As I pieced it all together I looked across at my son; he was digging a hole in the sand a few feet away from where I lay on the beach. ‘Tom,’ I asked him, ‘remember when you came back to the house and found that Aunt Adrienne had gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you take Charlie for a walk along the beach that morning? You know that dogs aren’t allowed there at this time of year.’
‘She told me to,’ he replied. ‘I told her that I wasn’t supposed to, but she made me. She said I’d get no breakfast if I didn’t.’
The old bitch! She’d bullied him out of the house so that she could pull her disappearing act with Venable, Frank’s hired gun. Except. .
Another huge ‘but’ exploded before my eyes. ‘But why would Frank hire real hit-men if all they were doing was role-playing?’ I asked, in a whisper. ‘And if they were pros, how did he ever get the drop on them and kill them?’ But, then, we’d all been Frank’s tools, hadn’t we?
That’s when it stopped being even slightly funny and got scary again.
When we were done on the beach, and Tom was in the shower washing off the sand before we went to Can Roura for dinner, I booted up my computer and went on line. Just for fun, I Googled up the names ‘Sebastian Loman’ and ‘Willie Venable’. I got no hits for hit-men, but I did come up with a fistful for Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the great twentieth-century American playwrights. Take Willy Loman, from Death of a Salesman, and Sebastian Venable, from Suddenly Last Summer, switch forenames and voilà.
The two ‘killers’ were fictional characters. Which meant?
I entered both plays in the search bar, added Spain, and in an instant I found myself looking at something called the Toronto Theatre Arts Group. The previous winter it had undertaken a tour of expat communities across Iberia, bringing the joys of Miller and Hemingway to retired coppers and retired villains along the Algarve and the Costa del Sol, with a one week stop-over in. . Sevilla.
I was hot on the trail. It took me only a few more seconds to find the group’s website. Its menu was extensive and included a section labelled ‘Performers’. I clicked on it, and a dozen faces popped up, with a short biography below each one.
The guys I was looking for were there. ‘Sebastian Loman’ was, in reality, Jerry Martis, from Uxbridge, Ontario. ‘Willie Venable’ was Jeff Paton, from Rochester, New York. Poor bastards.
They were actors, hired to play unorthodox roles for big bucks, I guessed. And Frank had written the script. He had shown them to Caballero and Ludmila, by having them ‘bodyguard’ her in Sevilla. He had sent them to intercept me in the tapas bar, to drop me their names, and feed me the clue that had taken us to Masia Josanto where, of course, they had been careful to make themselves known in advance. He had told Jerry to be in the Mezquita for me to spot. He had planned Jeff’s ‘abduction’ of his mother, with the aid of the video footage that the simpleton Ludmila had shot for him, and, no doubt, he had set up his own ‘kidnapping’, being careful to leave me his rucksack, with the mobile, so that it would be me who unravelled Adrienne’s video clue. Finally, he had put the trap for me in place, the one that had fooled me completely, so terrifying had it been.
Those two guys had earned their money. They hadn’t deserved the pay-off they’d been given. I knew what had happened. Just as ‘Lidia’ and Caballero had believed in Sevilla that their gun had been loaded with blanks, so had Jerry and Jeff, until they had handed it back to Frank and found out the terminal truth.
So that was it, the whole story. My cousin wasn’t just a con-man. He’d done what he had to in bringing down the curtain on a superb performance. He’d become a killer too. And my aunt had been a part of it. . unless, of course, her little bastard had buried her somewhere else. I wouldn’t put that past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him now.
Forty-five
I had two more calls to make, before I finally put the affair to bed.
En route to Los Angeles, Tom and I stopped over in Toronto, where I hired a car and drove for an hour and a half to the home of Mrs Lina Martis, of Uxbridge, Ontario. She was in her early fifties and she was worried to distraction about what had happened to her son, Jerry. She hadn’t heard from him in months, not since he had told her that he and his boyfriend, Jeff, had been hired for this weird project by an English guy. He hadn’t given her any detail, but said that there was a quarter of a million Canadian in it for each of them.
I didn’t give her my real name. I called myself Lidia Bromberg. I did give her a distorted, but still recognisable lapel pin, and suggested that she contact Intendant Gomez of the Mossos d’Esquadra, to report her son missing, and that she also should let the Canadian Embassy know what she had done. I left the poor woman in a state of shock.
My second call was on the way home. We stopped off in London, and there, in Mark Kravitz’s flat, I had another meeting with the rodent-like Moira from MI5. Mark had arranged it, at my request. This time the woman was polite, cautious, and curious.
I told her my story in every detail, save two. I invented names for Justin and Ludmila Mayfield. (Yes, an investigation might trip over Ludo, but very quickly it would look the other way, given who her husband was.)
I gave her my copy of Reverse Circle, by Michael Jacks, and advised her to read it. I told her how much Frank, and probably his mother, had got away with, in terms of cash and murder. I said that, although I had no proof, I believed that my cousin might now be using the name Jason Lee. Finally, I asked her what her service, if it was really interested in major crime, proposed to do about it.
‘We’ll look out for them,’ she replied.
As far as I know, they’re looking still.
Me? I’m watching the sun rise out of the sea, from my bedroom terrace. One day my Tom will deign to join me, but not yet, not yet. He’s his own man.