As Serious As Death

Book 5: Primavera Blackstone Series

by Quintin Jardine

Genres: General Fiction; City Life; Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Private Investigators; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Primavera Blackstone has found contentment in a small Spanish village by the sea. A fiercely protective single mother, she doesn’t appreciate an offer of marriage. Nor does she welcome the arrival of a blast from her past, retired cop Ricky Ross, now a private detective and working for Jack Weighley, millionaire owner of a budget airline. Primavera teams up with Ricky to investigate a series of mystery assaults on Jack’s aircraft. Are they mere acts of vandalism, or the sinister work of Catalan extremists? When Ricky’s car is fire-bombed, more questions arise…not least, why is the Spanish Special Branch involved? As Primavera and Ricky are drawn into events, Primavera begins to understand the true meaning of “till death us do part”.

Release date: November 7, 2013

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 354

Sample

One

I don’t know how I’d have managed if it wasn’t for my kids.

How can you be depressed when you live in one of the most attractive places on the planet, and you’re wealthy enough to be in complete control of your life for ever? Good question, but lately I’ve known times when I have been.

Most of them came during the night, after Liam left St Martí d’Empúries and Spain, heading off to finish his travel book. He didn’t say that he wasn’t coming back, but I had no expectation that he would.

When did the shine start to wear off?

For certain it happened one early summer Wednesday evening, on the terrace of my house, looking down on the village square watching the restaurants begin to close up for the night, as the last few punters finished their pizzas. We were alone, as next day was a school day and the kids had gone to bed.

Out of the blue, Liam used the ‘M’ word, asked me to marry him, and I told him, rather more bluntly than I should have, as now I realise, that I didn’t want to be Mrs Matthews, or Mrs Anyone Else for that matter. It wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting.

‘But you are already,’ he pointed out, quietly. ‘You call yourself Primavera Blackstone. It’s not your birth name: that was Phillips. It’s Oz’s name, your former husband . . . your late former husband.’

He was speaking the plain truth, but I flared up at him, I’m afraid. ‘That’s different! I do that for the kids’ sake, not for Oz’s. They’re all Blackstones, so it makes life easier if I’m one as well.’

‘Does it? Does it make the slightest bit of difference to them? Have you ever asked any of them?’

‘I don’t need to,’ I pouted.

‘What do Janet and little Jonathan call you?’ he asked, but didn’t give me the chance to reply. ‘They call you Auntie Primavera. You’re not their natural mother; you’re not even their real aunt. You adopted them formally when their mother’s death . . . and by the way, Susie was Oz’s widow, not you . . . left them orphaned, but neither of them call you “Mum”, do they?’

‘I don’t expect it of them, nor will I ever. But Tom does.’

‘Yes, in a fine baritone. Primavera, have you taken a look at your kid lately? He isn’t a little boy any more.’

I couldn’t argue about that. My son was into his teens and making a good job of puberty. Out of nowhere, he had a couple of inches on me, his frame was thicker and his voice had broken more or less overnight. He was taller than the best footballer on the planet and as big as its best golfer.

‘Clearly not, but what does that have to do with it?’

‘He knows who he is, and he knows who you are. Like you say, you’re his mum. Do you think that if you married me his nose would be put out of joint? Do you think he still dreams that his father faked his death and that he’s out there waiting until it all blows over, so that he can come back one night, under another name and with maybe a little plastic surgery? I don’t believe he does, that’s for sure, just like I don’t believe he’d mind if you and I got married. In fact I know he wouldn’t.’

‘Oh yes? And how do you know that?’ I challenged.

‘Because I asked him.’

I stared at him. ‘You what?!?’ I exploded. ‘You asked my son for my hand in marriage?’

‘If you want to put it that way, I suppose I did.’ He grinned at me. That made it worse; my glower became a full-on glare.

‘How dare you do that?’ I protested. ‘What were you thinking about? I suppose you asked Janet as well.’

‘As a matter of fact I did. She beamed, all over her face, and said that would be great.’

‘And wee Jonathan? Did you ask him too?’

‘No,’ he conceded. ‘He’s maybe a little young for that sort of question.’

‘Small mercies,’ I muttered. ‘What the hell are you trying to do, Liam, force my hand? I won’t be railroaded into marriage, not by you, not by my kids, not by anyone.’

‘I’m sorry if I was presumptuous,’ he replied. His tone was distant, like I’d never heard it before. I’d hurt him, but at that moment I didn’t care.

‘I’d call it manipulative,’ I snapped. I could see him withdraw further into himself.

‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ he murmured. ‘It was meant to show you that there’s nothing in the way of us getting married . . . only you.’

‘See what I mean by railroading?’ It was time to cool it a little. ‘Sorry, Liam, I appreciate your proposal, but I don’t want to do that. We’re fine as we are. We’ve been fine for a year now. So why change things? It’s obviously important to you. Tell me why.’

‘It’s complicated. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘No chance. I’m a bright girl; I can process complicated issues. Try me.’

‘Okay.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Oz was my best friend, but he’s dead, and I’m alive. So why doesn’t it feel like that? Primavera, I want to be the only man in your life.’

‘But you are,’ I protested.

‘No, I’m not. That dream I mentioned, Tom’s dream: he told me that he doesn’t have it any more, but I’m sure that you do. You’ve never buried Oz Blackstone. You mumble his name in your sleep, but never mine. You look for him in the face of every forty-something male stranger who strolls alone into that square down there. Primavera, your thirteen-year-old son has come to terms with the fact that his father’s gone, and he’s ready to get on with his life. But you, you haven’t, and you’re not. You fantasise that he’s out there somewhere. The worst part for me is knowing that you’re thinking of him when you fuck me.’

‘If any of that was true . . . which it isn’t . . .’ I lied, ‘how would being married to you make any difference? You make it sound like you’re trying to brand me. I never figured you as insecure, Liam. That’s certainly not how Oz saw you.’

‘Then maybe you’ve made me that way . . . or you both have.’

‘That’s arrant nonsense,’ I insisted. ‘You have no reason to doubt me, and you haven’t from the day we got together. We have a great relationship, so why should we change it?’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Of course I do. I’m sharing my life with you, aren’t I?’

‘Not all of it; that’s my point.’

That set me off again. ‘Christ Almighty, man, listen to yourself. Don’t you have a little place inside your head that’s all your own? Of course you do, yet here you are trying to control my thoughts.’

‘I’m not.’ Goddammit, why did he have to be so calm? ‘I’m simply suggesting that you get on with your life, and I’m asking you to share it with me.’

‘As I’ve just said, I’m doing that already,’ I insisted, ‘and I’m happy with things as they are. I see no need for us to get married, so thanks, but no thanks.’

He shrugged his shoulders, and finished his mineral water.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ I said, feeling that a little contrition was in order. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed and I’ll make it up to you.’

I did just that, and next morning we made it business as usual with the kids, getting them off to school . . . Janet and wee Jonathan have adapted well to the Catalan system, with the aid of some intensive private tutoring, and with Tom looking out for them. An outsider would have thought that everything was fine and dandy, and so it was, almost.

Liam was as loving as before, and I’d like to think I was too, but things had been said that couldn’t be unsaid. There was a distance between us that hadn’t been there before. It was imperceptible, or so I thought until three weeks later, when Janet asked me if everything was all right.

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘I’m not really sure. It’s just that you seem a little quieter than usual.’

‘Do you know what the menopause is?’ I asked her.

‘Ah,’ she murmured, and dropped the subject. As it happened, I haven’t reached the change yet, but I hadn’t lied to her, as I had lied to Liam about that damned dream.

I knew without him having to tell me that Tom dreamed about his father when he was younger . . . because he was only too ready to tell me himself . . . but I never discussed mine with him, or anyone else.

It visited me often for a year or so, maybe once a week, and it was always the same, more or less. A man appeared out of the blue. The first time, it was in Susie’s house in Monaco, after her death, but usually it was right here in St Martí. He was always the same in every appearance. Facially, he wasn’t Oz; his nose was broader, and his cheekbones higher. His voice was different; it had a pronounced Western drawl. His hair was mostly grey, and close-cropped in military style. He was narrower in the waist and his muscles were different, though just as formidable, not gym-enhanced like Oz’s but the result of hard physical work of some kind.

But he couldn’t hide those eyes, not when he took off his Ray-Bans and looked at me as he stepped towards me.

I always woke up then, crying out, whether in fear, panic, or frustration I know not, but I imagine that’s when Liam would have heard me calling Oz’s name.

I wasn’t surprised when he broke the news that he was leaving to finish his magnum opus, one morning in the square, when we were having a coffee at Meson del Conde. I couldn’t really complain either; his book pre-dated me in his life, and he had put it to one side.

After the injuries that are an inevitable part of a very rough profession caught up with him, he developed a second career as a writer and photographer. His travel book was a long-term project, going back to his days of fame as a professional wrestler . . . sports entertainer, they call them sometimes, but he didn’t like that, for he was the real thing, not a body-builder or failed US footballer. It was going to be a photographic guide to all the places that the global grappling circuit had taken him, complete with anecdotes. Not quite an autobiography, but not far off.

He had put it on hold when we paired up, only taking on work that could be done from Spain, apart from a stint at the Olympics as a commentator for Irish TV, but it had always been there in the background.

‘How long will you be away?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t say for sure. Most of the locations are in the US and Canada, but I’ll need to go to Japan as well, and Mexico, South America and Australia. It’s not a personal project any more; I’ve sold it to a publisher in New York, so I’m working to a delivery deadline. I’ll do my travelling and my photography and when I’m ready, I’ll sit down and write the text.’

‘Will you come back here to do that?’

He gazed at the table as he replied; that’s when I twigged that it was probably more than a business trip. ‘No, I plan to hole up in my place in Toronto to do that. My new editor says that’s what I should do. Writing’s a solitary profession, she tells me.’

‘How long will it take you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

‘What’s your deadline?’

‘End of March next year.’ He smiled and looked towards me once again, without quite meeting my gaze. ‘But hey, I don’t plan to use every minute of it. I need to spend the rest of the summer and autumn doing research and taking pictures; I should be able to start writing by the beginning of November. Of course, whenever I have a gap in my schedule, I’ll come back here.’

‘Of course,’ I repeated.

I knew that he was being less than truthful, because honest men are always terrible liars, but who was I to complain?

Looking back on it, I know that I lied to Liam about more than just the dream.

I didn’t love him. I’ve only ever loved one man in my life, in a way and with an intensity that almost destroyed us both. Liam was comfort, Liam was shelter, Liam was company, by day and by night, but ultimately he was right. He could never compete with Oz, alive or dead.

And he is dead, make no mistake about that; I can fool myself no longer.

After Liam left, I decided that I had to confront that dream, and all the other things that had been nagging at me. For example, there was Brush Donnelly.

Oz’s nephew, Jonathan Sinclair, is a professional golfer, and a fairly successful one at that. By chance he played in (and won) his first pro tournament at the PGA course at Girona. It’s less than an hour away from St Martí, and naturally I took him under my wing. He lived with Tom and me for a while, until he bought his own place, on his adopted home course of Pals.

When he turned pro after finishing his college degree in the USA, he did so under the management of a man named James ‘Brush’ Donnelly, whom he described as a former tour player himself, who hadn’t been very good at it, and had disappeared off the radar for a few years, before re-emerging under a new guise. But Brush . . . he earned the nickname by sweeping up every detail of business . . . was something of a recluse. He and Jonny did all their early business by correspondence over the phone and email, and never met face to face.

I’ve always had a fertile imagination. The mysterious Brush made me wonder and I began to look for little anomalies in his story. I found a couple too. For example, his correspondence address was in Chicago, but the one time that he and I spoke, when he called one day looking for Jonny, it turned out that he was calling from his home in Arizona.

That was enough: I got it into my head that Brush was Oz, taking care of his nephew. That illusion was shattered when he and his client met up for the first time, in Chicago. I had Jonny send me a photograph. Okay, maybe if he decided on a completely new look, my ex might have tried to appear ten years older than he was, but no way would he have had his legs shortened by six to eight inches.

I didn’t give up on the idea though; for little Brush to have a winter home in Tucson and a town house in Chicago, he must have been a man of substance, yet he had very few clients and his abortive golfing career had probably cost him money rather than earning him any.

Instead, I decided that he was a front. For whom? There could be only one candidate in my sad mind. I didn’t pursue the notion though, not until Liam left. When I did, I didn’t mess about; I hired Securitas, the biggest detective agency in the US, to investigate and report on Mr James Donnelly.

It didn’t cost me much, for it only took them a day. They reported back to me that Brush was the son of a Mr Andrew Donnelly of Las Vegas, Nevada, a heating engineer until his death in 1962, and the nephew of Mrs Violet di Luca, the widow for twenty years of a Mr Antonio Luca, from whom she had inherited twenty-four per cent of one of the earliest and biggest casinos built in what had been the unspoiled Nevada Desert. I knew the place; they’d pulled it down for rebuilding in the brief period in which I lived in Las Vegas, but I’m sure that Brush hadn’t cared about that when Auntie Vi had snuffed it herself in 2009 and he, her only living relative, had inherited the lot.

He used his new wealth to support charities in general and, in a way, through his role as a golf agent, for all six of his clients, four male, two female, had been hand-picked from the college system and had been helped financially at the start of their careers. For example, a couple of perks that Jonny thought had come from sponsors had been funded by Brush himself.

The report also revealed that his reputation as a recluse flowed from the fact that he had suffered from agoraphobia. He had been treated for the condition, but still avoided crowds or wide open spaces, which explained why he was never seen at a golf tournament. Like many Americans he did not own a passport, a simple explanation for the fact that he had never visited Jonny, his star client, in Europe, not even when he won the German PGA last summer.

With Brush out of the way as a possible link to a still-living Oz, I had only one other avenue to explore. Roscoe Brown was his Hollywood agent, and still represents the children’s interests as his professional executor. Oz didn’t make all that many movies in his short acting career, not compared with the likes of John Wayne, but every one that he did was a major box office hit and even though he’s no longer around to promote them, the estate continues to pull in substantial income from DVD and Blu-ray sales, and now from streaming.

One thing you should know; I wasn’t the only one clinging on to the notion that he wasn’t dead. A cult has grown around him, not quite of Elvis proportions, but significant enough to sustain three different ‘Oz Blackstone Lives’ websites. I forbid few things to the kids, but I’ve told them that going anywhere near them is absolutely off limits.

I’d wondered on occasion whether Roscoe might be behind at least one of them, given that he’s one of the most commercially acute guys I’ve ever known, so after I’d washed the Brush option out of my shortish blond hair, I called him in Los Angeles . . . via Skype, so I could look him in the eye.

‘I need to know, Roscoe,’ I told him. ‘Do you feed any of the legends that Oz might still be alive?’

I could see that he was offended. ‘Absolutely not, Primavera; to do that would be to take financial advantage of deluded people’s grief, and that runs against my moral code. I have never thrown out a single hint to any of them that my client is anything but dead. Maybe that means I’m not doing as good a job for the kids as I could, but I’m not going to apologise for it.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to,’ I said. ‘It’s just . . .’

Roscoe’s black, and the light was behind him, making his eyes unnaturally bright as they held mine from the screen. ‘You’re a believer, aren’t you,’ he murmured. If my sound hadn’t been turned full up I might not have heard him. ‘You are one of those poor deluded people.’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘Usually not, but there are times, when . . . I find myself asking, “What if?” Oz was a role player all his life. Very few people saw the real him. For those of us who did, him faking his death, that’s not such a hard concept to take on board.’

‘But why would he do that?’ he asked.

‘To protect the kids,’ I replied.

‘From what?’

‘From him. Oz did a couple of things in his life that would have ruined him if they’d ever come out . . . and they might have. I could see him thinking that if they did, the effect on his children would be emotionally catastrophic. And I can see him looking to spare them from that.’

‘I hear what you’re saying, but that would mean abandoning them. He loved those kids, Primavera.’

‘But if it wasn’t for ever . . .’

‘Death tends to be permanent.’

‘But if you have the resources, you can be reborn. It happens all the time, to supergrass witnesses and the like; I’ve even met one of those.’

‘Do you want him to be alive?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Even if it means that you’re never going to see him again?’

‘Even if . . .’ I paused. ‘Are you saying he is alive?’ I gasped.

‘No,’ Roscoe replied, instantly. ‘I am not.’

‘But do you believe he could be?’

‘No. Primavera, I didn’t want to get into this with you, but I think I need to. As you know, the official reports said that Oz died of an unsuspected heart condition while doing a stunt for a movie he was making in Ecuador, involving a bridge over a rocky river. He fell in and was pretty badly smashed up facially when he was pulled out. Hence the legend that it might not have been him, that the victim might actually have been a stuntman. There’s even a name that the true believers latch on to: Gary Hazelwood. There was such a person, but he was fired three days before Oz died, for smoking dope on set. That’s why Oz did the stunt himself. The websites believe that Hazelwood died in the river and that Oz took advantage of the fact to disappear. They argue that he’d had enough of fame and wanted out. Straws, Primavera, that’s all; they’re clutching at straws.’

‘Where is Hazelwood now?’

‘He died in a car accident in Quito two months later. He never went back to the US.’

‘Was his body identified?’

‘Only by his driving licence and passport, I’ll grant you, but that’s irrelevant. It was him in that car, no doubt about it.’

‘How can you be so sure, and why is it irrelevant? Look, Roscoe, nobody outside that film unit ever saw Oz’s body, before it was cremated to comply with Ecuadorean law.’

‘That’s true,’ he conceded. ‘But it was Oz.’

‘How can you be certain?’

‘Didn’t Susie tell you?’

‘No, we made a pact never to talk about Oz’s death.’

‘I can understand that,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the death certificate.’

‘No, I haven’t. All I know for sure is that no autopsy was ever done, although the press reported, wrongly, that one had been.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘The Ecuadoreans forestalled that. The film unit doctor, who certified his death, in British form since it was UK money that backed the project, didn’t even mention a heart condition. He said that death was caused by the trauma of multiple head injuries sustained in the fall. However he also said in a side letter that in his opinion the accident may have been caused by the rupturing of an aortic aneurysm, which he had been able to detect.’

I was a nurse in a past life so I know about those: a weakness in an arterial wall that can occasionally leak or burst, with consequences that are usually fatal.

‘How could he be sure of that without a post-mortem examination?’

‘He said it was so big that he could feel it. But he couldn’t be certain, which is why the insurance company was wasting its time when it tried to reject my claim under the policy.’

‘What insurance company?’

‘The one that covered Oz, and all the other major people on the project; it insisted that everybody have a medical. That involved full body scanning. Oz’s showed a previously undetected abdominal aneurysm. The unit doctor knew nothing about that, incidentally,’ he added. ‘The insurance company’s own nominated surgeon said that given its size the risk of rupture was probably no more that one in a hundred, and they went along with that. He was advised to have it repaired surgically, and he said he would, after the movie was done. Nobody saw it as an issue, so when the company tried to use it to void the policy, my lawyer said, “Hey, it was your guy who made a mistake, not us who didn’t disclose.” They folded pretty quickly.’

‘Mmm,’ I murmured. ‘Even so . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roscoe said. ‘There’s more. At first, I was like you; I didn’t want to believe. I wasn’t happy with the situation, so I instructed Oz’s assistant on the movie to take hair samples and swabs from the body and to have them couriered to me in Los Angeles. I had DNA profiles run and compared them with the Federal database. It was a match.’

‘Oz was on the FBI database?’ I exclaimed.

‘Primavera, these days many of us get on to a DNA database, one way or another. Bottom line, there is no doubt. Oz did die in Ecuador and it was his ashes that Susie scattered. I’m sorry to end your hopes but, ma’am, I really do think it’s for the best.’

I looked into his eyes again, and I believed him, on all counts.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ I replied. ‘You’re right. Goodbye.’

I ended the call and leaned back in my chair. I felt physically exhausted and yet my mind was clearer than it had been for longer than I could remember.

There wasn’t a single anomaly left for me to latch on to, not one last tendril that I might grab to sustain my fanciful hopes. I had reached the point of acceptance. Oz Blackstone was dead. The man in my dream was there and there alone; he wasn’t going to walk into the square in my village or anywhere else.

‘Closure’ has become a bit of a buzzword, but I realised that it was something I needed. I didn’t have to consider it for too long before I knew what I had to do. The eighth anniversary of . . .