salad out, pretty much equally . . . try giving Tom a smaller portion than anyone else and see what happens. We must all have been even hungrier than we thought, for we demolished it in no time at all. The main courses weren’t long in coming, though. I was just about to start on mine, when I saw Alex Guinart, out of uniform, ambling slowly into the square, pushing Marte, my goddaughter, in her chair, with Gloria, who’s a real classic Andalusian beauty, by his side. Husband and wife both saw us, and waved to me, but didn’t come to join us, opting instead for a table at Meson del Conde.

  Mac didn’t want a dessert, but Tom and I both voted for fresh pineapple; his kebab had been enormous, and I wasn’t sure that he really was still hungry, but he slogged his way through it. Finally, though, he couldn’t put off the evil hour any longer. ‘Bed, kid,’ I told him. ‘School day tomorrow, and all that.’

  ‘Aw, Mum!’ He doesn’t usually argue, but his grandpa doesn’t arrive every day either.

  ‘Come on,’ said Mac, with a grin. ‘She’s saying my time’s up too, you know. Us old guys and you young guys have to play by the same rules.’

  That mollified him. I paid the bill and the three of us made to leave, but as we did, I spotted Alex waving to me, as if he wanted to talk. I tossed Mac the key and said I’d join him in a minute, if he fancied a drink on the sitting-room terrace. (That was a rhetorical invitation, folks.)

  Alex and Gloria were at the coffee stage when I joined them. He asked me if I’d like one; I asked for a cortado, although I’d had one at Esculapi. I said ‘Hello’ to Gloria and made a fuss of Marte, who seemed pleased to see me even if she still can’t say my name properly. ‘Tia Prima’ is as far as she gets . . . I’m an honorary auntie . . . and I suspect it’s going to stay that way, by habit and repute, to use an old Scots legal phrase.

  I asked Alex how things were going, in Catalan, as usual. ‘Progressing,’ he said. He surprised me by answering in English. Gloria doesn’t speak it, not at all, and so I guessed that he must want to shield her from the darker side of his new job. ‘Professor Perez gave us her findings this afternoon. She confirmed the original autopsy report, and more.’

  ‘More? In what way?’

  ‘She’s not so convinced about the time of death; she reckons it could have been any time up to six o’clock, before the sun rose.’ He must have seen my eyebrows rise, for he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a faint smile, ‘that puts your friend Senor Reid back among the list of possibles, but from what I’ve heard of his state when he left the Anchovy Tavern, he would not have been able to find his . . . How you say? . . . his backside with both hands, far less go out again, find Planas’s house and kill him. Also . . . Perez may be eminent, but I don’t really think that the old man would have been in his garden in his day clothes at five or six in the morning. Especially as he must have been tired.’

  ‘I dunno,’ I countered. ‘They say the older you get the less sleep you need.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that the hour had made him tired. He’d had sex not long before he died.’

  ‘What?’ I gasped, open mouthed. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  He laughed, then said to Gloria, in Catalan, ‘Finally, I have been able to surprise Primavera.’

  She grinned back at him. ‘Make sure you never surprise me like that.’

  ‘Alex,’ I said, ‘exactly how eminent is this professor of yours? Could she be mistaken? You never mentioned this after the first autopsy.’

  ‘The local pathologist missed it. In fact he didn’t look for it. He’s embarrassed now; he says that he was given the body of a man thought to have been killed by a fall, so it never occurred to him to look at his . . .’ he paused, stuck for the English word, ‘. . . his pene.’

  Gloria’s eyes widened, then she smiled. ‘Prick,’ she chuckled. ‘It’s one of the only English words I know,’ she told me, in Catalan. I didn’t ask her how she had come to learn it. Neither did Alex, but I judged from a faraway look that came into his eyes for a moment that the subject might be raised later.

  ‘Patricia Perez looks at everything,’ he continued.

  ‘Rather her than me, in this case. Does she know what sort of farmyard animal he’d been fucking?’

  ‘Oh, it was a woman, no question of that. She found traces of body fluids on his . . .’ He paused.

  ‘If you’d like the proper English word, it’s penis. There are several informal alternatives, apart from the one that Gloria knows.’

  ‘Thank you . . . there, on his underpants and on his trousers.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Jesus, he was a real class act. He just unzipped himself and got on the job? What a knight in shining armour. I take it these samples are viable for DNA.’

  ‘Yes. We’re testing, but where we’ll find a match . . . God alone knows that.’

  I shuddered. ‘Not with my sample, I promise you that. Does anyone know whether Planas had a lady friend?’

  ‘That was one of the first questions we asked the people who knew him, including his son, his bank manager, the owner of Hostal Miryam, Justine Michels, and all the other people on the council. They all said the same thing, that he hasn’t been seen with a lady since Angel’s mother died six years ago. One or two of the older ones said that he wasn’t seen with her all that often either. They would go to church together, but it was unusual for them to go anywhere else as a couple. She was a very quiet woman, apparently.’

  ‘Did you ask Angel about her?’

  ‘No. There was no reason.’

  ‘I suppose not. So who do you reckon this woman was? A prostitute, a call girl?’

  ‘That was Gomez’s first thought. If she is, she won’t be from L’Escala. The old goat would have been more discreet than to pick up a local. Maybe one of the clubs along the road to Figueras has been sending women out on house calls. We’re going to check all of them tomorrow.’

  ‘Then you’ll be looking for someone who’s gone missing.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Don’t you? This woman, whoever she is, has to be your new prime suspect. Maybe he wouldn’t pay her or tried to short change her . . .’

  ‘That’s our thinking,’ Alex agreed.

  ‘. . . she picked up a rock, or something similar . . . maybe she had a cosh in her bag . . . and hit him with it. She probably didn’t mean to kill him, but when she realised she had, she did some quick thinking, dragged him to the wall and tossed him over to make it look like a fall. And after doing that, a
nd getting rid of the second wine glass, she hung around? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t think so either. You have quite an imagination, Primavera; you see it much as we do. In fact the crime scene team found traces of blood on the grass, near the patio, and then again, in several other places, leading towards the wall. But you got the weapon wrong. Perez found something else that our man had missed: fine traces of wood and paint embedded in Planas’s skull, where it was crushed. She says that there was only one blow, and that death was probably instantaneous. We’re going back to the scene tomorrow, early, to see if we can find a match.’

  ‘Whatever he was hit with, it did the job. Tell me, was there any money in his wallet? I assume that he had one.’

  ‘Oh yes, he did, and there was four hundred and eight euro in it. He always paid his bills in cash, at Hostal Miryam and everywhere else. He didn’t have any credit cards; no plastic at all.’

  ‘Doesn’t that argue against the prostitute theory?’ I wondered, aloud.

  ‘Not necessarily. If she was smart enough to fake the accident scenario, she’d have known that robbing him would have blown it. Besides, for all we know he could have had a thousand on him originally.’

  ‘True,’ I conceded. ‘In any event, your lady killer is probably long gone from Spain by now.’

  ‘I fear you may be right,’ he conceded. ‘But that isn’t going to stop us looking for her.’

  Twenty-four

  Mac was waiting in the garden when I returned; the evening had cooled and he had put on a sweater. ‘What would you like?’ I asked him, as I led the way inside, and sent him up to the first-floor terrace, overlooking the square.

  ‘A beer will do.’

  I fetched a couple of bottles of Coronita from the fridge (they call it Corona in Mexico, where it’s made, and just about everywhere else on the planet; it’s my ‘house’ beer), stuck a wedge of lime in the neck of each and carried them upstairs. Grandpa Blackstone had settled himself into one of the chairs and was gazing down at the rapidly clearing cafés.

  ‘You’re doing a great job, Primavera,’ he said, as I handed him his nightcap.

  ‘Uh?’ I grunted, as I lit a mozzy candle.

  ‘With Tom.’

  ‘He’s due most of the credit.’

  ‘Some of it, but you’re setting the example, you’re doing the raising. He’s turning into a fine boy.’ He smiled. ‘I had a look at his teeth once he’d brushed them. He’s got the same kink in his lower incisors that his father had, and his aunt still does. You could have it straightened by an orthodontist, indeed if you were American it would be automatic, but it’s a very small imperfection. I never bothered with Oz or Ellie. It won’t stop him having a killer smile when all his adult set are through.’

  ‘That’ll be good,’ I murmured, ‘as long as he smiles with his eyes at the same time.’

  A frown seemed to settle on Mac’s face in the candlelight. ‘Are you saying that my son didn’t?’

  ‘He did when I first met him. I’ll die thinking of the first time he smiled at me. Latterly, though, it wasn’t always the case.’

  ‘What changed him, d’ you think?’

  I sighed. ‘Me probably.’

  ‘Nah. You set him on the road to doing things he’d never dreamed of.’

  ‘And came between him and Jan.’

  ‘Sometimes monogamy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

  I had no response to that, and he wasn’t about to elaborate, and so we sat in silence for a while, until he reached across and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he began, and the grin was back, ‘what about this Gerard then?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Tom seems to like him.’

  ‘Tom’s one of his altar servers.’

  ‘You’re okay with that?’

  ‘Absolutely. If you’re looking for a role model for the son of a single mum, who better?’

  ‘And for the single mother herself?’

  I chuckled. ‘Mac, think of him as the bloke next door, because that’s what he is. You’ve been single, you know how these things really are.’

  ‘Hah! Bad example, lass. In my case, Mary and I were creeping in and out of each other’s houses late at night, until we went legit.’

  ‘Well, there’s no creeping done here!’

  He nodded. ‘Just as well.’ He pointed with his beer bottle, down the square. Alex and Gloria had just left their table and he was steering Marte’s buggy round the corner. ‘That was a long conversation,’ he remarked.

  At times, Mac can be as subtle as a flying mallet, but I know that his curiosity isn’t that of the prurient, but that of someone who really cares about me, almost as much as my own father does.

  ‘See you,’ I said, smiling. ‘His name is Alex, his wife’s called Gloria and I’m the baby’s godmother, unlikely as that may seem. He’s a cop, and he was giving me the lowdown on a case that is currently the talk of the steamie in this part of the world.’

  ‘What happened? Has somebody been nicking the lead off the church roof?’

  ‘No, someone’s drawn a line under a prominent citizen. Alex is one of the investigators.’

  ‘Jesus, homicide?’

  I nodded.

  ‘In a place like this?’

  ‘We’re not immune. I didn’t mention it earlier, because Tom was around.’

  I gave him a full rundown on the events leading up to Planas’s death, and on what had happened afterwards.

  ‘They thought Matthew did it?’ he gasped.

  ‘Let’s just say that they entertained the possibility.’

  ‘Ridiculous. The big fella’s harmless. Plus, on the golf course he couldna’ hit a cow on the arse with a shovel, so I doubt if he’s capable of clubbing anyone over the head, unless the bloke stood very still and told him what to do. What about his stepson, this Ben lad? Surely he had a down on the dead man?’

  ‘Ben’s problems with him were over by that time, and he never knew about the money. Besides, he told me that Alex had been to see him and asked him where he was. Seems that he wasn’t alone; he isn’t saying who he was with, not to me, anyway, but he’s not in the frame. As for Matthew, he can prove where he was at the time as well.’

  ‘So the theory is that this righteous pillar of the community bought himself some nookie and then got hit over the head?’

  ‘That’s the current police thinking, yes.’

  He looked at me. ‘Do I get the impression you don’t share their conviction?’

  I frowned back at him. ‘It seemed obvious at first, but . . . When I think about it, and I try to imagine the situation, like an old guy calling a discreet number on his mobile as if it’s for a home delivery pizza: I can picture it, sure . . . but not with that particular old guy. When he and I had our set-to in his office and he called me a whore, there was real contempt in his voice when he said the word. He spat it out; the old bastard spat it all over me, in fact. He was saying that in his eyes a puta is the lowest of the low. So you see, I’m not sure I can see him soiling himself with one. I have a feeling that Alex and his boss can spend all day tomorrow checking the brothels between here and Figueras, or between here and Madrid for that matter, and they’re going to come up empty handed.’

  Twenty-five

  I tried to forget about it. Really, I did. But it wouldn’t go away. The vision of that odious man and his midnight assignation kept forcing itself between me and everything else I tried to do. And I had plenty on my plate next day, with our guest to look after. Tom dropped a hint about pulling a sickie from school, but I wasn’t having any of that. The year end was approaching and that’s a big time for the kids at every level, so I dug my heels in.

  Once he had set off on his bike . . . with a promise from his grandpa that the two of them would go shopping for a new one at the weekend . . . I took Mac, and Charlie, for a stroll around the village, so that Mac could see it properly, before the holidaymakers and day trippers started to flock in. Yes, he’d b
een before, but there’s always something you miss. For example there’s the ruined building between the church and Esculapi; he’d never noticed that before. It has nothing resembling a roof, and it’s overgrown, but lots of the outer walls are still there.

  ‘Who owns it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I confessed. ‘But somebody does, and if he ever gets the money together to rebuild it as it should be, then it’ll complete the square.’

  There are two or three spots like that left in St Martí, ruins with potential, you might say, and worth a bomb, even in their derelict state. I won’t tell you how much I paid for our house, but it’s appreciated mightily in value in the time we’ve owned it, and since it’s very rare for an ‘outsider’ to be able to buy property within the village walls, it’s not going to be affected by any credit crunch.

  As we walked along Carrer del Pou towards Plaça Petita, Charlie ran on ahead, sniffing his mates, I guessed, and sure enough when we turned the corner there was Ben, in the process of opening his wine shop, despite the distractions of Cher and Mustard. As soon as I introduced them, Ben sparked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you know my stepfather, I believe.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mac confirmed. ‘Does he know I’m here?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know. Why don’t you call in on them? He’ll be pleased to see you. Give him a call first mind; my mum doesn’t like being caught unawares.’ He scribbled an address and phone number on a scrap of paper from a pile on the shop counter. ‘There you are. You know where it is, Primavera. It’s just down the hill from Shirley Gash’s house.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll do that. If he’s got over being picked up by the fuzz.’

  ‘He has now. I spoke to Mum half an hour ago. She told me that he had a phone call this morning from the head of the force, the Director General himself, in person, apologising for . . .’ He paused. ‘How did he put it? . . . The embarrassment to which he was subjected.’ He grinned. ‘I suppose it’s good to know that the good old British Consul still has some clout these days.’