Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘So what do you want to do?’ I asked Miguel, quietly, over my shoulder.

‘I want to move the other body. Tonight. Out of here, away from St Marti, somewhere else, where it will be found.’

‘You’re crackers, man!’ I tapped the side of my head.

‘Maybe. But will you help me?’

I gave it a couple of seconds’ thought. ‘Of course I will. No one ever accused me of being sensible either.’

‘You’re going to what!’ She had been straddling me on the bed; suddenly she sat bolt upright.

‘I’m going to help him,’ I repeated, staring up at her. ‘What else should I do? The guy’s beside himself with worry about it, and he’s got no one else. Shifting that lid will be a two-man job, and Jaume’s far too old for it.

‘Remember, Miguel’s the reason we’re here. He’s done us a huge favour, and if he’s got a problem, it’s up to us to help him out. We’re part of this community now. If Miguel says he knows what’s best for it, then even though it scares me shitless, I just think I have to go along with it.’

Prim frowned at me, and resumed her ministrations with Dettol-soaked cotton wool to the graze on my right temple, where I had bumped it on the coffin. I had come home unaware of the line of blood trickling down my face.

‘But won’t that make you both accessories after the fact, or something like that?’

‘I’d rather not think about that, thank you very much.’

‘Well what about this poor man?’ she said, severely. ‘From the way you described the condition of the skeleton, he can’t have been dead for all that long. Almost certainly, he’ll be on someone’s missing persons list. What about his family? Don’t they have rights?’

She dabbed again, a wee bit too hard, I thought, making me wince. ‘Easy on the antiseptic, love. They’ve got the same rights today as they had yesterday, but you could argue that thanks to Jordi and Miguel they’re nearer today to having them fulfilled. Miguel isn’t talking about burying the guy again. He plans to leave him in a place where he’s likely to be found.’

‘Such as?’ My arguments were having little or no effect on her disapproval level.

‘Well, hardly in the middle of the road, but in a place where he won’t be too hard to find yet where realistically he might have been since he was killed.’

She seemed to brighten up a bit. ‘I see. Then you and I might go for a walk one day and sort of trip over him. Accidentally. Yes?’

I wasn’t so sure about that idea, but I said ‘Yes,’ anyway.

‘Okay then,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘D’you want me to come with you tonight?’

I shook my head. ‘I think that would make Miguel uncomfortable. Anyway, two of us stumbling around in the dark will be quite enough.’

‘When are you meeting him?’

‘Three o’clock. I’ll try not to wake you, going out or coming back.’

She shook her head, shot me her best ‘Daft bugger!’ expression, and kissed me gently in the middle of the forehead. ‘Fair enough, but make damn sure you do one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Have a shower before you get back into bed!’

She jumped off me and headed for the bedroom door. ‘Change of subject,’ she called back to me. ‘Come on and I’ll show you our advertisement. I’ve got it written out.’ I followed her into the living room. We had added a writing bureau to our inherited furniture, to accommodate my lap-top and printer. The fall-flap was down and on it lay a sheet of paper. ‘There you are,’ said Prim, standing over it. ‘What d’you think?’

I scanned it, murmuring as I read.

Blackstone Spanish Investigations

Legal, Business, Personal

Member BEAA

Write Box No xxx

Until I eyeballed a skull at close quarters, I used to think that there was nothing as savage as the grin of a monkfish, cooked whole and taken straight from the oven.

Prim had returned from the peixateria — sounds so much more interesting than fishmonger, doesn’t it — beside the roundabout on the way into L’Escala, with two of the sublimely ugly fish, gutted but otherwise intact. We had cooked them whole, as we had seen it down in Meson del Conde, the restaurant on the lower side of the square, in a rich tomato and onion sauce, with sliced potatoes boiling in the juice.

Prim’s nursing experience came into play as she took them off the bone. All I could do was admire her skill, and stare back at the fish as they looked at me reproachfully, their huge mouths stretched in wicked smiles.

After that, we had an early night. Prim, unwakeable by an earthquake, fell into her usual depth of sleep while I dozed fitfully, dreaming occasionally of my dad, dressed as a pirate for Hallowe‘en, my nephew Jonathan, in a suit and speaking into a mobile phone, and Jan sitting cross-legged on the harbour wall at Anstruther, gazing out to sea through my big binoculars, with the wind ruffling her hair. As I looked at her, she lowered the glasses and turned towards me. ‘I know, Oz,’ she said. ‘See you.’ Then she went all fuzzy and turned, somehow, into Prim.

I was awake a couple of minutes before 2:55 a.m., the time at which I had set the alarm to ring. I cancelled it, slipped out of bed without waking Primavera — as if there was a chance — then put on my oldest jeans, sweatshirt and trainers, and went outside.

This time, Miguel was waiting for me out of sight, against the wall of the Casa Forestals. I didn’t see him at first, not until he stepped from out of the shadows, scaring me half to death. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was a full moon and a cloudless sky. Luckily it had occurred to Miguel. He had even catered for it. He beckoned me over to where the skeletons lay. As I stepped towards him I could see that he had set up a makeshift screen, a rough wooden framework covered with dark cloth. Behind it, we were screened completely from any insomniacs in the village.

The moon cast some light on the grave, but Miguel had added to it by wedging his torch between two rocks and directing its beam on to the coffin. ‘We have to move more earth, then lift the lid,’ he said. He handed me a funny sort of tool, a cross between a pickaxe and a shovel, with a short handle. Clearing the earth away didn’t take long, but raising the stone lid was a different matter. Since its original disturbance, soil had worked its way between the lid and base and had been turned by moisture into a form of cement. It took us twenty minutes of muffled chipping and levering with the sharp end of our implements before we could get the thing to budge. At last we swung it up and over, lowering it gently to avoid any chance of it breaking. The beam now shone full into the open coffin, reflecting on the white of the younger skull, and on the replica of my Dad’s Giorgio watch.

‘Okay, Miguel,’ I whispered. ‘That was the easy part. Now tell me, how the hell are we going to shift this poor bugger without him turning into a jigsaw puzzle?’

He looked at me, puzzled himself for a second until he caught on. Then he smiled, looking macabre in the torch light. I shuddered. Miguel has long canine teeth. I glanced up at the moon and looked furtively at him for signs of sprouting hair, or fingers turning into claws. ‘Like this,’ he said, and produced a bolt of black cloth, just like the one from which our screen was made.

Carefully, he spread it inside the coffin, beside the ragged skeleton. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we take care, and we roll him over into the sheet. See?’

I did as I was told. Together, very delicately, we reached behind and under the body, and very slowly, rolled it over into the waiting black shroud.