Blood Red

Thirty-seven

I called Gerard on the mobile as soon as I went back downstairs. Breakfast was abandoned when I realised that I was talking with a stranger while clad in a long T-shirt and nothing else.

I told him of my heart-stopping visit from Pinky and Porky, and of my nick of time rescue by his doppelgänger brother. ‘You should have warned me, Gerard,’ I complained. ‘Have you any idea of the way I felt when he walked into that room and took on those two cops? I honestly believed it was you, that you’d climbed on a plane and come down to. .’ I paused. ‘Even when he said that he’d got in late and had been careful not to wake me,’ I continued, ‘I thought he was you.’

‘I imagine that could have been embarrassing.’ He sounded apologetic.

‘Could have been?’ I squawked. ‘Could have been? Bloody well was.’

‘You didn’t do anything. . inappropriate, did you?’

‘Certainly not!’

I thought I heard a sigh of relief. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was going to tell you all about Santi, before you left from Shirley’s, but you talked across me and I was anxious for you to be on your way, so the chance never came up again.’

‘Did you know he was coming here?’

‘I sent him an email from a café in Figueras, telling him that I had a friend who was in trouble and that I was sending her down to Granada for a while. I asked him to keep an eye on you, if he could, even if it was only from a distance like me. Last night, after we’d spoken, I had a reply from him saying that he’d adjusted his schedule and was taking some time off. I didn’t expect him to arrive so soon, though.’

‘I’m glad that he did. I don’t know how I’d have handled those two cops if he hadn’t walked in and taken over.’ I recalled a detail. ‘Who’s Jorge Lavorante, by the way? Santi mentioned the name to them and it seemed to impress them.’

‘It would have; he’s a tough guy. Jorge’s a captain in the municipal police. We were at school with him.’

‘I bet you were tough guys too, you and Santi. They were backing off him even before he mentioned Lavorante. And you: you’ve got a temper on you; you can’t deny it.’

‘We could handle ourselves,’ Gerard admitted. ‘With the old man we had we’d no choice but to grow up tough.’ His voice was sad.

‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you grew up nice with it as well.’

‘That was down to our mother.’ He stopped, abruptly. ‘I have to go. If I have the chance I’ll speak to Alex later today, to see if there have been any developments. I’ll try to call you this evening.’

‘Can you look in on Tom?’

‘Of course. I treat the boy like my own son, Primavera; you must realise that, surely.’

It had occurred to me, but it was nice to hear him say so.

I had another shower, and dressed properly for the day, before going upstairs to rejoin Santi. He was still in the kitchen, but he’d clearly been out shopping, for he was working on a mushroom omelette in a big frying pan, and a fresh baguette lay on the counter. There was coffee on the hob too, in one of those oldfashioned percolators that beats a filter every time, and fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table.

I offered to help, but there was nothing for me to do, other than set the table for two, and watch him as he flipped the omelette over and finished it off.

‘You make a damn good breakfast,’ I told him, as we ate.

‘I enjoy cooking,’ he replied. ‘Given my line of work, most of my waking up is done in hotels. I could list the breakfast menus in most of the Sheratons, Marriotts and Hiltons in North America and the Far East. Appetising they may be, but it’s volume food and you can have too much of it. There are few things I like more than working in my own kitchen. . or in this case my brother’s. . after sleeping in my own bed.’

‘I can understand that,’ I conceded. ‘I’ve been a nomad for quite a bit of my life, and I’ve eaten a few institutional breakfasts too.’

‘What sort of institution?’

‘The kind where they lock you in at night.’

He whistled. ‘Is that the sort of trouble you’re in now?’

‘Potentially, but I didn’t do it.’

‘I know. Gerard told me that you’ve been wrongly accused of something. But that was all; he made a point of not telling me more than that.’

I smiled at that one. ‘On the evidence, the accusation’s justified. But the evidence has been fixed, planted, fabricated. Gerard’s sent me down here to hide out, while he does his best to get to the bottom of it.’

‘So you have God on your side,’ he murmured. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked suddenly, throwing me off balance in the process. ‘My brother has never been one for filling in every small detail.’

‘Primavera Blackstone,’ I replied. ‘My house is next door, literally, to Gerard’s church.’

‘That big old house?’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘Four years ago, just after Gerard was posted there, the first time I went to visit him; he drove me around, but we never got out of the car. Very imposing. You live there on your own?’

‘With my son.’

‘No. .?’

‘His father is dead. It’s Mrs Blackstone, by the way; that’s the name I choose to go by. Tom uses the Spanish form at school, adding on the mother’s surname, so on the class roll he’s Tom Blackstone Phillips.’

I caught his frown, and knew what was coming. ‘That’s an unusual name,’ he commented. ‘I go to the movies a lot, between flights. .’ He paused.

I nodded. ‘It was him,’ I said, and filled him in on my connections with the rich and famous, alive and dead. I couldn’t tell whether he was impressed or not. It barely registered with Gerard when I told him.

I moved on, to fill the silence as much as anything else. ‘One of the few things your brother told me about you is that when he went into the church, you went into the air force.’

‘Yes. Our upbringing wasn’t. . what should I say. . wasn’t ideal. We both had to get out; otherwise we might have wound up like our father, heavy-handed bullies. I wanted Gerard to join the military like me, full-time, but his experiences sent him in another direction.’

‘Were you surprised by his choice?’

‘Not in the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances? The thing with your father?’ He nodded. ‘I thought that happened after he’d gone to the seminary, that he came home and found him beating your mother.’

Santi sighed. ‘So that’s the official version, is it? That’s how he explains it. For a priest, my brother can be indelicate with the truth, even if it’s for the best of motives.’

‘That’s something I’ve learned for myself, Santi, but what do you mean by it?’

He picked up the percolator and refilled his cup; the coffee must have been almost cold by then, but he didn’t seem to notice as he sipped it. ‘For all his many faults, our father never laid a hand on our mother in his life; on us, yes, and he abused her verbally, all the time, but she had brothers, and that thought may have restrained him. He was an awful man, though, hateful. We put up with it at home, and I suppose we took it out on others outside, for nobody messed with us, not even Jorge Lavorante. But our mother’s influence kept us more or less straight. She made sure we went to church; there was a good old parish priest, and he taught us proper values. Gerard, in particular, came under his influence.’

He put his cup down, picked up an apple from the fruit bowl, and bit a chunk out of it. ‘When I was nineteen, I applied to join the air force as a regular, rather than simply do national service. Gerard didn’t know what to do as a career, so he did his nine months in the marines, then came home to decide his future. While he was away. . not far, only in Cartagena. . he met a girl. Her name was Irena, nice kid, very churchy, like he was. When he came back, they got engaged, and she moved to Granada, to live with an uncle and aunt, down in the modern city, near Federico Garcia Lorca’s house. Gerard got a couple of jobs, as a labourer during the day and as a bar bouncer in the evening.’

‘A bouncer?’ I exclaimed.

‘Gerard never had to bounce anyone. He had a gift for turning away trouble. Anyway, he had a night off once, and he and Irena were going out. He was to go home from work to change, she was to meet him, and they were heading off from there. Unfortunately. . Irena arrived early. Our father was there. Mother was visiting our aunt, her sister. The old man was drunk. To cut to the chase, he raped her; he dragged her downstairs and raped her. Gerard walked in and heard her screaming. He threw the old man out into the back yard and he beat the living shit out of him. He’d have killed him too, for sure, but for a piece of luck that he believes to this day was divine. I was given a forty-eight-hour pass, for some spurious achievement or other. I arrived just in time to haul him off, something that only I could have done, I reckon. I dragged him inside, leaving an unconscious heap behind us. We took care of Irena, got her covered up, and that helped to distract Gerard. It didn’t calm her, though. She was bleeding and she was hysterical. He carried her upstairs and I called an ambulance. Gerard said that he was going for Jorge Lavorante. Knowing Jorge, that could have been to have the old man arrested or to finish him off, but neither came about, for Irena screamed, “No police, no police.” She wouldn’t make a complaint, not then, or afterwards, in hospital when they’d sedated her and stitched her up. I wouldn’t let Gerard go back to the garden. I went down myself, with no clear idea of what I’d do when I got there. But I had no decision to make, for the old bastard was gone. He never came back.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘We told her nothing about what had happened. After a while she assumed that he had simply left her, and she was happy.’

‘And what about Irena, and Gerard?’

‘She went back to Cartagena. He talked about going to bring her back, but he never did. Instead he went back to church, to our old friend the priest, and a few months later went to the seminary. A little while after that, I tried to trace Irena. When I did, I found that she’d committed suicide, a couple of years after the rape.’

‘Does Gerard know?’

‘Yes.’ He shuddered, as if to shake off the horror, then stood up. I felt pretty numb myself. I could understand why Gerard had no desire to go home.

‘Come on,’ he said, briskly. ‘That’s enough family history for a while. What would you like to do?’

I looked at him; blankly, I suspect. ‘Do?’ I repeated.

‘Yes, do. You’re in Granada; far away from your trouble. You don’t need to hide away here. Let me show you around.’

And that’s what he did. He stilled all my nerves and protestations with his calmness, and led me out into the day, my personal tour guide. We walked back down to the Paseo, then back along the riverside road until it opened out into the Plaza Nuevo, through which I had driven around twenty-four hours earlier. It was Monday, and so it was noticeably quieter, as we strolled down towards a blue booth on the shady side of the street. There were a few people before us in the queue, but it cleared fairly quickly. Santi had a quick conversation with the attendant and came away with two white tickets. ‘These are the bono turistica,’ he told me, ‘the best value in Granada. They’ll let us into all the monuments, including the Alhambra. We’ll go there this afternoon, but they also get us a ride on the tour bus, so let’s find it.’

The stop turned out to be next to the cathedral, beside some steps where gypsy women were selling sprigs of lucky white heather and telling fortunes with it. Normally I don’t go for such stuff, but that day of all days, I couldn’t resist. It’s probably the most expensive heather I ever bought, but the show made it worth it. The woman seized my hand and stared at the palm, which had half the number of lines, I reckon, that there were on her brown forehead, knitted with concentration as it was.

‘I see happiness and sadness,’ she announced, ‘both in the past and yet to come. I see fine children. .’ Hold on, I thought, I’m forty-two; the plural’s unlikely now. ‘. . and grandchildren to come.’

‘How about the immediate future?’ I asked her.

She peered once more, and a funny thing happened; she squeezed her eyes shut and seemed to go into a trance. ‘I see death,’ she moaned, ‘but not yours. It is the father who dies.’ My blood ran cold. ‘I see difficult times, but you come through them. I see evil, I see a fall, I see tears, I see separation. The father,’ she repeated, ‘the father. He dies.’

And then she fainted; she folded up and fell to the ground. I had to yank my hand free to avoid being pulled over. Two other Roma women came across and bent over her; one was grinning. An act, I thought. Sucker.

‘That looked pretty dramatic,’ said Santi, as I rejoined him at the bus stop.

‘All bullshit,’ I told him.

‘Don’t you mean cowshit, in this case?

‘I suppose. Here, you can have this.’ I handed him the sprig of heather; he pushed its stalk through an unused buttonhole in his shirt, just as the open-topped tour bus pulled up at the stop.

We took seats upstairs, right at the front; there were audio guides available, but with Santi as a commentator, I didn’t need one. He began as soon as we pulled away, explaining where we were, place by place. The tour began by taking us out of the city and up towards the Alhambra. It was a clear day, and so we had a fine view of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that’s one of the great surprises of southern Spain. Think Spain, think Pyrenees; that’s how it is for most people, but the Snowy Mountains are more dominant, and those who do such things tell me that the skiing and snow-boarding are more reliable there than in the north. Santi was a skier, as it turned out; he had taken it up once he could afford it, but in his youth and Gerard’s it had been a luxury scorned by their father.

He knew just about everything there was to know about the city and its history, ancient and modern, from the expulsion of the Moors. . ‘In case you haven’t noticed,’ he joked as the bus passed a gaggle of young mothers, all with heads covered, ‘they’ve found their way back’. . and the death of the poet Lorca during the Spanish Civil War. ‘Granada Airport is named after him,’ he told me. ‘One thing I’ve noticed in my job is the number of airports named after people who’ve been shot. Think about it; apart from him, there’s JFK, La Guardia, also in New York, John Lennon in Liverpool, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, Ronald Reagan in Washington. . although he survived. . and Charles de Gaulle.’

‘De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated,’ I pointed out.

‘Only because of incredible luck. So many people tried to shoot him, he deserves to be on the list.’

I laughed. In truth I was grateful for the distraction, because for all that I was interested in what he was telling me, my mind kept drifting back to the gypsy woman and what she had said. I’ve always convinced myself that fortune telling, be it centred on palmistry, tea leaves, tarot cards or anything else, is based on probability, and on intelligent guesswork. But her insistent use of the word ‘father’ had lodged itself in my brain. Did she mean my dad? That was possible; most of us outlive our fathers and the way she had put it, that’s where she was most likely to have been taking me. But had she meant Tom’s father? I wear a wedding ring, so it was a fair chance that I was a mother. I was alone, for she hadn’t noticed Santi, I was sure. Yes, another good guess. But. . the thought that wouldn’t go away, however hard I pushed it, what if there was something in the whole claptrap nonsense? What if she’d meant Father Gerard?

The bus tour ended where it had begun, but we stayed on board until it arrived at the Alhambra for the second time. Santi explained that the greatest benefit of the bono turistica lies in the fact that it includes an advance booking time for the Alhambra, or specifically, for entry to the Nazrene Palaces, the heart of the place, and it lets you bypass the regular ticket queue, which can be enormous.

By the time we got to the main concourse, breakfast had worn off; we grabbed sandwiches and beer before Santi led me into the Alcazabar, the castellated fort that was the earliest construction on the great rock.

There’s a lot I could tell you about the Alhambra, but I’ll restrict myself to three things: one, although the place as a whole is vast, the Nazrene Palaces are smaller than I’d expected; two, there is a very fine art collection in the Carlos Five palace; and three, it has the finest public toilets in all of Spain. After three hours we’d visited the lot, and were ready to leave. I’d have taken the bus, but Santi promised me that it would have been a nightmare, so we settled for a taxi, back to Goats’ Hill, or as close to it as the driver could take us.

‘Put your feet up for a while,’ said Santi, as we stepped back indoors. ‘I’m going to see what’s in my mailbox.’

‘Do you have a computer here?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No. I have an iPhone; for my job, it’s best.’

He left to get on with it, and I went outside, on to the patio. The sun was still high, so I unrolled the awning that was fixed above the doors. As I settled myself into a chair, I couldn’t help wondering what state my email must have reached, and from that to those people who were likely to have sent me messages. As I scrolled down my mental contacts list, I paused at a name, and found myself wondering why I hadn’t thought of him before.

As I did, it suddenly occurred to me that the old Primavera wouldn’t be hiding out waiting for her luck to take a turn for the better; the old Primavera would be doing all she could to make that happen. Fond as I was of Gerard. . oh hell, much as I loved him. . I’d allowed him to take me so far under his wing that I hadn’t bothered to look out. First chance I had, I promised myself, that was going to change.