Instead of heading into the sunset at high speed, like the thieves we would have been, we went to see our client. We told him the whole story of what had happened in our pursuit of his stolen money. We told him of the risk we had taken, and were taking still, in withholding information from the police. We told him how close we had come to dying, and of the grisly end of our would-be murderer.
As he sat there, white-faced, we told him, finally, that we reckoned that a third of the recovered proceeds was a reasonable price to pay for our continued shtumm.
And he agreed. On the spot, with barely a blink. I guess that when you’re facing bankruptcy, disgrace, maybe even an extended holiday in Saughton Prison, and two people walk into your office and offer you your life back, you know exactly what it’s worth to you.
So there we were, Prim and I, with well upwards of three hundred grand in a bag, and with the world as our mollusc. On top of all that we were in lurv. Maybe each of us had cast aside our rose-coloured spectacles, but still we only had eyes for each other.
Without any disagreement, we decided that we would regard our windfall as a gift from a grateful friend, and that the Tax Man could have his cut out of my stiff invoice to our grateful client. However, just in case the Tax Man didn’t agree with us, we decided that we should go to live out of his clutches for a while. We decided that we would go on a voyage of discovery, not just in search of new places, but of ourselves, of what we would become as a couple.
So I began to wind down my private enquiry business, leaving all my clients in good hands, with the proviso that one day I might be back. Prim put her flat in the hands of the estate agents, with instructions to sell. I paid off the loan on my loft and put it in the hands of Jan More, my childhood friend, youthful lover, and potential step-sister, with the request that she rent it out and send me some of the proceeds.
Next, with the same sorrowful reluctance I guess I would have felt on seeing a child off to boarding school, I delivered Wallace, my faithful companion and loft-mate, into the hands of my dad, the only other man I could think of who was daft enough to take on an iguana as a pet.
There followed an almost endless round of hugging, selective kissing and general goodbyeing: in Edinburgh to a smiling, tearful Jan and her lesbian lawyer girlfriend Anoushka Turkel; in Anstruther to my dad and Auntie Mary, Jan’s mum, the two of them an official couple at last, and to Ellie, gathering her two boys around her as she cut herself loose mentally from her useless, uncaring husband; in Auchterarder, to mum and dad Phillips, living happily in the time-warp that was Semple House, and to their younger daughter Dawn, the actress, as idyllically happy as Prim and I with Miles Grayson, her new leading man.
Finally, all goodbyes said, we fuelled up the nearly-new, one-careful-lady-owner Frontera Ozmobile and headed south … without the faintest bloody idea of where we were going.
We had taken much the same route into France a few weeks earlier, terrified, excited, fleeing — or so we had thought — from a relentless and murderous pursuer. This time was different. This time we sat on the dockside in St Malo, newly landed from Jersey on a sunny Wednesday morning in July, with the cheque book for our new joint account in Grindlay’s Bank clean, crisp and virgin in our luggage, and with our gold cards gleaming in our pockets.
‘This is it, partner,’ I said, giving Prim’s hand a squeeze. ‘Decision time. Where’s it to be? The Cote d’Azur? Tuscany? Greece?’
She wrinkled her amazingly cute nose. ‘Been there. Done all of them. Still got the Tshirts.’
‘Back to Switzerland?’
‘No!’ she said, firmly. ‘Never again. Ever!’ I nodded in agreement, breathing a sincere sigh of relief. Switzerland is the one place I never want to see again either.
‘France is expensive, even for us,’ she said. ‘Even though I speak the language. Spanish can’t be too difficult to pick up, though. Yes, let’s try Spain.’
I pondered her choice. I’d been to Benidorm. ‘Which part?’ I asked her, doubtfully. ‘It’s a big place. They say Seville’s nice, though,’ I added, trying as always to be constructive.
She looked at me, wrinkling her eyebrows this time as well as her nose. ‘Seville? In mid-summer? No, my love. I want to be able to get up in the morning and look at the Mediterranean, and I don’t want it too hot to got out during the day.’
‘Sod it! Let’s just drive. We’ll know when we get there.’
So we headed out of St Malo, more or less due south, picking our way carefully round Rennes, gasping as we climbed over the soaring bridge across the river in Nantes, and on towards Bordeaux and then Toulouse, more grateful with every kilometre for the air-conditioning which the Frontera’s one careful lady owner had been thoughtful enough to instal.
I wanted to stop just past Toulouse, but Prim, doing her best to be excited as a schoolgirl, insisted that we drive on until she could see the Mediterranean. It was touch and go, but as we approached Narbonne, we took a curve and there it was, the last of the daylight glinting on its flat-calm waters as it stretched out silver-grey in the distance.
We found a hotel in the old French town: it looked nothing fancy from the outside, but the owner’s eyes lit up as I flashed my gold card, and he showed us to his best room, en-suite, overlooking a leafy avenue, and with an impressive four-poster bed.
‘Oh yes,’ said Prim, as she saw it. ‘I think I’m going to like this.’
She did. So did I. Very much.
The next day shaped the next part of the rest of our lives. Yet it began just like any other in our new existence. We made love — you can’t practise hard enough, I always say — readied ourselves for the world outside, and had breakfast. Prim settled our bill with her card, said goodbye to our host in her excellent French, and followed me out to our car.
I watched her as she climbed into the Frontera. God, but she was beautiful; her denim shorts emphasised the curve of her hips and the tanned smoothness of her legs, her breasts swung heavily in her sleeveless cotton shirt as she pulled herself up into the high front seat. She smiled at me with her big brown eyes, a shaft of sunlight glinting through the glass roof on the tips of her blonde forelock. Just as I had every day of the incredible weeks since she had come into my life, I fell in love all over again.
‘Don’t take all day,’ she called with a hint of a laugh. I vaulted, almost, into the driver’s seat and as I strapped myself in she leaned across and kissed me. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘Today we’ll find what we’re looking for. I can tell.’
We headed west out of Narbonne, down the autoroute towards Perpignan. We had been in too much of a rush the night before to appreciate the way the French landscape changes as you approach the Mediterranean. Now, driving along only a few miles from its coast, we were struck by the red rocks and soil and by the relative lack of vegetation, other than the ordered rows of the Languedoc vineyards. Prim pointed away up to her right, where a big sign in a field proclaimed that we were in Fitou country.
‘Driving through France is a bit like being lost in a wine-list, isn’t it,’ she muttered.
It was as if the mountains jumped out at us. I swung the Frontera round a long curve, and there they were, a new, sudden, skyline, taking our breath away in simultaneous gasps.
‘Big buggers, these Pyrenees, aren’t they?’
For once Prim was lost for a reply. She just sat there, staring ahead, her mouth slightly open, fingertips to her lips. I had never seen her awestruck before. Somehow it was nice to know that she could be.
There had been overnight rain, and the morning was bright and clear, early enough still for there to be no heat haze to obscure the view. They stood out jagged against the blue sky, with the sun lighting their eastern slopes, their ravines and their valleys showing as dark shadows cast by its glare.