‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘Why do you think? After Davidoff went away, I just hated the place. I couldn’t look at that summerhouse again without thinking of him, and without wondering what had happened to him. You don’t know do you?’ She fired her question too quickly for her effort at sounding casual to be convincing.
‘No,’ I lied quietly. I did, of course, but I couldn’t tell her; not even her.
‘Ahh,’ she sighed. ‘There was always a bit of the cat about him. I expect he just went off somewhere to die, just like an old moggie. I miss him, all the same. So that’s why I sold up. Couldn’t leave L’Escala though; so I found this lump of land and I had this house built. That’s what you two should do.’
Shirley had made her point. We didn’t get into a discussion right there and then, but that night, back at the hotel as we did justice to a bottle of cava before going down for dinner, Prim brought it up. ‘She’s right, you know,’ she exclaimed, out of the blue.
‘Who? Margaret Thatcher?’
‘Yes, but apart from her. Shirley is. We should buy something else in L’Escala.’
‘Yes, dear.’
She frowned at me. ‘Are you humouring the little woman?’
‘No, dear.’
‘Well, what do you mean?’
‘I mean okay.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Why? Do you want an argument? I can read that look in your eye, and I know that if we had one I’d lose. So I might as well agree with you and save the hassle.’
She isn’t just a magnet for trouble: she can radiate it too, when she feels like it.
‘Besides,’ I conceded. ‘I happen to agree with old Shirl. I do feel right here. And there’s something else. Back in Glasgow we live in a place that Jan and I shared. Sure, I know you can hack that, but given our financial position it’s only fair that we have a place that’s ours alone.’
‘Aww,’ she murmured, slightly, unusually, stuck for a word.
‘And finally. .’
Prim laughed. ‘Oh yes? You’ve got your smartarse look on. Out with it.’
‘I looked around as we were leaving Shirley’s. There’s a place two doors along with a “for sale” sign, and I like it up there; I like the quiet. So I thought we might look at it tomorrow.’
3
And so we did. Next morning I called the estate agent, having mentally noted the number on his signboard, and next afternoon we met him on the road which runs towards the public entrance to the Ruins of Empuries.
It occurred to me as we shook hands that I hadn’t spoken any serious Spanish for a while, but in any case he launched straight into his version of English. ‘Goot morning, sir,’ he began, getting off on the wrong foot by ignoring Primavera. ‘I am Sergi.’
He looked to be around forty, a strapping bloke approaching six feet tall, big for a Catalan of that vintage. He had a heavy jaw. . not quite in the Jimmy Hill class, but showing promise. . which made all of his other features seem smaller. When finally he did turn to acknowledge Prim, I saw that his thick dark hair was held back in a pony-tail.
He reached into his pocket, fishing around for keys. I hadn’t expected him to be wearing a suit. . very few business people in that part of Spain wear jackets and the manager in any bank is usually recognisable as the guy wearing a tie. . so I thought nothing of his designer jeans, but his heavy woollen jacket looked a bit flamboyant. It had a South American look to it.
‘I sorry I ask to meet you here. It been such a long time since I visit this house, I forget how to find it.’ He smiled, creasing up his little eyes. ‘But I look before you come, so I know now where it is.’
‘It’s been for sale for a while then?’ Prim asked him, in Spanish.
He looked at her, gratefully. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘For seven months now. It has been empty for over a year.’
‘Who is the owner?’ I ventured in Castellano. Actually, I’m not bad at the national language, although most of the local tongue, Catalan, is a mystery to me. To put my communications skills in perspective, though, I once met an eight-year-old boy in L’Escala who spoke four languages and was fluent in three of them.
‘He’s a Frenchman,’ Sergi replied. ‘I don’t know what happened. He just went away. A few months later I had an instruction to sell the villa, exactly as it stands. I get in touch with him through a lawyer’s office in Geneva. Come on, I’ll show you the place. The road from this side is rough; it’s easier if we walk than drive all the way round.’
He led us up a short rocky alleyway which might have taken a car, but might have taken out its exhaust in the process. At the top of a short slope we turned left into Carrer Caterina, which happily is a proper tarmac street, with paving and everything, and found ourselves in front of Shirley’s new Ibizan villa, its terra-cotta walls standing out proudly against the cloudless blue winter sky.
‘This way,’ said our guide leading us on, rummaging again in the pocket of his cardigan and coming out at last with a monster bunch of keys, just as we arrived in front of the house where I had seen the ‘En Venda’ sign. There was a plastered brick wall facing the street, two metres high and solid. Once it had been white but it looked around ten years overdue for repainting. On one of the pillars, which supported its gate, there was a stone nameplate. It read ‘Villa Bernabeu’. Sergi caught me peering at the mossed-over lettering.
‘The owner is a Real Madrid fan,’ he explained.
‘No wonder he left town,’ I murmured.
The estate agent’s sign covered half of the double metal gate, hiding, I guessed, a sizeable patch of rust in the process. It took our lantern-jawed pal three minutes, and several failed attempts, to find the key which unlocked it. As he swung it open, my heart sank.
The house was on the crest of a slope, the front door approached by a weed-invaded driveway on the right of the plot, which led from the gate to the garage, then veered off to form a path. It was big enough, a two storey villa with a pillared entrance, designed by an architect who had either a rough idea of Greek style or had seen Gone With the Wind. Like the wall, it was plaster-clad, and in a similar state of disrepair.
The garden to the left of the drive was raised up; a short flight of stone steps led up to what seemed to be a terrace. It had a balustrade, which for some reason had been painted blue.
‘The plot is two shousand metros,’ Sergi announced, lapsing into lumpy English once again.
‘Dos mil,’ Prim repeated, getting him back on track.
‘Yes, it’s big. The land alone is worth twenty million pesetas; the price of the house. . everything, including the furniture and the car in the garage. . is fifty million.’
‘Pardon?’ I exclaimed.
‘But I think they would take forty-two,’ he added quickly.
‘I think they might have to,’ said Primavera as we walked up the driveway. ‘Look at those shutters.’
I followed her pointing finger. Several of the slats of the wooden blinds, which covered all of the windows, were twisted and rotten, and some were missing altogether.
‘As I said to you, I was told to sell the house in its present condition. I concede that it needs work done to it, but once you have spent the money, you will have something very good indeed.’ He led us up to the front door; this time he was able to open it at the third attempt.
Even in the little light which spilled in from the doorway we could see that it looked much better inside. Sergi found the power box, in the customary place behind the door, and switched on the light. The house smelled musty, but that was only to be expected. To the front, the ground floor was one open area from wall to wall, with a stairway rising from the centre, seating to the left of the entrance, and fine oak dining furniture to the right. Two big open fireplaces, stone-built with thick timber mantelshelves faced each other across the huge apartment and a Sony wide-screen television, with a video player and a satellite decoder box stood in a corner of the living area.
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sp; He walked from window to window, opening each one inwards; they were floor length, with black-painted metal frames and small square panes. ‘See,’ he exclaimed, as if he had remembered that he was supposed to be selling the property. We kept our faces straight as the shutter nearest the seating area more or less disintegrated in his hands.
He rushed us through the rest of it: cloakroom, breakfasting kitchen, bathroom and laundry on the ground floor and, upstairs, four bedrooms, the front two en-suite. . the master chamber with the biggest, most solid brass bedstead I had ever seen, and an oval Jacuzzi big enough for a football team. . and opening out on to an upper terrace which ran the full width of the house.
As we looked down we saw that the spacious garden to the front was paved in stone, and dominated by a big rectangular pool, covered for the season by a blue tarpaulin, lashed securely to rings which were set into the ground all around.
‘Twenty metres by eight,’ our guide volunteered. ‘That’s big for a private pool.’
He paused. ‘What do you think?’
I followed Primavera’s gaze out over the Golfo de Rosas, and read her mind at once. ‘We’re interested,’ I told him. ‘But we want it checked out.’
If we had been at home, we’d have sent a surveyor, but that’s not the way they do it in Spain. Instead, we went to Shirley’s builder, Vincens Siemens, who had a good reputation around the town, and asked him to give us a report and an estimate of what it would cost to refurbish it to a standard suitable for an international movie star and his consort.
It was less than we thought; the central heating system and plumbing were in good condition, and the bathroom fittings were all of the finest quality. The pump machinery had been renewed and the pool retiled less than three years before, by Senor Siemens himself, and so we were left to contemplate only rewiring, a new kitchen, replacement shutters and a complete redecoration.
Apart from the lumpy mattresses, the furniture was pretty good too; not antique, but old enough to have a comfortable feel to it. The car in the garage turned out to be a Lada Niva four by four, but you can’t have everything.
Sergi’s little eyes lit up when we told him we wanted to buy. They narrowed to slits when we said we had been thinking of offering forty million, but relaxed once more when we said that we would go to forty-four, for completion within the week. Three days later, on the second Friday in December, we did the deal before the local notary, a pleasant chap with a moustache thick enough to have swept a ballroom floor. Sergi acted for the seller, having been granted a power of attorney months before.
‘Well,’ I asked my wife as we stood, that afternoon, on the terrace of our new second home, ‘have we done the right thing?’
‘Let’s hope so,’ she answered. ‘But time will tell. Come on; let’s find out where the bodies are buried.’
4
We hadn’t said a word to Shirley. Nor did we, until we had checked out of Crisaran and moved in, on the following Tuesday. It wasn’t a problem; the place wasn’t just furnished, it was fully equipped with linen, towels, crockery, cutlery, glassware, the lot.
I called her, mobile to mobile, and asked if she fancied a coffee. ‘Sure. Where?’
‘Two doors along.’
‘You bleeding what!’
I was watching from the bedroom terrace as, within two minutes, she came striding into the driveway. It was a mild day, but she was wrapped in a long dark overcoat. ‘Honest to God,’ she bellowed, as I swung the door open and we stepped out to greet her. ‘I drop one bleeding hint and look what happens. What if I was to say I fancied a new car?’
Primavera laughed out loud. ‘There’s a very nice Lada in the garage with four thousand kilometres on the clock; you’re welcome to it.’
‘Here,’ I protested. ‘That’s a motor of character. I plan to drive that.’
‘Ship it to Russia and break it up for spares,’ said Shirley. ‘That’s my son’s new business venture,’ she added. ‘He buys Ladas in Britain and France for peanuts, breaks ’em up and ships the parts across to a warehouse in St Petersburg. Making a bleedin’ fortune, he is.’
‘Do you see much of John these days?’ I asked.
‘No. He’s too busy, with his Russian thing, with running the family company. . although our manager does most of the donkey-work. . and with keeping an eye on a pub he bought just outside Newcastle. The other Newcastle, I mean; the one in the Midlands.
‘Last time he was over, though, round about Easter, he had a look at this place. I heard him mutter something about buying it as an investment. He’ll be pissed off that you’ve beaten him to it; still, if he was serious, he should have been quicker off his mark.’
She stepped inside and looked around. The place was a mess, with two big cardboard crates, which until an hour before, had held a washing machine and a tumble dryer, lying in front of the stairway, and the plastic coverings from four new mattresses strewn on the floor, waiting to be stuffed inside them for disposal. It was warm, though; there had been plenty of oil in the tank which fed the central heating boiler, and for good measure we had lit fires in each of the two great hearths, using dry logs which we had found piled in an Aladdin’s cave of a brick shed at the back of the house.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Shirley said, slowly. ‘You’ve moved in already?’
‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘The place is liveable, the telly works, and we’ve had the old broken-down shutters taken away, and that rusty old gate’s going too, once its replacement is ready. Vincens the builder has our new kitchen on order; he’ll do that and the rewiring once we go off to start work on Miles’s new movie. We have a painter starting work tomorrow, and we’ve even got a guy doing something to the satellite dish that’ll give us British digital television.’
‘Christ, you’ll be in the bleedin’ pool before the week’s out.’
‘Hardly,’ Prim laughed. ‘We’ll need to fill it first. We have been thinking about putting in a heating system for it, but so far we haven’t even taken the cover off.’
We installed Shirl in one of our new soft leather armchairs, and Prim poured coffee from a top-of-the-hob percolator, which we had found in one of the old kitchen cupboards. She looked around, nodding from time to time.
‘Yes,’ she proclaimed at last. ‘Not bad at all. Get some nice pictures on the walls, and some nice rugs on the floor, put some nice lights on that big terrace around the pool, and you’ll have a home fit for a film star.’
‘Thanks,’ I acknowledged. ‘Do you know anything about the previous owner?’
‘Well. .’ Shirley answered slowly, ‘he was French, I know that much; also a friend of mine, who lives up here, mentioned him once or twice, after he went away. She didn’t know his name, but she said she’d heard that he was a bit dodgy. Not that that means much; there are lots of mysterious people around here. Even me. Even you two.
‘When John looked at the place he asked about him. He told me that all that Sergi bloke said was that he’d gone away; when John pressed him a bit more he got the impression that no one was quite sure where he’d gone to. Again, there’s nothing unusual about that, not by L’Escala standards. People come and go all the time, and if they don’t volunteer information they don’t get asked for it. That’s one reason I prefer it to England. You’re allowed a bit of privacy here.’
Our new neighbour drank her coffee, and demolished a pastry stick filled with chocolate, which I had found in one of the local bread shops. When she was finished, we gave her the grand tour of the house, then, like the good guest she is, she excused herself and left us to get on with settling in.
We had hired a firm of commercial cleaners to go through the house like a dose of salts in advance of our moving in, so from that point of view there was little to do. We finished laundering the sheets and towels, then filled the cardboard crates with the mattress wrappings, for me to pile them into the Lada. . I really was taking a shine to the ugly, square, bus. . and take them to the nearest rubbish skip. While I was g
one the telly man, an English ex-pat, did what he had to do to our satellite dish and tuned in the decoder box which gave us illicit access to British broadcasting.
I came back to find Prim almost jumping for joy. ‘We can get British radio,’ she shouted as I stepped inside. ‘It comes through the satellite! I can keep up with The Archers.’
I gave the bloke a serious stare. ‘What the hell did you tell her that for?’ I asked him. Both he and my wife grinned. I didn’t know why they thought I was kidding, but they did. From somewhere close by, I thought I imagined a Satanic chuckle.
All the same, when he left I was ready to sit down for an hour’s telly. It was almost five, and there was a review of the previous week’s European football about to begin on Eurosport. Prim had other ideas. ‘Is that it?’ she exclaimed, in a tone which told me at once that it wasn’t.
‘What else is there?’ I protested. ‘You can’t want to go out for a drink, can you? We’ve just filled that bloody great fridge with booze.’
‘No. We’ll go out later. But first we have to get that cover off the pool.’
‘Gie’s a break, love,’ I pleaded. ‘That thing must weigh a ton. There’s a hell of a lot of it. Look, I’ll get the painters to help me tomorrow.’
‘They’ll be here to paint. The two of us can manage it together, Oz; and Vincens said we should fill the pool as soon as possible, to get the motor running. It’s a ten-minute job and there’s enough daylight, so let’s do it now.’
I gave up. Normally, I’d have muttered something about alternative uses for daylight, and taken her off to test-drive our new mattress, and that monster of a bed, but I’d had enough of that at Crisaran. (We have a technical term in Scotland for that condition. We call it Being Shagged Out.) Or maybe my actions were being guided by A Higher Power? (No, on this occasion I was Absolutely Shagged Out.)
I followed her outside and went to work untying the ropes which held the big blue cover firmly in place. We started nearest to the house, which we assumed was the shallow end, working our way down the sides. The metal rings to which the nylon rope was lashed were set two metres apart, eleven of them down either side, with three along the top and the far end. They were screwed into the stone, so that they could be removed when not in use, thereby saving a right few broken toes.
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