As Easy as Murder (2 page)

We strolled out into the square, leaving Charlie on guard duty
in the garden, and joined the crowds. The kids were making more din than ever, but I didn’t mind any more. In any event their parents, after a few tastings, were beginning to drown them out. I bought a ticket, exchanged a tear-off for a tapas from La Terrassa d’Empúries, our newest restaurant, and began to explore the exhibitors’ tables. Unlike too many other fairs of its type, only the best is on offer at Arrels del Vi. It’s become a showcase for the growers of the Emporda comerc, and they’re keen to show the world how good they are.

Miles, my brother-in-law, dabbles in the wine business, like many rich Aussies. Some time before he’d acquired a winery, a bodega, near Cadaques, and he’d been nagging me for a while to become involved as a director, since he lives in California and can’t be hands-on himself. With the government job off my hands, I had told him that I’d do it, so my tour around the stalls wasn’t entirely for fun. I knew many of the wines that were on offer so I concentrated on those I didn’t, looking to compare them with our range and to see where it might be deficient.

I’d just taken a sip of a very nice white, one hundred per cent garnaxa grape, and let Tom have a noseful, when a hand fell on my shoulder.

‘I knew I’d find you here, gal.’

‘Hello, Shirley,’ said Tom, before I’d had a chance to turn around, but I’d known who it was anyway. Very few people are allowed such familiarity.

‘And hello to you, young man. God, but you’re growing fast. I’ll bet you’re pissed off with people telling you that.’

He was, but he was too polite to agree with her, plus, he liked
her. Shirley Gash, my best lady pal in L’Escala, the town of which St Martí d’Empuriès is a slightly detached suburb, is one of the most likeable people I know. She’s had tragedy in her life, more than I’ve had, the sort that would have destroyed a lesser woman, but she’s overcome it, as far as the world can see. She’s tall, blonde, buxom but elegant with it, and she looks after herself so carefully that people who meet her for the first time don’t have a clue about her age. I’m privy to the secret, and that’s what it shall remain.

‘Hey,’ I greeted her. ‘Where have you been and what the hell have you been up to?’ She’d been away from her big house on the far side of L’Escala for a few weeks. Her departure had coincided with one of my away trips, and I’d known nothing about it till she was gone.

Before she could tell me, my gaze fell on a man, standing slightly behind her, but not so far that he was in the Duke of Edinburgh position. One look, and I didn’t need an answer any more. I knew the ‘what’, if not the ‘where’. He was at the upper end of middle-aged, as dark as Shirley is fair, solidly built but not gone to fat, dressed, immaculately, in slacks, white shirt and gold-buttoned blazer, looking as if he’d just stepped off a very large yacht. All it would have taken was an apricot scarf, and Carly Simon might have been singing about him.

Or might it have been someone else’s song? Not ‘You’re So Vain?’, rather ‘Just a Gigolo’? I fixed on my smile but focused a little harder: no, I reckoned I was being suspicious without a reason. His eyes were soft, warm, and there was a degree of uncertainty in them. I’ve seen quite a few professional Romeos in my time, and in each of them there was the look of the shark.

‘This is Patterson,’ Shirley announced. ‘Patterson, with two “t”s and never Pat, Cowling. We’ve been on a getting acquainted trip, now he’s come to stay for a while, and maybe even for longer than that.’

I extended a hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Patterson.’ He shook it as gently as if I’d been the Queen of Spain. His fingers were thick, like sausages, but soft, like those of a lawyer or a banker. If he had come off a yacht, he’d been on the bridge, captain rather than crew.

‘Likewise,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been waiting for this meeting for a while now. You’re Shirley’s number one topic of conversation. It’s easy to see why.’

Brownie points, Patterson
, I thought. That could have made him sound like a smoothie too, but it didn’t, just a friendly, open guy. I frowned at my pal. ‘Oh yeah? And what’s she been saying about me?’

‘That you’re the best friend she has. That you’re the unofficial mayor of this place. That you’re a sort of roving ambassador for HMG. She’s told me everything about you and yet nothing, nothing about what you were or what you did before you came here.’ He paused, and grinned at Tom, who looked back at him, deadpan, as if he was still weighing him up, which he was. ‘Oh yes, she says your son’s a bit of a character as well.’

‘I’ll take all those, save the roving ambassador part; I’ve chucked that. And yes, he is; the loveliest boy in the world, until someone upsets his mum.’ I turned back to Shirley. ‘Are you just here to show Patterson off, or have you come for the fair as well?’

She waved their tickets at me. ‘What do you think?’

They joined us on a leisurely tour. We didn’t visit every producer . . . there was no need, since the event was only in its first day and the weekend weather was set fair . . . but I made sure that we stopped at Miles’s bodega’s table. The representative there knew who I was, but I didn’t let Shirley in on the connection until she’d tasted, and pronounced the red that she tried, ‘excellent’.

‘This is the one?’ she exclaimed, when I’d told her. ‘The place your famous brother-in-law bought a couple of years ago? I’d forgotten about that until now.’ She peered at the bottle. ‘You wouldn’t know from the label.’

‘Miles doesn’t take a high profile in any of his sideline businesses,’ I explained. ‘They have to succeed through the quality of the product, not because of his name.’

‘What is his name?’ Patterson asked. ‘His other one, that is.’

‘Grayson.’

His thick eyebrows rose. ‘Miles Grayson? That Miles Grayson? The movie director?’

‘That’s him. He’s married to my kid sister.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ He paused, making a mental connection. ‘And your second name’s Blackstone. Does that mean that Oz Blackstone, the actor, was—’

I cut him off. ‘Yes. I was married to him for a while. He was Tom’s dad.’ Indeed he hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that Shirley had told him nothing about my past. I felt my son stand just a little taller beside me, and sensed the squaring of his shoulders. We don’t discuss his father very often, and his name means nothing to his school and village contemporaries, but he is intensely proud of him. The only Oz that he ever knew was loving,
generous and caring, and it’s my firm intention that he will never hear of the other one.

Patterson had the good sense to realise that I was going to say no more about the subject, and the good taste not to follow it up. I headed him off anyway, by spotting an empty table outside Esculapi, and securing it with a wave to Salvador, the front of house man. (There’s no point being the unofficial mayor of anywhere unless you make it work for you from time to time.)

There was a football match on telly that night, so I let Tom order a takeaway; I could see the house from the table, so I had no worries about letting him go home on his own. To be honest, I was quite pleased; it gave me more freedom to interrogate Mr Patterson Cowling, and for that matter Mrs Shirley Gash.

I started on her as soon as the wine arrived. ‘So, woman, explain yourself,’ I challenged.

‘How did this new liaison come about?’

‘It was Tom’s doing,’ she replied.

‘Tom!’ I repeated. ‘You turn up with a new bloke and you’re blaming my ten year old?’

‘Ten going on eighteen, Primavera.’

‘Maybe so, but still . . . More,’ I told her. ‘I need more.’

‘Well, one day last autumn, when the two of you came up to the house and you were in the pool . . .’ She broke off. ‘She likes my pool, Patterson. Puts it to good use every chance she gets.’ I’m too brown to go pink or I might have; we both knew what she meant, and with whom I’d gone swimming.
A warning shot across my bows
, I wondered,
lest I spill too many beans?
‘ . . . I got him to
show me how to use Google. You know I’m crap on the internet. I got him to search for dating sites.’

I’m rarely surprised by anything these days, but I gasped. ‘You what . . .’

‘Single people sites, mature singles, you know,’ she continued, nowhere even close to being abashed. ‘We found one that I thought looked respectable and he showed me how to find the form. He didn’t fill it in for me, Primavera, honest: I did that myself.’

‘Bloody hell! Why didn’t you just ask him to get you a plastic chair and a parasol and pick you out a nice spot at the roadside with the other working girls?’

She beamed. ‘Because I wanted quality, not quantity. I sent it off, then I forgot all about it, for a couple of months, until I had a reply from this one here. Not directly, through the agency; they sent me his entry and a message form if I wanted to get in touch with him. I decided that I did, and he replied, and I replied to him and then we exchanged email addresses. Oh, and photos: I had to ask Tom how to work my scanner. I hadn’t a clue about that either. After a while we spoke on the phone . . . it was all very gradual, you understand. About three months ago we decided to meet. I flew over to London and we had dinner. A month after that Patterson flew to Barcelona and we did it again . . . just dinner, mind,’ she added quickly. ‘Finally we decided to go on holiday together.’

I looked her in the eye. ‘Separate rooms?’

‘Not by that stage. Come on, love,’ she chuckled. ‘At my age? How much quality shaggin’ time have I got left? But we split the bill,’ she added, ‘fifty-fifty.’

‘I did offer to pick up the whole tab,’ Patterson volunteered, quietly.

She nodded. ‘True, but if I’d let him do that,’ she explained, ‘I might have wound up feeling like one of those roadside girls.’

‘To some people that might be not a lot different from putting your name on a website.’

‘Sure,’ she snorted, ‘to the same people who read the small ads for hookers and their services in the Barcelona papers.’

‘Hey, I’m not judging you,’ I insisted. ‘Obviously it’s worked out for you both. It strikes me as just a bit risky, though.’

‘True,’ Patterson conceded: then he smiled, ‘but I’ve survived.’

‘So far,’ Shirley laughed.

I studied them. They seemed truly relaxed in each other’s company, no question of that, and I still hadn’t detected the faintest whiff of bullshit from him, not that he’d had much to say up to then. I waited until our meals had been served before I switched my interrogation to him.

‘So, Mr Cowling,’ I began, ‘what’s your tale?’

The smile left his face. ‘Widowed, like Shirley,’ he replied. ‘I suppose that makes three of us.’

‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘I’m not the official widow. She lives in Monaco with their two kids. I’m the divorcee, the second Mrs Blackstone.’

‘The second?’

‘Yes, but that’s a long story. Summarised, he dumped me to marry number one, she died young, and I picked up the pieces for a while.’

‘Then why do I get the impression that you feel like a widow?’

He was a sharp one, was Patterson. He’d hit on something that I’d never really articulated for myself, and he was right. Oz and I might have been divorced, but we were never really apart. I suppose we were a little like Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner in that movie where they played a married couple, both hit people, each with a contract on the other. Mutually self-destructive, but never out of love.

I felt my throat constrict, and took an easy escape route. ‘Perhaps it’s because I still see him across the breakfast table every morning,’ I told him, ‘when I look at our son.’

I was forced to admire the way that he had turned my attempted interrogation back on myself, but he wasn’t going to get away with it. ‘How many Mrs Cowlings have there been?’ I continued.

‘Just the one. Jennifer. She died seventeen years ago; brain tumour, very sad. She was only thirty-seven.’

‘I’m sorry. Do you have any kids?’

‘Two daughters, both flown the coop; I have two grandchildren now.’

‘You’ll fit into L’Escala very well in that case. The place is overflowing with Brit grandparents.’ I glanced towards the church where the unofficial crèche was still as lively as before. ‘And Catalans, for that matter,’ I added. ‘Was there much of an age difference between you?’

The grin returned. ‘I’m going to take that as a compliment. The very fact that you’re asking means you imagine I could still be in my fifties. Jen was eleven years younger than me. I’ve just turned sixty-five.’

‘And retired?’

‘Yup. That was one of the reasons for my foray into the partnership site. I’ve always been pretty busy since . . . since it happened, initially as a working single parent, more recently as, just a worker, I suppose. I had no time for a personal life and no inclination to pursue one, to be honest.’

‘What shook you loose?’

‘My younger daughter, Ivy. She’s quite a lot like you, frank and forthright. She sat me down about a year ago and told me that with two kids to raise, her life plan did not include time as a carer for her father in his dotage, so I should get out and find myself some appropriate companionship. Then she showed me how to do it, pretty much like young Tom did for Shirley.’