My dad laughed, loudly enough for Jonny to frown at him over his shoulder. ‘The Big Apple!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Big Raspberry, more like. And what does that make Enster? The Big Turnip! How about that? And L’Escala, what would you call this place?’
I was sucked into his game. ‘It has to be the Big Anchovy, hasn’t it?’
That was it for the serious discussion. We were through our second beers when the team came back with the shopping and when Prim announced that there would be no cooking done in the house that night.
My nephews are serious students of pizza and, as I mentioned, I’m not averse to it myself, so we took them to Pizza Pazza. It’s on the beach in Riells, the newer end of L’Escala and it’s a nice, recently built family restaurant. We’d only been there for half an hour when who came in with his nice, recently built family but Ramon Fortunato.
In Spain, the kids are barely out of the wrapper when they’re taken out with their parents of a Saturday night; so it didn’t surprise me to see a six-month-old loaded in the carrier which was strapped to the policeman’s chest.
I waved them over and made the introductions; I didn’t have any choice really. The ladies did the obligatory cooing over the baby, although it was obvious to me, if no one else, that Prim was a little more restrained in this than the other two. While they were doing that I took my first look at Veronique. She was very attractive; tall, slim, dark, well-groomed and, I told myself, unmistakably Spanish. She smiled at me, in a gentle way that told me a hell of a lot, not least that right at that moment she’d rather have been somewhere else than watching her old man’s ex inspect her kid.
I caught the shrewd old dentist looking at her too; he wasn’t just admiring her teeth.
It was as well that the Fortunatos’ table was on the other side of the restaurant. I would have been happy simply to nod to them on the way out, had not the beer caught up with me. I was washing my hands in Pizza Pazza’s palatial bog when who came in but the bold Ramon.
‘Nice kid,’ I said, as he went about his business.
‘Thank you.’ I was about to leave but he called me back.
‘A moment, Oz. I wanted to ask you something.’
He sounded unprofessionally serious. I hoped we weren’t about to go into any off-limit areas. ‘The man you mentioned the other day; Sayeed the fisherman. Who told you about him going to prison?’
‘An English guy in Bar JoJo. Or was it the lady herself? I can’t remember, but they both seemed to know about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Fortunato. ‘The story seems to be all over town. I can’t find out where it began, but I do know this much. . it is not true.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked him, well hooked by this time.
‘What I say. If Sayeed had gone to jail for smuggling I would not necessarily have known about it, since it would have been a Guardia Civil matter. But in the way of things, I would have heard something. So, I checked with them, and with the prison authorities; Sayeed Hassani. . that’s his full name. . is not in prison, nor has he been in prison. . Not in the last six years at any rate.’
‘They got it wrong, then.’
‘They did, but so did everybody else.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’ve checked around. I looked for his boat on the beach, where he pulls it up to save paying for a berth in the marina. It’s there, but it’s rotting. I went to his apartment; it’s locked up, and the town taxes for the last year have not been paid. I asked the neighbours; none of them can remember seeing him this year.
‘So I spoke to his brother, Abou. It was easy to find him, for he is in jail. He’s doing three years in Barcelona for robbery. They were not close, but he was upset that Sayeed had not been to visit him for a long time. While I was talking to him, I leaned over and pulled a hair from his head. He thought I was crazy, that’s all, or maybe that I was trying to frighten him. But I took that hair away and I used it as a comparison in a DNA test.
‘And guess what, Oz?’
I guessed; and I got it right this time. ‘The guy in the pool. It was Sayeed; not Capulet.’
He nodded. ‘I thought you deserved to know that, since you were responsible for my finding out. There’s more, too. The bullet that we found in the body is a heavy calibre, point four five. I discovered that at one time Capulet was a Swiss Army reservist, and as such, he was issued with a point four five Colt automatic.’
In spite of myself, I felt a bit of a shiver run down my back. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Find Capulet, if I can.’ The policeman reached into his jacket, and took out a card, one of those that Pizza Pazza leaves lying on all of its tables for punters to take away and give to their friends.
‘But first, there is something you could do for me.’
I looked at him and saw that he seemed to be blushing. ‘If only to explain why we’ve been in here so long …’ He held out the card. ‘Could you give me your autograph?’ He gave me a cringing smile. ‘It’s for my wife, you understand.’
13
Christmas Eve isn’t quite the same in Catalunya as in Scotland; Spanish kids are given their presents on 6 January, the last day of the festive season, rather than on 25 December. There was no point in trying that on with my nephews, though, and especially with wee Colin. He had a focused look about him, and an air of suppressed excitement that seemed to be shooting off sparks.
Prim and I had put up the tree at the foot of the big stairway, and had decorated the rest of the house in traditional style, well before the team had arrived from Scotland, so there was nothing to be done in that department.
The ladies were working themselves into a controlled frenzy too, as they began the day-long preparations for a meal that would take two hours at most to demolish. As for my dad, he had bought Volume One of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle at Edinburgh Airport and had settled himself in the gentle winter sunshine in one of our big deck chairs, not to be disturbed.
Since there was nothing for me to do, I decided to play the favourite uncle and take the boys off to see the Greco-Roman ruins of Empuries. The entrance to the great rambling site was less than a quarter of a mile from our front door, so I resisted the urge to take them for a hurl in the Lada, and instead we set out to walk there.
We hadn’t got out of our street when an English voice called out to me. ‘Hello there!’ It came from inside Shirley’s garden; I looked over the gate and saw her son. I had met John Gash before, in unhappy circumstances, and I had been unimpressed by a couple of things he had done, under the influence of his late and not very lamented uncle. But according to Shirl, he had got his act together and was doing a pretty fair job of running their family business, alongside his own ventures like the Russian spares job.
I was taken by surprise by his shout, since I had begun to think once more about Fortunato’s bombshell the night before. Naturally, I hadn’t mentioned it when we got back to the table; I still didn’t want the family to know anything about the episode, and I didn’t think that the new development would make Prim’s evening either. Somehow, I had been more comfortable with the concept of Capulet being the bag of bones in the piscina. I mean, it was almost as if I knew him and, given his supposed line of work, his demise could have been classed almost as an industrial injury.
Call me illogical if you will, but the thought that it wasn’t him. . that it was a total stranger, if you like. . made me feel a shade uncomfortable. For one thing, it meant that Capulet was probably still alive. For another, it raised the possibility that he had put the bloke there himself, before he disappeared. But would he really put the place up for sale with an accessory like that? I mean selling with furniture and fittings is one thing, but. .
That was as far as I had got when Shirley’s son and heir hailed me over her garden gate. ‘It’s Oz Blackstone, isn’t it?’ he boomed, cheerily as he strolled down the path to the high garden gate. The slope of the land wasn’t quite as severe as ours, so he didn’t see the lads until he had almost reached it. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise you had company.’