We installed Shirl in one of our new soft leather armchairs, and Prim poured coffee from a top-of-the-hob percolator, which we had found in one of the old kitchen cupboards. She looked around, nodding from time to time.

  ‘Yes,’ she proclaimed at last. ‘Not bad at all. Get some nice pictures on the walls, and some nice rugs on the floor, put some nice lights on that big terrace around the pool, and you’ll have a home fit for a film star.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I acknowledged. ‘Do you know anything about the previous owner?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Shirley answered slowly, ‘he was French, I know that much; also a friend of mine, who lives up here, mentioned him once or twice, after he went away. She didn’t know his name, but she said she’d heard that he was a bit dodgy. Not that that means much; there are lots of mysterious people around here. Even me. Even you two.

  ‘When John looked at the place he asked about him. He told me that all that Sergi bloke said was that he’d gone away; when John pressed him a bit more he got the impression that no one was quite sure where he’d gone to. Again, there’s nothing unusual about that, not by L’Escala standards. People come and go all the time, and if they don’t volunteer information they don’t get asked for it. That’s one reason I prefer it to England. You’re allowed a bit of privacy here.’

  Our new neighbour drank her coffee, and demolished a pastry stick filled with chocolate, which I had found in one of the local bread shops. When she was finished, we gave her the grand tour of the house, then, like the good guest she is, she excused herself and left us to get on with settling in.

  We had hired a firm of commercial cleaners to go through the house like a dose of salts in advance of our moving in, so from that point of view there was little to do. We finished laundering the sheets and towels, then filled the cardboard crates with the mattress wrappings, for me to pile them into the Lada . . . I really was taking a shine to the ugly, square, bus . . . and take them to the nearest rubbish skip. While I was gone the telly man, an English ex-pat, did what he had to do to our satellite dish and tuned in the decoder box which gave us illicit access to British broadcasting.

  I came back to find Prim almost jumping for joy. ‘We can get British radio,’ she shouted as I stepped inside. ‘It comes through the satellite! I can keep up with The Archers.’

  I gave the bloke a serious stare. ‘What the hell did you tell her that for?’ I asked him. Both he and my wife grinned. I didn’t know why they thought I was kidding, but they did. From somewhere close by, I thought I imagined a Satanic chuckle.

  All the same, when he left I was ready to sit down for an hour’s telly. It was almost five, and there was a review of the previous week’s European football about to begin on Eurosport. Prim had other ideas. ‘Is that it?’ she exclaimed, in a tone which told me at once that it wasn’t.

  ‘What else is there?’ I protested. ‘You can’t want to go out for a drink, can you? We’ve just filled that bloody great fridge with booze.’

  ‘No. We’ll go out later. But first we have to get that cover off the pool.’

  ‘Gie’s a break, love,’ I pleaded. ‘That thing must weigh a ton. There’s a hell of a lot of it. Look, I’ll get the painters to help me tomorrow.’

  ‘They’ll be here to paint. The two of us can manage it together, Oz; and Vincens said we should fill the pool as soon as possible, to get the motor running. It’s a ten-minute job and there’s enough daylight, so let’s do it now.’

  I gave up. Normally, I’d have muttered something about alternative uses for daylight, and taken her off to test-drive our new mattress, and that monster of a bed, but I’d had enough of that at Crisaran. (We have a technical term in Scotland for that condition. We call it Being Shagged Out.) Or maybe my actions were being guided by A Higher Power? (No, on this occasion I was Absolutely Shagged Out.)

  I followed her outside and went to work untying the ropes which held the big blue cover firmly in place. We started nearest to the house, which we assumed was the shallow end, working our way down the sides. The metal rings to which the nylon rope was lashed were set two metres apart, eleven of them down either side, with three along the top and the far end. They were screwed into the stone, so that they could be removed when not in use, thereby saving a right few broken toes.

  The knots were tight. For a while I thought we were going to have to cut the damn thing free, until Prim had the bright idea of using a long screwdriver, which we had found in the outhouse, as a lever. With that tool, we finally managed to unfasten all the ropes at the shallow end, then one by one on either side, turning back the cover as we went, so that its weight would not pull it downwards into the empty pool.

  Primavera’s ten-minute job took us forty-five: by the time we were finished, it was practically dark. We stood at the deep end, the blue cover in a roll at our feet and looked down into our new pool. The tiles seemed to be navy blue, with a denim fleck through them, chosen to give a cool look and yet to attract the warmth of the sun at the same time.

  It wasn’t completely empty. Since it was last filled, rainwater had flowed or been driven under the cover, and had gathered down there below us. Looking at the sides I guessed that it was between two and three feet deep; it was dark, stagnant, impenetrable to the eye and, now that the tarpaulin was off, smelly.

  ‘Shouldn’t there be a drain?’ Prim asked.

  ‘Of course there’s a bloody drain. It’s probably clogged with leaves. I’ll run some water in. That should clear it. If not, we’ll add it to Vincens the builder’s things-to-do list.’

  The small room which housed the pool machinery was directly beneath the point where we were standing. I trotted down the steps to the driveway and opened it with a key on the big ring which I carried. Vincens had given me a quick run-through of the system, so I knew what to look for . . . starting with the light switch so that I could see what I was doing. I didn’t bother about setting the filter at that stage, but went straight to the lever which controlled the flow of water, turned it on full throttle and switched on the pump.

  Even in the pool-house I could hear it splashing on to the tiles. I waited there for a minute or two to make sure that it was running okay, then I grabbed the pole and net which stood against the side wall, at an angle because it was so long, thinking to use it to clear the leaves. As an afterthought, I pressed the button marked ‘luz’, which over-rode the master clock of the pool lights.

  Prim is not a screamer, other than in certain private circumstances, and then she does it quietly. But I wasn’t even out of the small room when, above me, she let out a belter. ‘Oz!’ she cried. ‘Oz!’ Not frightened, I thought . . . she has never been frightened in her life . . . but startled, very startled.

  I was up that stair in a flash; or would have been if I hadn’t tripped over that bloody pole on the second step. I made it though, as fast as I could, stumbling and scrambling, grabbing hold of her, and turning her towards me.

  ‘What’s up?’ I gasped.

  She was calm once more; icy calm. A sure sign of shit flying off a fan. ‘Look,’ she ordered, glancing back over her shoulder.

  I felt icy myself as I peered over the side into the pool; icy with apprehension.

  The rushing water had done its work, the stagnant pool was clearing fast and the drain was unblocked. There was no doubting what the obstruction had been; no doubting it at all.

  As I stared down; I came to a conclusion. It was based on pure speculation, but I was strangely certain nonetheless. The mysterious Frenchman hadn’t gone far. Indeed, he hadn’t gone at all.

  5

  I wish I could describe the expression on Ramon Fortunato’s face when he saw who owned Villa Bernabeu. Yes, I really do, but, glib bastard though I am, it’s beyond me.

  Our living room was well lit, by four big wall fittings, one on either side of each fireplace. When the captain stepped in from the night outside and saw us, his jaw dropped, he turned several different colours in succession, and it was well over a minute before he could speak.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted at last. The regional commander of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, has a remarkable command of the English language; for a guy from Albons, that is.

  I hadn’t seen Fortunato for a while; our acquaintance went back to my last extended stay in Spain when Prim and I had become involved in a business which had led to us a stumbling over a number of people in succession, each of them, coincidentally, somewhat deceased. As muerto as cordero as they say in Spanish. To his great credit he had accepted from the off that we weren’t the sort of people who were likely to have been responsible for any of them.

  Prim had got to know him socially rather than professionally, after I had left St Marti and gone back to Scotland to marry Jan. During that time, she eventually told me, she had carnal relations with a Spanish man . . . and why not, as she put it. I had never been entirely sure, despite her denial, and despite the existence of a wife, that it wasn’t Fortunato that she’d shagged.

  If that was the case, the memory of it didn’t exactly overwhelm him right then. ‘You are magnets for corpses!’ he exclaimed, running his fingers through his thick black hair as I poured him a medicinal glass of Le Panto. Prim and I don’t usually attack the brandy early in the evening . . . or late, for that matter . . . but we agreed that the circumstances justified the exception.

  Looking back, in that moment, I realised that he was right . . . about Prim at least. In all my time with Jan, we never discovered a single body!

  ‘Just a minute, Ramon,’ my wife exclaimed. ‘You can’t say that. We came upon him, not the other way around.’

  She walked over to him; he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. Looking at the two of them, in a fleeting second, my suspicions were reinforced. There was something in the way he allowed his hands to rest on her hips that convinced me they’d been there before. Not that I got steamed up; at the time she had been well entitled.

  I walked across, shook his hand and gave him the brandy. He hadn’t changed much; medium height, solidly built, black-haired, olive-skinned. He was clean-shaven but looked like the sort of bloke who should be wearing a moustache.

  ‘Don’t go on to us,’ I warned him. ‘Talk to the estate agent. What sort of an impression will it give property investors if word gets around that in L’Escala there’s a free stiff in every swimming pool?’

  ‘Who sold you the place?’ he asked, as he sat down on the couch.

  ‘A bloke called Sergi, from an agency called SolVacances.’

  Fortunato chuckled. ‘That figures. He’s a good guy, but not of this world. A bit like the man in the pool, but not in the same way.

  ‘When did you buy it?’

  ‘Last week. We moved in today. We’re on our honeymoon. ’ I didn’t have to volunteer that, but something made me. ‘We sold the apartment a while back, but were talked into having another property here.’

  He looked at Prim. ‘I never thought I’d see you back here,’ he said quietly.

  ‘How else would you find your corpses?’ she shot back with a grin. ‘How’s Veronique?’

  ‘Very well. We had a little boy six months ago; his name is Alejandro.’

  There was a silence; somehow I didn’t feel part of it.

  ‘So who’s our pal out there?’ I asked, to break it as much as anything else. I glanced out of the window, just in time to see two uniformed Mossos officers carrying a plastic coffin up the steps of the pool.

  The captain looked up at me and shrugged his shoulders. ‘How the hell should I know? He’s not exactly recognisable. He’s been out there for a long time, but this house has been empty for a long time too.’ His face twisted into a bitter grin. ‘That shows you how quiet it is up here; apart from the lady Shirley, no one lives in this street all the year round. Even at that though, the smell must have been bad for a while.’

  ‘When you remember how the L’Escala drains get sometimes, ’ I muttered, ‘who’d wonder about it?

  ‘Come on,’ I persisted. ‘Is it the Frenchman? The guy who owned this place?’

  ‘It could be him; but like I say, it could be anybody. It could be a tramp who crawled under the cover for shelter in the winter, then took a heart attack or something. Christ, I can’t even be certain that it’s a man.’

  ‘Forget the tramp idea,’ I told him. ‘That cover was lashed down tight; no one could have crawled under it, or at least no adult. Wasn’t there anything on the body to give you a clue? He was clothed, after all.’

  ‘Hah!’ Fortunato laughed, explosively. ‘I tell you what Oz; I haven’t heard the morgue wagon leave, so why don’t you go out and take a look through his pockets? Go on, I give you permission.’

  I thought I caught a challenge in his tone; it needled me so much that I actually moved towards the door. Then I thought better of it.

  ‘No?’ the policeman chuckled. ‘Well not me, either. Let’s leave it to the man who does the autopsy. He’s paid more than I am; he can look through the pockets, and pick through the bones.’ He held up his goblet; somehow he had managed to empty it. ‘Meanwhile, I am still suffering from the shock of exposure to that thing, and to the cold night air.’

  He wasn’t wrong about the weather; when the sun goes down on the Costa Brava in the winter months it can turn bloody freezing, bloody quickly, however bright the day may have been. I poured him another Le Panto.

  ‘Going back to the Frenchman,’ I said, as I settled myself into an armchair. ‘I got the impression back there that you knew who I was talking about. Right?’

  He sipped his brandy, then gave me a funny smile. ‘Name, Reynard Capulet. Height, one metre seventy-nine; fair hair, small scars on right cheek and on chin. Date of birth, June eight, nineteen fifty-seven. At least that’s what it said on the Interpol file which I saw, and that’s what it said on the passport he used around here. Monsieur Capulet crossed frontiers under several different names, and one or two different hair colours, too, I suspect.

  ‘Technically, he didn’t own this place . . . but you’ll probably know that by now, from your transaction with the notario. It belonged to a company which he and his sister set up in Switzerland.’

  ‘His sister?’ Prim murmured. ‘Sergi never mentioned her.’

  ‘There was no reason why he should; I’d be surprised if he ever met her. Her birth name is Lucille Capulet, and as far as I know that’s the only one she uses. She didn’t come here, though. She lives in Geneva, and she runs the company through a lawyer.’

  ‘I take it from the fact that Interpol have a file on him,’ I said, ‘and from your tone, that Mr Capulet is bent.’

  ‘Bent?’ For once Fortunato’s English let him down.

  ‘Crooked. Not straight. A criminal.’

  ‘All three. Capulet is, or maybe was, a friend of the friends. He has contacts with organised crime in France, Italy, Spain and the United States. He has homes in Paris and Florida.’

  ‘What was his business?’

  ‘He was a merchant, you might say. He was registered, quite legitimately, in Monaco as an antique dealer. He bought and sold internationally; often he would act for individuals on an agency basis. They’d give him lists of what they wanted, and he would find the items and acquire them. He did very well.

  ‘But there was a suspicion that he had another, more lucrative business. He may have been involved in the movement of goods from one country to another, usually, but not always, on an informal basis.’

  ‘He’s a drug smuggler?’

  ‘Smuggler yes . . . or so the police believe . . . but drugs no, apparently. According to the Interpol file he did not deal in narcotics. He was suspected of smuggling cigarettes, alcohol and people; those three illicit commodities.’

  ‘People?’ Prim exclaimed.

  Fortunato gave her a smile and a shrug. ‘Sure. There’s money to be made by moving people from one country to another; Moroccans into Spain, Chinese and Asians into Britain . . . Christ, Chinese everywhere . . . Africans anywhere in mainland Europe, and into the States.’

  ‘But if you know all this, why wasn’t he in jail?’

  ‘No, we suspect all this. Nobody has ever been able to prove any of it. But maybe he is in jail, dear Primavera.’ He seemed to caress her name with his tongue. ‘Maybe he is in prison in another continent, under another of his names.’ Outside, a diesel engine barked into life. ‘Or maybe he’s in a plastic box on his way to the morgue in Figueras.

  ‘To answer your question, criminals like our French friend do their business on the basis of bribery. People are paid to be absent from their posts at certain times, or not to search particular consignments, or to develop sudden deafness should they hear voices coming from within a container as it is being unloaded from a truck or a ship. It’s very difficult to catch them.

  ‘Whatever the truth, he hasn’t been seen anywhere for over a year, by the people whose business it is to watch him. On my way here, I checked with Interpol; in Lyon ...’

  I interrupted. ‘I thought it was based in Paris.’

  ‘That’s what everyone thinks. No, it’s in Lyon; Quai Charles de Gaulle. Christ, it even has a website. I used the telephone though; I called them when my men gave me this location, and asked about M. Capulet. They told me that he had dropped out of sight.’

  ‘At around the same time the house was put on the market?’

  ‘A few months before that.’

  ‘Mmm. If that is him in the van, he might have had a problem when it came to giving the sale instruction to the lawyer.’

  Fortunato frowned.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if it is him, and he didn’t authorise the sale, who did? His sister?’

  ‘A good question. One of many Interpol may be asking . . . if it turns out that way.’

  ‘How about his antiques business?’ Prim asked.

  ‘As far as I know it’s still trading; but it was run by a manager for much of the time. Capulet needed it, you see, to make his wealth look legitimate.’