Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

I was halfway through my second read-through when I heard a car pull up in the street outside. The new gate swung open silently and Ramon Fortunato stepped into the drive. ‘ Bon dia ,’ he called out. . ‘Good day,’ in Catalan. He looked up at the house. ‘Very impressive,’ he said, dropping into English. ‘It’s amazing what bright colour can do to a place. There’s a town on the Costa Brava where the mayor has banned all the builders from painting new houses white.’

He whistled as he saw Primavera’s new car in the driveway. ‘Very impressive also. More than I can afford on my poor policeman’s salary.’

‘Bullshit,’ I told him, watching him climb the stair to the terrace. ‘You don’t fancy being talked about, that’s all.’

‘I wish,’ he muttered.

‘So,’ I asked, ‘to what do we owe the honour, and all that?’

The captain shook his dark head. ‘Nothing; nothing at all. I was just passing.’

I stared at him, unable to keep the smile from my face. ‘What? You were just passing by, on a dead-end road, in the back of beyond?’

‘I was visiting the ruins,’ he claimed, but I didn’t believe a word of it.

‘Crap. You either want to tell us something, casually, or you want to find something out. You’re a detective; I never yet met one of them who did something for no reason at all.’

Ramon surrendered. ‘Okay, okay; I admit it. I am curious.’

‘About what?’

‘I am wondering whether you have been doing your own detecting, into the mystery of the man in your pool.’ He glanced into the water. ‘It looks good now that you’ve filled it.’

I held up Miles Grayson’s script. ‘Believe it or not, Capitano ,’ I said, ‘I do have other priorities than doing your fucking job for you. I take it from that, that the crime on our premises is still not at the top of your list of things to do.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Not exactly. I caught the man who killed the child, though. He’s in jail in Barcelona; having a very bad time, I hope. But since then there has been a jewel robbery in Figueras, and a large German-owned sailing boat has been set on fire in Ampuriabrava. They rank ahead of Senor Capulet also.’

‘Well don’t look to me for help, mate; not even in fun. Prim would kill me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he murmured. ‘Prim is an unceasingly curious lady. For her life is one big question, or so it seemed to me.’

I didn’t answer him. In fact I made a point of not answering him; I just let his words hang in the air for a while, as if they might remind him not to dig up Prim’s past, not with me at any rate.

‘We did find out one thing,’ I told him, once I reckoned that he had got the message. ‘Purely by chance, of course. We heard that he had a pal around here. He used to go into Bar JoJo in L’Escala, with a tall, thin, scruffy Moroccan fisherman called Sayeed. . until he went to the slammer for running illegal immigrants into the country.’

‘Is that so?’ the policeman murmured. ‘Did they go there often?’

‘A few times, according to what we were told. Ask Jo if you want chapter and verse about it.’

Fortunato turned and ambled towards the staircase to the driveway. ‘I might just do that,’ he said. ‘I think your body has just moved a couple of places up my priority list.’

My old man has spent most of his fifty-something years in Fife, so you might think that landing in a foreign country, then driving over a hundred kilometres to a backwater street in a strange town would be a major exercise for him. Not so.

You can see Edinburgh from some of the higher parts of the East Neuk, it’s that close to the mainstream; yet there are villages tucked away in there, in their home county, that many Fifers have never heard of. My dad knows the lot, the whole place, like the back of his hand. As a Round Table member, and later, as a Rotarian, his speciality was the Treasure Hunt, point to point car chases with clues which lead competitors to the most obscure spots, following a trail which leads back to the starting point. This is invariably a pub with a large car park within walking distance, essentially, of the competitors’ homes.

When Mac the Dentist put together a Treasure Hunt, they used to say that the farmers were favourites to win, because many of the points en route could only be reached in a Land Rover, but I know for a fact that he always did his research in his old Jaguar. You see he’s a rare creature, a dentist who’ll do house calls, on old or sick people whose only needs are running repairs to their dentures. I remember him telling me, once upon a time, about visiting a very old lady in a cottage near a hamlet called Carnbee. He discovered, in the course of conversation, that in all of the century for which she had lived, she had never been further from home than St Andrews.

Of course he offered to take her to Edinburgh, so that she could cross the Forth Bridge, at least, before she died, but she just looked at him and asked, ‘And fit have they got there, son, that wid be ony guid tae me?’

Given that history, I never had any worries about him finding our new house. I simply faxed him a street map of L’Escala, with a big ‘X’ marking the spot and put the coffee on the hob at five o’clock on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Ten minutes later, a hired people-mover turned into our driveway, through the open gate.

At first, my nephews were unimpressed. ‘Where’s the beach?’ asked Colin, the younger one, before he had even jumped out of the car. They had been to our old place, in St Marti, where they could run down a hill into the sea.

‘Up there,’ I told him, pointing to the terrace and the pool. ‘We have our own. If you don’t like it, you’ll just have to get used to walking half a mile.’

Jonathan’s the cool one. When he was a couple of years younger he was a toe-rag of a kid, but since his mum and dad split up he’s taken his role as the senior man in the household very seriously. ‘Nice house,’ he said, just turned eleven and trying to sound sixteen. . he didn’t make a bad job of it either.

‘Yes it is,’ I agreed. ‘Nice telly too. We’ve got BBC1; if you move yourself, you’ll catch the football results in about half an hour.’ He barely twitched, but I could tell from his eyes that I’d scored.

‘Honest to God,’ said my sister Ellie. ‘You always were a self-indulgent bugger, even when you couldn’t really afford it. There’ll be no holding you now.’

We had a general hugging session in the driveway, Prim, Ellie, Mary, my stepmother, and me. While my dad started to lug bags from the car. I took one from him, and turned to pass it to Jonny, but he and his brother were gone, straight in front of the telly, for sure.

‘Boys!’ their mother bellowed but, like me at their ages, they were masters of selective deafness.

It was good to have the family there. For the first time since we’d moved in, Prim and I were able to show the place off. Looking back, I think that was the moment at which Villa Bernabeu began to feel like a home.

We were so domesticated that Prim took the girls straight to the supermarket on the edge of town, to finish off the shopping for the Christmas dinner. Dad and I gave the boys Cokes and a bag of pretzels as they squatted on the floor watching the early Premiership match reports, then sat down ourselves with a couple of beers.

‘So you’ve landed on your feet again, son,’ he chuckled. ‘Did you get this for a song too?’

‘If we did it was grand bloody opera. This is how the other half live, I’ll have you know.’

‘So what’s wrong, then?’ he asked, quietly.

I looked at him, genuinely astonished by his question. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I protested. ‘What the hell made you ask that?’