‘Do you want us to have them?’ he laughed. ‘Oz, Prim, those cleaners you hired were very good indeed. They wiped just about every print in the place.
‘As for the investigation, one of my colleagues just said to me in Catalan, that if a gangster is killed, the most sensible thing to do is bury him and take him off the wanted list. Even if we’re right and we have found Capulet, they don’t care; certainly they want nothing to do with the investigation. That’s all mine.’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
The amiable copper grinned. ‘I believe that you have a saying in English, which does not translate into Spanish or Catalan. Fuck all. That is what I am going to do about it; fuck all.
‘I don’t even have a victim identification, until the Swiss or Interpol find the sister. . If they even bother to look for her. Where would I start? There is no one on the missing persons list who matches the age and sex. No, I will keep samples for DNA testing, and I will bury the rest.’
He looked at me, searching my eyes. ‘Have I surprised you, my friend Oz? Do I disappoint you?’
‘You surprise me, for sure. And yes, you disappoint me. When we first met, I had you pegged as someone who understood the rights of the victim. That guy in the pool; whoever he was, whatever he did, somebody put him there. Somebody killed him. Doesn’t he have a right to. . justice?’
‘Maybe he’s had it,’ the policeman shot back at me. Then he seemed to soften. ‘Life is not a movie, Senor.’ He shot me another quick smile. ‘Yes, even I have heard of your new career.
‘In the real world, all of us have to set priorities. For example, if that was a child you had found murdered in your pool, or a young woman violated, then this crime would have a very high priority indeed. In fact, my men and I are currently investigating the abduction and murder of a child, a young girl, in another part of the province. It is painstaking work, and we are under a lot of pressure from the newspapers and the politicians to find the beast who did it.
‘If I took even one of my few detectives from that case and set him to work chasing the killer of a man who was probably a criminal himself, I would be crucified. The Spanish people do not care about French smugglers, but they do care, very deeply, about their own children.
‘The truth is that I brought my Guardia friends here because I hoped they would take this business off my hands, but they are in the same position as me; overstretched.
‘I’ll deal with it when I am able. Until then, if you feel a personal interest, then you go ahead and investigate.’
Beside me, Prim snorted. Actually, it wasn’t far short of an explosion. ‘That will be right! We’re on honeymoon, Ramon. And our detecting days are very definitely over.’
Fortunato smiled at her, softly, as if he had played the scene with her himself at some point in the past; as, probably, he had. ‘In that case, my dear, fill your swimming pool.’ He glanced at the men who were erecting scaffolding around the house. ‘Paint your villa. Enjoy yourselves.
‘You are here for Christmas, yes?’
‘We don’t know,’ Primavera replied. ‘We haven’t decided yet.’
‘I am looking forward to Christmas,’ he murmured. ‘It will be Alejandro’s first; even if he will be too young to appreciate it. I know now I was never really happy till I had a son.’ There was something in the way he said it, that made me wonder; as if he was telling her that he knew. Or maybe I’m simply paranoid.
‘Make a fuss of him, then,’ my wife told her former lover, making an effort to keep her voice light, but only succeeding in sounding unlike herself. ‘He’ll appreciate that.’ I thought I caught a message in her tone too; maybe it was an unspoken apology. If it was, then certainly it wasn’t intended for me.
‘Sure he will.’ I burst in to the middle of whatever might have been going on. ‘Maybe we should have our boys here too; our nephews. We’ve got room for them and Ellie, if they fancy it.’
‘I will leave you to your planning,’ said the policeman. He chuckled. ‘And please, feel free to investigate our late friend if you wish. Just don’t find any more like him.’
9
My casual suggestion took wings. As the overtime painters finished their scaffolding, we talked and made a couple of phone calls.
My sister Ellen jumped at the chance to spend Christmas in our new house. Jonathan and Colin weren’t old enough to vote, but there was no doubt about what they’d want. More than that, we decided that we had room for my dad and Mary, my stepmother, too. . without creating parental rivalries, since Prim’s folks were heading for Los Angeles to end the year with the pregnant Dawn and her megastar husband, Miles.
The master plan was completed when Mary insisted on cooking the turkey. Nobody does it better.
We had no intention of doing any more cooking ourselves than we had to, so in the evening we headed into L’Escala, for dinner in La Dolce Vita, at a table in an upstairs window with a view across the Golfo de Rosas. The pizza was world-class. . I could live on pizza. . but the place was busy and there was a queue for tables, so we didn’t hang about long after dessert.
It was just after ten when we stepped out into the crisp, December night. We didn’t feel like going home; instead, we went for a wander.
We had walked past Bar JoJo many times, but had rarely gone in. We probably wouldn’t have that night either, only we saw Shirley sitting there, at a table.
I really don’t know how to describe JoJo’s. It serves as a local for many of the L’Escala ex-pats, but it isn’t exclusively their club. It caters for young. . some very young. . and old. . some very old. . alike, and it is open at least six nights a week through the year, even on black Mondays in the dead of winter when there are no other lights showing in the old town. I’m not even going to try to describe JoJo herself. . Dammit, yes I am. Imagine, if you will, that Rita Hayworth had been English and had lived a year or two longer than she did.
Shirley wasn’t alone when we stepped inside; there were half a dozen other customers, plus Jo herself, and a set of dominoes lay scattered on each of the two tables. Clearly, there had been a hot time in the old town that night.
The proprietrix pushed herself up from her chair. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said. ‘What can I get you?’
The wrong answer to that question can lead to the land of very sore heads, but we settled for two beers. As we took them, and as Jo entered them into the notebook where she keeps everyone’s tab, Shirley called across from her table. ‘Hello you two. Your ears burning? I was just talking about you; so was everyone else, in fact. You’re the talk of the town.’
The man on her right nodded, then took a quick slurp from a drink that looked as if it might have been lemonade, but wasn’t. ‘Aye, that’s right,’ he barked, in an accent from somewhere north of Birmingham. . I’ve never been very good at telling Yorkshiremen from Lancastrians. I can’t even remember which colour of rose is which. ‘It’s been right quiet here for a while. Still, it’s nice to ’ave you back, for all that.’
‘Nice to be back,’ I said. I like Frank Barnett; he’s a fixture in L’Escala, to the extent that when he dies there’s talk of stuffing him. As a matter of fact, some people can’t wait, or so it seems; I’ve heard them tell him to get stuffed on several occasions. He and his wife Geraldine left wherever it was around ten years ago for a brief stay in Spain, and have hardly been back since. He’s a plain-spoken man, is our Frank; I didn’t really appreciate the meaning of the adjective ‘bluff ’ until I met him at a Catalan Society do.
‘So,’ he demanded, ‘is it ’im, then? The French bloke who was chatting up Shirl; is it ’im?’
‘Well if it is, it isn’t, Frank. . If you see what I mean. What we found in our new pool was a pile of bones and other stuff I don’t even like to think about.’