Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

I thought about it for a while. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t think there was a single piece of paper left in the house; other than books, novels and such, all of them French. I tell you something that struck me as odd. There was a telephone, but no directories. Why would somebody leave town, leave Spain, as far as anyone knows, yet take the telephone directory with him?

‘And the tape? There was a telephone answering machine, but it was empty. There was no cassette in it, and none anywhere in the house.’

I looked at Fortunato. ‘I see what you mean,’ I told him. ‘When we moved in here there was nothing that referred in any way to the Frenchman. It was as if the place had been stripped of anything that might, anything on which he might even have made a note, or scrawled down a phone number, an e-mail address, anything like that.’

‘And yet his clothing was still here, his books. .’

‘And a stack of CDs,’ I added.

‘And a few cases of expensive wine. . Unless you have bought the bottles which I found in the storeroom at the back.’

‘No, we found them there too. So what does that tell you, Captain?’

No one can shrug his shoulders quite like a Catalan. It’s a national trait, and one of the most expressive gestures I know. Fortunato’s said it all. He didn’t need to add, ‘Everything. Nothing. Either the body is Capulet and the person who killed him has covered his tracks, or it is not, and he is covering his own.’ But he did.

‘What it means,’ he continued, ‘is that I think I do have to share this now, with my colleagues in the Guardia Civil. I hope they don’t want to dig up your terrace, or your garden at the back, but you never know.’

Happily, they didn’t. Three days later, on Saturday morning, Fortunato came back with a couple of them, stern-looking, thirty-something guys in olive green uniforms. They looked into the pool, as if they were thinking deep thoughts; they looked around the house; they looked into the outbuildings; they looked into the garage and the Lada.

Then one gave the other a Catalan shrug that would have scored high marks for both performance and artistic impression, and they left.

‘Is that it?’ I asked Ramon as they walked down the path. ‘Is that the investigation? Don’t they want to take our fingerprints for elimination? Don’t you want to take them?’

‘Do you want us to have them?’ he laughed. ‘Oz, Prim, those cleaners you hired were very good indeed. They wiped just about every print in the place.

‘As for the investigation, one of my colleagues just said to me in Catalan, that if a gangster is killed, the most sensible thing to do is bury him and take him off the wanted list. Even if we’re right and we have found Capulet, they don’t care; certainly they want nothing to do with the investigation. That’s all mine.’

‘And what are you going to do about it?’

The amiable copper grinned. ‘I believe that you have a saying in English, which does not translate into Spanish or Catalan. Fuck all. That is what I am going to do about it; fuck all.

‘I don’t even have a victim identification, until the Swiss or Interpol find the sister. . If they even bother to look for her. Where would I start? There is no one on the missing persons list who matches the age and sex. No, I will keep samples for DNA testing, and I will bury the rest.’

He looked at me, searching my eyes. ‘Have I surprised you, my friend Oz? Do I disappoint you?’

‘You surprise me, for sure. And yes, you disappoint me. When we first met, I had you pegged as someone who understood the rights of the victim. That guy in the pool; whoever he was, whatever he did, somebody put him there. Somebody killed him. Doesn’t he have a right to. . justice?’

‘Maybe he’s had it,’ the policeman shot back at me. Then he seemed to soften. ‘Life is not a movie, Senor.’ He shot me another quick smile. ‘Yes, even I have heard of your new career.

‘In the real world, all of us have to set priorities. For example, if that was a child you had found murdered in your pool, or a young woman violated, then this crime would have a very high priority indeed. In fact, my men and I are currently investigating the abduction and murder of a child, a young girl, in another part of the province. It is painstaking work, and we are under a lot of pressure from the newspapers and the politicians to find the beast who did it.

‘If I took even one of my few detectives from that case and set him to work chasing the killer of a man who was probably a criminal himself, I would be crucified. The Spanish people do not care about French smugglers, but they do care, very deeply, about their own children.

‘The truth is that I brought my Guardia friends here because I hoped they would take this business off my hands, but they are in the same position as me; overstretched.

‘I’ll deal with it when I am able. Until then, if you feel a personal interest, then you go ahead and investigate.’

Beside me, Prim snorted. Actually, it wasn’t far short of an explosion. ‘That will be right! We’re on honeymoon, Ramon. And our detecting days are very definitely over.’

Fortunato smiled at her, softly, as if he had played the scene with her himself at some point in the past; as, probably, he had. ‘In that case, my dear, fill your swimming pool.’ He glanced at the men who were erecting scaffolding around the house. ‘Paint your villa. Enjoy yourselves.

‘You are here for Christmas, yes?’

‘We don’t know,’ Primavera replied. ‘We haven’t decided yet.’

‘I am looking forward to Christmas,’ he murmured. ‘It will be Alejandro’s first; even if he will be too young to appreciate it. I know now I was never really happy till I had a son.’ There was something in the way he said it, that made me wonder; as if he was telling her that he knew. Or maybe I’m simply paranoid.

‘Make a fuss of him, then,’ my wife told her former lover, making an effort to keep her voice light, but only succeeding in sounding unlike herself. ‘He’ll appreciate that.’ I thought I caught a message in her tone too; maybe it was an unspoken apology. If it was, then certainly it wasn’t intended for me.

‘Sure he will.’ I burst in to the middle of whatever might have been going on. ‘Maybe we should have our boys here too; our nephews. We’ve got room for them and Ellie, if they fancy it.’

‘I will leave you to your planning,’ said the policeman. He chuckled. ‘And please, feel free to investigate our late friend if you wish. Just don’t find any more like him.’

My casual suggestion took wings. As the overtime painters finished their scaffolding, we talked and made a couple of phone calls.

My sister Ellen jumped at the chance to spend Christmas in our new house. Jonathan and Colin weren’t old enough to vote, but there was no doubt about what they’d want. More than that, we decided that we had room for my dad and Mary, my stepmother, too. . without creating parental rivalries, since Prim’s folks were heading for Los Angeles to end the year with the pregnant Dawn and her megastar husband, Miles.

The master plan was completed when Mary insisted on cooking the turkey. Nobody does it better.

We had no intention of doing any more cooking ourselves than we had to, so in the evening we headed into L’Escala, for dinner in La Dolce Vita, at a table in an upstairs window with a view across the Golfo de Rosas. The pizza was world-class. . I could live on pizza. . but the place was busy and there was a queue for tables, so we didn’t hang about long after dessert.

It was just after ten when we stepped out into the crisp, December night. We didn’t feel like going home; instead, we went for a wander.