The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Apart from Concepçion, the only people we really knew were Will’s parents and when another hour had gone by and Piers and Rosario were not back my father said he would walk down to the hotel, there to consult with the Harveys. Besides, the hotel had a phone. It no longer seemed absurd to talk of phoning the police. But my father was making a determined effort to stay cheerful. As he left, he said he was sure he would meet Piers and Rosario on his way.

  No one suggested I should go to bed. My father came back, not with Will’s parents who were phoning the police “to be on the safe side”, but with Concepçion at whose cottage in the village he had called. Only my mother could speak to her but even she could scarcely cope with the Mallorquin dialect. But we soon all understood, for in times of trouble language is transcended. Concepçion had not seen my brother and cousin that evening and they had not come for the meal she prepared for them.They had been missing since five.

  That night remains very clearly in my memory, every hour distinguished by some event. The arrival of the police, the searching of the beach, the assemblage in the hotel foyer, the phone calls that were made from the hotel to other hotels, notably the one at Formentor, and the incredible inefficiency of the telephone system. The moon was only just past the full and shining it seemed to me for longer than usual, bathing the village and shoreline with a searching whiteness, a providential floodlighting. I must have slept at some point, we all must have, but I remember the night as white and wakeful. I remember the dawn coming with tuneless birdsong and a cool pearly light.

  The worst fears of the night gave place in the warm morning to what seemed like more realistic theories. At midnight they had been dead, drowned, but by noon theirs had become a voluntary flight. Questioned, I said nothing about the cypress tree, entwined in the garden, but Will was not so reticent. His last day on the island had become the most exciting of all. He had seen Piers and Rosario kissing, he said, he had seen them holding hands. Rolling his eyes, making a face, he said they were “in lo-ove”. It only took a little persuasion to extract from him an account of our visit to the Casita and a quotation from Piers, probably Will’s own invention, to the effect that he and Rosario would go there to be alone.

  The Casita was searched. There was no sign that Piers and Rosario had been there. No fisherman of Llosar had taken them out in his boat, or no one admitted to doing so. The last person to see them, at fi ve o’clock, was the priest who knew Rosario and who had spoken to her as they passed. For all that, there was for a time a firm belief that my brother and Rosario had run away together. Briefly, my parents ceased to be afraid and their anger returned. For a day or two they were angry, and with a son whose behaviour had scarcely ever before inspired anger. He who was perfect had done this most imperfect thing.

  Ronald and Iris Harvey postponed their departure. I think Iris liked my mother constantly telling her what a rock she was and how we could not have done without her. José-Carlos and Micaela were sent for. As far as I know they uttered no word of reproach to my parents. Of course, as far as I know is not very far. And I had my own grief – no, not that yet. My wonder, my disbelief, my panic.

  Piers’s passport was not missing. Rosario was in her own country and needed no passport.They had only the clothes they were wearing. Piers had no money, although Rosario did. They could have gone to the mainland of Spain. Before the hunt was up they had plenty of time to get to Palma and there take a boat for Barcelona. But the police found no evidence to show that they had been on the bus that left Llosar at six in the evening, and no absolute evidence that they had not. Apart from the bus the only transport available to them was a hired car. No one had driven them to Palma or anywhere else.

  The difficulty with the running away theory was that it did not at all accord with their characters.Why would Piers have run away? He was happy. He loved his school, he had been looking forward to this sixth form year, then to Oxford. My mother said, when Will’s mother presented to her yet again the “Romeo and Juliet” theory,

  “But we wouldn’t have stopped him seeing his cousin. We’d have invited her to stay. They could have seen each other every holiday. We’re not strict with our children, Iris. If they were really that fond of each other, they could have been engaged in a few years. But they’re so young!”

  At the end of the week a body was washed up on the beach at Alcudia. It was male and young, had a knife wound in the chest, and for a few hours was believed to be that of Piers. Later that same day a woman from Muralla identified it as a man from Barcelona who had come at the beginning of the summer and been living rough on the beach. But that stab wound was very ominous. It alerted us all to terrible ideas.

  The Casita was searched again and its garden. A rumour had it that part of the garden was dug up. People began remembering tragedies from the distant past, a suicide pact in some remote inland village, a murder in Palma, a fishing boat disaster, a mysterious unexplained death in a hotel room. We sat at home and waited and the time of our departure from the island was due, came and went. We waited for news, we three with José-Carlos and Micaela, all of us but my mother expecting to be told of death. My mother, then and in the future, never wavered in her belief that Piers was alive and soon to get in touch with her.

  After a week the Harveys went home, but not to disappear from our lives. Iris Harvey had become my mother’s friend, they were to remain friends until my mother’s death, and because of this I continued to know Will. He was never very congenial to me, I remember to this day the enjoyment he took in my brother’s disappearance, his unholy glee and excitement when the police came, when he was permitted to be with the police on one of their searches. But he was in my life, fixed there, and I could not shed him. I never have been able to do so.

  One day, about three weeks after Piers and Rosario were lost, my father said,

  “I am going to make arrangements for us to go home on Friday.”

  “Piers will expect us to be here,” said my mother. “Piers will write to us here.”

  My father took her hand. “He knows where we live.”

  “I shall never see my daughter again,” Micaela said. “We shall never see them again, you know that, we all know it, they’re dead and gone.” And she began crying for the first time, the unpractised sobs of the grown-up who has been tearless for years of happy life.

  My father returned to Majorca after two weeks at home. He stayed in Palma and wrote to us every day, the telephone being so unreliable. When he wasn’t with the police he was travelling about the island in a rented car with an interpreter he had found, making enquiries in all the villages. My mother expected a letter by every post, not from him but from Piers. I have since learned that it is very common for the mothers of men who have disappeared to refuse to accept that they are dead. It happens all the time in war when death is almost certain but cannot be proved. My mother always insisted Piers was alive somewhere and prevented by circumstances from coming back or from writing. What circumstances these could possibly have been she never said and arguing with her was useless.

  The stranger thing was that my father, who in those first days seemed to accept Piers’s death, later came part of the way round to her opinion. At least, he said it would be wrong to talk of Piers as dead, it would be wrong to give up hope and the search. That was why, during the years ahead, he spent so much time, sometimes alone and sometimes with my mother, in the Balearics and on the mainland of Spain.

  Most tragically, in spite of their brave belief that Piers would return or the belief that they voiced, they persisted in their determination to have more children, to compensate presumably for their loss. At first my mother said nothing of this to me and it came as a shock when I overheard her talking about it to Iris Harvey. When I was fifteen she had a miscarriage and later that year, another. Soon after that she began to pour out to me her hopes and fears. I cannot have known then that my parents were doomed to failure but I seemed to know, I seemed to sense in my gloomy way perhaps, that something so much
wished-for would never happen. It would not be allowed by the fates who rule us.

  “I shouldn’t be talking like this to you,” she said, and perhaps she was right. But she went on talking like that. “They say that longing and longing for a baby prevents you having one. The more you want the less likely it is.”

  This sounded reasonable to me. It accorded with what I knew of life.

  “But no one tells you how to stop longing for something you long for,” she said.

  When they went to Spain I remained behind. I stayed with my Aunt Sheila who told me again and again she thought it a shame my parents could not be satisfied with the child they had. I should have felt happier in her house if she had not asked quite so often why my mother and father did not take me with them.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I said. “I’ll never go back.”

  7

  The loss of his son made my father rich. His wealth was the direct result of Piers’s disappearance. If Piers had come back that night we should have continued as we were, an ordinary middle-class family living in a semi-detached suburban house, the breadwinner a surveyor with the local authority. But Piers’s disappearance made us rich and at the same time did much to spoil Spain’s Mediterranean coast and the resorts of Majorca.

  He became a property developer. José-Carlos, already in the building business, went into partnership with him, raised the original capital, and as the demands of tourism increased, they began to build. They built hotels: towers and skyscrapers, shoebox shapes and horseshoe shapes, hotels like ziggurats and hotels like Piranesi palaces. They built holiday flats and plazas and shopping precincts. My father’s reason for going to Spain was to find his son, his reason for staying was this new enormously successful building enterprise.

  He built a house for himself and my mother on the northwest coast at Puerto de Soller. True to my resolve I never went there with them and eventually my father bought me a house in Hampstead. He and my mother passed most of their time at Puerto de Soller, still apparently trying to increase their family, even though my mother was in her mid-forties, still advertising regularly for Piers to come back to them, wherever he might be. They advertised, as they had done for years, in the Majorca Daily Bulletin as well as Spanish national newspapers and The Times. José-Carlos and Micaela, on the other hand, had from the first given Rosario up as dead. My mother told me they never spoke of her. Once, when a new acquaintance asked Micaela if she had any children, she had replied with a simple no.

  If they had explanations for the disappearance of Piers and Rosario, I never heard them. Nor was I ever told what view was taken by the National Guard, severe brisk-spoken men in berets and brown uniforms. I evolved theories of my own. They had been taken out in a boat, had both drowned and the boatman been too afraid later to admit his part in the affair. The man whose body was found had killed them, hidden the bodies and then killed himself. My parents were right up to a point and they had run away together, being afraid of even a temporary enforced separation, but before they could get in touch had been killed in a road accident.

  “That’s exactly when you would know,” Will said. “If they’d died in an accident that’s when it would have come out.”

  He was on a visit to us with his mother during the school summer holidays, a time when my parents were always in England. The mystery of my brother’s disappearance was a subject of unending interest to him. He never understood, and perhaps that kind of understanding was foreign to his nature, that speculating about Piers brought me pain. I remember to this day the insensitive terms he used. “Of course they’ve been bumped off,” was a favourite with him, and “They’ll never be found now, they’ll just be bones by now.”

  But equally he would advance fantastic theories of their continued existence.“Rosario had a lot of money. They could have gone to Spain and stopped in a hotel and stolen two passports. They could have stolen passports from the other guests. I expect they earned money singing and dancing in cafés. Spanish people like that sort of thing. Or she could have been someone’s maid. Or an artist’s model. You can make a lot of money at that. You sit in a room with all your clothes off and people who’re learning to be artists sit round and draw you.”

  Tricks and practical jokes still made a great appeal to him. To stop him making a phone call to my mother and claiming to be, with the appropriate accent, a Frenchman who knew Piers’s whereabouts, I had to enlist the help of his own mother. Then, for quite a long time, we saw nothing of Ronald and Iris Harvey or Will in London, although I believe they all went out to Puerto Soller for a holiday. Will’s reappearance in my life was heralded by the letter of condolence he wrote to me seven years later when my mother died.

  He insisted then on visiting me, on taking me about, and paying a curious kind of court to me. Of my father he said, with his amazing insensitivity,

  “I don’t suppose he’ll last long. They were very wrapped up in each other, weren’t they? He’d be all right if he married again.”

  My father never married again and, fulfilling Will’s prediction, lived only another five years. Will did not marry either and I always supposed him homosexual. My own marriage, to the English partner in the international corporation begun by my father and José-Carlos, took place three years after my mother’s death. Roger was very nearly a millionaire by then, two-and-ahalf times my age. We led the life of rich people who have too little to do with their time, who have no particular interests and hardly know what to do with their money.

  It was not a happy marriage. At least I think not, I have no idea what other marriages are like. We were bored by each other and frightened of other people but we seldom expressed our feelings and spent our time travelling between our three homes and collecting seventeenth century furniture. Apart from platitudes, I remember particularly one thing Roger said to me:

  “I can’t be a father to you, Petra, or a brother.”

  By then my father was dead. As a direct result of Piers’s death I inherited everything. If he had lived or there had been others, things would have been different. Once I said to Roger,

  “I’d give it all to have Piers back.”

  As soon as I had spoken I was aghast at having expressed my feelings so freely, at such a profligate flood of emotion. It was so unlike me. I blushed deeply, looking fearfully at Roger for signs of dismay, but he only shrugged and turned away. It made things worse between us. From that time I began talking compulsively about how my life would have been changed if my brother had lived.

  “You would have been poor,” Roger said. “You’d never have met me. But I suppose that might have been preferable.”

  That sort of remark I made often enough myself. I took no notice of it. It means nothing but that the speaker has a low self-image and no one’s could be lower than mine, not even Roger’s.

  “If Piers had lived my parents wouldn’t have rejected me. They wouldn’t have made me feel that the wrong one of us died, that if I’d died they’d have been quite satisfied with the one that was left. They wouldn’t have wanted more children.”

  “Conjecture,” said Roger. “You can’t know.”

  “With Piers behind me I’d have found out how to make friends.”

  “He wouldn’t have been behind you. He’d have been off. Men don’t spend their lives looking after their sisters.”

  When Piers and Rosario’s disappearance was twenty years in the past a man was arrested in the South of France and charged with the murder, in the countryside between Bedarieux and Lodeve, of two tourists on a camping holiday. In court it was suggested that he was a serial killer and over the past two decades had possibly killed as many as ten people, some of them in Spain, one in Ibiza. An insane bias against tourists was the motive. According to the English papers, he had a violent xenophobia directed against a certain kind of foreign visitor.

  This brought to mind the young man’s body with the stab wound that had been washed up on the beach at Alcudia. And yet I refused to admit to myse
lf that this might be the explanation for the disappearance of Piers and Rosario. Like my parents, Roger said, I clung to a belief, half fantasy, half hope, that somewhere they were still alive. It was a change of heart for me, this belief, it came with my father’s death, as if I inherited it from him along with all his property.

  And what of the haunted house, the Casita de Golondro? What of my strange experience there? I never forgot it, I even told Roger about it once, to have my story received with incomprehension and the remark that I must have been eating some indigestible Spanish food. But in the last year of his life we were looking for a house to buy, the doctors having told him he should not pass another winter in a cold climate. Roger hated “abroad”, so it had to be in England, Cornwall or the Channel Islands. In fact no house was ever bought, for he died that September, but in the meantime I had been viewing many possibilities and one of these was in the south of Cornwall, near Falmouth.

  It was a Victorian house and big, nearly as big as the Casita, ugly Gothic but with wonderful views. An estate agent took me over it and, as it turned out, I was glad of his company. I had never seen such a thing before, or thought I had not, an internal room without windows. Not uncommon, the young man said, in houses of this age, and he hinted at bad design.

  This room was on the first floor. It had no windows but the room adjoining it had, and in the wall which separated the two was a large window with a fanlight in it which could be opened. Thus light would be assured in the windowless room if not much air. The Victorians distrusted air, the young man explained.

  I looked at this dividing window and twenty-eight years fell away. I was thirteen again and in the only darkened room of a haunted house, looking into a mirror. But now I understood. It was not a mirror. It had not been reflecting the room in which I stood but affording me a sight of a room beyond, a room with windows and another door, and of its occupant. For a moment, standing there, remembering that door being opened, not a reflected but a real door, I made the identification between the man I had seen, the man at the wheel of the battered Citroën and the serial killer of Bedarieux. But it was too much for me to take, I was unable to handle something so monstrous and so ugly. I shuddered, suddenly seeing impenetrable darkness before me, and the young man asked me if I was cold.