‘Weren’t you worried then?’
‘Not really. Frank’s never been all that reliable when it comes to keeping dates with his mum.’
‘How long did your moody last?’
‘About a month. I’d planned to sit it out until he got in touch with me to apologise, but it got too much for me. So I sent him an email, asking how he was, as if nothing had happened. Again, no reply. I texted him and called him, but it was the same. Finally I called the office number he’d given me, and asked to speak to the sales manager. I was put through to a woman. I told her I didn’t want to speak to her, but to Frank McGowan.’
‘And?’
Adrienne’s carefully drawn eyebrows rose. ‘And she said, “Who?” I repeated myself. She said, “Who’s he?” in a dry way, and in a mid-European accent that I didn’t care for. I told her that he was her sales manager and my son, and advised her to mind her tone, to which she told me that she was the sales manager, that her name was Lidia Bromberg, and that she had never heard of any Frank McGowan.’
‘So it was bullshit: the big job in Switzerland, the promotion to Spain, it was all crap?’
‘No!’ my aunt protested. ‘It was real. I visited him in Davos. I had a week there, in the resort, as his guest. So was the casino; the number I called was on his business card, plus he sent me some literature on the place.’
‘Then he’s been fired, Auntie. He’s been up to something, he’s been caught and they’ve sacked him.’
‘If that’s so, why not tell me? Why would that woman deny his very existence?’
I didn’t have a snappy answer for that one. ‘What have you done about it?’ I asked instead.
‘Nothing that’s worked. I contacted the embassy in Madrid, but they had no knowledge of him. The man I spoke to assured me that if he’d been arrested, or involved in a serious accident, they’d have been informed by the Spanish authorities. He checked with all nine consular offices, and he even contacted the Guardia Civil, to see if they had any unidentified. .’ She paused. ‘But there was no one.’
‘How about his friends? Lady friends?’
‘There was a girl in Davos, Susannah. I met her when I was over there: she was head receptionist at the resort. I called her. She told me that they kept in touch after Frank moved to Spain, but there was nothing between them any more. She’d had a Christmas card from him, but nothing since. She did say she thought he was involved with someone else, but she couldn’t give me a name.’
‘How about London? Anyone there?’
‘Not many. His business colleagues dropped him when the trouble arose, and so did most of his school chums. There are still one or two, though, people who stayed loyal. Justin’s the closest, Justin Mayfield. He and Frank worked in the House of Commons, in the dying days of the last Tory government. They were both researchers: Frank worked for a junior minister and Justin was with an opposition back-bencher. ’
‘What does he do now?’
‘He’s a junior minister himself; number two in the Culture department. He’s been an MP for seven years. I called him, of course; his assistant said he was busy, and that he would get back to me. He hasn’t though; not yet, at any rate.’
Some long-buried instincts started to murmur within me. I pushed myself out of my chair. ‘Let’s get this right, Adrienne,’ I said. ‘You’re telling me that Frank’s vanished into thin air, and that the company he was supposed to be working for has denied all knowledge of him.’
‘That sums it up.’
‘What about the bird in Davos, Susannah? If she and Frank had a thing going, she must be concerned too. Can’t you get more out of her?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Then it’s time you spoke to her again. And it’s time you rattled the man Justin’s cage again. If he’s Frank’s closest friend, it’s time he was told about the situation, if nothing else. As a government minister he’ll have clout.’
And then a thought struck me, like a car I hadn’t seen coming. I found myself grinning at her. ‘But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ I exclaimed. ‘You want me to find him for you.’
‘No, no, no.’ She shook her head, but not quite emphatically enough. ‘How could you do that, really? You have Tom, you have a dog. Your hands are quite full enough, Primavera.’
‘I have a computer with a broadband Internet connection.’
‘So have I, but even today, there are limits to what the web can achieve. I need a hands-on approach.’ She sighed heavily. ‘And, yes, I admit that when I decided to visit you, I did have in mind the fact that you and Tom’s father ran an investigation business a few years ago, before all the later stuff happened to you. But now that I’ve seen how you live, I can’t possibly expect. .’
‘No, you can’t, Adrienne.’ I picked up my glass from the table and took a sip of sauvignon blanc. It was warm, so I refreshed it from the bottle in the ice bucket. As I leaned against the terrace rail, ostensibly looking down at my aunt, I found myself seeing other things, scenes from times past, from affairs that might have been described as adventures, with a tall figure by my side, one whose smile and good looks were a match for a much darker persona. Old thrills, old dangers, all in the past. Compared to which, asking a few questions about my crooked, probably recidivist cousin. . ‘But now that we’ve established that,’ I continued, ‘if you were able to look after Tom and Charlie for a few days, I suppose I could catch a flight down to Sevilla.’
She stayed poker faced: I made a mental note never to play cards with her. ‘I couldn’t possibly allow that, Prim. .’
There were men out on the bay, in boats, fishing for squid. I could see, like fireflies in the night, the bright lights they used to draw their catch to the surface. I grinned at her, aware that she was luring me into her net. ‘Cut the crap,’ I retorted. ‘We both know that you could, and that you will.’
Six
Tom was very good about it, when I told him I had something to do for Aunt Adrienne and that she’d be house-sitting with him and the dog. If he’d been upset in the slightest, I’d have aborted the mission there and then, but he assured me he didn’t mind a bit. In truth I was the one with reservations; my son’s early years had been a little nomadic, thanks to me, and I didn’t want him to form the impression that history might be repeating itself.
Once I was fully committed, mentally, I booked myself a flight on-line, from Barcelona to Sevilla for the next day, Monday: the regular schedules were full, but I found a seat on a budget operation called Clickair. That done, and having despatched Tom and Charlie to give the great-aunt a guided tour of the nearby Greco-Roman ruins of the city of Empuries, I sat down to review the situation.
Ade had given me a small glossy strip of paper with the logo of the Hotel and Casino d’Amuseo, Sevilla, a telephone number and a web address. I turned back to my computer and keyed it into the address bar, then sat back, impressed.
The home page showed a complex that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Las Vegas Strip, with a Y-shaped, ten-storey building sitting on top of what I took to be a vast gaming area, an assumption confirmed when I read the detailed description. A lake guarded the front of the building, while the rear opened out on to an eighteen-hole golf course. It was impressive, but it would have been even more so if it had been a photograph. What I was looking at was all artwork, apart from photography of the Andalucían countryside and the Sierra Nevada.
I scratched my head absent-mindedly as I studied it, feeling myself frown. There was something about the place that I couldn’t put my finger on. I thought about my time in Vegas, and as I did it came to me. I was looking at an amalgam, a blend of things I’d seen there; it was as if the architect, or artist, or whoever, had looked at an aerial shot of the place and had nicked pieces from it to form his grand design. Yes, for sure, the lake had been taken straight from the Bellagio, and the golf course from the Wynn. The building itself was more or less identical in shape to the Mirage.