The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  One evening, quite late, I asked them to tell me about the day itself, the day which ended so terribly in fear and bright empty moonlight. They looked away from me and at each other, exchanging a rueful nostalgic glance. It was Rosario who began the account of it.

  It was true that they had met several times since that first time in the little haunted house. They could be alone there without fear of interruption and there they had planned, always fearfully and daringly, their escape. I mentioned the man I had seen, for now I was sure it had been a man seen through glass and no ghost in a mirror, but it meant nothing to them. At the Casita they had always found absolute solitude. They chose that particular day because we were all away at the gardens but made no other special preparations, merely boarding the afternoon bus for Palma a little way outside the village. Rosario, as we had always known, had money. She had enough to buy tickets for them on the boat from Palma to Barcelona.

  “If we had told them or left a note they would have found us and brought us back,” Rosario said simply.

  She had had a gold chain around her neck with a cameo that they could sell, and a gold ring on her finger.

  “The ring with the two little turquoises,” I said.

  “That was the one. I had it from my grandmother when I was small.”

  They had sold everything of value they had, Piers’s watch and his fountain pen and his camera. The ring saved their lives, Piers said, when they were without work and starving. Later on they became quite rich, for Piers, like my father, used tourism to help him, went into partnership with a man they met in a café in Marseille, and for years they had their own hotel.

  There was only one question left to ask. Why did they ever come back?

  They had sold the business. They had read in the deaths column of a Spanish newspaper they sometimes saw that Micaela, the last of our parents, was dead. Apparently, the degree of shame they felt was less in respect to me. I could understand that, I was only a sister. Now I think I understood everything. Now when I looked at them both, with a regard that increased every day, I wondered how I could ever have doubted their identities, how I could have seen them as old, as unutterably changed.

  The time had come to tell Will. We were on speaking terms again. I had mended the rift myself, phoning him for the first time ever. It was because I was happy and happiness made me kind. During the months Piers and Rosario had been with me he had phoned as he always did, once or twice we had met away from home, but I had not mentioned them. I did not now, I simply invited him to stay.

  To me they were my brother and sister-in-law, familiar loved figures with faces already inexpressibly dear, but he I knew would not know them. I was not subjecting them to a test, I needed no test, but the idea of their confronting each other without preparation amused me. A small deception had to be practised and I made them reluctantly agree to my introducing them as “my friends Mr and Mrs Page”.

  For a few minutes he seemed to accept it. I watched him, I noticed his hands were trembling. He could bear his suspicion no longer and burst out:

  “It’s Piers and Rosario, I know it is!”

  The years could not disguise them for him, although they each separately confessed to me afterwards that if they had not been told they would never have recognized him. The red-headed boy with “one skin too few” was not just subsumed in the fat red-faced bald man but utterly lost.

  Whether their thoughts often returned to those remarks the solicitor had made on the subject of legal proceedings I cannot say. When mine did for the second time I spoke out. We were too close already for litigation to be conceivable. I told Piers that I would simply divide all my property in two, half for them and half for me. They were shocked, they refused, of course they did. But eventually I persuaded them. What was harder for me to voice was my wish that the property itself should be divided in two, the London house, the Somerset farm, my New York apartment, literally split down the middle. Few people had ever wanted much of my company in the past and I was afraid they would see this as a bribe or as taking advantage of my position of power. But all Rosario said was,

  “Not too strictly down the middle, Petra, I hope. It would be nicer to share.”

  All I stipulated was that in my altered will I should leave all I possessed to my godchild and cousin, Aunt Sheila’s daughter, and Piers readily agreed, for he intended to leave everything he had to the daughter of his old partner in the hotel business.

  So we lived. So we have lived for rather more than a year now. I have never been so happy. Usually it is not easy to make a third with a married couple. Either they are so close that you are made to feel an intruder or else the wife will see you as an ally to side with her against her husband. And when you are young the danger is that you and the husband will grow closer than you should. With Piers and Rosario things were different. I truly believe that each wanted my company as much as they wanted each other’s. In those few months they came to love me and I, who have loved no one since Piers went away, reciprocated. They have shown me that it is possible to grow warm and kind, to learn laughter and pleasure, after a lifetime of coldness. They have unlocked something in me and liberated a lively spirit that must always have been there but which languished for long years, chained in a darkened room.

  It is two weeks now since the Majorcan police got in touch with me and told me what the archaeologists had found. It would be helpful to them and surely of some satisfaction to myself to go to Majorca and see what identification I could make, not of remains, it was too late for that, but of certain artefacts found in the caves.

  We were in Somerset and once more Will was staying with us. I suggested we might all go. All those years I had avoided revisiting the island but things were different now. Nothing I could see there could cause me pain. While I had Piers and Rosario I was beyond pain, it was as if I was protected inside the warm shell of their affection.

  “In that case,” Will said, “I don’t see the point of going. You know the truth. These bits of jewellery, clothes, whatever they are, can’t be Piers’s and Rosario’s because they sold theirs, so why try to identify what in fact you can’t identify?”

  “I want to see the place again,” I said. “I want to see how it’s changed. This police thing, that’s just an excuse for going there.”

  “I suppose there will be bones too,” he said, “and maybe more than bones even after so long.” He has always had a fondness for the macabre. “Did the police tell you how it all got into the caves?”

  “Through a kind of pothole from above, they think, a fissure in the cliff top that was covered by a stone.”

  “How will you feel about going back, Piers?” asked Rosario.

  “I shan’t know till I get there,” he said, “but if Petra goes we go too. Isn’t that the way it’s always going to be?”

  10

  When I woke up this morning it was with no sense of impending doom. I was neither afraid nor hopeful, I was indifferent. This was no more than a chore I must perform for the satisfaction of officials, as a “good citizen”. For all that, I found my room confining in spite of the wide-open windows, the balcony and view of the sea, and cancelling my room service order, I went down to breakfast.

  To my surprise I found the others already there in the terrace dining room. It was not quite warm enough to sit outside so early. They were all unaware of my approach, were talking with heads bent and close together above the table. I was tempted to come up to them in silence and lay a light loving hand on Rosario’s shoulder but somehow I knew that this would make her start. Instead I called out a “good morning” that sounded carefree because it was.

  Three worried faces were turned to me, although their frowns cleared to be replaced in an instant by determined smiles on the part of my brother and his wife and a wary look on Will’s. They were concerned, it appeared, about me. The effect on me of what they called the “ordeal” ahead had been the subject of that heads-together discussion. Horrible sights were what they were afrai
d of, glimpses of the charnel house. One or all of them should go with me. They seemed to believe my life had been sheltered and perhaps it had been, compared to theirs.

  “I shan’t be going into the caves,” I said as I ordered my breakfast. “It will be some impersonal office with everything spread out and labelled, I expect, like in a museum.”

  “But you’ll be alone.”

  “Not really. I shall know you’re only a few miles away, waiting for me.”

  The table was bare except for their coffee cups. None of them had eaten a thing. My rolls arrived and butter and jam, my fruit and fruit juice. I suddenly felt unusually hungry.

  “Let’s see,” I said, “what shall we do for the rest of the day? We could take the boat to Formentor for lunch or drive to Lluc. This evening, don’t forget, we’re having dinner at the Parador de Golondro. Have we booked a table?”

  “I’m sorry, Petra, I’m afraid I forgot to do that,” Piers said.

  “Could you do it while I’m out?” A little fear struck me. I was going to say I don’t know why it did, but I do know. “You will all be here when I get back, won’t you?”

  Rosario’s voice sounded unlike her. I had never heard bitterness in it before. “Where should we go?”

  The car came for me promptly at ten. The driver turned immediately inland and from the road, just before he took the turn for Muralla, I had a sudden bold sight of the Casita, glimpsed as it can be between the parting of the hills. It seemed a deeper brighter colour, an ochreish gold, an effect either of new paint or of the sun. But when does the sun not shine? The yellow hills, with their tapestry stitches of grey and dark green, slipped closed again like sliding panels and the house withdrew behind them.

  I was right about what awaited me at Muralla, a new office building made of that whitish grainy concrete, which has defaced the Mediterranean and is like nothing so much as blocks of cheap ice-cream. Inside, in what I am sure they call the “atrium”, was a forest of plastic greenery. There was even a small collection, in styrofoam amphorae, of plastic strawberry trees. I was led via jungle paths to a room marked privado and then and only then, hesitating as two more policemen joined us and a key to the room was produced, did my heart misgive me and a tiny bubble of panic run up to my throat so that I caught my breath.

  They were very kind to me. They were big strong macho men enjoyably occupied in doing what nature had made them for, protecting a woman from the uglinesses of life. One of them spoke tolerable English. If I would just look at the things, look at them very carefully, think about what I had seen and then they would take me away and ask me one or two simple questions. There would be nothing unpleasant. The bones found in the cave – he apologised for their very existence. There was no need for me to see them.

  “I would like to see them,” I said.

  “They cannot be identified after so long.”

  “I would like to see them.”

  “Just as you wish,” he said with a shrug and then the door was opened.

  An empty room. A place of drawers and bench tops, like a dissecting room except that all the surfaces were of light polished wood and at the windows hung blinds of pale grey vertical strips. Drawers were opened, trays lifted out and placed on the long central table. I approached it slowly, holding one of my hands clasped in the other and feeling my cold fingertips against my cold damp palm.

  Spread before me were two pairs of shoes, the woman’s dark blue leather with sling backs and wedge heels, the man’s what we call trainers now but “plimsolls” then or “gym shoes”; rags, gnawed by vermin, might once have been a pair of flannel trousers, a shirt, a dress with a tiny pearl button still attached to its collar; a gold chain with pendent cross, a gold watch with bracelet and safety chain, a heavier watch with its leather strap rotted, a child’s ring for a little finger, two pinhead turquoises on a gold band thin as wire.

  I looked at it all. I looked with indifference but a pretence of care for the sake of those onlookers. The collection of bones was too pitiful to be obscene. Surely this was not all? Perhaps a few specimens only had found their way to this room. I put out my hand and lifted up one of the long bones. The man who had brought me there made a movement towards me but was checked by his superior, who stood there watching me intently. I held the bone in both my hands, feeling its dry worn deadness, grey and grainy, its long-lifeless age, and then I put it down gently.

  I turned my back on the things and never looked at them again.

  “I have never seen any of this before,” I said. “It means nothing to me.”

  “Are you quite sure? Would you like some time to think about it?”

  “No, I am quite sure. I remember very well what my brother and my cousin were wearing.”

  They listened while I described clothes that Piers and Rosario had had. I enumerated items of jewellery. There was a locket I remembered her wearing the first time we met, a picture of her mother in a gold circlet under a seed pearl lid.

  “Thank you very much. You have been most helpful.”

  “At least I have eliminated a possibility.” I said, knowing they would not understand.

  They drove me back to Llosar. The fruit on the strawberry trees takes a year to ripen. This year’s flowers, blooming now, will become the fruit of twelve months’ time. And immediately it ripens they pick it for making fruit pies. I had this sudden absurd yearning to see those strawberries in the hotel garden again, to see them before the bushes were stripped. I opened the car door myself, got out and walked up to the hotel without looking back. But instead of going up the steps, I turned aside into the shady garden, the pretty garden of geometric paths and small square pools with yellow fish, the cypresses and junipers gathered in groups as if they had met and stopped to gossip. To the left of me, up in the sun, rose the terrace and beyond it was the swimming pool, but down here grew the arbutus, its white blossom gleaming and its red fruits alight, as shiny as decorations on some northern Christmas tree.

  Piers and Rosario were up on the terrace. I am not sure how I knew this for I was not aware of having looked. I felt their anguished eyes on me, their dread communicated itself to me on the warm, still, expectant air. I knew everything about them, I knew how they felt now. They saw me and read into my action in coming here, in coming immediately to this garden, anger and misery and knowledge of betrayal. Of course I understood I must put an end to their anguish at once, I must go to them and leave adoration of these sweet-scented snowy flowers and strawberry fruits until another day.

  But first I picked one of the fruits and put it in my mouth. Iris Harvey had been wrong. It was not tasteless, it tasted like some fresh crisp vegetable, sharp and strange. It was different, different from any other fruit I had tasted, but not unpleasant. I thought it had the kind of flavour that would grow on me. I walked up the steps to the terrace. Will was nowhere to be seen. With the courage I knew they had, their unconquered brave hearts, they were waiting for me. Decorously, even formally, dressed for that place where the other guests were in swimming costumes, they were nevertheless naked to me, their eyes full of the tragedy of long wretched misspent lives. They were holding hands.

  “Petra,” Piers said. Just my name.

  To have kept them longer in suspense would have been the cruellest act of my life. In the time they had been with me I had learned to speak like a human being, like someone who understands love and knows warmth.

  “My dears,” I said. “How sad you look. There’s nothing wrong, is there? I’ve had such a stupid morning. It was a waste of time going over there. They had nothing to show me but a bundle of rags I’ve never seen before and some rubbishy jewellery. I don’t know what they expected – that all that was something to do with you two?”

  They remained there, quite still. I know about the effects of shock. But slowly the joined hands slackened and Rosario withdrew hers. I went up to each of them and kissed them gently. I sat down on the third chair at the table and smiled at them. Then I began to laugh.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m only laughing because I’m happy. Children laugh from happiness, so why not us?”

  “Why not?” said Piers as if it was a new thought, as if a new world opened before him. “Why not?”

  I was remembering how long long ago I had heard my brother ask that same rhetorical question, give that odd form of assent, when Will proposed going into the Casita and Rosario had demurred. For a moment I saw us all as we had been,Will in his grass hat, long-legged Rosario with her polished hair, my brother eager with love. I sighed and turned the sigh to a smile.

  “Now that’s behind me,” I said, “we can stay on here and have a holiday. Shall we do that?”

  “Why not?” said Piers again, and this time the repetition of those words struck Rosario and me as inordinately funny and we both began to laugh as at some exquisite joke, some example of marvellous wit.

  It was thus, convulsed with laughter, that we were found by Will when, having no doubt been watching from some window up above for signs of good or ill, judged the time right and safe to come out and join us.

  “Did you book that table at Golondro?” I said, hoarse with laughter, weak with it.

  Will shook his head. I knew he would not have, that none of them would have. “I’ll do it this minute,” he said.

  “Don’t be long,” I called after him. “We’re going to celebrate. I’m going to order a bottle of champagne.”

  “What are we celebrating, Petra?” said Rosario.

  “Oh, just that we’re here together again,” I said.

  They smiled at me for I was bestowing on them, on both of them, the tender look I had never given to any lover. And the feeling which inspired it was better than a lover’s glance, being without self-deception, without illusion. Of course I had never been deceived. I had known, if not quite from the first, from the third day of their appearance, that they were not my brother and his wife. For one thing, a man is not operated on twice in his life for appendicitis. But even without that I would have known. My blood told me and my bones, my thirteen years with a brother I was closer to than to parent or any friend. I knew – always – they were a pair of imposters Will had found and instructed. I knew, almost from the beginning, it was a trick played on me for their gain and Will’s.