Cocaine Nights

‘Thanks, but I have a car.’

‘Charles Prentice? You’re Frank’s brother.’ He shook my hand with unfeigned warmth. ‘Bobby Crawford, tennis pro and dogsbody at the Club Nautico. It’s a pity we had to meet here. I’ve been away a few days, looking at property along the coast. Betty Shand’s itching to open a new sports club.’

While he spoke I was struck by his intense but refreshing manner, and by the guileless way he held my arm as we walked towards our cars. He was attentive and eager to please, and I found it hard to believe that he was the man who had carried out the attempted rape. I could only assume that he had lent the car to a friend with far rougher tastes.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said. ‘Hennessy tells me you’re an old colleague of Frank’s.’

‘Absolutely. He brought me into the club – until then I was just a glorified tennis bum.’ He grinned, showing his expensively-capped teeth. ‘Frank never stops talking about you. In a way I think you’re his real father.’

‘I’m his brother. The boring, older brother who always got him out of scrapes. This time I’ve lost my touch.’

Crawford stopped in the middle of the road, ignoring a car that swerved around him. He stared at the air with his arms raised to the sky, as if waiting for a sympathetic genie to materialize out of the spiralling dust. ‘Charles, I know. What’s going on? This is Kafka re-shot in the style of Psycho. You’ve talked to him?’

‘Of course. He insists he’s guilty. Why?’

‘No one knows. We’re all racking our brains. I think it’s Frank playing his strange games again, like those peculiar chess problems he’s always making up. King to move and mate in one, though this time there are no other pieces on the board and he has to mate himself.’

Crawford leaned against his Porsche, one hand playing with the tattered roof liner that hung over the passenger seat. Behind the reassuring smile his eyes were taking in every detail of my face and posture, my choice of shirt and shoes, as if searching for some clue to Frank’s predicament. I realized that he was more intelligent that his obsessive tennis playing and over-friendly manner suggested.

‘Did Frank have it in for the Hollingers?’ I asked him. ‘Was there any reason at all why he might have set fire to the house?’

‘No – Hollinger was a harmless old buffer. I won’t say I cared for him myself. He and Alice were two of the reasons why Britain doesn’t have a film industry any longer. They were rich, likeable amateurs – no one would have wanted to hurt them.’

‘Someone did. Why?’

‘Charles … it may have been an accident. Perhaps they microwaved one too many of their god-awful canapés, there was a sudden spark and the whole place went up like a hay-suck. Then Frank, for some weird reason of his own, begins to play Joseph K.’ Crawford lowered his voice, as if concerned that the dead in the cemetery might overhear him. ‘When I first knew Frank he talked about your mother a lot. He was afraid he’d helped to kill her.’

‘No – we were far too young. We didn’t even begin to grasp why she wanted to kill herself.’

Crawford brushed the dust from his hands, glad to acquit us of any conceivable complicity. ‘I know, Charles. Still, there’s nothing more satisfying than confessing to a crime you haven’t committed …’

A car emerged from the Catholic cemetery and turned to cruise past us. Paula Hamilton was at the wheel, David Hennessy beside her. He waved to us, but Dr Hamilton stared ahead, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

‘She looks upset.’ I winced at a clumsy gear change. ‘Why the Catholic cemetery?’

‘She’s seeing an old boyfriend. Another doctor at the Clinic.’

‘Really? A strange rendezvous. Rather macabre, in a way.’

‘Paula doesn’t have much choice – he’s lying under a headstone. He died a year ago from one of these new malarias he picked up in Java.’

‘That’s hard … Was she close to the Hollingers?’

‘Only to their niece and Bibi Jansen.’ Crawford stared through the gate into the Protestant cemetery, where the gravediggers were loading their spades on to the cart. ‘A pity about Bibi. Still … You’ll like Paula. Typical woman doctor – a calm and efficient front, but inside rather shaky.’

‘What about the psychiatrist, Dr Sanger? No one wanted him here.’

‘He’s something of a shady character … interesting in his way. He’s one of those psychiatrists with a knack of forming little ménages around themselves.’

‘Ménages of vulnerable young women?’

‘Exactly. He enjoys playing Svengali to them. He has a house in Estrella de Mar, and owns some bungalows in the Costasol complex.’ Crawford pointed to a large settlement of villas and apartment houses a mile to the west of the peninsula. ‘No one’s sure what goes on there, but I hope they have fun.’

I waited as the gravediggers pushed their cart through the cemetery gate. A wheel lodged in a stony rut, and one of the spades fell to the ground. Crawford stepped forward, ready to help the men, then watched wistfully as the cart moved along the pavement, its wheel-rims grating. In his black suit and sunglasses he seemed a fretful figure, faced for once with a fast service he had no hope of returning. I guessed that he, Andersson and Dr Sanger were the only ones to mourn the dead girl.

‘I’m sorry about Bibi Jansen,’ I said when he returned to the car. ‘I can see you miss her.’

‘A little. But these things are never fair.’

‘Why did the others bother to attend? Mrs Shand, Hennessy, the Keswick sisters – for a Swedish housemaid?’

‘Charles, you didn’t know her. Bibi was more than that.’

‘Even so. Could the fire have been a suicide attempt?’

‘By the Hollingers? On the Queen’s birthday?’ Crawford began to laugh, glad to free himself from his sombre mood. ‘They’d have been posthumously stripped of their CBEs.’

‘What about Bibi? I take it she was once involved with Sanger. She might have been unhappy at the Hollingers.’

Crawford shook his head, admiring my ingenuity. ‘I don’t think so. She liked it up there. Paula had weaned her off all the drugs she was taking.’

‘Who knows, though? Some sort of hysterical outburst?’

‘Charles, come on.’ His spirits lightening, Crawford took my arm. ‘Be honest with yourself. Women are never that hysterical. In my experience, they’re intensely realistic. We men are far more emotional.’

‘Then what can I do?’ I unlocked the driver’s door of the Renault and fiddled with the keys, reluctant to take my seat. ‘I need all the help I can get. We can’t just leave Frank to rot. The lawyer estimates he’ll get at least thirty years.’

‘The lawyer? Señor Danvila? He’s thinking of his fees. All those appeals …’ Crawford opened the door and beckoned me into the driver’s seat. He took off his sunglasses and stared at me with his friendly but distant eyes. ‘Charles, there’s nothing you can do. Frank will solve this one himself. He may be playing his end-game, but it’s only just begun, and there are sixty-three other squares on the board …’

6 Fraternal Refusals (#ulink_f7e3d290-79d8-5825-aa8f-f1d5c98841c7)

THE RETIREMENT PUEBLOS lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake. As always, when I drove along the coast to Marbella, I seemed to be moving through a zone that was fully accessible only to a neuroscientist, and scarcely at all to a travel writer. The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road. Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves.

This glacier-like slowness had affected my attempts to free Frank from Zarzuella jail. Three days after Bibi Jansen’s funeral I left the Los Monteros Hotel, carrying a suitcase filled with fresh clothes for Frank’s court appearance in Marbella that morning. I had packed the case in his apartment at the Club Nautico after a careful search through his wardrobe. There were striped shirts, dark shoes and a formal suit, but as they lay on the bed they resembled the elements of a costume that Frank had decided to discard. I hunted the drawers and tie-rack, unable to make up my mind. The real and far more elusive Frank seemed to have turned his back on the apartment and its dusty past.

At the last moment I threw in some pens and a block of writing paper – the latter suggested by Señor Danvila in the vain hope of persuading Frank to withdraw his confession. Frank would be brought from Malaga to attend the hearing in the magistrates’ court, a formal identification of the five victims by Inspector Cabrera and the autopsy pathologists. Afterwards, Señor Danvila told me, I would be able to speak to Frank.

As I parked in a narrow street behind the courthouse I weighed what I would say to him. More than a week of amateur sleuthing had yielded nothing. Naively, I had assumed that the unanimous belief in Frank’s innocence held by his friends and colleagues would somehow force out the truth, but in fact that unanimity had only wrapped another layer of mystery around the Hollinger murders. Far from springing the lock of Frank’s prison cell it had given the key another turn.

Nevertheless, five people had been killed, by someone almost certainly still walking the streets of Estrella de Mar, still eating sushi and reading Le Monde, still singing in a church choir or modelling clay at a sculpture class.

As if unaware of this, the hearing at the magistrates’ court unfolded in its interminable way, a Möbius strip of arcane procedures that unwound, inverted themselves and returned to their departure points. Lawyers and journalists each embrace a rival physics where motion and inertia reverse themselves. I sat behind Señor Danvila, only a few yards from Frank and his translator, as the pathologists testified, stood down and testified again, body by body, death by death.

Eager to talk to Frank, I was surprised by how little he had changed. I expected him to be thin and drained by the grey hours of sitting alone in his cell, forehead harrowed by the stress of maintaining his absurd bluff. He was paler, as the sunlight of Estrella de Mar faded from his face, but he seemed composed and at ease with himself, offering me a ready smile and a handshake quickly cut off by his police escort. He took no part in the proceedings, but listened intently to his translator, emphasizing for the magistrate’s benefit his central role in the events described.

When he left the court he gave me a wave of encouragement as if I were about to follow him into the headmaster’s study. I waited on a hard seat in the public corridor, deciding to avoid a direct confrontation. Bobby Crawford had been right to say that the initiative lay with Frank, and by sticking to pleasantries I might force him to show his hand.