The clunk-clunk of the tennis machine had resumed, sounding across the empty courts. A fair-skinned man in a turquoise Club Nautico tracksuit was playing against the machine as it fired balls across the net, barrel set to swing at random. Despite the screens of wire netting I could see that an intense duel was taking place between player and machine. The man leapt across the court on his long legs, feet raking the clay as he raced to return every ball. Cross-court volley, lob and backhand flip followed one another at breakneck pace. A misfire brought him skidding to the net to cut a drop-shot into the tramlines, but he ran back to reach a baseline serve with his outstretched racket.
Watching him, I realized that he was urging on the machine, willing it to beat him, beaming with pleasure when an ace knocked the racket from his hand. Yet I felt that the real duel taking place was not between man and machine, but between rival factions within his own head. He seemed to be provoking himself, testing his own temper, curious to know how he would respond. Even when exhausted, he drove himself on, as if encouraging a less skilful partner. Once, surprised by his own speed and strength, he waited for the next ball with a dazed schoolboy grin. Although in his late twenties, he had the pale hair and youthful looks of a subaltern barely out of his teens.
Deciding to introduce myself, I made my way through the courts. A skied ball sailed over my head and bounced across the empty clay. I heard him slam heavily into the side netting and, a moment later, the sound of a racket slashed against a metal post.
He was leaving when I reached the practice court, stepping through the wire door by the opposite baseline. Surrounded by dozens of balls, the machine stood on its rubber wheels, timer ticking, the last three balls in its hopper. I crossed the court and stood among the skidmarks, the choreography of a violent duel, of which the machine had been little more than a spectator. Tossed aside, the broken racket lay on a linesman's chair, its shaft a mass of splinters.
I held the racket in my hand, and heard the whipcrack of the tennis machine. A heavy top-spin serve swung across the net and bit the clay a few inches inside the baseline, swerving past my legs to rebound against the fencing. A second ball, faster than the first, clipped the top of the net and stung the ground at my feet. The last ball bounced high at my chest. I flailed at it with the damaged racket and sent it over the netting into the next court.
Beyond the tennis machine the wire door opened briefly. A raised hand saluted me, and above the towel around the player's neck I saw a wry but cheerful grin. Then he strode away, slapping the netting with the vizor of his cap.
Nursing the torn skin on my hand, I left the court and strode back to the club, in time to see him disappear through the rainbows that swayed across the lawn. Perhaps the tennis machine had malfunctioned, but I guessed that he had reset the mechanism when he saw me approach, intrigued to know how I would react to the vicious serves. Already I was thinking of the testing games that this high-strung man would almost certainly have played with Frank, and of the luckless machine now summoned to take my brother's place.
4 An Incident in the Car Park
Estrella de mar was coming out to play. From the balcony of Frank's apartment, three floors above the swimming pool, I watched the members of the Club Nautico take their places in the sun. Tennis players swung their rackets as they set off for the courts, warming up for three hard-fought sets. Sunbathers loosened the tops of their swimsuits and oiled themselves beside the pool, pressing their lip-gloss to the icy, salty rims of the day's first margaritas. An open-cast gold mine of jewellery lay among the burnished breasts. The hubbub of gossip seemed to dent the surface of the pool, and indiscretion ruled as the members happily debriefed each other on the silky misdemeanours of the night.
To David Hennessy, who hovered behind me among the clutter of Frank's possessions, I commented: 'What handsome women… the jeunesse dorée of the Club Nautico. Here that means anyone under sixty.'
'Absolutely, dear chap. Come to Estrella de Mar and throw away the calendar.' He joined me at the rail, sighing audibly. 'Aren't they a magnificent sight? Never fail to make the balls tingle.'
'Sad, though, in a way. While they're showing their nipples to the waiters their host is sitting in a cell in Zarzuella jail.'
Hennessy laid a feather-light hand on my shoulder. 'Dear boy, I know. But Frank would be happy to see them here. He created the Club Nautico – it owes everything to him.
Believe me, we've all been hoisting our pina coladas to him.'
I waited for Hennessy to remove his hand, so soft against my shirt that it might have belonged to the gentlest of importuning panders. Bland and sleek, with an openly ingratiating smile, he had cultivated a pleasant but vague manner that concealed, I suspected, a sophisticated kind of shiftiness. His eyes were always elsewhere when I tried to catch them. If the names in his Lloyd's syndicate had prospered, even that unlikely outcome would have had an ulterior motive. I was curious why this fastidious man had chosen the Costa del Sol, and found myself thinking of extradition treaties or, more exactly, their absence.
'I'm glad Frank was happy here. Estrella de Mar is the prettiest spot that I've seen on the coast. Still, I would have thought Palm Beach or Nassau more your style.'
Hennessy waved to a woman sunbathing in a pool-side lounger. 'Yes, friends at home used to say that to me. To be honest, I agreed with them when I first came here. But things have changed. This place isn't like anywhere else, you know. There's a very special atmosphere. Estrella de Mar is a real community. At times I think it's almost too lively.'
'Unlike the retirement complexes along the coast – Calahonda and so on?'
'Absolutely. The people of the pueblos…' Hennessy averted his gaze from the poisoned coast. 'Brain-death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement. Estrella de Mar is more like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon bleu classes. Sometimes I dream of pure idleness, but not a hope. Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot.'
'I'm impressed. But what's the secret?'
'Let's say…' Hennessy checked himself, and let his smile drift across the air. 'It's something rather elusive. You have to find it for yourself. If you have time, do look around. I'm surprised you've never visited us before.'
'I should have done. But those tower blocks at Torremolinos throw long shadows. Without being snobbish, I assumed it was fish and chips, bingo and cheap sun-oil, all floating on a lake of lager. Not the sort of thing people want to read about in The New Yorker.'
'I dare say. Perhaps you'll write a friendly article about us?'
Hennessy was watching me in his affable way, but I sensed that a warning signal had sounded inside his head. He strolled into Frank's sitting room, shaking his head over the books pulled from the shelves during the police searches, as if enough rummaging had already taken place at Estrella de Mar.
'A friendly article?' I stepped over the scattered seat cushions. 'Perhaps… when Frank comes out. I need time to get my bearings.'
'Very sensible. You can't guess what you might find. Now, I'll drive you to the Hollingers'. I know you want to see the house. Be warned, though, you'll need to keep a strong grip on yourself Hennessy waited as I made a last tour of the apartment. In Frank's bedroom the mattress stood against the wall, its seams slit by the police investigators searching for the smallest evidence that might corroborate his confession. Suits, shirts and sportswear lay strewn across the floor, and a lace shawl that had belonged to our mother hung over the dressing-table mirror. In the bathroom the hand-basin was filled with shaving gear, aerosols and vitamin packs swept from the shelves of the medicine cabinet. The bathtub was littered with broken glass, through which leaked a stream of blue shower gel.
On the sitting-room mantelpiece I recognized a childhood photograph of Frank and myself in Riyadh, standing with Mother outside our house in the residential compound. Frank's sly smile, and my owlish seriousness as the older brother, contrasted
with our mother's troubled gaze as she strained to be cheerful for Father's camera. Curiously, the background of white villas, palms and apartment houses reminded me of Estrella de Mar.
Beside the row of tennis trophies was another framed photograph, taken by a professional cameraman in the dining room of the Club Nautico. Relaxed and pleasantly high, Frank was holding court in his white tuxedo among a group of his favourite members, the spirited blondes with deep décolletages and tolerant husbands.
Sitting beside Frank, hands clasped behind his head, was the fair-haired man I had seen on the tennis court. Frozen by the camera lens, he had the look of an intellectual athlete, his strong body offset by his fine-tuned features and sensitive gaze. He lounged back in his shirtsleeves, dinner jacket slung over a nearby chair, pleased with the happy scene around him but in some way above all this unthinking revelry. He struck me, as he must have done most people, as likeable but peculiarly driven.
'Your brother in jollier times,' Hennessy pointed to Frank. 'One of the theatre club dinners. Though photographs can be misleading – that was taken a week before the Hollinger fire.'
'And who's the brooding chap beside him? The club's leading Hamlet?'
'Far from it. Bobby Crawford, our tennis professional, though he's far more than that, I may say. You ought to meet him.'
'I did this afternoon.' I showed Hennessy the sticking-plaster which the concierge had pressed against my bleeding palm. 'I still have a piece of his tennis racket in my hand. I'm surprised he plays with a wooden one.'
'It slows down his game.' Hennessy seemed genuinely puzzled. 'How extraordinary. Were you on the courts with him? Bobby does play rather fiercely.'
'Not with me. Though he was up against someone he couldn't quite beat.'
'Really? He's awfully good. Remarkable fellow in all sorts of ways. He's actually our entertainments officer, and the absolute life and soul of the Club Nautico. It was a brilliant coup of Frank's to bring him here – young Crawford's totally transformed the place. To be honest, before he came the club was pretty well dead. Like Estrella de Mar in many ways – we were turning into another dozy pueblo. Bobby threw himself into everything: fencing, drama, squash. He opened the disco downstairs, and he and Frank set up the Admiral Drake regatta. Forty years ago he'd have been running the Festival of Britain.'
'Perhaps he still is – he's certainly preoccupied with something. Yet he looks so young.'
'Ex-army man. The best junior officers stay young for ever. Strange about that splinter of yours I was still trying to prise the splinter from my hand as I stared at the charred timbers of the Hollinger house. While Hennessy spoke to the Spanish chauffeur on the intercom I sat in the passenger seat beside him, glad that the windshield and the wrought-iron gates lay between me and the gutted mansion. The heat of the conflagration still seemed to radiate from the bruised hulk, which sat atop its hill like an ark put to the torch by a latter-day Noah. The roof joists jutted from the upper walls, a death-ship's exposed ribs topped by the masts of the chimneys. Scorched awnings hung from the windows like the shreds of sails, black flags flapping a sinister semaphore.
'Right – Miguel will let us in. He looks after the place, or what's left of it. The housekeeper and her husband have gone. They simply couldn't cope.' Hennessy waited for the gates to open. 'It's quite a spectacle, I must say…'
'What about the chauffeur – do I tell him that I'm Frank's brother? He may 'No. He liked Frank, sometimes they went scuba-diving together. He was very upset when Frank pleaded guilty. As we all were, needless to say.'
We entered the gates and rolled on to the thick gravel. The drive rose past a series of terraced gardens filled with miniature cycads, bougainvillea and frangipani. Sprinkler hoses ran across the hillside like the vessels of a dead blood system. Every leaf and flower was covered with white ash that bathed the derelict property in an almost sepulchral light. Footprints marked the ashy surface of the tennis court, as if a solitary player had waited after a brief snowfall for an absent opponent.
A marble terrace ran along the seaward frontage of the house, scattered with roof-tiles and charred sections of wooden gabling. Potted plants still bloomed among the overturned chairs and trestle tables. A large rectangular swimming pool sat like an ornamental reservoir beside the terrace, constructed in the 1920s, so Hennessy told me, to suit the tastes of the Andalucian tycoon who had bought the mansion. Marble pilasters supported the podium of the diving board, and each of the gargoyle spouts was a pair of carved stone hands that clasped an openmouthed fish. The filter system was silent, and the surface of the pool was covered with waterlogged timbers, floating wine bottles and paper cups, and a single empty ice-bucket.
Hennessy parked the car under a canopy of eucalyptus trees whose upper branches had been burned to blackened brooms. A young Spaniard with a sombre face climbed the steps from the pool, gazing at the devastation around him as if seeing it for the first time. I expected him to approach us, but he remained thirty feet away, staring at me stonily.
'Miguel, the Hollingers' chauffeur,' Hennessy murmured. 'He lives in the flat below the pool. A little tact might be in order if you ask any questions. The police gave him a hell of a time.'
'Was he a suspect?'
'Who wasn't? Poor chap, his whole world literally fell in on him.'
Hennessy took off his hat and fanned himself as he gazed at the house. He seemed impressed by the scale of the disaster but otherwise unmoved, like an insurance assessor surveying a burned-out factory. He pointed to the yellow police tapes that sealed the embossed oak doors.
'Inspector Cabrera doesn't want anyone sifting through the evidence, though God only knows what's left. There's a side door off the terrace we can look through. It's too dangerous to go inside the place.'
I stepped over the shattered tiles and wine glasses at my feet. The intense heat had driven a jagged fissure through the stone walls, the scar of a lightning bolt that had condemned the property to the flames. Hennessy led the way towards a loose French door levered off its hinges by the firemen. Wind gusted across the terrace, and a cloud of white ash swirled around us like milled bone, restlessly hunting the air.
Hennessy pushed back the door and beckoned me towards him, smiling in a thin way like a guide at a black museum. A high-ceilinged drawing room looked out over the sea on either side of the peninsula. In the dim light I found myself standing in a marine world, the silt-covered state-room of a sunken liner. The Empire furniture and brocaded curtains, the tapestries and Chinese carpets were the decor of a drowned realm, drenched by the water that had poured through the collapsed ceiling. The dining room lay beyond the interior doors, where an oak table carried a pile of laths and plaster and the crystal debris of a chandelier.
I stepped from the parquet flooring on to the carpet, and found my shoes sinking as the water welled from the sodden fabric. Giving up, I returned to the terrace, where Hennessy was gazing at the sunlit peninsula.
'It's hard to believe one man started this fire,' I told him. 'Frank or anyone else. The place is completely gutted.'
'I agree.' Hennessy glanced at his watch, already keen to leave. 'Of course, this is a very old house. A single match would have set it going.'
The sounds of a tennis game echoed from a nearby court. A mile away I could make out the players at the Club Nautico, a glimmer of whites through the haze.
'Where were the Hollingers found? I'm surprised they didn't run on to the terrace when the fire started.'
'Sadly, they were upstairs at the time.' Hennessy pointed to the blackened windows below the roof. 'He was in the bathroom next to his study. She was in another of the bedrooms.'
'This was when? About seven o'clock in the evening? What were they doing there?'
'Who can say? He was probably working on his memoirs. She might have been dressing for dinner. I'm sure they tried to escape, but the intense blaze and the ether fumes must have driven them back.'
I sniffed at the damp air, trying to catch a scent o
f the hospital corridors of my childhood, when I had visited my mother in the American clinic at Riyadh. The air in the drawing room carried the mould-like odours of a herb garden after a rain shower.
'Ether…? There's something curious about that. Hospitals don't use ether any more. Where was Frank supposed to have bought all this bottled ether?'
Hennessy had moved away, watching me from a distance as if he had realized for the first time that I was a murderer's brother. Behind him Miguel stood among the overturned tables. Together they seemed like figures in a dream-play, trying to remind me of memories I could never recover.
'Ether?' Hennessy pondered this, moving aside a broken glass with one shoe. 'Yes. I suppose it does have industrial uses. Isn't it a good solvent? It must be available at specialist laboratories.'
'But why not use pure petrol? Or lighter fuel for that matter? No one would ever trace the stuff. I take it Cabrera tracked down the lab that's supposed to have sold this ether to Frank?'
'Perhaps, but I somehow doubt it. After all, your brother pleaded guilty.' Hennessy searched for his car keys. 'Charles, I think we ought to leave. You must find this a dreadful strain.'
'I'm fine. I'm glad you brought me here.' I pressed my hands against the stone balustrade, trying to feel the heat of the fire. 'Tell me about the others – the maid and the niece. There was a male secretary?'
'Roger Sansom, yes. Decent fellow, he'd been with them for years – almost a son.'
'Where were they found?'
'On the first floor. They were all in their bedrooms.'
'Isn't that a little odd? The fire started on the ground floor. You'd expect them to climb out through the windows. It's not that long a jump.'
Cocaine Nights Page 4