The mugs which I held in my hand were both blue, but the ridges on one were round, rather than square. I put them back on the tray, then opened the wall cabinet and looked inside. When we had done a kitchen inventory we had found eight blue china mugs, made in Italy, four with square and four with circular contoured patterns. Only five remained in the cupboard, two square, and three round. I never had a moment’s doubt that I had done my usual matching trick that morning, whatever else had been on my mind, but I checked in the dishwasher just in case. It was empty. I had hand-washed the breakfast dishes that Susie and I had used the day before, and everything since. I pulled out the slide-away rubbish bin and looked in that. It contained a couple of blackened banana skins, and nothing else.
I looked again, and I was certain. While I had been out on my abortive mission of revenge against the innocent Steve Miller, someone had been in the house. I dropped to my knees and peered at the kitchen floor. It was tiled, a deep terra-cotta shade which made it difficult to spot crumbs and other fragments, but I started to go over every inch, until I found what I was looking for; a sliver of broken china, bone white with a blue glaze.
I knew I hadn’t broken anything. I knew that Prim hadn’t. I knew beyond any self-doubt that when I had opened that cabinet in the morning there had been eight mugs inside. Someone had been in the house, someone in enough of a rush to have knocked a mug off the work-surface to smash on the floor. The damage done, that person had replaced it with another from the cabinet, cleaned up the fragments, or as many of them as he could see against that dark-coloured floor, and taken them away with him to cover his tracks. Tough on him that he was dealing with an obsessive in the midst of a very bad day.
He? I thought. It had to be; had to be the same person who had broken in and attacked Susie, and no woman had done that. The size of the hands that had left those marks on her arms had told me that for sure.
‘How?’ I asked myself, aloud. That was an easy one; he had to have come in by the back door, through which I had left when I had gone off in my rage in search of Miller. The windows were all secure and the front door was bolted. ‘Did I lock it?’Yes, I had, and I had set the alarm. So the intruder had picked the lock again and had switched off the alarm again, at the panel by the door. This time, undisturbed, he had had time to set the alarm on the way out, and to lock the door behind him.
‘Can you do that?’ I asked myself again. ‘Can you unpick a lock?’ I didn’t know the answer to that, but if it was ‘No,’ it led to only one conclusion, and a very disturbing one at that: my visitor had a key.
I went out to the back door once again, knelt down and looked at the lock on the outside, searching for scrapes, scores, scratches in its bright brass facing. It was unmarked. ‘Change this son of a bitch right away,’ I muttered as I walked back into the house.
‘Now just hold on, Oz, hold on. Think this through.’ I was talking to myself, but I’m my favourite audience; that’s because I’m never heckled, as sometimes I have been at GWA shows. I remembered why I’d come into the kitchen in the first place, so I took a beer from the fridge, uncapped it and strolled back through to the living room. As I settled on to the couch, the phone rang, but I let it go unanswered. I didn’t want to speak to anyone just then.
‘What’s happened here?’ I asked myself.
One, someone took a shot at me in Capulet’s Lada.
Two, someone broke into the house, grabbed Susie from her bed and threw her down the stairs.
Three, someone sent Prim compromising photos of Susie and me. Not Steve Miller; who?
Four, someone broke into the house as soon as I went out; maybe someone with a key.
‘Why Oz, why?’ I said, aloud once more.
What if Susie had been killed by that fall? I’d have been arrested, sure as God made wee green apples.
What if I’m wrong about an enemy of Capulet shooting at the car, thinking that it was him. Maybe he knew it was me all along and thought he could scare me out of town.
Why would anyone want to break Prim and me up? Maybe, he didn’t, or didn’t care one way or the other. Maybe what he really wanted was just to get us out of the house.
Who might have a key to this place? The Frenchman, that’s who. But why would he sell us the bloody house then try to get us out of it so that he could break in? Answer me that one, smartarse. No, you can’t can you?
‘No, I bloody can’t,’ I admitted to myself. ‘The answer’s in here, I’m sure of it. There’s something about this house. But as to how it all fits together, and how, or even if, the body in the pool relates to it, there I don’t have a bloody clue.’
There was only one logical thing to be done at that point. I searched the place, from top to bottom, looking for signs of the intruder, looking to see if anything else was missing other than that one giveaway mug. It took me three hours, and it was dark outside when I was finished. While I was working, the phone rang three more times and my mobile sounded twice. I ignored them all.
There wasn’t a thing out of place. My passport was still there; my chequebooks and the passbooks for our Spanish bank accounts in the Caixa de Girona were still in the bedside drawer where I’d left them. The bed itself was rumpled, just as we had left it that morning.
I looked in every cupboard, every wardrobe, and every drawer. I checked the wall safe behind the mirror in our bedroom; it had come with the house too. We had found it open and empty, and I had programmed in my own combination. I kept some cash in there in pesetas and sterling, some receipts given to us by the notary and by Sergi when we had completed our purchase of the house, and a few valuable jewellery items, like my white gold Piaget watch and Prim’s necklace; gifts which we had bought for each other when we were married. They were still there, every item.
Nothing in the house was out of place as far as I could see; yet I knew that he’d been there. I could sense it.
I walked out of our bedroom, wondering what he could have been after, and whether he had finished searching for it. I was halfway down the stairs when another question jumped up in my mind and bit me.
How did the guy know when he broke in that Susie wouldn’t wake up and scream the place down?
‘Because he’d seen her, son, that’s why and possibly because he knew she wasn’t drunk, but drugged. Those two guys in JoJo’s; the two playing pool in the back room. Who the hell were they, and could one of them have spiked her drink while I was in the bog?’
I tried to remember what had happened that night, and who they were. Then I recalled that I had only seen one of them, a veteran L’Escala anchovy fisherman called Miguel. When I’d gone into Jo’s unisex toilet, one of the two cubicles had been occupied. When I had come out of the other one, it had been empty and the pool players had both been gone.
Suddenly, right at the top of my list of priorities was another visit to Bar JoJo.
I was thinking about that and about going out for something to eat when the phone rang once more. This time, I picked it up.
‘Hi. You’re back at last. I was beginning to think you were headed for Glasgow.’ Prim sounded quiet and subdued, far from her normal breezy businesslike self.
‘No. I’m still here; I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone for a while, that’s all.’
‘You spoke to Susie, though. You told her where I was.’
‘That was earlier, when I was out in the car. She called me to tell me she got home safe. I told her she didn’t.’
‘You told her right.’