I felt that I should do something to help, but Davidoff shooed me away, to switch off the floodlights, then to join the girls, seated now at a white table beside the pool. I had barely joined them before he was fluttering around us, holding a tray with the Cava in four flutes, finely made, with gold leaf round their long stems.
‘My dear friend Clive gave these to me, in the year before he died,’ he said to Primavera, leaning towards her as he sat down. ‘I have always kept them here. This is the first time since he died, is it not, Shirley, that all four have been filled together. That’s good, because this is a special night. Look,’ he said, pointing up to the darkening sky, ‘I have even arranged the moonlight.’
I grinned. ‘Never,’ I thought, ‘have I heard bullshit of such a high order.’ But I kept the thought to myself, for our host was clearly firing on all cylinders and it would have been churlish to interrupt his flow.
I felt slightly huffed when he rushed us through the very fine Cava. ‘Come, come.’ He stood up. ‘To the table. Davidoff’s paella does not suffer being kept waiting.’
A bowl of toasted bread was on the table, with halved beef tomatoes ready to rub into it, with olive oil and garlic and a dish of anchovies. ‘The L’Escala starter,‘ the chef announced, ’is one of the world’s simplest. It is also one of the best.’
He’s right. Tomato-soaked toast, rubbed with garlic, with oil and anchovies doesn’t sound like much: till you try it.
If Davidoff had a fault that night, it seemed to be a tendency to rush his guests, but we accepted it as being in the interests of arriving at the paella at exactly the right moment. There are regional variations of Spain’s national dish; along the Costa Brava, as I had come to know, they favour seafood. But I never in my life tasted one like Davidoff served up that night, with the Krug.
How he persuaded the fish to remain in such substantial chunks, and yet be so moist, I’ll never know. How he coaxed every mussel and clam to open its shell is quite beyond me. How he managed to keep the rice at such a consistency, while the cooking of every other ingredient should have militated against it, I have no idea.
He shared one secret with us, but only one. He bent towards Prim once again, and picked up a tiny crustacean. ‘You must have these, my darling,’ he said. ‘You don’t find them in the fish shops but on the quayside. The fishermen who catch the prawns throw these away. I gather them and cook them in my paella, for the extra flavour. Look.’ He put the crab between his teeth and bit it, hard enough to crush the shell, then he sucked. ‘Like that. Don’t eat them. Just crack them for the juices and the taste.’
He had made enough for six at least. We finished it, disregarding even the Krug until we had whacked our way through the lot.
Davidoff grinned, as he looked at us, one by one. Then, lightning fast, he slapped his stomach. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted. ‘The best I can do.’ He jumped to his feet and fetched a fruit bowl. ‘This is to finish. God makes a better dessert than I do, but when it comes to paella, I can whip his ass.’ He paused. ‘As for coffee, well, we’ll just have another bottle of Krug.’
I watched him as he leaned back in the moonlight, savouring his champagne and making small talk with Prim and Shirley. There was a grace about him, an economy of everything, as though his whole metabolism had been set up with an eye to longevity. When night came he seemed to be at the height of his powers, fascinating, charming and somehow provocative, and on that night in particular, I thought him the most amazing man that I had ever met. Nothing has happened since to change that view.
Shirley had gone to the bathroom, walking with a degree of concentration, when the phone rang in the villa.
Davidoff gestured to me. ‘You better answer it. It could be Adrian, full of contrition, or better still, the awful John calling to say that he is not coming after all.’
I nodded and ran round the edge of the pool towards the house. The kitchen was dark, but I found the light switch in a second. The phone was on one of the work surfaces, and it was still ringing insistently. I strode across and picked it up.
‘Hola, este residencia Senora Gash,’ I said, in the best Spanish I could manage.
There was a long silence at the other end of the phone line. I waited for it to go dead, but instead, after a while, I heard a low rumbling sigh. ‘Tell me, Mr Blackstone,’ said Captain Fortunato, evenly, ‘that I am having a bad dream, and that I have not just heard you trying to speak Spanish with an appalling Scottish accent. Tell me, please, that isn’t you.’
I knew at once that the evening had taken a very unpleasant turn. ‘I have a terrible feeling,’ I muttered into the phone, ‘that I should be saying much the same to you. But the trouble is, I don’t think either of us is dreaming.’
‘In that case, Senor, this is what I want you to do. I want you to wait at the villa of Senora Gash, until one of my cars gets there. Then I want you and she to get in, and let it bring you here to join me. Don’t ask any questions of me, but between now and your getting to where I am, you should be thinking very carefully of what it is you were going to tell me two days ago, but which slipped your mind.’
‘I’ll wait for your car,’ I croaked, and replaced the phone. I leaned against the surface, heart pounding, legs shaking, and looked out of the window, at Shirley, leading Prim and Davidoff towards the group of sofa loungers beneath the moonlit palms, he with his arm wound round my partner’s waist, laughing softly in her ear.
I don’t know why, but just then, my eye was caught by a photograph, one of a number pinned to the window-frame. I stared at it, and as I did, I saw Ronnie Starr’s murderer: more than that, I knew instinctively in my gut, who, in turn, had killed him.
49
From the moment the car pulled away, Shirley asked the same question, over and over again.
‘Where are we going?’ she snapped at the driver, in Spanish, until she realised that his silence meant that he had been ordered not to speak to us at all.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked me, in my turn.
I told her, as I had in the villa, ‘We’re going to meet the regional commander of the Guardia Civil. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know where.’
I was pretty certain that I had told her one lie. As the car reached Verges, and turned left towards La Bisbal, I had a feeling that it might be two. When it turned right on to the road for Flaca, La Pera and Pubol, that suspicion hardened.
The driver raced recklessly along the twisting road to La Pera, then swung right. I expected him to stop in the Pubol car park, but he didn’t. Instead, he drove right up to the entrance to Gala’s castle, and screeched to a halt, giving a blast on the horn as he did so.
A green-uniformed officer at the top of the steps which led to the house beckoned to us as we stepped out. The approach was lit, but the building was still in darkness. ‘Round there,’ he said, in Spanish as we reached him, pointing not into the house, but to the garden.
We turned the corner, and saw a blaze of light coming from the garage doorway. Another uniformed policeman stood outside, waving to us to approach.
‘What the ’ell’s going on?’ said Shirley. It was the first time she had spoken in fifteen minutes and she was ready to explode. We stepped inside the garage.
The Cadillac was still there, as it had been on my earlier visits to the castle, only this time the great lid of its cavernous trunk was raised. Captain Fortunato stood beside it. He smiled at me and called out something in Catalan. I stared blankly back at him.
‘Eh?’
‘I said three in a row can be bad luck, Senor. Come here.’
I moved towards him. Shirley followed me, but the detective held up his hand. ‘Not you, Senora,’ he said.