‘What the f-’ I gasped at last. ‘That was a bit peremptory, wasn’t it? I thought you guys didn’t do that any more.’
‘They don’t,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I do. .’ He picked up Lucille’s eight keys and put them in his pocket with their twins. ‘. . when the stakes are high enough.’ Then he pointed the gun at me. I thought that I was about to keep my date with Jan, right then, but he nodded towards the door.
‘Go on,’ he grunted. ‘Back the way we came.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re going to have an accident. You’re going to fall off a cliff, into the sea. No one’s going to report you missing for a few days; by that time the fish may have finished with you.’
‘And what about them?’ Pointless question, since the answer was so obvious.
‘Killed resisting arrest. I have another gun that I’ll plant on them, unless they have one already. After they give me my medal, I’ll empty Capulet’s boxes, one by one.’
‘Very good. But there is someone who’ll report me missing.’
He frowned at me, and then it dawned on him. ‘Ahh, my wife. I thought so. Fair enough, it doesn’t matter now.
‘She might report your disappearance, Oz, but she’ll report it to me. I’ll tell her that you opted out at the last minute and ran off into the night like a chicken.’
‘She won’t believe you.’
‘Then I’ll kill her too; probably stage it as a robbery gone bad. After that, I’ll have Prim. There’s a fine last thought for you.’ He gestured with the gun again. ‘Go on. Out to the car.’
I did as he told me. ‘This is definitely the last time I will ever trust a policeman,’ I murmured, seeing Mike Dylan grin in the dark.
When we got to the Cordoba, Ramon tossed me its keys. ‘You drive. I’ll tell you where.’
It wasn’t far. We drove over the hill and down towards Montgo, then took a side road which was signposted ‘L’Estartit’. I knew where we were headed.
The track was tarmaced at first, but when we crossed the L’Escala town limit the tarmac ran out and became rough and rutted … they must be tight buggers in L’Estartit.
‘Turn left,’ Ramon grunted as we came to a gap in the hedge alongside. I did as I was told, driving through woodland until we came to a clearing. ‘Stop.’
I could see the cliff path in the headlights; I had walked it, a couple of years before. I knew how far down it was to the rocks and the water. I knew also that once I got out of that car I was dead.
Happily, Ramon had made two big mistakes; one, he had underestimated me, and two, he hadn’t made me wear the seatbelt.
When you’re holding a gun on someone, you don’t expect him to throw an elbow into your throat. But equally, it’s bloody difficult to do it accurately in the dark. That’s where luck came into it.
My forearm whacked up under his chin, then my hand chopped down on to his wrist, numbing it and knocking the Colt to the floor of the Seat. I reached across, opened the door and shoved him out of the car, scrambling across after him, leaving the weapon where it was.
He rolled away from me, choking and coughing as he scrambled to his feet. ‘Right pal,’ I yelled at him cheerfully, ‘what was that you were saying about Prim?
‘You guessed it right back there. While you were having my wife, I was having yours and just like with the two of you, it was her idea. You’re a fucking loser, Ramon. You didn’t need to kill me. For all you knew, you just needed to split Capulet’s dough with me; there’s well enough for two.’
He held his hands out before him. ‘Okay! Okay! Okay!’ he squealed. ‘I’ll do that now.’
‘Too late. Anyway, I’d have shopped you: I’m many things but I’m not a thief.’
A gleam came into his eye. ‘I’ll say you killed them,’ he shouted. ‘That you grabbed my gun and did it.’
‘Don’t be daft. You shot them; so the traces are on your hand, not mine. And anyway, how are you going to say it?’
He looked at me, terrified, edging back and away from me.
And then his foot caught the root of a tree which grew no more than a couple of metres away from the crumbling face of the cliff. He fell backwards, and seemed to bounce, realising too late where he was.
He went over, his hands scrabbling at the edge of eternity. I threw my left arm around the tree-trunk, bracing myself, and grabbed him by the right wrist, at the very last second. I was strong from all that lifting; I took his weight easily.
He hung there, looking up at me, begging with his eyes. ‘Oz,’ he croaked.
‘Sure, Ramon, but just one thing first. The girl, Gabrielle. What did you really do with her? Vero thinks you took her to the airport and put her on a plane, but I know different.
‘Did you kill her, or did you sell her?’
‘I sold her,’ he screamed. ‘To Madame Midnight’s, a club near Girona.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get her out of there before she’s hurt too badly.’
‘Okay,’ he called out, mishearing me. ‘I’ll do that; now pull me up.’
I looked down at him, and thought about what my dad had said about forgiving and forgetting, and decided that I couldn’t come close to doing either. I thought about my ghostly Jan’s words, ‘Unless they deserve it’.
If she’d meant anyone, she’d meant him.
So I let him go. I started to haul him up, so that just for a second, I could see the light of relief in his eyes, then I simply let him go. What the hell? Vero was going to drop him anyway. I just saved her the trouble, that’s all.
He screamed for half the way down. Then, as I watched him in the moonlight, he hit a rocky outcrop, and I heard the crack of his breaking neck even above the sound of the sea. I’m certain he was dead before he hit the bottom.
38
They arrested me, believe it or not. I called the Guardia Civil. . not the Mossos; no way did I want Ramon’s people dealing with this. . on my mobile phone. I waited for them, told them an acceptable version of the story, and took them back to the summerhouse.
Their response was to stick me in a van and drive me to Figueras.
I wasn’t there for long, though. I called the nice lady in the Consulate and she had me released inside fifteen minutes. There was never a problem, really. Fortunato’s body didn’t go into the sea; it was recovered, and they were able to determine that he had shot John and Lucille, just like I said.
They also found the safe-deposit keys and the note on his body; that clinched it. The whole thing was hushed up, of course, as always. The official story was that the three of them had died in a fire-fight when he had gone to arrest them for Capulet’s murder. My part in it was never mentioned; my name didn’t even make the Spanish papers, far less the British tabloids.
I went to see Vero, of course; they had fed her the official version too, but I could tell she didn’t believe it. So I told her what had really happened, including the bit about Gabrielle. By that time the Guardia had rescued her from the brothel, and handed her over directly to the Filipino consul, in person.
The only thing I left out was what happened at the end, but from the way she thanked me, I suspect that she guessed that too.
I couldn’t stand to see Shirley, though, not then anyway; I couldn’t have lied to her. Thankfully, she had gone back to the UK to make arrangements to bury her son, and begin what would turn out to be the recovery of the family business.
Once I’d done more or less right by Vero. . which took me a couple of days. . tidied up the mess in the house, and sampled a couple of the better wines in my new cellar, there was nothing to do but lock the place up, hire Sergi as a caretaker, and bugger off back home, a couple of days early for the premiere.
Ellie loved it, of course. I was the star attraction, and so was she, done up to the nines in the new dress I’d bought her, and with a professional hair and make-up job. She even picked up a bloke at the party afterwards; big Darius Hencke, one of the wrestling crowd for whom I’d fixed guest invitations.