Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘So the first place we should look for Starr is La Pera. Christ, Prim, I think I’ll give up the detecting game. You’re far better at it than I am.’

Primavera laughed. ‘You’ve always said you’re an enquiry agent, not a detective. Maybe you should stick to that and leave the detecting to me.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘In that case, get out of those very fetching shorts and into your raincoat, trilby and gumshoes.’

She grinned across the table. ‘Okay. But only if you’ll help me.’

It was lunchtime when finally we arrived at the cafe-bar in what passes for the main street in La Pera. It wasn’t difficult to find, being the only one in town. Prim had stopped short of the detective kit, settling instead for a cotton skirt and the style of white blouse in which, on occasion, she could stop heavy traffic.

The owner was fifty-something, a short, round-shouldered man, with a bad shave and greased hair. The sleeves of his creased, blue-and-white striped shirt were rolled up and he smelled of stale tobacco. When we walked in he had been deep in conversation with his only customer.

He leered at Prim as we took two seats at the bar. I could sense her displeasure, but she kept a smile set on her face.

I ordered a cafe con leche para mi, and a copa de vino blanco para la senora, in perfectly acceptable Spanish. The man gave an approving nod, and set a dish of small sweet olives before us as he prepared the drinks. I glanced around his cafe. There were bench seats along the wall between the two doors, and at the far end, beyond the bar, a dozen tables waited in vain for diners. The place was badly in need of a paint job, but it was clean and tidy. It reminded me a lot of Al Forn, in Tarragona. I wondered how long it had been in the same family, and whether there was another generation ready to take over.

The man came back with the coffee and wine. I thanked him and plundered my Spanish once more. Slowly and carefully I told him that we were from Escocia, and that we were looking for someone who had been in La Pera a year before, a cousin of la senora aqui. He frowned at me and replied in Catalan, a long rambling sentence.

I couldn’t understand a word, but I knew what he was saying all right because I had encountered the same attitude many times before. He was telling me, ‘I’ll respond to your pidgin Spanish to sell you food and drink, but if you want information from me, boy, you’d better be able to talk to me in my own language.’ It can be put much less subtly than that. In Port Lligat, there is a notice painted on the wall beside the jetty which reads: ‘Only Catalan spoken here.’

Before I could even glare at the guy, Prim saved the day. She smiled at him and asked him the same question in perfect French, her eyes wide and beguiling. The man looked at her for a second or two, and was duly beguiled. He replied, in French as good as hers, even if his accent was a bit guttural.

They spoke quickly, so I couldn’t follow all of it. When they were done, and when the man had retired to resume his conversation with his crony, she filled in the blanks. ‘He remembers my cousin Ronnie,’ she said. ‘I was right. My friend says that Starr arrived here last summer. He remembers him very well because he spoke Catalan. Not many foreigners do. He had a meal here, and he took a room above the bar for one night.

‘Next day he told him that he liked the place and wanted to find an apartment so that he could stay longer, somewhere with a little space for him to paint. At the end of this street there’s a tabac and liquor store run by a Senora Sonas. There’s an apartment above it which she used to rent out. It was empty at the time and so my friend sent him there.

‘He took it, and he was here all summer. In the autumn, he said, he just went away; back to Wales, he assumed. He says that Senora Sonas will be able to tell us everything about my cousin Ronald.’

I squeezed her hand. ‘Bullseye,’ I said. ‘Did you ask him if Starr ever came here with friends?’

‘Of course I did. He says that he remembers him being here a couple of times with deux Anglais. One of them was a bald man, smallish, heavily tanned. He can’t remember anything about the other one. Not young, not old, well dressed; that’s all.’

I looked at my watch. It was almost two o‘clock. ‘Sod it,’I said. ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait to see Senora Sonas. She’ll be shut for the afternoon.’

Prim shook her head. ‘No. He says she doesn’t close. The people here smoke a lot, it seems. They like the tabac to be open all day long.’ She finished her drink and the last of the olives. ‘Come on,’ she said, waving goodbye to her new pal, ‘let’s go and see her.’

As far as I can see there’s never quite enough room inside Spanish village liquor stores, for some of the stock is always lying out in the street; big carafes of dodgy wine, plastic blocks of spring water, much of it drawn free from the village well and sold to the unwary, and cases of beer, all set out on the ground, well below the height of the average dog’s cocked leg. A tip: if you choose to drink straight from the bottle in Spain, always give the top a really good wipe first.

The sign above the door read ‘Bodegas Sonas’, not that there was much chance of us getting it wrong. La Pera is not a shopper’s paradise. I suppose I was expecting the female equivalent of the man in the cafe-bar, and I guess Prim was too. The reality took us by surprise.

Inside the store was a tall woman, in her mid thirties, with jet black hair and skin which looked rich and creamy even in the dim light of her shop. It’s my observation that there is a time in the lives of members of the human species, in their early fifties, when everything seems to head south at once. Senora Sonas was a long way short of that. She was in her prime. As I looked at her, tall and dark-haired, I thought at once of Jan, and felt a momentary pain.

Prim took the lead this time. Speaking French, as she had in the bar, she explained, untruthfully of course, who she was, and what she and I were looking for.

‘That’s funny,’ said Senora Sonas, in almost flawless English. ‘Ronnie told me that he had no relatives alive.You’re not going to tell me now that he has a wife, are you?’

There was something in her tone that set the hair prickling at the back of my neck. Prim’s too, I discovered later. A faint sound made me look into the corner of the room. There, on a metal stand, I saw a carry-cot. I’m no expert, but I guessed that the sleeping child was around four months old. I glanced quickly at the woman’s left hand. There was no wedding ring; not even the mark of one.

‘No, Senora,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have one of those. The truth is he doesn’t have a cousin either. I’m Oz Blackstone, and this is Primavera Phillips. We’re investigators, trying to discover why he disappeared a year ago. He hasn’t been seen since.’

Her head dropped. ‘I was afraid that something had happened. I could never believe that he would just go off and leave me like that.’

For the sake of it, I had to ask. ‘The baby is …?’

She nodded.

‘Did he know, before he disappeared?’

‘No, but neither did I at that time.’

‘What happened?’

She held up a hand. ‘Wait.’ She stepped to the door and locked it, then turned the ‘Obert’ sign round to show ‘Tancat’. ‘Come through here,’ she said, and led the way through to a comfortable sitting room behind the shop. She sat in a chair by the stone fireplace and offered us seats opposite. ‘I used to live here,’ she said. ‘There is a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. Since I had my little boy, I’ve moved upstairs to the apartment. It’s lighter and there’s more room.’