Quintin Jardine: On Honeymoon With Death

‘Let me get this straight,’ Shirley said, slowly. ‘You’ve moved in already?’

‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘The place is liveable, the telly works, and we’ve had the old broken-down shutters taken away, and that rusty old gate’s going too, once its replacement is ready. Vincens the builder has our new kitchen on order; he’ll do that and the rewiring once we go off to start work on Miles’s new movie. We have a painter starting work tomorrow, and we’ve even got a guy doing something to the satellite dish that’ll give us British digital television.’

‘Christ, you’ll be in the bleedin’ pool before the week’s out.’

‘Hardly,’ Prim laughed. ‘We’ll need to fill it first. We have been thinking about putting in a heating system for it, but so far we haven’t even taken the cover off.’

We installed Shirl in one of our new soft leather armchairs, and Prim poured coffee from a top-of-the-hob percolator, which we had found in one of the old kitchen cupboards. She looked around, nodding from time to time.

‘Yes,’ she proclaimed at last. ‘Not bad at all. Get some nice pictures on the walls, and some nice rugs on the floor, put some nice lights on that big terrace around the pool, and you’ll have a home fit for a film star.’

‘Thanks,’ I acknowledged. ‘Do you know anything about the previous owner?’

‘Well. .’ Shirley answered slowly, ‘he was French, I know that much; also a friend of mine, who lives up here, mentioned him once or twice, after he went away. She didn’t know his name, but she said she’d heard that he was a bit dodgy. Not that that means much; there are lots of mysterious people around here. Even me. Even you two.

‘When John looked at the place he asked about him. He told me that all that Sergi bloke said was that he’d gone away; when John pressed him a bit more he got the impression that no one was quite sure where he’d gone to. Again, there’s nothing unusual about that, not by L’Escala standards. People come and go all the time, and if they don’t volunteer information they don’t get asked for it. That’s one reason I prefer it to England. You’re allowed a bit of privacy here.’

Our new neighbour drank her coffee, and demolished a pastry stick filled with chocolate, which I had found in one of the local bread shops. When she was finished, we gave her the grand tour of the house, then, like the good guest she is, she excused herself and left us to get on with settling in.

We had hired a firm of commercial cleaners to go through the house like a dose of salts in advance of our moving in, so from that point of view there was little to do. We finished laundering the sheets and towels, then filled the cardboard crates with the mattress wrappings, for me to pile them into the Lada. . I really was taking a shine to the ugly, square, bus. . and take them to the nearest rubbish skip. While I was gone the telly man, an English ex-pat, did what he had to do to our satellite dish and tuned in the decoder box which gave us illicit access to British broadcasting.

I came back to find Prim almost jumping for joy. ‘We can get British radio,’ she shouted as I stepped inside. ‘It comes through the satellite! I can keep up with The Archers .’

I gave the bloke a serious stare. ‘What the hell did you tell her that for?’ I asked him. Both he and my wife grinned. I didn’t know why they thought I was kidding, but they did. From somewhere close by, I thought I imagined a Satanic chuckle.

All the same, when he left I was ready to sit down for an hour’s telly. It was almost five, and there was a review of the previous week’s European football about to begin on Eurosport. Prim had other ideas. ‘Is that it?’ she exclaimed, in a tone which told me at once that it wasn’t.

‘What else is there?’ I protested. ‘You can’t want to go out for a drink, can you? We’ve just filled that bloody great fridge with booze.’

‘No. We’ll go out later. But first we have to get that cover off the pool.’

‘Gie’s a break, love,’ I pleaded. ‘That thing must weigh a ton. There’s a hell of a lot of it. Look, I’ll get the painters to help me tomorrow.’

‘They’ll be here to paint. The two of us can manage it together, Oz; and Vincens said we should fill the pool as soon as possible, to get the motor running. It’s a ten-minute job and there’s enough daylight, so let’s do it now.’

I gave up. Normally, I’d have muttered something about alternative uses for daylight, and taken her off to test-drive our new mattress, and that monster of a bed, but I’d had enough of that at Crisaran. (We have a technical term in Scotland for that condition. We call it Being Shagged Out.) Or maybe my actions were being guided by A Higher Power? (No, on this occasion I was Absolutely Shagged Out.)

I followed her outside and went to work untying the ropes which held the big blue cover firmly in place. We started nearest to the house, which we assumed was the shallow end, working our way down the sides. The metal rings to which the nylon rope was lashed were set two metres apart, eleven of them down either side, with three along the top and the far end. They were screwed into the stone, so that they could be removed when not in use, thereby saving a right few broken toes.

The knots were tight. For a while I thought we were going to have to cut the damn thing free, until Prim had the bright idea of using a long screwdriver, which we had found in the outhouse, as a lever. With that tool, we finally managed to unfasten all the ropes at the shallow end, then one by one on either side, turning back the cover as we went, so that its weight would not pull it downwards into the empty pool.

Primavera’s ten-minute job took us forty-five: by the time we were finished, it was practically dark. We stood at the deep end, the blue cover in a roll at our feet and looked down into our new pool. The tiles seemed to be navy blue, with a denim fleck through them, chosen to give a cool look and yet to attract the warmth of the sun at the same time.

It wasn’t completely empty. Since it was last filled, rainwater had flowed or been driven under the cover, and had gathered down there below us. Looking at the sides I guessed that it was between two and three feet deep; it was dark, stagnant, impenetrable to the eye and, now that the tarpaulin was off, smelly.

‘Shouldn’t there be a drain?’ Prim asked.

‘Of course there’s a bloody drain. It’s probably clogged with leaves. I’ll run some water in. That should clear it. If not, we’ll add it to Vincens the builder’s things-to-do list.’

The small room which housed the pool machinery was directly beneath the point where we were standing. I trotted down the steps to the driveway and opened it with a key on the big ring which I carried. Vincens had given me a quick run-through of the system, so I knew what to look for. . starting with the light switch so that I could see what I was doing. I didn’t bother about setting the filter at that stage, but went straight to the lever which controlled the flow of water, turned it on full throttle and switched on the pump.

Even in the pool-house I could hear it splashing on to the tiles. I waited there for a minute or two to make sure that it was running okay, then I grabbed the pole and net which stood against the side wall, at an angle because it was so long, thinking to use it to clear the leaves. As an afterthought, I pressed the button marked ‘ luz ’, which over-rode the master clock of the pool lights.

Prim is not a screamer, other than in certain private circumstances, and then she does it quietly. But I wasn’t even out of the small room when, above me, she let out a belter. ‘Oz!’ she cried. ‘Oz!’ Not frightened, I thought. . she has never been frightened in her life. . but startled, very startled.