Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘Senor Oz! Are you there, please?’

I don’t believe that I sighed a lot in Scotland. I like to think that if someone asked me something, or if the phone rang, I answered as quickly and as pleasantly as I could.

Of course there were exceptions, like the time my mobile went off on the bedside cabinet just when I thought that my girlfriend Tomorrow — she was called Alison really — was about to lose her nickname at last. She gasped, under my skilled and delicate touch. She gasped again. Her eyes widened, and as they did, something else seemed to narrow. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘Is this it?’ she whispered. And then Mr Motorola sang his shrill, insistent wee song. The moment was gone, never to return.

I remember sighing then. Truth is, I remember swearing.

But by and large, the Edinburgh version of Osbert Blackstone was a happy, obliging soul, who never minded being disturbed, and who was always glad to see a pal.

‘Oz! Please! Are you there!’ The familiar voice, crying up from the pathway thirty feet below, had an unfamiliar, insistent tone.

I sighed; and I scowled. As I did, I caught my reflection in the mirror propped against the terrace wall. For an instant, I wondered who that sour-faced bloke was: in that same instant I realised that what Primavera had said was true. The Spanish version of Oz was well on the way to becoming a real slob.

I blinked hard and pushed myself up from my sunbed. A few months before I would have jumped up, but now three and a half kilos of extra baggage slowed me down.

‘It’s okay, Miguel,’ I called out as I stepped towards the seaward wall. ‘I’m here.’

I leaned over the wall, feeling my back, bum, and legs washed by the soft warmth of the autumn sun. Our Catalan neighbour stared up at me, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and apparently, now that he had attracted my attention, speechless. He stood in the shadow of the building, dressed as always in dark trousers and a white polyester shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Behind him, beyond the fringing trees, only a few white tops flicked the big blue crescent of the Bay of Roses, on which half a dozen wind-surfers were struggling in vain to gather some momentum in the Indian summer conditions.

Although Miguel is as amiable a bloke as you’d ever hope to meet, when you catch him off guard his natural expression is sombre. However I’d never seen him looking scared before. There was no mistaking it. The unofficial Deputy Mayor of St Marti d’Empuries looked as if he had had the fright of his life.

‘What’s up?’ I asked him. My brain felt sluggish, the aftermath of half a bottle of Miguel’s house vi negre over lunch, half an hour’s sleep, a couple of beers and half of a heavy discussion, interrupted, just at the right moment, by his shout.

‘Can you come down please, Senor Oz,’ he said, wringing his hands with anxiety, a gesture which I might have found comical, had it not been for the expression on his face. Normally he’s a faintly amusing guy in an unconscious sort of way. Looking up at me from the pathway, he was about as funny as the Callas scene from Philadelphia.

‘Sure, but what is it?’

‘Is my son.’

‘What! Has something happened to him?’

He shook his dark head, violently. ‘No. He is all right. But you know, he likes to be, what’s the word, archaeologist?’

‘Si,’ I said, slipping unconsciously into Spanish.

‘Just now, he find something. By the church, in front of the Forestals’ House. Can you come an’ look, please. There is no one else here. Everywhere is closed. And I need a witness.’

‘Okay, man, okay.’ I picked up a towel from the terrace floor and tied it round my middle, then stood up straight. ‘I’m coming down, but what is it? What’s Jordi found?’

His long face twisted even more. ‘Is a body, Senor Oz. It is a body.’

‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

Primavera put her drink on the tiled floor of the terrace, and propped herself up on an elbow. She was wearing the bottom half of a yellow bikini, and a sad and disappointed frown. There was something about the frown which made me forget all about the rest of her.

In most people’s lives there comes a moment when they are convinced that they have discovered perfection on two legs.

Invariably, absolutely without exception, they are wrong.

Nobody’s perfect. I know that now. But when first I clapped eyes on Primavera Phillips, I really believed that she was that one unique being. I went on believing that, all the way through our incredible adventure, right up to the moment when she saved our lives in that wood in Geneva, and beyond that … for a few more days.

Yes, I thought the sun shone out of every orifice in Prim’s body, until the moment when she put her proposition to me; the moment when, sat there in my old Nissan, with our client’s nine hundred and something thousand quid in a bag in the back ready to be returned to him, she stuck that gun (okay, it was empty, but just for one moment …) in my ribs and proposed that we should keep the lot. It came as a total surprise when she showed me that she was susceptible to greed and lust just like everyone else.

She really would have taken all of the money and run, leaving our client up to his neck in the ordure. For a while I almost ran alongside her. When you have that amount of dough in your hands, never being able to come home again doesn’t seem like much of a problem.

That was when my mum put in an appearance.

As I pondered the opportunity of being a near-millionaire, I saw her there in my car, quite clearly, over Prim’s shoulder. Just like Prim on the terrace, she was frowning and shaking her head with that sad resignation which came over her whenever I had done something really stupid, or when she had caught me in the act of it.

When I was a kid in Anstruther, my maw had a great knack of showing up at the very moment when I didn’t want to see her. Wee Oz and mischief tended to be synonymous, and my wrong-doings seemed to draw her like a magnet. I looked at my vision of her, over Prim’s shoulder in the car, and I remembered that awful pre-pubescent time, when inexplicable curiosities started to stir, questions that had never occurred before, about how boys and girls are different, and why, exactly.

There I’d been, crouched at the bathroom door, peering through the keyhole with one wide eye at my sister’s white bum and tanned thigh as she stepped carefully into the bath, managing without knowing it to answer none of my questions.

She hadn’t coughed, said ‘ahemm’ or anything. My maw wasn’t a theatrical person. I’d simply known that she was there from the way the hairs had prickled on the back of my neck. I fancy still that I heard a very quiet ‘pop’ as I unglued my eyeball from the keyhole and turned round.

She had worn the same expression then, a sad disappointed frown. She hadn’t said a word, just shaken her head and turned away.

Mac and Flora, my dad and maw, weren’t smackers. In all our childhood, they never laid a finger on Ellie or me. They didn’t even shout at us … well, hardly ever. Whenever either of us transgressed they simply let us know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we had disappointed them; we knew that they didn’t love us any the less because of our sin, but that it had made them sad because they loved us so much. That hurt more, and had a more curative effect than any leathering, I can tell you.

So I looked over my lover’s shoulder at my lost mother’s frown, and I knew that Flora Blackstone hadn’t raised the sort of lad who could run off with someone else’s money and live with himself thereafter. I realised, in a split-second spasm of remembered grief, the extent to which I’d missed her since she died. I realised too that I did not love Primavera Phillips more than I’d ever loved any woman who ever lived.