At the last moment I threw in some pens and a block of writing paper-the latter suggested by Senor Danvila in the vain hope of persuading Frank to withdraw his confession. Frank would be brought from Malaga to attend the hearing in the magistrates' court, a formal identification of the five victims by Inspector Cabrera and the autopsy pathologists. Afterwards, Senor Danvila told me, I would be able to speak to Frank.
As I parked in a narrow street behind the courthouse I weighed what I would say to him. More than a week of amateur sleuthing had yielded nothing. Naively, I had assumed that the unanimous belief in Frank's innocence held by his friends and colleagues would somehow force out the truth, but in fact that unanimity had only wrapped another layer of mystery around the Hollinger murders. Far from springing the lock of Frank's prison cell it had given the key another turn.
Nevertheless, five people had been killed, by someone almost certainly still walking the streets of Estrella de Mar, still eating sushi and reading Le Monde, still singing in a church choir or modelling clay at a sculpture class.
As if unaware of this, the hearing at the magistrates' court unfolded in its interminable way, a Mobius strip of arcane procedures that unwound, inverted themselves and returned to their departure points. Lawyers and journalists each embrace a rival physics where motion and inertia reverse themselves. I sat behind Senor Danvila, only a few yards from Frank and his translator, as the pathologists testified, stood down and testified again, body by body, death by death.
Eager to talk to Frank, I was surprised by how little he had changed. I expected him to be thin and drained by the grey hours of sitting alone in his cell, forehead harrowed by the stress of maintaining his absurd bluff. He was paler, as the sunlight of Estrella de Mar faded from his face, but he seemed composed and at ease with himself, offering me a ready smile and a handshake quickly cut off by his police escort. He took no part in the proceedings, but listened intently to his translator, emphasizing for the magistrate's benefit his central role in the events described.
When he left the court he gave me a wave of encouragement as if I were about to follow him into the headmaster's study. I waited on a hard seat in the public corridor, deciding to avoid a direct confrontation. Bobby Crawford had been right to say that the initiative lay with Frank, and by sticking to pleasantries I might force him to show his hand.
'Mr Prentice, I must apologize…' Senor Danvila hurried towards me, mournful face agitated by yet another setback. His hands fumbled at the air as if searching for an exit from this ever-more-confusing case. 'I'm sorry for making you wait, but a small problem has arisen…'
'Senor Danvila…?' I tried to calm him. 'When can I see Frank?'
'There's a difficulty for us.' Senor Danvila searched for his absent briefcases, eager to shuffle them. 'It's hard for me to say. Your brother does not wish to see you.'
'Why not? I don't believe it. This whole thing's becoming absurd.'
'My sentiments too. I was with him a moment ago. He spoke very clearly.'
'But why? For heaven's sake… you told me yesterday that he'd agreed.'
Danvila gestured to a statue in a nearby alcove, calling on this alabaster knight to be his witness. 'I spoke to your brother both yesterday and the day before. He did not refuse until now. My sympathies, Mr Prentice. Your brother has his own reasons for making up his mind. I can only advise him.'
'It's ridiculous…' I sat wearily on the bench. 'He's determined to convict himself. What about bail? Is there anything we can do?'
'Impossible, Mr Prentice. There are five murders and a confession of guilt.'
'Can we get him declared insane? Mentally incompetent to plead?'
'It's too late. Last week I contacted Professor Xavier of the Juan Carlos Institute in Malaga -a distinguished forensic psychiatrist. With the court's permission he was willing to examine your brother. But Frank refused to see him. He insists he is entirely sane. Mr Prentice, I have to agree with him…'
Dazed by all this, I waited outside the courthouse, hoping to see Frank taken to one of the police vans for his return journey to Malaga. But after ten minutes I gave up and returned to my car. The snub hurt. Frank's refusal was not only a rejection of my traditional role as protective older brother, but a clear signal that he wanted me away from Marbella and Estrella de Mar. A deviant logic was at work, driving him towards decades of confinement in a provincial Spanish prison, an ordeal he seemed so calmly to welcome.
I drove back to Los Monteros and walked along the beach, a forlorn shelf of ochre sand littered with driftwood and waterlogged crates, like the debris of a ransacked mind. After lunch I slept through the afternoon in my room, waking at six to the sounds of serve and volley from the hotel's tennis courts. I sat up and began to write one of my longest letters to Frank, reaffirming my faith in his innocence, and asking him for the last time to withdraw his confession to an atrocious crime that not even the police believed he had committed. If I had no reply from him I would leave for London and return only for the trial.
It was dusk when I sealed the letter, and the lights of Estrella de Mar trembled across the dark water. My senses sharpened as I gazed at this private peninsula with its theatre clubs and fencing classes, its louche psychiatrist and handsome doctor with her bruised face, its tennis professional obsessed by his serving machine, and its deaths in high places. I was sure that the solution to the Hollinger murders lay not in Frank's involvement with the retired film producer but in the unique nature of the resort where he had died.
I needed to become part of Estrella de Mar, sit in its bars and restaurants, join its clubs and societies, and feel the shadow of the gutted mansion fall across my shoulders in the evening. I needed to live in Frank's apartment, sleep in his bed and shower in his bathroom, insinuate myself into his dreams as they hovered on the night air above his pillow, faithfully waiting for him to return.
An hour later I had packed my suitcases and settled my account. As I drove from the Los Monteros Hotel for the last time I decided that I would stay on in Spain for at least another month, cancel my future assignments and transfer enough funds from my London bank to keep me going. Already I felt a curious complicity in the crime I was trying to solve, as if not only Frank's claims to guilt were being questioned but my own. Twenty minutes later, when I turned off the Malaga highway and took the slip-road to Estrella de Mar I sensed that I was going back to my true home.
Across the Avenida Santa Monica, a hundred yards from the gates of the Club Nautico, was a small late-night bar that drew its clientele from off-duty chauffeurs and the engine-fitters and deckhands who worked at the marina boatyard. Above it was a billboard advertising Toro cigarettes, a coarse, high-nicotine brand. I drew up at the kerb and gazed at the proud black bull lowering his horns at any would-be smoker.
For years I had tried to start smoking again, but without any success. In my twenties a cigarette had always calmed the nerves or filled a conversational pause, but I had given up smoking after a bout of pneumonia, and the social taboos were now so strong that I could never even bring myself to place an unlit cigarette in my mouth. Yet in Estrella de Mar the constraints of the new puritanism seemed less intense. I left the engine running and opened the door, deciding to buy a packet of Toros and test the powers of my will against a narrow-minded social convention.