At first I thought … then I stepped through the door, felt the stickiness beneath my feet, moved past the island work surface in the middle of the room and saw, behind it, Duncan Culshaw, lying on his back, mouth wide open, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, his face a waxy off-white, looking as dead as anyone I’d ever seen. He was wearing nothing but a pair of Speedo budgie-smugglers. It wouldn’t take a detailed autopsy to determine what had killed him. There was a great gaping wound on the inside of his right thigh, and both of his legs were covered in his blood.
Conrad stood beyond him; he was holding wee Jonathan in his arms. The kid’s face was pressed hard against his chest, and his body heaved with silent sobs.
‘Gimme him,’ I demanded, walking around the other side of the work unit, to avoid the great crimson pool. Conrad handed him over, without a word.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him. ‘Did he threaten the children? Or did he just push you too far?’
‘Let’s just say I’d had enough of him,’ he replied.
‘It wasn’t Conrad,’ wee Jonathan mumbled into my belly. ‘It was me, Auntie Primavera, it was me.’ The sobs began again, with full sound effects.
Why did I have no trouble believing him? You might wonder that, but the answer’s quite simple. If Conrad Kent had decided to kill Duncan, he’d have done it in a very quiet place with no witnesses, no mess and no fuss.
‘How?’ I didn’t say the word, I mouthed it.
‘Duncan got back three hours ago,’ Conrad began. ‘He told Audrey and me, in front of the two kids, that we were fired, then he went for a swim. He had a few beers by the poolside, then he came into the kitchen. Audrey was here; she’d started to make dinner for the children. Duncan said something to her along the lines of, “Are you trying out for a job as a chef?” Little Jonathan was standing beside her. He started to protest, but Culshaw said to him, “Shut up, you, and learn some fucking respect. I’m your daddy now!” The little chap picked up the knife that Audrey had been using to cut the veg, and lashed out at him. He didn’t think about it, he just did it. He’d have grabbed anything, a carrot, a courgette, a handful of spaghetti, whatever was nearest. It happened to be the knife, and it happened to be as sharp as a razor, as all good chef’s knives are. I was in the children’s day room with Janet when the screaming started. And there was a lot of it, from Audrey, from little Jonathan, and most of all from Culshaw. As soon as I got here, I knew he didn’t have a prayer. You can see that for yourself, Primavera.’
I nodded agreement; the wound was very high on the inner thigh and the whole femoral arterial structure seemed to have been severed. A tourniquet wouldn’t have done much good.
‘He bled out in a couple of minutes,’ Conrad concluded.
‘When?’
‘Less than a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘Where’s Janet now?’ I asked.
‘Where I left her, I hope. I asked Audrey to stay with her.’
I assumed she’d taken Tom there too. ‘Have you done anything?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not yet. There hasn’t been time. I suppose we should call the police.’
‘And have this little boy stigmatised for the rest of his life?’ I retorted. ‘He might be below the age of criminal responsibility, but I don’t care. I’m not having him mauled by the media.’ Wee Jonathan made a snuffling sound, which I took to be agreement. ‘He’s just lost his mother. What’s happened here stays here, just like Vegas. You’re the fixer, Conrad; so fix it.’
‘Primavera.’ Liam spoke from the doorway. ‘Miles can’t be involved in this.’
‘The hell I can’t,’ my brother-in-law protested.
‘No,’ I said, firmly. ‘He’s right. It’s best all round for you to leave. You’ve got too much to lose. Whatever we do to clean this up it’s going to be stupid, and it’s going to be illegal. Our Dawn would kill both of us if I let you get involved then we got caught.’
‘Nonetheless,’ he insisted, ‘I have to do something to help.’
‘Then take the kids, Tom as well, and get them out of here on your posh new plane. Take Susie’s car, leave it in a car park at the airport and once you’ve got where you’re going, text me the bay number and I’ll have it collected.’
‘Okay,’ he agreed, ‘but where? I’d head for California, but the kids would need visas.’
‘Then go back to Scotland. Take them to Mac Blackstone. Better him than my dad, since he’s only Tom’s grandfather, and the two Js have nothing to do with him, and don’t know him. I promised Tom he’d see his granddads this week, and Mac hasn’t seen the other two in a long time. Then you go home; I’ll let you know later how this all pans out.’
‘I’ll do that,’ he agreed. ‘But hold on a minute. What about the chauffeur who brought us here? Won’t he talk?’
‘Miles,’ I sighed. ‘This is the south of France. As far as black car companies are concerned, we were invisible.’
‘In that case, it sounds like a plan,’ he conceded. ‘But what about the little guy?’ He nodded in the general direction of my bundle, who had quietened down. ‘Isn’t he going to need looking after?’
‘There’s nobody better to do that than Janet and Tom.’
Miles came with me as I took wee Jonathan to join his siblings. The other two were quiet, knowing that some serious shit had hit the fan but not quite what. ‘There’s been an accident,’ I began, ‘and Duncan’s dead.’ Janet and Tom were both impassive. At least they didn’t whoop with glee.
Then I told them the rest as Conrad had explained it. ‘We need you all to go away with Miles, to Grandpa Mac in Anstruther. The rest of us have things to do here, then Liam and I will join you. But one thing,’ I stressed. ‘You don’t talk to anyone else about what happened here. Wee Jonathan needs to try to forget about it and you have to help him.’
They both nodded. Another year of childhood’s gone in a single day, I thought, and it almost broke my heart.
‘What about Mum’s funeral?’ Janet asked, solemnly.
I looked back at her. ‘Where would you like it to be? Here or in Scotland? It’s your decision, yours and wee Jonathan’s.’
She considered the question for a while, then replied, ‘Scotland. It’s where she was from.’ Her brother nodded agreement.
‘Then so it shall be,’ I promised.
‘Won’t someone come looking for Duncan?’ Audrey whispered as I left.
‘The Nevada State police might,’ I replied, ‘and possibly Strathclyde. Shame he was never here. I doubt if anyone else will, though.’
Miles and the three children were gone in less than half an hour. Meanwhile, when I got back to the kitchen, the blood was almost all gone. Liam and Conrad had stripped off their clothes, all of them, to avoid contamination, hosed the bulk of it into a drain in the floor, and were cleaning the remnants with what smelled like industrial-strength bleach.
Duncan was still there, but he was wrapped in what looked to me like a sail.
It was. ‘I have a boat,’ Conrad said. ‘I keep it in the marina at Fontvieille. Sometimes I do a bit of night fishing, and tonight’s going to be one of those nights. Once it gets fully dark, I’ll load him,’ he jerked a thumb at the body, ‘into the car and take him down.’
‘We will,’ Liam murmured.
‘No, just me.’
‘All due respect, Conrad, but there are bound to be cameras down there. You might be fit, but looking at what I can see right now tells me that carrying that thing on board, you ain’t going to be able to make it look like it’s nothing more than a sail.’
‘But it won’t look any more right with two of us carrying it.’
Liam grinned, and flexed his musculature for a second. ‘There won’t be two of us carrying it.’
‘When you two naked men have finished your pose-down contest,’ I barked at them, ‘get used to the idea that there will be a woman on board.’ Liam opened his mouth but I shut it for him. ‘You guys are not risking everything on your own,’ I decreed. ‘No arguments.’
And that’s how it was. We were able to park a few metres away from Conrad’s mooring. Liam lifted the sail and its contents out of the trunk and hefted it on board as if it weighed ten kilos or so. On deck the three of us unrolled it so that the body fell into the footwell out of sight of everything, even the sharpest-eyed owl, and we fixed the sail to the mast, as if it had been taken away for maintenance, and returned renewed. Obviously there were no bloodstains on it, since Duncan didn’t have any left.