I was beginning to get the impression that Justine had had a few also, especially when she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Okay, tell me about you and the priest. I know I was told no, but, let’s hear it from you. Are you or not?’
‘Not,’ I replied firmly. ‘Why, do you have ambitions?’
‘Ouch. Even if I did, I couldn’t. I’m the mayor, remember. But. . would you like to? Come on, secretly.’
‘You wouldn’t tell me your secrets a minute ago, so why should I tell you mine? But it’s still no. He’s a pal, that’s all.’ (Even though, at that moment, he wasn’t.)
‘Don’t believe you.’
‘Honest,’ I tried to insist.
She’d have pressed me further, maybe asked me if the thought had ever crossed my mind, but we were both distracted by the sound of a mobile. We followed it, to see Gomez reaching for his pocket. He pressed the phone to his ear. As he listened, his face seemed to darken, and he glanced towards Justine. He ended the call, quickly, spoke briefly to Alex, then headed for the mayor, but she was already moving towards him. He spoke to her quickly, earnestly, and I saw her hand go to her mouth, then he and Alex turned and made for the exit.
I stepped up to Justine’s shoulder. ‘What is it?’ I whispered.
‘They’ve found my mother’s car; in some woods beside the main road, opposite Ventallo, where nobody lives. It’s a shell, burned out.’
‘And. .’ I gasped.
‘No. She wasn’t in it, thank God.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Primavera, I have to go, to be with my sister.’
‘Of course.’
She went in the same direction as the two cops, through the whispering crowd, ignoring everyone who spoke to her. As she did, I felt the room begin to wobble, very slightly, or maybe it was me. Maybe it was the news, maybe it was the cava, maybe I’d lost a week somewhere and it was the time of the month, but I knew my evening was over. I thanked Angel. . he was still by the door, frowning as if he didn’t know what to do for the best. . and made my way unsteadily home.
Thirty-one
When I woke up next morning, I felt fine. My memory of the latter part of the evening was hazy, but with a little effort I recalled announcing that I was going to bed and Mac saying that was fine and that he was going to see if Ben was still open, and if so, he was going to drag him off for a beer.
I swung my feet out of bed and planted them on the floor. . right in the centre of my satin party dress, which lay in a perfect circle exactly where I’d let it drop and stepped out of it. I winced, and hoped that I hadn’t destroyed it, but it looked okay when I fastened it to a hanger, no food, wine or other embarrassing stains.
I checked my watch; seven fifty, too late to go for a swim and be back in time to make breakfast, so I settled for a quick shower instead, dressed in my usual daywear and headed downstairs. I beat Tom by five minutes. . he’s a self-starter these days. . and in that time his oranges were freshly squeezed, his Coco Pops and my Special K were in their bowls, ready for the milk, and the coffee percolator was on the stove alongside a pan in which three eggs were beginning the short journey to being soft boiled.
Of Mac, there was no sign. I sneaked a look into the garden, and into the kennel. Of Charlie there was no sign either, and so I guessed that one had taken the other for a walk. With our dog, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who’s in charge.
They still hadn’t come back when Tom headed off to school on his soon-to-be-replaced bike, but a burst of furious barking, in a familiar canine voice, told me that they weren’t far off. Charlie was still giving it plenty when the garden gate opened and he burst in, pulling on his leash.
‘I don’t know what the hell’s up with this dog,’ Mac exclaimed. ‘We were just going past your garage when he stopped in his tracks and started barking at the door alongside it. He wouldn’t come when I told him; finally I had to put the lead on him and drag him away. What is that down there anyway?’
‘It’s mine,’ I told him. ‘Go through to the kitchen and pour yourself some coffee. I’ll go down and take a look.’ I headed for the door that opens on to the stairs and trotted down to the garage.
As I’ve told you, my house is very old, but clearly, my garage isn’t, not in relative terms, given that cars have only been around for a hundred years or so. It’s big, and could hold at least three vehicles, although it doesn’t. The rear part is cut into the rock on which the house stands, and the rest is built out from that. The oldest man in the village is over ninety; he told me that his father told him, that when he was a boy, a hundred and twenty years ago, the back of my garage was a dwelling in its own right, and that a family lived there. . the cave dwellers, they were called. Alongside it, there was, and still is, a trustero, an outhouse, entirely self contained, that he believed was used as a privy by the nineteenth-century occupants. It’s possible that it might have been; the floor’s mainly stone, but there’s a concrete slab right at the back that might be covering what could have been a limepit, a makeshift chemical toilet. Today, I use it as a storeroom, for logs mostly, for the wood-burning stove in the main living room. That’s what Charlie had gone off at, and I couldn’t figure out why, for he goes past it every day without a murmur.
I opened the up-and-over garage with the remote, grabbed the big old store key from its hook and stepped outside. The wooden door was scratched, by Charlie’s hard claws, I guessed. I’d half a mind to dock the cost of the paint out of his next bag of dog food. I slid the key into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open.
There’s no light in the cupboard and it’s at least twenty feet deep, so I couldn’t see very clearly, not straight away anyway. There was a tall pile of logs near the door; I stepped past it to see what was beyond. As soon as I did I knew what had scared my big tough softie of a Labrador. We had a visitor, a woman. She was seated, on some more logs, leaning against the back wall, and she was staring straight at me, sticking her tongue out at me as if a game had been played and I had lost. As I looked back at her, I knew that, somehow, she was right too.
It was Dolores Fumado, Justine’s mother, Elena’s mother. Her normally immaculate hair resembled a caricature of the Beijing Olympic stadium, and her face was streaked with days-old make-up. I didn’t have to touch her to know that she was dead, and I didn’t have to go any closer to know how she’d died. Something was knotted tight around her neck, something black: my clever, all-purpose, missing shawl.
I’m not usually a screamer, under any circumstances, but I came close then. I backed out of there faster than Jackie Kennedy crawled out of that car in Dallas, pulled the door shut and locked it, stepped back into the garage and pressed the remote closer. I didn’t even think to look around me, to check that nobody had been watching.
I leaned against the wall, panting, feeling the thumping of my heart, trying to retain a degree of self-control, fighting against the sheer blind panic that threatened to overwhelm me. The best way to do that is to put your mind to work, and so I made myself analyse what I had seen, and tried to fit answers to some obvious questions.
How long had she been there?
Only a matter of hours, I told myself. Charlie went past the storeroom every day; he’d been set off by an unfamiliar scent, one his doggie brain told him instinctively was wrong. Tom had taken him out as soon as he’d got back from school the day before. Which meant that: she must have been dumped in there during the night. And in turn, that since the store is directly below my bedroom terrace. . quite a few metres below, I’ll grant you, but below it. . even though I’d left the patio door slightly open, as I often do when it’s warm and out of the peak mosquito season, I’d slept right through it.