He finished his brandy. ‘I must go,’ he announced abruptly, rising easily from the couch.

  As we walked him to the door, he looked down at Prim. ‘It is good to see you again, my dear,’ he said quietly, giving her forearm a gentle squeeze. ‘I am happy to see that you seem to be happy.’

  ‘You too,’ she murmured.

  He seemed to remember that I was there. ‘I hope that we don’t have to disturb you much more, Señor Oz. If your latest specimen turns out not to be Capulet, we won’t. But if it is . . . well, that may be another matter.’

  He shook my hand, kissed Prim briefly on the cheek once more, and stepped out into the night.

  6

  I did my best to put it out of my mind; honest. I might have succeeded too, had Prim not been clearly as preoccupied as I was trying to pretend I wasn’t . . . if you see what I mean.

  We made it all the way through dinner; big steaks, with fried red peppers, washed down with a bottle of Vina Pomeral. Maybe it was the brandy I had earlier, but eventually, as we settled down into our armchairs with mugs of coffee, it overcame me.

  I looked at her, trying to smile. ‘Remember what you said about you and the captain? Just good friends, and all that stuff?’

  She nodded. When she reddened, I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘That wasn’t exactly true,’ she exclaimed, then paused, and her eyes fell. ‘Christ, it wasn’t at all true!

  ‘We had an affair, Ramon and I. It started a few months after you had gone back to Scotland, to marry Jan.

  ‘I told you that I used to see him in Meson del Conde, in St Marti, remember. The first time he was with this nice young woman; he introduced her as Veronique, his wife. The second time she wasn’t there. I was at a table in the square one evening, when he appeared and asked if he could join me.’

  She shot me a glance. ‘I didn’t just jump into bed with him, you know. He sat down, and we began to talk: a lot, as it turned out. I told him about how you had gone, and why. He told me about himself, and Veronique. I hadn’t realised that they were separated, when I met them before. That evening, he had been trying to persuade her to come back to him: with no success, at that point at any rate.

  ‘At some time that second evening, I said that I was bored. About two days later Ramon called me. I had told him about having been a nurse, and without another word he had arranged an interview for me in the hospital in Girona. I saw him again after that, after I got the job, for a “thank you” meal in the restaurant. Afterwards I took him home to the apartment . . . and I asked him if he wanted to sleep with me.’ She chuckled, bitterly. ‘He was every centimetre the gentleman; he even asked if I was sure! I said, “Too right, I am!”

  ‘That was the start of it.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked. I felt strange, like a voyeur, in a way. I was aware of the need to be calm and rational, yet surprised to find that I actually was. I knew I wasn’t Prim’s only lover, but, with one unforgettable exception, she’d never discussed any of my predecessors, or successors; not till right then.

  ‘Five months. After a few weeks he moved in. We kept ourselves to ourselves at that point; I didn’t mix with the British crowd at all, so as far as I’m aware none of them know about it.’

  ‘He was gone when I met you again.’ I realised that was an assumption. ‘He was, wasn’t he?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I got bored, and threw him out.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why don’t I believe,’ I challenged her, ‘that that’s the whole story?’

  She hesitated, looked down, and went an even deeper shade of red. ‘I became pregnant by him,’ she whispered, and I could see that her eyes were glazed with tears.

  I haven’t been struck dumb very often in my life, but score one on that occasion.

  ‘Oh my,’ I murmured eventually. It was all I could say.

  ‘I had a termination,’ she went on, in that same small voice.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, in a tone as quiet as hers.

  ‘Because I didn’t love him. And because he was still in love with Veronique; I knew that. He told me eventually that she’d been unfaithful to him. He assured me that he hadn’t simply been using me to get even, but he could never make me believe that. Not quite. Honestly, I had told him to go before I even suspected I was in the club.

  ‘When I did find out, I thought about keeping it, as one does. But it felt like nothing inside me and, try as I might, I couldn’t summon up a single maternal urge. I was afraid, no, I knew, that if I went ahead with it, I’d never have been able to give it the love it deserved, the depth of love I had as a child. It would have been difficult for Ramon too, trying to make things work with Veronique, yet having a baby by another woman in the next village. So I kept my secret, saw someone at the hospital where I worked, and did what I had to do.

  ‘Hell, I didn’t want Ramon’s child. Oz, the truth is, I didn’t want anyone else’s child but yours. Even then, though you had gone out of my life for good, or so I thought. Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me about irony, love. Just tell me this. What do you feel for the bloke now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied at once. ‘He’s a nice enough guy, but I never loved him, or anything approaching it. Okay, so he may have got involved with me to get back at his wife, but I’d nothing to complain about there. That was nothing to what I was doing with him, from the start. I was fucking to forget in a big way!

  ‘What you have to realise, Oz, is that after you left, and after he died, I was here on my own, doubly hurt, feeling bitter and sorry for myself at the same time. I had no one to talk to, no shoulder to cry on. Shirley had troubles of her own at that time, and the rest of the people you and I had got to know here are all so much older than us.

  ‘Then Ramon turned up, as if it had been planned. I needed someone like him as a friend if nothing else. But I decided that he’d serve a more practical purpose than that. Once I’d thought about it for a while . . . like an hour or two . . . I decided to screw you out of my life, boy; in our bed, too, yours and mine.’

  She settled into her chair, and took a sip from her coffee, not looking at me; looking at anything but me. ‘The trouble was,’ she murmured, ‘my tactic backfired on me . . . and I’m not talking about getting pregnant. When I was with him, there in the dark in the apartment, being ridden in our bed, and I was faking it for him, to make him feel a bit special . . . which he wasn’t, by the way . . . the face I always saw was yours ...’

  ‘Not his?’ I interrupted with a cruel emphasis, which I regretted, in the instant I saw her flinch.

  ‘That couldn’t be,’ she murmured, ‘not in that way, as you know well.

  ‘No, even as I was banging Ramon, I couldn’t erase you. It was your breath I felt on my neck, your prick I felt inside me, not his.’ Prim ground the words out, bitterly. She sounded like a stranger. She was punishing someone, but I wasn’t sure whether it was herself or me. ‘It was dispassionate, ’ she continued, ‘but I didn’t want passion anyway. I was cold inside, frigid, but that’s how I felt. Yet always, Oz, from the moment I helped him into me until the moment he slithered out again, I saw your face.’

  She sat bolt upright and glared at me. ‘And . . .’ she shouted, making me start for an instant . . . then she stopped abruptly, as if afraid of voicing thoughts that might destroy everything. She slumped down again in her chair, her eyes misted suddenly.

  I finished it for her anyway. ‘... and that’s more than I can say? Or is it what you want me to say? That when I was with Jan, I saw you?’

  ‘Well, did you? Were you thinking of me while you were fucking her?’

  She had gone much further than she intended. I knew that, just as I knew that she couldn’t help herself. Why couldn’t I have left her that one secret, so I could hold on to mine? But no, once the ball was rolling it couldn’t be stopped; and after all, it was good old Oz who had started it on its way down the hill. I tried to put a foot against it, all the same.

  I looked at the ceiling, and whistled. ‘Christ there’s a shit-load of worms in this can. Let’s put the lid back on it, eh?’

  ‘We can’t,’ she retorted. ‘You took it off with a tin-opener.

  ‘No, you didn’t think of little Prim while you were on the job, did you. Not once, I’ll bet.’ I opened my mouth, not knowing quite what I was going to say. She cut me off. ‘No, wait. There’s another begged question, isn’t there.

  ‘Are you picturing her now, when you’re on top of me?’

  I looked at her for a moment, blankly, afraid that this was something I couldn’t control, afraid that it really would never be the same again. I didn’t feel any anger towards her, only pain within myself; but that was nothing new.

  ‘No: never: not once.’ I told her. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  ‘Oh I see Jan, all right. Every time we go to Anstruther, where she and I grew up, I see her in the fields, in my dad’s garden, on the harbour wall. I see her at ten years old, at sixteen, at her twenty-first. But I’ll never see her at any older than thirty. How could I?

  ‘I see her every time I walk into that kitchen where she died, and my blood runs cold.’

  When I opened my eyes, I saw that she was staring at me. For the first time, I was showing her all of me, even the darkest corner of my heart. ‘Yet you kept it,’ she exclaimed. ‘We live there now.’

  ‘Sure we do. It’s just a house.

  ‘Prim, I’ll see that fucking kitchen wherever I am, just as I’ll see the inside of that wee room in the Royal Infirmary mortuary, where they showed me her body. So there’s no point in selling the flat for the sake of it.

  ‘Anyhow, that’s the truth of it. That’s as far as it goes. She’s gone and you’re alive and I don’t mix the two of you up,’ I ventured a grin. ‘Neither horizontally nor vertically: honest. You want to sell the Glasgow flat? No problem to me.’

  ‘I like Glasgow.’

  ‘But not there?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘That’s it then. Done deal.’

  She smiled back at me, faintly.

  ‘Since it’s all coming out,’ I continued, ‘has there ever been a time since then when you’ve pictured him, Davidoff, in the same way?’

  It was Primavera’s turn to examine the ceiling. ‘Honestly?’ she began. With some people that’s a sure sign that what you are about to hear will be anything but; not with Prim, though . . . I thought.

  ‘Not when I’ve been with you: anyway, you know that it wasn’t physical with him . . . not completely, that’s to say. He was my lover, yet I couldn’t be his, not in the same way.

  ‘Still there were times when I was alone, and I tried to imagine how it might have been if he had been there after you’d gone. I tried to convince myself that I could have made him whole again, and that I could have given myself to him properly, rather than taking all the time. I could never make it a happy scene, though. He wasn’t immortal; he’d have died eventually, and the best I’d have got would have been to watch him. I think he knew that too, that’s why ...’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I think he told me as much, that last time I saw him.’

  We sat for a while, gathering our thoughts; gathering our breath almost.

  ‘One last secret,’ I said eventually, ‘and then there are no more. Remember that time I went back to Scotland to see a potential client? I slept with Jan then. We couldn’t help ourselves, but then we never could. That was when I understood how it was.’

  ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve always known that.’

  I frowned at her, taken aback. ‘How?’

  ‘Same way you guessed about Ramon and me. I know you all too well.’

  I beckoned to her. She rose from her chair, put down her mug, came to me and settled into my lap. I kissed her on each eye, tasting salt on her lashes.

  ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Feel any different knowing you’re married to the village bike?’

  ‘As long as you’re not a tandem, I don’t care.’

  She giggled and slapped me on the chest. I felt myself rock-hard, and realised that I had been that way for some time, and that I wanted her, maybe more than I had ever done.

  ‘It all needed saying,’ I told her. ‘Long ago, probably. I wonder why it wasn’t?’

  ‘We needed a catalyst. Something to start the ball rolling.’

  I grunted in her ear. ‘Some catalyst . . . your spurned lover.’

  ‘What will be . . .’ she murmured. ‘Sauce for ganders, but let’s not start that again. No, maybe we needed neutral ground too, somewhere that’s ours and ours alone.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I paused. ‘One more thing I have to tell you.’

  ‘Whassat?’ she murmured.

  ‘I love you, Mrs Blackstone.’

  ‘Then take me to bed.’

  ‘Ever faked it for me?’

  ‘Never had to; honest.’

  Afterwards, we lay in the dim light of a bedside lamp . . . an item to be changed, for sure, along with bedroom curtains that made the place look like every schoolboy’s idea of a Paris brothel. ‘I feel much the better for that,’ I said, my grin from ear to ear.

  ‘What? Our true confessions?’

  ‘Them too. But I’ll tell you this. If that’s what happens when you find a body, I hope we don’t discover another for a while.’

  7

  When Fortunato came back two days later, I did my best not to give him the slightest hint that Prim had told me about the two of them. So I don’t know how he guessed, unless he caught something in my eye, or, more probably in Prim’s. She was edgy from the moment that he phoned to check that we’d be in.

  I gave him my best, ‘Hail, fella, good to see ya,’ greeting, and he responded, but as soon as Prim disappeared off to the kitchen to fetch the coffee, he seemed to change, to become completely un-copperlike, on the defensive. He spent quite a while admiring our new rugs, and a very nice repro cabinet which we’d bought the day before from the Masia Store, on the road to Girona, before he could bring himself to look me in the eye. When he did, it was as if he was quizzing me.

  No way was I going to kick the subject off. ‘Well?’ I asked, trying not to sound aggressive.

  ‘So you know?’

  ‘So I know. So I didn’t know last time you were here. So what am I thinking?’

  Ramon nodded.

  ‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘She was a free girl then, to misquote Tom Petty; I was gone. You’re part of her history. God knows I have enough of my own, so I can’t take issue with hers.’

  I let that sink in, but not for too long. ‘I take it that Prim is history as far as you’re concerned?’ I asked him.

  He looked at the cabinet again. ‘Yes,’ he answered quietly.

  ‘That’s fine then. The subject’s closed, for good, as far as I’m concerned.’

  The captain looked relieved. ‘For me too, obviously. Thank you.

  ‘You must meet Veronique some time, and Alejandro.’

  I couldn’t think of a worse idea, but of course he didn’t know about Prim’s child. So all I said was, ‘Let’s not rush that one.’

  Bang on cue, Primavera returned with coffee on a tray. I suspected that she had been listening, behind the door. ‘So, Ramon,’ she began as she handed him his, ‘what’s the news on our departed guest?’

  ‘No good news,’ he answered, mournfully. ‘As you saw, the body was badly decomposed, but not completely. The pathologist estimates that it had been in the water for around a year, maybe a month more, maybe a month less. There was nothing on it to identify it, but you can forget my theory that it might have been a tramp. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the heart; the bullet was still there, lodged in the spine.’

  ‘So it was the Frenchman, Capulet?’

  Fortunato shook his head. ‘I can’t say that for sure. It’s beyond visual identification, and the clothing gave us no clue. It’s all designer stuff, a mix of Hugo Boss and Pierre Cardin. Could have been bought in L’Escala, could have been bought anywhere. There was no wristwatch, no jewellery.’

  ‘What about dental records?’ Prim asked.

  The detective smiled, sadly. ‘For that you have to have been to a dentist. This man had perfect teeth. No, I’m afraid there is only one way we can prove it is Capulet, and that’s through DNA profiling. There’s no material from him that we can use for cross-reference, so we’ll need to take a blood sample from a close relative. He had no children, so that means his sister, Lucille.

  ‘Yesterday I called my colleagues in Geneva and asked them for cooperation. This morning they called me back. She has not been seen at home since Saturday, and no one knows where she is. They’ve spoken to the lawyer who administered the company; she visited his office on Friday afternoon to check that the company had received your bank transfer for the purchase of this house, but said nothing about going away. I also have checked Capulet’s homes in Paris and Florida. Each one was sold during last summer, and new people live there now. Quite a mystery.’

  I glanced out of the window at our empty, uncovered pool. Ramon had asked us not to fill it for the time being. ‘Where’s the mystery? She’s killed her brother, then cashed up and buggered off into the wide blue yonder.’

  Captain Fortunato stared at me, bewildered. It was another of those rare occasions when his English let him down. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s sold the company’s assets and gone away.’

  ‘You may be right. And that will not help me.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ Prim asked. ‘Can we fill our pool?’

  The policeman shook his head. ‘Not yet, not yet. Your pool is now a murder scene; that makes this situation very awkward. It brings up matters of jurisdiction also.’

  ‘How come?’

  He looked up at me from the couch. ‘When I met you for the first time, I was an officer of the Guardia Civil. Now I am Mossos d’Esquadra, but I have many of the same duties. Normally, the death of this man would be for me to investigate. However, if the body is that of Capulet, that could make things different. He was suspected of crimes which crossed the Catalan border, into other parts of Spain, and those would still be the responsibility of the Guardia.