Back at the vineyard I spent a sweaty late afternoon scooping up armfuls of the kitchen lino I'd earlier ripped out, tossing them into the the van. At the communal skip I scooped it all back out again, liberated myself of the damn stuff like a snake shedding its scales. Little by little, piece by piece, old man De Ruvo's lingering stamp on the world was beginning to fade.
It was during the short drive home back along the coast road that I was surprised to receive a phone call from my daughter.
"It's not even my birthday," I commented by way of greeting as I pulled over onto the edge of an olive grove.
More than the wrinkles and the thinning hair, a sure sign of old age is when you start trying make offspring feel guilty for the irregularity of their calls.
She'd been busy with a new campaign, Ellie was quick to inform me. The market launch of a new chocolate bar, it seemed, was more of a preoccupation than her old pa.
"So..." she began, her tone the hesitant one of someone bracing themselves for a long and difficult response, "how are you dad?"
"Fine," I replied simply. Yet even to my own ears the word sounded somehow dud, as automatic as a fridge light.
An unconvinced sigh swooshed its way the length of Europe. "No, I mean, really how are you dad?"
So I considered the question seriously for a moment; considered the languid swathe of the Ionian out of the passenger window to my right, the initial glow of sunset sending peach-coloured shards skipping over the waves.
"I'm doing great Ellie," I assured her. "Really." It wasn't even a whole lie, I realised pleasantly, maybe just half a one.
"But I mean, don't you get bored?"
The question brought a rueful smile to my face. "Far too busy for that," I assured her. This time, there wasn't even the merest hint of mistruth.
Our conversation proceeded along its usual course. After winning the exchange of cross-continental weather reports - it seemed the UK was suffering one of its usual rain-tossed August bank holidays - I enquired dutifully as to the welfare of Tabatha, her demonic cat, and that of her live-in lover, Adam. Both, I was a little disappointed to hear, were doing fine. Our conversational repertoire thus exhausted, we fell into awkward silence.
It was always the same: I would wait so long for the phone to ring and then when it did wonder what a retired provincial detective and a London-based advertising executive were supposed to talk about exactly.
There was, of course, one subject matter we had in common. It had to be broached I supposed, a question of basic politeness, of feigning a continued sense of family - as much for Ellie's sake as anyone else's.
"How are your mother and..."
I faltered, my tongue blocked in my mouth. Eighteen months on, and I still couldn't bring myself to utter the sod's name.
"Gordon. His name's Gordon, dad."
"Gordon, yes." There, I'd done it. Passed the test.
"Oh, the same as always I suppose."
This was the reply of someone readily acceptant of the new status quo. A casual shrug of the shoulders, as if Heather and Gordon were an established thing, had been together for decades.
The same as always... What did it even mean, I wondered? That they were still in that sex-twice-a-day thrall of the newly married, or had already lapsed into mutual boredom?
"Taken themselves off to the Algarve for a fortnight," Ellie added. "Flew out a few days ago."
"That's nice." What the hell else was I supposed to say?
Though the pain had by then dulled to a lingering sort of bruise, I only had to cast my mind back to that black hrole of a March night to re-experience some of the original sting. Me bustling through the front door, shaking out my umbrella. Lord how I'd needed a drop of something strong. It had been another late one: gone two, maybe even gone three. The fourth victim of what the The Evening Gazzette had dubbed the Albert Park Rapist after the location of the first two incidents, although by this point crime scenes were starting to spread across the whole of Middlesbrough. Another poor shivering rag of thing unable to raise her eyes to mine, to those of any other male officer. Somebody's daughter, I couldn't help thinking. Christ, it could just as easily have been Ellie.
And there was Heather waiting for me in the living room, a ghostly figure in the flickering light of the TV screen. Had I noticed first the moisture in her eyes, I would later wonder, or the suitcase by the side of the settee? "I'm leaving you Jimmy," she'd said. Just that: straight, uninflected. Plate of sausage and mash waiting for you in the microwave. Then: "Been waiting up all night. Owed you that at least. Tell you to your face." And the craziest thing of all - although it later transpired that the whole world and its dog had been in the know - until that moment, I'd never suspected a thing.
Gordon ruddy Foster. A former neighbour of ours, next door but one. A friend of the family kind of thing. Who knew how many barbeques he'd been round to, all smiles, friendly chat. Football, work hassles, DIY.
The Albert Park Rapist would prove my last major case in active service. I was still a little short of the requisite thirty years, but to hell with maximising my pension.
*
As was my habit, I was in bed by ten that evening, up by six the following morning. Even though there was little real reason for such crack-of-dawn starts - being a winemaker wasn't quite like being a real farmer with livestock pens to swab out, cattle to milk ready for market - like many recently retired, I just didn't want to slip into bad habits I supposed: Sunday morning lie-ins becoming every day lie-ins, breakfast taken at lunchtime. Without the safety net of work places to scurry to, it's the temptation of becoming slovenly that we fear, of falling into a rut of indolence from which it would be difficult ever to escape.
Nor was there any real reason for the vine inspections I conducted immediately upon getting dressed. Indeed, I knew of other, larger wine producers - their land perhaps split over various different sites - who didn't check on their fruit for weeks or even months at a time. Between spring time spraying and autumn harvest, grapes require very little attention at all in fact. They don't even need to be irrigated; apart from insects and disease, prolonged spells of summer rain - in any case unheard of this far south - are a winemaker's only real enemy.
Those early morning strolls around the property - the dawning sun at my back, it's creamy-gold luminescence dappling through the vines - they gave me pleasure, nothing more than that. My hand reaching out every now and again to check the leaves for any signs of ill health, pop a grape in my mouth - its juices squished around my tongue, tasting the balance of sweetness and acidity. The correct moment to harvest - any time between late-August and October - is the most crucial decision of a winemaker's year.
The only low point in my morning inspections came when I reached the letterbox at the bottom of the dirt track. Any missives there waiting fell almost invariably into one of two categories: either they were utility bills or else tradesmen's invoices. Thankfully, the box was most usually empty, but not that morning. It wasn't a demand for money this time however, but instead a postcard, the picture showing a sunset view of the Alhambra in Granada. Ellie had got it wrong: Andalucia, not the Algarve.
On the flipside was my ex-wife's familiar, elegant handwriting:-
Dear Jimmy,
Having a lovely time. Hope all's well with you.
Love Heather and Gordon
P.S Looking forward to sampling the first vintage!
I read it twice, three times. Studied each word carefully, as if searching for clues, some kind of hidden code. Try as I might, nothing seemed to click. It was a thing without sense, as devoid of meaning as the twittering of a bird.
I ripped it into quarters, tossed the pieces to the morning breeze.
*
After scrambled eggs and a pot of coffee, I got started on the floor tiling. Though the fiddliest and most back-breaking of chores, I needed a distraction, something to keep visions of Andalucian hotel rooms at bay.
As I got down on my hands and knees, matchsticks serving as jointing guides, it was perhaps inevitable that my thoughts should turn to the events of the previous day.
Sarah had thus far failed to call. It had slipped her mind perhaps, too wrapped up as she must have been in her relief at her husband's safe return. She would call me later in the day no doubt, before getting on the plane home.
The tiling was meanwhile proving even slower and more laborious than I'd anticipated. My back seriously beginning to throb, I got to my feet, headed into the bathroom for a quick scrub up.
Maybe it was a vague sense of compatriotism which stirred me. Maybe, although she'd been wrong about her mother's holiday destination, Ellie had been right about one thing. Perhaps I did get a little bored sometimes.
Whichever was the case, a few moments later I'd climbed into the van, was pulling out northwards onto the coast road.
*
There being no sign of any hatchback - red, burgandy or otherwise - it was only half in expectation that I trod my way along the front path of the holiday bungalow. The four had taken themselves off into town perhaps - one last cocktail, a final stroll along the promenade, before heading back to the airport.
Approaching the front door however, poised to knock, I became aware of a faint murmur of voices from within. Still I thought little of it, the hypothesis now morphing into the equally plausible one that someone of the four had taken the hire car into town to grab a few last-minute supplies, souvenirs for family and friends.
"Oh, it's you."
The door juddered open only a second or two after the knock: Sarah, her face collapsing with disappointment. There in her hand was her mobile phone. It was almost as if, since I'd said goodbye to her the previous afternoon, it hadn't for one second left her grasp.
And in that moment it became clear. The brothers. Something had happened to them. Between them.
Something as yet impalpable, impossible to conceive...
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