He sat beside me and held me until I’d cried myself out. ‘There’s nothing to absolve, little sister,’ he whispered. ‘You have no sin in your heart.’ He stood, and I did also; I looked down at my sweaty, begrimed body and felt embarrassed by my state of undress. I walked back to the retreat and looked inside. My shirt was useless, but my jacket was still there, on the floor. I put it on and fastened it. Not pretty, but it did the job.
‘We must call the police,’ said Gerard, taking out his mobile.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But I’m going to look around. Frank and Adrienne, their bodies. .’ My words tailed off.
‘You should leave that for the Mossos.’
‘Yes? And what if one of them’s still alive?’
If they were there, I guessed that they’d be in the open. There couldn’t have been time to bury them, surely. I headed across the clearing to where the vehicle had been. The ground was hard and dry. There were no tyre marks, but crushed twigs and leaves showed where it had stood. All around, the bushes were thick. If two bodies had been dragged in there, I’d have seen the evidence. I was about to look in another area when something dark caught my eye, on the ground, a few metres distant. I approached it, carefully, and knelt when I reached it.
‘What is it?’ Gerard called to me. ‘I’m speaking to Alex Guinart.’
‘Blood,’ I replied. ‘Tell him I’ve found blood.’ There were two of them, side by side, big pools of dark blood. I’d seen things like that before, in Africa, and the people involved hadn’t walked away. I didn’t want to touch them, but I could see that they were fresh, still not quite dry, for all the force of the sun. ‘Tell him it looks as if they were killed here, and their bodies taken away.’
Thirty-two
Alex was there within half an hour. He was first on the scene, with the same cop who’d been with him earlier at the roundabout. He took me back to the stone wall and sat beside me, with Father Gerard on my other flank, listening quietly and patiently as I told him about the clue Adrienne had given me, and how it had led me there.
When I was finished, he looked past me at the priest, accusingly. ‘She could have been killed, Father.’
‘I should have stopped her physically from coming up here, are you saying?’
Alex shook his head. ‘No, but you could have called me.’
‘And you would have done what? As Primavera supposed, you would have come storming up here with your guns at the ready, and there would have been a battle. Frank and his mother would have died anyway, and maybe, friend, so would you. She didn’t want to risk you, and neither did I.’
‘But that’s my job.’
‘Your job is to die? I don’t think so.’
‘My job is to protect.’
‘I believe that these people were beyond protection.’
‘Then now my job is to apprehend. Primavera, what can you tell me about these two men?’
‘I’ve told you some of it already. Their names are Sebastian Loman … he’s Canadian, I believe. . and Willie Venable. I told you about him yesterday, remember?’
‘Yes, and I checked with Immigration. There’s no record of anyone with that name, but that doesn’t prove anything. He could have come into Spain by road, from France or Portugal, or through Andorra. How did you come to know him?’
‘I met them both on Monday evening, in Sevilla, in a restaurant. I thought it was a casual encounter, but I know now that it wasn’t: they’d set out to look for me. They were friendly; in conversation, I told them I was having a break and that my aunt was here, in St Martí, minding my son. Next morning, Willie Venable kidnapped her. I’m sure if Tom had been there. .’
‘But he wasn’t,’ said Alex, calmly, ‘so be cool. Go on.’
‘Next day in Sevilla, two people from the fraud that Frank was sent to infiltrate tried to abduct me from my hotel. Their names are Emil Caballero, a city councillor, and Lidia Bromberg. But Frank had been watching me, without me knowing. He intervened and we escaped. We made it to Córdoba, but saw Sebastian Loman in the Mezquita, searching for us. We evaded him and went to Barcelona, on the night train, then yesterday we came here. The rest you know.’
‘What can you tell me about the Land Rover you saw here?’
I frowned as I considered the question. ‘Alex,’ I answered, ‘given the state I was in, I’m not even sure it was a Land Rover, or what colour it was. It was a big vehicle, that’s all. I didn’t see the number.’
‘I understand.’
‘What do we do now?’ I asked.
‘We wait for my bosses to get here from Girona. I fear the day isn’t over for you yet, Primavera.’
I was sure he wasn’t kidding. ‘One thing I don’t get,’ I told him. ‘They didn’t come back for me after they killed Frank and Adrienne. Why not? Did Father Gerard interrupt them?’
He shook his head. ‘They didn’t drive past him, and that road back there is the only one out of here. Okay, if you take a chance you might get off another way in a four-by-four, but you’d need to know the lie of the land. No, I’d say, my dear friend, that they left you because you’re high profile, Mrs Oz Blackstone, the mother of his son. If you’d died, it would have made news internationally. . as it did before, if I may remind you.’
He frowned. ‘Your cousin, on the other hand, is a former criminal, if I remember correctly what you told me about him before. Nobody will care that he’s wound up dead. Your aunt, that’s unfortunate, but she’s not famous either. Her murder will be forgotten in a couple of weeks in England, and will barely make the front page here in Spain.’
I thought about what he’d said, and realised that it was all true: sad, but inescapably true.
Alex’s middle-aged and higher-ranking colleagues, an intendant whom he introduced as Gomez, and an inspector, whose chest badge identified him as J. Garcia, arrived from Girona not long afterwards, with a support team who went to work at once on the drying blood. I wanted to give them a statement, then go home, but they insisted on taking me to the Mossos station in L’Escala, for interrogation, as they put it bluntly. Father Gerard did some insisting too, that he would accompany me. The unsmiling coppers tried to put him off, but he wasn’t having any.
In fact, they didn’t take me straight to the station. Instead I was driven to the adjacent emergency medical centre, where I was given a thorough physical examination by the receiving doctor while they and Gerard waited outside. I could hear the medic through the half-open door as she briefed them. She said I hadn’t been raped. . I’d never claimed to have been raped, as my friend the priest was quick to point out. . but I had suffered some form of trauma, in the aftermath of which I was in a confused and highly excitable state.
‘You mean she could be delusional?’ I heard Intendant Gomez ask.
‘That is possible,’ she replied.
‘I’m not delusional!’ I shouted, proving beyond reasonable doubt that at the very least she’d been right about my excitability.
I didn’t contribute to the improvement of relations between us by refusing to get dressed. ‘I want fresh clothes,’ I demanded, from under a sheet on the examination table. ‘I don’t have a proper shirt and those jeans are filthy.’
Garcia scowled at me. ‘We need those anyway,’ he said, ‘for forensic testing. What you’re going to wear, that’s your problem.’
‘No,’ Gerard told him, in a quiet tone that might have been threatening if it hadn’t come from a man in holy orders, ‘it’s yours.’
Gomez stepped between them; he sent the inspector to the police station to fetch a T-shirt and shorts as close to my size as he could find. ‘What did he mean by forensic testing?’ I asked, as the door closed on him.
‘We need to check your garments,’ the intendant replied coolly, ‘for blood splashes. There was a lot of it up there.’