Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘What was the phone call about?’ she asked, at last. ‘Why did Fortunato want to see you?’

As I told her, her face grew more and more shocked. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Poor Shirley. We should stay with her.’

‘She doesn’t want that. Besides, the old chap’s here.’

‘No he isn’t. He’s gone. And stop calling him the old chap.’

‘When did he go? And why?’

She began to dress. ‘A while back. Before I had my swim. I think John’s coming early tomorrow, and Davidoff won’t stay here at the same time as him.’

‘He must be a real charmer, this John,’ I said. ‘He’d better be on his best behaviour tomorrow.’

We were half-way home before she asked me, ‘Who does Fortunato think killed Eames and Adrian? David Foy?’

I shook my head in the dark. ‘No, he’s not quoted. He’s too rich, for a start. This thing was about money, and for now the captain is putting his cash on Reis. He thinks she could have been in it from the start. And he could be right. We only have her word about the visit from Trevor.’

‘No,’ she said, violently. ‘No way. That poor girl. And her baby. She loved the man, Oz. I know that.’

And in the dark, she began to cry. She was still crying when we got home, and later as I kissed her face after she had made unexpected, furious love to me, I could still taste the salt of her tears, where they flowed soft, hot and wet.

I didn’t believe it was Reis either, not for an instant. I knew who did it from the moment I saw the photograph in Shirley’s kitchen. When I looked into the trunk of that Caddy, I knew I would see Adrian there, and in my blood, I knew who had executed him.

Fortunato held the girl for a couple of days, then let her go, as convinced finally of her innocence as I was.

He came to see us on the following Thursday, the day after we had seen Shirley and John off from Girona Airport, with Adrian’s body in their chartered aircraft. We met him for lunch at one of the few tables which was still set up outside Casa Minana, with the dying of the season.

‘There’s nothing you’re holding out on me?’ he asked. Behind him, in the doorway, Miguel watched us, nervously.

‘No. What we know for certain, you know for certain,’ I replied, truthfully. ‘Have you developed a theory yet?’

Fortunato shook his head. ‘It wasn’t the girl; I accept that now. And like you said, I squeezed that man Foy until he sweated blood. He’s a fool, and a bad friend to have, but no more than that.

‘I did think that it might have been your Mr Scott, getting even for being conned. The Scottish police interviewed him yesterday, and reported that he can prove that he was nowhere near Spain at the time of either murder. Then of course there was you two. You were in the thick of it, but I realised pretty quickly that you couldn’t have killed Adrian Ford.’

‘Thanks for that,’ said Primavera. ‘What made you see that?’

‘Simple. At the time he was being shot, you were in Ventallo, helping to discover Starr’s remains.’

‘I suppose you could have killed Trevor Eames, though. You didn’t, did you?’

‘Afraid not,’ I said.

‘That’s all right, then.’

‘So where do you go from here?’ Prim asked.

‘Back to my office, to sit and wait for something to turn up that I haven’t thought of. Only, Senor Oz and Senora Prim, I don’t think that it will. Of all the people who knew Starr well, only his girlfriend is left alive. I have spoken to everyone in La Pera, and in Pubol.

‘Some of them remember him, but none well. Most never even knew his name. I know that the picture which your Mr Scott bought is the key. If I could discover who painted that, or who gave it to Starr, the mystery might be solved. But I don’t see how I ever will find that out.’

‘What about Scott,’ I asked him, ‘and the way he bought the picture? Will there be any comeback on that?’

Fortunato laughed. ‘I’m no fucking tax man,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a shit about Scott, or the goddamn picture. Spain is not so cruel, Senor, that if a man is stupid enough to pay four hundred thousand dollars for a phoney Dali, she would expect him to pay tax on it as well. If he has a problem, it is in Britain.’

He finished his Cortado and stood up. ‘Thanks for lunch, and thanks for your help, when you finally got round to giving it. I got to go now.’

‘What’ll happen to Starr’s body?’ asked Prim.

‘Senora Sonas has claimed it. She is having him buried next Monday; properly, with respect, in La Pera.’

Of course, Prim and I went to Ronnie Starr’s funeral. We had expected to be the only people there, other than Reis, but we were wrong. Mrs Adams, the principal of the Cardiff Art College, had flown over to pay her respects. She took me by surprise; from her voice, I had expected her to be an Amazon, but in fact she was a small, fat woman with bad hair, the kind you would always walk past in a crowd.

The discovery of Starr’s body had made news in Britain, and as a result, the media outnumbered the mourners by two to one. They stood back silently as the coffin was slid into its hole in the white wall of the mausoleum, and as we filed out of the cemetery, but as soon as they were through the gates, they pounced on Reis.

Only one reporter approached us, a spotty wee girl in her mid-twenties. She had a Welsh accent, and she grinned all the time, as if she was enjoying her unexpected swan in Spain, regardless of the circumstances.

‘What’s your connection with the deceased?’ she asked, without an ‘excuse me’, or a ‘please’, just the arrogant assumption that she had a right to an answer.

I told her that her mother was a hand-maiden of the whore of Babylon and that her father was a wild boar, and then I invited her to fuck off. Since I told her all this in Spanish, she simply grinned some more and walked away, to find someone who would understand her stupid questions. I watched her go with a feeling of accomplishment: my Spanish was improving all the time.

As I watched her, I took a long look around for someone else, someone whom I thought just might have shown up, but I saw no one, save Reis, the principal, the TV cameraman, the reporters and the undertakers.

‘Come on,’ I said to Prim, ‘Let’s go along to Pubol.’

We drove the half-kilometre or so, and had a snack in the bar where I had sat last with Fortunato and with a stunned Shirley Gash. We were the only people there for a while, then an English family arrived, dad, mum and two loud, overindulged kids, over for half-term at the villa, as they announced to the owner.

I waited for a little longer, in case I caught sight of someone else, but eventually, we headed back to L’Escala, to devote more time to our expanding business.

The growing work-list was done on time, good and full reports were submitted to our clients, and invoices were prepared. It was good, healthy, stimulating activity, and as it proceeded, Prim seemed to recover from her shock over Adrian’s death, and possibly from delayed reaction to our encounters with the remains of Eames and Starr.

But for my part, I went through life as if I was in a bubble of unreality. Captain Fortunato had gone back to his office to wait for nothing to happen. Prim, even if she might be a little strange and distant, seemed to be putting the bizarre events behind us. Shirley Gash, who returned from England on the Friday after Starr’s funeral, came to us for dinner next day with her grief under control.

Looking at them across the table, making their small talk, I saw them suddenly as someone had once noticed some people on a famous football pitch. They thought it was all over. I knew it wasn’t.