Cocaine Nights

‘Even though they know they have the wrong man?’

Señor Danvila raised his eyes to the sky. ‘They may know it now, but in three or four months, when your brother comes to trial? Self-admitted guilt is a concept they find very easy to live with. Files can be closed, men reassigned. I extend my sympathies to you, Mr Prentice.’

‘But Frank may go to prison for the next twenty years. Surely the police will go on looking for the real culprit?’

‘What could they find? Remember, the conviction of a British expatriate avoids the possibility of a Spaniard being accused. Tourism is vital for Andalucia – this is one of Spain’s poorest regions. Inward investors are less concerned by crimes among tourists.’

I pushed away my coffee glass. ‘Frank is still your client, Señor Danvila. Who did kill those five people? We know Frank wasn’t responsible. Someone must have started the fire.’

But Danvila made no reply. With his gentle hands he broke his tapas and threw the pieces to the waiting cats.

If not Frank, then who? Given that the police had ended their-investigation, it fell to me to recruit a more aggressive Spanish lawyer than the depressed and ineffective Danvila, and perhaps hire a firm of British private detectives to root out the truth. I drove along the coast road to Malaga, past the white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses, and reminded myself that I knew almost nothing about Estrella de Mar, the resort where the deaths had occurred. Frank had sent me a series of postcards from the Club, which portrayed a familiar world of squash courts, jacuzzis and plunge-pools, but I had only the haziest notions of day-to-day life among the British who had settled the coast.

Five people had died in the catastrophic fire that had gutted the Hollinger house. The fierce blaze had erupted without warning about seven o’clock in the evening of 15 June, by coincidence the Queen’s official birthday. Clutching at straws, I remembered the disagreeable Guardia Civil at Gibraltar and speculated that the fire had been started by a deranged Spanish policeman protesting at Britain’s occupation of the Rock. I imagined a burning taper hurled over the high walls on to the tinder-dry roof of the villa …

But in fact the fire had been ignited by an arsonist who had entered the mansion and begun his murderous work on the staircase. Three empty bottles containing residues of ether and gasoline were found in the kitchen. A fourth, half-empty, was in my brother’s hands while he waited to surrender to the police. A fifth, filled to the brim and plugged with one of Frank’s tennis club ties, lay on the rear seat of his car in a side-street a hundred yards from the house.

The Hollingers’ mansion, Cabrera told me, was one of the oldest properties at Estrella de Mar, its timbers and roof joists dried like biscuit by a hundred summers. I thought of the elderly couple who had retreated from London to the peace of this retirement coast. It was hard to imagine anyone finding the energy, let alone the necessary malice, to bring about their deaths. Steeped in sun and sundowners, wandering the golf greens by day and dozing in front of their satellite television in the evening, the residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world.

As I neared Estrella de Mar the residential complexes stood shoulder to shoulder along the beach. The future had come ashore here, lying down to rest among the pines. The white-walled pueblos reminded me of my visit to Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s outpost of the day after tomorrow in the Arizona desert. The cubist apartments and terraced houses resembled Arcosanti’s, their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time, as befitted the ageing population of the retirement havens and an even wider world waiting to be old.

Searching for the turn-off to Estrella de Mar, I left the Malaga highway and found myself in a maze of slip-roads that fed the pueblos. Trying to orientate myself, I pulled into the forecourt of a filling-station. While a young Frenchwoman topped up my tank I strolled past the supermarket that shared the forecourt, where elderly women in fluffy towelling suits drifted like clouds along the lines of ice-cold merchandise.

I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds – British, Dutch and German – were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations. I sensed that the Costa del Sol, like the retirement coasts of Florida, the Caribbean and the Hawaiian islands, had nothing to do with travel or recreation, but formed a special kind of willed Umbo.

Although seemingly deserted, the pueblos contained more residents than I first assumed. A middle-aged couple sat on a balcony thirty feet from me, the woman holding an unread book in her hands as her husband stared at the surface of the swimming pool, whose reflection dressed the walls of a nearby apartment house with bands of gold light. Almost invisible at first glance, people sat on their terraces and patios, gazing at an unseen horizon like figures in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.

I returned to my car, reassured by the distant sounds of the coastal highway. Following the Frenchwoman’s instructions, I found my way back to the Malaga signpost and rejoined the motorway, which soon skirted an ochre beach and revealed a handsome peninsula of iron-rich rock.

This was Estrella de Mar, as generously wooded and landscaped as Cap d’Antibes. There was a harbour lined with bars and restaurants, a crescent of imported white sand, and a marina filled with racing yachts and cruisers. Comfortable villas stood behind the palms and eucalyptus trees, and above them was the liner-like prow of the Club Nautico, topped by its white satellite dish.

Then, as the motorway turned through the coastal pines, I saw the gutted eminence of the Hollinger mansion on its hill above the town, the charred roofing timbers like the remains of a funeral pyre on a Central American mesa. The smoke and intense heat had blackened the walls, as if this doomed house had tried to camouflage itself against the night to come.

Traffic overtook me, speeding towards the hotel towers of Fuengirola. I turned off on to the Estrella de Mar slip-road and entered a narrow gorge cut through the porphyry rock of the headland. Within four hundred yards I reached the wooded neck of the peninsula, where the first villas stood behind their lacquered gates.

Purpose-built in the 1970s by a consortium of Anglo-Dutch developers, Estrella de Mar was a residential retreat for the professional classes of northern Europe. The resort had turned its back on mass tourism, and there were none of the skyscraper blocks that rose from the water’s edge at Benalmadena and Torremolinos. The old town by the harbour had been pleasantly bijouized, the fishermen’s cottages converted to wine bars and antique shops

Taking the road that led to the Club Nautico, I passed an elegant tea salon, a bureau de change decorated with Tudor half-timbering, and a boutique whose demure window displayed a solitary but exquisite designer gown. I waited as a van emblazoned with trompe-l’œil traffic scenes reversed into the courtyard of a sculpture studio. A strong-shouldered woman with Germanic features, blonde hair pinned behind her neck, supervised two teenaged boys as they began to unload butts of modelling clay.

Within the open studio half a dozen artists worked at their sculpture tables, smocks protecting their beach clothes. A handsome Spanish youth, heavy genitals scarcely contained by his posing pouch, stood with sullen grace on a podium as the sculptors – every one an amateur, judging by their earnest manner – massaged their clay into a likeness of his thighs and torso. Their burly instructor, a ponytailed Vulcan at his forge, moved among them, tweaking a navel with a stubby forefinger or smoothing a furrowed brow.

Estrella de Mar, I soon discovered, had a thriving arts community. In the narrow streets above the harbour a parade of commercial galleries showed the latest work of the resort’s painters and designers. A nearby arts and crafts centre displayed a selection of modernist costume jewellery, ceramic wares and textiles. The local artists – all, I assumed from their parked Mercedes and Range Rovers, residents of nearby villas – sat behind their trestle tables like Saturday vendors in the Portobello Road, their confident voices ringing with the accents of Holland Park and the Sixteenth Arrondissement.

Everyone in the town seemed alert and confident. Customers crowded the bookshops and music stores, or scrutinized the racks of foreign newspapers outside the tabacs. An adolescent girl in a white bikini crossed the street at the traffic lights, a violin case in one hand, a hamburger in the other.

Estrella de Mar, I decided, possessed far more attractions than I had guessed when Frank first arrived to manage the Club Nautico. The monoculture of sun and sangria that becalmed the pueblo residents had no place in this vibrant little enclave, which seemed to combine the best features of Bel Air and the Left Bank. Opposite the gates of the Club Nautico was an open-air cinema with an amphitheatre carved from the hillside. A placard by the ticket kiosk advertised a season of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy films, the very height of intellectual chic of a certain kind.

The Club Nautico was quiet and cool, its afternoon trade yet to appear. Sprinklers rotated over the crisp lawns, and beside the deserted restaurant terrace the surface of the pool was smooth enough to walk upon. A single player was practising on one of the hard courts with a tennis machine, and the clunk-clunk of the bounding balls was the only sound to disturb the air.

I crossed the terrace and entered the bar at the rear of the restaurant. A blond steward with a babyish face and a sail-rigger’s shoulders was folding paper napkins into miniature yachts, origami decorations for the peanut saucers.

‘Are you a guest, sir?’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘I’m afraid the club is closed to non-members.’

‘I’m not a guest – or a non-member, whatever strange form of life that is.’ I sat down on a stool and helped myself to a few nuts. ‘I’m Frank Prentice’s brother. I think he was the manager here.’

‘Of course … Mr Prentice.’ He hesitated, as if faced with an apparition, and then eagerly shook my hand. ‘Sonny Gardner – I crew on Frank’s thirty-footer. By the way, he still is the manager.’

‘Good. He’ll be glad to hear that.’

‘How is Frank? We’re all thinking about him.’

‘He’s fine. I met him yesterday. We had a long and interesting talk together.’

‘Everyone hopes you can help Frank. The Club Nautico needs him.’

‘That’s fighting talk. Now, I’d like to see his apartment. There are personal things I want to collect for him. I take it someone has the keys?’

‘You’ll have to speak to Mr Hennessy, the club treasurer. He’ll be back in half an hour. I know he wants to help Frank. We’re all doing everything we can.’

I watched him delicately fold the paper yachts with his calloused hands. His voice had sounded sincere but curiously distant, lines from a previous week’s play spoken by a distracted actor. Turning on my stool, I gazed across the swimming pool. In its glassy surface I could see the reflection of the Hollinger house, a sunken fire-ship that seemed to rest on the tiled floor.

‘You had a grandstand view,’ I commented. ‘It must have been quite a spectacle.’

‘View, Mr Prentice?’ Lines creased Sonny Gardner’s baby-smooth forehead. ‘What of, sir?’

‘The fire at the big house. Did you watch it from here?’

‘No one did. The club was closed.’

‘On the Queen’s birthday? I would have thought you’d be open all night.’ I reached out and took the paper yacht from his fingers, examining its intricate folds. ‘One thing puzzles me – I was at the magistrates’ court in Marbella yesterday. No one from Estrella de Mar turned up. None of Frank’s friends, no character witnesses, no one who worked for him. Just an elderly Spanish lawyer who’s given up hope.’

‘Mr Prentice …’ Gardner tried to fold the paper triangle when I returned it to him, then crushed it between his hands. ‘Frank didn’t expect us there. In fact, he told Mr Hennessy that he wanted us to stay away. Besides, he pleaded guilty.’

‘But you don’t believe that?’

‘Nobody does. But … a guilty plea. It’s hard to argue with.’

‘Too true. Then tell me – if Frank didn’t set fire to the Hollinger house, who did?’

‘Who knows?’ Gardner glanced over my shoulder, eager for Hennessy to appear. ‘Maybe nobody did.’

‘That’s hard to believe. It was a clear case of arson.’

I waited for Gardner to reply, but he merely smiled at me, the reassuring smile of professional sympathy reserved for the bereaved at funeral chapels. He seemed unaware that his fingers were no longer folding the paper napkins into his miniature flotilla, but had started to unwrap and smooth the triangular sails. As I walked away he leaned over his little fleet like an infant Cyclops, and called out to me in a hopeful voice: ‘Mr Prentice … perhaps it was spontaneous combustion?’

Rainbows rode the rotating sprinklers, slipping in and out of the spray like wraiths leaping a skipping-rope. I strolled around the pool, whose untidy water swilled below the diving board, disturbed by a long-legged young woman swimming a crisply efficient backstroke.