A Coffin For Two ob-2

by Quintin Jardine

  Our voyage might have been over for the moment, but there was still plenty of discovering to do. We spent the next week exploring the region: the incredible detail of the excavated Greek and Roman cities of Empuries, the homely L’Escala with the narrow streets of its old town sloping down to a pocket-sized sandy beach, and its expanding marina where we encountered another expatriate Scot, running a very good restaurant with her Catalan husband, the neighbouring town of Torroella de Montgri, with its baking hot square and its leafy avenues … sorry, ramblas. In the process we found at least a dozen good places to eat, since neither of us was in a hurry to learn about supermarket shopping in Spain.

  On our seventh night in St Marti, as on all the others, we brought our evening to an end at a table outside Casa Minana, enjoying the buzz of the people and the cold of the draught Estrella beer. As our friend passed by with a nod and a smile, Prim stopped him with a touch on his arm.

  ‘Miguel.’ She hesitated, for about half a second. ‘What would it cost to buy the apartment?’

  He looked down at her, suddenly solemn. So did I. ‘To buy it?’ he repeated.

  She nodded.

  He glanced across at me, then back at Prim, all the time scratching his chin. ‘An apartment like that, in this village,’ he said at last, ‘it cost maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen million pesetas.’

  I gulped. Millions of anything have that effect on me. I looked across at Prim, watching her concentrate as she converted mentally to sterling.

  ‘But the Dutchman,’ Miguel went on, ‘he say to me, get me nine million and I will be happy.’ He paused. ‘That is with the furniture, the cups, the saucers, everything.’

  We both liked Miguel, he had befriended us, and given us a couple of mines full of useful information about places to go, things to see, and even places to eat — not a hint normally thrown out by a restaurateur. But both of us looked at him as if he was Tommy Cooper at his funniest.

  ‘Nine million!’ I gasped, when at last I could. ‘For a top quality, furnished two-bed apartment in an exclusive village, with one of the finest views in Europe. Christ, Miguel, that’s forty-five grand in real money. Forgive us, but what’s the catch?’

  He smiled and shrugged. ‘Senor Oz, Senora Prim, I assure you there is no catch. Things between the Dutchman and his wife are very bad. She is not a good woman. She run off with another man, but she wants all his money. He say to me that the more he sell the place for the more he will have to give her. So he say to me to find someone I like, someone who will enjoy the place, and who will not tell anyone in the village what they pay for it, and to sell it to them for nine million.

  ‘You are interested, yes? If you need a hipoteca … Sorry. How you say? Mortgage, I know a man in a bank.’

  Prim looked at me and nodded. If I had said no I would have been deeper in the shit than the Dutchman. So instead, I said, ‘Yes, we’re interested. No, we don’t need a mortgage.’

  Miguel beamed. ‘Good. That is very good! I will phone the Dutchman now and tell him.’

  He disappeared into the bar, leaving us staring at each other, stunned. ‘Can you believe it?’ Prim whispered.

  ‘Just,’ I replied, ‘but to be on the safe side, we’d better find a lawyer, pronto.’

  Miguel reappeared five minutes later, still smiling. ‘Everything is okay. Nine million is okay. He says he hopes you have better luck there than he did. Before he left he gave me power of attorney, so I can go to the notario with you to pass the escritura.’

  He had read my mind. ‘But you, you should have a lawyer. Just so everything can be explained to you.’ He passed me a card which he had been holding between his fingers. ‘You go see this man. He is in L’Escala and he is lawyer for a lot of British people here. He is very good, very honest.’

  His name was Ray Lopez, half Catalan, half English, all lawyer. We saw him next morning, and found that a phone call from Miguel had beaten us to it. Sr Lopez looked into the local and regional registers and pronounced everything as ‘Appropriate, Senor y Senora,’ and five days later Sr Osbert Blackstone and Sra Primavera Phillips were joint owners of the apartment of their dreams.

  The dreams continued through the summer. Every morning we walked along the three-kilometre road to L’Escala, for coffee in the open air, either at the Casablanca by the beach, or at El Centre, beside the old church. Most afternoons we spent swimming in the sea and sunbathing on the beach below St Marti, or lying naked on the beds on the terrace. On alternate nights we would cook for ourselves, at home, or eat out, at one of our growing list of restaurants, occasionally with members of our circle of English ex-pat acquaintances which had developed out of a couple of introductions made by Ray Lopez.

  Weeks turned into months as we enjoyed our idyll beneath the Spanish sun. It was there, on the twenty-first of September, that I clambered over the milestone of my thirtieth birthday. In the course of it all, we became sybarites, Prim and I. Without our realising it our voyage had turned into an exploration of the limits of self-indulgence, and in the process we were turning ourselves into different people.

  I suppose that it had begun to dawn on us both, but as usual, it was Prim who said it first; on the terrace, in the still-hot autumn sun, on the day after my birthday.

  ‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

  I took a swig of my beer, from the bottle as usual, and frowned back at her. ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve got quarter of a million in the bank in Jersey, we’ve got a house a lot of people would kill for, in a place we both love. We screw each other’s brains out every day … like half an hour ago for example. We’ve got no ties, no worries, no responsibilities. And you lie there with the Piz Buin glistening on your brown bosom and tell me that it isn’t working.’

  She clenched her jaw. ‘Well it isn’t. We’ve found our place, sure. We’ve had our holiday, too. But it’s got to stop sometime.’

  She had thrown me into a grim mood. I resisted. ‘Why has it got to stop?’

  The frown grew deeper. ‘Well … our cash won’t last for ever.’

  ‘No? Where we have it, we’re earning a minimum of fifteen grand investment income. Jan’s starting to bank another four-fifty a month in rent of the loft. That’s twenty K without touching our capital. So!’ My voice rose of its own accord. I’d never snapped at Prim before. Come to think of it I don’t remember ever snapping at anyone before. ‘Why isn’t it working?’

  She swung her legs round and sat on the edge of the lounger, pulling her knees up to her chin. The frown had gone, replaced by what looked like a plea in her eyes. ‘Because I, at least, need ties, need worries, need responsibilities. I need to be doing something. And so, if you’d think about it, do you.

  ‘When we met you were dynamic.You couldn’t stop moving if you tried. You swept me off my feet.’

  ‘As you swept me,’ I said. ‘As you still do.’

  ‘Fine, but if we become stagnant there will come a point when I don’t. Oz, we’re too bloody young to opt out. You say we can live on what we have now, but if we have kids … when we have kids … what then? What sort of role models would we be?’ She was in full cry now. ‘Remember that English bloke Trevor. The one we met at Gary’s restaurant.The fellow who’s been here for years, doing little or nothing, but knowing everything. How’d you like to have him for a father?’

  ‘Aw, come on!’ That was a sure sign that she was winning the argument. She knew it, and she closed in for the kill.

  ‘The last couple of months have been great, sure. But I’ve got to the stage when I’m conscious that all I’m really doing is sitting on my steadily widening arse watching you doing the same thing. And am I wrong or is the sex not quite as magic as it was at the start?’ She had me there.

  ‘Oz, we have to think about what’s ahead. It’ll be winter soon, even here. It’s time we got back to work.’

  With a very ill grace, I gave up. ‘Okay, so what’ll we do?’

  She beamed at me. ‘Why don’t we do what we’ve shown we
’re good at? Investigations.’

  I stared at her. ‘Investigations? Here? But we barely …’

  She waved a hand, as if she was brushing me aside. ‘Let me finish. I mean investigations here for people in Britain. You were a private enquiry agent in Edinburgh. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing in Spain for people in Britain. All we have to do is widen the definition a bit. If a UK company wants some market intelligence we’ll do that. If a lawyer wants a witness interviewed, we’ll do that. If a travel company wants resorts checked out we’ll do that. If a parent wants a missing kid found, we’ll do that.’ All the time she spoke her smile was getting wider, and her eyes brighter.

  ‘We’ll place small ads in British newspapers,’ she burbled, ‘in the business sections. Something like “Phillips and Blackstone. Spanish Investigations. You want to know? Let us find out. Replies to a box number.” We’ll use the Telegraph, Sunday Times, Scotsman, Herald, and a legal magazine. We can mailshot the big law firms in London and Scotland, through a post office box here. It won’t cost all that much to try, and I’m sure it’ll be a winner.’

  I looked across at her. I was on my fourth San Miguel of the day. The light in her eyes was beginning to hurt mine.

  ‘Couldn’t you just get a job nursing?’ I said wearily. ‘In Gerona or Figueras, maybe. Couldn’t we just buy a bar that I could run? That we could both run?’

  She looked at me. Now the brightness of her eyes had turned into lasers, cutting me open. ‘Sure we could do that, Oz. I could go out every day and force myself to do a job I swore I’d never do again. Then I could come home at night — or worse still, be there all day — to watch you sat on your barstool, pontificating and turning into a replica of that arsehole Trevor.

  ‘You said it all really: “Couldn’t we just …”’ She twisted the word like a knife. ‘You meant find something, anything, to occupy our time. Well, you can become a cabbage if you like, Oz, but I won’t stick around to watch. If we’re going to stay here long-term, and I’d like to, we have to get a life that makes the most of our strengths, rather than indulges our weaknesses. Laziness is an easy vice to pick up. I can see it taking hold of you, and I can feel it growing in me.’

  I finished my San Miguel in a single swallow, took another from the ice bucket, twisted off the top, and stared across at her, unsmiling. Temper tantrums were strangers to me. I had a feeling that I was about to say something very bad, something about once a nurse always a sergeant major, something about not trying to run my fucking life. It didn’t occur to me for a second to look for a funny line to divert her with laughter. It didn’t even occur to me that I might have looked a wee bit ridiculous, lying there naked and quivering with petulance.

  I took another swig of beer, then a deep breath, as if I was fuelling the tirade to come.

  ‘Senor Oz! Are you there, please?’

  3

  ‘Okay, Miguel. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll see you at the church.’

  He nodded and I turned away from the wall. I was alone on the terrace. Prim’s lounger was empty, although a bisected crescent in the cushion marked the spot where she had been sitting.

  I stepped from the sunlight into the cool darkness of the living room. She was leaning against the bedroom door. I looked at her big brown eyes. The lasers had been switched off, and normal sparkling conditions restored, with perhaps an added hint of contrition.

  As I came up to her she reached out for the towel around my waist, unfastening it and using it to pull me towards her. I felt two hard nipples warm against my chest, as her mouth reached up for mine. I kissed her, a bit warily still.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she whispered, ‘sounding off like that. But I really do want it to work for us. Can we give it a try?’

  I looked down at her.

  ‘Please?’ she said, very quietly.

  My conversation with Miguel had already done something for my lethargy level. That wide-eyed look was enough to do the rest. ‘Okay, partner. Let’s try it out. But it’s Blackstone and Phillips, mind, not the other way around.’

  Primavera beamed up at me. ‘Tell you what,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s call ourselves Blackstone Spanish Investigations. My mother doesn’t expect me to live in sin forever, you know.’

  I gulped. Marriage, for us, was a bit like death. Probably on the agenda, only we weren’t sure when.

  She let go of the towel and grasped my bum in both hands. ‘And now, since we’ve nothing better to do before dinner …’

  I disengaged her. ‘Ah but I have,’ I said. ‘I have to meet Miguel, now. You draw up the ads. We can fax them to Jan tonight and ask her to place them.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay. What did Miguel want, anyway? I couldn’t hear.’

  ‘It was about young Jordi. He’s found a body.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Prim. ‘I see.’

  4

  Finding a body in St Marti is not, actually, all that uncommon an occurrence.

  The village has renewed itself time and time again, on the same site, over the last couple of millennia. Even the church isn’t any more than a few centuries old … or most of it, since there is a stone over the door which dates back over a thousand years.

  People have lived there pretty well continuously all that time, and nature being what it is they’ve died there too. All that history is lying there in layers beneath the surface, and you don’t have to scratch too deep before you begin to find it. Every time the locals dig up a drain or lay a cable there’s a fair chance they’ll find an ancestor.

  During the previous few weeks the town council of L’Escala, which is responsible for the village, had put men to work on the area in front of and alongside the Casa Forestals, the foresters’ house, clearing and levelling the site, making it ready to be transformed into a paved public viewpoint.

  I could see Miguel pacing about restlessly in front of the church as I stepped out of our yellow front door, back into the sunshine in my shorts, sandals and Runrig T-shirt. To my surprise, he was smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen him do before. Yet the Minana family had been in St Marti for as long as their records went back, so I guessed that it was the possibility that young Jordi’s find might have been his great-great-great-great-great granny that was making him so twitchy. Something else surprised me. In the bright light of day, he was carrying a black, rubber-bound Ever Ready torch.

  He turned as I approached. ‘Ahh, Oz. Thank you for coming. I am sorry if I interrupted your siesta. You do not bring Senora Prim? No. Is good.’

  I smiled at his concern for my beloved. After the year she had spent as a nurse in an African war zone, not to mention our escapade in Switzerland, I was pretty certain that there was nothing beneath the soil of St Marti to make her bat an eyelid.

  ‘No problem, Miguel. So, where’s your old Roman warrior?’

  He gave me a strange look. ‘Over here, come on.’ He led the way across the crown of the square, towards the excavations around the foresters’ house. It was late afternoon on a Monday in late September, one of the very few occasions on which the hub of St Marti is likely to be completely deserted.

  ‘When did Jordi do his digging?’ I asked.

  ‘This afternoon, once the men had finished work for the day. He likes the archaeology. He says that he wants to go to study it at university. My father says that like us he should work in the bar and on our farm, but I say, we’ll see.’

  He beckoned me on, round to the side of the tall house, to the narrow area which lay between it and the church. The ground was uneven, littered with stones and clumps of dried yellow soil, with the remnants of vegetation wound through it. The workers had marked the walls of the church and the house to show where, eventually, the line of the new viewpoint would be.

  Miguel pointed to a patch of ground in the shadow of the house, almost against the wall. ‘There it is. Look.’ I followed his pointing finger, bending to see better.

  It lay just below the level to which the men had been di
gging. I could see what young Jordi’s sharp eye had picked up, and how he had gone about exposing it handful by handful. It was the lid of a stone coffin. It had been pulled aside, exposing about half of the width of the chamber, but not recently, for despite young Jordi’s excavation I could see that it was still partly full of soil.

  The body was there all right. The skull grinned up at me, its big teeth standing out and its eye sockets full of dry yellow earth. It was a big skull, and the bones of the shoulders seemed wide. I guessed that this had been a man, and probably an important one at that, to have merited a coffin, since most of the early inhabitants of St Marti had been buried in shrouds. I looked down the length of the skeleton, as the boy had exposed it. All the bits seemed to be there as it lay stretched out on its bed of clay. Something on the left wrist caught my eye. I leaned a bit closer. It was a bracelet, about an inch and a half wide, with a finely worked design showing where Jordi had rubbed away the dirt.

  I stood up and looked at Miguel. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘You were right. It’s a body. Now what do you want me to witness?’

  He looked at me still frowning. ‘Eventually, I want you to say that there was nothing there but the bracelet when we find him. The archaeologists are very suspicious. They may say that there was something else and that Jordi took it.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I trus’ you, that’s why.’

  I smiled at the compliment. Then an idea struck me. ‘I’ll get my camera and take a photo. That should satisfy them.’

  A look of horror flashed across his face. ‘No, no! You must not. There is something else. Look again.’ Hesitantly he handed me the torch.

  I took it and knelt down beside the stone coffin, noticing for the first time how deep it was. I shone the torch inside, looking more closely at the centuries-old skeleton, beginning to feel a wee bit ghoulish.

  For an instant, a strange flash caught my eye; it could have been gold or silver. I couldn’t be sure, for the stone lid cast a dark shadow. I swung the torch back slowly until its beam found the bright metal once more. My stomach turned over. The torch-light shone full on a man’s wristwatch. It had a black face with gold hands, and gold roman numerals and a stainless steel back, with what looked like 18-carat gold plate around the edge of the face. Its strap was black leather, and looked as if it was partly rotted.