‘I see where we could have a big argument. For the moment though, since we don’t know for sure that it is the Frenchman who is dead, I am keeping hold of this business. I want to have my technical people look at your pool again. Also I want to search your house, to see if there is anything still here that might tell us something about the man’s death.’

  ‘But we’ve had cleaners in,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but it is still something I have to do. Better that it is me than someone from the Guardia, who does not know you.’

  ‘Better the Devil you know,’ I murmured.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I mean, yes; I agree with you.’

  Ramon had been sure of himself, and us; there was a squad of officers waiting in a van, out of our sight in the street below. Prim and I decided that it was best for us to leave them to get on with it, so we took ourselves along to Shirley’s.

  She had been wide-eyed the day before, when he had told her about our bonus surprise in the pool. ‘Bloody hell, Oz,’ she had exploded. ‘People leave some funny things behind them when they sell houses here . . . the punters who bought mine were left a model of the Tower of London that my late husband made out of matchsticks . . . but dead tramps is pushing it.’ We hadn’t let her into our suspicion that the body was that of the previous owner.

  When we told her the hot-off-the-press news, that the guy had been shot, her jaw dropped so far I thought it was dislocated.

  ‘Say that again,’ she gulped eventually.

  I did.

  ‘Do they know who it is?’ she asked.

  ‘They think it might be our predecessor. He was an antique dealer but he was also in the import business, apparently.’

  ‘You mean he was a smuggler?’ She catches on quickly, does our Shirl.

  ‘So they reckon. Not drugs, though. According to Fortunato, he dealt in fags and stuff. His name was Reynard Capulet.’

  She looked at me steadily enough, only I thought I caught a flicker somewhere in her gaze.

  ‘You said the police think it might be him. Don’t they know for sure?’

  I nodded. ‘From what we saw the other night, he looks a lot worse than his passport photo. They’re going to have to identify him by other means. The police in Switzerland are looking for his sister right now, so they can run a comparison test.’

  ‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ she muttered.

  There was no doubt about it; Shirley Gash seemed just a bit distracted. She was making a big effort to hide it, but she wasn’t quite getting there.

  Prim saw it too. ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t know this man, did you?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted. ‘I knew Rey Capulet: knew him fairly well, or so I thought. But I never, ever, knew that he lived up here. All your talk of a Frenchman, and I never made the connection. I thought he was Swiss, you see; he mentioned his sister in Geneva fairly often, so I just assumed.’

  ‘How did you get to know him?’

  ‘I met him one night in Bar JoJo, oh, it’ll be eighteen months ago at least; first half of last year. He was with that bloke Sergi, from the agency in town. I was with some people from Conservatives Abroad. I had had enough of the bloody dominoes by that time, so I said hello to Sergi, and he introduced me to his pal.

  ‘He seemed like a nice chap. We talked for a bit and that was all. Then a few days later, I bumped into him in the bank. He invited me to dinner in El Golf Isobel. A perfect gentleman, he was; bit younger than me, but what’s that got to do with anything.

  ‘I took him out to Kathleen and Carlos’s restaurant . . . you know, La Clota . . . returning his hospitality, then we had a few more dinner dates after that. Never got down to any of the other, you understand, but it was on the agenda . . . mine at any rate. Mind you, he did talk about me going to his place in Florida, so it might have been on his too.

  ‘Last time I saw him? Oh, it must have been a year ago.’ She frowned. ‘November, it was; early November. He took me to Mas Torrent . . . that was when he mentioned going to Florida, in fact. He said he was off to Geneva for a couple of weeks, to visit his sister. But he never came back . . . or so I thought. I never saw him again, anyway.’

  ‘And you never knew he lived two doors down from here?’ Prim asked.

  ‘I’d no idea; we never got to the stage of him inviting me back to his place. I was still in my old house then. I’d only just signed up for the plot, and when Vincens showed it to me, Rey was off on his travels. So I never made the connection; all I was told was the same as you, that Villa Bernabeu was owned by some French geezer.’

  ‘Did he never discuss his business?’

  ‘Not much. He said that he came from a wealthy family and that he dealt in commodities. When someone says that to you in L’Escala, you can draw your own conclusions, but you tend not to ask any more questions. If Fortunato says that he was a smuggler, it doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about other friends or business associates? ’ I caught Prim giving me an old-fashioned look.

  ‘No. And Sergi was the only guy I ever saw him with, as far as I can remember.’

  All of a sudden, Shirley shuddered. She seemed to shrink into herself, to become smaller, as the impact of what we had told her began to sink in. ‘The police really think that was Rey in the pool?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ I told her. ‘They’re a bit vague about the actual time of death, but it could fit with the time you saw him last.’

  ‘God,’ she whispered.

  ‘Unlikely,’ I muttered. ‘He doesn’t use a gun.’ I winced as soon as I’d said it, knowing that she had heard. It wasn’t something that the old Osbert Blackstone would have come out with. No, that crack was very definitely new Oz, worldly wise and maybe none the better for it. But Shirley didn’t seem to mind; in fact she sat upright again.

  ‘No, He doesn’t. If you move in that world, I suppose you have to live by its rules. I wonder who he upset?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t upset anyone,’ Prim suggested, an hour later, as we walked back to the villa. ‘Maybe someone upset him.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘What? So he shot him, dumped him in the pool, then left town and put the place on sale: with all furnishings and fittings?’

  ‘Smartarse,’ my wife grumbled.

  ‘Come on. You love me really.’ I remembered a moment. ‘Here, why did you give me that funny look back there at Shirley’s?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Sure you do. When I was asking her who Capulet’s pals might have been, you shot me a right frown.’

  ‘Ah that. Just for a moment I thought you were slipping into private eye mode.’

  ‘Gie’s a break, honey. I never was a private detective. I was a private enquiry agent; different animal altogether. I just got drawn into a few things, that’s all.’ I paused as another brick slipped into place. ‘And always when you were around, come to think of it.’

  ‘Don’t blame me! You couldn’t stop yourself. Well, just remember, whatever you called yourself, you’re out of that business for good. You’re an actor, and to prove it you’re an Equity member. I will not . . . Hear me? I said I will not . . . have you getting involved with this business.

  ‘If that was the previous owner in our pool, then he probably got what was coming to him. If it wasn’t . . . So what? It’s Ramon’s job to find out who it was and why he was put there. It’s got nothing to do with you. Hear me?’

  ‘I hear you! I hear you! You just remember it too. You know, sometimes I think that it’s no wonder I took to acting. My whole life’s been a fucking movie since I met you, darlin’.’ My blood went cold suddenly. I had pronounced that last word just like Jan used to.

  Prim never noticed though. She was still chuntering to herself as we walked back into the villa.

  ‘Hello there,’ Captain Fortunato greeted us, clutching a mug of our finest Bonka coffee. (I’ve often wondered why they don’t market that brand in Britain.) ‘We have almost finished. You will be glad to hear that, so far, we found nothing out of the usual.’

  ‘If you’re happy, we’re happy,’ I said, being fairly keen to see the back of the bloke.

  No such luck. ‘Ahh, I did not say I was happy. I am a detective, and so I have the sort of mind that expects to find something out of the ordinary. When I do not, I become suspicious.

  ‘When people buy a house in this town, it is not unusual for it to be sold with furniture and most of the fittings. Normally, the person who sells will clear out personal items, but there is usually something left behind, something which gives a clue about the previous owner.

  ‘When you moved in here, what did you find? Were there clothes in the wardrobes?’

  Prim nodded. ‘Yes, there were; men’s clothing. Most of it casual. I chucked it all out.’

  ‘Were there any papers in the drawers, anything at all? For example, were there any cards for restaurants, or for businesses in L’Escala? Were there any maps of the town? Were there even any matchbooks, or the little packs of sugar which they give people in cafés, and which everyone takes home?’

  ‘No, there weren’t. Not that I can recall. Can you, Oz?’

  I thought about it for a while. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t think there was a single piece of paper left in the house; other than books, novels and such, all of them French. I tell you something that struck me as odd. There was a telephone, but no directories. Why would somebody leave town, leave Spain, as far as anyone knows, yet take the telephone directory with him?

  ‘And the tape? There was a telephone answering machine, but it was empty. There was no cassette in it, and none anywhere in the house.’

  I looked at Fortunato. ‘I see what you mean,’ I told him. ‘When we moved in here there was nothing that referred in any way to the Frenchman. It was as if the place had been stripped of anything that might, anything on which he might even have made a note, or scrawled down a phone number, an e-mail address, anything like that.’

  ‘And yet his clothing was still here, his books . . .’

  ‘And a stack of CDs,’ I added.

  ‘And a few cases of expensive wine . . . Unless you have bought the bottles which I found in the storeroom at the back.’

  ‘No, we found them there too. So what does that tell you, Captain?’

  No one can shrug his shoulders quite like a Catalan. It’s a national trait, and one of the most expressive gestures I know. Fortunato’s said it all. He didn’t need to add, ‘Everything. Nothing. Either the body is Capulet and the person who killed him has covered his tracks, or it is not, and he is covering his own.’ But he did.

  ‘What it means,’ he continued, ‘is that I think I do have to share this now, with my colleagues in the Guardia Civil. I hope they don’t want to dig up your terrace, or your garden at the back, but you never know.’

  8

  Happily, they didn’t. Three days later, on Saturday morning, Fortunato came back with a couple of them, stern-looking, thirty-something guys in olive green uniforms. They looked into the pool, as if they were thinking deep thoughts; they looked around the house; they looked into the outbuildings; they looked into the garage and the Lada.

  Then one gave the other a Catalan shrug that would have scored high marks for both performance and artistic impression, and they left.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked Ramon as they walked down the path. ‘Is that the investigation? Don’t they want to take our fingerprints for elimination? Don’t you want to take them?’

  ‘Do you want us to have them?’ he laughed. ‘Oz, Prim, those cleaners you hired were very good indeed. They wiped just about every print in the place.

  ‘As for the investigation, one of my colleagues just said to me in Catalan, that if a gangster is killed, the most sensible thing to do is bury him and take him off the wanted list. Even if we’re right and we have found Capulet, they don’t care; certainly they want nothing to do with the investigation. That’s all mine.’

  ‘And what are you going to do about it?’

  The amiable copper grinned. ‘I believe that you have a saying in English, which does not translate into Spanish or Catalan. Fuck all. That is what I am going to do about it; fuck all.

  ‘I don’t even have a victim identification, until the Swiss or Interpol find the sister . . . If they even bother to look for her. Where would I start? There is no one on the missing persons list who matches the age and sex. No, I will keep samples for DNA testing, and I will bury the rest.’

  He looked at me, searching my eyes. ‘Have I surprised you, my friend Oz? Do I disappoint you?’

  ‘You surprise me, for sure. And yes, you disappoint me. When we first met, I had you pegged as someone who understood the rights of the victim. That guy in the pool; whoever he was, whatever he did, somebody put him there. Somebody killed him. Doesn’t he have a right to . . . justice?’

  ‘Maybe he’s had it,’ the policeman shot back at me. Then he seemed to soften. ‘Life is not a movie, Señor.’ He shot me another quick smile. ‘Yes, even I have heard of your new career.

  ‘In the real world, all of us have to set priorities. For example, if that was a child you had found murdered in your pool, or a young woman violated, then this crime would have a very high priority indeed. In fact, my men and I are currently investigating the abduction and murder of a child, a young girl, in another part of the province. It is painstaking work, and we are under a lot of pressure from the newspapers and the politicians to find the beast who did it.

  ‘If I took even one of my few detectives from that case and set him to work chasing the killer of a man who was probably a criminal himself, I would be crucified. The Spanish people do not care about French smugglers, but they do care, very deeply, about their own children.

  ‘The truth is that I brought my Guardia friends here because I hoped they would take this business off my hands, but they are in the same position as me; overstretched.

  ‘I’ll deal with it when I am able. Until then, if you feel a personal interest, then you go ahead and investigate.’

  Beside me, Prim snorted. Actually, it wasn’t far short of an explosion. ‘That will be right! We’re on honeymoon, Ramon. And our detecting days are very definitely over.’

  Fortunato smiled at her, softly, as if he had played the scene with her himself at some point in the past; as, probably, he had. ‘In that case, my dear, fill your swimming pool.’ He glanced at the men who were erecting scaffolding around the house. ‘Paint your villa. Enjoy yourselves.

  ‘You are here for Christmas, yes?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Primavera replied. ‘We haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘I am looking forward to Christmas,’ he murmured. ‘It will be Alejandro’s first; even if he will be too young to appreciate it. I know now I was never really happy till I had a son.’ There was something in the way he said it, that made me wonder; as if he was telling her that he knew. Or maybe I’m simply paranoid.

  ‘Make a fuss of him, then,’ my wife told her former lover, making an effort to keep her voice light, but only succeeding in sounding unlike herself. ‘He’ll appreciate that.’ I thought I caught a message in her tone too; maybe it was an unspoken apology. If it was, then certainly it wasn’t intended for me.

  ‘Sure he will.’ I burst in to the middle of whatever might have been going on. ‘Maybe we should have our boys here too; our nephews. We’ve got room for them and Ellie, if they fancy it.’

  ‘I will leave you to your planning,’ said the policeman. He chuckled. ‘And please, feel free to investigate our late friend if you wish. Just don’t find any more like him.’

  9

  My casual suggestion took wings. As the overtime painters finished their scaffolding, we talked and made a couple of phone calls.

  My sister Ellen jumped at the chance to spend Christmas in our new house. Jonathan and Colin weren’t old enough to vote, but there was no doubt about what they’d want. More than that, we decided that we had room for my dad and Mary, my stepmother, too . . . without creating parental rivalries, since Prim’s folks were heading for Los Angeles to end the year with the pregnant Dawn and her megastar husband, Miles.

  The master plan was completed when Mary insisted on cooking the turkey. Nobody does it better.

  We had no intention of doing any more cooking ourselves than we had to, so in the evening we headed into L’Escala, for dinner in La Dolce Vita, at a table in an upstairs window with a view across the Golfo de Rosas. The pizza was world-class . . . I could live on pizza . . . but the place was busy and there was a queue for tables, so we didn’t hang about long after dessert.

  It was just after ten when we stepped out into the crisp, December night. We didn’t feel like going home; instead, we went for a wander.

  We had walked past Bar JoJo many times, but had rarely gone in. We probably wouldn’t have that night either, only we saw Shirley sitting there, at a table.

  I really don’t know how to describe JoJo’s. It serves as a local for many of the L’Escala ex-pats, but it isn’t exclusively their club. It caters for young . . . some very young . . . and old . . . some very old . . . alike, and it is open at least six nights a week through the year, even on black Mondays in the dead of winter when there are no other lights showing in the old town. I’m not even going to try to describe JoJo herself . . . Dammit, yes I am. Imagine, if you will, that Rita Hayworth had been English and had lived a year or two longer than she did.

  Shirley wasn’t alone when we stepped inside; there were half a dozen other customers, plus Jo herself, and a set of dominoes lay scattered on each of the two tables. Clearly, there had been a hot time in the old town that night.

  The proprietrix pushed herself up from her chair. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said. ‘What can I get you?’