Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

‘I. . Oh shit, I don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though; I wouldn’t have any bloody illusions about you.’

Susie gave the short, brittle laugh that was one of her trademarks. ‘Now there’s a fine basis for a relationship. Oz, don’t be an idiot any longer than you have to; get your arse down the road to Barcelona and ask her to come back home. Even if a wee bit of begging’s called for as well. What’s the name of her hotel?’

‘The Husa Princesa. Why?’

‘Because I’m going to phone her, take my punishment like a big girl, and apologise for my part in messing up your nice, yuppie, beautiful people future.’

‘She probably won’t speak to you,’ I warned.

‘Oh she will. She’ll speak to me all right. It’ll take me a while to get a word in, but when I do I’ll tell her the truth, that when a couple of self-indulgent schemers like you and me are left alone under the same roof, by accident or design, then sparks are bound to fly.’

A recollection came to me. ‘And she did tell me not to put you in a hotel, I recall.’

‘That’s better!’ Susie exclaimed. ‘You’re sounding like your real self again; conniving, crafty and quick on your feet.’

‘Just like you?’

‘Absolutely. By the time we’re finished, the pair of us, she’ll be apologising to you because her mother got cancer.’ She giggled.

‘If I thought you really meant all that,’ I murmured into the phone, ‘you would terrify me. Happily, I know that most of it’s just front.’

I heard her take a deep breath. ‘I’m glad you said that; I really am. I can take anyone else thinking I’m nothing but a brassy wee cow, but not you.

‘Oz, Prim’s a good woman who had a hard time and didn’t deserve another. Yet I’ve given her one, and as a lady who’s been hurt herself, and knows what it’s like, the truth is that I’m just a tiny bit ashamed of myself. And so, when you’ve run out of ways to justify yourself, will you be.’

Deep in my heart of hearts, I wished that I could agree with her. . but I didn’t tell her that. ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘If you’re serious about calling her, do it. Just don’t take all the blame on yourself.’

‘Oz Blackstone,’ she gasped. ‘You are some piece of work. As if I would!’

I could feel her hair against my face as she spoke, catch her fragrance, taste her lips. ‘That’s good,’ I laughed, ‘because neither will I.’

It would be wrong to say that I was preoccupied as I drove home. I knew that Susie was right and that there was a case for contrition, but I hesitated. I knew that I was a degree-level, out of the closet, male chauvinist pig, and I had my doubts about whether I could pull it off. I once heard a famous comedian say that when you can fake sincerity, you’ve cracked it. He got a laugh, but I knew that he was serious. Budding actor or not, I doubted whether I was in his class.

The garage looked enormous as I drove into it. Even with the Voyager in it, there was still a big aching void where the Mercedes had stood. I had grown to love that car.

I went in through the back door for the second time that day, disabling the alarm, and wandered through to the living room. The envelope in which those damned photographs had been delivered still lay on the floor where Prim had dropped it. I picked it up and looked at it, in a vain attempt, I suppose to find something familiar in the way the letters P. R. I. M. were printed. Nothing did. A name scrawled in ballpoint, that was all I saw. I wandered back to the kitchen, to get myself a beer and to think about fixing myself something to eat.

The tray lay on the work-surface; the one which I had used to carry our breakfast through to the lounge, before our world blew up, and on which I had carried it back afterwards. The cereal was still in its bowls, the milk was curdling in its jug, the coffee was cold in the pot, and the two mugs stood empty waiting for it to be poured.

I sighed and then I frowned. The mugs didn’t match. I picked them up, one in each hand and looked at them closely. They didn’t match.

We all have our characteristics, every one of us; mannerisms, habits, phrases we use to flag up and emphasise meaningful statements. ‘To be honest with you …’ is one of my stepmother’s, and it’s meaningless, because she always is.

One of my peculiarities is symmetry; I like things to match whenever possible, to the point that I’m obsessive about it. I’ve been known to spend half an hour with a pile of black socks from the tumble dryer sorting them into absolutely identical pairs. . As if one black sock is any different from another as far as your feet are concerned.

So, when I had loaded the breakfast tray that morning, naturally I had picked out, from the crockery and cutlery which we had inherited with the house, two identical bowls, yellow, to go with the milk jug, two matching spoons carefully picked out from among the odds and sods in the drawer, and two blue mugs with raised square markings.

The mugs which I held in my hand were both blue, but the ridges on one were round, rather than square. I put them back on the tray, then opened the wall cabinet and looked inside. When we had done a kitchen inventory we had found eight blue china mugs, made in Italy, four with square and four with circular contoured patterns. Only five remained in the cupboard, two square, and three round. I never had a moment’s doubt that I had done my usual matching trick that morning, whatever else had been on my mind, but I checked in the dishwasher just in case. It was empty. I had hand-washed the breakfast dishes that Susie and I had used the day before, and everything since. I pulled out the slide-away rubbish bin and looked in that. It contained a couple of blackened banana skins, and nothing else.

I looked again, and I was certain. While I had been out on my abortive mission of revenge against the innocent Steve Miller, someone had been in the house. I dropped to my knees and peered at the kitchen floor. It was tiled, a deep terra-cotta shade which made it difficult to spot crumbs and other fragments, but I started to go over every inch, until I found what I was looking for; a sliver of broken china, bone white with a blue glaze.

I knew I hadn’t broken anything. I knew that Prim hadn’t. I knew beyond any self-doubt that when I had opened that cabinet in the morning there had been eight mugs inside. Someone had been in the house, someone in enough of a rush to have knocked a mug off the work-surface to smash on the floor. The damage done, that person had replaced it with another from the cabinet, cleaned up the fragments, or as many of them as he could see against that dark-coloured floor, and taken them away with him to cover his tracks. Tough on him that he was dealing with an obsessive in the midst of a very bad day.

He? I thought. It had to be; had to be the same person who had broken in and attacked Susie, and no woman had done that. The size of the hands that had left those marks on her arms had told me that for sure.

‘How?’ I asked myself, aloud. That was an easy one; he had to have come in by the back door, through which I had left when I had gone off in my rage in search of Miller. The windows were all secure and the front door was bolted. ‘Did I lock it?’Yes, I had, and I had set the alarm. So the intruder had picked the lock again and had switched off the alarm again, at the panel by the door. This time, undisturbed, he had had time to set the alarm on the way out, and to lock the door behind him.

‘Can you do that?’ I asked myself again. ‘Can you unpick a lock?’ I didn’t know the answer to that, but if it was ‘No,’ it led to only one conclusion, and a very disturbing one at that: my visitor had a key.

I went out to the back door once again, knelt down and looked at the lock on the outside, searching for scrapes, scores, scratches in its bright brass facing. It was unmarked. ‘Change this son of a bitch right away,’ I muttered as I walked back into the house.