As Easy as Murder (3 page)

‘And your older daughter? What did she think?’

‘Fleur has always delegated paternal management, as she puts it, to Ivy. The fact is, she doesn’t have much choice. She’s in the army. Major Cowling, in fact.’

I sensed, or perhaps I only imagined, a sudden tension in him. ‘Active?’ I inquired.

He winced ‘Very. She’s a surgeon, in the field. Bloody awful job. I told her not to join, but she was adamant. I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know how any of them do it, her people or the boys they patch up.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, she’s a heroine.’ Then I tried to put myself in his shoes. ‘That said, if Tom ever announces that he wants to join the armed forces, here or in Britain, I’ll . . .’

‘What?’ he asked. ‘What will you do?’

‘Lock him in his room, possibly. But more likely I’ll go all weepy Mum and beg him not to risk breaking my heart.’

‘Is it likely that he will?’

Good question; I had to take a few moments to consider it. ‘At this moment, I’d say no,’ I decided, aloud. ‘He goes to martial arts classes, but as a discipline, not to encourage aggression, or even to work it off. His teacher’s very strong on pacifism and he’s being brought up by me to believe in the sanctity of life. Somehow I don’t see him with an assault rifle in his hand, or launching a missile.’

‘There’s always bomb disposal,’ Shirley chipped in.

‘Fuck!’ I barked at her. ‘Don’t even think that. I’ve seen
The Hurt Locker
, thank you very much. I take it you weren’t in the army, Patterson.’

He laughed. ‘Me? No, boring old civil servant, me. I spent most of my career in a suit in Whitehall.’

‘Mmm. A mandarin, no less. I’ve met a couple of them.’

‘Nothing so exotic.’

‘Senior, though.’

‘Eventually.’

‘Were you one of those who earn more than the Prime Minister?’ All of a sudden he seemed a little fidgety. ‘You were,’ I exclaimed, ‘weren’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But most of us would argue that the Prime Minister isn’t paid nearly enough. It’s reasonable to suggest that the people who run the country are worth more than footballers . . .’

‘Or silly birds with artificially big tits who’re famous for being famous,’ Shirley added. ‘Every time I log on to AOL and see the shit on the “Welcome” page, it makes me want to throw my
computer out the bloody window, and my breakfast after it.’ She paused. ‘You’re right, love,’ she added. ‘MPs shouldn’t have to fiddle their expenses.’

‘My dear,’ he said, quietly. ‘As long as there are expenses, people will always fiddle them . . . apart from civil servants, of course.’

‘What was your department, Patterson?’ I asked.

‘I moved around. But I spent most of my career in the Foreign Office. It was balls-aching boring stuff, most of it. You’ll appreciate that, given the job you’ve been doing.’

I shook my head. ‘Actually I enjoyed mine, while it lasted. The expenses were crap, though,’ I added.

‘So why give up?’

I leaned back in my chair and took a long, leisurely look around the square, with its cafe restaurants, full of happy people, then sideways towards the crowds under the tents of Arrels Del Vi, and finally at the ancient church, and at our house.

‘I understand,’ he murmured.

‘It’s very quiet in the winter, mind,’ I pointed out. ‘But Miles’s wine business should keep me occupied. That and writing.’

Shirley stared at me. ‘Writing?’ she repeated. ‘When did you become a writer?’

‘As soon as I handed in my resignation from my job,’ I told her. ‘That’s one of the things I plan to do.’

‘What the f . . . are you going to write about?’ Then her mouth fell open. ‘Here, you’re not going to do a biography of Oz, are you?’

I whistled. ‘No danger. And I will block anyone who tries. No, I’ll possibly write about . . . about this place, and about the things
that have happened since we settled here. Dunno yet. I’ve still got to work it all out in my head.’

‘How about children’s books, with Tom the boy detective?’ Patterson suggested.

‘Mmm. His grandmother did that; she was quite successful too. But that might give him too high a profile, and I don’t think I want to draw attention to him. Maybe I’ll write a cookbook instead. Anybody with a shilling for the gas meter seems to be doing one of those these days.’

Actually, although a village portrait was on my agenda, I knew very well what I was going to write about. I was planning to undertake a biography of my father, one of life’s great eccentrics, a quiet, creative Scotsman who’s managed to keep much of the twentieth century at bay, and all of the twenty-first. I even had a title:
The Man Who Makes Monsters
. (He creates wonderful, hand-carved, chess sets, populated by creatures weirder than any you’ll see in a video game.)

We moved past the cross-examination stage, and on to general chat, although I was left with the nagging feeling that I was losing my touch, and that Patterson had got more out of me than I had from him. However I was impressed that he hadn’t asked me anything about Miles and Dawn, even after he’d learned of the relationship, and very little about Oz. I have an automatic antipathy to people who meet me and quiz me about them, but he didn’t fall into that trap. Okay, they were famous, but he seemed to be interested in me for what I was, not for my link to them.

One thing I did learn was that he had revived Shirley’s interest in golf. He asked me for a rundown on the courses in the region
and I was able to help him. Tom and I are members at Platja de Pals, the oldest course on the Costa Brava. He’s been hitting balls since he was five; he shows promise, not only in my eyes but in those of his Grandpa Mac, who’s no slouch himself. The game’s big in the Blackstone family, as it happens. Oz was a low handicapper, and of course there’s … but I’ll get to him, in due course.

‘I’ll take you both along next week,’ I offered. ‘We can’t start too early, because I’ve got to get Tom off to school, but it isn’t desperately hot during the day just now.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Patterson, ‘but I’ve got plans for next week. There’s a European Tour event, the Catalan Masters, at the PGA course at Girona, wherever that is, and Shirley and I are planning to go along. The pros will be practising from Monday, I’m assuming. We were going to take a look at them before it gets too busy. Fancy joining us?’

I doubted if it would ever get too busy, since golf is still very much a minority sport in Spain, but it sounded like a nice day out. ‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Who knows, I might pick up some tips.’

‘Or even a nice young golfer,’ Shirley suggested, with that gleam in her eye.

‘At my age, love,’ I pointed out, ‘if I was on the prowl for talent, I’d be eyeing up the senior tour. I’ll be older than most of next week’s field.’

‘Nobody’s going to believe that without seeing the date on your passport.’ Shirley is damn good for a girl’s morale; it’s one of the things I’ve always liked about her.

Once we had finished eating, I left them to carry on exploring
the fair and went back home, to rejoin my son. The game was approaching a climax, but he seemed to have only one eye on it. I took a couple of Fanta drinks from the fridge, handed one to him and sprawled on the sofa. He jumped up from his usual place on the floor beside Charlie, and came to join me, pressing against me, his head on my shoulder.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘I thought you might have been sad about Gerard.’

I ruffled his hair. ‘I stopped being sad about Gerard a long time ago; that’s if I ever was. If he’d wanted to be with us as part of our family, he wouldn’t have taken two years to consider it. He could have stayed but he didn’t.’

‘So we forget him?’

‘No, let’s not do that,’ I decreed, firmly. ‘It was nice to have known him for a while. You’ll find that, love. People come into your life, and then they go out again.’

‘Like Dad?’

‘Not in that way. I didn’t mean by dying. Nobody stays in one place for ever; our circumstances change, and we move on, from place to place.’

He frowned. On screen someone scored, but he barely seemed to notice. ‘I don’t ever want to leave St Martí,’ he murmured.

‘You say that now, but you will. One day you’ll go to university. Even if it’s no further away than Girona, it’ll take you out of here and into a bigger circle. One day you’ll have a career.’

‘Maybe I’ll start a restaurant here, like Cisco.’

‘I don’t think Cisco and the rest would be very pleased to have
you as competition. And anyway, I don’t see an opening in St Martí, ever. No spare premises.’

He considered that for a while. ‘Then maybe I’ll make wine; I could go and work for Uncle Miles. That’s not very far away; I could work there and live here.’

‘And put someone else out of a job? It’s not a very big bodega, Tom, and most of the people there will still be around when you’re old enough to be starting a career. Anyway, the last I heard you wanted to be a cop, like Alex Guinart.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded, tentatively.

‘Then you could wind up anywhere in Catalunya, somewhere you couldn’t commute from.’

He frowned up at me. ‘You’re not going to move on yourself, Mum, are you?’

He touched my heart yet again. ‘No, my darling,’ I promised him. ‘I have done plenty of that in my life, but finally I’ve arrived where I want to be.’

‘You lived here before, didn’t you? With Dad?’

That wasn’t something we’d ever discussed. I’d told him, years before, when I’d brought him to live in St Martí, but he hadn’t pressed me about it; until now.

‘Yes,’ I replied, then waited for the follow-up that I knew would come.

‘And yet you moved away then,’ he pointed out, a little anxiously.

‘I was younger then, and sillier. I wasn’t ready to settle here, and neither was your dad. There were things he had to get out of his system.’

‘Did he?’

‘Honestly? I don’t think he ever did.’

‘Sometimes I wonder, Mum,’ he murmured, pensively. ‘If he hadn’t died, would he still be in Monaco with Susie Mum and Janet and wee Jonathan, or would he be here with us?’

I ponder the same question myself, often, for all that I try to avoid it. I’m no nearer knowing the answer, and I wasn’t going there with Tom, so I settled for a vague, general bullshit response. ‘I’m sure he’d have found time for everybody, love.’
Heaven knows
, I thought,
he shared himself around when he was alive
. I’ve often wondered what happened between him and that girl from Singapore, the one who showed up just in time to stop him getting on board the plane on which I came so close to meeting my Maker.

He sighed. ‘It’s not fair, Mum,’ he said, with a hard edge to his voice that startled me. I’d never heard it before. ‘Why did he have to go and die?’

‘He didn’t plan it, Tom. Don’t blame him.’

‘I’m not blaming him,’ he snapped, pulling himself upright on the sofa. ‘I asked Gerard once, if God’s so good, why did he let it happen? He said that God operates on a different level, and that as people, we have to take the rough with the smooth.’

‘What did you say to that?’ I asked, knowing that he couldn’t have been any more than eight when the conversation took place.

‘I told him that if God was only a sort of Presidente del Gobierno in the sky, then he wasn’t much good to ordinary people.’

Gerard had told me once that Tom didn’t believe in the Man Upstairs. If he’d been encouraged to see Him as a celestial prime
minister, it was pretty clear why. Nobody believes in those people.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘leaving God out of the discussion and going back to your dad, the truth is that none of us knows what each day will bring. Some things we can change, if we want to. Others, we can’t. If we’re bitter about them, the more we will hurt. And when I see you in pain . . . I feel it too.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he exclaimed.

‘No, no. Don’t be. We all go through these things in life. I still miss your grandma, and I always will. It’s a part of being, and I suppose when you’re very young, it’s not something that’s easy to understand. You’ve reached the age when you do. Now you have to learn to accept it. You have to learn . . .’

He glanced at me. ‘. . . that shit happens?’

My mouth fell open. I snapped it shut. ‘Where did you learn that expression?’

‘Grandpa Blackstone.’

‘That figures!’ I snorted. ‘When?’

‘I asked him the same thing, why Dad had to die. That was all he said.’

And that was pure Mac Blackstone, I had to concede. Oz’s father is not a man to tiptoe around his feelings. ‘Succinct, but spot on, kid. Life is about accepting that, and putting it in perspective. You know what the word “grief” means in English?’ Tom’s multilingual, naturally, given his Scottish parentage, and the fact that he’s spent most of his life in Monaco and Spain. He has a lot of words inside his head, but I don’t assume that at his age he understands all of them.

‘I think so. It’s what you feel when you’re very sad, isn’t it?’