A Coffin For Two

42

It was lunchtime when finally we arrived at the cafe-bar in what passes for the main street in La Pera. It wasn’t difficult to find, being the only one in town. Prim had stopped short of the detective kit, settling instead for a cotton skirt and the style of white blouse in which, on occasion, she could stop heavy traffic.

The owner was fifty-something, a short, round-shouldered man, with a bad shave and greased hair. The sleeves of his creased, blue-and-white striped shirt were rolled up and he smelled of stale tobacco. When we walked in he had been deep in conversation with his only customer.

He leered at Prim as we took two seats at the bar. I could sense her displeasure, but she kept a smile set on her face.

I ordered a cafe con leche para mi, and a copa de vino blanco para la senora, in perfectly acceptable Spanish. The man gave an approving nod, and set a dish of small sweet olives before us as he prepared the drinks. I glanced around his cafe. There were bench seats along the wall between the two doors, and at the far end, beyond the bar, a dozen tables waited in vain for diners. The place was badly in need of a paint job, but it was clean and tidy. It reminded me a lot of Al Forn, in Tarragona. I wondered how long it had been in the same family, and whether there was another generation ready to take over.

The man came back with the coffee and wine. I thanked him and plundered my Spanish once more. Slowly and carefully I told him that we were from Escocia, and that we were looking for someone who had been in La Pera a year before, a cousin of la senora aqui. He frowned at me and replied in Catalan, a long rambling sentence.

I couldn’t understand a word, but I knew what he was saying all right because I had encountered the same attitude many times before. He was telling me, ‘I’ll respond to your pidgin Spanish to sell you food and drink, but if you want information from me, boy, you’d better be able to talk to me in my own language.’ It can be put much less subtly than that. In Port Lligat, there is a notice painted on the wall beside the jetty which reads: ‘Only Catalan spoken here.’

Before I could even glare at the guy, Prim saved the day. She smiled at him and asked him the same question in perfect French, her eyes wide and beguiling. The man looked at her for a second or two, and was duly beguiled. He replied, in French as good as hers, even if his accent was a bit guttural.

They spoke quickly, so I couldn’t follow all of it. When they were done, and when the man had retired to resume his conversation with his crony, she filled in the blanks. ‘He remembers my cousin Ronnie,’ she said. ‘I was right. My friend says that Starr arrived here last summer. He remembers him very well because he spoke Catalan. Not many foreigners do. He had a meal here, and he took a room above the bar for one night.

‘Next day he told him that he liked the place and wanted to find an apartment so that he could stay longer, somewhere with a little space for him to paint. At the end of this street there’s a tabac and liquor store run by a Senora Sonas. There’s an apartment above it which she used to rent out. It was empty at the time and so my friend sent him there.

‘He took it, and he was here all summer. In the autumn, he said, he just went away; back to Wales, he assumed. He says that Senora Sonas will be able to tell us everything about my cousin Ronald.’

I squeezed her hand. ‘Bullseye,’ I said. ‘Did you ask him if Starr ever came here with friends?’

‘Of course I did. He says that he remembers him being here a couple of times with deux Anglais. One of them was a bald man, smallish, heavily tanned. He can’t remember anything about the other one. Not young, not old, well dressed; that’s all.’

I looked at my watch. It was almost two o‘clock. ‘Sod it,’I said. ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait to see Senora Sonas. She’ll be shut for the afternoon.’

Prim shook her head. ‘No. He says she doesn’t close. The people here smoke a lot, it seems. They like the tabac to be open all day long.’ She finished her drink and the last of the olives. ‘Come on,’ she said, waving goodbye to her new pal, ‘let’s go and see her.’

As far as I can see there’s never quite enough room inside Spanish village liquor stores, for some of the stock is always lying out in the street; big carafes of dodgy wine, plastic blocks of spring water, much of it drawn free from the village well and sold to the unwary, and cases of beer, all set out on the ground, well below the height of the average dog’s cocked leg. A tip: if you choose to drink straight from the bottle in Spain, always give the top a really good wipe first.

The sign above the door read ‘Bodegas Sonas’, not that there was much chance of us getting it wrong. La Pera is not a shopper’s paradise. I suppose I was expecting the female equivalent of the man in the cafe-bar, and I guess Prim was too. The reality took us by surprise.

Inside the store was a tall woman, in her mid thirties, with jet black hair and skin which looked rich and creamy even in the dim light of her shop. It’s my observation that there is a time in the lives of members of the human species, in their early fifties, when everything seems to head south at once. Senora Sonas was a long way short of that. She was in her prime. As I looked at her, tall and dark-haired, I thought at once of Jan, and felt a momentary pain.

Prim took the lead this time. Speaking French, as she had in the bar, she explained, untruthfully of course, who she was, and what she and I were looking for.

‘That’s funny,’ said Senora Sonas, in almost flawless English. ‘Ronnie told me that he had no relatives alive.You’re not going to tell me now that he has a wife, are you?’

There was something in her tone that set the hair prickling at the back of my neck. Prim’s too, I discovered later. A faint sound made me look into the corner of the room. There, on a metal stand, I saw a carry-cot. I’m no expert, but I guessed that the sleeping child was around four months old. I glanced quickly at the woman’s left hand. There was no wedding ring; not even the mark of one.

‘No, Senora,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have one of those. The truth is he doesn’t have a cousin either. I’m Oz Blackstone, and this is Primavera Phillips. We’re investigators, trying to discover why he disappeared a year ago. He hasn’t been seen since.’

Her head dropped. ‘I was afraid that something had happened. I could never believe that he would just go off and leave me like that.’

For the sake of it, I had to ask. ‘The baby is …?’

She nodded.

‘Did he know, before he disappeared?’

‘No, but neither did I at that time.’

‘What happened?’

She held up a hand. ‘Wait.’ She stepped to the door and locked it, then turned the ‘Obert’ sign round to show ‘Tancat’. ‘Come through here,’ she said, and led the way through to a comfortable sitting room behind the shop. She sat in a chair by the stone fireplace and offered us seats opposite. ‘I used to live here,’ she said. ‘There is a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. Since I had my little boy, I’ve moved upstairs to the apartment. It’s lighter and there’s more room.’

‘Have you always been here, Senora?’ Prim asked her.

She laughed. ‘Call me Reis, why don’t you; it’s my name. No, I’m really a furniture designer. I worked in agencies in Paris, Brussels, then Barcelona, until my father died a couple of years ago, and I came back here to sell the place. I realised soon that it was only worth anything as a going concern. Anyway, I could hardly close it and leave the village without a tabac or a bodega, or worse still, having to rely on that greedy bastard Mendes in the bar. So I kept it open while I waited for a buyer, and rented out the apartment to make some extra money.’

‘That’s how you met Starr?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Mendes sent him along to me at the beginning of July last year. I showed him the apartment and he took it for three months, rent paid in advance. He is very honest, is Ronnie: at least I thought so then.’

‘What does he look like?’ asked Prim.

‘He has fair hair, much the same colour as yours, and he is very good looking. When I saw him first, I thought he might be gay, but we became friends, then more than friends and I found out for sure that he is not. He is an artist, I am an artist too, of a sort. We had a lot in common.’

‘Did he tell you things about himself?’

Reis Sonas shrugged. ‘At the time I thought he did. Then, when he vanished and never wrote, I guessed that they had all been stories. He told me that he taught painting in a college in Wales, and sold some original work, not through the galleries, but to businesses, through interior design agencies, like the ones I worked for.

‘He said that like mine his father had died, a few years after his mother. He had sold their house, and they had left him a little money too. He came to Spain with the thought that after another year in college, he might come over here to paint. “In the footsteps of Dali,” he told me.

‘He is an expert on his work,’ she said, with sudden pride. ‘He knows everything about him. That was why he came here, to be near Gala’s castle in Pubol. He painted it. He took a photo of the plain, as you can see it from her window, and painted that. He went to Port Lligat and to Cadaques, and painted them.’

‘Did he ever paint like Dali?’ I asked her. ‘Did he copy his style?’

She nodded. ‘Sometimes he did. He is very good. The soft colours, the surreal subjects, he can do them all. Just like Dali, only not like him. Gentler in the concepts, you know what I mean. Not crazy, like he was.’

‘What did he do with this work? Did he show any of it?’

‘No, only to me. Then he painted over it, or burned it.’

‘What!’

‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she laughed. ‘Ronnie is a real artist, in his own way. Copying he would do for fun, or to teach a class, but he would never try to pass it off.’

‘You sure?’

‘Certain. He told me so, and he meant it. He meant that at least.’

I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you remember him ever painting a picture of a toreador?’ I asked her. ‘A toreador with a red cape and a tear running down his cheek?’

She looked at me as if she had caught me peering through her bedroom window. ‘How did you know about that?’

‘I’ve seen it. It was bought by a man in Scotland.’

She sighed and shook her head, ‘Ronnie did not paint that picture. I went up to the apartment one day, and it was there, in the room he used as his studio. I asked him if he had done it, but he said, “I know I’m good, but I’m not that good.” He said that he had been given it, as a present. I asked him who gave it to him, but he didn’t tell me. He just said that it was someone he had met. It was an incredible picture, a tour de force.’

‘Do you think it could have been an unknown Dali?’

Reis looked at me and made a face. ‘I can’t say that. I can’t say it wasn’t. But I got the feeling that Ronnie thought it might have been. Not from anything he said, but from the way he looked at it, like it was a holy relic.’

‘Can you remember when you saw the picture?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, it was the twenty-fifth of September, last year. That’s my birthday, that’s how I know. I came up to the apartment and saw the picture, we had a drink, and then we went to the restaurant in Pubol and had dinner.

‘Over dinner, Ronnie said that he was thinking about leaving the college right then, rather than a year later. He asked me how I would feel about not going back to Barca, but about us setting up home together, in La Pera or somewhere else around here.

‘I said that sounded like a damn fine idea.’ A tear came to her eye but she kept control. ‘There and then, he took off the gold chain from round his neck, and gave it to me. “Till I can buy a ring,” he said.’ She reached up to her throat, and held the chain out for us to see. ‘I didn’t get no ring,’ she snorted. ‘I got Felipe instead. Ronnie said that he would have to go back to Wales to sort things out with the college. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when the man came.’

I frowned at her. ‘What man?’

‘An Englishman named Trevor. I’d met him once in the bar with Ronnie.’

‘Was there another man with him? Around forty, medium everything?’

‘Yes there was, but he never told me his name. I never saw him again after that.’

‘So when did Trevor come?’ I asked.

‘Two days after my birthday. The day after it, I went to Barca, to visit a girlfriend. I told Ronnie about it and said I’d be staying overnight. He said okay, and that he would look after the shop for me.

‘When I got back, the shop was closed, and there was no sign of Ronnie. I opened up and a couple of hours later, Trevor came in. He said that he had a message from Ronnie. He told me that he had to drive back to Wales very suddenly, the evening before, and had asked Trevor to pick up his things and send them on.’

‘What things?’

‘That’s what I asked. “All of them,” Trevor said. “His clothes, and his pictures.” He said that Ronnie needed those for the college.’

‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that he had left without them?’

‘Sure it did, at first. But Trevor explained that they had been having a drink on the previous afternoon when Ronnie had gone off to make a call to the college. He had returned in a panic and had said that the college wanted him back before the end of the next working day. “Or else,” were the words Trevor used. He had to leave then if he was going to make it back in time, in his little car. He had been worried about his clothes and pictures, but Trevor had told him that his friend, the other guy, whose name I didn’t know, was going back to England next day, and that he would take them and drop them off in Cardiff.’

‘So you gave Trevor Ronnie’s clothes and all his pictures?’

‘Not all,’ she said. ‘I kept the one of Gala’s castle, and of the plain. Ronnie gave me those as my birthday presents. They’re upstairs, still. But the others I gave to Trevor, with his clothes.’

‘Including the Toreador?’

‘Yes. That and the painting of Cadaques.’

‘What about the Port Lligat painting?’ I asked.

‘Ronnie told me he had traded that. But he didn’t say where. Artists do that all the time; trade pictures for materials, or meals in restaurants.’

‘When he didn’t contact you,’ asked Prim, sympathetically, ‘did you try to get in touch with him, after a while?’

Reis shook her head. ‘No. I knew I was pregnant by then. I reckoned that if Ronnie had wanted to get in touch with me he would. So I decided that he had been lying to me; and because of that I decided also that I would bring up my baby on my own.’

Her jaw was set in a hard line. Suddenly she didn’t look quite so pretty.

‘When Ronnie was here, did he get to know anyone else that you were aware of?’

A crease appeared between her eyebrows as she considered my question. ‘No,’ she began, ‘but there was one time. Once on a Sunday afternoon when I was closed, and Ronnie wasn’t painting, we went along to the bar in Pubol. While we were there a man walked past the doorway, looked in and said hello to Ronnie, in English. Ronnie waved back, then the man walked on. When I asked who he was, he said only that it was someone that he had met there before.’

‘Can you describe him, after all this time?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Reis Sonas. ‘I could still draw you his picture. He was Catalan, obviously, with olive skin, and he was wiry. He moved like a little cat, except he was not all that small. He looked ancient, yet not old, if you can understand me. And he had a patch over one eye.’

Beside me, I heard Primavera’s quiet gulp.

‘Have you seen him since, this man?’ I asked. She shook her head.

‘Reis, I don’t think Ronnie was lying to you.’ I took Starr’s watch from my pocket and showed it to her. She went chalk white. ‘I believe that Ronnie’s dead, and I expect that pretty soon there will be proof of that.’ I could almost hear her heart hammering, though she was on the other side of the room. As I looked at her, her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head slowly, as if in denial of the truth.

‘If I can give you some advice,’ I said, ‘if I were you I would raise a court action in Wales to have Felipe recognised legally as Ronnie’s son. He could be in line for quite a legacy. I reckon his father would want him to have it, rather than the government, don’t you?’

She squeezed her eyes shut tight, briefly, then nodded. ‘If we can help,’ I said. For the first time I felt the need of a business card. Instead I picked up a pen and paper from the fireside and wrote down our names and our telephone number. I handed it to her. ‘If you need to contact us.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, as she took it.

She stood up and showed us to the door, past Ronnie Starr’s son, who was beginning to stir in his cot.

As soon as we were out in the street Prim’s breath exploded in a loud gasp. ‘Davidoff,’ she burst out. ‘He knew Ronnie Starr. And he didn’t tell us.’

I took her arm. ‘Hold on. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. They were on talking terms, yes, but there’s no proof it was any more than that. Starr didn’t mention his name to Reis; maybe he didn’t know it. Maybe Davidoff didn’t know Starr’s name either.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘The most nationalistically biased man in Spain forms a nodding acquaintance with a foreigner, without finding out his name.’ Still, she had cooled down.

‘We’ll ask him, okay?’

She frowned at me. ‘Too bloody right we will!’