Forty

There were some blokes on the radio... - Donald has been out in the hills again. He has found Paradise deserted on the way home. He muses on the nature of economics and evolution, seeing the former as a means of achieving the latter, but absurdly. He is attracted by a television report of serious events of much local significance. He is confused at first, but then clarifies the issue via a chat with a neighbour.

There were some blokes on the radio the other day arguing about evolution. Now that’s not surprising, given that we are experiencing the centenary of the Greatest Ape himself, Charles Darwin. The argument went like this.

Women, who are apparently immune from all aspects of spontaneous mutation, natural selection or indeed nocturnal emission, need criteria upon which to select their mates. My own popularity has never been great enough to afford me the luxury of selecting my mates, but then that’s equality for you. Women, it seems, are naturally influenced by strength, overtly expressed breeding potential and ability to hunt. This is why it’s best to go to the disco in a Michelin man suit, dressed as a gladiator and sporting a long sword and a codpiece, preferably not served with chips. This apparently made us humans successful. It does not explain, however, why most Kiddingtonians, male or female, are overweight wimps who could be out-run by a wingless mosquito. Or perhaps, on further analysis of the nature of success, it does.

Now what seems strange to me is that this analysis pertains. One contributor did ask the perfectly serious question of whether the classical rules of natural selection, in other words those described by Plato, still apply to a species that has antibiotics and the hydrogen bomb. I mean, why would spider A wait around for five million years until it develops red spots by chance one day so it can compete with the already successful and dominant yellow striped variety when it can nuke its way to complete dominance at any time?

What also presents a conundrum is why current thinking is still based on the long-outmoded social organisation of hunter gathering. After at least several thousand years, you would have thought that the question, “How straight is your furrow?” or indeed “How deep does your plough go?” might now have achieved greater priority in the considerations of any self-respecting hen-house of selecting females, rather than an advertised capability to knock a neighbour on the head. Indeed in the modern era, whose enlightenment might only be two hundred years old, one might assume that the size of his IQ would be the more relevant criterion. “How long are your qualifications, darling?” might have limited applicability as a chat-up line for ladies at hen parties, but the answer is surely more relevant to today’s needs than knowing when he last bagged a rabbit or did for a sheep.

In fact, if earnings potential married to the opportunity to screw the competitors is the more relevant modern indicator of the male’s ability to provide, then surely the most desirable breeders would be the high-earning graduates of elite universities, who have at least a first or a two one in the frame on the wall alongside a Master’s they didn’t have to work for. Unless, of course, the graduate is a woman and then, as we all know, she would never look at a male that did not already earn at least twice what she does. There is a market, after all.

It was in the anthropology course A 102, Simian Household Interactions Theory: Beginning Appropriate Groundwork that I first appreciated the relevance of the football term, ‘give and go’, to the analysis of inter-human interaction. To unearth its true significance I had to bear in mind the overall philosophy of another course, an economics unit, E999, Economics And Reality Amid Changing Human Environments, in which the dismal science became truly soporific. It concentrated on theories of that Scottish shop-owner, replaced all references to ‘God’ with the word ‘market’ and claimed ‘competition’ as its prophet. The outmoded phrase ‘God willing’ simply became ‘the market will decide’, with nature no longer admitting any force other than the professedly competitive.

But it was this prophet, competition, that really interested me. Competition, I learned, always identifies the optimal solution. Prophets, after all, know how to achieve the best results and invite both assessment and judgment on the basis of profit achieved. There’s no place in capitalism for a prophet whose predictions prove inaccurate and thus generate no profit. There is simply no room for error, otherwise the supreme being that employed such a prophet on the sales team would have a status little beyond the weather forecaster, and they aren’t even on presenter’s contracts. This of course assumes that the supreme being was not on megabucks for the couple of years that could not be meaningfully evaluated before then legging it just as the entire strategy crashed. The only option then is to the kill the messenger. Goodbye prophet.

On reading the predictions of this prophet, however, I began to suspect a certain falseness, an inflation of argument whose price increases marginalise producers and promise more than they deliver. The word specious came to mind, thus linking the entire argument with the theory of evolution where I started. Darwin’s Origin Of The Specious clearly had much to say about the role of competition in defining the genetic characteristics of living organisms, which is why honing one’s skills in the pursuit of bushbucks in the Kalahari runs on a continuous thread to going to the disco dressed as a gladiator with a long sword and a codpiece. And, as you can see, the role of joined-up thinking is crucial.

But considering competition and the origins of specious in a single thought led me to football and breakdowns in reverse order. Now, I used to own an Austin Allegro. As a car, the Allegro was not only a non troppo, it often never sustained an adagio, despite being largo than a Metro, which was largely suburban. I was thankful when my Allegro managed allegretto, and certainly never expected da capo al fine. In five years it hit con brio about twice and on several occasions its metronome ran right down, the tempo giusto of its working becoming distinctively rubato. Its ownership, however, was obbligato, since my ensemble at the time was limited to strings, shoestrings.

I remember one particular occasion when I, along with Pete Crawshaw, had been to the Kiddington Hotel for a pint. We were on our way home, having just turned left off the main road opposite the corner of the common. A cough and a splutter brought us to a halt. The Allegro’s engine stopped as well.

I had offered Pete a lift home. I hadn’t intended to purchase his labour. But, as usual, his wallet had been on the light side all evening and I had stood him a couple. I therefore had no hesitation in asking him to get out and push. I knew the fault. It was all in the electrics. A quick spray with WD40 and a few bashes with the edge of a spanner, an English key, on the battery contacts and the fuse box would do the trick, but I had left the spray can at home after a spring clean of the boot that afternoon.

“Pete,” I said, “give us a push down the road until we get to the next junction. I can freewheel from there down the hill.” There was no other traffic through the estate at that hour. I shoved on the door column by the driver’s seat so I could steer at the same time and Pete went round the back. Lo and behold, the said task was completed in just a minute or two. Silicone spray was duly located and applied, the fault remedied and thus Pete’s promised lift home was delivered.

But if I had been a proper prophet of market forces capitalism, I would surely have invoked my colleague, competition, as my guide. In that case my comment ought to have been, “Oh dastardly thing, Pete, the Allegro has gone non troppo again! Why don’t you go round the back and give it a push? Meanwhile, I’ll go to the front and push in the opposite direction. Thus we will compete and thereby automatically identify the most efficient solution to our problem.” I can suddenly hear all you politically right-handed people scoffing at my naiveté and pointing out that the car had been built by socialists. But what you are ignoring, my friends, is ‘give and go’.

I accept that football is competitive. I accept that sometimes there’s a winner. But football is essentially a team game, not an individualist’s park. ‘Give and go’ indicates that the best way to skin a cat might be to release from your possession the prime object of your desire - actually let someone else have the ball, for market’s sake! - and then, unselfishly, break into a run so that you might occupy an area of the pitch which is currently vacant. There are economic opportunities in innovation, it seems.

The tactic will work not only to the mutual advantage of yourself and your team-mate, but also for your team as a whole. It can only work, however, if the cretin you pass to can control the ball and then deliver to the space you find, his skills thus complementing your vision. The Scottish shopkeeper, no doubt, would have advocated that each one of the eleven on the team should take turns to see if they could individually dribble through the entire opposing team, since that would identify the one person who was the best option to use in future in order to pursue the same tactic. And so this brings me right back to the Origins Of The Specious, because if there’s anything that earmarks any human endeavour specifically as human then it’s the ability to cooperate, not compete. Ah, it’s the two teams on the pitch that compete, I hear you say. No, I answer, it’s the seventy-two thousand watching cooperators that have paid an arm and a leg each to spectate that create the spectacle.

That’s why the concept of solidarity arose within the old left. United we stand, divided we fall. The workers, united, will never be defeated, especially if you say it in Spanish. Don’t explain the world, change it. Organise! It was in this area that the Neo-Anarchist Trotskyite wing of the True Socialist Party of Kiddington (Non-Affiliated) was so strong. Our analysis was superb, our funds limited. We had all the arguments, but no pennies. Our delegates to the regional conference in Punslet would surely have changed the Party’s national manifesto if only we could have agreed to club together for the bus fare. Thus an opportunity literally went begging when we tried to raise the funds along the market side in Bromaton one Saturday. We didn’t succeed, most shoppers not donating, preferring to tell us to go to Russia, or words to that effect. When we told them that we were more into the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung, they became more interested, a good number of people actually asking what channel it was on.

Consideration of economic interest, competition, market forces and natural selection are at the forefront of my own thoughts tonight. I have spent an afternoon up and down the mountains. I have stencilled rock after rock with my No Molesta windmill. I have paused for a beer in my bar by the gates of Paradise and watched the early evening comings and goings. But tonight I have come home to Rosie and my blog in a completely different frame of mind from anything I have experienced before. All I can say is twelve inches. Something’s afoot. Tonight, unlike any other early evening casual surveillance of those who enter Paradise, drew a complete blank. The world, apparently in its entirety, was damned, the gates of Paradise remaining closed to all. Not a soul entered or left. I even stayed for a second beer before letting myself in for a quick nose around. And inside, I found the place as empty as my observation had predicted. Paradise was closed. Twelve inches, I thought.

It was later than usual when I arrived home, of course, but then Suzie would have gone off to The Castle by five at the latest. She had left half a pizza that fit exactly in the microwave and I tried hard not to compete with the three beers that were left in the fridge, the last of which I had just opened post-pizza with a snap, not in the anatomical manner habitually employed by Randy Sandy, and settled down to watch the news.

My thoughts were elsewhere as I began to watch. I was still troubled at finding Paradise deserted. I had grown used to the continued absence of my goal, whom I had not seen anywhere since that chance half-sighting with her hands on Pedro’s wheel in Benidorm. But Paradise going dark was a completely different proposition, an event that surely had much greater than merely local significance. So it was with a mixture of troubled thoughts and potentially injured pride that I waited for the television to come alive with España Directo. The troubles were all centred on Paradise, while the pride emanated from the fact that my Spanish has now achieved a level good enough to understand the headlines on the news, as long, of course, that there’s a full set of pictures alongside to offer a little context.

Now Suzie had clearly been at the old films again during the afternoon. She had left the channel selector set to something up in the hundreds, on a slot surrounded by broadcasts offering kitchen appliances, things to reduce your waist, increase the length of your todger or clean your bowels. There was travel, various aspects of paradise, all of which involved blue sea, sunshine, concrete hotels and palm trees, and a sports broadcast where the competitors had to ride quad bikes over old pianos whilst making spaghetti and singing Blue Moon, a game that can only be played on Thursdays. Apparently it’s going to be in the Olympics next time round. It was then that my remote hit a channel I don’t normally watch, because it’s in one of those funny languages I can’t understand. It’s broadcast from a local town just down the road. Normally, it’s a channel that features local bazaars, festivals, fiestas and reports from the pensioners’ club, and it habitually sounds like the copy was edited in someone’s bathroom. Tonight, however, was different.

I was already past the channel and pursuing my anticipated dose of domestic violence, weather reports and cooking that make up the daily fare of my usual evening magazine programme when something registered. “I know that place,” I said to myself. “I recognise that hefty stone wall across the front of the compound. I know that sea view. I know those palms set so close together that their fronds tangle.” I swiftly flicked back up the channel numbers.

I was greeted now not with a vista I thought I recalled, but a face I recognised. The next shot cut to a driveway, at the head of which the automatic door of a garage was raised to reveal the back of the car inside. It was a beige BMW, a big one, but a composite model with no series number. The registration, of course, had been blurred out with a matrix, just like they do on the free porn channels with any peninsularities that might arise or any vagaries that open up.

The setting here, however, was unmistakable, as was the presence of twisted yellow tape across all entrances and exits. Sexless beings meanwhile meandered collectively in their head to foot enclosing white suits. And then the full face of a still photo occupied the screen. I knew it well. I was tempted to say “Hello,” or even the more apposite, “Buenas tardes.” I knew he wouldn’t reply, of course. Twelve inches, I thought.

Now I am not used to seeing the house from that angle, but there was no mistaking where we were. I have driven past that entrance many times, not, you must understand because I was casing the joint or spying on anyone, but merely because I had, let’s say, a professional interest in its comings and goings. This interest of mine had only heightened in the weeks since my goal had vanished. I had at one stage been convinced that if I camped out along the street I would be sure to see her at least from a distance, so sure was I that this was her resting place. But all I ever saw was Alicia coming in and out and then, at rather odd times, the car making its own discreet entries. I was never once there to witness its departure.

On arrival it would stop short in the street, the occupant or occupants electing to open the electric gates with a remote and then driving straight into the garage rather than alighting into the fresh air. Though I had never been inside that clearly ample cavern, I could make out that there was access from within to the interior of the house via an escalator. Once the car pulled in, the garage doors invariably closed before anyone got out. The identity of whoever was driving in and out was thus never once revealed, the tinted windows delivering their intended secrecy.

The television report showed several more shots of the house, some from angles where I would not have recognised it. Then the cameras moved inside, and it was completely deserted but neatly and tidily presented. If there was a problem, then it clearly wasn’t burglary. And then outside we went again. The garage doors were still open and the strands of yellow tape stretched across its doors still ruffled in the breeze.

It was a long shot this time while someone voiced over in that strange tongue. There was no longer any doubt. It really was the beige BMW behind whose wheel I had recently seen my goal. They only showed the car from the rear. As was local habit, it had been driven into its housing nose first. There was a close-up shot of a policeman who was talking in that strange local language again, not a word of which I can usually understand. All I can remember is that they have almost the same word for love as Germans have for death. I noted with remorse how the two might have come together in this evening’s report.

Then we were in the street again. There was more yellow tape along the stone wall and across the gates, which were closed, as I would have expected, since I had watched the regime many times of late. Whoever was driving the car always closed the gates from the remote. Usually, by the time the car had reached the garage, it was no longer visible from the street. I had tried to watch many times with only marginal success. In fact, I had only managed to get a better view by locating a nearby hillside that overlooked the drive and employing rather powerful zoom-enabled binoculars purchased specially for the task from a Chinese emporium in Benidorm. Tonight it seemed that the place was infested with people dressed as moon-walkers. They were crawling around on hands and knees in the garden, apparently inspecting grit.

There was a picture of Alicia, another still, a detail from an official function with her standing beside her husband, Pedro the Mayor. So she was still around. I was marginally surprised. I had seen her many times in recent days, usually in dark glasses, usually being picked up along the road, down at the end of the street, calculatedly away from the house in different cars, whose ownership or driver I never once recognised. I watched her do that several times. I wondered why she never had them pick her up by her gates. Twelve inches, I thought.

If truth were told, I had quite learned to fancy her in recent times. I had never really appreciated what a beautiful body she had, since more often than not she kept it covered in rather frumpish cardigans and denims. While up above, hidden amongst the vegetation, I began training my binoculars on other parts of the compound to see if they might reveal anything of substance from glimpses they might afford. I learned nothing on that front, but what I did see was Alicia by the pool, sunbathing topless on occasions, always alone at home, and sometimes, in the perceived privacy of her enclosed garden, on occasion seeking the solace of the self. It was just a chink through the trees from a nearby promontory on a patch of waste ground. I needed to negotiate the innards of a giant prickly pear to achieve the vantage, but it sufficed. She had a lot to offer, I soon realised. There was far more to her than met the casual eye.

Now I will take this opportunity to state that my interest never went beyond that of a distant admirer. I swear I never once rang the bell, picked the lock, nosed around or suggested anything other than a coffee at the local bar. I was glad she accepted, however, because she clearly wanted to talk. I hadn’t realised before that she had spent two years in Britain studying the local lingo. She was surprised when I told her that there was a view of her pool surround from above. I could spend some time relating what she said, but her language was laced with ripe fruit and just at the moment that seems a tad inappropriate.

The picture of her that filled the screen showed her decked in finery, in the formal gown of the mayor’s wife at a function. She looked quite different from when I watched her lying by the pool. You would never have thought that underneath that spangled dress...

She was from a well-to-do family and it seemed that it was their influence that had got Pedro’s career in politics onto the right foot. It definitely went nowhere near a left one. It was their presence that influenced the competition for candidacy, and later it was their social capital that assisted willing co-operators through the polling stations, the mere detail of a few boxes of paper being destroyed by fire being treated at the time as the irrelevance it was later to become. Local newspapers also avoided covering stories suggested by numerous town hall employees who lost their jobs in favour of political sympathisers when Pedro eventually took office. Let’s say his path to the top was an escalator and someone else was providing the power. But let’s also not take anything away from the bloke. He did a good job, I’m reliably informed. Alicia, on the other hand, could relate numerous channels he had explored that were obviously beyond the call of duty, a habit that often kept him decidedly on the job and away from home.

And then Pedro’s face reappeared full screen and stayed there as a voice-over mouthed about a page and a half of script. It was in the fourth level communications course, M444, Media: Understanding Generalised Systems, Althusser Revisits Socialist Eras, where I first learned that it is inherent in the sub-text of popular mass broadcasting that long-lasting shots accompanied by large blocks of spoken text are only ever used to deliver obituaries. The black border that enclosed the screen also gave a clue. Pedro was dead.

There followed several minutes of apparently adulatory reports of Pedro’s mayoral tenure. Various vistas of the town were showed, including the controversial mountain tops reputedly earmarked for power generation, sites where No Molesta had campaigned for the opposing camp. Then shots took us back inside the house again, the report offering nothing less than a guided tour of the interior. I particularly liked the solid jasper double-sized bath with air jets that tickle your adumbration. A blacked-out room full of red costumes was also fetching, as was the well-equipped torture chamber beneath the garage that no domestic situation should be without. I lost the plot somewhat when a half a dozen quite ordinary apartment blocks appeared in quick succession, a couple of which I recognised being in Benidorm, just along the street from The Castle. When, a moment later, the said public house, Poncho Suzie’s Ribthwaite Castle also appeared full screen, followed by a mug-shot of my favourite mug, Mick Watson and then, much to my surprise, a recent picture of one Susan Cottee, whom at first I hardly recognised, I almost regurgitated my margarita. Twelve inches, I thought, and then the story changed. I still only had an inkling of what I clearly ought to know.

So I went next door and knocked up Jenny and Ted to ask if they knew what had happened. And they did. News had travelled a few hours before, it seemed. They knew the full story by about two that afternoon, four hours before the first television broadcast that I had just seen repeated. The story they related took me immediately back to the Origin Of The Specious, competition and market forces. Clearly something had been and probably remained specious. The competition was alive and well, but as yet ill-defined, even unidentified. Motives were ultimately related to an intensely lucrative market. An evolutionary dead-end, however, had been pursued and its usefulness subsequently identified as limited Thus its longevity, even survival, had been questioned, and questioned so severely it had already suffered extinction.

“Hello, Ted,” I said as he opened his van’s door. “Have you seen the news?”

“Seen it?” he asked. “Living next to the Cottees means I am usitative making it! What the widdershins are you and Suzie playing at?”

“Playing at? Playing at?” I repeated tautologically. “We aren’t ridibund playing at anything. Buddle me, Ted! The last time I played something I pulled a sporuliferous muscle and tore a molinary ligament! So what the discepting gorsedd are you talking about?”

“It’s all over the shikaring news, Don. You’ve just seen it on the television yourself.”

“And what makes you think I’ve just seen it?”

“Because as per haemotoxic usual, we could hear your blepharal tele from our front room! And you came across here the very minute the ondoyant thing ended. And no doubt you came here to ask if we’d seen your missus and The Castle on the refrangible programme!”

“Look, Ted,” I said, “it’s all news to me...”

“Of course it’s news to you, you blockhead! It’s news of you!”

“Ted, please, what’s it all about?”

“Alfie?”

“Bonze off, you maieutic moron!”

“Don, I can’t believe that you don’t know what I am talking about. Your mate Pedro the Mayor has copped it and copped it good and proper. We heard it through the grapevine from people in our university group.” The reniform skeg has the habit of tapping the side of his nose with a finger whenever he wants to indicate the linguistic employment of euphemism. He phemisms regularly, and always taps his nose. I said nothing, knowing full well that any secret would bore a hole through his teeth in thirty seconds. “Shot. Five times in the garage. Straight through his windscreen.”

“Shot? When?”

“It all happened last night, Don, some time in the early hours, about the time when you were bringing Suzie home from The Castle. He’d been out on the town, perhaps at The Castle...”

“He wasn’t there last night...” I was about to say, “He was in Paradise,” but I didn’t.

“... or perhaps he’d been out on the tiles, or even the tiles in the town, or perhaps other tiles that used to be in town and have been replaced...”

“You can be a right leguminous kumquat when you try, Ted. Cut the craquelure and tell the fustic story!”

“He’d been out on the town and he went home...”

“Alone?”

“No idea. No-one has mentioned anyone else being involved, apart from his wife... and no-one seems to be saying whether she had been with him in the car of had stayed at home.”

“She was at home,” I muttered inaudibly.

As he spoke my memory recreated the half-experienced, perhaps imagined, perhaps stolen vision of my goal behind the wheel of the beige BMW with the matching leather seats and walnut fascia, the composite without the series number in chrome on the boot lid. In a mind’s eye I could see her, still driving, but waiting for the electric gates of Pedro’s drive to open and anticipating the tilting garage door rising beyond as Pedro, the passenger, fingered his remote at her side. In that mind’s eye, I could see her behind that wheel, with Pedro suitably shocked, suitably sated and suitably rewarded as a result of his competition with the forces of markets, half-reclining in languorous comfort of the bucket seat whose angled backrest had no doubt been adjusted after the salpinx chauffeur had reassumed her erect posture after bending over one of his while parked out of the streetlights at the bottom of the hill.

“We’ve not heard anything to suggest there’s anyone else involved, other than Pedro and his wife. I can’t remember her name...”

“Alicia.”

“Alicia, is it? Well they are presenting it as a domestic.”

This is about as domestic as an African buffalo, I thought as he spoke.

“Apparently...” said Ted, using that wonderful word that means, ‘this is what the windage told me’, “he came home late. From what I have been told it was around two in the morning, about the time that he usually came home, is what is being said.”

“Paradise,” I muttered. Ted heard and stopped speaking. For once he said nothing, but a raised eyebrow asked for further qualification. Deciding that mere knowledge could not hang me, I offered. “He was a regular in Paradise. He was known for his research into electrical circuit theory.” Ted ignored the comment and continued his tale.

“Well he drove his car into the garage. Now they say that the house is a bit spectacular. I’ve just seen it on the tele and it certainly looks a bit special.”

“It is a bit special,” I said, “specially stupid. There’s no proper front door. You go inside through the garage which is below the house. There’s even a decurrent escalator linking the garage and the upstairs. You can’t get into the place without operating the electric doors, and there’s no controls on the outside.”

“So you have been there?”

“Not actually invited in, but Pedro and Alicia were often part of the group that we go out with on Wednesday afternoons. We’ve often dropped them off at home on our way back with Phil and Karen. They always had to use the remote to get through the gate. He’s part-owner of the business that owns The Castle. And I’ve met Alicia several times...”

“Well he didn’t make it into the house this time. He only got as far as the garage.”

“It sounds strange. I happen to know that you can’t get into that house from the street except through the garage. You have to close the outer door behind you using a remote because there are no manual controls. Only then, once that is closed, does the lock for the escalator open up. Then you have to use the remote again to open the door that gives access and starts the motors. Only then does the escalator start. They were security mad, those two. They had it all built that way in case they were attacked by intruders or hijacked on the way home. If there’s someone in the house they can use the internal control on the door into the house and it overrides the remote in the car. That way they can actually trap people in the garage - even inside the car! - until the police arrive.”

“Then that’s what she used,” said Ted. “That explains everything. Don, somehow you seem to know more about that house than the people on the tele. And I bet you know more about the murder than anyone else as well.”

“Murder?”

“I thought you saw it on the news... Well the story is that the wife was in the garage when he drove in. She was standing in front of the car as he stopped, and then she pulled a gun on him. She’d had enough...”

“She’d had quite a lot of her own, I can tell you,” I thought.

“...of his fooling around. She’d obviously closed the garage doors and then locked him inside the car. None of us could work out why he didn’t get out of the car. Now we know. Anyway, she pointed the gun at him through the windscreen. Why she didn’t point it through the side window defeats me...”

“You have to walk round the front of the car, Ted,” I offered. “The entrance into the house is on your right if you drive in nose first. It’s a vast garage, but I do remember that you have to get out of the car and walk round the front to get to the escalator exit. She might have been on her way to the driver’s window, but she would have had to walk across the front of the car to get there. And what’s more I happen to know that the glass in that car was all bullet-proof.”

“Well it didn’t stop these ones...”

“It wouldn’t, Ted. I happen to know the type of gun they kept in the house. It was a Smith and Wesson 500. The glass is not bullet-proof when one of those is pointed at it, but then I am sure they would also have known that. Their planning was always meticulous.”

“For once, Don, you make perfect sense,” said Ted. “We’ve been speculating about this all day over at the club. We couldn’t work it out, but now it’s all clear. He must have seen her carrying the gun and on her way round to his side. The engine was running because he’d just driven in so he put his foot on the gas and ran into her.”

“He did what?”

“He ran into her - trapped her, it seems.”

“What? There’s a solid bench across the back of the garage. The car would have gone under it. She would have been bent double, almost lying face down on the bonnet.”

“Precisely described, Sir! Uncanny, if you ask me! That’s exactly the story. I’m beginning to wonder if you were there as well! So you’re prime witness as well as perpetrator, eh? Anyway, it broke both of her legs above the knee. She couldn’t have moved even if she had not been trapped.”

“Except that she could move, couldn’t she? She could move her arm...”

“Again precisely, Don, my old chum. I thought I was telling this story? That’s what she did. A moment after the impact she raised her arm and let go with the gun at the windscreen, five times in all.”

“It had to be five. She couldn’t re-load.”

“He was hit in the head and chest... he died instantly.”

“From a range of about a metre and a half at most with an S and W 500...”

“There haven’t been any pictures of the body yet.”

“I’m surprised there’s very much left to photograph. It would have blown his head off, even through the glass. Tell me, Ted, who has the body now and who is responsible for identifying it?”

“Don, I’m just a retired gossip. It seems to me that you are far more likely to know that than I am.”

“And what about Alicia? She obviously didn’t shoot herself because she had no shells left and she couldn’t move.”

“He’d left the car running, Don. He was dead and the car was ticking over. There was no-one near enough to hear...”

“The whole building is sound-proofed as a protection against surveillance from outside.”

“...and she was there all night. She had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The maid raised the alarm this morning when she couldn’t get in. From the street she could hear the car still running in the garage.”

“And they are sure there was no-one else involved?”

“There was no-one else around...”

“...at least there was no-one when they were found...”

“I saw a picture of Suzie on television.”

“So did I.”

“They were doing a survey of his business interests. He owned several apartment blocks in town, and The Castle, it seems.”

“He had an interest in The Castle...”

“They said on the news that he owned the lot.”

I was momentarily dumbfounded, but not surprised, of course. What worried me was who might own it now.

“And he owned most of those new high-rise blocks along the Rincon. And then there was Paradise. That was another shady place with all sorts of things going on... ”

“He was a bit insatiable.”

“And he’s been buying up vast areas of campo up in the hills. There’s been talk that...”

“He wanted to establish a private venture in power generation from wind farms, power that he would sell to the distributors. I know all about that, Ted.”

“Don, you are a real fount.”

I left Ted with his comforting scandal. He was now better informed and would no doubt share everything I’d said over the phone before the hour was out. It was around five to at the time. Everything was suddenly a lot clearer. The market had expanded. There was competition around. Pedro was calling the shots and they were being misdirected. Someone wanted them better aimed. I had suspected for some time where Mick Watson’s false wealth might originate. But I still had no real idea how the individual forces linked up. Now I knew. Surely, I retained my goal in life. Twelve inches.