‘He had it coming. Tell me, if it had been Santi who’d beaten the crap out of him, rather than you, would you have absolved him?’
‘Totally.’
I raised his hand to my lips and kissed it, then set it down on the table ‘Then do the same for yourself.’
Eleven
I
went to church that Sunday. As I’ve said, I’m not an adherent, but something drew me to put on a skirt and a black scarf that also worked as a shawl and a head cover, and go next door. I took a place right at the back on one of the long wooden pews. They were not designed for comfort. ‘They are all penitents’ benches,’ my father is fond of declaring. ‘Church-going is not a social occasion; you can’t win true believers with comfortable seats.’
You might think it was social for me, but you’d be wrong if you did. I was there to see my men at work. Even though my relationship with Gerard had defined limits, my feelings were proprietorial as I watched him conduct the service, and even more so as I looked at his white-robed assistant, my son the altar person. After the travails of the previous week, there was a . . . a niceness about it, a family feeling, that gave me a warm glow inside. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there; once or twice I caught women in the congregation glancing at me over their shoulders. But I didn’t feel that there was anything wrong about it, so I simply smiled at them, redirecting their attention to the main event.
I hadn’t been first into the church, but I was first out. I went straight down to Can Coll, and found an outside table, taking a seat facing the way I had come, from which I could watch the worshippers emerge.
‘What can I get you, Primavera?’ asked Joaquim, the master of the café.
‘Coffee Americano with a little milk, and a fizzy water, please.’
‘And will Tom be joining you?’
‘He will, once he’s finished his tidying up duties and gone home to fetch the dog. But I’d better not make any choices for him.’ I knew he’d want Fanta orange and a ham sandwich, but he always made a show of studying the menu.
I looked back towards the church. Gerard stood in the doorway, shaking hands with his people as they left, spirits lifted and ready to face the day. His fan club was out in force; quite a few, especially the ladies, paused for a word.
I hadn’t realised that the mayor was there; she must have gone in before the sound of the bells had faded away, and been in one of the front rows. I had her labelled ‘unconventional’ in my mind, after seeing the way she dressed for the office, but her church-going outfit gave that notion the lie; black dress, black shoes, black lace around her shoulders. She was the last person to leave. It may be that she had been dealing with some of her own congregation inside. Whatever, she stopped beside Gerard, just as Tom emerged, no longer white robed but in shorts and T-shirt, trotted past them with a quick, ‘So long,’ and headed next door.
I watched as they spoke, neither glancing in my direction; their conversation didn’t seem to be casual, for there were no smiles. I wondered whether they were discussing the wine fair, and Planas’s extortion, then chided myself for such a self-centred thought. They were both important civic figures, dealing with many things, and ours wasn’t the only game in town.
I’d been right, though. Justine saw me almost as soon as she and Gerard parted; she waved, and headed for me. My coffee and water arrived just as she did. She asked for the same, and took a seat at my table. ‘Father Hernanz and I were talking about you. I came to church here today because I wanted to take another look at Plaça Petita. I’ve done that; I’ve even paced it out, to judge roughly how many square metres it is. Primavera, I’m not going to be complicit in this thing, and I’m not going to allow the council to be either. You will pay exactly the same rent per square metre, per day, as every other business in St Martí does, not a cent more, not a cent less. I’m taking a stand against Planas; I’m going to negotiate on my programme with the council’s Green members, and deliver as much of it as I can.’
I stared at her. My day had just got even brighter. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely, and I apologise for ever even thinking about allowing that man to dictate to me.’
‘Hey,’ I said, just as Tom arrived, with Charlie on his short leash, ‘I was going to pay him, remember. I was prepared to let him dictate to me as well.’
‘No. You beat him. He quoted you a figure that he thought would be impossible for you, but you accepted it without batting an eyelash. He tried to bully you politically and he tried to bully you financially. You kicked his ass both times; you humiliated him privately and if the story ever comes out, he’ll be humiliated publicly as well. People have supported him because he said he stands for the best of the old values, but they didn’t include extortion.’
Tom had seated himself, and settled Charlie on the ground, as we spoke. He gazed at Justine, fascinated. I introduced her, formally: ‘Senora Michels, the mayor of L’Escala.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he told her. ‘What’s extortion?’
She looked at me, batting the question to me. ‘It can be many things,’ I said, ‘but in this case it means forcing someone to pay too much money for something.’
‘And has someone done that to you?’
‘They tried to, but they failed, because it was worth that amount of money to me, or would have been.’
He frowned, and in the instant, I saw a flash of his father in him. A quick shudder ran through me. ‘Who was it?’ he asked.
‘A silly man, who’ll know better next time. Now forget it. Do you want to see the menu?’
‘Don’t need to. I’d like a Fanta lemon and a chorizo sandwich.’ My boy’s tastes were evolving.
I invited Justine to stay with us for lunch. She and I were considering our options when a shadow fell across the table. I looked up, half expecting to see Gerard, but instead found Sub-inspector Alex Guinart, of the Mossos d’Esquadra, standing beside us. Alex is a good friend of mine . . . one of my rare official visits to the church in L’Escala was to stand as godmother to his daughter . . . but two things told me that his visit wasn’t social. One was the fact that he was in uniform, and the second was the look on his face.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Primavera,’ he said, ‘but I need to have a word with the mayor.’
She groaned. ‘Town business on a Sunday, Alex?’
‘Not of the usual kind,’ he said, moving away with a nod of his head that indicated he wanted to speak in private.
‘Sorry,’ Justine murmured as she rose to follow him. ‘Hopefully this won’t take long.’
I watched them for a few seconds, as they walked up the hill towards Alex’s police vehicle, a four-by-four, which he had parked in front of the church, then turned my attention back to the menu. A couple of minutes passed before the mayor returned, her expression sombre, and then some.
‘Alex needs me to go somewhere. Given what’s happened recently, I thought that you might want to come with us.’
I was surprised, but I was intrigued too. ‘If you think so, and it’s OK with Alex. How about Tom?’
She shook her head, firmly. By that time I wasn’t smiling either.
‘OK,’ I said. I handed my son a fifty. ‘Have your lunch, then either wait here till I get back, or pay for what we’ve had, then go down to Ben’s shop and see if you can help out there.’
‘Can I have an ice cream too?’ Tom knows when he’s in a good negotiating position.
‘The biggest one they have, if you want.’
I spoke to Joaquim, to let him know what was happening . . . with him and Ben as minders, and with the added insurance of Charlie, who might be dumb but is loyal and can be formidable, Tom was in the safest hands possible . . . then headed towards Alex’s vehicle, wondering what the hell could have happened to have him wearing his sternest cop face on a Sunday.
Twelve
O
n the way, I asked Alex where we were going, but he kept his eyes firmly on the road. Justine was no more communicative; her forehead was set in a deep frown.
We drove out of St Martí and back towards the main road. I assumed that he was taking us to L’Escala, but we were barely halfway to the junction where one of the tourist information centres is when he made a sharp left turn, on to a dirt track that I’d seen many times but never gone up, not even when I was running, or cycling, not even when Oz and I lived there in what I’m beginning to call ‘the old days’. It has a name, but I’d never paid any attention to it, and that afternoon we were past it before I could read the sign. I still couldn’t tell you what it’s called.
I knew that there were houses up there, in the fields behind the ruins of the ancient Greco-Roman town, but I had never met anyone who lived there, so I knew nothing of them. The road rose gradually; the ground is quite high up there. I counted three houses as we passed, two on the left and one on the right, before Alex drew to a halt behind two other police vehicles and an ambulance. They were all lined up alongside a high stone wall, in which there was a double gate, partly open. I could just see the pitch of a roof from my raised position in the back seat of the car.
If the length of the wall was anything to go by, it enclosed a pretty substantial plot of land. ‘Whose house is this, Alex?’ I asked, as I stepped out of the cool of the vehicle, into the heat of the day.
‘You’ll see in a little while.’ He led Justine and me through the gate into a garden that was mainly lawn to the front, apart from the swimming pool to the right. The house itself was splendid, as fine as any I’d seen in the area. It was two storey, stone built also, with a loggia over the entrance, and wooden shutters framing each of the small windows. Older Spanish houses were built to keep the sun out; now that there are things like air-con and heat-reflecting glass, the country’s architects have been liberated.
We followed a paved path round the side. As we turned towards the back of the house, we stepped under a pagoda frame with a canvas cover that was set up to shade a small patio. I almost tripped over a chair, a solid wooden white-painted thing, but grabbed its leg to save myself, then trotted on to catch up with Alex.
As I looked around, I saw that the ground at the back sloped downwards, and that the stone wall enclosed the property completely, save for a gate at the back. Only the area of the garden along the length of the house was level, with a mixture of lawn and paving. It was defined by a small wall, of white cast concrete pillars, with plant pots set on top at regular intervals a few metres apart. A middle-aged man was sitting on the wall beside one of them, sweat forming dark patches under the armpits of his green uniform shirt. I recognised him. His name was Gomez and he was an intendant from the Mossos d’Esquadra criminal investigation branch.
He blinked when he saw me. ‘Senora Blackstone,’ he exclaimed. ‘What connection have you with this?’
‘The mayor suggested that she come,’ Alex told him. ‘And . . . well, she’s the mayor, OK.’
‘Connection with what?’ I asked.
‘Come and see.’
Gomez beckoned me forward. I approached him and as I did I could see over the wall, into the lower garden. Four crime-scene officers, in sterile tunics, were on their knees, searching the ground, square metre by square metre. Two paramedics stood off to one side, holding a stretcher, as if waiting to be called into action. At the foot of the steps that led down to the area, I saw a second uniformed officer: I had met him before too, Inspector Garcia, the intendant’s more abrasive sidekick. He and I exchanged not very friendly glances; and then the smell hit me, that and the buzzing of what sounded like a thousand flies.
I stood against the pillared wall and looked down. Beneath me, maybe three metres below, there was a rockery, with cactus plants in the sandy soil, and in its centre, teeth bared as if he was snarling, glaring up at me as he had in his office, lay the unmistakably dead form of José-Luis Planas.
Justine came to stand beside me, and gasped in horror, even though she had been told what she had been brought to see. ‘When was he found?’ she asked Gomez.
‘About two hours ago,’ he replied, ‘by his gardener, when he came in to check the watering system. Apparently it had been faulty for the last week or so.’
‘He’s been there for a while,’ I said. ‘You’d better move him pretty quick. I’ve seen this; I nursed in Africa for a while in a combat zone. Decomposition has a different timetable in the heat.’
‘So how long would you say he’s been here?’ asked Garcia, who had climbed the stairway. ‘Our medical examiner . . . he’s gone back to his barbecue . . . says at least three days.’
‘Then he’s a fucking idiot . . . pardon my English. If he’d been here for three days in these hot weather conditions he’d be starting to go black; he might even have burst open. I’d say less than two days, that he died Friday night or Saturday morning.’
‘And you know better than our doctor, do you?’ he sneered. ‘It’s possible; his housekeeper comes in three days a week; her husband says that she was here on Friday, but that she has her own keys and often comes when he’s not here. So he could have been lying here all that time and she might not have known. The husband, the gardener, he was last here on Wednesday.’
‘In this instance, I do know better than your medic. I had a meeting with Senor Planas in his office . . .’ I checked my watch; it showed 2 p.m., ‘. . . exactly two days and two hours ago.’