Crampsey twisted in her seat, staring at him. ‘Did you say his half-brother? I thought Joe was his father.’

  Skinner sighed, realising that he had made a false assumption. ‘June,’ he said, ‘the story of Xavi’s early life is told in the book he commissioned. I have a copy. It’s in my office. It’s a ghosted autobiography called The Loner, written by a man named Matthew Reid. Normally he wrote crime fiction. Xavi thought that his life was so bizarre it made that appropriate. The book was written, but it was never commercially published. Xavi had it printed, but very few people have ever been given copies. You know about it, June. I told you about it. I even suggested that you read it. Are you telling me you never did?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she insisted, her voice uncharacteristically high. ‘Bob, it wasn’t until Xavi left Edinburgh and made me managing editor of the Saltire that I learned I was his sister. Even then he didn’t tell me himself. It was a message through his lawyer, and he’s never referred to it since.’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘The truth is,’ she confessed, ‘that Xavi sent me a copy of the book. There was no covering letter, just a signed compliments slip. When I opened the envelope and took it out, I stared at it, on my desk, and decided there and then that I didn’t want to find out about my relationships, or about any part of my life through the eyes of a third party . . . even if he was a ghost.’

  Skinner paused, turning up the volume of the background music to make it more difficult for Kiko to overhear them. ‘Your mother never mentioned him at all?’ he continued.

  ‘To me? Never in her life. I was in my teens before my sister Nanette and I even found out that she’d been married before, and even then it was by accident, something my dad let slip. We asked her, but she told us never to raise the subject again, and she wasn’t kidding. Anything I know about Xavi’s life came from Dad, and he said he didn’t really know much, only that the Aislados had been refugees from the Spanish Civil War, that they’d built up a chain of pubs. When Franco died, Joe sold up, bought the paper in Girona and moved back to Spain with Xavi’s grandmother. His father was dead by then.’

  ‘Does Nanette know about her brother owning the Saltire?’

  ‘No. I’ve never told her about Xavi. And he never asked about her.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘She’s in Alberta, in Canada. She’s a teacher. Bob,’ she said, urgently, ‘when we get to Xavi’s he’s going to assume that I’ve read the book. If Joe wasn’t his father, who was?’ Her eyes widened as he told her and her mouth fell open. ‘Xavi’s grandfather was really his father?’

  ‘That’s right. The old man liked them young, it seems. Joe had mumps when he was twenty and he was sterile as a result.’

  ‘But my mum . . .’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘I’m sorry, June,’ he sighed. ‘Your mum didn’t know that. But old Paloma, Xavi’s grandmother, she did. She also knew her husband. When your mother called her and announced that she was pregnant by Joe, it backfired on her. Paloma went storming into the office, there was a confrontation, and the truth came out. A deal was done. Joe and your mother lived together as a couple, and when Xavi was born the world, and eventually Xavi too, thought he was theirs. Your mother was financially rewarded of course. Even after she left, she was still paid by Paloma. And even after she married your father . . . who was actually her only husband; Paloma wouldn’t allow her the status of a wife . . . after she married Tommy and had you and your sister, she was still on the payroll.’

  ‘Does Dad know this?’ she asked.

  ‘Not from Xavi, or anyone else. No, I don’t believe he does.’ As he spoke, the car cruised through the gateway to the Aislado estate. ‘So you see, June, that’s why Xavi regards your mother as a non-person, and why he didn’t embrace you and Nanette as his siblings.’

  ‘Yes, I see. I can even understand it. Bob, how do you know all this about Xavi?’

  ‘I’ve read Matthew Reid’s book,’ he replied.

  ‘Why did he give you a copy if the circulation was so tight?’

  ‘Because I’m in it. I pop up in a very important scene, in fact. You might not have read the book, but you might well have seen the story in the Saltire back issues.’

  As they approached the stone mansion at the end of the long driveway, Kiko killed the music. The crunching of the gravel under the wheels was the only sound to be heard as the EQS reached the entrance. A giant of a man stood framed in the open doorway. Crampsey looked up at him as she stepped out of the car. He was around sixty years old, she knew, but his white hair and beard made him seem a little older. They had met on many occasions, indeed he had recruited her to the newspaper, but it was only then that she realised how closely his eyes resembled Skinner’s, capable of warming the soul and yet, in other moments, of chilling the blood.

  ‘Senor Presidente, Hermana,’ he greeted them. His Spanish had a Scottish undertone. ‘Welcome to the masia.’

  She was unable to disguise her surprise. He had called Skinner ‘Mr Chairman’, but he had called her ‘Sister’.

  Twenty

  There were times when a small part of Detective Inspector Noele McClair regretted giving up her comfortable job in East Lothian in favour of a move back to CID. They were awakened by the difficulty of being a working single mother with a child of primary-school age. She knew that were it not for her mother’s availability and continuing good health, she would be spending her days in uniform rather than interviewing witnesses in rural Perthshire.

  As senior investigating officer in the Black Shield Lodge investigation, she had decided that she would base herself on site, for the first two days at least. She was spared a three-hour daily commute when Sauce Haddock suggested to Mia McCullough’s hotel manager that he provide accommodation for the core team. That consisted of herself, DS Jackie Wright and DC Tiggy Benjamin, amplified as necessary by local officers, CID and uniform.

  ‘Yes,’ Sauce had said, ‘we could park you in an Airbnb somewhere, but it wouldn’t be much cheaper than the deal I can do here. Plus, Stallings has approved the cost.’

  The manager had given her a suite, with a small well-furnished sitting room that she could use as an operating base. As soon as her two colleagues had arrived and unpacked, she called them there for a briefing. ‘A step up from our office, ladies,’ she remarked, looking around, ‘but we won’t be spending too much time here. Professor Grace will be at work already on the remains. I expect her preliminary findings by midday, maybe even earlier, but in the meantime we have priorities. Before I left last night I had another conversation with Ronnie Sexton, the estate manager. He says that the entire woodland will probably have to be harvested. He’s calling in foresters to advise him, the same firm that planted the wood. OKW Forestry Services, they’re called, but I don’t want to be sat here waiting for them to turn up. We’re going to see them, this morning. When I say “we” I mean you and me, Tiggy. They’re not that far from here, on the other side of Perth. I’ve called and they know we’re coming.’ She looked at Wright. ‘Jackie, I’ve got a painstaking but necessary job for you. I want you to go back in time, to the planting of the trees, and go through all the missing-persons records you can find, looking for a young male. Go back initially for ten years beyond your starting point. We don’t have any better idea of age than that, so let’s play safe and look for males aged between fifteen and thirty. While you’re doing that, recruit a couple of bodies from the Dundee CID office and have them check the newspapers of the time; that would be the Courier and the Evening Telegraph. We can’t rely on police records from that far back. Painstaking, as I say, but necessary.’ McClair stood. ‘Come on, DC Benjamin, let’s get going.’

  Twenty-One

  ‘After all these years,’ June Crampsey said as they stood in the masia’s entrance hall, ‘finally you call me sister.’

  ‘The woman who gave birth to us is dead,’ Xavi Aislado replied. ‘Before . . . I don’t know, it’s complicated, I felt that if I acknowledged you I would be acknowledging her too, and revealing myself to her. I’d hoped that the book would make that clear to you.’

  ‘I’ve never read the book,’ she admitted. ‘Yes, you sent me a copy, but I didn’t want to read it. I was waiting for today, when you finally decided to tell me yourself.’

  ‘I hadn’t decided to do that. I assumed that you would know when I had you brought here with Bob.’

  ‘She knows enough,’ Skinner said. ‘I let something slip in the car, about Joe having been your brother. She’s a journalist, mate, like you; no way would she let that get past her.’

  ‘I can see why you resented her,’ June told him, ‘but to make her a non-person and Nanette and me too, because of it, that I don’t get.’

  ‘I was as much of a non-person to her. She was indifferent to me when she lived with us. When she left she made no effort to keep in touch with me. As for her parents, your grandparents too, they treated me as if I embarrassed them. I don’t remember ever having a Christmas card from them, far less a present.’

  ‘Mmm. Nanette and I never felt too welcome there either, I admit. When did you last see Mum?’

  ‘When I was entering my twenties, around the time my short-lived football career came to an end. We met in the Balmoral Hotel. There was no great enthusiasm on either side. I did it for your father’s sake, because he asked me; maybe she did the same, I don’t know. It was well-meaning on his part, I know, but it didn’t work. The only part of me that she wanted was the money that Grandma Paloma paid her from the day I was born, until I found out about it and stopped it. I never wanted any part of her . . . and that was before I learned the truth about Joe.’ He broke off. ‘But it cut both ways, didn’t it? Did she ever tell you about me being your half-brother?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘Not even after you started at the Saltire?’

  ‘No. The message you sent me through Lascelles, the solicitor, when you made me managing editor, that was the first I knew about it. I asked her about it, obviously, but she refused to discuss it, or you. I asked my dad, but he wouldn’t talk about it either. He knew about you, Xavi, because he knew Joe, but I can’t say that he knew who your real father was, or that he knows even now.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that, but if he doesn’t there’s no need to tell him,’ Xavi said. ‘He probably still has illusions about his dear Mary. I see no point in destroying them.’ He paused, then turned. ‘Come on, both of you.’

  He led them into a massive space, the size of a gallery: which indeed it was. Two portraits hung on either side of a high stone fireplace. ‘Sheila,’ he told his sister, pointing at the one on the right, ‘by Carmen Mali, who began her life as the gardener’s daughter here and went on to become one of Spain’s top portrait artists. She was also Joe’s companion for the last years of his life. Carmen lives in Madrid now, but visits me regularly. She did that one too,’ he added, indicating the work to the left. It was a study of an old woman, tall, ramrod straight, with silver hair. ‘That, is Grandma Paloma,’ Xavi murmured, ‘who raised me. She hated your mother with a passion too, and yet she kept her in designer clothes for as long as she was alive.’

  Skinner knew from The Loner that a third portrait by Carmen Mali had once hung in the great room, a nude, of Grace, Xavi’s first wife. He had never asked why it was no longer there, but his guess was that his friend simply could no longer tolerate the pain of the memory of that part of his life. ‘So,’ he exclaimed, ‘pleasant family reunion as this is for you two, something tells me it’s not the only reason why we’re here.’

  ‘No,’ Xavi admitted, ‘it’s not. But let’s eat before we get down to that. It’s too early for lunch, but I can’t just offer you coffee.’ He led them to a refectory table laid out with ham, anchovies, tomatoes, garlic and white bread that looked home baked.

  Skinner grinned and picked up a slice of bread. He smeared it with tomato, then rubbed it with garlic, added a little oil and laid four anchovies across it. ‘There is a specific order in which that should be done,’ he told Crampsey, ‘but I can never remember whether it’s tomato first or the other way round.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Xavi laughed. ‘Catalunya has some of the finest restaurants in the world, and the most famous chefs, but our traditional cooking is pretty basic.’

  He led them over to the sofas around the fireplace. They ate seated and mostly in silence until it was broken by Xavi. ‘I’m sorry, June,’ he said. ‘The Catalans and the Scots are high on any list of the most intransigent bastards on the planet, and I’m a mix of both. I should have knocked down the wall I built between us years ago.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she murmured. ‘I’m finding things out about my mother that I don’t think I wanted to know. And maybe realising things too. Now that I’m forced to think about it, I can’t remember a thing she ever said to me that made me feel loved.’

  ‘Are you attached?’ her brother asked, unexpectedly. ‘Do you have anyone significant in your life?’

  ‘He’s called the Saltire,’ she chuckled. ‘Otherwise, no. Since I was widowed, I’ve had a few relationships, but they all perished on the rock of my work.’

  ‘In that case I’d like you to take a couple of weeks off.’

  ‘So would I,’ Skinner said. ‘In all the time I’ve occupied a neighbouring office I’ve never known her to take longer than a week, and even then it was in August, the silly season. I’ve tried ordering her to take a decent holiday, but all I got was “Fuck off!” for an answer.’

  ‘I won’t take anything but yes,’ Xavi said. ‘I’d like you to take a month, at least. I’d like you to come here and stay with me, so that we can get to know each other and let some sunshine into our lives. Let’s plan for around Easter, during Paloma’s college vacation. You need to meet your niece too. You’ll come as a great shock to her, but you’ll get on, I know it. I’m not forgetting Nanette either. Is she married?’

  ‘Divorced, but with three kids, including twins like her and me. One of the boys is in the Canadian Air Force, the other works in his dad’s construction business, and my niece is studying to be a teacher like her mother.’

  ‘They have to come too, all of them. Maybe not until the summer, with the schools and everything. Tell her, please.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell her a hell of a lot before I get round to that, Xavi, but I will. And yes, I’ll take that month myself.’

  ‘Finally!’ Skinner exclaimed. He rose from the sofa to make himself another tomato bread, with ham rather than anchovies. ‘Now, are you ready to tell us why you wanted us here?’

  ‘Patience, man, patience,’ Aislado said. ‘Come back and sit down. There’s something I want to show you.’

  As Skinner resumed his seat, Xavi extracted an iPhone from one of his gilet’s many pockets, opened it and handed it to him. He peered at it, then took out his reading glasses. He frowned as he looked at the screen. He saw four numbers and read them aloud. ‘Thirty, six, a hundred and twenty-two, thirty-nine.’ He stared at his friend, bewildered. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a text. It landed on my British phone a couple of days ago. As you know I have two, one UK that I’ve kept up since I moved here and one Spanish.’

  ‘Who sent it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It came from a French mobile, that’s all.’

  ‘What the fuck does it mean?’

  ‘It took me a while to figure that out,’ Aislado said, ‘but I get it now. They’re map coordinates. With no indication beyond those words, they point to four possible locations. The first’s in China, the second’s near Baja California, the third is at the foot of the Pacific Ocean, and the fourth is in West Australia, a little more than a hundred miles inland from Perth, in the middle of the middle of fucking nowhere. Think back to my book, Bob, and think about . . .’

  Skinner held up a hand to stop him. ‘I’m there already,’ he said, remembering a chapter in Aislado’s autobiography, one in which he had been involved himself, a robbery and murder in the heart of Xavi’s world that had led his friend to Australia on a mission of retribution. ‘It’s the place where . . .’

  ‘Where Bobby Hannah disappeared.’

  ‘Or maybe where you killed him, Xavi,’ Skinner said quietly. ‘That’s the trouble with autobiographies; they’re always your version of events, and when there are no witnesses, well . . .’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  Skinner smiled and shook his head. ‘No, I never did. But I was a cop, so when you told me the story I was duty bound to go looking for the suspect. I asked the police in West Australia to locate and hold him, pending extradition.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ Xavi murmured.

  ‘We weren’t as close then,’ he replied. ‘But I didn’t drop your name, nor did I tell any of my colleagues about your involvement. My request was logged, but there was no response, not for three years, not until a couple of miners found human remains with your man’s wallet in the back pocket of his blue jeans. I didn’t tell you that either, because I didn’t think you needed to know. I left it for the consulate to deal with. I’m sure they did, but I don’t know how.’

  Aislado exhaled. ‘Wow,’ he murmured. ‘That’s one name off the list. I was wondering if somehow he had survived, and it was him that sent the text. If not, then who could it have been?’

  ‘Who’s read the book? I have. June hasn’t. That’s why she’s sat there without a clue to what we’re talking about. Who else?’

  ‘Joe read it,’ he replied. ‘Carmen too. So did Hector Sureda, our Intermedia CEO. And his mother and father, Simon and Pilar. Three of them are dead. I can think of no one else.’

  ‘I can,’ Skinner countered. ‘The man who ghosted the book, Matthew Reid. The only snag with that is, he’s supposed to be dead too.’