Quintin Jardine: A Coffin For Two

I finished my San Miguel in a single swallow, took another from the ice bucket, twisted off the top, and stared across at her, unsmiling. Temper tantrums were strangers to me. I had a feeling that I was about to say something very bad, something about once a nurse always a sergeant major, something about not trying to run my fucking life. It didn’t occur to me for a second to look for a funny line to divert her with laughter. It didn’t even occur to me that I might have looked a wee bit ridiculous, lying there naked and quivering with petulance.

I took another swig of beer, then a deep breath, as if I was fuelling the tirade to come.

‘Senor Oz! Are you there, please?’

‘Okay, Miguel. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll see you at the church.’

He nodded and I turned away from the wall. I was alone on the terrace. Prim’s lounger was empty, although a bisected crescent in the cushion marked the spot where she had been sitting.

I stepped from the sunlight into the cool darkness of the living room. She was leaning against the bedroom door. I looked at her big brown eyes. The lasers had been switched off, and normal sparkling conditions restored, with perhaps an added hint of contrition.

As I came up to her she reached out for the towel around my waist, unfastening it and using it to pull me towards her. I felt two hard nipples warm against my chest, as her mouth reached up for mine. I kissed her, a bit warily still.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ she whispered, ‘sounding off like that. But I really do want it to work for us. Can we give it a try?’

I looked down at her.

‘Please?’ she said, very quietly.

My conversation with Miguel had already done something for my lethargy level. That wide-eyed look was enough to do the rest. ‘Okay, partner. Let’s try it out. But it’s Blackstone and Phillips, mind, not the other way around.’

Primavera beamed up at me. ‘Tell you what,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s call ourselves Blackstone Spanish Investigations. My mother doesn’t expect me to live in sin forever, you know.’

I gulped. Marriage, for us, was a bit like death. Probably on the agenda, only we weren’t sure when.

She let go of the towel and grasped my bum in both hands. ‘And now, since we’ve nothing better to do before dinner …’

I disengaged her. ‘Ah but I have,’ I said. ‘I have to meet Miguel, now. You draw up the ads. We can fax them to Jan tonight and ask her to place them.’

She nodded. ‘Okay. What did Miguel want, anyway? I couldn’t hear.’

‘It was about young Jordi. He’s found a body.’

‘Oh,’ said Prim. ‘I see.’

Finding a body in St Marti is not, actually, all that uncommon an occurrence.

The village has renewed itself time and time again, on the same site, over the last couple of millennia. Even the church isn’t any more than a few centuries old … or most of it, since there is a stone over the door which dates back over a thousand years.

People have lived there pretty well continuously all that time, and nature being what it is they’ve died there too. All that history is lying there in layers beneath the surface, and you don’t have to scratch too deep before you begin to find it. Every time the locals dig up a drain or lay a cable there’s a fair chance they’ll find an ancestor.

During the previous few weeks the town council of L’Escala, which is responsible for the village, had put men to work on the area in front of and alongside the Casa Forestals, the foresters’ house, clearing and levelling the site, making it ready to be transformed into a paved public viewpoint.

I could see Miguel pacing about restlessly in front of the church as I stepped out of our yellow front door, back into the sunshine in my shorts, sandals and Runrig T-shirt. To my surprise, he was smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen him do before. Yet the Minana family had been in St Marti for as long as their records went back, so I guessed that it was the possibility that young Jordi’s find might have been his great-great-great-great-great granny that was making him so twitchy. Something else surprised me. In the bright light of day, he was carrying a black, rubber-bound Ever Ready torch.

He turned as I approached. ‘Ahh, Oz. Thank you for coming. I am sorry if I interrupted your siesta. You do not bring Senora Prim? No. Is good.’

I smiled at his concern for my beloved. After the year she had spent as a nurse in an African war zone, not to mention our escapade in Switzerland, I was pretty certain that there was nothing beneath the soil of St Marti to make her bat an eyelid.

‘No problem, Miguel. So, where’s your old Roman warrior?’

He gave me a strange look. ‘Over here, come on.’ He led the way across the crown of the square, towards the excavations around the foresters’ house. It was late afternoon on a Monday in late September, one of the very few occasions on which the hub of St Marti is likely to be completely deserted.

‘When did Jordi do his digging?’ I asked.

‘This afternoon, once the men had finished work for the day. He likes the archaeology. He says that he wants to go to study it at university. My father says that like us he should work in the bar and on our farm, but I say, we’ll see.’

He beckoned me on, round to the side of the tall house, to the narrow area which lay between it and the church. The ground was uneven, littered with stones and clumps of dried yellow soil, with the remnants of vegetation wound through it. The workers had marked the walls of the church and the house to show where, eventually, the line of the new viewpoint would be.

Miguel pointed to a patch of ground in the shadow of the house, almost against the wall. ‘There it is. Look.’ I followed his pointing finger, bending to see better.

It lay just below the level to which the men had been digging. I could see what young Jordi’s sharp eye had picked up, and how he had gone about exposing it handful by handful. It was the lid of a stone coffin. It had been pulled aside, exposing about half of the width of the chamber, but not recently, for despite young Jordi’s excavation I could see that it was still partly full of soil.

The body was there all right. The skull grinned up at me, its big teeth standing out and its eye sockets full of dry yellow earth. It was a big skull, and the bones of the shoulders seemed wide. I guessed that this had been a man, and probably an important one at that, to have merited a coffin, since most of the early inhabitants of St Marti had been buried in shrouds. I looked down the length of the skeleton, as the boy had exposed it. All the bits seemed to be there as it lay stretched out on its bed of clay. Something on the left wrist caught my eye. I leaned a bit closer. It was a bracelet, about an inch and a half wide, with a finely worked design showing where Jordi had rubbed away the dirt.

I stood up and looked at Miguel. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘You were right. It’s a body. Now what do you want me to witness?’

He looked at me still frowning. ‘Eventually, I want you to say that there was nothing there but the bracelet when we find him. The archaeologists are very suspicious. They may say that there was something else and that Jordi took it.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I trus’ you, that’s why.’

I smiled at the compliment. Then an idea struck me. ‘I’ll get my camera and take a photo. That should satisfy them.’

A look of horror flashed across his face. ‘No, no! You must not. There is something else. Look again.’ Hesitantly he handed me the torch.

I took it and knelt down beside the stone coffin, noticing for the first time how deep it was. I shone the torch inside, looking more closely at the centuries-old skeleton, beginning to feel a wee bit ghoulish.