I sighed. My pal wasn’t a quick thinker, but he always got there eventually. ‘Okay, you’re on. It’d better be worth it, though.’
‘You can tell me,’ he said. ‘Your man’s Visa was last used in Spain on the twelfth of September last year. He bought petrol with it, in a place called Verges. He seems to have taken his car over there.’
I took a deep breath. ‘You don’t know …’
Eddie laughed. ‘He bought it on finance three years ago. The last payment was made in July last year. A Renault Five, L 213 NQZ. Who’s a clever boy, then?’
‘You are mate, you are. What else?’
‘The Mastercard was used last on the twenty-fifth of September, last year again. He paid a restaurant bill with it in a place called Pubol. That’s P, U, B, O, L. He signed for a debit of seven thousand pesetas. How much is that in real money?’
I barely heard the question. ‘Oh,’ I replied at last, ‘about thirty-five quid. What was the restaurant called?’
‘It doesn’t say, just Ristorante.’
‘How about other debits?’
‘The three before that were in a bar stroke cafe in a place called La Pera. Need any more?’
I beamed across the table at Prim, who was watching me intently. ‘No, Eddie. That’s great. You’ve earned that Rioja, China. In fact we might even throw in the beer as well!’
41
‘Eddie may have turned up trumps,’ said Primavera, looking across the breakfast table as I crunched my way through half a xapata filled with boiled eggs, ‘but we’d better think what use we can make of his information.’
Our successes of the day before had dulled the memory of our confrontation on Tuesday. Breakfast was a fun time once more, and play had resumed as well in other areas. The weather seemed to have responded to our change in mood. It was warmer than it had been; well into autumn, we could still feel the heat in the morning air.
‘I’ve already done some thinking along those lines,’ I said, when I could. I wiped the flour from the xapata from the corners of my mouth. ‘In fact, when you were out getting the bread, and the eggs were boiling, I made a couple of phone calls.
‘Ronnie Starr bought his petrol in Verges. He picked up the tab for at least one guest, maybe two, in Pubol on September twenty-five, and he seems to have been a regular at that bar in La Pera.
‘All of that indicates that he was based somewhere in that area. Agreed?’
‘Yes.’ Prim nodded.
‘In that case, if we can find out where he lived, we might find other people who knew him, and who can tell us more about him. Maybe someone will give us a lead to the phoney Starr.’
‘Unless one of them is the phoney Starr.’
I grimaced. ‘That had occurred to me. We’ll just have to be careful about the questions we ask.’
‘Why don’t we say that I’m his cousin and that we’re out here trying to find him?’ she suggested.
‘Good idea. People are more likely to talk to us on that basis. Well done.’
She nodded. ‘Don’t mention it. Now, how are we going to find out where he lived?’
‘We can ask around the hostels. But he was out here from the end of the academic year to the autumn. That’s three months, at least. Isn’t it more likely that he would have rented an apartment?’
‘At summer prices?’
‘It’s cheaper inland. A small place in the area in which we’re interested wouldn’t cost you very much. I thought we might ask around the rental agencies in Verges, Flaca and La Bisbal, so I phoned Maggie and got some numbers from her.’
Prim looked at me doubtfully. ‘That’s fair enough; it’s logical. But you’ve got an orderly mind. Couldn’t Starr have done what we did? Stopped off somewhere and found a place to stay by accident? If you looked at our Visa slips what name would you find most often?’
I smiled at her. ‘Casa Minana.’
‘Right,’ she said, patiently. ‘Which is next door to our apartment. So …’
‘So the first place we should look for Starr is La Pera. Christ, Prim, I think I’ll give up the detecting game. You’re far better at it than I am.’
Primavera laughed. ‘You’ve always said you’re an enquiry agent, not a detective. Maybe you should stick to that and leave the detecting to me.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘In that case, get out of those very fetching shorts and into your raincoat, trilby and gumshoes.’
She grinned across the table. ‘Okay. But only if you’ll help me.’
42
It was lunchtime when finally we arrived at the cafe-bar in what passes for the main street in La Pera. It wasn’t difficult to find, being the only one in town. Prim had stopped short of the detective kit, settling instead for a cotton skirt and the style of white blouse in which, on occasion, she could stop heavy traffic.
The owner was fifty-something, a short, round-shouldered man, with a bad shave and greased hair. The sleeves of his creased, blue-and-white striped shirt were rolled up and he smelled of stale tobacco. When we walked in he had been deep in conversation with his only customer.
He leered at Prim as we took two seats at the bar. I could sense her displeasure, but she kept a smile set on her face.
I ordered a cafe con leche para mi, and a copa de vino blanco para la senora, in perfectly acceptable Spanish. The man gave an approving nod, and set a dish of small sweet olives before us as he prepared the drinks. I glanced around his cafe. There were bench seats along the wall between the two doors, and at the far end, beyond the bar, a dozen tables waited in vain for diners. The place was badly in need of a paint job, but it was clean and tidy. It reminded me a lot of Al Forn, in Tarragona. I wondered how long it had been in the same family, and whether there was another generation ready to take over.
The man came back with the coffee and wine. I thanked him and plundered my Spanish once more. Slowly and carefully I told him that we were from Escocia, and that we were looking for someone who had been in La Pera a year before, a cousin of la senora aqui. He frowned at me and replied in Catalan, a long rambling sentence.
I couldn’t understand a word, but I knew what he was saying all right because I had encountered the same attitude many times before. He was telling me, ‘I’ll respond to your pidgin Spanish to sell you food and drink, but if you want information from me, boy, you’d better be able to talk to me in my own language.’ It can be put much less subtly than that. In Port Lligat, there is a notice painted on the wall beside the jetty which reads: ‘Only Catalan spoken here.’
Before I could even glare at the guy, Prim saved the day. She smiled at him and asked him the same question in perfect French, her eyes wide and beguiling. The man looked at her for a second or two, and was duly beguiled. He replied, in French as good as hers, even if his accent was a bit guttural.
They spoke quickly, so I couldn’t follow all of it. When they were done, and when the man had retired to resume his conversation with his crony, she filled in the blanks. ‘He remembers my cousin Ronnie,’ she said. ‘I was right. My friend says that Starr arrived here last summer. He remembers him very well because he spoke Catalan. Not many foreigners do. He had a meal here, and he took a room above the bar for one night.
‘Next day he told him that he liked the place and wanted to find an apartment so that he could stay longer, somewhere with a little space for him to paint. At the end of this street there’s a tabac and liquor store run by a Senora Sonas. There’s an apartment above it which she used to rent out. It was empty at the time and so my friend sent him there.
‘He took it, and he was here all summer. In the autumn, he said, he just went away; back to Wales, he assumed. He says that Senora Sonas will be able to tell us everything about my cousin Ronald.’