Quintin Jardine: On Honeymoon With Death

‘As long as you’re not a tandem, I don’t care.’

She giggled and slapped me on the chest. I felt myself rock-hard, and realised that I had been that way for some time, and that I wanted her, maybe more than I had ever done.

‘It all needed saying,’ I told her. ‘Long ago, probably. I wonder why it wasn’t?’

‘We needed a catalyst. Something to start the ball rolling.’

I grunted in her ear. ‘Some catalyst. . your spurned lover.’

‘What will be. .’ she murmured. ‘Sauce for ganders, but let’s not start that again. No, maybe we needed neutral ground too, somewhere that’s ours and ours alone.’

‘Maybe.’

I paused. ‘One more thing I have to tell you.’

‘Whassat?’ she murmured.

‘I love you, Mrs Blackstone.’

‘Then take me to bed.’

‘Ever faked it for me?’

‘Never had to; honest.’

Afterwards, we lay in the dim light of a bedside lamp. . an item to be changed, for sure, along with bedroom curtains that made the place look like every schoolboy’s idea of a Paris brothel. ‘I feel much the better for that,’ I said, my grin from ear to ear.

‘What? Our true confessions?’

‘Them too. But I’ll tell you this. If that’s what happens when you find a body, I hope we don’t discover another for a while.’

When Fortunato came back two days later, I did my best not to give him the slightest hint that Prim had told me about the two of them. So I don’t know how he guessed, unless he caught something in my eye, or, more probably in Prim’s. She was edgy from the moment that he phoned to check that we’d be in.

I gave him my best, ‘Hail, fella, good to see ya,’ greeting, and he responded, but as soon as Prim disappeared off to the kitchen to fetch the coffee, he seemed to change, to become completely un-copperlike, on the defensive. He spent quite a while admiring our new rugs, and a very nice repro cabinet which we’d bought the day before from the Masia Store, on the road to Girona, before he could bring himself to look me in the eye. When he did, it was as if he was quizzing me.

No way was I going to kick the subject off. ‘Well?’ I asked, trying not to sound aggressive.

‘So you know?’

‘So I know. So I didn’t know last time you were here. So what am I thinking?’

Ramon nodded.

‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘She was a free girl then, to misquote Tom Petty; I was gone. You’re part of her history. God knows I have enough of my own, so I can’t take issue with hers.’

I let that sink in, but not for too long. ‘I take it that Prim is history as far as you’re concerned?’ I asked him.

He looked at the cabinet again. ‘Yes,’ he answered quietly.

‘That’s fine then. The subject’s closed, for good, as far as I’m concerned.’

The captain looked relieved. ‘For me too, obviously. Thank you.

‘You must meet Veronique some time, and Alejandro.’

I couldn’t think of a worse idea, but of course he didn’t know about Prim’s child. So all I said was, ‘Let’s not rush that one.’

Bang on cue, Primavera returned with coffee on a tray. I suspected that she had been listening, behind the door. ‘So, Ramon,’ she began as she handed him his, ‘what’s the news on our departed guest?’

‘No good news,’ he answered, mournfully. ‘As you saw, the body was badly decomposed, but not completely. The pathologist estimates that it had been in the water for around a year, maybe a month more, maybe a month less. There was nothing on it to identify it, but you can forget my theory that it might have been a tramp. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the heart; the bullet was still there, lodged in the spine.’

‘So it was the Frenchman, Capulet?’

Fortunato shook his head. ‘I can’t say that for sure. It’s beyond visual identification, and the clothing gave us no clue. It’s all designer stuff, a mix of Hugo Boss and Pierre Cardin. Could have been bought in L’Escala, could have been bought anywhere. There was no wristwatch, no jewellery.’

‘What about dental records?’ Prim asked.

The detective smiled, sadly. ‘For that you have to have been to a dentist. This man had perfect teeth. No, I’m afraid there is only one way we can prove it is Capulet, and that’s through DNA profiling. There’s no material from him that we can use for cross-reference, so we’ll need to take a blood sample from a close relative. He had no children, so that means his sister, Lucille.

‘Yesterday I called my colleagues in Geneva and asked them for cooperation. This morning they called me back. She has not been seen at home since Saturday, and no one knows where she is. They’ve spoken to the lawyer who administered the company; she visited his office on Friday afternoon to check that the company had received your bank transfer for the purchase of this house, but said nothing about going away. I also have checked Capulet’s homes in Paris and Florida. Each one was sold during last summer, and new people live there now. Quite a mystery.’

I glanced out of the window at our empty, uncovered pool. Ramon had asked us not to fill it for the time being. ‘Where’s the mystery? She’s killed her brother, then cashed up and buggered off into the wide blue yonder.’

Captain Fortunato stared at me, bewildered. It was another of those rare occasions when his English let him down. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s sold the company’s assets and gone away.’

‘You may be right. And that will not help me.’

‘So what happens now?’ Prim asked. ‘Can we fill our pool?’

The policeman shook his head. ‘Not yet, not yet. Your pool is now a murder scene; that makes this situation very awkward. It brings up matters of jurisdiction also.’

‘How come?’

He looked up at me from the couch. ‘When I met you for the first time, I was an officer of the Guardia Civil. Now I am Mossos d’Esquadra, but I have many of the same duties. Normally, the death of this man would be for me to investigate. However, if the body is that of Capulet, that could make things different. He was suspected of crimes which crossed the Catalan border, into other parts of Spain, and those would still be the responsibility of the Guardia.

‘I see where we could have a big argument. For the moment though, since we don’t know for sure that it is the Frenchman who is dead, I am keeping hold of this business. I want to have my technical people look at your pool again. Also I want to search your house, to see if there is anything still here that might tell us something about the man’s death.’

‘But we’ve had cleaners in,’ I said.

‘I know, but it is still something I have to do. Better that it is me than someone from the Guardia, who does not know you.’

‘Better the Devil you know,’ I murmured.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean, yes; I agree with you.’

Ramon had been sure of himself, and us; there was a squad of officers waiting in a van, out of our sight in the street below. Prim and I decided that it was best for us to leave them to get on with it, so we took ourselves along to Shirley’s.

She had been wide-eyed the day before, when he had told her about our bonus surprise in the pool. ‘Bloody hell, Oz,’ she had exploded. ‘People leave some funny things behind them when they sell houses here. . the punters who bought mine were left a model of the Tower of London that my late husband made out of matchsticks. . but dead tramps is pushing it.’ We hadn’t let her into our suspicion that the body was that of the previous owner.

When we told her the hot-off-the-press news, that the guy had been shot, her jaw dropped so far I thought it was dislocated.