Quintin Jardine - Inhuman Remains

What do I like most about my village?

It’s this: nobody asks any questions.

In St Martí d’Empúries they don’t want to know what brought you here, or why you choose to live here. Okay, maybe they do, but it’s not in their nature to ask. If you want to tell them, they’ll listen, but they won’t push you to it. If you have a past that you need to leave behind you, that’s where they’ll let it stay. . even if, now and then, it still shows in your eyes.

Our house is on the Catalan coast, on the north of what you might know as the Costa Brava. It overlooks the sea, with nothing obscuring the view. It’s set on the highest point in the village, alongside the church. I’ve no idea how old it is, but some of the outer walls must date back for hundreds of years, maybe even a full millennium. It wasn’t built, as such, it evolved through the centuries into its present form, with successive owners leaving their stamp upon it, until finally, it came to us. . or, rather, we came to it.

I can’t begin to tell you how beautiful this place is. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Often, when the year is starting to bloom and the weather is set fair, I leave my bedroom shutters open at night so that I’ll waken at first light. Then I go out on to the east-facing terrace and gaze at the horizon, waiting and watching as the red sun rises from the still waters of the Mediterranean.

I’ve tried to persuade Tom to share the experience, but he’s not at his best in the morning. . not that early at any rate. One day he’ll come to appreciate it.

How did we get here, Primavera and Tom Blackstone? That’s a looooong story, too looooong to get into now. . but I’ll give you the shortened version.

They thought I was dead, you know, my dad, my sister, my son (although Tom didn’t understand ‘dead’ then: I’m not sure he does even now); everybody in the whole damn world thought I was gone from it.

They even held a memorial service for me, thirty-nine years old and gone to Jesus, at my family’s parish church in Auchterarder. It was full, with people standing in the boneyard outside, the sound from within relayed through loudspeakers. The Scottish media were unanimous, for once, in their reporting of the gig next day. (I know this because I read all the coverage on-line. I wish I could have been there to hear what was said about me, in disguise, hidden somewhere at the back of the crowd, but that really would have been pushing my luck.) They found it moving in the extreme, made all the more poignant by the fact that my body had never been recovered from the swamp in New Jersey into which the aircraft had plunged.

They agreed on something else too, that my ex had given the performance of a lifetime in his eulogy. The lady who wrote the colour piece for the Courier newspaper was convinced that, at its end, he had real tears in his eyes.

He wouldn’t have fooled me, though. I’ve always known Oz Blackstone for the consummate actor that he proved himself to be, even back in the days when he was two-timing me with his supposedly ex-girlfriend.

I wish I could look back on Oz without a trace of bitterness. Maybe I will, some day, but I’m not close to it yet, even though he was the only man I ever loved.

He owed it all to me, you know, everything that he became.

I don’t say that lightly. But for me, he’d never have met Dawn, my actress sister, and Miles, her film-director husband, who in a drink-fuelled moment decided to give him the break that he seized with both hands, both feet, and that almost prehensile cock of his.

Hah! That’s something about him that I do miss: I have to admit that from the day we met he and I were, metaphorically and often literally, joined at the groin. There was always that thing between us, indestructible, even after the second time he dumped me for another woman. I had power over him, and now I’m a little ashamed to admit that I used it whenever I could, even though it got me into bad trouble and, for a while, cost me custody of Tom.

Yes, I had my own share of guilt in our relationship but, still, I can’t call it quits and look back on him with kindness. Why not? Because the bastard tried to kill me, that’s why not!

If I had fronted him up about it, I’m sure he would have denied it. Christ, he might even have made me believe in his innocence, as everyone else does, for long enough for him to make a proper job of it second time around. But I know I’m right; nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.

He never got on the damn plane, you see, the private jet he had chartered to take us from Trenton to Newark to catch a transatlantic flight. Four passengers were listed but only three got on board; Oz stayed behind, with a Chinese messenger girl who had turned up to collect a package. I didn’t hear the story he spun the pilot, but I’m damn sure she was part of it, part of the set-up.

He was standing there as we began our taxi. I looked at him through the window, and our eyes met. He had the strangest expression on his face. It puzzled me then but now I can describe it as anticipation, mixed with a little fear, and fear was something Oz didn’t show too often. I wondered about it all the way through the flight, right up to the moment when we heard the bang and Scott, the pilot, told us through the speaker system that we had a problem, and that he was going to attempt an emergency landing.

I knew then, for sure, what that look had been about. He had decided to get me out of his life for good. When he wanted to be, Oz was lethal, and like many very wealthy people, he could get things done.

The ‘emergency landing’ wasn’t: it was a crash, pure and simple. We came down hard, with a crunching, tearing bang, and that’s all I remember, until I came to among the wreckage and found that everyone else on board was dead.

How did I survive? That’s a little embarrassing, but it’s true nonetheless.

I was on the toilet, wasn’t I, perched on the tiny bog at the back end of the plane, when Scott read us all our death warrant. There was a little speaker in there too. I thought about going back to my seat, but decided that if Elvis had met his Maker with his knickers round his ankles, that was good enough for me. On the way down, I hung on tight to the hand-grips and concentrated my thoughts on Tom, banishing everything from my mind but his face, until we hit the swamp and everything went blank.

I don’t imagine I was unconscious for more than a few seconds; a minute at most. When I came to I was waist-deep in brown, smelly water and my head hurt like hell. I glanced in the cracked mirror and saw a big lump in the process of forming above my left eye, as if a baby alien was trying to chew its way out. For a moment, I had visions of the flood rising until it filled the compartment, but it seemed to have found its own level. I kicked my way out of my underwear and tried to open the door, fearful that it might have been jammed shut by the impact. I had to push hard against the water, but I made it, and stepped outside.

I saw, at once, what had saved my life. At some point during the disaster, the tiny tail section of the aircraft had been ripped off and had soft-landed in an open area, while the rest had smashed through a stand of trees. The main fuselage was yards away, still ablaze, although the swamp water was doing an effective fire-fighting job.

I thought about Oz again, and knew for sure that he had taken himself out of this. No one, not even he, was that lucky. Accident or sabotage? With him involved, the odds were way in favour of the latter. I considered my two companions on the flight, the man and the woman: both of them had been trouble in their own way, and I reckoned that Oz had simply seen them as expendable. To this day, such an idea might shock his millions of fans, but trust me, that’s how he was.