Quintin Jardine - Inhuman Remains

I might have had a strong suspicion that Justin and Rowland were one and the same, given what I knew about Ludmila, but the part about the seal had taken me totally by surprise. No wonder Frank had hung on to that rucksack as if his family jewels were in it. No wonder it had landed in Caballero’s back seat with such a thud. No wonder I’d noticed a difference when I’d picked it up in my garage.

The rest of the scheme, though, that had been brilliant. What a pity, I thought, that he hadn’t hired his muscle from Mark, who would have made sure that the guys were completely trustworthy. I told him as much as we left.

‘With that sort of cash in the pot,’ he replied, ‘you can never be one hundred per cent sure.’

‘What do you think, Mark?’ I asked. ‘Did it all happen as Justin said?’

‘He believes that it did. His wife confirms that for me; she’s way short of bright enough to do that sort of thinking for herself. Is it the truth? Maybe, but there’s another possibility I can’t ignore, and it’s much the likelier, that as far as Frank was concerned, this was a fraud all along, only he told his hired hands too much and they turned on him.’

‘I can’t bring myself to accept that.’

‘Think of the story he spun you.’

‘Maybe he was an undercover agent.’

He held up a crutch. ‘And maybe next week I’ll sign for Chelsea.’

I laughed. ‘As a Barcelona fan, I hope you do.’

Tom had been waiting in the car for an hour by the time we returned, but he had a supply of crisps and fizzy water, and the two police officers had been keeping an eye on him, as I’d asked them. He was fine and I didn’t feel too guilty.

I did feel troubled, though, as Mark dropped us off at the Tower Bridge Hotel. I could understand why he thought Frank might have been on the con from the start, considering the story he’d told me. And that was where Justin’s version really rang true, when I thought about it.

All of the core information I’d gathered about the whole d’Amuseo affair had come from Frank himself. Mark had done some digging, but the key details had been offered by my cousin.

The problem was I had believed it before, and I still did then; and suppose he had embellished it a little, with the undercover stuff and his lies about Caballero being involved with Energi, and about the breakin. I convinced myself that he’d done it to keep the Mayfields’ involvement secret and maybe also in the hope that I’d hang in there and help him, after Loman and Venable, his badly chosen security team, had turned on him.

What I did know for certain was what had happened to us after we were reunited in Sevilla, and what had happened ultimately to him and Auntie Ade.

So why had Ludo filmed my house? Since I had come to believe the rest of her tale I decided to accept her explanation, that Frank was thinking of hiding in St Martí. I wished I could ask him, but still I concluded loyally that he had indeed concocted a brilliant scheme to help his best pal out of a jam, and it had gone fatally wrong on him.

For the next couple of days, I focused on Tom alone. I took him to a cricket Test match at Lords. . he knows all the players, and loved it; I slept through much of it. . and for a cruise on the Thames. . he’s been nagging me ever since to buy a boat. . before we headed back to Spain, back to our usual, humdrum, sun-splashed existence, filling in time before we were due to leave for California.

For his age, Tom’s a great reader. In no time, he’d devoured all six books I’d brought him from Dad’s. For my age, I’m not. I found the first of mine to be a struggle, which eventually I gave up and turned to the second, plucked in a hurry, and completely at random, from the shelf. It was called Reverse Circle , by a guy named Michael Jacks. I sat down to read it one night, on the front terrace, when Tom had gone to bed.

I had reached page thirty when I began to feel a tingle. By page one hundred I was aware that I was sitting stiff and upright in my chair, reading as fast as I could, and that I couldn’t stop. It was almost three in the morning when I put the book down. The square below was deserted, the mosquito population was well fed, my eyes were standing out like organ stops, and I was wide awake.

With certain subtle differences, I had just read the story of the Hotel Casino d’Amuseo scam, page by page. Ex-con comes up with a brilliant wheeze, recruits team in Italy, finds some Mafia interests to come up with front-end money, and the fund-raising gets under way. Then it all goes pear shaped, the Mafia figure out what’s happening, ex-con’s wife is kidnapped, and he’s chased halfway across Europe before. .

And that’s why I found myself staring, gasping, and finally laughing, alone in the middle of the night. In the end, with the aid of a gullible accomplice, the ex-con and his wife get clean away.

By next morning, it didn’t seem so funny. I sat outside Mesón del Conde with Tom, watching an American coffee with a little milk get cold before me, happy for my son to devour my croissant as well as his own, my brows knitted as I racked my brains thinking how I could prove what I suspected or, better, rid myself of my worst fears. And then I remembered. I replayed a scene in my mind, dialogue between me and. .

I looked at my mobile. The signal was just strong enough for me to make a call. This time it didn’t take me as long to get through to Intendant Gomez, and to make an appointment to see him in his office in an hour.

I took Tom with me. He would have stayed on the beach, but I wouldn’t allow that. Normally I’d use the slower road to Girona, but that day I headed for the autopista , bombing down it and paying the toll at exit seven. Gomez was ready for me when I arrived. I asked Tom to stay in the waiting room, found him a magazine, and headed for the intendant ’s office.

‘Do you have the ashes?’ I asked him.

‘Of course. Do you want to take them away?’

‘I want to see them.’

He looked puzzled, but he agreed. He led me along to a store room, issued an order to a clerk, then led me on into a second room, windowless, with a table set under a strip light. I waited, until the orderly entered with something a little bigger than a hat-box. ‘This is all of them,’ he told Gomez, shooting me a strange glance.

The intendant was equally puzzled when I took the lid off, peered inside at the greyish contents and started to sift through them with my bare hands, feeling for anything other than ash and bone chips. I worked away for ten minutes and more, until I was sure I had gone through everything, every last scrap of cremated tissue.

‘Is this everything?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he assured me. ‘I supervised the recovery myself, I made sure there wasn’t a single piece left there. Why? Are you going to tell me what you’re looking for?’ He was staring at my arms; they were grey to the elbow.

I swallowed, hard. ‘Mr Gomez, my aunt had silicon breast implants. They would have survived the fire, altered perhaps, but they would have survived in some form. Also her front teeth were capped, steel-bonded porcelain on gold posts. Was there any melted gold?’

‘No,’ he whispered.

‘Can I see everything else that was taken from the site?’

‘Sure.’ He left, returning ten minutes later with another, smaller, box. I tipped its contents on to the table and peered at them. I saw the remnants of my taser gun, two scraps that might once have been mobiles, and three shrunken relics that looked as if they had once been credit cards. They were fused to a metal clip that I recognised as having come from Frank’s Gucci billfold. I checked them carefully, looking for a fourth, but there was no sign of it. Either it had been destroyed completely. . or it had never been in the fire.