So I didn’t bat an eyelid when she slid out of her jeans. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t go into a restaurant looking like this. There’s a pair of scissors in the glove box. Pass them over, will you please.’
I did as she told me: they were big, heavy dress-making scissors. Knowing her as well as I did, I guessed that she kept them there for security. She took them from me and as I watched, never thinking to avert my eyes from the sight of Prim in her knickers, she cut off the bloodstained trouser legs just above the knees. Next she unbuttoned her shirt, and slipped it off. I breathed an inward sigh of relief; she was wearing a bra. Invariably the sight of her without one had a certain effect on me. She trimmed the sleeves off the garment just above the elbows, then dressed quickly and jumped out of the car.
‘There,’ she said, modelling her new-look outfit on the tarmac. ‘A bit skimpy for this time of year, I’ll grant you, but at least we won’t be arrested.’ She opened the driver’s door and slid into her seat, beside me.
‘Like it?’ she asked, grasping the steering wheel.
‘It looks fine from inside, but were you blindfolded when you bought it? I mean, the colour, Prim. .’
She laughed: not her normal, easy laugh, but high-pitched, not unlike Susie Gantry’s distinctive giggle; as if for the first time in our lives she was unsure of herself with me. ‘I got a deal on it, didn’t I. Anyway, most of the time it’s so dirty that you can’t tell what colour it is.’ She turned the ignition key, and the engine thrummed into life. It certainly sounded okay. ‘I know a place where we can eat,’ she said. ‘I’ve been exploring Barcelona.’
‘What else have you been doing?’ I asked. ‘Improving your Spanish for one thing. I was impressed, back there.’
‘My job has a lot to do with that. I’m nursing again, in the big hospital in Girona.You know, the one you see just as you drive into the town from the north.’
‘Yes, I know it. How did you get in there? I thought they’d have recruited Spanish only; you know what they’re like.’
‘I had help,’ she said. ‘Ramon put in a word for me.’
‘Ramon?’
‘Ramon Fortunato. Remember the Guardia Civil captain we met?’ I nodded in the dark. ‘He’s not Guardia any more, he transferred to the Mossos Esquadra, the new Catalan national police force, and he’s based in Girona. He heard about a supervisor job that was going in the A amp; E department and he asked me if I’d be interested. I hadn’t thought about going back to nursing, but equally, I didn’t intend to sit on my arse working my way through our capital. So I thought, what the hell.’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘For big Jerry’s sake, it’s as well you’re up to speed on emergencies.’
‘That stuff back there?’ she exclaimed. ‘Pure meatball surgery: I learned that trick on chest wounds when I worked in Africa. Out there I used my Mastercard so often, then steam-sterilised it, so that the signature was obscured. I had to report it lost and get a replacement. That procedure would make great television, but I’d be sacked from any hospital in Europe for doing anything as unhygienic.’
‘Don’t worry, kid,’ I said softly. ‘I won’t report you.’
I stared at her profile as she drove us down from Montjuic and into the city, thinking of the last time I had seen her: when we had split that morning in St Marti d’ Empuries; the village where we had lived together for a while until I had an encounter with Jan which made me realise where I really belonged. And until Prim. . but that was still too painful a memory for me to dwell on for long.
I had left her there, with a last kiss for luck. One way and another we had amassed a fair bit of money in our short time together, but we had agreed that we would do nothing about dividing it for a year, to give Prim a chance to decide how and where she wanted to live her life.
So I had driven off into the autumn afternoon, knowing that I would have to see her again at some point, but never dreaming that it would be in such bizarre circumstances.
The place which she knew was a restaurant in a side street about half a kilometre from the Columbus Monument. She found a space in one of the city’s many underground car parks and led me to it. There were tables available, since it was still only around nine-forty-five, early on a Spanish Saturday night.
I let her order for us both: anchovies and escalivada, followed by two T-bone steaks, with two beers for starters and a bottle of Faustino III.
I watched her as she took her first mouthful of Estrella, and thought to myself that for all the tiredness which still showed on her face, and for all that she looked to have dropped a pound or two, I had never seen her looking lovelier.
‘What else has Ramon been doing for you, then?’ I asked her, casually.
She arched her eyebrows over the top of her glass. ‘Nothing in that respect, my dear,’ she said. ‘Not that it would be any of your bloody business. He’s a friend, that’s all. He and his wife live in Albons, and they eat in Meson del Conde every so often. I saw them there and we all sort of got to know each other.’
She looked down at the table-cloth. ‘There’s been no one else, Oz. Not so far. In the last year I’ve had the two most memorable relationships of my life, both of them all too brief, sadly. I’ve always been aware of the dangers of rebound flings, so I’ve made a point of declining all offers.’ She grinned. ‘There have been more than a few, by the way. Junior doctors the world over would shag themselves into oblivion, given half a chance.
‘So much for my non-sex-life, though. What about yours?’
I made a hole in my beer. ‘Did you get my letter?’ I asked her, as casually as I could.
‘The one where you told me that you and Jan were getting married?’ She nodded. ‘I got it. Thanks for not inviting me, by the way. That would have been pushing it.’ For the first time, I caught the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice.
‘We’re living in Glasgow,’ I went on, quickly. ‘Dad and Auntie Mary got hitched too, Ellie and the boys are fine, I’m back in business, Jan’s carrying on with hers, we’re both making plenty of money. . and Jan’s pregnant.’
She gasped slightly. ‘When you went back, Oz,’ she asked, after a moment, ‘she wasn’t, was she?’
‘No, no, no,’ I assured her. ‘I’d have told you that. We only just found out.’
‘The icing on the cake, eh.’ She tried to hide it, but I saw her chin tremble.
‘Prim, love, I’m sorry.’
She shook her head, and smiled, but her eyes were shining. ‘Don’t be, my dear. We talked it all out, remember. It wasn’t just you who made the decision. As for Jan, I was never convinced that you were over her, even if you believed it. Why d’you think I wouldn’t marry you when you asked me?’
‘You said you wanted more time to think about it.’
‘Yes, but what I meant was that I wanted you to have more time to think about it, so that both of us could be sure that it was me you really wanted. Brilliant tactician me, eh. Bloody backfired on me, didn’t it.’
‘But you didn’t want to marry me either! You told me.’
She finished her beer and signalled for two more. ‘Bollocks, my darling. Given the job that you do, I’m amazed that you always believe everything a woman says to you.’
She reached across the table and grabbed my hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say all this. I didn’t want to marry you if you were in love with someone else. That’s the truth. Let’s just be thankful it wasn’t me who got pregnant and leave it at that.
‘Quick, change the subject. Tell me, exactly how the pluperfect fuck did you get involved in this carry-on?’
‘I’m doing a bit of undercover work for Everett,’ I explained. ‘Someone’s been trying to sabotage his operation. What happened tonight is the culmination of a series of events. The big Daze fella hired me to help him find who was behind it.’
‘And have you?’ Prim asked.
‘We have now. The road foreman: an American called Sonny Leonard. We suspected him be
fore tonight, and now he’s done a runner. The device that shot Jerry was hidden in the top pad in the corner of the ring. It was triggered by the impact of twenty-seven and a half stone of wrestler hitting it at high speed. It was Leonard’s job to fit those pads; we even watched him do it.’
‘I see. Are you sure he knew about the device?’
‘There was other evidence against him; also, like I said, he’s vanished.’
I finished my first beer, just as the second arrived. ‘But how about you? How the hell did you come to leap up into that ring tonight like Florence fuckin’ Nightingale?’
‘Simple. I was in the English lady’s bar in L’Escala last night, having a drink after work, the telly was on and all of a sudden, you were on it, speaking dodgy Catalan, and talking gibberish about this thing called the Global Wrestling Alliance. I have never fallen off a bar stool in my life before, but I was so surprised last night that I did just that.
‘At the close of the item, the presenter said that there were still tickets available, and gave a number to contact. So I called it. The rest, as one says in Auchterarder, is geography. ’ She paused.
‘I had quite a good seat too, overlooking the ring, When Jerry went down, I could tell from the way Everett reacted that it wasn’t right, even before he yelled for assistance. Then I saw the blood. I had to argue my way through security to get to the ring, but I made it in time.’
‘Thank heaven,’ I said, sincerely. We both sat silent for a while, contemplating the outcome that might have been.
‘Tell me,’ I asked her, eventually. ‘If there hadn’t been an emergency, would I ever have known you were there?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I hadn’t decided. You tell me. If I hadn’t seen you on Canal 33, would I ever have known you’d been here?’
‘I don’t know either. I’d been thinking of calling you.’ I took my mobile phone from my pocket, and in that instant it rang.
‘Probably Everett,’ I said. But it wasn’t.
‘Oz? Is that you?’ I didn’t recognise the voice on the other end; not even after he’d told me who it was.
‘Of course it is. Who’s that?’
‘It’s Mike here.’
I held the phone away from my ear for a second and stared at it, astonished. ‘Dylan? What the fuck are you calling me here for? Are you drunk or something?’
Prim stared at me across the table, as surprised as I was. The name, Dylan, meant plenty to her too.
‘No, Oz, I’m not drunk.’ The voice seemed to steady. ‘I have something to tell you. Where are you?’
‘In a restaurant.’
‘Are you in company?’
‘Yes. Now will you please tell me what this is about.’
‘Okay.’ His voice cracked again. ‘Oh Christ man, I’m sorry.’
To this day, I still don’t remember the moment he told me that Jan was dead; that my wife and my child were dead. What I do remember is the sensation of a blow within my head; the sudden overpowering dizziness, the phone slipping from my hand on to the table, Prim looking frightened as she reached to pick it up, and the cold beer splashing over me when my hand caught the glass and upset it, as I slipped from my chair to the floor.
Chapter 30
I wanted my dad, very badly. I sat there, on a chair in the wine cellar of the restaurant, where Prim and the owner had taken me as I began to recover from my faint.
I was aware, yet unaware. I knew that something very bad had happened, but my mind refused to tell me what it was. All I knew was that I wanted Mac the Dentist with me, just as I had wanted him when I was four, when I had fallen out of a tree and broken my wrist.
Primavera was sitting next to me. Her head was on my shoulder, she was clutching my arm tightly, and she was crying. She was shaking like a leaf, too.
A man stood facing us. He asked me in Spanish if we would be all right. I looked at him blankly. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ I said, in English. He must have thought that I had meant ‘Yes’, for he nodded and disappeared back up a flight of stairs, to the restaurant.
I looked down at Prim again, and I saw my phone in the breast pocket of her shirt. I remembered, and I knew. My mind still wouldn’t form the words, ‘Jan is dead’, but I knew all right. Mike Dylan’s cracking voice on the phone, the look of unprecedented fear on Prim’s face as she had picked it up, and now her racking, helpless sobs, far different from the tears of relief which she had shed earlier.
Horror. It was a word you saw in bookshops over a rack of shelves filled with names like Koontz, Barker and Stoker. It was an adjective used with movies. It was a concept from wars long before my time. It wasn’t a word that was meant to figure in my chaotic, but comfortable, life.
Yet now it did; now it consumed me. I sat there, in that dingy, musky, dusty cellar and I felt myself becoming cocooned in it: in a chrysalis of pure horror. It was numbing; it brought out beads of sweat which clung to my forehead like little chips of ice. ‘Where are my tears?’ I demanded of myself as Prim sobbed beside me, but it was too, too cold for weeping.
I closed my eyes and, clear as day, Jan’s face swam into my vision, her dark hair shining as if moonlit, her head tilted back slightly, her eyes giving me her knowing look, light laughter on her lips. ‘It’s all right,’ I told myself, ‘it was a dream.’ But then, as if to mock me, red blood began to froth from her mouth. It ran in thick lines from her nostrils, and from her ears, down her cheeks and chin to form a river round her neck.
I opened my eyes again, to drive away the vision, but it would not go. Whatever I did I had to confront it. I twisted my head, this way and that, but still it was before me, until at last I felt my mouth twist, and I heard myself scream, ‘No! No! No!’
Then Prim was on her feet, still crying, but wrapping her arms around my head, pressing my face against her. ‘Oz, oh Oz,’ she whispered. ‘This can’t be happening.’
But she couldn’t break through my chrysalis, through my cold carapace. Nothing could crack that. I seized her arms above the elbows, near the shoulders, in my hands, gripping hard enough to bruise, and forced her away from me. I held her at arm’s length and I spoke to her in a voice that I had never owned before.
‘You talked to him? You talked to Dylan?’
She nodded, helpless in my grip.
‘Tell me what he said.’
‘Let me go, Oz. You’re hurting me.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I will, but Oz, you’re breaking my arms.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Oz,’ she wept. ‘Please don’t punish me for being alive.’
At last, her pain got through to me: I let her go, noticing the furious red and white weals which my madman’s strength had left on her skin, noticing, but dispassionately, still not caring much.
‘What did Mike say, Prim?’ I asked her yet again, but patiently this time. ‘I remember he was talking to me, but that’s all. Then we were down here.’
She sat down again beside me, in her dining chair, with its bentwood back, and she began to stroke my arm, with her right hand, gently; up, down, up, down, ruffling the soft blond hairs, then smoothing them down again, ruffling, smoothing. I watched her, knowing that I didn’t really want her to speak.
She did, though, as I had demanded of her, more fool me. She spoke, and changed my life.
‘Dylan told me that Jan is dead, Oz. He said that she was found this evening. He couldn’t say any more, he was too upset. But he gave me a couple of numbers for you to call, when you’re ready.’
Her tears came again. ‘Oh, Oz. I am so, so sorry.’
I was still numb, and by now I was taking relief in it. I looked at her, and I said, ‘I’ll bet.’
She looked at me as if I’d slapped her. I saw her hurt, but I was impervious to it. No, nothing got through my cocoon.
A small part of my rational brain knew all this, and made me realise that I had to use my horror as a shield. It wouldn’t hold for ever, I knew, but while it did, I coul
d be functional. Once it gave out. .
So I cherished my coldness, and I hung on to it. To read that sort of book, they say you must suspend disbelief. In my need, I did it the other way round; I suspended belief.
‘Come on,’ I told her, standing as I spoke. ‘We can’t stay here. We have to go. I have things to do.’
She nodded, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. ‘Okay. Do you want to go back to your hotel?’
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I hadn’t thought my way past the top of the staircase, in fact. I handed the controls to my ice-cold auto pilot, and let myself go by instinct. ‘No, I can’t be with them. They’re friends but they’re strangers too. I need privacy for what I have to do. Take me to the apartment.’
Primavera looked at me. ‘Are you sure? Is that-’
‘Right and proper, you were going to say? I don’t give a monkey’s about that. What Dylan said isn’t right or fucking proper either. I need privacy if I’m to deal with it. So come on. I’ll drive.’
The man in the restaurant wasn’t going to take any money, but I insisted on paying for what we had ordered. The Faustino III was on the table, not yet uncorked: having paid for it, I took it with me.
The hamlet of St Marti d’ Empuries, in the municipal district of L’Escala, lies just over an hour and a half away, by the Autopista, from the centre of Barcelona. Prim’s car had a sporty engine, and so I did it in an hour and fifteen minutes. Neither of us said a word all the way up the road. I was aware that my speed was making her nervous, but I didn’t care, comfortable as I was within my icy state. Once she reached for the temperature control on the heater panel, turning it into the red zone, but I twisted it back to the blue minimum straight away.
The lights were still on in Meson del Conde when I drove into the square and parked beyond the church. Even before I switched off the engine, Prim jumped out, ran to the ground level entrance to the apartment, opened it and pounded up the stairs to the living area. I followed her, carrying the Faustino; as I stepped inside and closed the door, I heard loud retching sounds coming from the bathroom.
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