Quintin Jardine: On Honeymoon With Death

‘Forward planning’s bullshit anyway.’

I looked around Shirley’s new garden. She had sold the house in which she had lived when first we had met, for reasons similar to our own. . to an Australian beer baron, she told us; now she was settled in a newly built bungalow, ostentatiously named Villa Balearic, and designed in what she described as Ibizan style. It was built on a half-acre plot in a street called Carrer Caterina, not far from the old Greco-Roman city of Empuries, and had a fine view across the Golfo de Rosas.

‘Nice this, Shirl,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’ If she’d had feathers she’d have preened herself. ‘I only moved in a month ago. I had a big hand in the design.’

‘That must have been a help to the builder,’ Prim chipped in, so deadpan that not even I could tell whether she was kidding or not.

‘Yes,’ Shirley nodded. ‘Although he never said.’

She looked from Prim, to me, then back again. ‘So,’ she demanded, ‘where you gonna live now you’ve sold your old place in St Marti?’

‘What do you mean?’ we asked in unison. ‘We live in Glasgow,’ I added, ‘with a better view than you’ve got. . If you like buildings and bridges and lots of traffic, as we do.’

‘Sure, but you belong here as well. L’Escala fits you two like a glove. Besides, we need a movie star here. We’ve got all bleeding sorts, Flash Harrys from all over Europe, but we’re a bit low on showbiz. Go on, buy a new place, then we’ll have someone to gossip about.

‘Who knows, Oz, you might even become a tourist attraction. Before you know it the British Catalan Society will be organising bus trips past your house.’

I was flattered, but I had to laugh. ‘One movie does not a celebrity make, Shirley.’

‘Bleeding well does in L’Escala,’ she countered.

‘In that case we’re well out of it,’ said Prim.

‘But you need to invest some of that money in property. Where else you gonna go?’

‘How about Florida?’

‘Too hot, and they’ve got alligators.’

‘Barbados?’

‘Hotter and the sanitation’s lousy.’

‘Rome?’

‘Full of Italians.’

‘Puerto Banus?’

‘Puerto Anus more like. Come on Prim, you love it here, admit it. You too, Oz. You’ve got memories here.’

‘Some of which we’d rather forget,’ I suggested.

‘Sure, but you’ve sold your apartment, just like I’ve sold my house.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘Why do you think? After Davidoff went away, I just hated the place. I couldn’t look at that summerhouse again without thinking of him, and without wondering what had happened to him. You don’t know do you?’ She fired her question too quickly for her effort at sounding casual to be convincing.

‘No,’ I lied quietly. I did, of course, but I couldn’t tell her; not even her.

‘Ahh,’ she sighed. ‘There was always a bit of the cat about him. I expect he just went off somewhere to die, just like an old moggie. I miss him, all the same. So that’s why I sold up. Couldn’t leave L’Escala though; so I found this lump of land and I had this house built. That’s what you two should do.’

Shirley had made her point. We didn’t get into a discussion right there and then, but that night, back at the hotel as we did justice to a bottle of cava before going down for dinner, Prim brought it up. ‘She’s right, you know,’ she exclaimed, out of the blue.

‘Who? Margaret Thatcher?’

‘Yes, but apart from her. Shirley is. We should buy something else in L’Escala.’

‘Yes, dear.’

She frowned at me. ‘Are you humouring the little woman?’

‘No, dear.’

‘Well, what do you mean?’

‘I mean okay.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Why? Do you want an argument? I can read that look in your eye, and I know that if we had one I’d lose. So I might as well agree with you and save the hassle.’

She isn’t just a magnet for trouble: she can radiate it too, when she feels like it.

‘Besides,’ I conceded. ‘I happen to agree with old Shirl. I do feel right here. And there’s something else. Back in Glasgow we live in a place that Jan and I shared. Sure, I know you can hack that, but given our financial position it’s only fair that we have a place that’s ours alone.’

‘Aww,’ she murmured, slightly, unusually, stuck for a word.

‘And finally. .’

Prim laughed. ‘Oh yes? You’ve got your smartarse look on. Out with it.’

‘I looked around as we were leaving Shirley’s. There’s a place two doors along with a “for sale” sign, and I like it up there; I like the quiet. So I thought we might look at it tomorrow.’

And so we did. Next morning I called the estate agent, having mentally noted the number on his signboard, and next afternoon we met him on the road which runs towards the public entrance to the Ruins of Empuries.

It occurred to me as we shook hands that I hadn’t spoken any serious Spanish for a while, but in any case he launched straight into his version of English. ‘Goot morning, sir,’ he began, getting off on the wrong foot by ignoring Primavera. ‘I am Sergi.’

He looked to be around forty, a strapping bloke approaching six feet tall, big for a Catalan of that vintage. He had a heavy jaw. . not quite in the Jimmy Hill class, but showing promise. . which made all of his other features seem smaller. When finally he did turn to acknowledge Prim, I saw that his thick dark hair was held back in a pony-tail.

He reached into his pocket, fishing around for keys. I hadn’t expected him to be wearing a suit. . very few business people in that part of Spain wear jackets and the manager in any bank is usually recognisable as the guy wearing a tie. . so I thought nothing of his designer jeans, but his heavy woollen jacket looked a bit flamboyant. It had a South American look to it.

‘I sorry I ask to meet you here. It been such a long time since I visit this house, I forget how to find it.’ He smiled, creasing up his little eyes. ‘But I look before you come, so I know now where it is.’

‘It’s been for sale for a while then?’ Prim asked him, in Spanish.

He looked at her, gratefully. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘For seven months now. It has been empty for over a year.’

‘Who is the owner?’ I ventured in Castellano. Actually, I’m not bad at the national language, although most of the local tongue, Catalan, is a mystery to me. To put my communications skills in perspective, though, I once met an eight-year-old boy in L’Escala who spoke four languages and was fluent in three of them.

‘He’s a Frenchman,’ Sergi replied. ‘I don’t know what happened. He just went away. A few months later I had an instruction to sell the villa, exactly as it stands. I get in touch with him through a lawyer’s office in Geneva. Come on, I’ll show you the place. The road from this side is rough; it’s easier if we walk than drive all the way round.’

He led us up a short rocky alleyway which might have taken a car, but might have taken out its exhaust in the process. At the top of a short slope we turned left into Carrer Caterina, which happily is a proper tarmac street, with paving and everything, and found ourselves in front of Shirley’s new Ibizan villa, its terra-cotta walls standing out proudly against the cloudless blue winter sky.

‘This way,’ said our guide leading us on, rummaging again in the pocket of his cardigan and coming out at last with a monster bunch of keys, just as we arrived in front of the house where I had seen the ‘ En Venda ’ sign. There was a plastered brick wall facing the street, two metres high and solid. Once it had been white but it looked around ten years overdue for repainting. On one of the pillars, which supported its gate, there was a stone nameplate. It read ‘Villa Bernabeu’. Sergi caught me peering at the mossed-over lettering.