bar, his comfortable little life had lately fallen apart. Clothes lay strewn about the floor. The sofa was rumpled as though it had been slept on a lot recently. Empty beer cans lined up on the coffee table gave off a sour smell of stale booze.
Ben glanced around him. A corner of the room was set aside as a little study area. Above the desk hung a crucifix, to the left of it a framed degree certificate from the University of Madrid, awarded to one Raul Fuentes for achieving first-class honours in English. To the right of the cross, a poster was tacked to the wall depicting a forlorn-looking polar bear cub alone on a melting ice floe that was drifting on unbroken blue water under a bright and sunny sky, with the legend STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW.
Next to that hung a smaller framed photo of the Spaniard, grinning and laughing on a white-sanded beach somewhere hot, with his arm around the shoulders of a strikingly beautiful dark-haired woman. She was laughing with him, showing perfect white teeth. It was a happy picture, obviously from a happier time not so very long ago.
‘Raul Fuentes,’ Ben said. ‘That would be you?’
The Spaniard nodded. He slumped on the rumpled sofa. Leaned across to pick up one of the beer cans to give it a shake, in case there might be some left inside.
‘No beer for you,’ Ben said, stepping over to snatch it from his fingers. ‘Which way’s the kitchen? I presume you have coffee in the place.’ Raul Fuentes flopped back against the cushions and sighed, wagged a hand in the direction of a door.
The kitchen was a mess, though Ben could tell it hadn’t always been. Copper saucepans hung neatly on little hooks above the worktop, next to a shelf with a collection of cookbooks. An ornamental wine rack was loaded with a selection of decent bottles that Raul hadn’t yet got around to emptying down his throat. The ones he had filled the bin and stood around the surfaces, along with more empty beer cans and piles of unwashed dishes. Ben shoved them to one side and set about making coffee.
Raul had a real percolator and real fresh-ground beans. Ben approved. The instant stuff was essentially dehydrated military rations, popularised during successive world wars. You shouldn’t have to drink it unless there was no other choice.
As he waited for the coffee to bubble up on the stove, Ben thought about the picture on the wall above the desk and wondered whether the woman in it was the reason behind Raul Fuentes’ troubles. She’s not worth it, mate. The yob’s words had evidently touched a nerve.
When the coffee came up, he poured the contents into two cups. Straight, black, as it came. Milk and sugar were trivial nonessentials at a time like this. He carried the cups back into the other room and set one down in front of Raul.
‘Drink it while it’s hot. It’ll do you good.’
Raul slurped some, and pulled a face.
‘It needs to be strong,’ Ben said.
Raul braved another sip. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said, looking up.
‘Ben,’ Ben said.
‘You’re not from around here.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘You’re English.’
‘The half of me that isn’t Irish.’
‘What are you doing here in Frigiliana?’ Raul asked. ‘Are you on vacation or something?’
Ben wasn’t about to reveal to a stranger how he’d been wandering aimlessly through Europe for the last couple of months, never lingering long in one place, staying in cheap hotels to preserve his savings, travelling by public transport wherever whim or random choice took him.
‘I wanted to see the castle,’ he said.
Which, as far as it went, was true, although Ben hadn’t been aware of the existence of the ancient Moorish fortress – whose ruins topped the hill overlooking Frigiliana – until he’d happened to pick up a discarded magazine on the bus from Sevilla, just for something to read. Then, just for something to do, when he’d got off the bus he’d made the long, hot, dusty hike up the hill to visit the lonely ruins that marked the site of the battle of El Peñon de Frigiliana, where in 1569 some six thousand Christian soldiers had stormed the last stronghold of the Moorish empire and spelled the final end of Muslim rule in Spain.
Once he’d got to the top, Ben had wondered why he’d bothered. He’d seen all the battlefields he ever wanted to see in his life, both ancient and modern. The remains of the fortress didn’t look much different from crusader ruins he’d observed in the Middle East or the smoking rubble of killing zones in Afghanistan, from back in the day. It was a sad old place, haunted by the same ancient ghosts as all such places inevitably were.
Ben had perched on a crumbled wall and smoked a few cigarettes while looking out over the valley below, then got thirsty and come wandering back down the hill into Frigiliana to find a cool drink. The rest of the story, Raul didn’t need telling.
‘Well, I’m glad you showed up when you did,’ Raul said after another grateful slurp of coffee. It seemed to be reviving him a little already. ‘I can’t believe the way you went through those idiots. You must be some kind of seventh-dan Aikido master or something.’
‘It’s just a few simple tricks,’ Ben said.
‘Tricks.’ Raul considered that for a moment. ‘Well, whatever, you saved my ass from a serious beating back there. Probably saved my job, too. Respectable schoolteachers aren’t supposed to get into drunken fights and turn up at school all bruised up.’
‘You teach English?’ Ben said, glancing in the direction of the degree certificate.
Raul nodded. ‘In a secondary school, just a few kilometres from here.’
‘It’s the middle of the week. Is there a holiday?’
Raul said quietly, ‘No, I … I’m taking time off.’
Ben didn’t ask why. ‘Respectable schoolteachers don’t generally have such a useful right jab, in my experience.’
Raul gave a sour laugh. ‘I was an amateur boxing champion in my teens. It’s been years since I so much as threw a punch. Stupid.’ He sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, toying with his cup and frowning. ‘I shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. As if I hadn’t already got enough booze in this place to drink myself into a hole in the ground. Maybe I was looking for a fight. Maybe I wanted it to happen.’
‘Whatever it was about,’ Ben said, ‘it’s none of my business. I’m going to finish up my coffee and get out of here. Do us both a favour and try not to get yourself killed with a repeat performance, okay? A broken heart’s not worth getting beaten to death over. No matter how pretty she is.’ Ben pointed back with his thumb at the picture over the desk.
Raul hung his head down so low that it almost touched his knees. He whispered, ‘Was. And she was more than that. She was a lot more.’
Ben said nothing.
‘See, everything anyone says about her now has to be in the past tense. Even I catch myself doing it. As if she really had gone, as if she were no longer a part of the world. That’s what the police would have everyone believe.’
Ben
