We wrote off any further reconnoitring and explored Ventallo, discovering that it had a second restaurant, a town hall, a small, bizarre zoo and sod all else. Our table was ready when we returned to the farmhouse, and the kitchen had been cranked into action, even though it was only eight forty-five.
We had almost finished our pork, with apples and Calvados sauce, and our first bottle of house red when I noticed the animal in the far corner of the garden. Even as Spanish dogs go, it was quite big: mostly Alsatian, it seemed. I recognised it from our earlier visit and guessed that it belonged to the place.
I thought no more of it, nor would I have to this day, had it not come into Prim’s line of vision as it moved across the spotlit wall.
She stiffened and sat bolt upright in her chair. Her eyes, big at the best of times, became huge and completely round. She stared at the hound, and pointed, speechless. The owner was standing beside us, serving the next table. He laughed, in an apologetic sort of way. ‘I sorry for my dog. Is bad manners to carry a bone into a restaurant.’
‘It sure is,’ Prim gasped at last, revealing the benefit of her years of nursing and her six months in an African war-zone. ‘Especially when it’s a human thigh-bone!’
The young proprietor looked at her, bewildered. She dropped her bombshell again, in French this time. He shrieked, and dropped his tray.
The rest of it was like a movie farce: the dog leashed, the bone taken from him, then given him again to scent, the five of us — the owner, the couple at the next table, Prim and I — FOLLOWING the straining animal, three of us with flashlights. We were barely out of the village before the mostly Alsatian veered off the track, and across the ditch that had become a small river. His master, the bloke from the next table, Prim and I all leapt over into the field beyond, leaving the second lady teetering on the edge, afraid of the jump.
I tripped twice over ploughed ruts, and was lagging behind when the short hue and cry came to a silent halt. When I caught up, covered in mud and waving my torch, the other three were standing in a semi-circle, with the mostly Alsatian held on a very tight leash. Two beams shone on the ground, on something white.
I flashed my light in the same direction, and fought off the urge to say, ‘Hello again!’ as the gleaming skull of Ronnie Starr grinned up at me. The rest of him was there too, apart from the major bones of one leg. Most of the scraps of clothing had been lost in transit, but he still wore his leather belt.
We all stared at him in silence for a while. Once the young restaurateur tugged at his curly hair, as if reaching for a hat to remove. At last he said, in English, to me, for some reason. ‘We should call the police.’
‘I think we should,’ I agreed. ‘You should call Captain Fortunato, of the Guardia Civil, in L’Escala. He’s the head man for this whole area. If you fetch your local people, there’s no saying where the poor bastard will end up.’
He nodded sagely, as if he understood me, then tugging at the dog’s leash, turned back towards the village, with Prim and the second man at his heels. I followed hard behind, but only after, with no one looking, I had bent over the skeleton, and slipped Ronnie Starr’s shiny Giorgio watch, wiped clean of fingerprints with the napkin which I had stuffed in my pocket as we left the restaurant, back on his shiny, bony wrist.
46
Captain Fortunato gave me the strangest look I’ve ever had from another human being. ‘What are you, my friend?’ he asked, in his slow English. ‘Some kind of a fucking magnet?’
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, staring back at him defensively across the restaurant bar, and pointing at the owner. ‘It was his bloody dog found the thing. We only came here to eat!’
The Guardia Civil detective laughed. ‘I don’t care whose fucking dog it was, when someone is as close as you to two bodies in two days, then I start to think he must be a very special person.’ But in almost the same moment, he made a shooing gesture with both hands. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get outta here, you and your girlfriend. I see enough of you last night.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ I said, pushing my luck. ‘But if it’s all right with you, we’d like to finish our meal. Maybe, while we’re doing that, you could interrogate the dog. He’s probably the best witness you’ll find.’
So while the captain and his assistant went back to the field, Prim and I went back to our table. The owner brought us some more pork, apples and sauce as a reward for our efforts. We had polished off that and two portions of seasonal fruits, when Fortunato returned alone.
He came over to our table and sat down, a tall, wide-shouldered man with black hair, dressed in the same lightweight tan suit that he had been wearing the night before. I asked for a third glass and poured him some wine. He sipped it and nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good here, the wine. If you want to buy some, it comes from a place in San Pedro Pescador.’ However, a sour look soon returned to his face.
‘How are you doing?’ Prim asked.
‘I can tell you one thing for sure about the man in the field,’ said the detective.
‘What’s that?’
‘He’s dead!’ he snorted. ‘The rest, we’ll find out if we’re lucky.’ He reached into the left-hand pocket of his jacket, and tossed the Giorgio watch on to the table. ‘That’s his.’ He reached into the right-hand pocket and produced the belt, rolled up. ‘So’s that. On the inside it says Marks amp; Spencer, so he could be British.’
‘Or French, or Spanish, for M amp;S have stores there too,’ I said, just to cheer him up. ‘Or he could have been a foreign visitor to Britain.’
‘Sure, but that is where we’ll start nonetheless. There is a number on the watch: that may help us. Then, of course, there are his teeth.’ He gritted his own, and muttered. ‘Bastards!’ under his breath.
‘Who?’
Fortunato shot me a look. ‘Whoever it was dumped those bones in that field. The guy’s been dead for at least a year, but he can only have been there for a day or two, otherwise the dogs would have spread him all over town.’ He scowled. ‘These bastards in the local police. Either in L’Escala or Ampuriabrava; it was them, I know it. You would not believe it, but it happens all the time. They find a body like this one, with a big hole in the back of his skull. Do they call us in? Oh no, they move it on, out of their hair, to a place like this. Nothing gets in the way of the tourist business.
‘Mind you, it’s not usually bodies. Mostly it’s cars. A couple of years ago, we found a Porsche which had ben stolen in Paris a week before. It was dumped inland, around twenty kilometres from where anyone who stole a Porsche in Paris would want to go. When he saw it, one of my guys recognised it as a car he had seen on the beach in Ampuriabrava. The local cops, they had moved it on. It’s the same with this guy.’
Prim shook her head in sympathy. ‘How are you getting on with the Trevor Eames investigation?’
‘About as well as we will get on with this one. The truth is Eames was a smuggler. Last week he was away crewing a boat which was moving drugs from Corsica to the Balearics. He mixed with some very bad people; any one of them could have been mad with him.’
He paused. ‘Maybe you’re lucky you didn’t walk in on them when they caught up with him. Sleep on that thought. Now good night, and I hope that the next time I see you, there are no bodies around. There had better not be!’
47
I wakened that morning with what the psychologists would call a feeling of closure. We had gone as far as we could with Gavin Scott’s commission. We had found the real Ronnie Starr, linked him to the picture, and established … for we both believed Reis Sonas … that he had not painted it. What we couldn’t tell our client for sure was whether the picture was a fake or not.
Since that was why he had hired us in the first place, all we had to report were our suspicions and our failure.