‘Drink it while it’s hot. It’ll do you good.’
Raul slurped some, and pulled a face.
‘It needs to be strong,’ Ben said.
Raul braved another sip. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said, looking up.
‘Ben,’ Ben said.
‘You’re not from around here.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘You’re English.’
‘The half of me that isn’t Irish.’
‘What are you doing here in Frigiliana?’ Raul asked. ‘Are you on vacation or something?’
Ben wasn’t about to reveal to a stranger how he’d been wandering aimlessly through Europe for the last couple of months, never lingering long in one place, staying in cheap hotels to preserve his savings, travelling by public transport wherever whim or random choice took him.
‘I wanted to see the castle,’ he said.
Which, as far as it went, was true, although Ben hadn’t been aware of the existence of the ancient Moorish fortress — whose ruins topped the hill overlooking Frigiliana — until he’d happened to pick up a discarded magazine on the bus from Sevilla, just for something to read. Then, just for something to do, when he’d got off the bus he’d made the long, hot, dusty hike up the hill to visit the lonely ruins that marked the site of the battle of El Peñon de Frigiliana, where in 1569 some six thousand Christian soldiers had stormed the last stronghold of the Moorish empire and spelled the final end of Muslim rule in Spain.
Once he’d got to the top, Ben had wondered why he’d bothered. He’d seen all the battlefields he ever wanted to see in his life, both ancient and modern. The remains of the fortress didn’t look much different from crusader ruins he’d observed in the Middle East or the smoking rubble of killing zones in Afghanistan, from back in the day. It was a sad old place, haunted by the same ancient ghosts as all such places inevitably were.
Ben had perched on a crumbled wall and smoked a few cigarettes while looking out over the valley below, then got thirsty and come wandering back down the hill into Frigiliana to find a cool drink. The rest of the story, Raul didn’t need telling.
‘Well, I’m glad you showed up when you did,’ Raul said after another grateful slurp of coffee. It seemed to be reviving him a little already. ‘I can’t believe the way you went through those idiots. You must be some kind of seventh-dan Aikido master or something.’
‘It’s just a few simple tricks,’ Ben said.
‘Tricks.’ Raul considered that for a moment. ‘Well, whatever, you saved my ass from a serious beating back there. Probably saved my job, too. Respectable schoolteachers aren’t supposed to get into drunken fights and turn up at school all bruised up.’
‘You teach English?’ Ben said, glancing in the direction of the degree certificate.
Raul nodded. ‘In a secondary school, just a few kilometres from here.’
‘It’s the middle of the week. Is there a holiday?’
Raul said quietly, ‘No, I… I’m taking time off.’
Ben didn’t ask why. ‘Respectable schoolteachers don’t generally have such a useful right jab, in my experience.’
Raul gave a sour laugh. ‘I was an amateur boxing champion in my teens. It’s been years since I so much as threw a punch. Stupid.’ He sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, toying with his cup and frowning. ‘I shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. As if I hadn’t already got enough booze in this place to drink myself into a hole in the ground. Maybe I was looking for a fight. Maybe I wanted it to happen.’
‘Whatever it was about,’ Ben said, ‘it’s none of my business. I’m going to finish up my coffee and get out of here. Do us both a favour and try not to get yourself killed with a repeat performance, okay? A broken heart’s not worth getting beaten to death over. No matter how pretty she is.’ Ben pointed back with his thumb at the picture over the desk.
Raul hung his head down so low that it almost touched his knees. He whispered, ‘Was. And she was more than that. She was a lot more.’
Ben said nothing.
‘See, everything anyone says about her now has to be in the past tense. Even I catch myself doing it. As if she really had gone, as if she were no longer a part of the world. That’s what the police would have everyone believe.’
Ben still said nothing.
‘And now Klein says it too,’ Raul murmured. ‘I thought maybe he’d see it differently, but he’s just like the others. Nobody but me can see it’s just bullshit.’ He closed his eyes, held them shut for a few moments. When he opened them, they were bright with wetness. ‘And so there it is. Catalina’s dead. That’s what I’m supposed to believe, too. But I can’t. I just can’t. So I won’t talk about her as if she were. Everyone else can play that game. Not me.’ He put the coffee down on the table. ‘You were kind to help me. But it’s no good. I’m just going to keep drinking. I’m going to drink until I can’t think about anything any more. Except another drink.’
‘I can’t stop you,’ Ben said. ‘But you’re going to have to get off your arse and pour it yourself.’
Raul looked at him. ‘Some friend you are.’
‘I’m not your friend, Raul.’
Ben looked at Raul and felt the depth of his pain. But Ben also sensed he was in danger of getting drawn in. There was an untold story here, and he didn’t want to hear it.
He drank the last of his coffee and stood up. ‘I’m sorry your life turned to shit. I’m sorry your girlfriend died.’
Raul Fuentes raised his head from his knees and slowly turned to look at Ben. The muscles in his face looked tight enough to snap.
‘Not my girlfriend. My sister. She’s my twin sister. Don’t you get it? That’s how I know they’re wrong.’
Chapter Three
Ben felt a brother’s grief hit him like a fist to the face. He went silent. Glanced again at the woman’s picture over the desk, and now he could see it. The similarity in the eyes, the nose, the cheekbones. The same fine, lean Latin features. He looked back at Raul, feeling suddenly torn between walking away and staying to hear more.
‘My sister did not kill herself,’ Raul said, with as much absolute rock-solid unflinching certainty as Ben had ever heard in a person’s voice. ‘My sister is alive.’
Ben made no reply. He hesitated, then sat down again. It was the least he could do for the guy to listen.
‘They’re saying she drove her car off a cliff into the ocean,’ Raul said. ‘Just let it roll right off the edge. They say it was suicide.’
Ben could imagine it. The beautiful dark-haired young woman in the picture sitting at the wheel. Her face strained with terror and resolution as she let off the handbrake and let herself trundle towards oblivion. The car falling into space, plummeting down to smash itself to pieces as that fragile body inside it was pummelled and broken. He pictured torn metal and shattered plastic and bloodied glass. But something about the picture was wrong. Something Raul didn’t believe. Ben remained silent for a moment longer before he said, ‘Are you going to tell me there was no body inside the car when they found it?’
Raul’s eyes brightened visibly, the way a prisoner’s on death row light up when they tell him about the last-minute stay of execution that’s just been granted. ‘Exactly. All they pulled out of the water was an empty car. What does that tell you?’
‘It tells me the body could have been flung free of the car, Raul.’ He hated dashing the guy’s hopes like that. But better to face reality than to be tormented by wishful fantasy for the rest of your life.
Raul flinched as if Ben had pulled a gun on him. ‘How would you know? How can you assert something like that?’
Ben wished he’d said nothing at all. The thing he’d wanted to avoid was happening. He was getting sucked in. ‘Tell me where this happened, Raul.’