Chapter 40
Violet
The first key Henry produced opened a door that led straight into a cobbled courtyard. There was a single flight of stone steps leading up to the left, a long, low bench on the right, while towards the rear I could see a bank of potted plants and several wrought-iron tables and chairs. Everything was immaculately clean, and the space felt blessedly cool after the hot drive down from Pollen?a.
‘Have you been here before?’ I asked, as Henry stared around.
‘Once, I think, when I was a teenager. I seem to remember my mother bringing me here to parade me around in front of my father, so he’d agree to give her money.’
I guessed Henry must have put a call through to his mother in Bali to let her know that Antonio had died, and wondered if it would be to him that she made her next plea for money. Not that I could talk...
‘I thought you said the office was borderline derelict,’ said Eliza, and Henry turned momentarily to face her, his mouth set in a grim line.
‘I’ve been told it is,’ he replied. ‘We’d better go and take a closer look.’
He took off across the courtyard, leaving the three of us to follow in his stead, presently coming to a stop in front of another door, this one smaller and far grubbier than the one we’d come through from the street. Once open, it emitted a putrid scent of rotting vegetables, and Luke raised a hand to cover his nose.
‘One sec,’ said Henry, heading inside as Eliza made a gagging sound, then returning a few minutes later with a tied-up rubbish sack.
‘Mini fridge,’ he explained, holding it aloft. ‘Whoever unplugged it didn’t bother to empty it first. I’ve opened all the windows, so the smell should clear pretty quickly.’
Eliza nodded, eyes watering with the effort of not throwing up, and Luke took a few steps back, giving the bag a wide berth.
‘I might just... Shall we go and get some cleaning stuff?’ he suggested.
Eliza nodded furiously. ‘Yes, good idea, I’ll come with you.’
‘Take my wallet.’ Henry fished it out from his back pocket and passed it across. ‘Bring back some snacks as well.’
We watched them go, fingers entwined, and bodies pressed together, and heard the clank of the heavy outer door closing behind them.
‘Should we have asked them to get pegs for all our noses?’ I said mildly. ‘How bad is it?’
Henry smiled rather ruefully. ‘Remember that guesthouse in Great Yarmouth, the Easter before Luke turned four?’
I shuddered. ‘As bad as that?’
Henry clenched his teeth together. ‘Worse.’
The office, as it had allegedly once been described, consisted of a single square room plus a broom-cupboard-sized bathroom complete with toilet and minuscule basin. I lifted the lid to find brown, stagnant water festering in the bowl, and hurriedly closed it again. The electricity was off, and each of the windows opened out into a narrow lane packed with more tall town houses, meaning barely any natural light filtered in. It was dingy and dank, sad and unloved, and I noticed that even Henry, who prided himself on transforming properties not dissimilar to this into beautiful, liveable spaces, looked downcast by the state of it.
‘I wonder why he kept hold of this place for so long,’ Henry mused, running his finger along the top of a rickety old desk and disturbing years of dust in the process.
‘For storage?’ I suggested, only to lever open a filing cabinet and find nothing save for a few empty document folders inside.
There was a framed photo on the desk, and Henry picked it up, using his thumb to wipe the glass clean. I saw the lift in his shoulders, the twitch of his lips.
‘My great-grandparents,’ he said, passing it over. ‘Raimundo and Valentina.’
I’d heard talk of the couple before from both Henry and his late father but had never seen them, so it was with some eagerness that I examined the picture.
‘That’s their wedding photo,’ Henry said, coming to stand beside me and pointing to the long veil that was draped over the seated woman’s shoulders. Like me, she had chosen to wear a garland of flowers in her hair for her nuptials, though unlike me, nobody had attempted to claw them off before the pictures were taken. The man standing beside her was strikingly handsome.
‘He looks like you,’ I told Henry. ‘Same eyes. And that expression is pure Luke.’
‘Do you think I should grow a moustache like his?’
‘All the better to tickle people with.’
Henry laughed faintly. ‘Perhaps not, then.’
Unsure of what to say in reply, I was relieved when Luke and Eliza reappeared, bringing disinfectant, dusters, more rubbish sacks, and several tubes of crisps with them. Having gone into mild ecstasies over the black-and-white photo of Raimundo and Valentina Torres, Eliza set about polishing the frame, while Luke and I emptied a sheath of old papers from a desk drawer and began to flick through them.
‘Anything interesting?’ asked Henry, through a mouthful of salt and vinegar Pringles.
‘Looks to be building insurance and various completion documents,’ I said, squinting to make out the scribbled Spanish words. ‘Antonio’s signature is on a lot of them.’ I thrust a few sheets towards him, and Henry examined them briefly, forehead a concertina of lines.
‘All these are dated from more than twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘Surely we can bin them?’
I had no idea, and so merely shrugged, but Luke looked thoughtful.
‘You should probably keep everything relating to house sales or deeds,’ he told us. ‘Just in case.’
Henry considered. ‘I’ll give the lot to Mateo,’ he decided. ‘Let him choose.’
I left Luke and Eliza to put the paperwork into an old box file and continued exploring the rest of the office space, wrinkling my nose at the dust motes that hung in the air. A small potted cactus had thirsted to a crisp just below one of the windows, and a map of the island hung loose from its corroded Sellotape fastenings. Lifting some ancient cushions from a long, low table, I brought them to my face and was promptly choked into a coughing fit by the dank smell.
‘Are you all right?’
Henry had rushed over and was hammering my back.
‘Here,’ he said, when I’d regained control of my breathing, and passed me a bottle of water from the bag of supplies. Then, ‘Oh, what’s this you’ve found?’
Squatting down, he ran a finger over the top of what I had assumed was a table but what I could see now was actually an intricately carved wooden chest.
‘Cedar,’ said Henry, lowering his ear to the lid and giving the side a quick tap. ‘And seems to have all its original iron fittings. If I had to guess, I’d say it was eighteenth century.’
‘If you say it is, I’ll happily believe you.’
‘They come up every so often in house clearances over here,’ he said, as Luke and Eliza came to join us. ‘Sell really well at auction.’
‘For how much?’
Eliza had asked the question, which fortunately meant I wouldn’t have to. The subject of money was a tetchy one between myself and Henry, and I didn’t want to be accused by him of reducing everything to its cash value. As it was, his eyes raked over mine before he answered.
‘It’s hard to say, but I’ve seen them go at auction for around two thousand euros.’
‘Is that all?’
Luke sniggered, but Eliza looked nonplussed. ‘It’s three hundred years old – perhaps even more. It should, by rights, be priceless.’
‘I agree with you.’ Henry smiled at her. ‘But there are a lot of them around – availability dilutes worth. Only the rarest things fetch the highest prices, it’s why original artwork always tops the bill. There’s only one Mona Lisa, after all.’
Luke was looking at his father with new respect. ‘I didn’t know you were into art,’ he said.
‘Oh, you know,’ Henry feigned indifference. ‘I’ve picked up a few things over the years, eavesdropped on yours and Mum’s conversations when you thought I was asleep in front of the telly.’
He had? This was news to me as well.
‘Why didn’t you ever say?’ Luke asked, and at this, Henry looked sheepish.
‘Because it was your thing. I didn’t want to get in the way.’
A loaded silence followed this, which Eliza eventually broke by sneezing several times in quick succession.
‘There’s so much dust in here,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m going to keep polishing.’
I glanced at Luke; his deep-set eyes unreadable behind the mop of his dark fringe, then down at Henry, who was tugging ineffectually at the padlock on the chest.
‘I wonder if there’s a key somewhere in here,’ he mumbled, more to himself than us, although I told him I’d help him hunt for it regardless. I was halfway through a second, smaller filing cabinet, when the outer door was pushed slowly open.
‘Hola,’ called a male voice.
Henry stood up.
The visitor, who was small and wiry with tufts of white hair and half-moon spectacles, introduced himself as Ignacio before explaining that he owned the rest of the building.
‘I knew Antonio when he was a boy,’ he said in English, appraising Henry before remarking, ‘You are very tall, not like him at all.’
‘My mother was a giant,’ Henry replied soberly, and the man wheezed out a chuckle.
‘Come,’ he said, beckoning with a wizened hand. ‘We must speak about business.’
Throwing a mystified glance over his shoulder, Henry followed the man out into the courtyard. I could hear the murmur of their voices as I continued my fruitless search for the padlock key, unable to discern much of what was being said. When Henry came back a few minutes later, he seemed happier somehow, lighter.
‘That’s one problem solved,’ he said, pouring a stack of crisps into his hand.
‘He had the key?’ I asked hopefully, and for a moment, Henry looked confused.
‘Oh, you mean...? No, nothing like that. He just wanted to know if I’d let him rent this place. His daughter is taking over the house and has plans to turn it into a hostel. They want this office as a sort of lounge area for guests, somewhere they can socialise, and they’re prepared to hire me to do the refit.’
‘Sounds like a win-win,’ said Luke, and Henry smiled.
‘I thought so, too. I was never going to do anything with this place – it may as well be given a new lease of life.’
‘A second chance,’ enthused Eliza, and again, Henry’s roving gaze settled briefly on me. Having finished his crisps, he glanced around.
‘Now that I know the place will be gutted in due course, I say we leave most of the mess where it is. It’ll all end up in a skip in a few weeks anyway.’
‘Most?’ I echoed, as Henry wiped the crumbs from his hands onto the front of his overalls.
‘Everything except the paperwork and the chest,’ he said. ‘We’re taking that with us.’
Luke carried one end and Henry the other, each stepping carefully over the line of plant pots in the courtyard while I locked the office door behind us. Eliza led the way, issuing instructions as she went – ‘watch out for the Monstera’; ‘don’t trip over the step’ – and we made it back to the jeep without incident.
‘Shit,’ said Henry, as he propped his end of the chest against a raised knee. ‘The car keys are in my pocket – can you?’
I was ready to retrieve them for him, but as Henry readjusted his position, Luke somehow lost his grip on the chest, which teetered for a second before crashing down sideways on to the cobbles, its lid crunching open as the centuries-old wood splintered apart. Eliza let out a wail, Henry cursed, but I made no sound at all. Any words that might have come were caught fast in my throat, trapped behind the shock that had settled itself there the moment my brain took in what my eyes were seeing. The chest had not been padlocked for no reason; it had been secured to protect what had been hidden inside.
Bundle after bundle of tightly rolled banknotes.