Inhuman Remains

Forty-four

It nagged at me, though. The more I thought about it, the whole damn business nagged at me. Frank had conned everybody, from the word go. Justin, his best friend, had told him about his wife’s problem. He had recalled that non-selling novel that his mother’s client had written and that undoubtedly he had read, and he had stolen the plot, lock, stock and smoking barrel.

He had conned Justin, Ludmila, Caballero, Hermann Gresch, every-damn-body. Who had fed Gresch his dope in number forty-seven? Frank, of course, and I was willing to bet that the final delivery had been spiked. Where had he found him? I took a guess, one that wouldn’t be hard to verify, with Justin’s help: in prison, and if so, sure as hell, he’d had a drug problem there too. The guy had been a tool, no more.

But weren’t we all? I thought back to the time I had spent with him. Most of all, he’d conned me: I’d been cast in the role of the gullible accomplice.

From the moment we’d hooked up in Sevilla, I’d been the softest touch of them all, falling for all the bluff and double-bluff. My fake abduction, set up on Frank’s orders by the desperate Ludmila, the rescue, painful for her, the frantic flight across Spain, had all been fake, and its ultimate purpose had been. . to make me an unassailable witness to Frank’s death and, in the process, his ticket to a life of luxury. Yes, Ludo had been stupid, but what did that make me?

Yet, I realised, at the time it had all been real, so real that for much of my time as a ‘fugitive’ I’d been genuinely, authentically scared. My cousin had to be some sort of a dark genius, the king of the fraudsters.

Worst of all, the cunning, needle-dick swine had even conned me into screwing him on board that damn sleeper train, with that scared, trembling act of his. I was sure that if I checked back, I’d find out that ours hadn’t been the last compartment available, as he’d claimed. Then there had been the next night, in the pool. . only. . No, I had to admit that maybe that was my idea as much as his, maybe even more.

And then there was Auntie Ade. He had conned her, too, into coming after him. Yes, of course he had. Except why, exactly, had he asked Ludmila to video my house? He’d had no intention of hiding out with me; clearly that was crap. So why had he done it? There could only have been one reason for that. He wanted to show Willie Venable the lie of the land when it came time for him to snatch Adrienne. But how had he known that she’d ever be there?

Because they both bloody well knew, that’s why. My outrageous old aunt had been in on it from the start. Those ashes had shown she was no more dead than he was; she and Frank had run off with the loot together!

As I pieced it all together I looked across at my son; he was digging a hole in the sand a few feet away from where I lay on the beach. ‘Tom,’ I asked him, ‘remember when you came back to the house and found that Aunt Adrienne had gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you take Charlie for a walk along the beach that morning? You know that dogs aren’t allowed there at this time of year.’

‘She told me to,’ he replied. ‘I told her that I wasn’t supposed to, but she made me. She said I’d get no breakfast if I didn’t.’

The old bitch! She’d bullied him out of the house so that she could pull her disappearing act with Venable, Frank’s hired gun. Except. .

Another huge ‘but’ exploded before my eyes. ‘But why would Frank hire real hit-men if all they were doing was role-playing?’ I asked, in a whisper. ‘And if they were pros, how did he ever get the drop on them and kill them?’ But, then, we’d all been Frank’s tools, hadn’t we?

That’s when it stopped being even slightly funny and got scary again.

When we were done on the beach, and Tom was in the shower washing off the sand before we went to Can Roura for dinner, I booted up my computer and went on line. Just for fun, I Googled up the names ‘Sebastian Loman’ and ‘Willie Venable’. I got no hits for hit-men, but I did come up with a fistful for Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the great twentieth-century American playwrights. Take Willy Loman, from Death of a Salesman, and Sebastian Venable, from Suddenly Last Summer, switch forenames and voilà.

The two ‘killers’ were fictional characters. Which meant?

I entered both plays in the search bar, added Spain, and in an instant I found myself looking at something called the Toronto Theatre Arts Group. The previous winter it had undertaken a tour of expat communities across Iberia, bringing the joys of Miller and Hemingway to retired coppers and retired villains along the Algarve and the Costa del Sol, with a one week stop-over in. . Sevilla.

I was hot on the trail. It took me only a few more seconds to find the group’s website. Its menu was extensive and included a section labelled ‘Performers’. I clicked on it, and a dozen faces popped up, with a short biography below each one.

The guys I was looking for were there. ‘Sebastian Loman’ was, in reality, Jerry Martis, from Uxbridge, Ontario. ‘Willie Venable’ was Jeff Paton, from Rochester, New York. Poor bastards.

They were actors, hired to play unorthodox roles for big bucks, I guessed. And Frank had written the script. He had shown them to Caballero and Ludmila, by having them ‘bodyguard’ her in Sevilla. He had sent them to intercept me in the tapas bar, to drop me their names, and feed me the clue that had taken us to Masia Josanto where, of course, they had been careful to make themselves known in advance. He had told Jerry to be in the Mezquita for me to spot. He had planned Jeff’s ‘abduction’ of his mother, with the aid of the video footage that the simpleton Ludmila had shot for him, and, no doubt, he had set up his own ‘kidnapping’, being careful to leave me his rucksack, with the mobile, so that it would be me who unravelled Adrienne’s video clue. Finally, he had put the trap for me in place, the one that had fooled me completely, so terrifying had it been.

Those two guys had earned their money. They hadn’t deserved the pay-off they’d been given. I knew what had happened. Just as ‘Lidia’ and Caballero had believed in Sevilla that their gun had been loaded with blanks, so had Jerry and Jeff, until they had handed it back to Frank and found out the terminal truth.

So that was it, the whole story. My cousin wasn’t just a con-man. He’d done what he had to in bringing down the curtain on a superb performance. He’d become a killer too. And my aunt had been a part of it. . unless, of course, her little bastard had buried her somewhere else. I wouldn’t put that past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him now.