Quintin Jardine - As Easy as Murder

She’s a truly sad person, she who can harden her heart against the joyous sound of children at play!

. . but sometimes the incessant squeal of a swarm of the little buggers would grate on the nerves of the Blessed Virgin herself. Was there never a time, maybe from the years 3, to 6 or 7AD, when she didn’t turn on Him and yell, ‘For Christ’s sake, Jesus! Would you allow me five minutes of peace and quiet? Is that too much to ask?’

In Plaça Major, the centrepiece of the village of St Martí d’Empuriès, the enchanted Catalan village that I, Primavera Blackstone, Phillips as was, and my son Tom, have called our home for the last five years or so, the fourth Arrels del Vi. . the proper name of the annual wine fair. . was in the fullest swing. Since it moved a couple of those years ago from its original, smaller site, it’s become a magnet for family groups. Now Mum and Dad can bring the nippers along while they wander among the stalls and sample the best that Emporda can offer, knowing that they have room to play in front of the church, and my house, which is bang next door.

Until that evening I hadn’t really appreciated the fecundity of the current generation of young adult Catalans. The place was swarming with under-fives, all too young to have any sort of meaningful volume control, and the din was huge. Not only that; a quick bump count among the women in the crowd was enough to tell me that the breeding programme was still in place.

At any other time, I’d have been amused, probably even charmed, but that was not the best day of my life. I’d arrived home with Tom from a clothes-shopping trip to Girona. . for him, he’s ten and seemed to have been taking a growth hormone (now there’s an ironic analogy) behind my back; I’m not short, yet he’s up to my shoulder already, and solidly built with it. . to find that when we’d been out the post person had called, on her wee yellow scooter. I knew this because Ben Simmers, who created and runs the fair, had spotted a letter sticking out of the top of my mail box, and had rescued it, and three others, before anyone else could. Two of those others were bills. The third was a letter acknowledging my resignation from a part-time job I’d held for a couple of years. I’d been a sort of. . how best to describe myself?. . honorary consul, with a remit to promote Scottish interests and business on behalf of the Edinburgh government.

The role had involved lots of travel around Catalunya and beyond, throughout the rest of Spain. I’d enjoyed it for a while, but it had only been possible because I’d been able to employ a young woman called Catriona O’Riordan to look after the house, Tom, and Charlie, our amiable idiot Labrador retriever, during my weekly absences. When I was there she took it upon herself to run all three of us, and I was fine with that. Catriona was great; irreplaceable, as it turned out. When family circumstances forced her to go back to Britain, I’d looked apathetically for a successor, but none of the CVs that I was sent appealed to me, and so I decided, after not too much internal debate, that since being a full-time mum is what I’m best at, that’s what I should go back to doing.

The job had been useful at the beginning, though. Not because we needed the money. . we don’t, and we never will. . but because it took me out of myself, and out of St Martí at a time when, without it, I’d probably have spent too much of my time sitting around brooding.

About what? Not what, whom: a man, of course, the only one who’s ever come close to making me go all domestic, other than Tom’s dad. . although here I need to volunteer that my brief attempt at a conventional lifestyle with Oz Blackstone ended in disaster so acrimonious that our son was three and a half years old before his father even knew of his existence.

God, I can’t even tell this tale without getting myself sidetracked, all screwed up with angst and regret over my years with that guy. When they were over, irrevocably, as death tends to be, and I was able to consider them, and him, from a distance, I did some internet research that led me to a pretty unshakeable conclusion. When I looked at fifteen behavioural traits indicative of anti-social personality disorder, I found that my former husband ticked fourteen of those boxes. The experts say that particular condition is something you’re born with, but none of them ever knew my ex. The Oz Blackstone that I met was lovely, open, honest and brave, just as his son is growing up to be.

But things happened, and they transformed him.

I had a rival for his affections. She won out for a while, but then she was killed, murdered, and that, I am certain, triggered a change in him, and turned him into what he became, a classic sociopath.

And yet, I loved that Oz too. Having admitted that, I made myself go deeper and looked at myself in the same context, to be faced with another truth. There was a period in my life when, in my relationship with him if nowhere else, I was pretty similar myself.

But it’s over, Primavera, it’s over, he’s dead. Forget the bad that he was, and concentrate on the good that he’s left behind him in our son.

Fine, with an effort of will, I do that and I come to the man who’s come closest to filling what others. . but not I, never I. . see as a gap in my life. There was a time two years ago, a brief moment when I thought that all things might have been possible. If Gerard Hernanz had asked me to, I might even have left St Martí for him. It would have been difficult for me to walk away from paradise, but I believe I’d have given it a try. So would Tom, I’m sure, because he liked the man too. He didn’t worship him in the way that he keeps his father’s memory alive in his heart, but if I’d put it to him he’d have followed my lead with only a little regret.

However, it didn’t come to that. Once again, unforeseeable events got in the way. Gerard lost someone very close to him, and he felt that he needed to go away to consider his future at length, to discover whether he was able to turn his back completely on a previous relationship, one that had been his career also: his priesthood within the Roman Catholic Church.

The fourth item in my Saturday post was his decision. I won’t burden you with the text of his letter. . I couldn’t anyway, even if I had a mind to, for it went through the shredder that same evening. . but what he told me was that while he wasn’t returning to his ministry, he wasn’t returning to me either. He’d spent two years teaching in a monastic school in Ireland. There, he said, he’d found the sort of peace that had eluded him all of his life. He had thought about coming back to St Martí, to build a life with Tom and me, but he had realised that it would involve challenges that might be beyond him and he was concerned about the damage that failure would do to all of us, and most of all to Tom, whose interests he placed above our own. And so, with the blessing of his abbot, he had decided to commit his life to his cloistered pupils.

It was after my second reading of his epistle that the noise below my balcony began to grate on me. I could do nothing about it, so I took the letter off to my bedroom, which has a secluded terrace overlooking the sea, and went through it another couple of times, looking for any sign that he might really be expecting me to respond, to fight my corner against the bloody Benedictines, to write back to him protesting, ‘Bollocks to that, get yourself back here.’

But there was none, I concluded. What he was telling me was unequivocal, with no sign at all of an uncertain man waiting to be persuaded. The more I studied what he was saying, the more my respect for him wore away. The way that I saw it, he was using my ten-year-old son as cover for the blatant lack of guts he was displaying, either in not taking a chance on life, or in not telling me he didn’t really fancy me. He’d come to know Tom well, and he must have appreciated that the real boy was a lot tougher than the one he was describing. Tom seemed to have dealt with his father’s early death and built on his spirit; in truth there had been moments when his strength had reinvigorated me. If we’d tried, and it didn’t work out between Gerard and me, the same thing would happen, I was sure. He’d give me a hug and we’d move on.