A Coffin For Two

10

The phone rang early next morning, around 8:30 a.m.. Well, it was early for us. I swung myself around to sit on the edge of the bed and picked up the portable hand set from its cradle.

‘Hola,’ I mumbled, expecting it to be one of the many wrong numbers generated by the L’Escala exchange.

‘And hola to you too, son,’ said Mac the Dentist. ‘Rub the sleep out of your voice, for fuck’s sake. What’s happened to the old rise and shine Oz? Jesus, here am I, all ready for a day’s drilling and filling and you’re still sounding like last night’s washing up.’ As an irregular user of the telephone my father has no idea of proper etiquette. Under that heading I include niceties like not phoning before breakfast.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I croaked. ‘I had a busy day yesterday. I did eight or nine hundred miles.’

‘Aye, I know. Your sister told me all about it. Allan phoned her last night, like he promised you. They had a civilised conversation, he said he was sorry about that lawyer’s letter, and he spoke to the boys … well to Jonathan, at least. Wee Colin hadn’t a clue who he was; he thought it was you, in fact.

‘The upshot is, he’s agreed to a separation. Ellen spoke to Jan’s pal Noosh, and she’s going to draw up an informal agreement, recording the date of the split and the arrangements for custody and child support. There’s a half-term holiday next month. He’s going to take time off and come over then, to see the kids and sign on the dotted line.’

I grunted. ‘That’s good. I don’t think as badly of the guy now, you know. He just needed to be made to see past his own pressures and his own needs. He’s a workaholic; the truth is that a family’s just a distraction to him.’

My dad grunted. ‘Aye, that’s probably so. Tell you, though, he’ll get a shock when he sees our Ellie again. So’ll you, for that matter. The wee fat barrel is no more. She’s lost at least a stone and a half, she’d had a decent haircut and she’s started taking care of her appearance again.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done more than you know for your sister, son. She told me that if you and Prim hadn’t turned up in France, and made her see what was happening to her, she’d probably never have got out of her rut. She’d just have drifted quietly into a miserable middle age. Now she’s young again.’

I smiled at the thought. ‘Ahh, that’s good. But how about you? How are you and Auntie Mary getting on?’

‘Perfectly well, son. Perfectly well. As a matter of fact, I’ve more or less moved in with Mary. For the moment at least, while Ellie’s in Anstruther. It’s better for the boys to be alone with their mother. I’m Grandad, and I want to stay that way. I don’t want them to start thinking of me as any form of dad, and if we were all under the one roof that could happen. I’ll move back in when Allan gets here, as a sort of chaperone if you like, but until then I’m leaving the three of them to get on with it.’

There was a silence on the line for a couple of seconds. At last I asked him the obvious. ‘So? Or are your intentions strictly dishonourable?’

‘Cheeky bastard,’ my dad growled. ‘You’re in no position to ask me that, after you and Jan built up our hopes for years. But since you have asked, I’ll tell you. We’re going to let Ellen get herself sorted out, and fixed up with a place to live. She’s looking for a permanent job, in Fife, Dundee or Edinburgh. Meantime, Allan’s going to sell the house in Perrouges and move himself into Lyon. When he’s done that, she’ll get herself a flat somewhere handy for her work.

‘Once all that’s taken care of, Mary and I will expect you and Jan to chum us to the Registry Office in St Andrews, as best man and bridesmaid.’

I beamed, wide awake now. ‘That’s great. When d’you reckon? Around Christmas, maybe?’

‘Possibly. But not a word to a soul, apart from Jan and Primavera. If it leaks out in advance I’ll have your balls for paperweights.’

‘Promise. See you at Christmas, then.’

‘Before that, I hope. Here, have you spoken to Jan lately?’

‘Aye. On Monday, in fact. She sounded fine.’

‘Mmm,’ said my dad. ‘I rather think she is. See you when I see you.’ He hung up.

As I replaced the phone in its charger, I felt an arm slip around my waist and pull me back into bed. ‘Was Mac saying what I thought he was saying?’ Prim asked.

‘Yup. I’m going to be best man. Around Christmas.’ I rolled around and squeezed her bum, friendly like. ‘How about making it a double event?’

She wove her fingers into my chest hair and tugged, hard enough to get my attention. ‘Like we’ve agreed, there’s no rush. A year or two down the road we can think about that.’

‘Come on now, darlin’. A year or two’s a long way off’

‘Exactly.’

‘The point my dad was making …’

She cut me off, frowning. ‘I can guess. It was that you and Jan dithered around so long that eventually you went off the idea. Well, I’m going to allow us time to find out whether the same could happen to us.’

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s with this “I”? This is a “we” thing.’

Her frown vanished, and she reached down. ‘I wouldn’t say that, darling. Not at all!’

With one thing and another, it was early afternoon before we set out on the walk which we had discussed over supper in the Trattoria. I went for my morning run, part of my routine since catching sight of my spreading middle in the mirror a few days before, then swam in the sea with Prim, before lunching at Casa Minana on Catalan salad and chips … well, you can’t give everything up.

Miguel smiled as he brought our meals, and nodded towards the Casa Forestals. The town hall’s site workers had gone, replaced by half a dozen earnest young people in shorts and Tshirts. ‘The archaeologists,’ he said, loud enough for the diners at the other tables to hear. ‘They have found a Roman body. They are very excited. It has a bracelet, an’ they think this means that he was a very important man. A governor, maybe. They think they may know who he was. It was on Catalan television last night. Is very good for St Marti. It means lots of extra visitors this weekend. Lots of extra business. Very good.’

When we set out for L’Escala, finally, I was still swelled with inner pride over my contribution to the local tourist industry. To make our search as authentic as possible we walked all the way, along the walkway behind the beaches, then following the road past the garages, heading up towards the Hiperstel supermarket and the entrance to the town.

That was where it got difficult. I remembered Miguel making a turn, but suddenly I was faced with a choice of three. I picked one with absolute certainty. We headed along the straight road, past villas on either side for almost a kilometre, before it ran out in open country, with only a bare, tree-less hillside in sight. We retraced our steps, with Prim grumbling not a little, and looked along the second option, which we decided ran too close to the first to be a likely choice. Finally, we made the third turn. There before us was a white building with ‘Tenis-Bar’ emblazoned along its side.

‘This is the one,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten about that bar.’

‘Better you hadn’t told me that,’ muttered Prim, looking flushed, hot and sticky. ‘Is it open?’

Sadly it was closed. We headed along the road, following my path of three nights before. The first part of the road was made up, but in common with much of that sprawling part of outer L’Escala, the tarmac soon ran out. I remembered the teeth-jarring bumps in Miguel’s pick-up as we walked along the hard, rutted pathway. The trees began to appear fairly early on in the gardens of villas built on either side of the road. All but a very few were empty, their owners back at work in France, Belgium, Germany, or maybe Barcelona. Eventually, the houses simply came to an end. There was a small development of apartments on our right, then nothing but trees.

‘Is this it?’ asked Prim.

‘On a bit yet,’ I said. ‘Miguel drove till we were out of sight of any houses.’ We trudged on until the trees before us were so thick that no truck could pass, or no moonlight could penetrate. ‘It has to be around here. Maybe we were nearer the edge of the forest than this.’

Beside me, Prim shivered in the warmth of the afternoon. I knew that she was remembering, like me, the last time we had been together in a forest, and how narrowly we had escaped with our lives. ‘I don’t like this, Oz,’ she said. I had never heard her sound scared before.

‘No. Me neither. Come on.’ I led her quickly away to the right, to where the trees were thinnest and the light brightest. All at once we could see the edge of the wood, and the bare brown fields beyond. I looked around, and all of a sudden I saw two pines, close together, thirty yards away. ‘There.’ I pointed. ‘I’m sure that’s where Miguel stopped.’

We hurried across and stood between them. The fields sloped down, and looking northwest we could see the great Pyrrenean skyline, carved in its blue background, with lines of snow on its highest peaks. Much closer stood two old barns, converted into discos, and on the far side of the road to Bellcaire, the go-kart track.

The drainage ditch — never a firebreak, as I could see in the daylight — was only a few feet away. I took Prim’s hand and led us to it. Together we looked down its length.

There was nothing to be seen.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Oz!’ She exploded. ‘After all that, you’ve brought us to the wrong place.’

I shook my head. ‘No! This is it. We must have put him further down than I thought. Come on. Let’s walk down the length of it. But remember, act casual. We can be seen from over there.’

Hand in hand, we ambled casually down the fringe of the wood, on the edge of the ditch, expecting with every step to find a skeleton, and planning our ‘shock, horror’ reactions for the benefit of anyone who might have been watching us from a distance. But there was nothing. Not a trace, not a scrap, not a sign. Eventually the ditch simply stopped.

Silently, we turned and retraced our steps, bumbling along with growing dismay. Eventually we found ourselves back at our starting point. ‘Well, smartarse,’ said Prim, ironically. ‘Still so confident?’

I was not amused, and was about to tell her so, when something caught my eye. A few feet beyond us, the ditch sloped downwards towards the town out of our sight. Just on the curve I saw that a number of twigs and broken branches lay on its northern bank.

‘Look there,’ I said, pulling her with me as I moved forward again, no longer giving a stuff about onlookers. We reached the wooden debris in a few strides, and stared into the ditch. It was empty.

‘But this is it,’ I said. ‘I’m certain. We put a few branches over him to cover him, and make it look as if he could have been here for a while. Some bastard’s beaten us to it.’

Prim let my hand go and knelt beside the ditch, then leaned in and picked something up, something that had been half hidden by a stone. She held it up and gazed at it, appraisingly. ‘Big toe,’ she said at last. ‘I was good at anatomy. You’re right. Someone’s found your body.’

‘In that case,’ I said. ‘I suggest that we get out of here … fast. Because we’ve just sent a signal to anyone who might be watching this place that we are after it too.’