A Coffin For Two

1

‘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.’