Read Inhuman Remains Online

Authors: Quintin Jardine

Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Scotland

Inhuman Remains (3 page)

BOOK: Inhuman Remains
11.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
I didn’t see him again for another seven years, when I stopped off in London to spend a few days with my aunt, before beginning a contract as a theatre sister at a hospital in Dubai. This time Frank was the one putting his schooldays behind him . . . and how. He hadn’t stretched that much, being no taller than me, but his self-assurance had been boosted by a clutch of A levels, enough to win him entry to Cambridge to study economics. He had become a charismatic lad, and when he flashed me one of the looks he had given Dawn in his prepubescent days . . . let’s just say it was my turn to be caught off guard.
There was something underlying it, though, something about him that I didn’t like. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but when the trouble erupted, I might have professed shock to my parents, but I can’t say I was surprised.
When it happened, Frank was twenty-six. I was in Glasgow with Oz, helping him get over Jan’s death as best I could and working in the investigations business we had set up together. His court case wasn’t hot news, but it made headlines big enough to embarrass Auntie Ade and my mum. Dad never said anything about it, but he keeps his own counsel most of the time.
Essentially, my cousin’s own ego tripped him up. He had come out of Cambridge with a good degree, a two-one, had done a couple of years as a political researcher in the House of Commons, then schmoozed himself into a job in a merchant bank. From what the papers said, backed up by the account Mum had from Auntie Ade, he had done a Nick Leeson; in other words he had traded without authority in high-risk markets. But unlike Leeson, he had been consistently successful.
So why hadn’t the bank regarded him as a hero, rather than a criminal? Simple answer: he had diverted a proportion of the profits he had generated into a personal account. When his unorthodoxy was discovered he had claimed that he had been risking his own money as well as the bank’s, drawing what he called ‘advances on salary and bonuses’ totalling just over eighty thousand pounds to fund his own short-term investments. Unfortunately for Frank, just as no senior officer had given his trading the okay, neither had anyone approved the advances. The bank, its auditors, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and ultimately twelve jurors all agreed that they had in fact been theft.
He might have got off with just the sack, and no prosecution, if he had coughed up all the money he had made before the police were brought in. The bank wasn’t thrilled about the publicity that prosecution was going to bring. But he wouldn’t: all he ever returned were the so-called advances, arguing that however he had come by his stake, the profits he had generated with it had been the result of his skill and, as such, were his. By that time they were also well hidden, in an untraceable offshore account.
He was sentenced to nine years, much more than Leeson’s six and a half, as a salutary example to other City slickers, I suppose. I felt a little sorry for him when I heard that, as the bank had made much more from his trading than the amount of the ‘advances’ for which he went to jail. The Parole Board may have had some sympathy too, for they sprang him after only five.
If anyone held a coming-out party for him I wasn’t invited, not least because I’d just emerged myself from a short spell as a guest of the Mountbatten-Windsor Hotel Group, the fall-out from an ill-judged plot against Oz. (I must stop talking about him, or you’ll get the impression that I still love him, that I remember every moment of the last night we spent together, in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, and that there hasn’t been a day since he died when I haven’t shed a mental tear for him. And I wouldn’t want you to get that impression.)
It’s not something I’m proud of, and nobody in my family will ever broadcast the fact that we had two members in the nick at the same time, but looking back I see that time as the start of the healing process that brought me to where I am today. I wasn’t thinking about Frank at that time, even though his mother was the only person who came to visit me in HM Prison, Cornton Vale. I’d forbidden my dad and my sister to come near the place, but I hadn’t thought to extend the ban to Auntie Ade, whom I hadn’t seen in years until my mum’s funeral a few months before. I held myself together pretty well in jail, but when she turned up I did lose it for a few minutes. We didn’t talk about my cousin at all; she didn’t mention him and I didn’t ask, being much too wrapped up in my own situation to be bothered about someone I barely knew.
Not long afterwards, I was out and getting on with my life, with every intention of being a fit and proper mother to my son, even if his father (I’m getting better: I didn’t mention his name) had obtained legal custody during my enforced absence. It wasn’t that easy, though: before long I found myself caught up in the fateful last adventure that led to New York, to that night in the Algonquin and, two days later, to my ‘death’.
Three
T
here’s one problem about an earthly paradise. After a year or two, it can become a little stale, a little . . . what’s the word? . . . yes, a little boring. (I suspect that’s also true about the Other Side, but I’m in no hurry to check it out, not least because I doubt that my CV would get me past the first interview. As Jim Steinman wrote, and Meat Loaf sang, beautifully, ‘Heaven Can Wait’.)
When we moved here Tom was in the process of becoming five, and looking after him was more or less a full-time job, but once he had started school in L’Escala, things started to change. I had time on my hands during the day, and my recent history indicates that when I’m in that situation I don’t always fill the hours as constructively as I might. That doesn’t mean I drink too much: if I over-indulge in anything, these days, it’s coffee. No, my tendency has been to get myself engrossed in projects, wild schemes that usually lead to disaster.
At first, my intentions were pretty good. I enrolled on distance courses in Spanish and Catalan, so that I could keep up with my son’s developing language skills, but I found pretty quickly that I had already progressed beyond the stage where they could do me much good. I looked into going back to nursing, part-time, and went so far as to enquire about job vacancies at the local primary-care clinic, but I bottled out when I saw a section on the application form that required me to declare criminal convictions. I thought about starting an estate agency, until I looked at a copy of the local
Yellow Pages
and found that there were almost fifty such businesses operating already in that one small town. I did a few afternoon waitress shifts in one of the four restaurants in the village, but that came to an abrupt end when a fat tourist groped me as I walked past his table and I buried a paella, still in its pan, in his face. (He shouted something from the floor, in French, about suing, until the proprietor called his bluff, and the police, and he legged it.)
My problem, all that time, was a lack of motivation. I have enough money invested to afford my son and myself a very nice lifestyle, without ever needing to work again, and the apartment I sold in London more than paid for the house in St Martí. Looking back, I reckon that my efforts to fill my days fruitfully owed more to my Scottish Protestant (I’m not discriminating here, I just happen to have been born one, so don’t get on my case, okay?) work ethic than anything else. So, after a while, I settled for my new life as a home-maker, and a full-time mum.
The house was spotless. I didn’t have the heart to lay off the cleaner, but everything she did I did over again as soon as she’d gone, and a bit more besides. The rest of my time was spent exercising (swimming in the sea, or running on the country roads), reading, and messing about on my computer. That was when Tom was in school; when he was home I concentrated on giving him the best time I possibly could. He got a bike; so did I. He asked for a PlayStation for Christmas; now I’m a gamester too. Soon we added a dog to the family: my son assured me that we were the only household in the village without one . . . a distinction that was okay by me . . . and kept on raising the subject, until I raised a hand in surrender. His name is Charlie, he’s a golden Labrador retriever and he is, I swear, the only dog I’ve ever known with the ability to frown when he’s puzzled about something, which, being essentially thick, he is quite often.
The one thing I did not go looking for was a man. Tom’s a good boy in many ways, not least in that he doesn’t talk much about his father. Whatever his current level of understanding about death, he knows that he’s not coming back, and he’s come to terms with it. I’m sure he was helped by the fact that Oz was only in his life for around a year, but still, he keeps his picture by the side of his bed, and that’s nice. I don’t know if he’s waiting for me to fill the vacancy, but if he is, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him down on that one. Two people, one dog: that’s our family and that’s how it’s going to stay. Sex? Twice in all that time, and the first time barely counted. Emotionally, I still haven’t left the Algonquin; maybe I never will.
Unlike my auntie Ade; she’s spent her life moving from one ship in the night to another. She passed the seventy mark a couple of years ago, and yet she insisted that the fancy still took her until she hit that number. It may have been all in her mind, but somehow I doubt it.
Her phone call, six months ago now, took me by surprise, and her announcement even more so. My son answered, when it rang: most of the calls we receive are for him. He keeps nagging me about a mobile, but I don’t reckon he’s quite ready for that yet. After a few seconds he switched to English. ‘Yes, this is Tom. Yes, Mum’s in.’ He passed me the handset with the Catalan raised eyebrows and the shrug he’s picked up at school. The boy’s going native.
‘Primavera,’ the voice at the other end boomed.
‘Yes?’ I replied, tentatively.
‘For Christ’s sake, niece!’
‘Auntie Ade? Is that you?’
‘Unless your mother had another sister I’ve never heard of, it bloody well has to be, does it not?’
‘It’s great to hear from you,’ I told her, meaning it at the time. ‘How are you?’ I paused, as a small spasm of dread gripped my stomach. ‘This isn’t bad news, is it?’
‘That depends on you. Does that house of yours have a spare room?’
‘Three, actually.’
‘That’s good. I’m coming to visit. That okay?’
‘Of course it is. Where’s the fair?’
‘What bloody fire?’
‘I said “fair”, Adrienne, as in book fair. Barcelona, is it?’
As I understood it, since the Las Palmas adventure that had led to Frank’s arrival, every trip she had made outside London had been work related, to book fairs in Germany, Australia, Prague and the US.
‘This isn’t business, girl. I’m going into semi-retirement, and I plan to celebrate by coming to visit my niece and great-nephew for a few days. At my age, I can’t afford to ignore any members of my family any longer. I got your number from your father: he said you’d be pleased to hear from me. Bugger didn’t give me your address, though, just in case.’
Good for Dad
, I thought. ‘It’s all right, really. When are you coming?’
‘In a couple of days, I thought. How do I get there?’
‘Find yourself a peanut flight from London to Girona. Let me know the date and number and I’ll pick you up.’
‘I don’t do cheap flights, dear. I always travel business class.’
‘Not to Girona you don’t. But don’t worry: at this time of year and with that sort of notice it won’t be all that cheap.’
Auntie Ade sighed. ‘If I must, I must. I’ll have my PA book for me, and give you the details. Will it be hot?’ she asked.
‘Don’t pack the mink,’ I told her. Adrienne had turned up at my mum’s funeral dressed all in black, and encased in a fur coat that she made a point of telling me was ‘Wild, dear, not ranch. As with salmon, the farmed variety just isn’t the same.’
‘That sounds promising,’ she said. ‘I look forward to seeing you. By the way, what strange tongue did young Tom speak just now?’
‘Catalan.’
‘Ah, that explains why I didn’t understand a bloody word of it. There’s no market for book translations in anything other than Castilian Spanish. Can he read and write?’
‘In four languages.’ Actually he’s not very literate in French, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
‘Bloody hell, that’s as many as me.’
We said our farewells and I tossed the phone back to Tom, to replace in its cradle. ‘We’re having a visitor,’ I announced. ‘Your great-aunt.’
‘Is she as great as Auntie Dawn and Uncle Miles?’
‘In her own special way.’
‘She sounded funny.’
‘She’s all that.’ He frowned. ‘You don’t mind if she comes to stay, do you, Tom?’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No, I don’t mind. I like it when we have visitors. I liked it when Grandpa Phillips came to see us, and Auntie Ellie and Uncle Harvey, and Auntie Dawn.’ My dad had come to Spain twice in the time we had been there, and Dawn once. Oz’s sister and brother-in-law had called in too, on the way to a legal convention in Barcelona, to see Tom, of course, not me.
I looked at him, suddenly concerned. Had I missed something? Had I screwed up his young life by uprooting him from the rest of his family and bringing him to yet another country, the fifth in his short life? ‘Tom,’ I asked him nervously, ‘if you didn’t like it here you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’
BOOK: Inhuman Remains
11.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

La muñeca sangrienta by Gaston Leroux
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
Love Through LimeLight by Farrah Abraham
DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN by Monroe, Mallory, Cachitorie, Katherine
Free Fall by Robert Crais
Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston