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someone’s full name. But Mima was rather different. She seemed to be just an appendage of Stuart Pedrell at first, the typicallycultured and affected wife of a rich and cultured man. She never dropped her social airs, even when she was sitting here. But she never gabbled. She’s been a different woman since her husband disappeared. She’s brought so much energy into the business that the partners are even getting a bit concerned. Stuart Pedrell was easier to work with.’
    ‘And Viladecans?’
    ‘I only see him when he has to pay me. He’s the typical smart-arsed lawyer who helps the boss keep his hands clean.’
    ‘Girlfriends?’
    ‘That’s a very delicate area. What are you interested in? Past, present, or more wine?’
    ‘Wine and the present.’
    Artimbau brought another bottle.
    ‘It’s my last one of this vintage.’ He spilt a little as he filled Carvalho’s glass. ‘The most recent one is called Adela Vilardell. She was more or less permanent. But there were also plenty of short-term relationships—younger than most people would think acceptable. Stuart Pedrell had passed the fifty mark, and he favoured the classical style of erotic vampirism. I can set you on the trail of Adela Vilardell, but not of the one-nighters.’
    ‘Did you know him well?’
    ‘Yes and no. A painter can get to know these types quite well, especially if they’re clients. They bare their souls … and their pockets. It’s a revealing dual operation.’
    ‘The South Seas?’
    ‘His obsession. I think he’d been reading a poem about Gauguin, and he started to pursue the myth. He even bought a copy of the George Sanders film—
The Moon and Sixpence
I think it’s called—and screened it at home.’
    Carvalho handed him the sheet of verse that he had found among Stuart Pedrell’s papers. He translated the line from
The Waste Land
.
    ‘Do you know where these lines in Italian could come from?Can you see any hidden meaning? Maybe something Stuart Pedrell said to you?’
    ‘I often heard him say: “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” It was his pet phrase. The Italian doesn’t remind me of anything special, though.’

    Stuart Pedrell had lived in a house on the Puxtet, one of the hills which used to overlook Barcelona, in the same way that the Roman hills used to dominate Rome. Now it is carpeted with flats for the middle bourgeoisie, interspersed with the occasional penthouse occupied by an upper bourgeoisie that has some sort of relation to the older inhabitants of Puxtet’s surviving mansions. It had become the custom among the owners of the surviving mansions to provide their offspring with a duplex apartment close to home, a pattern repeated on the fringes of Pedralbes and Sarriá, the last bastion of an upper bourgeoisie clinging to its dignified towers. They too preferred to have their little ones close to hand.
    Stuart Pedrell had inherited the turn-of-the-century house from a childless great aunt. It was the work of an architect influenced by the ironwork styles current in Britain at the time. Even the gates were a statement of principle, and an ornamental iron crest like the mane of some glazed dragon ran along the ridge of the tiled roof. Neo-Gothic windows; an ivy-covered façade; whitewood furniture with blue upholstery in a trim and disciplined garden. The elegance of a tall hedge of cypress framed the controlled freedom of a cluster of pine trees and the precise geometry of a little maze made of rhododendrons. Underfoot, turf and gravel. A polite sort of gravel, that crunched discreetly under your feet. Turf that must have been nearly a hundred years old: well-fed,brushed and trimmed, a green, springy velvet on which the house seemed to float, as on a magic carpet. Black and white table trimmings, in silk and pique. A gardener dressed in the clothes of a Catalan peasant; a butler with symmetrical sideburns and a striped waistcoat. Carvalho noted that the chauffeur who got into the