Sins of the Father: MANTEQUERO BOOK 3 (4 page)

IV

He was standing on the mountain, the wind whipping at his clothes, looking down at the little village, and the shadow man was standing beside him. “Ignacio, my son,” he said. “You will come to me. You must come to me and set me free, and together we shall feed on the food of the gods.” He wanted to say, ‘That is not my name,’ but the words would not come. Instead he watched in horror as the man turned to face him and he saw his face for the first time. He saw his face . . . and it was his own!

Rupert sat up in bed, wreathed in a cold sweat, barely able to hold in the scream. The sheets were damp and twisted around his limbs.

Somehow this seemed worse than all the previous dreams.

He knew that he was only dreaming this. It wasn’t really his dead father calling to him. And there was no doubt that his father
was
dead. His mother and Auntie Alison had told him.  And just so there would be no doubt about it, after the villagers killed the Mantequero,
Auntie Alison had said,
they staked him and cut his head off.
She hadn’t actually seen the last bit. She had turned away in horror and disgust and helped take his mother back down the mountain. But it seemed unlikely, didn’t it, that anyone could have survived that?  Even Rasputin would have had a job to survive that.

Once his mother had decided Patsy was right, she had turned into a whirlwind of activity. Within the hour she had booked their flight, arranged for her friend, Johan, to rent them one of his holiday villas, and ordered a taxi to take them to the airport. Then she instructed them all to pack a bag for a few days and be ready to go by three o’ clock. The plane would be leaving at seven and they had to be at the airport two hours before.

Once Rupert had packed his bag, she had insisted that he went to bed, overriding his objections that he would never sleep. He had been hoping to get on his laptop and research Caserones. He wanted to see whether it looked like the place in his dream.

But his mother was adamant, insisting he needed to get some sleep before the journey.

So much for that idea. After the dream he just had he felt like he never wanted to sleep again.

“Rupert,” his mother called up the stairs, “are you ready? The taxi will be here in a quarter of an hour.”

He got out of bed, leaving the sheet in a tangled heap, and headed for the shower. His bag was packed, his clothes were ready.

“Down in five minutes, Mum.”

****

“What did your Mum say?”

They were on the plane. The sun had come up just as they
had taken off and now they were high in the air looking down at the vineyards and cornfields of France.

Samantha pursed her lips. “She wasn’t best pleased. She couldn’t understand why I would suddenly want to hare off to Spain without any notice. I thought about telling her it was a school trip for the Spanish class, but then I realised there was no way she was going to buy that, so I told her your Mum had got a last minute bargain and offered to take us. She was still a bit uncertain, but then when I said Mrs Winton was coming as well, she caved in and even gave me some holiday money. Look!”

She had taken her purse out of her bag and pulled out a bundle of fifty euro notes. “Good God!” Rupert said. “How on earth did she get hold of all those euros after the banks had closed?”

“She already had them,” Samantha said with a smug smile, “from when we go to France. She keeps a load of them in her dressing table drawer.”

“Blimey,” said Rupert, and closed his eyes. Samantha watched him for a while. His face was white and strained. Then she turned away to look out of the window at the world below, impossibly far away, rising now towards the mountains.

****

Heather’s friend, Johan, met them in the bar at Orgiva. He hadn’t changed much in the nearly twenty years that had passed since she had last seen him. His hair was perhaps a bit more white than grey and he may have had a few more wrinkles but otherwise he looked the same – tall, lean and fit.
How old must he be now?
Heather wondered.
In his sixties at least. Maybe in his seventies.
And then she thought,
It’s us who’ve changed.

“Heather!” Johan took her in his arms and gave her the traditional Spanish kiss, one on each cheek. Heather beamed back at him.

“You look amazing! So slim and shapely. You could be a model. I can hardly believe you’re the same person.”

Heather looked down at herself with evident satisfaction.  She could hardly remember what it had been like to have been so fat. “I never put the weight back on,” she said. “Not even when I had Rupert.”

She looked across at her son, who came forward with his hand outstretched. Johan gave a start and stepped back a pace, his face registering shock.

“It’s all right,” Heather said. “He looks like him, but he doesn’t have the same – er -propensities.” She gave an uncharacteristically nervous laugh. “This is Rupert.”

Johan recovered himself very quickly and smiled at the boy. For a moment there he had thought it really was him, the Mantequero – back from the dead – but he could see now that it could not be the same person. For a start, the boy was much younger. The man he remembered had been a fully-grown adult. The boy was tall, but not as tall as the Mantequero, who had been the same height as Johan himself. The boy had to look up to meet his eyes.

“Pleased to meet you, Sir,” he said and Johan immediately warmed to him. So polite. So unusual in the young people of today. He ignored the proffered hand and gave him the full Andalusian hug and double kiss. Rupert looked startled but didn’t flinch away.

Then Johan greeted the others. He told Alison she hadn’t changed a bit, then turned his charm on Patsy. “And I can’t believe this is the little girl who came here to see her Auntie’s grave. You have grown into such a beauty.”

He felt another twinge of anxiety when he saw Samantha. She was undeniably fat. Not so fat as Heather had been, but nevertheless . . . He sincerely hoped the boy didn’t take after his father.

“He doesn’t take after his father,” Alison whispered, as if reading his thought. “They’ve been going out together for months now. If he took after his father she wouldn’t still be fat.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Johan whispered back. “It just took me by surprise.”

Alison laughed at him and called over the waiter.

“Well,” said Johan, standing up and wiping his lips, “if we’re going to get to Caserones while the bar is still open we ought to go now. We can stop off at the ranch on the way and drop your luggage off. I’ve given you the big villa by the pool. It’s got three bedrooms.”

“Great,” Heather said, hauling Alison out of her seat. She was still a bit shell-shocked from the drive up the mountain. Of all of them, she was the only one who was afraid of heights. Samantha thought this was rather amusing, since in every other respect she would have said that Mrs Winton was the most practical of the lot.

She leaned over towards Patsy. “How did she manage when she brought you here to see your Auntie’s grave?” Patsy watched as Alison allowed herself to be led reluctantly to the car. “If I remember correctly, we hired a taxi and she sat in the back with me and didn’t look out of the window.” She grinned. “I think she may have gibbered slightly.”

Samantha returned her smile and then went over to Rupert.

“Are you all right?” she whispered. “You look awful.” His face had paled so much it had a greenish-grey tinge. “Are you feeling sick?”
“No. Well, yes, but it’s nothing physical.” Samantha looked at him sympathetically. “It must be awful, coming to confront your father now you know what he was.”

“What he
is,
”  Rupert said, taking her by the arm and swinging her to face away from the others, who were just getting into the car. “Sam, I can hear him. Now we’ve got closer. I can hear him calling me. And I’m still awake!” His voice rose on the last few words and Samantha shushed him, shooting an anxious glance at the others.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

****

It was lunchtime and Rafa’s bar was crowded. Alison strained to look over the heads of the diners but she couldn’t see Rafa, only two young men dashing between the tables, serving steaming dishes and chatting merrily with the customers. She couldn’t immediately see any spare seats, but one of the waiters came over and directed her to a table in the corner. It was only intended for four, but he managed to squeeze in another two chairs
, and they all sat down.

“I was looking for Rafa,” Alison said. The young man grinned at her, his teeth shockingly white against his tanned skin. “I’m Rafa,” he said. For a moment she was nonplussed and then she realised this must be Rafa’s son.

“No, I meant your father.” The boy frowned. “I am so sorry,” he said, “but my father is down the mountain buying fish.”
Alison’s face fell. “Oh dear,” she said. “When will he be back?”

The boy glanced at the clock on the wall and shrugged. “I don’t know. An hour, maybe.”

Johan clapped his hands together. “Just nicely in time for us to have lunch while we wait.” He beamed at the assembled company and smiled up at the waiter. “What have we got for the menu del día?”

Rafa came in nearly two hours later. By then everyone except Rupert was stuffed, having eaten large bowls of gazpacho with crusty bread, followed by paella, followed by crème caramels – the whole washed down with copious glasses of wine. Rupert and Samantha had been allowed tinto de verano, red wine mixed with lemonade, and were both feeling a little drunk, particularly Rupert, who had eaten hardly anything.

The waiter ran over to his father and began to gesticulate in the direction of their table.

Rafa looked over and his face lit up as he saw Heather and Alison, both of whom were waving enthusiastically. He hurried across, wiping his hands on his trousers as he came.

“Alison!” He shouted, as she and Heather both stood up at once, nearly upsetting the table. There was a flurry of hugging and kissing of cheeks, then he turned to be introduced to the others, saw Rupert and gasped with shock, backing away from them and making the sign of the evil eye.
The noisy conversation in the bar ceased as abruptly as if someone had pulled a switch, and all eyes turned to Rafa, who had backed up into a corner and was shaking with fear, still making the sign of the evil eye, his finger trembling as it pointed at Rupert.

Rupert had stood up and was looking round wildly, as if he were seeking an avenue of escape. Slowly, as if they were all being pulled by the same string, the eyes of the customers swung round to Rupert and the crowd drew in a collective sharp breath.

Samantha and Heather both moved protectively in front of him, and Alison went across to Rafa.
“It’s not him,” she said. “It just looks like him. You know it can’t be him. You killed him, didn’t you? You killed him yourself. You and the others. I was there. I saw.” She turned to look back at Rupert. “Look at him! He is just a boy. You can see he is not the same.”

Rafa looked at her, his eyes staring so wide that the whites showed all the way round. He reminded Alison of a frightened horse. When he spoke it was in a gruff whisper. “What is he?”

“He is Heather’s son. He is called Rupert.” Rafa gave her a searching look and then turned his attention back to Rupert.

Everyone stopped breathing for a heartbeat and the scene froze in Samantha’s memory, like a still from a film. The huge man cowering in the corner, his hands raised in the sign of the evil eye, Mrs Winton looking up at him pleadingly, the waiters halted in mid-serve, their trays suspended above their heads, the customers staring in horror and disbelief at the boy
beside her – and Rupert himself, trembling like a young deer, backed against the wall with his hands flat out behind him.

Then time sped up again. Rafa slumped down, his sons put down their trays and ran towards him, the customers began talking again, mainly in whispers, with many glances and gesticulations
towards Rupert. Samantha heard the word ‘mantequero’ repeated many times.

“Come on, Papá.” The young Rafa helped his father to his feet and sat him at a nearby table, the other men moving their chairs aside to make space. The other boy had rushed over carrying a flagon and poured his father a large glass. Rafa knocked it back in one gulp and smacked the glass back down on the table. The boy filled it again.

“Rafa.” Alison had followed him to the table and now squatted in front of him so their eyes were level. “We need your help. I need you to tell me something.”

Rafa turned his eyes towards her but said nothing, merely taking another deep draught of the spirit.

“I have to know whether you did kill him properly. Did you stake him and cut off his head?”
Rafa put his glass back down on the table, put his head in his hands and groaned.
“Aah, no. No I could not. I staked him, yes. And it was so hard. All the time he was looking at me. His face – he had such a beautiful face – and so sad. It broke my heart. I cannot tell you how hard it was. As I hammered in the stake, he shuddered and he opened his eyes and he spoke.”
Alison was listening with horrid fascination, unable to take her eyes off the old man.