On Honeymoon With Death ob-5

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, in a tone as quiet as hers.

  ‘Because I didn’t love him. And because he was still in love with Veronique; I knew that. He told me eventually that she’d been unfaithful to him. He assured me that he hadn’t simply been using me to get even, but he could never make me believe that. Not quite. Honestly, I had told him to go before I even suspected I was in the club.

  ‘When I did find out, I thought about keeping it, as one does. But it felt like nothing inside me and, try as I might, I couldn’t summon up a single maternal urge. I was afraid, no, I knew, that if I went ahead with it, I’d never have been able to give it the love it deserved, the depth of love I had as a child. It would have been difficult for Ramon too, trying to make things work with Veronique, yet having a baby by another woman in the next village. So I kept my secret, saw someone at the hospital where I worked, and did what I had to do.

  ‘Hell, I didn’t want Ramon’s child. Oz, the truth is, I didn’t want anyone else’s child but yours. Even then, though you had gone out of my life for good, or so I thought. Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me about irony, love. Just tell me this. What do you feel for the bloke now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied at once. ‘He’s a nice enough guy, but I never loved him, or anything approaching it. Okay, so he may have got involved with me to get back at his wife, but I’d nothing to complain about there. That was nothing to what I was doing with him, from the start. I was fucking to forget in a big way!

  ‘What you have to realise, Oz, is that after you left, and after he died, I was here on my own, doubly hurt, feeling bitter and sorry for myself at the same time. I had no one to talk to, no shoulder to cry on. Shirley had troubles of her own at that time, and the rest of the people you and I had got to know here are all so much older than us.

  ‘Then Ramon turned up, as if it had been planned. I needed someone like him as a friend if nothing else. But I decided that he’d serve a more practical purpose than that. Once I’d thought about it for a while. . like an hour or two. . I decided to screw you out of my life, boy; in our bed, too, yours and mine.’

  She settled into her chair, and took a sip from her coffee, not looking at me; looking at anything but me. ‘The trouble was,’ she murmured, ‘my tactic backfired on me. . and I’m not talking about getting pregnant. When I was with him, there in the dark in the apartment, being ridden in our bed, and I was faking it for him, to make him feel a bit special. . which he wasn’t, by the way. . the face I always saw was yours …’

  ‘Not his?’ I interrupted with a cruel emphasis, which I regretted, in the instant I saw her flinch.

  ‘That couldn’t be,’ she murmured, ‘not in that way, as you know well.

  ‘No, even as I was banging Ramon, I couldn’t erase you. It was your breath I felt on my neck, your prick I felt inside me, not his.’ Prim ground the words out, bitterly. She sounded like a stranger. She was punishing someone, but I wasn’t sure whether it was herself or me. ‘It was dispassionate, ’ she continued, ‘but I didn’t want passion anyway. I was cold inside, frigid, but that’s how I felt. Yet always, Oz, from the moment I helped him into me until the moment he slithered out again, I saw your face.’

  She sat bolt upright and glared at me. ‘And. .’ she shouted, making me start for an instant. . then she stopped abruptly, as if afraid of voicing thoughts that might destroy everything. She slumped down again in her chair, her eyes misted suddenly.

  I finished it for her anyway. ‘… and that’s more than I can say? Or is it what you want me to say? That when I was with Jan, I saw you?’

  ‘Well, did you? Were you thinking of me while you were fucking her?’

  She had gone much further than she intended. I knew that, just as I knew that she couldn’t help herself. Why couldn’t I have left her that one secret, so I could hold on to mine? But no, once the ball was rolling it couldn’t be stopped; and after all, it was good old Oz who had started it on its way down the hill. I tried to put a foot against it, all the same.

  I looked at the ceiling, and whistled. ‘Christ there’s a shit-load of worms in this can. Let’s put the lid back on it, eh?’

  ‘We can’t,’ she retorted. ‘You took it off with a tin-opener.

  ‘No, you didn’t think of little Prim while you were on the job, did you. Not once, I’ll bet.’ I opened my mouth, not knowing quite what I was going to say. She cut me off. ‘No, wait. There’s another begged question, isn’t there.

  ‘Are you picturing her now, when you’re on top of me?’

  I looked at her for a moment, blankly, afraid that this was something I couldn’t control, afraid that it really would never be the same again. I didn’t feel any anger towards her, only pain within myself; but that was nothing new.

  ‘No: never: not once.’ I told her. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  ‘Oh I see Jan, all right. Every time we go to Anstruther, where she and I grew up, I see her in the fields, in my dad’s garden, on the harbour wall. I see her at ten years old, at sixteen, at her twenty-first. But I’ll never see her at any older than thirty. How could I?

  ‘I see her every time I walk into that kitchen where she died, and my blood runs cold.’

  When I opened my eyes, I saw that she was staring at me. For the first time, I was showing her all of me, even the darkest corner of my heart. ‘Yet you kept it,’ she exclaimed. ‘We live there now.’

  ‘Sure we do. It’s just a house.

  ‘Prim, I’ll see that fucking kitchen wherever I am, just as I’ll see the inside of that wee room in the Royal Infirmary mortuary, where they showed me her body. So there’s no point in selling the flat for the sake of it.

  ‘Anyhow, that’s the truth of it. That’s as far as it goes. She’s gone and you’re alive and I don’t mix the two of you up,’ I ventured a grin. ‘Neither horizontally nor vertically: honest. You want to sell the Glasgow flat? No problem to me.’

  ‘I like Glasgow.’

  ‘But not there?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘That’s it then. Done deal.’

  She smiled back at me, faintly.

  ‘Since it’s all coming out,’ I continued, ‘has there ever been a time since then when you’ve pictured him, Davidoff, in the same way?’

  It was Primavera’s turn to examine the ceiling. ‘Honestly?’ she began. With some people that’s a sure sign that what you are about to hear will be anything but; not with Prim, though. . I thought.

  ‘Not when I’ve been with you: anyway, you know that it wasn’t physical with him. . not completely, that’s to say. He was my lover, yet I couldn’t be his, not in the same way.

  ‘Still there were times when I was alone, and I tried to imagine how it might have been if he had been there after you’d gone. I tried to convince myself that I could have made him whole again, and that I could have given myself to him properly, rather than taking all the time. I could never make it a happy scene, though. He wasn’t immortal; he’d have died eventually, and the best I’d have got would have been to watch him. I think he knew that too, that’s why …’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I think he told me as much, that last time I saw him.’

  We sat for a while, gathering our thoughts; gathering our breath almost.

  ‘One last secret,’ I said eventually, ‘and then there are no more. Remember that time I went back to Scotland to see a potential client? I slept with Jan then. We couldn’t help ourselves, but then we never could. That was when I understood how it was.’

  ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve always known that.’

  I frowned at her, taken aback. ‘How?’

  ‘Same way you guessed about Ramon and me. I know you all too well.’

  I beckoned to her. She rose from her chair, put down her mug, came to me and settled into my lap. I kissed her on each eye, tasting salt on her lashes.

  ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Feel any different knowing you’re married to th
e village bike?’

  ‘As long as you’re not a tandem, I don’t care.’

  She giggled and slapped me on the chest. I felt myself rock-hard, and realised that I had been that way for some time, and that I wanted her, maybe more than I had ever done.

  ‘It all needed saying,’ I told her. ‘Long ago, probably. I wonder why it wasn’t?’

  ‘We needed a catalyst. Something to start the ball rolling.’

  I grunted in her ear. ‘Some catalyst. . your spurned lover.’

  ‘What will be. .’ she murmured. ‘Sauce for ganders, but let’s not start that again. No, maybe we needed neutral ground too, somewhere that’s ours and ours alone.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I paused. ‘One more thing I have to tell you.’

  ‘Whassat?’ she murmured.

  ‘I love you, Mrs Blackstone.’

  ‘Then take me to bed.’

  ‘Ever faked it for me?’

  ‘Never had to; honest.’

  Afterwards, we lay in the dim light of a bedside lamp. . an item to be changed, for sure, along with bedroom curtains that made the place look like every schoolboy’s idea of a Paris brothel. ‘I feel much the better for that,’ I said, my grin from ear to ear.

  ‘What? Our true confessions?’

  ‘Them too. But I’ll tell you this. If that’s what happens when you find a body, I hope we don’t discover another for a while.’

  7

  When Fortunato came back two days later, I did my best not to give him the slightest hint that Prim had told me about the two of them. So I don’t know how he guessed, unless he caught something in my eye, or, more probably in Prim’s. She was edgy from the moment that he phoned to check that we’d be in.

  I gave him my best, ‘Hail, fella, good to see ya,’ greeting, and he responded, but as soon as Prim disappeared off to the kitchen to fetch the coffee, he seemed to change, to become completely un-copperlike, on the defensive. He spent quite a while admiring our new rugs, and a very nice repro cabinet which we’d bought the day before from the Masia Store, on the road to Girona, before he could bring himself to look me in the eye. When he did, it was as if he was quizzing me.

  No way was I going to kick the subject off. ‘Well?’ I asked, trying not to sound aggressive.

  ‘So you know?’

  ‘So I know. So I didn’t know last time you were here. So what am I thinking?’

  Ramon nodded.

  ‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘She was a free girl then, to misquote Tom Petty; I was gone. You’re part of her history. God knows I have enough of my own, so I can’t take issue with hers.’

  I let that sink in, but not for too long. ‘I take it that Prim is history as far as you’re concerned?’ I asked him.

  He looked at the cabinet again. ‘Yes,’ he answered quietly.

  ‘That’s fine then. The subject’s closed, for good, as far as I’m concerned.’

  The captain looked relieved. ‘For me too, obviously. Thank you.

  ‘You must meet Veronique some time, and Alejandro.’

  I couldn’t think of a worse idea, but of course he didn’t know about Prim’s child. So all I said was, ‘Let’s not rush that one.’

  Bang on cue, Primavera returned with coffee on a tray. I suspected that she had been listening, behind the door. ‘So, Ramon,’ she began as she handed him his, ‘what’s the news on our departed guest?’

  ‘No good news,’ he answered, mournfully. ‘As you saw, the body was badly decomposed, but not completely. The pathologist estimates that it had been in the water for around a year, maybe a month more, maybe a month less. There was nothing on it to identify it, but you can forget my theory that it might have been a tramp. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the heart; the bullet was still there, lodged in the spine.’

  ‘So it was the Frenchman, Capulet?’

  Fortunato shook his head. ‘I can’t say that for sure. It’s beyond visual identification, and the clothing gave us no clue. It’s all designer stuff, a mix of Hugo Boss and Pierre Cardin. Could have been bought in L’Escala, could have been bought anywhere. There was no wristwatch, no jewellery.’

  ‘What about dental records?’ Prim asked.

  The detective smiled, sadly. ‘For that you have to have been to a dentist. This man had perfect teeth. No, I’m afraid there is only one way we can prove it is Capulet, and that’s through DNA profiling. There’s no material from him that we can use for cross-reference, so we’ll need to take a blood sample from a close relative. He had no children, so that means his sister, Lucille.

  ‘Yesterday I called my colleagues in Geneva and asked them for cooperation. This morning they called me back. She has not been seen at home since Saturday, and no one knows where she is. They’ve spoken to the lawyer who administered the company; she visited his office on Friday afternoon to check that the company had received your bank transfer for the purchase of this house, but said nothing about going away. I also have checked Capulet’s homes in Paris and Florida. Each one was sold during last summer, and new people live there now. Quite a mystery.’

  I glanced out of the window at our empty, uncovered pool. Ramon had asked us not to fill it for the time being. ‘Where’s the mystery? She’s killed her brother, then cashed up and buggered off into the wide blue yonder.’

  Captain Fortunato stared at me, bewildered. It was another of those rare occasions when his English let him down. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s sold the company’s assets and gone away.’

  ‘You may be right. And that will not help me.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ Prim asked. ‘Can we fill our pool?’

  The policeman shook his head. ‘Not yet, not yet. Your pool is now a murder scene; that makes this situation very awkward. It brings up matters of jurisdiction also.’

  ‘How come?’

  He looked up at me from the couch. ‘When I met you for the first time, I was an officer of the Guardia Civil. Now I am Mossos d’Esquadra, but I have many of the same duties. Normally, the death of this man would be for me to investigate. However, if the body is that of Capulet, that could make things different. He was suspected of crimes which crossed the Catalan border, into other parts of Spain, and those would still be the responsibility of the Guardia.

  ‘I see where we could have a big argument. For the moment though, since we don’t know for sure that it is the Frenchman who is dead, I am keeping hold of this business. I want to have my technical people look at your pool again. Also I want to search your house, to see if there is anything still here that might tell us something about the man’s death.’

  ‘But we’ve had cleaners in,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but it is still something I have to do. Better that it is me than someone from the Guardia, who does not know you.’

  ‘Better the Devil you know,’ I murmured.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I mean, yes; I agree with you.’

  Ramon had been sure of himself, and us; there was a squad of officers waiting in a van, out of our sight in the street below. Prim and I decided that it was best for us to leave them to get on with it, so we took ourselves along to Shirley’s.

  She had been wide-eyed the day before, when he had told her about our bonus surprise in the pool. ‘Bloody hell, Oz,’ she had exploded. ‘People leave some funny things behind them when they sell houses here. . the punters who bought mine were left a model of the Tower of London that my late husband made out of matchsticks. . but dead tramps is pushing it.’ We hadn’t let her into our suspicion that the body was that of the previous owner.

  When we told her the hot-off-the-press news, that the guy had been shot, her jaw dropped so far I thought it was dislocated.

  ‘Say that again,’ she gulped eventually.

  I did.

  ‘Do they know who it is?’ she asked.

  ‘They think it might be our predecessor. He was an antique dealer but he was also in the import business, apparently.’

  �
�You mean he was a smuggler?’ She catches on quickly, does our Shirl.

  ‘So they reckon. Not drugs, though. According to Fortunato, he dealt in fags and stuff. His name was Reynard Capulet.’

  She looked at me steadily enough, only I thought I caught a flicker somewhere in her gaze.

  ‘You said the police think it might be him. Don’t they know for sure?’

  I nodded. ‘From what we saw the other night, he looks a lot worse than his passport photo. They’re going to have to identify him by other means. The police in Switzerland are looking for his sister right now, so they can run a comparison test.’

  ‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ she muttered.

  There was no doubt about it; Shirley Gash seemed just a bit distracted. She was making a big effort to hide it, but she wasn’t quite getting there.

  Prim saw it too. ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t know this man, did you?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted. ‘I knew Rey Capulet: knew him fairly well, or so I thought. But I never, ever, knew that he lived up here. All your talk of a Frenchman, and I never made the connection. I thought he was Swiss, you see; he mentioned his sister in Geneva fairly often, so I just assumed.’

  ‘How did you get to know him?’

  ‘I met him one night in Bar JoJo, oh, it’ll be eighteen months ago at least; first half of last year. He was with that bloke Sergi, from the agency in town. I was with some people from Conservatives Abroad. I had had enough of the bloody dominoes by that time, so I said hello to Sergi, and he introduced me to his pal.

  ‘He seemed like a nice chap. We talked for a bit and that was all. Then a few days later, I bumped into him in the bank. He invited me to dinner in El Golf Isobel. A perfect gentleman, he was; bit younger than me, but what’s that got to do with anything.

  ‘I took him out to Kathleen and Carlos’s restaurant. . you know, La Clota. . returning his hospitality, then we had a few more dinner dates after that. Never got down to any of the other, you understand, but it was on the agenda. . mine at any rate. Mind you, he did talk about me going to his place in Florida, so it might have been on his too.