‘Oh dear,’ she sighed at last. ‘I must have been crazy to assume that she’d never find out. She’ll be after my blood, I suppose.’
‘Several pints of it. The least you can expect is a fairly ferocious phone call,’ I admitted. ‘I guess I should have called you, to warn you, but the red mist came down. As a result, I’m just on my way back from making a fool of myself yet again.’
‘How?’
‘Miller. I assumed it was him and I went to his place to give him another doing. It wasn’t.’
‘So who did take the photos?’
‘I haven’t a bloody clue, Susie; not yet, at any rate.’
‘Don’t go overboard when you find him, Oz. Promise me that.’
‘I’m promising nothing any more. Promises just get you into bother.’
‘What about the one you made to me? About looking out for me?’
I had actually thought about that. ‘That still stands, whether Prim comes back or not. I gave you my word.’
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I really am sorry. I never meant to mess things up between you two.’
‘What would you do differently in the same circumstances? ’ I fired at her.
‘Nothing.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Do you want to come over here?’ she asked.
‘No. We’ve been over that, and you were right.’
‘What about the new movie? What happens if Prim doesn’t come back, and tells Dawn and Miles why?’
‘Right now, I don’t give one damn. But we’re contracted, Miles and I, for one more picture at least, and he has an option on me for the one after that.’
‘Will she come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want her to?’
I had been thinking about that, on and off, from the moment her car turned out of the driveway. ‘Susie,’ I replied, ‘you made it pretty clear that I’ve been misusing women all my adult life. I’ve got to start being honest with someone.’
‘Be honest with me, then. If Prim did leave, and I turned up again, would you throw me out?’
‘I. . Oh shit, I don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though; I wouldn’t have any bloody illusions about you.’
Susie gave the short, brittle laugh that was one of her trademarks. ‘Now there’s a fine basis for a relationship. Oz, don’t be an idiot any longer than you have to; get your arse down the road to Barcelona and ask her to come back home. Even if a wee bit of begging’s called for as well. What’s the name of her hotel?’
‘The Husa Princesa. Why?’
‘Because I’m going to phone her, take my punishment like a big girl, and apologise for my part in messing up your nice, yuppie, beautiful people future.’
‘She probably won’t speak to you,’ I warned.
‘Oh she will. She’ll speak to me all right. It’ll take me a while to get a word in, but when I do I’ll tell her the truth, that when a couple of self-indulgent schemers like you and me are left alone under the same roof, by accident or design, then sparks are bound to fly.’
A recollection came to me. ‘And she did tell me not to put you in a hotel, I recall.’
‘That’s better!’ Susie exclaimed. ‘You’re sounding like your real self again; conniving, crafty and quick on your feet.’
‘Just like you?’
‘Absolutely. By the time we’re finished, the pair of us, she’ll be apologising to you because her mother got cancer.’ She giggled.
‘If I thought you really meant all that,’ I murmured into the phone, ‘you would terrify me. Happily, I know that most of it’s just front.’
I heard her take a deep breath. ‘I’m glad you said that; I really am. I can take anyone else thinking I’m nothing but a brassy wee cow, but not you.
‘Oz, Prim’s a good woman who had a hard time and didn’t deserve another. Yet I’ve given her one, and as a lady who’s been hurt herself, and knows what it’s like, the truth is that I’m just a tiny bit ashamed of myself. And so, when you’ve run out of ways to justify yourself, will you be.’
Deep in my heart of hearts, I wished that I could agree with her. . but I didn’t tell her that. ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘If you’re serious about calling her, do it. Just don’t take all the blame on yourself.’
‘Oz Blackstone,’ she gasped. ‘You are some piece of work. As if I would!’
I could feel her hair against my face as she spoke, catch her fragrance, taste her lips. ‘That’s good,’ I laughed, ‘because neither will I.’
It would be wrong to say that I was preoccupied as I drove home. I knew that Susie was right and that there was a case for contrition, but I hesitated. I knew that I was a degree-level, out of the closet, male chauvinist pig, and I had my doubts about whether I could pull it off. I once heard a famous comedian say that when you can fake sincerity, you’ve cracked it. He got a laugh, but I knew that he was serious. Budding actor or not, I doubted whether I was in his class.
The garage looked enormous as I drove into it. Even with the Voyager in it, there was still a big aching void where the Mercedes had stood. I had grown to love that car.
I went in through the back door for the second time that day, disabling the alarm, and wandered through to the living room. The envelope in which those damned photographs had been delivered still lay on the floor where Prim had dropped it. I picked it up and looked at it, in a vain attempt, I suppose to find something familiar in the way the letters P. R. I. M. were printed. Nothing did. A name scrawled in ballpoint, that was all I saw. I wandered back to the kitchen, to get myself a beer and to think about fixing myself something to eat.
The tray lay on the work-surface; the one which I had used to carry our breakfast through to the lounge, before our world blew up, and on which I had carried it back afterwards. The cereal was still in its bowls, the milk was curdling in its jug, the coffee was cold in the pot, and the two mugs stood empty waiting for it to be poured.
I sighed and then I frowned. The mugs didn’t match. I picked them up, one in each hand and looked at them closely. They didn’t match.
We all have our characteristics, every one of us; mannerisms, habits, phrases we use to flag up and emphasise meaningful statements. ‘To be honest with you …’ is one of my stepmother’s, and it’s meaningless, because she always is.
One of my peculiarities is symmetry; I like things to match whenever possible, to the point that I’m obsessive about it. I’ve been known to spend half an hour with a pile of black socks from the tumble dryer sorting them into absolutely identical pairs. . As if one black sock is any different from another as far as your feet are concerned.
So, when I had loaded the breakfast tray that morning, naturally I had picked out, from the crockery and cutlery which we had inherited with the house, two identical bowls, yellow, to go with the milk jug, two matching spoons carefully picked out from among the odds and sods in the drawer, and two blue mugs with raised square markings.
The mugs which I held in my hand were both blue, but the ridges on one were round, rather than square. I put them back on the tray, then opened the wall cabinet and looked inside. When we had done a kitchen inventory we had found eight blue china mugs, made in Italy, four with square and four with circular contoured patterns. Only five remained in the cupboard, two square, and three round. I never had a moment’s doubt that I had done my usual matching trick that morning, whatever else had been on my mind, but I checked in the dishwasher just in case. It was empty. I had hand-washed the breakfast dishes that Susie and I had used the day before, and everything since. I pulled out the slide-away rubbish bin and looked in that. It contained a couple of blackened banana skins, and nothing else.
I looked again, and I was certain. While I had been out on my abortive mission of revenge against the innocent Steve Miller, someone had been in the house. I dropped to my knees and peered at the kitchen floor. It was tiled, a deep terra-cotta shade which made it difficult to spot crumbs and other fragments, but I sta
rted to go over every inch, until I found what I was looking for; a sliver of broken china, bone white with a blue glaze.
I knew I hadn’t broken anything. I knew that Prim hadn’t. I knew beyond any self-doubt that when I had opened that cabinet in the morning there had been eight mugs inside. Someone had been in the house, someone in enough of a rush to have knocked a mug off the work-surface to smash on the floor. The damage done, that person had replaced it with another from the cabinet, cleaned up the fragments, or as many of them as he could see against that dark-coloured floor, and taken them away with him to cover his tracks. Tough on him that he was dealing with an obsessive in the midst of a very bad day.
He? I thought. It had to be; had to be the same person who had broken in and attacked Susie, and no woman had done that. The size of the hands that had left those marks on her arms had told me that for sure.
‘How?’ I asked myself, aloud. That was an easy one; he had to have come in by the back door, through which I had left when I had gone off in my rage in search of Miller. The windows were all secure and the front door was bolted. ‘Did I lock it?’Yes, I had, and I had set the alarm. So the intruder had picked the lock again and had switched off the alarm again, at the panel by the door. This time, undisturbed, he had had time to set the alarm on the way out, and to lock the door behind him.
‘Can you do that?’ I asked myself again. ‘Can you unpick a lock?’ I didn’t know the answer to that, but if it was ‘No,’ it led to only one conclusion, and a very disturbing one at that: my visitor had a key.
I went out to the back door once again, knelt down and looked at the lock on the outside, searching for scrapes, scores, scratches in its bright brass facing. It was unmarked. ‘Change this son of a bitch right away,’ I muttered as I walked back into the house.
‘Now just hold on, Oz, hold on. Think this through.’ I was talking to myself, but I’m my favourite audience; that’s because I’m never heckled, as sometimes I have been at GWA shows. I remembered why I’d come into the kitchen in the first place, so I took a beer from the fridge, uncapped it and strolled back through to the living room. As I settled on to the couch, the phone rang, but I let it go unanswered. I didn’t want to speak to anyone just then.
‘What’s happened here?’ I asked myself.
One, someone took a shot at me in Capulet’s Lada.
Two, someone broke into the house, grabbed Susie from her bed and threw her down the stairs.
Three, someone sent Prim compromising photos of Susie and me. Not Steve Miller; who?
Four, someone broke into the house as soon as I went out; maybe someone with a key.
‘Why Oz, why?’ I said, aloud once more.
What if Susie had been killed by that fall? I’d have been arrested, sure as God made wee green apples.
What if I’m wrong about an enemy of Capulet shooting at the car, thinking that it was him. Maybe he knew it was me all along and thought he could scare me out of town.
Why would anyone want to break Prim and me up? Maybe, he didn’t, or didn’t care one way or the other. Maybe what he really wanted was just to get us out of the house.
Who might have a key to this place? The Frenchman, that’s who. But why would he sell us the bloody house then try to get us out of it so that he could break in? Answer me that one, smartarse. No, you can’t can you?
‘No, I bloody can’t,’ I admitted to myself. ‘The answer’s in here, I’m sure of it. There’s something about this house. But as to how it all fits together, and how, or even if, the body in the pool relates to it, there I don’t have a bloody clue.’
There was only one logical thing to be done at that point. I searched the place, from top to bottom, looking for signs of the intruder, looking to see if anything else was missing other than that one giveaway mug. It took me three hours, and it was dark outside when I was finished. While I was working, the phone rang three more times and my mobile sounded twice. I ignored them all.
There wasn’t a thing out of place. My passport was still there; my chequebooks and the passbooks for our Spanish bank accounts in the Caixa de Girona were still in the bedside drawer where I’d left them. The bed itself was rumpled, just as we had left it that morning.
I looked in every cupboard, every wardrobe, and every drawer. I checked the wall safe behind the mirror in our bedroom; it had come with the house too. We had found it open and empty, and I had programmed in my own combination. I kept some cash in there in pesetas and sterling, some receipts given to us by the notary and by Sergi when we had completed our purchase of the house, and a few valuable jewellery items, like my white gold Piaget watch and Prim’s necklace; gifts which we had bought for each other when we were married. They were still there, every item.
Nothing in the house was out of place as far as I could see; yet I knew that he’d been there. I could sense it.
I walked out of our bedroom, wondering what he could have been after, and whether he had finished searching for it. I was halfway down the stairs when another question jumped up in my mind and bit me.
How did the guy know when he broke in that Susie wouldn’t wake up and scream the place down?
‘Because he’d seen her, son, that’s why and possibly because he knew she wasn’t drunk, but drugged. Those two guys in JoJo’s; the two playing pool in the back room. Who the hell were they, and could one of them have spiked her drink while I was in the bog?’
I tried to remember what had happened that night, and who they were. Then I recalled that I had only seen one of them, a veteran L’Escala anchovy fisherman called Miguel. When I’d gone into Jo’s unisex toilet, one of the two cubicles had been occupied. When I had come out of the other one, it had been empty and the pool players had both been gone.
Suddenly, right at the top of my list of priorities was another visit to Bar JoJo.
I was thinking about that and about going out for something to eat when the phone rang once more. This time, I picked it up.
‘Hi. You’re back at last. I was beginning to think you were headed for Glasgow.’ Prim sounded quiet and subdued, far from her normal breezy businesslike self.
‘No. I’m still here; I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone for a while, that’s all.’
‘You spoke to Susie, though. You told her where I was.’
‘That was earlier, when I was out in the car. She called me to tell me she got home safe. I told her she didn’t.’
‘You told her right.’
‘What did you say to her?’
‘Nothing you’d want to hear.’
‘And what did she say to you?’
‘That it was all her fault, that it began by her taking shameless advantage of you, and that it all got out of hand after that.’
‘That’s not true. It wasn’t all her fault.’
‘I know that, for God’s sake,’ she snapped.
‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I am truly sorry that I’ve hurt you, and so is Susie. But there’s someone else to blame, to an extent.’
‘You mean me?’
‘No, I do not. I mean the person who took those photos and sent them to you. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d never have been any the wiser, Susie and I would have had our little secret and that would have been that.’
She gasped. ‘Oz, you incredible bastard! I don’t blame him at all. I blame you and Susie Gantry; end of story. If you’ve made someone mad enough at you to do that, then it’s down to you. Who do you think it was anyway?’
‘I thought it was Miller, but I don’t any more.’
She let out a small sound; it could have been a yelp. ‘Oz, you didn’t …’
‘No, at least not much. He convinced me that he didn’t do it.’
‘So who do you think did?’
‘I don’t know, Prim,’ I told her. ‘But I’m certain it has something to do with this house. You maybe don’t believe that someone broke in and chucked Susie downstairs, but it happened. Then today, after you’d gone and while I was off qu
estioning Mr Miller, he broke in again: this time he searched the place.’
‘Are you serious? Or is this some story you’ve cooked up to make me feel sorry for you.’
‘I don’t give a shit whether you feel sorry for me or not, my love. It’s the truth. There is something in or about this house, and someone wants it.’
There was silence between us for a while. I could sense that she was working herself up to say, or ask something. It turned out to be both. ‘Oz,’ she exclaimed, finally, ‘I don’t think that me sitting down here brooding for a week is going to do either of us any good. Do you want me to come back?’
‘Frankly,’ I told her, ‘I’d rather you stayed in Barcelona. Until I’ve got to the bottom of what’s happening here, I’m not sure this place is safe. Give me a few days to sort it out.’
‘Is that the real reason you want me to stay away?’
‘Sure it is.’ Actually I wasn’t sure at all, but it was certainly a reason.
‘Okay then; a few days. I’ll stay for the five I’ve booked. If it gets too scary up there, you can always come down and join me.’
‘Honey, the mood I’m in, it’s me that’s scary. I’m going to catch this bastard.’
‘Why don’t you tell Ramon? Ask for his help.’
I had to laugh at that one. ‘First, unless it was in my interests, I wouldn’t ask him for the time if he had an armful of Rolexes. Second, I’m not entirely certain that he isn’t the guy I’m after.’
‘Ramon?’
‘Think about it. This guy has to have kept me under pretty close observation for the past few days. Who’s more capable of that than a policeman?’
‘No,’ she protested, ‘he wouldn’t have attacked Susie. I don’t believe it.’
‘Why not? He fucked you over badly enough, and that’s for sure. Or are you still in love with him just a bit?’
‘No.’ Her answer wasn’t quite quick enough for my liking. ‘But Oz, I know him too well to believe that of him.’
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