A Dead Man in Barcelona Read Free Page A

prickly.’
    She set off across the room.
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
    She was back, however, after two steps.
    ‘Why do you want to know about Lockhart?’ she demanded.
    ‘Friends are interested in what happened to him,’ he said. ‘Friends in England,’ he added with emphasis.
    ‘Tell them to go on being interested,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tell them to ask questions and go on asking questions. In the end someone’s got to answer.’
    The conversation in the café resumed.
    ‘You see?’ said the elderly man. ‘You see now how it was?’
    ‘I am sorry,’ said Seymour. ‘I did not mean to upset her.’
    The man shrugged.
    ‘She’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘It may even help her.’
    He got up from the table and put out his hand.
    ‘Marques,’ he said. ‘Ricardo Marques.’
    ‘Seymour.’
    ‘Do what she says: go on asking questions. Perhaps we will be able to help you.’
    He shook Seymour’s hand once more.
    He shook Seymour’s hand once ‘We shall meet again,’ he said.
    An hour later Seymour was walking up Las Ramblas with Chantale. As it left the port area the street opened up and became an airy boulevard crowded with people. They seemed in no particular hurry, stopping frequently to chat with acquaintances or study the great bunches of flowers hung above the flower stalls. There were flowers everywhere, not just on the stalls but spread out in swathes of colour along the side of the road and bunched in miniature fields at the foot of the trees: roses, sweetpeas, carnations, chrysanthemums and great streaked tiger lilies whose powerful scent reached out right across the boulevard.
    Everywhere, too, there seemed to be street performers, fire-eaters, jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and strange figures straight from a carnival, huge figures sometimes on stilts with grotesquely large papier-mâché heads. A Spanish word came into his mind: cabezudos . That’s what they must be, cabezudos , the bizarre, capering figures that were part of every procession at carnival time.
    The whole street was like a carnival. There were floats, there were musicians, there were clowns. From the floats people in bright costumes were throwing sweets for the children. The children dashed in among the cabezudos to retrieve the sweets and the cabezudos affected to trip over them. Everyone was laughing. Surely this must actually be a carnival? But no. He learned later that every day was like that on Las Ramblas.
    Chantale, responding to the mood, had unbound the headscarf she normally wore in Tangier, even when she was in European dress, and let her hair fall down on to her shoulders.
    If she had done that in Morocco it would have caused a riot. For some reason a woman’s hair seemed especially sexually inflammatory to Arabs.
    But here, on Las Ramblas, Chantale suddenly felt a great expansion of personal freedom, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She let her hair fall and felt as if she had come out into the sunshine.
    Seymour had been recommended a hotel in a small square off Las Ramblas. The square was little more than a patch of baked mud surrounded by apartment blocks. The blocks were three or four storeys high and many had rooms with little balconies fenced in by a kind of iron fretwork. Children played on the balconies and from time to time women dressed in black would come out and pick one up. Then they would lean on the balcony and monitor events in the plaza below. There was a play area in one corner of the plaza and perhaps they were keeping an eye on other offspring.
    Seymour suspected that a good deal of monitoring went on in the square. He knew that his arrival in the square earlier that day had been noticed and now Chantale’s arrival with him was registered too. When he had asked for a room he had wondered whether to make it a double room but the suspicious eye of the proprietor suggested that it might be unwise. She was one of the landladies, he felt sure, who could tell at once