And that’s why I found myself staring, gasping, and finally laughing, alone in the middle of the night. In the end, with the aid of a gullible accomplice, the ex-con and his wife get clean away.
By next morning, it didn’t seem so funny. I sat outside Mesón del Conde with Tom, watching an American coffee with a little milk get cold before me, happy for my son to devour my croissant as well as his own, my brows knitted as I racked my brains thinking how I could prove what I suspected or, better, rid myself of my worst fears. And then I remembered. I replayed a scene in my mind, dialogue between me and. .
I looked at my mobile. The signal was just strong enough for me to make a call. This time it didn’t take me as long to get through to Intendant Gomez, and to make an appointment to see him in his office in an hour.
I took Tom with me. He would have stayed on the beach, but I wouldn’t allow that. Normally I’d use the slower road to Girona, but that day I headed for the autopista, bombing down it and paying the toll at exit seven. Gomez was ready for me when I arrived. I asked Tom to stay in the waiting room, found him a magazine, and headed for the intendant’s office.
‘Do you have the ashes?’ I asked him.
‘Of course. Do you want to take them away?’
‘I want to see them.’
He looked puzzled, but he agreed. He led me along to a store room, issued an order to a clerk, then led me on into a second room, windowless, with a table set under a strip light. I waited, until the orderly entered with something a little bigger than a hat-box. ‘This is all of them,’ he told Gomez, shooting me a strange glance.
The intendant was equally puzzled when I took the lid off, peered inside at the greyish contents and started to sift through them with my bare hands, feeling for anything other than ash and bone chips. I worked away for ten minutes and more, until I was sure I had gone through everything, every last scrap of cremated tissue.
‘Is this everything?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he assured me. ‘I supervised the recovery myself, I made sure there wasn’t a single piece left there. Why? Are you going to tell me what you’re looking for?’ He was staring at my arms; they were grey to the elbow.
I swallowed, hard. ‘Mr Gomez, my aunt had silicon breast implants. They would have survived the fire, altered perhaps, but they would have survived in some form. Also her front teeth were capped, steel-bonded porcelain on gold posts. Was there any melted gold?’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Can I see everything else that was taken from the site?’
‘Sure.’ He left, returning ten minutes later with another, smaller, box. I tipped its contents on to the table and peered at them. I saw the remnants of my taser gun, two scraps that might once have been mobiles, and three shrunken relics that looked as if they had once been credit cards. They were fused to a metal clip that I recognised as having come from Frank’s Gucci billfold. I checked them carefully, looking for a fourth, but there was no sign of it. Either it had been destroyed completely. . or it had never been in the fire.
I was about to call a halt to my search, when my hand bumped against the melted taser. I turned it over and saw something small, sticking in it rather than to it. I hadn’t been aware that I’d been looking for it, but as soon as I saw it I knew that I had. I pulled it out and held it up.
All the enamel had gone, but the metal had survived the blaze in more or less its original form. I looked at it under the light. It was still recognisable, as a lapel pin in the shape of a maple leaf.
‘Do we have a problem?’ Intendant Gomez murmured.
‘I rather think we do. These ashes, they’re not my cousin and my aunt. They’re the guys who kidnapped them. Somehow Frank got the better of them, killed them, then did this to them, very efficiently, in the hope, well founded as it turned out, that we’d assume this was him and Adrienne. I don’t know how he managed it, but that little sod’s got away with everything.’
‘Everything? What do you mean?’
‘I mean he’s stolen seventy-seven million euros.’
The policeman sucked his teeth. ‘Maybe not everything,’ he exclaimed, ‘but damned close.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ he conceded. ‘But it could be better put. It could be, what are we going to do? Two deaths have been registered, by you. I have been chasing two murderers and now I find that they are dead, but so, officially, is the man who killed them. As for the money, was that stolen in Spain?’
‘No.’
‘Then I have no jurisdiction. That’s not my business.’ He looked at me. ‘I believe that in English you have a saying, something about covering your backside. Is that correct?’
‘It’s slightly less polite than that, but you’ve caught the meaning.’
‘Then that’s what I’m going to do, by doing nothing at all. I suggest, respectfully, that you do the same. You can take those ashes away, if you want. Otherwise I’m going to take them to a hill that I pass on my way home and release them.’
I thought about the old Dylan song, ‘Blowing In The Wind’. At that moment I couldn’t come up with a better solution. I walked out and left him to it.
Forty-four
It nagged at me, though. The more I thought about it, the whole damn business nagged at me. Frank had conned everybody, from the word go. Justin, his best friend, had told him about his wife’s problem. He had recalled that non-selling novel that his mother’s client had written and that undoubtedly he had read, and he had stolen the plot, lock, stock and smoking barrel.
He had conned Justin, Ludmila, Caballero, Hermann Gresch, every-damn-body. Who had fed Gresch his dope in number forty-seven? Frank, of course, and I was willing to bet that the final delivery had been spiked. Where had he found him? I took a guess, one that wouldn’t be hard to verify, with Justin’s help: in prison, and if so, sure as hell, he’d had a drug problem there too. The guy had been a tool, no more.
But weren’t we all? I thought back to the time I had spent with him. Most of all, he’d conned me: I’d been cast in the role of the gullible accomplice.
From the moment we’d hooked up in Sevilla, I’d been the softest touch of them all, falling for all the bluff and double-bluff. My fake abduction, set up on Frank’s orders by the desperate Ludmila, the rescue, painful for her, the frantic flight across Spain, had all been fake, and its ultimate purpose had been. . to make me an unassailable witness to Frank’s death and, in the process, his ticket to a life of luxury. Yes, Ludo had been stupid, but what did that make me?
Yet, I realised, at the time it had all been real, so real that for much of my time as a ‘fugitive’ I’d been genuinely, authentically scared. My cousin had to be some sort of a dark genius, the king of the fraudsters.
Worst of all, the cunning, needle-dick swine had even conned me into screwing him on board that damn sleeper train, with that scared, trembling act of his. I was sure that if I checked back, I’d find out that ours hadn’t been the last compartment available, as he’d claimed. Then there had been the next night, in the pool. . only. . No, I had to admit that maybe that was my idea as much as his, maybe even more.
And then there was Auntie Ade. He had conned her, too, into coming after him. Yes, of course he had. Except why, exactly, had he asked Ludmila to video my house? He’d had no intention of hiding out with me; clearly that was crap. So why had he done it? There could only have been one reason for that. He wanted to show Willie Venable the lie of the land when it came time for him to snatch Adrienne. But how had he known that she’d ever be there?
Because they both bloody well knew, that’s why. My outrageous old aunt had been in on it from the start. Those ashes had shown she was no more dead than he was; she and Frank had run off with the loot together!