On Honeymoon With Death

23

I always take the autopista when I go down to Barcelona. The drive along the Costa Brava is nice, but neither one of us was in tourist mode. We both had an interest in nailing the so-and-so who had broken into my house and attacked Susie, while the girl herself was brimming with suspicion that her golf investment might be a two-million-pound pig in a poke.

‘You think I’ve been swindled, Oz, don’t you?’ she asked as we picked up our ticket at the Orriols motorway entry.

‘I hope not. But I know Ullastret; I was there last week in fact. There are some old Iberian ruins there, complete with museum. I took my nephews to see them. Okay, I wasn’t looking for a new leisure complex, but I don’t remember seeing anything remotely like it, nor any billboards advertising it.

‘On the other hand, it could just be well away from the road. The story about tripping over some relics during excavation is certainly plausible enough. You’re walking on layer upon layer of history in this part of the world, and they’re keen on preserving it.’

‘Maybe I should have invested in a museum instead,’ Susie snorted.

‘That would probably have been a better bet; less risky, that’s for sure.’

She reached across and thumped me lightly on the shoulder ‘Go on, you; cheer me up.’

‘That’s what I’m here for. Tell me, have you met these guys, Chandler and Hickok?’

She frowned at me, so hard that I almost felt it. ‘Of course I have. I’m not so stupid that I’d entrust that sort of money to someone I’ve never met.

‘They gave a presentation of the project to the three investors before we signed up. Brian Murphy arranged it; he was there, together with various architects, brokers and financial advisers, and the guys themselves.’

‘What were they like?’

‘Impressive. Both about forty, one of them, Hickok, had quite a strong Manchester accent; the other one was smoother, bit of the public school about him. The presentation was very professional; they ran through their CVs, then the architect ran through the project, explained how it would be phased and how it would be sold. It made sense to me as a builder. They needed a lot of money up front, they said, because the Spanish insist on developers building the golf course first, then the housing which will have paid for it ultimately.’

‘Did they tell you how you were going to get your money out?’

‘The plan was that when the course was built and the first housing was sold, they’d float the company on the Spanish Stock Exchange, with a market value of not less than fifteen million sterling. The backers would double their investment and the executive directors would split the other three million in shares, plus they’d continue to manage the business.’

‘What’s Murphy’s take?’

‘Ten per cent of the investors’ profit: six hundred thousand.’

‘What is he investing?’

‘Nothing that I know of.’

‘Good deal for Mr Murphy.’

There was nothing but silence from the passenger seat.

We drove on down the road in the whisper-quiet sports car, and soon hit the peaje north of Barcelona. As we drove on, having paid with a card at one of the auto-booths, Susie pointed to a huge walled building off to the left of the road. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘That’s a rest home for retired property developers.’ She gave me a blank look. ‘They call it Barcelona Prison.’

Most cities these days are nightmares for motorists, and normally Barcelona is well up among them. However it was still the holiday season, and so the traffic was well short of gridlock. One thing that the city does have in its favour is plenty of off-street parking, much of it below ground. I knew of a well-guarded subterranean multi-level garage on the edge of Placa de Catalunya, and headed straight for it.

The sun had disappeared behind heavy clouds when we stepped out of the car park, and the temperature had fallen by several degrees. I had brought a heavy leather jacket, but Susie was cold, so we made a beeline for El Cort Ingles, where she bought a nice designer overcoat. While she was doing that, I asked a floor manager if he knew where we could find the Banco Provincial. He gave me precise directions. Without them, we’d probably never have found it before it closed, for it wasn’t actually on the square itself, but in a small passageway which led off it.

Susie walked up to the door and pushed it. ‘Damn!’ she swore. ‘They’re shut.’

I shoved again and heard a buzz as a cashier inside released the lock. ‘Security conscious,’ I told her. ‘Not unusual though.’

We stepped inside and I looked around. It looked like a pretty typical Spanish bank, not the kind you’d expect to be handling a significant corporate account. None of the staff wore uniforms; the women were smartly dressed in the same style as Susie, if less expensively, while most of the men wore slacks and sweaters. The counter was open, without security glass. I walked up to the first available teller and asked, in Spanish, if we could see the manager.

The girl, for she was no more, looked doubtful and replied in Catalan; I’m not much good at that but I worked out that she had said that he wasn’t available without an appointment. ‘No, en Castellano,’ I told her, trying to look business-like. ‘El jefe, por favor.’

She gave in and left her position; I watched her as she approached, a shade nervously, a man at the back of the staff area. He gave her a black look, but came towards us, unsmiling. ‘Si senor, yo soy el jefe aqui. Que pasa?’

I nodded towards Susie. ‘Por mi amiga, hablar Ingles?’

‘A little,’ he said. ‘You wish to open an account with us?’

‘No, thank you. But we do wish to enquire about an account here.’

As I’ve mentioned, no one shrugs better than a Catalan. They use the gesture so often and so well that it is almost a language of its own. The manager’s was a classic; it said, Piss off.

He emphasised it. ‘Sir, if it is not your account then I cannot tell you anything about it. It is not your business.’

‘Listen,’ Susie snapped at him. ‘It’s got a big chunk of my money in it, so that makes it my business.’

I put a hand on her shoulder to quiet her down. I could read the guy; there was a chance that he’d talk to me, but he’d never back down to a woman in front of his staff. ‘Let me explain, senor,’ I said. ‘My friend is a substantial investor in a company which, we are told, maintains its account at this branch. She has become nervous about her money. . it is a lot, as she says. . and so wants to make sure that the account actually exists.’

I won’t say that he softened, but at least he stopped to think about what I had told him. I watched him rub his chin for about thirty seconds until finally he shrugged again. This one said, I’ll go along with this guy for a while.

‘Come into my office.’ He pointed to a door to the left of the counter, then turned and walked away. A few seconds later the door opened and we were shown into a dull, sparsely furnished private room, and offered seats on the punter side of his desk. A nameplate faced us; Josep Lluis Peyra i Nunes.

‘Okay,’ Sr Peyra said briskly, ‘What is the name of this company?’

‘Castelgolf SA,’ Susie told him, then spelled it out for him.

Like everyone under the sun these days, me included, he had a computer on his desk. He clicked its mouse a couple of times, then played with the keyboard. As he was doing this, I watched his face, not his hands. I thought I saw a slight twitch of his right eyebrow.

Finally he swung his chair round, to look at Susie, not at me. ‘No, senora,’ he pronounced. ‘That company does not have an account here.’

She went noticeably pale. ‘How about the directors? Could it have been in their names; Chandler and Hickok?’

‘Senora, I cannot look through all my customer files …’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, fairly heavily, forcing him to turn his attention back to me. ‘Did that company ever have an account here?’

When he broke eye contact, he gave me my answer. He confirmed it with the tiniest shrug. This one said, Okay, you got me.

‘Yes, it did. But it is closed now.’

‘How much was in it, who were the signatories and when was the money moved out?’

He tried to look at me as if I had asked him something preposterous. ‘Senor, I cannot tell you any of those things,’ he laughed.

‘Would you rather tell my other friend?’ I asked. I produced Fortunato’s business card from my pocket and handed it to him. ‘Be sure that if you don’t give us some answers, he will be here to ask you.’

The manager studied the card for a long time. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I understand that you might be concerned about the effect on your bank of the publicity attached to an incident like this. But we are talking about a lot of money, and we are not just going to walk away. We are going to find out what we want to know. Please, let’s do it the easy way.’

He gave one last shrug to himself as much as to us. This was his What the hell! model. Then he looked at the screen once more. ‘The account was opened in June and closed in November. The opening balance was one billion, six hundred and fifty-six million pesetas, and it was almost the same when it was closed; it gathered twelve million pesetas in interest during the time it was open. There was one large payment made from it, of ten million pesetas, and a couple of smaller ones.

‘The money was transferred electronically to a bank in Nassau, in the Bahamas. The authorised signatories on the account were the people you mentioned, Senor Chandler and Senor Hickok. There was also a third signatory, Senor Josep Toldo; he has an office where we send all the account details.’

‘What’s his address?’

‘I cannot give you that; that I can only tell your policeman friend, if he ask. This man, Senor Toldo, he is a lawyer, and if you go to see him he may think that I sent you. He could make a lot of trouble for me.’

I understood that, so I didn’t press it. I was well chuffed with what we had got out of him as it was, and tracing the lawyer wouldn’t be hard. My elation lasted till we stepped back out into the narrow street and I saw the expression on Susie’s face. It looked like a stone mask. She might not have blown the entire Gantry fortune, but being taken for two million is going to hurt anyone.

‘Do you know what happened to me last month?’ she asked me, tugging her new designer overcoat closed tight against the cold. ‘A magazine in Edinburgh voted me Scottish Businesswoman of the Year. A fat bloody lot they knew, eh?

‘Business failure of the year; that’s more like it.’

I slipped my arm around her waist and headed her back towards El Cort Ingles. ‘Come on, wee one,’ I said, in what I hoped was my best ‘cheer up’ voice. ‘There are other people involved in this too, and they were supposed to be pretty smart. Are you bankrupt? No you’re not. . Not by a long shot. Are your shareholders going to demand your resignation? You are your shareholders.

‘The worst that’s going to happen is that you’ve generated a capital loss to offset against a capital gain somewhere along the way.’

She snorted. ‘Huh. You’ll be singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” next. I believed them, Oz. I really thought I was a business whiz kid. Now I know I’m anything but, and soon the whole world’s going to know about it. D’you think the newspapers aren’t going to find out about this?’

‘Get your PR people to handle it. They’ll get you a decent press.’

‘Maybe, but everything I’m trying to forget will get raked up in the process; my Lord Provost, Mike, maybe even the fact that Joe’s my real dad.’

‘No way anyone’s going to find that out. Jack Gantry’s name’s on your birth certificate, isn’t it?’

She conceded that point as we stepped back into the hypermarket and took the lift up to the top floor cafeteria.

We found a table with a fine view across the city and ordered lunch, plus a bottle of Vina Sol. Susie had decided that the hair of the dog was a must. As we sat and sipped it, waiting for our food, she looked at me. ‘What do you think, then? What do we do now?’

‘First, you call Ann Hay or Joe. Tell them what we’ve found out and have them contact the other investors. . they’ve got to be informed. Then we turn my friend Captain Fortunato loose on this man Toldo.’

‘Captain Fortunato? Your friend?’ She didn’t even try to hide her surprise.

I didn’t bite. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

She gave me a long look.

‘You’ve heard of him, though?’

‘Yes. Prim mentioned him to me once.’

‘What did she tell you about him?’

She eyed me up, unsure about me, unsure of what I knew.

‘Oh, you know; girl talk.’

‘What? Like when I left her they had a fling, but it collapsed when she found that she was in the club? That sort of girl talk?’

‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘She finally told you, then.’

‘Finally,’ I said. I didn’t like the thought that Prim had told anyone, even Susie, before me.

‘You don’t mind, then?’

‘It was none of my business then; it’s none of my business now.’

She looked at me again, out of the corner of her eye. ‘You don’t mind, then?’ she repeated.

‘Of course I fucking mind!’ It burst out of me in a shout that startled the woman at the next table, never mind making Susie jump; I lowered my voice. ‘We come back here on our honeymoon, and one of the first people we meet is a guy whose kid she had aborted. This might be amiable old Oz you’re talking to, but there’s a limit.’

‘So how come you say he’s your friend?’

‘First because I concentrate very hard on not thinking about it, and second because, apart from the fact that he had a wife at the time, there’s nothing I can blame him for. I can’t blame Prim for what happened either, only myself, but I don’t like the way I found out about it.’

‘Does that mean that you’re going to tell Prim about what happened this morning?’

‘It might.’

‘Bullshit.’

I glowered at her.

‘That’s it,’ she teased me. ‘Show me those hairy eyebrows. You’ve just proved something I’ve suspected for a while. No wonder you’re a hit in the movies.

‘You’re a natural, sunshine, a consummate actor. Amiable old Oz, as you called him, is a part you’ve chosen to play; the saintly youth that everyone loves and who can do no real wrong. But inside you’re just as tough as the next guy, and probably a hell of a lot tougher. When it suits your book, you can be really brutal, but you get away with it because people look at you and think “Oh, but it’s nice smiley Oz, so it must be all right.”

‘For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve been waiting for you to drop your guard, and now you’ve done it.’

I carried on looking at her, not smiling, not blinking. ‘You’re talking about someone I don’t recognise,’ I told her.

‘If you could hear the coldness in your voice, you’d recognise him. “We all wear masks, kid.” That’s something else the Lord Provost said to me. “Most of us look in the mirror without knowing who we really are, deep inside.” He did, though; he could see his inner man. His problem was that he didn’t realise that, deep inside, that man was a monster.’

‘And what about Susie Gantry?’ I asked her. ‘Who’s she?’

‘I’m like you,’ she answered at once. ‘On the outside, I’m light and cheerful and user-friendly; a lot of my business success is built on that, I’m sure. I’m everybody’s flavour of the month. But behind it all, I’m hard and cunning and ruthless and, sometimes, not very scrupulous.

‘I’ve only ever met one person who I reckon was the same however you looked at them, inside and out.’

‘Who was that?’

‘You have to ask? Jan, of course. She had no secrets from herself, or anyone else.’

I thought about that; she had none from me, of that I was sure. ‘And Prim?’ I asked her. ‘What about her?’

‘That, my dear, you have to find out for yourself.’

There was a bustling beside us, as the waiter arrived with our Catalan salads. I was grateful for the interruption. Susie hadn’t made me angry, but she had made me feel very uncomfortable. I’m not a great Burns student, but I do remember the line about seeing ourselves as others see us. I had a feeling that what she was saying was all too true.

We didn’t speak as we ate our starters, not until the waiter had taken away our plates. ‘I’m sorry,’ Susie began.

I held up a hand to stop her. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I feel like you’re taking me on a journey of self-discovery here. I might as well carry on till the train gets to the station.’

My mobile rang as I spoke. It was Fortunato. ‘Yes, Ramon,’ I answered, to let Susie know who was calling.

‘I have found out about your friend’s company,’ he told me. ‘It is in the official register, okay. The holders of the shares are the people you mentioned, Hickok and Chandler; there is a third also, but he has only one share; a formality, you understand.’

‘I understand. He’s a lawyer and his name’s Josep Toldo.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘We’ve been to the bank, and had a talk with the manager.’

‘Ahh. Yes, Senor Toldo is the administrator of the company. He has an office in Girona; I have heard of him before, some good, mostly bad. If you are wanting to set up a business here, it is as well that you have some Spanish involvement. If you want someone who will not ask too many questions, you want someone like him.

‘What did the manager tell you?’

‘He said that the money’s gone, and the account’s closed. It was moved on more than a month ago. You should find out whether Toldo knew that it was being transferred. If he did, he could be in trouble.’

‘Maybe. I would like that.’

‘What else did you find out about the company?’ I asked.

‘There was very little to find. I had my people ask around in the town of Ullastret, and in La Bisbal. Toldo and the two Englishmen approached a farmer last year and offered him ten million pesetas, merely to explore the possibility of building a golf course on his land. He thought they were crazy, so he said okay.

‘They brought designers along, and they brought another Englishman, a Mr Murphy, to meet him. Everything was very good, very enthusiastic, only they did not pay him the money. He had to ask Toldo for it, but eventually a transfer was made, last summer. That was the last he heard; there has been no digging, nothing; no visit from the people in the town council who approve these things, or from the Catalan government, which has a say also. This is not surprising, because no plans have ever been put forward.’

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘They showed the investors the agreement with the farmer, and the model of the project. They set up an account in a small unsophisticated bank in Barcelona and lodged the invested capital, six million sterling. Then they moved it on, and spun a story about the project being delayed by an archaeological investigation, to keep the investors at bay for a while.’

‘You are sure of all this?’

‘Yes. Someone knew that Ms Gantry, my friend, was coming out to visit the development. Last night they tried to stop her.’

‘How?’

‘That doesn’t matter right now. I’ll give you the detail another time. But it does tell me that at least one of these guys is still around.’

‘Then the sooner I pull Toldo in the better. I need your friend to make a formal complaint, Oz, but we can do that later.’

‘Sure. I’ll bring her to your office in Girona tomorrow.’

I looked across the table as I put the phone back in my pocket. ‘There you are, kid. The wheels of justice are in motion.’

‘That’s good. Did you say I get to meet the nice policeman tomorrow? That’s a dubious pleasure, after the way Prim described him when she told me about him.’

‘What d’you mean?’

She fluttered her eyelashes at me. ‘Well, dear, you know how we girls spill the beans to each other when we start. . Or maybe you don’t.

‘I got the impression that she was pretty smitten by him; I know that she was really hurt when he left her to go back to his wife. He sounded to me like a bit of an arsehole all round. I mean, the least he could have done was stick around until after the termination.’

‘You what?’ I couldn’t stop myself reacting.

‘Ahh,’ Susie exclaimed, with a hint of something I couldn’t place, ‘she didn’t tell you that bit. I guess that’s why the guy’s still your friend. Apparently, when she told him she was pregnant, he insisted that she had an abortion; he more or less arranged it, in fact. And as soon as the appointment was made, he packed up and went back to his wife.’

The whole story must have been written on my face. ‘She didn’t tell you that much, did she?’

‘No. She told me that he still doesn’t know about the kid. She also told me that he was pretty mediocre under the duvet as well,’ I added, bitterly.

‘I don’t know about that. She never told me otherwise, I promise you. And I can understand why she said what she did. She probably thought that if she’d told you the whole story you’d have filled him in.’

‘Who, me?’

‘Yes you!’ she gave a short, explosive laugh, which startled the lady at the next table again. ‘Mike told me once about the time you and your wrestler pal were attacked by a couple of hoodlums in London, and what happened to them.

‘Knowing that, if I’d been in Prim’s shoes, I’d have been worried about your reaction.’

‘Who me?’ I repeated.

‘You really don’t know yourself at all, do you?’

‘I guess not.’

I shook my head, picked up the Vina Sol, and filled my glass to the top. ‘Congratulations,’ I mumbled, ‘you’ve just earned yourself a shot at driving the Mercedes.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Susie, with no hint of remorse that I could pick up. ‘I have spoiled your lunch, haven’t I?’ She lifted up my hand from the table, and kissed it, quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to, really.’ I yanked it back from her and turned my head away, to stare out of the panoramic window of the cafeteria.

‘Enough,’ I snapped, then changed my mind. ‘No, not quite. Is there anything else you know about Prim, or about me, for that matter?’

‘I know she loves you. I know you think you love her.’

‘Think?’

‘You love you, Oz. Let’s face it, you’re a fucking egomaniac.’

I turned back towards her. ‘And you’re a fucking poison dwarf, you know that?’ I think I was probably snarling. ‘I should have let that guy bounce your head off the floor a couple more times before I came downstairs.’

She smiled at me, sweetly. ‘Yeah. But I’m really getting you hard, am I not?’

She was right.

I left my Vina Sol on the table. All of a sudden I wanted to drive back myself. And so I did: fast.

If there’s a speed record for the autopista A7, I must have broken it. There were times when I was fairly certain that the Merc’s wheels were clear of the ground. I looked at Susie’s knuckles as we swung into the exit lane at Sortida Five. Her fists were clenched tight, and they were bone white.

We hadn’t spoken all the way from Barcelona, and we stayed silent for the rest of the journey home. As I drew the car to a halt in the driveway and pulled on the brake, Susie jumped out, and ran to the front door. I was perverse enough to go to the back, and unlock that.

She followed me into the kitchen, but I kept on walking, round and up the wide stairs. Still she followed me. I stopped at her bedroom door; it was open. I picked her up, carried her inside and threw her on to the bed. She tore at my clothes, I tore at hers; we broke the speed record for getting naked as well.

Foreplay was a type of golf as far as we were concerned. I covered her and we took each other as hard and as roughly as we could, but not quickly, pulling back just in time, slowing, stopping even, until we knew we were both ready. When we did let go, it was perfect; savage, screaming, exultant; I thought I would never stop as I came into her.

I did though, even if I’m still not sure when. Eventually, I was aware that we were eye to eye on the pillow. ‘Tonight,’ Susie whispered hoarsely. ‘You’re going to fuck me in that great big brass bed of yours.’

I didn’t argue. I knew who I was now; I knew what I was.

After a while, I got up and went downstairs, naked, to fetch us a couple of beers. As I passed the telephone answering gadget, I noticed that its light was flashing. There were two messages. The first was from Shirley Gash, inviting me and my house guest to dinner that evening, eight thirty. The second was from Mark Kravitz.

‘Oz, I turned something up. Call me back; I don’t trust cell phones.’

I grabbed a pen and pad and called him from the kitchen, sitting up at the breakfast bar. ‘Mark. Whatcha got?’

‘Hey, you sound businesslike,’ he said.

‘No, I’m just cold. The weather’s turned and I’m not exactly dressed for it.’

‘Move to California then. Okay, I had a pal of mine. . no names, obviously. . feed your two punters into the Big Computer. Jeffrey Chandler is an alias of one Victor Fowler. He’s also been known at various times as Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard. Seems to have a thing about mid-twentieth century movie actors.’ He laughed. ‘You never know; forty years from now there might be a conman calling himself Oz Blackstone.’

‘What makes you think there isn’t already? Go on.’

‘Okay. Fowler’s a long-term and successful fraudster. He’s done one stretch for it, but that’s all. Mind you, in his younger days, twenty-odd years ago, he served five for manslaughter. His speciality is corporate fraud; sets up dummy projects and takes silly rich people for lots of money.’ He stopped; there was a silence. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Sure, sorry. Something distracted me for a moment.’

While he was speaking Susie had appeared in the kitchen, wearing a white tee-shirt. . a very short one. Without a word, she had dropped to her knees, crawled under the breakfast bar and gone to work in her own special way. I tried to push her away, but she dug her nails into my thighs and hung in there. I’ve had guns pointed at me a couple of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more vulnerable than I did right then.

‘Fowler’s whereabouts are currently unknown,’ Kravitz continued. ‘He pulled a scam in his Leslie Howard persona a couple of years back, and took a very embarrassed oil sheikh for three million.’

‘Ohhhh,’ I said.

‘Yeah, a big score,’ said Mark. He thought I’d been impressed by the number.

‘William Hickok, is also known as William Bonney. . Billy the Kid to you. . George Parker. . Butch Cassidy to you. . and Harry Longbaugh. . the Sundance Kid to you. A cowboy fetishist, clearly. However his real name is Arthur Hardstaff. .’ For a second or two that name very nearly made me laugh. I thought I was going to have to call him back.

‘He’s not in the same league as Fowler, but he’s worked with him a couple of times before. He won’t again, though.’ I sighed with relief as Susie came up for air, and a swig of beer. Again, Kravitz thought it was a comment. ‘That’s good news, is it? It isn’t for Mrs Hardstaff, though.

‘She found him in his garage last month. He’d topped himself with the car exhaust, or so the police assumed at first. When they did the postmortem, the pathologist determined that he’d been knocked unconscious by a severe blow to the back of the head, and left there to suffocate.

‘No clue who did it, though.’

‘Tell your pal. .’ Susie dropped to her knees again. I had to stifle a gasp. The beer had chilled her mouth; and the sudden shock sent a tingle right up my spine. ‘Tell your pal,’ I forced myself to continue, ‘to put Fowler at the top of his list. Jeff Chandler just got away with a six-million-pound fraud in Spain. I guess he didn’t fancy sharing it with Wild Bill.’

‘Do you think he’s out there, where you are?’

I came up with a very quick answer to that question. ‘I think he was, up until last night, but things didn’t quite go as he expected. I’d be very surprised if he’s within a thousand miles of here now.’

‘Wow. Can you give me details of that?’

‘Tell your guy to get in touch with Captain Ramon Fortunato, of the Mossos d’Esquadra in Girona.’

‘Thanks. That’s us square for this one, mate.’

‘Fair enough. What about the third name?’

‘Murphy? There’s scores of them, but not a Brian among them. He’s clean as far as the criminal intelligence network is concerned.’

‘That’ll come. . as a relief to a friend of mine.’

I replaced the phone, and took Susie by the hair, with the vague intention of pulling her to her feet. Then I thought, What the hell, there are worse ways to spend a Friday, and let her finish what she was doing.

I’ve always been amazed by the amount a good packer can get into a single, albeit large, suitcase. When she came downstairs at eight fifteen, my ‘house guest’, as Shirley had called her, was in another new outfit. This one was a cherry-coloured, silky-velvet dress, off one shoulder, its hem just below the knee. It clung to the contours of her body in a way that suggested that it was wearing her, rather than the other way around. The bump on her forehead had disappeared entirely, and she had covered the bruise which remained with some sort of foundation. Her lustrous hair was piled on top of her head, and she had picked dark eye make-up and crimson lip gloss to set it all off.

She had gone upstairs just after five to grab a couple of hours’ sleep, and a bath. Now, restored, she looked sensational, and very, very dangerous. . As indeed, she is. I wondered just what our hostess was going to make of her, although the newly self-aware Oz didn’t care all that much.

I didn’t feel tired at all. Far from going for a kip, like Susie, I had gone into the gym I had set up in a room in the outbuilding and lifted some weights, then done some serious exercising, following a programme which my friend Liam Matthews, the GWA World Wrestling Champion, had drawn up for me. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder than I did for that hour, that evening. It wasn’t just self-punishment; the part in the new movie was fairly physical and I wanted to be at my best for it.

Afterwards, I showered. I was towelling myself off when the phone rang. I picked it up in the bedroom; it was Prim. ‘Hi,’ she said, breezily. ‘How are things?’

‘My thing’s fine. How’s yours?’

‘Missing yours,’ she laughed. ‘You sound on top form.’

‘Never been better, my darling. Have you sorted your return flight?’

‘Yes. I can’t get out of LA till Monday. All going well I get back on Tuesday morning, at ten past eleven. Can you pick me up then?’

‘Of course.’

‘How’s Susie?’ she asked.

‘Resting,’ I told her. ‘I took her to Barcelona this morning.’

‘Yes, but how is she now? I mean, is she showing signs of getting over Mike.’

‘Hard to tell. She’s a bit withdrawn, sort of quiet. I’m having trouble getting her to talk at all.’

‘Don’t force it, then. If she wants to unburden herself, she will, in her own time. Got to go now, I’m off to see Mum again. Love you. Bye.’

Now, as I looked at Susie, the thought of her unburdening herself made me smile.

‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘you look pretty tasty.’ I had changed into Burberry jeans, a crisp white shirt and a wool and cashmere blazer.

‘You should know,’ I muttered.

‘Ha ha.’ She took my arm and turned me, so that we could see ourselves in the full-length mirror, which our predecessor had placed beside the front door. It’s a classic vanity thing; one last check to make sure that one looks perfect, and all that. We did, too. There was something about the guy who gazed back at me, something about his expression, that I didn’t recognise. I couldn’t put my finger on it; he just looked. . cool.

Susie reached across to my breast pocket and pulled the white silk handkerchief so that it showed a little more. ‘There,’ she whispered. ‘Now you look just like a movie star.’

‘Hey, kid. I am a movie star.’

‘I know. That’s one reason why I decided to add you to my trophy cabinet.’

‘When did you take this decision? This morning?’

She smiled at me, through the mirror. ‘No, no,’ she chuckled. ‘A while before that; I don’t know when exactly, but at some point a wee voice in my conniving wee head said, “I’m going to have his body”.

‘I must admit, though, I thought it would have been harder than that.’

I gave her my best ‘offended’ look, and she laughed. ‘Sorry. More difficult, I should have said.’ She patted my chest. ‘Like a rock, my darling, like a rock.’

We slipped on overcoats and walked the hundred metres to Shirley’s house, along the dimly lit Carrer Caterina. I’m sure she twigged right away, as she opened the door and saw us there, but she’s too good a hostess to have let anything show.

I introduced Susie, ‘our best friend from Glasgow’. This was only half true, at best; she sure as hell wasn’t Prim’s friend any more, even if Prim didn’t know it. As for me, I wasn’t entirely sure of my new relationship with her, but I was fairly certain that it wasn’t going to last long.

I was surprised to find that Shirley was alone. ‘John gone home?’ I asked her.

‘Yes. I had hoped that he would have stayed till the weekend at least, but he and Virginie left this morning. Now I’ve got that bloody car you sold him taking up half my garage. He started to strip it, but decided that it was too big a job for him. Gawd knows how long he proposes to leave it there.’

‘Does Virginie live with him?’

‘Sometimes. She’s fairly new on the scene, so I think they’re still sorting themselves out in that respect.’

‘Where does she live when she’s not with him?’

‘In a place called Divonne-les-Bains, so she told me; it’s in France, somewhere.’

‘How did they meet?’

‘At a furniture show in Paris, according to John. The way he tells it, he saw her, fell in love with her, and just swept her off her feet.’

‘Aww,’ said Susie, ‘isn’t that romantic? I’m just waiting for someone to do that to me.’

Shirley ushered us into her living room, disappeared into the kitchen and came back with three gin-and-tonics on a tray. ‘I don’t know about you,’ she exclaimed, ‘but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had so much cava, I’ve got bubbles coming out my ears. So I thought we’d have a real drink before dinner tonight.

‘So how’s Prim’s mum?’ she continued, briskly. I had bumped into her three days earlier and had told her about the emergency in California.

‘She’s coming along. She did have a malignant growth, but the surgeon’s confident that he got it all. They’re going to treat her to try to prevent any spread of the disease, and after that, we all live with our fingers crossed for a while.’

‘Prim staying out there for long, is she?’

‘She’ll be back on Tuesday, I’m glad to say.’

‘Me too,’ Susie murmured, coyly. ‘My idea of a surprise visit backfired on me, and no mistake. Oz has been great though. He’s been showing me the sights; he took me to Pals yesterday, and to Barcelona this afternoon.’

‘If you’re stuck for something to do tomorrow, there’s a Catalan Society cocktail party, at Frank and Geraldine’s place. Three o’clock, a thousand pesetas per skull, and bring a raffle prize. JoJo’s organising the drinks.’ She looked at me. ‘That’s how I knew you had a house guest, by the way. She told Geraldine you were in last night. . they came into the bar just after you’d left. . and she called me this morning.

‘The jungle drums beat fast in this place, as you know. She said that you’d been in with a redhead, and wondered who it was.’ She smiled. ‘I told her it was your sister. That seemed to satisfy her.’

‘I’ll put her right tomorrow if we go to this do. But wait a minute; you’ve met my sister. You know she isn’t a redhead.’

‘Yeah, but if I hadn’t told her something, then the story of Oz and the mystery woman would have been all over L’Escala by now. And who knows? Some bugger might have phoned the British tabloids. There are people everywhere who might try to make a quid by selling a story like that.

‘You’re a celebrity now, my young friend; people are interested in you. You want to remember that.’

She had a point; I couldn’t deny it. ‘Thanks for telling Gerrie a convenient porky, then.’

‘De nada. I knew there would be an innocent explanation, anyway.’ She laughed. ‘You and Prim have a hell of a history, but not even you could get off your mark that fast.’

‘Should I be offended at that?’

‘You wouldn’t have the brass neck to be offended, not after what you did to that girl when you lived here before. Going off and leaving her like that. I’ve never told you this before, but I thought that was really cruel, Oz Blackstone.’

‘Okay, but you don’t know the whole story. It was mutual.’

‘You might have told yourself that at the time, but don’t go believing it now.’

I tried a Catalan shrug, but it didn’t work. ‘Maybe,’ I said instead, ‘but at least she didn’t sit here pining for me.’

Shirley gave me an appraising look.

‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘There are no secrets between Prim and me. She’s told me everything about that time.’

‘Has she now?’ our hostess chuckled. ‘Good for her. I don’t suppose there’s a point to getting even with someone if they don’t ever know about it.

‘She really did too; especially with that Steve Miller bloke, so-and-so’s son, the car salesman. She thought he was a creep, yet she went off to Madrid with him for a week. I asked her why; she told me to work it out for myself. It wasn’t too difficult. You couldn’t stand him, so that was why she did it.

‘Then there was the Spanish guy, what’s his name?’

‘Fortunato?’

‘No, before him. After Steve, after that young fellow from St Albans. . only twenty-one, he was. . and after that racing driver from Sussex. He was a waiter in one of the restaurants in the old town; smarmy, oily chap, always chatting up the female customers.’

I knew him. But before I had a chance to dwell on him, Shirley went on. ‘You might not think so, but Fortunato was good for her. She was really off the rails after you left, but the policeman straightened her out, even if he was messed up himself, with his wife having left him for our mutual friend.’

‘What?’ She had lost me now.

‘Didn’t you know that? Mind you, Prim might not have known his name then. She never met him; I know that. It was Reynard Capulet. The policeman’s wife left him and went to Paris with Rey.’

I gave a light laugh. She didn’t know it, nor I imagine did Susie, but all the way through Shirley’s revelation I was honing my acting skills. ‘She got the short straw then,’ I said. ‘He was going to take you to Florida, wasn’t he?’

Another woman might have been hurt, but Shirley’s tougher than that. ‘Too right. Nothing but the best for me, and he knew it. Knows it, maybe. He could be living down the road, for all I know.’

I had a lot to think about over dinner. . in my Mum’s day, ‘supper’ was a cup of hot chocolate and a biscuit just before you went to bed. . but I kept myself in conversational mode. I told Shirley about Susie’s business back in Glasgow, and even mentioned casually that she’d been looking at something in our part of Spain.

‘Does the name Jeffrey Chandler mean anything to you?’ I asked her.

‘Big grey-haired bloke,’ she replied, ‘in the movies like you; built like a brick outhouse, was always playing cowboys, or soldiers and sometimes Indians, because he was naturally dark-complexioned. Been dead for donkey’s years.’

‘This one isn’t; he says he’s a property developer, but he’s really a con man and a thief. I wondered if he’d surfaced socially around here.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘He’s early forties, six feet odd, dark-haired, well-spoken,’ Susie told her. ‘He’s got a scar on his forehead. That’s all I remember about him.’

‘The streets are full of ’em, but I can’t say that name’s familiar. Ask Jo next time you see her; if he’s been around here, she’ll know. Did he do you wrong?’

‘A couple of million wrong, and no, I’m not talking pesetas, or even euros; real money.’

‘My God,’ said Shirley, after a mouthful of souffle. ‘What are you going to do when you catch him?’

‘Oz is going to have him killed,’ she answered, with a grin. ‘Aren’t you, Oz? You know people who do that sort of thing.’ It was a chilling thing for her to say, given recent history, but Shirl didn’t know any of that, so she took it as a joke.

‘Worse than that,’ I retorted. ‘I’m going to make him watch my new movie.’

We finished dinner, drank a couple of shots of chilled peach schnapps, then said ‘thanks’ and ‘good night’ to Shirley.

‘See you at the do tomorrow?’ she asked as we were leaving.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Why not? We’ll give you a lift down in the new bus.’

Back at Casa Nou Camp, I checked the alarm settings and bolted the doors. When I came out of the kitchen, Susie was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t have to search for her, though. I knew where she’d be. I didn’t even think about telling her to go back to her own room. I was as horny as hell, and I wanted her. I undressed and slipped under the duvet. She was smiling at me again.

‘You’re a master of deviousness, all right,’ she said. ‘You’re way beyond my league. The way you got all that stuff about Prim out of her, without her even knowing she was being questioned, or that any of it was news to you.’

‘And was it news to you?’

‘No, of course not. Prim told me the whole story a while back. I guessed she hadn’t told you that much, though; if she didn’t tell you the way it really was with the policeman, she was hardly going to confess to all the rest of it. What’s this guy Miller like, really?’

I felt my teeth clench. ‘A twerp. A real wee twerp. Shirl was right, I detest him.’

‘Yeah,’ Susie whispered, laying the palm of her hand on my belly, and sliding it downwards. ‘That’s what she told me too. She said that every time she did it with him, all she could feel was her hatred for you. He was your penance; that’s how she put it.’

What she was telling me was cutting into me like a knife. I didn’t want to hear any more.

‘Hey,’ I said, rolling over and into her in a single smooth movement, drawing a great deep gasp from her. ‘Enough about her. This one’s for you, and no one else.’