Susie reached across to my breast pocket and pulled the white silk handkerchief so that it showed a little more. ‘There,’ she whispered. ‘Now you look just like a movie star.’
‘Hey, kid. I am a movie star.’
‘I know. That’s one reason why I decided to add you to my trophy cabinet.’
‘When did you take this decision? This morning?’
She smiled at me, through the mirror. ‘No, no,’ she chuckled. ‘A while before that; I don’t know when exactly, but at some point a wee voice in my conniving wee head said, “I’m going to have his body”.
‘I must admit, though, I thought it would have been harder than that.’
I gave her my best ‘offended’ look, and she laughed. ‘Sorry. More difficult, I should have said.’ She patted my chest. ‘Like a rock, my darling, like a rock.’
We slipped on overcoats and walked the hundred metres to Shirley’s house, along the dimly lit Carrer Caterina. I’m sure she twigged right away, as she opened the door and saw us there, but she’s too good a hostess to have let anything show.
I introduced Susie, ‘our best friend from Glasgow’. This was only half true, at best; she sure as hell wasn’t Prim’s friend any more, even if Prim didn’t know it. As for me, I wasn’t entirely sure of my new relationship with her, but I was fairly certain that it wasn’t going to last long.
I was surprised to find that Shirley was alone. ‘John gone home?’ I asked her.
‘Yes. I had hoped that he would have stayed till the weekend at least, but he and Virginie left this morning. Now I’ve got that bloody car you sold him taking up half my garage. He started to strip it, but decided that it was too big a job for him. Gawd knows how long he proposes to leave it there.’
‘Does Virginie live with him?’
‘Sometimes. She’s fairly new on the scene, so I think they’re still sorting themselves out in that respect.’
‘Where does she live when she’s not with him?’
‘In a place called Divonne-les-Bains, so she told me; it’s in France, somewhere.’
‘How did they meet?’
‘At a furniture show in Paris, according to John. The way he tells it, he saw her, fell in love with her, and just swept her off her feet.’
‘Aww,’ said Susie, ‘isn’t that romantic? I’m just waiting for someone to do that to me.’
Shirley ushered us into her living room, disappeared into the kitchen and came back with three gin-and-tonics on a tray. ‘I don’t know about you,’ she exclaimed, ‘but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had so much cava, I’ve got bubbles coming out my ears. So I thought we’d have a real drink before dinner tonight.
‘So how’s Prim’s mum?’ she continued, briskly. I had bumped into her three days earlier and had told her about the emergency in California.
‘She’s coming along. She did have a malignant growth, but the surgeon’s confident that he got it all. They’re going to treat her to try to prevent any spread of the disease, and after that, we all live with our fingers crossed for a while.’
‘Prim staying out there for long, is she?’
‘She’ll be back on Tuesday, I’m glad to say.’
‘Me too,’ Susie murmured, coyly. ‘My idea of a surprise visit backfired on me, and no mistake. Oz has been great though. He’s been showing me the sights; he took me to Pals yesterday, and to Barcelona this afternoon.’
‘If you’re stuck for something to do tomorrow, there’s a Catalan Society cocktail party, at Frank and Geraldine’s place. Three o’clock, a thousand pesetas per skull, and bring a raffle prize. JoJo’s organising the drinks.’ She looked at me. ‘That’s how I knew you had a house guest, by the way. She told Geraldine you were in last night. . they came into the bar just after you’d left. . and she called me this morning.
‘The jungle drums beat fast in this place, as you know. She said that you’d been in with a redhead, and wondered who it was.’ She smiled. ‘I told her it was your sister. That seemed to satisfy her.’
‘I’ll put her right tomorrow if we go to this do. But wait a minute; you’ve met my sister. You know she isn’t a redhead.’
‘Yeah, but if I hadn’t told her something, then the story of Oz and the mystery woman would have been all over L’Escala by now. And who knows? Some bugger might have phoned the British tabloids. There are people everywhere who might try to make a quid by selling a story like that.
‘You’re a celebrity now, my young friend; people are interested in you. You want to remember that.’
She had a point; I couldn’t deny it. ‘Thanks for telling Gerrie a convenient porky, then.’
‘De nada. I knew there would be an innocent explanation, anyway.’ She laughed. ‘You and Prim have a hell of a history, but not even you could get off your mark that fast.’
‘Should I be offended at that?’
‘You wouldn’t have the brass neck to be offended, not after what you did to that girl when you lived here before. Going off and leaving her like that. I’ve never told you this before, but I thought that was really cruel, Oz Blackstone.’
‘Okay, but you don’t know the whole story. It was mutual.’
‘You might have told yourself that at the time, but don’t go believing it now.’
I tried a Catalan shrug, but it didn’t work. ‘Maybe,’ I said instead, ‘but at least she didn’t sit here pining for me.’
Shirley gave me an appraising look.
‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘There are no secrets between Prim and me. She’s told me everything about that time.’
‘Has she now?’ our hostess chuckled. ‘Good for her. I don’t suppose there’s a point to getting even with someone if they don’t ever know about it.
‘She really did too; especially with that Steve Miller bloke, so-and-so’s son, the car salesman. She thought he was a creep, yet she went off to Madrid with him for a week. I asked her why; she told me to work it out for myself. It wasn’t too difficult. You couldn’t stand him, so that was why she did it.
‘Then there was the Spanish guy, what’s his name?’
‘Fortunato?’
‘No, before him. After Steve, after that young fellow from St Albans. . only twenty-one, he was. . and after that racing driver from Sussex. He was a waiter in one of the restaurants in the old town; smarmy, oily chap, always chatting up the female customers.’
I knew him. But before I had a chance to dwell on him, Shirley went on. ‘You might not think so, but Fortunato was good for her. She was really off the rails after you left, but the policeman straightened her out, even if he was messed up himself, with his wife having left him for our mutual friend.’
‘What?’ She had lost me now.
‘Didn’t you know that? Mind you, Prim might not have known his name then. She never met him; I know that. It was Reynard Capulet. The policeman’s wife left him and went to Paris with Rey.’
I gave a light laugh. She didn’t know it, nor I imagine did Susie, but all the way through Shirley’s revelation I was honing my acting skills. ‘She got the short straw then,’ I said. ‘He was going to take you to Florida, wasn’t he?’
Another woman might have been hurt, but Shirley’s tougher than that. ‘Too right. Nothing but the best for me, and he knew it. Knows it, maybe. He could be living down the road, for all I know.’
I had a lot to think about over dinner. . in my Mum’s day, ‘supper’ was a cup of hot chocolate and a biscuit just before you went to bed. . but I kept myself in conversational mode. I told Shirley about Susie’s business back in Glasgow, and even mentioned casually that she’d been looking at something in our part of Spain.
‘Does the name Jeffrey Chandler mean anything to you?’ I asked her.
‘Big grey-haired bloke,’ she replied, ‘in the movies like you; built like a brick outhouse, was always playing cowboys, or soldiers and sometimes Indians, because he was naturally dark-complexioned. Been dead for donkey’s years.’
‘This one isn’t; he says he’s a property developer, but he’s really a con man and a thief. I wondered if he’d surfaced socially around here.’