A Coffin For Two ob-2

by Quintin Jardine

  A Coffin For Two

  ( Oz Blackstone - 2 )

  Quintin Jardine

  Quintin Jardine

  A Coffin For Two

  1

  ‘Senor Oz! Are you there, please?’

  I don’t believe that I sighed a lot in Scotland. I like to think that if someone asked me something, or if the phone rang, I answered as quickly and as pleasantly as I could.

  Of course there were exceptions, like the time my mobile went off on the bedside cabinet just when I thought that my girlfriend Tomorrow — she was called Alison really — was about to lose her nickname at last. She gasped, under my skilled and delicate touch. She gasped again. Her eyes widened, and as they did, something else seemed to narrow. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘Is this it?’ she whispered. And then Mr Motorola sang his shrill, insistent wee song. The moment was gone, never to return.

  I remember sighing then. Truth is, I remember swearing.

  But by and large, the Edinburgh version of Osbert Blackstone was a happy, obliging soul, who never minded being disturbed, and who was always glad to see a pal.

  ‘Oz! Please! Are you there!’ The familiar voice, crying up from the pathway thirty feet below, had an unfamiliar, insistent tone.

  I sighed; and I scowled. As I did, I caught my reflection in the mirror propped against the terrace wall. For an instant, I wondered who that sour-faced bloke was: in that same instant I realised that what Primavera had said was true. The Spanish version of Oz was well on the way to becoming a real slob.

  I blinked hard and pushed myself up from my sunbed. A few months before I would have jumped up, but now three and a half kilos of extra baggage slowed me down.

  ‘It’s okay, Miguel,’ I called out as I stepped towards the seaward wall. ‘I’m here.’

  I leaned over the wall, feeling my back, bum, and legs washed by the soft warmth of the autumn sun. Our Catalan neighbour stared up at me, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and apparently, now that he had attracted my attention, speechless. He stood in the shadow of the building, dressed as always in dark trousers and a white polyester shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Behind him, beyond the fringing trees, only a few white tops flicked the big blue crescent of the Bay of Roses, on which half a dozen wind-surfers were struggling in vain to gather some momentum in the Indian summer conditions.

  Although Miguel is as amiable a bloke as you’d ever hope to meet, when you catch him off guard his natural expression is sombre. However I’d never seen him looking scared before. There was no mistaking it. The unofficial Deputy Mayor of St Marti d’Empuries looked as if he had had the fright of his life.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked him. My brain felt sluggish, the aftermath of half a bottle of Miguel’s house vi negre over lunch, half an hour’s sleep, a couple of beers and half of a heavy discussion, interrupted, just at the right moment, by his shout.

  ‘Can you come down please, Senor Oz,’ he said, wringing his hands with anxiety, a gesture which I might have found comical, had it not been for the expression on his face. Normally he’s a faintly amusing guy in an unconscious sort of way. Looking up at me from the pathway, he was about as funny as the Callas scene from Philadelphia.

  ‘Sure, but what is it?’

  ‘Is my son.’

  ‘What! Has something happened to him?’

  He shook his dark head, violently. ‘No. He is all right. But you know, he likes to be, what’s the word, archaeologist?’

  ‘Si,’ I said, slipping unconsciously into Spanish.

  ‘Just now, he find something. By the church, in front of the Forestals’ House. Can you come an’ look, please. There is no one else here. Everywhere is closed. And I need a witness.’

  ‘Okay, man, okay.’ I picked up a towel from the terrace floor and tied it round my middle, then stood up straight. ‘I’m coming down, but what is it? What’s Jordi found?’

  His long face twisted even more. ‘Is a body, Senor Oz. It is a body.’

  2

  ‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

  Primavera put her drink on the tiled floor of the terrace, and propped herself up on an elbow. She was wearing the bottom half of a yellow bikini, and a sad and disappointed frown. There was something about the frown which made me forget all about the rest of her.

  In most people’s lives there comes a moment when they are convinced that they have discovered perfection on two legs.

  Invariably, absolutely without exception, they are wrong.

  Nobody’s perfect. I know that now. But when first I clapped eyes on Primavera Phillips, I really believed that she was that one unique being. I went on believing that, all the way through our incredible adventure, right up to the moment when she saved our lives in that wood in Geneva, and beyond that … for a few more days.

  Yes, I thought the sun shone out of every orifice in Prim’s body, until the moment when she put her proposition to me; the moment when, sat there in my old Nissan, with our client’s nine hundred and something thousand quid in a bag in the back ready to be returned to him, she stuck that gun (okay, it was empty, but just for one moment …) in my ribs and proposed that we should keep the lot. It came as a total surprise when she showed me that she was susceptible to greed and lust just like everyone else.

  She really would have taken all of the money and run, leaving our client up to his neck in the ordure. For a while I almost ran alongside her. When you have that amount of dough in your hands, never being able to come home again doesn’t seem like much of a problem.

  That was when my mum put in an appearance.

  As I pondered the opportunity of being a near-millionaire, I saw her there in my car, quite clearly, over Prim’s shoulder. Just like Prim on the terrace, she was frowning and shaking her head with that sad resignation which came over her whenever I had done something really stupid, or when she had caught me in the act of it.

  When I was a kid in Anstruther, my maw had a great knack of showing up at the very moment when I didn’t want to see her. Wee Oz and mischief tended to be synonymous, and my wrong-doings seemed to draw her like a magnet. I looked at my vision of her, over Prim’s shoulder in the car, and I remembered that awful pre-pubescent time, when inexplicable curiosities started to stir, questions that had never occurred before, about how boys and girls are different, and why, exactly.

  There I’d been, crouched at the bathroom door, peering through the keyhole with one wide eye at my sister’s white bum and tanned thigh as she stepped carefully into the bath, managing without knowing it to answer none of my questions.

  She hadn’t coughed, said ‘ahemm’ or anything. My maw wasn’t a theatrical person. I’d simply known that she was there from the way the hairs had prickled on the back of my neck. I fancy still that I heard a very quiet ‘pop’ as I unglued my eyeball from the keyhole and turned round.

  She had worn the same expression then, a sad disappointed frown. She hadn’t said a word, just shaken her head and turned away.

  Mac and Flora, my dad and maw, weren’t smackers. In all our childhood, they never laid a finger on Ellie or me. They didn’t even shout at us … well, hardly ever. Whenever either of us transgressed they simply let us know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we had disappointed them; we knew that they didn’t love us any the less because of our sin, but that it had made them sad because they loved us so much. That hurt more, and had a more curative effect than any leathering, I can tell you.

  So I looked over my lover’s shoulder at my lost mother’s frown, and I knew that Flora Blackstone hadn’t raised the sort of lad who could run off with someone else’s money and live with himself thereafter. I realised, in a split-second spasm of remembered grief, the extent to which I’d missed her since she died.
I realised too that I did not love Primavera Phillips more than I’d ever loved any woman who ever lived.

  I still love her, though, and no mistake. In the end, after a very short, slightly heated discussion, we compromised. We did what my dad, Mac the Dentist, would have done in the same circumstances. I know this, because afterwards, I asked him. ‘Sure as hell, son,’ he said. ‘I’d have screwed the bastard to the wall too.’

  Instead of heading into the sunset at high speed, like the thieves we would have been, we went to see our client. We told him the whole story of what had happened in our pursuit of his stolen money. We told him of the risk we had taken, and were taking still, in withholding information from the police. We told him how close we had come to dying, and of the grisly end of our would-be murderer.

  As he sat there, white-faced, we told him, finally, that we reckoned that a third of the recovered proceeds was a reasonable price to pay for our continued shtumm.

  And he agreed. On the spot, with barely a blink. I guess that when you’re facing bankruptcy, disgrace, maybe even an extended holiday in Saughton Prison, and two people walk into your office and offer you your life back, you know exactly what it’s worth to you.

  So there we were, Prim and I, with well upwards of three hundred grand in a bag, and with the world as our mollusc. On top of all that we were in lurv. Maybe each of us had cast aside our rose-coloured spectacles, but still we only had eyes for each other.

  Without any disagreement, we decided that we would regard our windfall as a gift from a grateful friend, and that the Tax Man could have his cut out of my stiff invoice to our grateful client. However, just in case the Tax Man didn’t agree with us, we decided that we should go to live out of his clutches for a while. We decided that we would go on a voyage of discovery, not just in search of new places, but of ourselves, of what we would become as a couple.

  So I began to wind down my private enquiry business, leaving all my clients in good hands, with the proviso that one day I might be back. Prim put her flat in the hands of the estate agents, with instructions to sell. I paid off the loan on my loft and put it in the hands of Jan More, my childhood friend, youthful lover, and potential step-sister, with the request that she rent it out and send me some of the proceeds.

  Next, with the same sorrowful reluctance I guess I would have felt on seeing a child off to boarding school, I delivered Wallace, my faithful companion and loft-mate, into the hands of my dad, the only other man I could think of who was daft enough to take on an iguana as a pet.

  There followed an almost endless round of hugging, selective kissing and general goodbyeing: in Edinburgh to a smiling, tearful Jan and her lesbian lawyer girlfriend Anoushka Turkel; in Anstruther to my dad and Auntie Mary, Jan’s mum, the two of them an official couple at last, and to Ellie, gathering her two boys around her as she cut herself loose mentally from her useless, uncaring husband; in Auchterarder, to mum and dad Phillips, living happily in the time-warp that was Semple House, and to their younger daughter Dawn, the actress, as idyllically happy as Prim and I with Miles Grayson, her new leading man.

  Finally, all goodbyes said, we fuelled up the nearly-new, one-careful-lady-owner Frontera Ozmobile and headed south … without the faintest bloody idea of where we were going.

  We had taken much the same route into France a few weeks earlier, terrified, excited, fleeing — or so we had thought — from a relentless and murderous pursuer. This time was different. This time we sat on the dockside in St Malo, newly landed from Jersey on a sunny Wednesday morning in July, with the cheque book for our new joint account in Grindlay’s Bank clean, crisp and virgin in our luggage, and with our gold cards gleaming in our pockets.

  ‘This is it, partner,’ I said, giving Prim’s hand a squeeze. ‘Decision time. Where’s it to be? The Cote d’Azur? Tuscany? Greece?’

  She wrinkled her amazingly cute nose. ‘Been there. Done all of them. Still got the Tshirts.’

  ‘Back to Switzerland?’

  ‘No!’ she said, firmly. ‘Never again. Ever!’ I nodded in agreement, breathing a sincere sigh of relief. Switzerland is the one place I never want to see again either.

  ‘France is expensive, even for us,’ she said. ‘Even though I speak the language. Spanish can’t be too difficult to pick up, though. Yes, let’s try Spain.’

  I pondered her choice. I’d been to Benidorm. ‘Which part?’ I asked her, doubtfully. ‘It’s a big place. They say Seville’s nice, though,’ I added, trying as always to be constructive.

  She looked at me, wrinkling her eyebrows this time as well as her nose. ‘Seville? In mid-summer? No, my love. I want to be able to get up in the morning and look at the Mediterranean, and I don’t want it too hot to got out during the day.’

  ‘Sod it! Let’s just drive. We’ll know when we get there.’

  So we headed out of St Malo, more or less due south, picking our way carefully round Rennes, gasping as we climbed over the soaring bridge across the river in Nantes, and on towards Bordeaux and then Toulouse, more grateful with every kilometre for the air-conditioning which the Frontera’s one careful lady owner had been thoughtful enough to instal.

  I wanted to stop just past Toulouse, but Prim, doing her best to be excited as a schoolgirl, insisted that we drive on until she could see the Mediterranean. It was touch and go, but as we approached Narbonne, we took a curve and there it was, the last of the daylight glinting on its flat-calm waters as it stretched out silver-grey in the distance.

  We found a hotel in the old French town: it looked nothing fancy from the outside, but the owner’s eyes lit up as I flashed my gold card, and he showed us to his best room, en-suite, overlooking a leafy avenue, and with an impressive four-poster bed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Prim, as she saw it. ‘I think I’m going to like this.’

  She did. So did I. Very much.

  The next day shaped the next part of the rest of our lives. Yet it began just like any other in our new existence. We made love — you can’t practise hard enough, I always say — readied ourselves for the world outside, and had breakfast. Prim settled our bill with her card, said goodbye to our host in her excellent French, and followed me out to our car.

  I watched her as she climbed into the Frontera. God, but she was beautiful; her denim shorts emphasised the curve of her hips and the tanned smoothness of her legs, her breasts swung heavily in her sleeveless cotton shirt as she pulled herself up into the high front seat. She smiled at me with her big brown eyes, a shaft of sunlight glinting through the glass roof on the tips of her blonde forelock. Just as I had every day of the incredible weeks since she had come into my life, I fell in love all over again.

  ‘Don’t take all day,’ she called with a hint of a laugh. I vaulted, almost, into the driver’s seat and as I strapped myself in she leaned across and kissed me. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘Today we’ll find what we’re looking for. I can tell.’

  We headed west out of Narbonne, down the autoroute towards Perpignan. We had been in too much of a rush the night before to appreciate the way the French landscape changes as you approach the Mediterranean. Now, driving along only a few miles from its coast, we were struck by the red rocks and soil and by the relative lack of vegetation, other than the ordered rows of the Languedoc vineyards. Prim pointed away up to her right, where a big sign in a field proclaimed that we were in Fitou country.

  ‘Driving through France is a bit like being lost in a wine-list, isn’t it,’ she muttered.

  It was as if the mountains jumped out at us. I swung the Frontera round a long curve, and there they were, a new, sudden, skyline, taking our breath away in simultaneous gasps.

  ‘Big buggers, these Pyrenees, aren’t they?’

  For once Prim was lost for a reply. She just sat there, staring ahead, her mouth slightly open, fingertips to her lips. I had never seen her awestruck before. Somehow it was nice to know that she could be.

  There had been overnight rain, and the morning was bright and clear, early
enough still for there to be no heat haze to obscure the view. They stood out jagged against the blue sky, with the sun lighting their eastern slopes, their ravines and their valleys showing as dark shadows cast by its glare.

  They towered over us as we crossed the plain around Perpignan, until at last the road began to rise, taking us ever more steeply into their foothills. Just like the mountains, the border would have taken us by surprise too, had we not reached an autoroute pay station a few miles earlier. What did take us by surprise, though, was the big Aztec monument overlooking the vehicle lanes.

  It seemed for a while that we had more chance of finding an Aztec than a border guard. If we had been expecting a fond farewell from France or a big hello from Spain, we would have been disappointed. There was no one in sight at the French control point. I drove through slowly towards the Spanish station, where a man in uniform sat, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up as Prim waved our passports.

  ‘Hasta la vista, Jimmy,’ I called as we headed into Spain down another steep incline, away from a pass, the possession of which, I guessed, had been a strategic imperative for centuries, and which was guarded now by a man with a fag and the sports section.

  A few miles along the road we came to a service area. ‘Pull in there,’ said Prim. A command, not a request.

  I expected her to make for the ‘ladies’ sign, but instead she headed into the shop, emerging a couple of minutes later with a map, and two litres of bottled water. ‘Let’s do some exploring,’ she said.

  Her expression was so intense that it made me laugh. ‘There’s more to Spain than this, love,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But one piece at a time, okay? I don’t want to leave those mountains behind just yet.’ She spread out her map, located our position and traced a line with her finger. ‘The next big town’s called Figueras. Let’s go past that, and head for the coast. Here, move over and let me drive.’