Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

Less than a minute after the transmission had stopped, the phone rang again. This time, there was a voice on the line. Jan’s.

‘Hi there. Did all that stuff come through okay?’

‘Yeah, clear as a bell.’

‘So how are you?’

‘I’ve been better.’

There was a silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, eventually. ‘I was home at the weekend, and Mac collared me. He said he’d given you a sort of a bollocking … his words. It made me realise that it was really me who deserved it, and that I’ve been an unthinking bitch. I should have told you about Noosh and me as soon as it happened, and asked your permission to use the loft. I’m sorry.

‘What I shouldn’t have done was sleep with you. Prim’s a great lass, Oz, and the two of you are perfectly happy. You don’t need, and Prim doesn’t deserve, me messing your life about.’

She paused again, then went on in a cold, flat, matter-of-fact voice I’d never heard before. ‘You probably can’t talk now. The only other thing I want to say is, forget that night ever happened, and forget all that stuff I came out with next day. You’re with Prim, and it’s for the right reason … you love her. I’ll see you at the wedding … both of you.’

I sat there, my heart pounding, and a cold feeling gripping me. I had never heard her like this before, not even in the tense times in our twenties, when we were drifting apart. ‘I can talk okay,’ I said. ‘Is that how you want it to be, Jan?’ A vision of her, naked in the light of morning, appeared in my mind.

‘Yes. That’s how I want it to be. See you four weeks on Friday.’The words snapped out, then the line went dead.

There was nothing to do after that but go for a beer, even though it was still only lunchtime. I dragged myself down to the square, in something close to a daze. Half an hour before, I had thought I was as confused as I could get. I had been wrong.

I was gazing into my empty glass, my mind still bouncing between Edinburgh and St Marti, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Hey Oz, you alone today?’

I looked up, brought back to my surroundings. ‘Oh, hi, Miguel. Yes, Prim’s away. So was I, just then.’

‘If you like, I leave you alone.’

‘No, no. Please join me.’ I looked around. All the other tables were empty. ‘You don’t seem to have anything else to do.’

He pulled up a chair, and waved to the other waiter to bring us two more beers. ‘Is good I see you. I was going to come up to the apartment. My wife’s nephew Santi is coming to see us. What he told me last night, I could hardly believe, so I asked him to come today and tell you himself. He finish work at one, and he come here for lunch. He be here any minute now.’

Miguel was right. Less than five minutes later we heard the scream of a moped with a straight-through exhaust, and a young man swung into the village in a cloud of dust. He parked at the edge of Casa Minana’s array of tables and shambled across towards us, pulling his crash helmet off as he did so.

Santi looked to be aged around twenty-five. From the colour of his jeans and shirt, I guessed that he worked on a building site. His thirst reinforced that guess. The first beer which was set before him disappeared in around ten seconds. Eventually, after we had ordered bocadillos for lunch, his uncle told him to begin his story.

He spoke no English, but his enunciation in Spanish was clear and I could follow most of what he said. Whenever I looked puzzled, Miguel filled in the blanks.

As I listened to what he told me, I could feel a smile spreading slowly across my face. After a while, I stopped him and turned to Miguel. ‘Let me get this right so far,’ I said, in English, knowing that Santi couldn’t understand us. ‘The day after I helped you evict our bony chum from up there beside the church, a farm worker found him and went to the local police.’ My pal nodded.

‘Santi’s wife and another officer went up to look. They checked that it was true, and they reported back to their boss. When they did, the local mayor was in the room, and he went crazy over the idea of a body being found in his town.’

‘That’s right,’ said Miguel, chuckling. ‘He thinks like I do, that a thing like that in the papers get the town a bad name, that it bad for the tourists.’

I grinned at Santi as I spoke to Miguel. ‘So he gives the farm hand some money to keep quiet, and he tells Ramona and her pal to bundle the skeleton up and move it somewhere else?’

‘Si. The poor guy, he being passed around like a parcel. At this rate he could wind up in Barcelona. Come to think of it, that where we should have taken him. They find lots of dead bodies there.’

I shook my head, helpless. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I chuckled. ‘So what did they do?’

Miguel finished the story himself. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘Ramona was going to take him to Estartit. But the mayor, he say, “No, that not fair.” Instead he tell them to take it to Ventallo, eight kilometres along the road to Girona. They have no tourists. There, if they find a body, it not matter.

‘So Ramona and her friend, they take a sack and they put the body in it. Then when it gets dark they take it to Ventallo. Not by the main road. There is another before that, a farm track. They leave it there, not far from the road and close to the town.’

‘And they’ve heard nothing since?’

‘Nothing.’

He paused, as the pair of us took in the latest stage in the odyssey of the late Ronnie Starr, and as Santi stared at us, absolutely bewildered. ‘Did Ramona say anything else?’ I asked.

‘Si, she said that she took a good look at the body as they were picking it up. She said that it looked as if the back of the skull had been smashed in. She say that someone must have hit him with something.’

‘Aye,’ I muttered, ‘unless you stood on him in the dark.’ My friend’s mouth fell open, as he looked at me. ‘You don’ think …’

‘No, don’t be daft. Someone caved his head in all right. And I know why.’

There was no more funny side. ‘What will you do now?’ asked Miguel. I made a mental note of the ‘you’.

‘I’ll need to think about that. But I guess we’ll wind up taking a run along to Ventallo.’

‘I think we’re in the wrong business, Oz.’

‘What makes you say that?’ I asked Prim, curious. I had been asleep when she came in, but the sound of the shower had wakened me.

She stood in the doorway of our en-suite bathroom, grinning as she towelled herself off. ‘It came to me today, that as investigators, in this country at least, we leave a lot to be desired.’

I frowned, feeling wounded by her slight. ‘We’ve got a result in every commission we’ve had so far, and there are four more waiting to be tackled. I call that pretty good work.’

She tossed the towel into the big clothes basket and pulled on her robe. ‘Maybe so, but it’s tame compared to what I saw today. I tell you, Davidoff could make a horse talk … and in any one of several languages at that.’

She followed me out on to the balcony, and sat down facing me. ‘Those people today! When we walked in they greeted me in English. But as soon as I started asking questions, the manager appeared and they ran out of vocabulary. The manager’s French dried up as well.

‘Then Davidoff stepped in. He was speaking in Catalan, so I hadn’t a clue what they were saying, but I could tell that he was laying down the law. Pretty soon the manager went off and came back with his bookings register. The dinner was there. A private room for nine, reserved by Mr Starr, as we thought.’

‘How did he pay for it?’

‘The manager said he settled the bill in cash. He would, wouldn’t he?’