Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘Have you always been here, Senora?’ Prim asked her.

She laughed. ‘Call me Reis, why don’t you; it’s my name. No, I’m really a furniture designer. I worked in agencies in Paris, Brussels, then Barcelona, until my father died a couple of years ago, and I came back here to sell the place. I realised soon that it was only worth anything as a going concern. Anyway, I could hardly close it and leave the village without a tabac or a bodega, or worse still, having to rely on that greedy bastard Mendes in the bar. So I kept it open while I waited for a buyer, and rented out the apartment to make some extra money.’

‘That’s how you met Starr?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Mendes sent him along to me at the beginning of July last year. I showed him the apartment and he took it for three months, rent paid in advance. He is very honest, is Ronnie: at least I thought so then.’

‘What does he look like?’ asked Prim.

‘He has fair hair, much the same colour as yours, and he is very good looking. When I saw him first, I thought he might be gay, but we became friends, then more than friends and I found out for sure that he is not. He is an artist, I am an artist too, of a sort. We had a lot in common.’

‘Did he tell you things about himself?’

Reis Sonas shrugged. ‘At the time I thought he did. Then, when he vanished and never wrote, I guessed that they had all been stories. He told me that he taught painting in a college in Wales, and sold some original work, not through the galleries, but to businesses, through interior design agencies, like the ones I worked for.

‘He said that like mine his father had died, a few years after his mother. He had sold their house, and they had left him a little money too. He came to Spain with the thought that after another year in college, he might come over here to paint. “In the footsteps of Dali,” he told me.

‘He is an expert on his work,’ she said, with sudden pride. ‘He knows everything about him. That was why he came here, to be near Gala’s castle in Pubol. He painted it. He took a photo of the plain, as you can see it from her window, and painted that. He went to Port Lligat and to Cadaques, and painted them.’

‘Did he ever paint like Dali?’ I asked her. ‘Did he copy his style?’

She nodded. ‘Sometimes he did. He is very good. The soft colours, the surreal subjects, he can do them all. Just like Dali, only not like him. Gentler in the concepts, you know what I mean. Not crazy, like he was.’

‘What did he do with this work? Did he show any of it?’

‘No, only to me. Then he painted over it, or burned it.’

‘What!’

‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she laughed. ‘Ronnie is a real artist, in his own way. Copying he would do for fun, or to teach a class, but he would never try to pass it off.’

‘You sure?’

‘Certain. He told me so, and he meant it. He meant that at least.’

I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you remember him ever painting a picture of a toreador?’ I asked her. ‘A toreador with a red cape and a tear running down his cheek?’

She looked at me as if she had caught me peering through her bedroom window. ‘How did you know about that?’

‘I’ve seen it. It was bought by a man in Scotland.’

She sighed and shook her head, ‘Ronnie did not paint that picture. I went up to the apartment one day, and it was there, in the room he used as his studio. I asked him if he had done it, but he said, “I know I’m good, but I’m not that good.” He said that he had been given it, as a present. I asked him who gave it to him, but he didn’t tell me. He just said that it was someone he had met. It was an incredible picture, a tour de force.’

‘Do you think it could have been an unknown Dali?’

Reis looked at me and made a face. ‘I can’t say that. I can’t say it wasn’t. But I got the feeling that Ronnie thought it might have been. Not from anything he said, but from the way he looked at it, like it was a holy relic.’

‘Can you remember when you saw the picture?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, it was the twenty-fifth of September, last year. That’s my birthday, that’s how I know. I came up to the apartment and saw the picture, we had a drink, and then we went to the restaurant in Pubol and had dinner.

‘Over dinner, Ronnie said that he was thinking about leaving the college right then, rather than a year later. He asked me how I would feel about not going back to Barca, but about us setting up home together, in La Pera or somewhere else around here.

‘I said that sounded like a damn fine idea.’ A tear came to her eye but she kept control. ‘There and then, he took off the gold chain from round his neck, and gave it to me. “Till I can buy a ring,” he said.’ She reached up to her throat, and held the chain out for us to see. ‘I didn’t get no ring,’ she snorted. ‘I got Felipe instead. Ronnie said that he would have to go back to Wales to sort things out with the college. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when the man came.’

I frowned at her. ‘What man?’

‘An Englishman named Trevor. I’d met him once in the bar with Ronnie.’

‘Was there another man with him? Around forty, medium everything?’

‘Yes there was, but he never told me his name. I never saw him again after that.’

‘So when did Trevor come?’ I asked.

‘Two days after my birthday. The day after it, I went to Barca, to visit a girlfriend. I told Ronnie about it and said I’d be staying overnight. He said okay, and that he would look after the shop for me.

‘When I got back, the shop was closed, and there was no sign of Ronnie. I opened up and a couple of hours later, Trevor came in. He said that he had a message from Ronnie. He told me that he had to drive back to Wales very suddenly, the evening before, and had asked Trevor to pick up his things and send them on.’

‘What things?’

‘That’s what I asked. “All of them,” Trevor said. “His clothes, and his pictures.” He said that Ronnie needed those for the college.’

‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that he had left without them?’

‘Sure it did, at first. But Trevor explained that they had been having a drink on the previous afternoon when Ronnie had gone off to make a call to the college. He had returned in a panic and had said that the college wanted him back before the end of the next working day. “Or else,” were the words Trevor used. He had to leave then if he was going to make it back in time, in his little car. He had been worried about his clothes and pictures, but Trevor had told him that his friend, the other guy, whose name I didn’t know, was going back to England next day, and that he would take them and drop them off in Cardiff.’

‘So you gave Trevor Ronnie’s clothes and all his pictures?’

‘Not all,’ she said. ‘I kept the one of Gala’s castle, and of the plain. Ronnie gave me those as my birthday presents. They’re upstairs, still. But the others I gave to Trevor, with his clothes.’

‘Including the Toreador?’

‘Yes. That and the painting of Cadaques.’

‘What about the Port Lligat painting?’ I asked.

‘Ronnie told me he had traded that. But he didn’t say where. Artists do that all the time; trade pictures for materials, or meals in restaurants.’

‘When he didn’t contact you,’ asked Prim, sympathetically, ‘did you try to get in touch with him, after a while?’

Reis shook her head. ‘No. I knew I was pregnant by then. I reckoned that if Ronnie had wanted to get in touch with me he would. So I decided that he had been lying to me; and because of that I decided also that I would bring up my baby on my own.’

Her jaw was set in a hard line. Suddenly she didn’t look quite so pretty.