Quintin Jardine - Deadly Business

‘Woof woof.’

That’s little Lily Simmers’ war cry. They were the first proper words she ever uttered, and on the day of her third birthday party they were still her favourites, even though she had amassed a much larger vocabulary by then, a mixture of the Catalan and Castellano spoken to her by her mum, Tunè Miralles, and her dad, Ben Simmers, and the English which she uses with her paternal grandparents, all three of them.

All the kids in Catalunya grow up bilingual, with two native languages, and around St Martí d’Empúries many are like Lily, picking up English or French as they grow up in the cosmopolitan community that it has become. My son speaks four, having learned French while living with his father in Monaco, then picking up the local lingos when we settled here, after his father’s death and my rebirth. He’s literate in all of them, more so than I am. I’m very proud of that because he’s … I almost said ‘only twelve’, but Tom Blackstone isn’t ‘only’ anything. I still think of him as my child, but he isn’t any more, not really. He’s a big boy, one metre sixty-two (around five feet four) already, mature for his years, and has taken the first steps into adolescence.

Lily’s toddler barks were directed at her parents’ two Labradors, Cher and Mustard, as they patrolled the perimeter of the party site, a grassy area enclosed by the remaining walls of what was, a couple of hundred years ago, the first house in the village as you approach up the hill that leads from the beach, on the other side of the church from our place. Tunè and Ben had chosen it because it’s shaded even in June, when the sun was at its highest. They’d held her first two parties at home, but they had been as much for adults as children, maybe even more so, since Ben’s father told me after the second that the last of the guests didn’t leave until after midnight.

Tom and I were invited to all of them because, as Tunè put it, we’re almost family. I’m ‘Tia’ to Lily; that’s ‘Auntie’ in English (‘Primavera’ has at least two syllables too many for her at the moment), and I am her number one babysitter. I volunteered as soon as she was born. When Tom was an infant, I was in a big mess personally and emotionally, and I didn’t get the most out of that time. Oz … that’s his father … and I were in the terminal stages of a very short marriage when I discovered I was pregnant, and I was so antagonistic towards him that I left him the same week that my Clearblue kits both showed positive. Yes, I did it twice, to be sure, to be sure.

Oz: my strength and my weakness, the guy I met when he was a nobody, without the merest twinkle of a film actor showing in his eye, then loved and battled with alternately as his star gained luminescence, until those people who suggested snidely that he was cast in his first movie only because of a passing resemblance to Keanu Reeves came to refer to Keanu as ‘Oz Blackstone lookalike’.

I let him think that I had run off with someone, but I hadn’t; in fact I cut myself off from everyone I knew, family and friends, although I had very few of the latter at that time, and one of those wouldn’t have been interested in helping me out as she was in a similar situation herself.

I didn’t know it at the time, and didn’t find out until I made the mistake of attempting to front him up just after Tom was born, that my fecund spouse had managed to knock up both me and my erstwhile best pal within a few weeks of each other, and that she had filled the vacancy I’d created. When I found out, I beat another hasty retreat, and it was another three years before he discovered that little Janet wasn’t his first child after all.

Things got even more complicated after that, and I lost my precious Tom for a while. I don’t know what would have happened if Oz had lived, but I’m certain of one thing. I would have fought tooth, nail and very sharp claw to get my boy back, for every day that I spent without him caused me pain that I cannot bear to recall and, if I did, wouldn’t be able to describe.

But he didn’t live, damn him. I re-emerged from my shadows, and did a deal with Susie, the official widow, who was my friend again by that time, to regain custody. I couldn’t think of moving anywhere else but St Martí. I’d lived here before, with Oz and without him. Tom doesn’t know it, but he was conceived in a house not far from where we live now; some day soon I’ll tell him, for a person has a right to know every scrap of the truth about himself. I may refrain, though, from telling him that his half-sister was also conceived there, a very few weeks later. Once he learns a little more about human gestation he will work out the timing for himself, but I’ll deal with that when it happens.

The two young people in question were both on party parade as I sat on the wall watching the fun, acting as toddler wardens, handing out drinks and wiping off smeared chocolate cake before it did too much damage to clothing. Janet looked completely at home, and in command. She’s bilingual in English and French, but she sees enough of her half-brother … Susie and I tried from the start to ensure that they, and wee Jonathan, her younger child with Oz, spend at least six weeks together each year … to have picked up plenty of Catalan and Spanish from him, even if she doesn’t really know which is which. She’s growing fast too, only a few centimetres shorter than Tom. She’s a pretty girl, taking after Susie in looks as much as Tom takes after Oz, but in a year or so she’ll have reached her mother’s height, while he’ll be eye to eye with my one metre seventy. Wee Jonathan, I reckon, will always be just that; he’s a small broody child, with his father’s dark hair, like Tom, his mum’s oval face and eyes that never give any hint of what’s going on behind them. He’d opted out of the celebrations; instead he was on the beach with Conrad Kent.

Conrad Kent? Susie’s minder. His official title was logistics manager, but make no mistake, that’s what he was employed to be, back when Oz was alive, so that she could run her property and construction group from Monaco, with a managing director in charge in Scotland. The idea was that he would keep the family home secure, well maintained and running smoothly, with his wife Audrey as Susie’s personal assistant, but that he would also be driver and bodyguard, and his number one priority would be keeping the children safe.

Oz employed both Kents some years ago, and they were even more needed after he died. Conrad isn’t a big bloke, and he dresses like a hotel manager, or the principal in a very expensive car dealership. He’s half Welsh, half Jamaican, and he has a degree that he’s never used, in some obscure subject. He’s very neat, always precise and immaculate, but he has a military background and there is something about him that tells you he is not a man you should ever mess with.

He’d come with the children, and would stay until it was time for them to go home, in a few days. We’d been a three-kid (and one minder) household for a month, for a reason that still concerned me. A year before, Susie had told me that she had ‘a wee health issue’. As it turned out, it was bigger than she’d suspected. She’d been investigated for anaemia but leukaemia had been diagnosed. She’d undergone a course of chemotherapy during the autumn, another a few months later, and, as scheduled, was just completing a third.

On each occasion the children, and Conrad, had stayed with me. Audrey had stayed by Susie’s side, to help her in any way she needed. She’d told the kids that she had to go away on business, and neither of them had questioned that, but the last time I’d seen her, when I took Tom along to hers for Easter and saw the effects of the chemo, I couldn’t imagine that she could fool them for much longer.