I squeezed her hand. ‘Bullseye,’ I said. ‘Did you ask him if Starr ever came here with friends?’
‘Of course I did. He says that he remembers him being here a couple of times with deux Anglais. One of them was a bald man, smallish, heavily tanned. He can’t remember anything about the other one. Not young, not old, well dressed; that’s all.’
I looked at my watch. It was almost two o‘clock. ‘Sod it,’I said. ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait to see Senora Sonas. She’ll be shut for the afternoon.’
Prim shook her head. ‘No. He says she doesn’t close. The people here smoke a lot, it seems. They like the tabac to be open all day long.’ She finished her drink and the last of the olives. ‘Come on,’ she said, waving goodbye to her new pal, ‘let’s go and see her.’
As far as I can see there’s never quite enough room inside Spanish village liquor stores, for some of the stock is always lying out in the street; big carafes of dodgy wine, plastic blocks of spring water, much of it drawn free from the village well and sold to the unwary, and cases of beer, all set out on the ground, well below the height of the average dog’s cocked leg. A tip: if you choose to drink straight from the bottle in Spain, always give the top a really good wipe first.
The sign above the door read ‘Bodegas Sonas’, not that there was much chance of us getting it wrong. La Pera is not a shopper’s paradise. I suppose I was expecting the female equivalent of the man in the cafe-bar, and I guess Prim was too. The reality took us by surprise.
Inside the store was a tall woman, in her mid thirties, with jet black hair and skin which looked rich and creamy even in the dim light of her shop. It’s my observation that there is a time in the lives of members of the human species, in their early fifties, when everything seems to head south at once. Senora Sonas was a long way short of that. She was in her prime. As I looked at her, tall and dark-haired, I thought at once of Jan, and felt a momentary pain.
Prim took the lead this time. Speaking French, as she had in the bar, she explained, untruthfully of course, who she was, and what she and I were looking for.
‘That’s funny,’ said Senora Sonas, in almost flawless English. ‘Ronnie told me that he had no relatives alive.You’re not going to tell me now that he has a wife, are you?’
There was something in her tone that set the hair prickling at the back of my neck. Prim’s too, I discovered later. A faint sound made me look into the corner of the room. There, on a metal stand, I saw a carry-cot. I’m no expert, but I guessed that the sleeping child was around four months old. I glanced quickly at the woman’s left hand. There was no wedding ring; not even the mark of one.
‘No, Senora,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have one of those. The truth is he doesn’t have a cousin either. I’m Oz Blackstone, and this is Primavera Phillips. We’re investigators, trying to discover why he disappeared a year ago. He hasn’t been seen since.’
Her head dropped. ‘I was afraid that something had happened. I could never believe that he would just go off and leave me like that.’
For the sake of it, I had to ask. ‘The baby is …?’
She nodded.
‘Did he know, before he disappeared?’
‘No, but neither did I at that time.’
‘What happened?’
She held up a hand. ‘Wait.’ She stepped to the door and locked it, then turned the ‘Obert’ sign round to show ‘Tancat’. ‘Come through here,’ she said, and led the way through to a comfortable sitting room behind the shop. She sat in a chair by the stone fireplace and offered us seats opposite. ‘I used to live here,’ she said. ‘There is a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. Since I had my little boy, I’ve moved upstairs to the apartment. It’s lighter and there’s more room.’
‘Have you always been here, Senora?’ Prim asked her.
She laughed. ‘Call me Reis, why don’t you; it’s my name. No, I’m really a furniture designer. I worked in agencies in Paris, Brussels, then Barcelona, until my father died a couple of years ago, and I came back here to sell the place. I realised soon that it was only worth anything as a going concern. Anyway, I could hardly close it and leave the village without a tabac or a bodega, or worse still, having to rely on that greedy bastard Mendes in the bar. So I kept it open while I waited for a buyer, and rented out the apartment to make some extra money.’
‘That’s how you met Starr?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Mendes sent him along to me at the beginning of July last year. I showed him the apartment and he took it for three months, rent paid in advance. He is very honest, is Ronnie: at least I thought so then.’
‘What does he look like?’ asked Prim.
‘He has fair hair, much the same colour as yours, and he is very good looking. When I saw him first, I thought he might be gay, but we became friends, then more than friends and I found out for sure that he is not. He is an artist, I am an artist too, of a sort. We had a lot in common.’
‘Did he tell you things about himself?’
Reis Sonas shrugged. ‘At the time I thought he did. Then, when he vanished and never wrote, I guessed that they had all been stories. He told me that he taught painting in a college in Wales, and sold some original work, not through the galleries, but to businesses, through interior design agencies, like the ones I worked for.
‘He said that like mine his father had died, a few years after his mother. He had sold their house, and they had left him a little money too. He came to Spain with the thought that after another year in college, he might come over here to paint. “In the footsteps of Dali,” he told me.
‘He is an expert on his work,’ she said, with sudden pride. ‘He knows everything about him. That was why he came here, to be near Gala’s castle in Pubol. He painted it. He took a photo of the plain, as you can see it from her window, and painted that. He went to Port Lligat and to Cadaques, and painted them.’
‘Did he ever paint like Dali?’ I asked her. ‘Did he copy his style?’
She nodded. ‘Sometimes he did. He is very good. The soft colours, the surreal subjects, he can do them all. Just like Dali, only not like him. Gentler in the concepts, you know what I mean. Not crazy, like he was.’
‘What did he do with this work? Did he show any of it?’
‘No, only to me. Then he painted over it, or burned it.’
‘What!’
‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she laughed. ‘Ronnie is a real artist, in his own way. Copying he would do for fun, or to teach a class, but he would never try to pass it off.’
‘You sure?’
‘Certain. He told me so, and he meant it. He meant that at least.’
I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you remember him ever painting a picture of a toreador?’ I asked her. ‘A toreador with a red cape and a tear running down his cheek?’
She looked at me as if she had caught me peering through her bedroom window. ‘How did you know about that?’
‘I’ve seen it. It was bought by a man in Scotland.’
She sighed and shook her head, ‘Ronnie did not paint that picture. I went up to the apartment one day, and it was there, in the room he used as his studio. I asked him if he had done it, but he said, “I know I’m good, but I’m not that good.” He said that he had been given it, as a present. I asked him who gave it to him, but he didn’t tell me. He just said that it was someone he had met. It was an incredible picture, a tour de force.’
‘Do you think it could have been an unknown Dali?’
Reis looked at me and made a face. ‘I can’t say that. I can’t say it wasn’t. But I got the feeling that Ronnie thought it might have been. Not from anything he said, but from the way he looked at it, like it was a holy relic.’
‘Can you remember when you saw the picture?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, it was the twenty-fifth of September, last year. That’s my birthday, that’s how I know. I came up to the apartment and saw the picture, we had a drink, and then we went to the restaurant in Pubol and had dinner.