Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

‘You two have a good Christmas?’ she asked the boys.

‘Yes thanks,’ Jonathan answered, leaning forward in the front passenger seat. ‘Uncle Oz is taking us to see the Dali now.’

‘Good for Uncle,’ Shirley laughed.

‘Got to be back for six though,’ I told her. ‘Guess what? Bloody turkey again. . curried this time.’

‘Better get on your way, then.’ She gave us a quick wave and we were off.

I was right about the museum. Colin thought it was great, especially the car exhibit. . the one which fills with water. . and the Mae West Room. I kept that back until the end of the tour. ‘Who’s Mae West, Uncle Oz?’ Jonny asked me. His wee brother didn’t care; he just liked looking through the funny glass thing.

‘She was a famous movie star in the last century. . for a good chunk of the last century actually.’

‘Like you, Uncle Oz?’ Colin shouted. ‘A film star like you?’ There was a queue to view the exhibit; the couple in front turned and gave me a curious, blank look. I thought they were English, till I heard him muttering to her in German.

I had to laugh. ‘No, wee man; not like me in the slightest. Mae West was a very naughty lady. I’m a very well-behaved man.’

‘That’s not what Mum says,’ my younger nephew shot back. ‘She says you were as bad as me when you were my age.’

That’s loyalty for you , I thought.

‘Listen sunshine,’ I told him. ‘Every dodgy thing I ever did, I learned from her. You can tell her that too.

‘Come on. It’s time we were heading back to L’Escala.’

There’s a handy car park less than two minutes from the Dali Museum, an ugly concrete thing, but it’s hidden out of the way. I loaded them back into my Russian off-roader, and pulled out into the narrow, twisty streets which led towards the outskirts of town. The Lada was beginning to pall on me. It handled okay, but its stiff suspension was pretty tough on the back. I had to drive fairly slowly, for I didn’t want Colin bounced around by too many potholes, so we were ten minutes late when we made it back to L’Escala, and turned up into the woodland road which led back to Villa Bernabeu. Darkness was falling fast.

We had gone fifty yards along, very slowly, for the tarmac is badly buckled in places by big tree roots, when I heard a crack. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

Jonathan, sitting beside me, looked over his shoulder. . for all the rough ride, Colin was out like a light in his seatbelt, dreaming of Mae West for all I knew. ‘I think the side window’s broken,’ Jonathan said.

‘Damn it,’ I swore, as we approached the villa. ‘Must have kicked up a stone. The road’s bloody awful here.’

I turned into the driveway and closed the automatic gate behind me with a remote. Colin was wakened when I stepped out of the car; I could see the woozy look on his face as he stretched in his seat. I could see it clearly through a round hole in the passenger window; that, and something else too.

In the opposite window, there was an almost identical hole; round, with spidery cracks radiating outward from it.

‘There’s one here too,’ Jonny called out, unnecessarily.

My heart was thumping as I unfastened Colin’s seatbelt. Call me a panic-merchant if you like, but by now, I think I know a bullethole when I see one.

‘What happened to the car?’ Prim’s voice came from the terrace, behind me, as I lifted the wee chap out.

‘A stone chip, I guess.’ I forced a laugh. ‘It almost looks as if someone took a shot at us,’ I told her, meaning her and the kids to take it as a joke, but I made the mistake of looking into her eyes as I did so.

I had to tell her the whole story after that, everything Fortunato had told me; that it was Sayeed, not the Frenchman in the pool, and that the bullet which had killed him had come from a gun similar to his.

‘Jesus,’ she whispered, looking out of our bedroom window as I finished, down at the moonlight reflected in the pool. ‘So what happened tonight? What happened to the car? You really think that someone took a shot at it?’

‘No,’ I answered, truthfully. ‘I think that, maybe, someone took a shot at me. I reckon someone’s seen the car driving around and thought that Capulet was back in town. The windows are smoked glass remember, from any sort of distance it would be difficult to tell who was at the wheel. It could be that our friend didn’t just leave a body behind. It could be that he left an enemy as well.’

I suppose I should have been shaking in my boots as I finished my story: yet I wasn’t. Neither, from the look of her, was my wife. . although she wasn’t actually wearing boots, but soft leather moccasins. The fact is, since she and I met we’ve been in stickier situations than that; one thing we’ve learned from them is that there’s nothing scary about the past. Once it’s happened, it isn’t dangerous any more.

‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked. ‘Tell Ramon?’

‘Probably. I’ll call him later. Before that, I’m going to see John Gash. He wants the Lada; he can have the Lada. The sooner that thing’s in bits, the happier I’ll be.’

I didn’t keep any secrets from John. No, I told him what I thought had happened, and I said that if he still wanted the bloody car he could have it, on condition that once it was in his mother’s garage, it did not go out again, other than in a large crate. I told him he could stuff the Fiat Punto, though; I settled for two and a half grand cash.

I also settled for a nice new Chrysler Voyager, a great big seven-seater with windows so dark that, in emergencies, the local priest could have used it as a confessional. It also had a black paint job. When I brought it back from the dealer in Girona three days after Christmas, my dad took one look at it and asked me, ‘What’s that? A fucking hearse? Why didn’t you have “Funeral Director” painted along the side?’

Of course, none of the family knew the real reason why I had sent the Lada along the road. Not even Jonny’s fertile mind had worked out the significance of the two simultaneous holes in the side windows. All I told them was that I had been self-indulgent for long enough and that if John Gash could make a buck out of the damn thing then good luck to him.

‘You’re not self-indulgent, you tell me,’ my dad grunted, as he looked at the Voyager and the Mercedes parked side by side in the big garage. ‘What do you call those then?’

‘Tax deductible, Dad,’ I answered. ‘That’s what I call them.’ The best investment any upwardly mobile young man can make. . at least after he suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself seriously rich. . is in a top-class tax adviser.

I suppose I should have called Fortunato right away to tell him about the Lada business, but I didn’t. When I called at his office in Girona next day, after I had ordered the Voyager, they told me that he was on leave for the rest of the week. I don’t know why, but I didn’t feel like asking Prim for his telephone number.

Anyway, after a couple of days, I had persuaded myself that my imagination was working overtime and that the ‘gunshot’ which had drilled the Lada’s windows was far more likely to have been a local vandal with a very strong catapult and a bag of ball-bearings.

So, instead of triggering yet another police investigation. . or having Fortunato simply laugh at me. . I concentrated on preparing for the Hogmanay party which Prim and I had decided to hold. As the only Scots couple in L’Escala, we felt more or less obliged to fly the Saltire.

We had invited a number of friends from the British community in the town, plus a few other people we had got to know during our previous stay. I didn’t expect Prim to have put the Fortunatos on the list, but when I saw their names there, I said nothing about it. I was surprised when they brought Alejandro, but I don’t suppose I should have been; as I said, Spanish parents are much more relaxed about their infants than we Brits are about ours.