On Honeymoon With Death

7

When Fortunato came back two days later, I did my best not to give him the slightest hint that Prim had told me about the two of them. So I don’t know how he guessed, unless he caught something in my eye, or, more probably in Prim’s. She was edgy from the moment that he phoned to check that we’d be in.

I gave him my best, ‘Hail, fella, good to see ya,’ greeting, and he responded, but as soon as Prim disappeared off to the kitchen to fetch the coffee, he seemed to change, to become completely un-copperlike, on the defensive. He spent quite a while admiring our new rugs, and a very nice repro cabinet which we’d bought the day before from the Masia Store, on the road to Girona, before he could bring himself to look me in the eye. When he did, it was as if he was quizzing me.

No way was I going to kick the subject off. ‘Well?’ I asked, trying not to sound aggressive.

‘So you know?’

‘So I know. So I didn’t know last time you were here. So what am I thinking?’

Ramon nodded.

‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘She was a free girl then, to misquote Tom Petty; I was gone. You’re part of her history. God knows I have enough of my own, so I can’t take issue with hers.’

I let that sink in, but not for too long. ‘I take it that Prim is history as far as you’re concerned?’ I asked him.

He looked at the cabinet again. ‘Yes,’ he answered quietly.

‘That’s fine then. The subject’s closed, for good, as far as I’m concerned.’

The captain looked relieved. ‘For me too, obviously. Thank you.

‘You must meet Veronique some time, and Alejandro.’

I couldn’t think of a worse idea, but of course he didn’t know about Prim’s child. So all I said was, ‘Let’s not rush that one.’

Bang on cue, Primavera returned with coffee on a tray. I suspected that she had been listening, behind the door. ‘So, Ramon,’ she began as she handed him his, ‘what’s the news on our departed guest?’

‘No good news,’ he answered, mournfully. ‘As you saw, the body was badly decomposed, but not completely. The pathologist estimates that it had been in the water for around a year, maybe a month more, maybe a month less. There was nothing on it to identify it, but you can forget my theory that it might have been a tramp. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the heart; the bullet was still there, lodged in the spine.’

‘So it was the Frenchman, Capulet?’

Fortunato shook his head. ‘I can’t say that for sure. It’s beyond visual identification, and the clothing gave us no clue. It’s all designer stuff, a mix of Hugo Boss and Pierre Cardin. Could have been bought in L’Escala, could have been bought anywhere. There was no wristwatch, no jewellery.’

‘What about dental records?’ Prim asked.

The detective smiled, sadly. ‘For that you have to have been to a dentist. This man had perfect teeth. No, I’m afraid there is only one way we can prove it is Capulet, and that’s through DNA profiling. There’s no material from him that we can use for cross-reference, so we’ll need to take a blood sample from a close relative. He had no children, so that means his sister, Lucille.

‘Yesterday I called my colleagues in Geneva and asked them for cooperation. This morning they called me back. She has not been seen at home since Saturday, and no one knows where she is. They’ve spoken to the lawyer who administered the company; she visited his office on Friday afternoon to check that the company had received your bank transfer for the purchase of this house, but said nothing about going away. I also have checked Capulet’s homes in Paris and Florida. Each one was sold during last summer, and new people live there now. Quite a mystery.’

I glanced out of the window at our empty, uncovered pool. Ramon had asked us not to fill it for the time being. ‘Where’s the mystery? She’s killed her brother, then cashed up and buggered off into the wide blue yonder.’

Captain Fortunato stared at me, bewildered. It was another of those rare occasions when his English let him down. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s sold the company’s assets and gone away.’

‘You may be right. And that will not help me.’

‘So what happens now?’ Prim asked. ‘Can we fill our pool?’

The policeman shook his head. ‘Not yet, not yet. Your pool is now a murder scene; that makes this situation very awkward. It brings up matters of jurisdiction also.’

‘How come?’

He looked up at me from the couch. ‘When I met you for the first time, I was an officer of the Guardia Civil. Now I am Mossos d’Esquadra, but I have many of the same duties. Normally, the death of this man would be for me to investigate. However, if the body is that of Capulet, that could make things different. He was suspected of crimes which crossed the Catalan border, into other parts of Spain, and those would still be the responsibility of the Guardia.

‘I see where we could have a big argument. For the moment though, since we don’t know for sure that it is the Frenchman who is dead, I am keeping hold of this business. I want to have my technical people look at your pool again. Also I want to search your house, to see if there is anything still here that might tell us something about the man’s death.’

‘But we’ve had cleaners in,’ I said.

‘I know, but it is still something I have to do. Better that it is me than someone from the Guardia, who does not know you.’

‘Better the Devil you know,’ I murmured.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean, yes; I agree with you.’

Ramon had been sure of himself, and us; there was a squad of officers waiting in a van, out of our sight in the street below. Prim and I decided that it was best for us to leave them to get on with it, so we took ourselves along to Shirley’s.

She had been wide-eyed the day before, when he had told her about our bonus surprise in the pool. ‘Bloody hell, Oz,’ she had exploded. ‘People leave some funny things behind them when they sell houses here. . the punters who bought mine were left a model of the Tower of London that my late husband made out of matchsticks. . but dead tramps is pushing it.’ We hadn’t let her into our suspicion that the body was that of the previous owner.

When we told her the hot-off-the-press news, that the guy had been shot, her jaw dropped so far I thought it was dislocated.

‘Say that again,’ she gulped eventually.

I did.

‘Do they know who it is?’ she asked.

‘They think it might be our predecessor. He was an antique dealer but he was also in the import business, apparently.’

‘You mean he was a smuggler?’ She catches on quickly, does our Shirl.

‘So they reckon. Not drugs, though. According to Fortunato, he dealt in fags and stuff. His name was Reynard Capulet.’

She looked at me steadily enough, only I thought I caught a flicker somewhere in her gaze.

‘You said the police think it might be him. Don’t they know for sure?’

I nodded. ‘From what we saw the other night, he looks a lot worse than his passport photo. They’re going to have to identify him by other means. The police in Switzerland are looking for his sister right now, so they can run a comparison test.’

‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ she muttered.

There was no doubt about it; Shirley Gash seemed just a bit distracted. She was making a big effort to hide it, but she wasn’t quite getting there.

Prim saw it too. ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t know this man, did you?’

She drew a deep breath. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted. ‘I knew Rey Capulet: knew him fairly well, or so I thought. But I never, ever, knew that he lived up here. All your talk of a Frenchman, and I never made the connection. I thought he was Swiss, you see; he mentioned his sister in Geneva fairly often, so I just assumed.’

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘I met him one night in Bar JoJo, oh, it’ll be eighteen months ago at least; first half of last year. He was with that bloke Sergi, from the agency in town. I was with some people from Conservatives Abroad. I had had enough of the bloody dominoes by that time, so I said hello to Sergi, and he introduced me to his pal.

‘He seemed like a nice chap. We talked for a bit and that was all. Then a few days later, I bumped into him in the bank. He invited me to dinner in El Golf Isobel. A perfect gentleman, he was; bit younger than me, but what’s that got to do with anything.

‘I took him out to Kathleen and Carlos’s restaurant. . you know, La Clota. . returning his hospitality, then we had a few more dinner dates after that. Never got down to any of the other, you understand, but it was on the agenda. . mine at any rate. Mind you, he did talk about me going to his place in Florida, so it might have been on his too.

‘Last time I saw him? Oh, it must have been a year ago.’ She frowned. ‘November, it was; early November. He took me to Mas Torrent. . that was when he mentioned going to Florida, in fact. He said he was off to Geneva for a couple of weeks, to visit his sister. But he never came back. . or so I thought. I never saw him again, anyway.’

‘And you never knew he lived two doors down from here?’ Prim asked.

‘I’d no idea; we never got to the stage of him inviting me back to his place. I was still in my old house then. I’d only just signed up for the plot, and when Vincens showed it to me, Rey was off on his travels. So I never made the connection; all I was told was the same as you, that Villa Bernabeu was owned by some French geezer.’

‘Did he never discuss his business?’

‘Not much. He said that he came from a wealthy family and that he dealt in commodities. When someone says that to you in L’Escala, you can draw your own conclusions, but you tend not to ask any more questions. If Fortunato says that he was a smuggler, it doesn’t surprise me.’

‘Did he ever talk about other friends or business associates? ’ I caught Prim giving me an old-fashioned look.

‘No. And Sergi was the only guy I ever saw him with, as far as I can remember.’

All of a sudden, Shirley shuddered. She seemed to shrink into herself, to become smaller, as the impact of what we had told her began to sink in. ‘The police really think that was Rey in the pool?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ I told her. ‘They’re a bit vague about the actual time of death, but it could fit with the time you saw him last.’

‘God,’ she whispered.

‘Unlikely,’ I muttered. ‘He doesn’t use a gun.’ I winced as soon as I’d said it, knowing that she had heard. It wasn’t something that the old Osbert Blackstone would have come out with. No, that crack was very definitely new Oz, worldly wise and maybe none the better for it. But Shirley didn’t seem to mind; in fact she sat upright again.

‘No, He doesn’t. If you move in that world, I suppose you have to live by its rules. I wonder who he upset?’

‘Maybe he didn’t upset anyone,’ Prim suggested, an hour later, as we walked back to the villa. ‘Maybe someone upset him.’

I laughed out loud. ‘What? So he shot him, dumped him in the pool, then left town and put the place on sale: with all furnishings and fittings?’

‘Smartarse,’ my wife grumbled.

‘Come on. You love me really.’ I remembered a moment. ‘Here, why did you give me that funny look back there at Shirley’s?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Sure you do. When I was asking her who Capulet’s pals might have been, you shot me a right frown.’

‘Ah that. Just for a moment I thought you were slipping into private eye mode.’

‘Gie’s a break, honey. I never was a private detective. I was a private enquiry agent; different animal altogether. I just got drawn into a few things, that’s all.’ I paused as another brick slipped into place. ‘And always when you were around, come to think of it.’

‘Don’t blame me! You couldn’t stop yourself. Well, just remember, whatever you called yourself, you’re out of that business for good. You’re an actor, and to prove it you’re an Equity member. I will not. . Hear me? I said I will not. . have you getting involved with this business.

‘If that was the previous owner in our pool, then he probably got what was coming to him. If it wasn’t. . So what? It’s Ramon’s job to find out who it was and why he was put there. It’s got nothing to do with you. Hear me?’

‘I hear you! I hear you! You just remember it too. You know, sometimes I think that it’s no wonder I took to acting. My whole life’s been a fucking movie since I met you, darlin’.’ My blood went cold suddenly. I had pronounced that last word just like Jan used to.

Prim never noticed though. She was still chuntering to herself as we walked back into the villa.

‘Hello there,’ Captain Fortunato greeted us, clutching a mug of our finest Bonka coffee. (I’ve often wondered why they don’t market that brand in Britain.) ‘We have almost finished. You will be glad to hear that, so far, we found nothing out of the usual.’

‘If you’re happy, we’re happy,’ I said, being fairly keen to see the back of the bloke.

No such luck. ‘Ahh, I did not say I was happy. I am a detective, and so I have the sort of mind that expects to find something out of the ordinary. When I do not, I become suspicious.

‘When people buy a house in this town, it is not unusual for it to be sold with furniture and most of the fittings. Normally, the person who sells will clear out personal items, but there is usually something left behind, something which gives a clue about the previous owner.

‘When you moved in here, what did you find? Were there clothes in the wardrobes?’

Prim nodded. ‘Yes, there were; men’s clothing. Most of it casual. I chucked it all out.’

‘Were there any papers in the drawers, anything at all? For example, were there any cards for restaurants, or for businesses in L’Escala? Were there any maps of the town? Were there even any matchbooks, or the little packs of sugar which they give people in cafes, and which everyone takes home?’

‘No, there weren’t. Not that I can recall. Can you, Oz?’

I thought about it for a while. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t think there was a single piece of paper left in the house; other than books, novels and such, all of them French. I tell you something that struck me as odd. There was a telephone, but no directories. Why would somebody leave town, leave Spain, as far as anyone knows, yet take the telephone directory with him?

‘And the tape? There was a telephone answering machine, but it was empty. There was no cassette in it, and none anywhere in the house.’

I looked at Fortunato. ‘I see what you mean,’ I told him. ‘When we moved in here there was nothing that referred in any way to the Frenchman. It was as if the place had been stripped of anything that might, anything on which he might even have made a note, or scrawled down a phone number, an e-mail address, anything like that.’

‘And yet his clothing was still here, his books. .’

‘And a stack of CDs,’ I added.

‘And a few cases of expensive wine. . Unless you have bought the bottles which I found in the storeroom at the back.’

‘No, we found them there too. So what does that tell you, Captain?’

No one can shrug his shoulders quite like a Catalan. It’s a national trait, and one of the most expressive gestures I know. Fortunato’s said it all. He didn’t need to add, ‘Everything. Nothing. Either the body is Capulet and the person who killed him has covered his tracks, or it is not, and he is covering his own.’ But he did.

‘What it means,’ he continued, ‘is that I think I do have to share this now, with my colleagues in the Guardia Civil. I hope they don’t want to dig up your terrace, or your garden at the back, but you never know.’