Cocaine Nights. J. G. Ballard

the hill towards the old town. This small enclave behind the beachfront hotels was a lavishly restored theme village with mock-Andalucian streets, antique shops and café tables set out under the orange trees. Surrounded by a stage set, we silently sipped our iced coffees and watched the proprietor scatter a kettle of boiling water over the feral cats that plagued his customers.

      This scalding douche, another stroke of cruel injustice, promptly set me off again. Señor Danvila heard me out, nodding mournfully at the oranges above my head as I repeated my arguments. I sensed that he wanted to take my hand, concerned as much for me as he was for Frank, aware that my brother’s plea of guilty also involved me in some obscure way.

      He agreed, almost casually, that Frank was innocent, as the police’s delay in charging him tacitly admitted.

      ‘But now the momentum for conviction will increase,’ he warned me. ‘The courts and police have good reason not to challenge a guilty plea – it saves them work.’

      ‘Even though they know they have the wrong man?’

      Señor Danvila raised his eyes to the sky. ‘They may know it now, but in three or four months, when your brother comes to trial? Self-admitted guilt is a concept they find very easy to live with. Files can be closed, men reassigned. I extend my sympathies to you, Mr Prentice.’

      ‘But Frank may go to prison for the next twenty years. Surely the police will go on looking for the real culprit?’

      ‘What could they find? Remember, the conviction of a British expatriate avoids the possibility of a Spaniard being accused. Tourism is vital for Andalucia – this is one of Spain’s poorest regions. Inward investors are less concerned by crimes among tourists.’

      I pushed away my coffee glass. ‘Frank is still your client, Señor Danvila. Who did kill those five people? We know Frank wasn’t responsible. Someone must have started the fire.’

      But Danvila made no reply. With his gentle hands he broke his tapas and threw the pieces to the waiting cats.

      If not Frank, then who? Given that the police had ended their-investigation, it fell to me to recruit a more aggressive Spanish lawyer than the depressed and ineffective Danvila, and perhaps hire a firm of British private detectives to root out the truth. I drove along the coast road to Malaga, past the white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses, and reminded myself that I knew almost nothing about Estrella de Mar, the resort where the deaths had occurred. Frank had sent me a series of postcards from the Club, which portrayed a familiar world of squash courts, jacuzzis and plunge-pools, but I had only the haziest notions of day-to-day life among the British who had settled the coast.

      Five people had died in the catastrophic fire that had gutted the Hollinger house. The fierce blaze had erupted without warning about seven o’clock in the evening of 15 June, by coincidence the Queen’s official birthday. Clutching at straws, I remembered the disagreeable Guardia Civil at Gibraltar and speculated that the fire had been started by a deranged Spanish policeman protesting at Britain’s occupation of the Rock. I imagined a burning taper hurled over the high walls on to the tinder-dry roof of the villa …

      But in fact the fire had been ignited by an arsonist who had entered the mansion and begun his murderous work on the staircase. Three empty bottles containing residues of ether and gasoline were found in the kitchen. A fourth, half-empty, was in my brother’s hands while he waited to surrender to the police. A fifth, filled to the brim and plugged with one of Frank’s tennis club ties, lay on the rear seat of his car in a side-street a hundred yards from the house.

      The Hollingers’ mansion, Cabrera told me, was one of the oldest properties at Estrella de Mar, its timbers and roof joists dried like biscuit by a hundred summers. I thought of the elderly couple who had retreated from London to the peace of this retirement coast. It was hard to imagine anyone finding the energy, let alone the necessary malice, to bring about their deaths. Steeped in sun and sundowners, wandering the golf greens by day and dozing in front of their satellite television in the evening, the residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world.

      As I neared Estrella de Mar the residential complexes stood shoulder to shoulder along the beach. The future had come ashore here, lying down to rest among the pines. The white-walled pueblos reminded me of my visit to Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s outpost of the day after tomorrow in the Arizona desert. The cubist apartments and terraced houses resembled Arcosanti’s, their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time, as befitted the ageing population of the retirement havens and an even wider world waiting to be old.

      Searching for the turn-off to Estrella de Mar, I left the Malaga highway and found myself in a maze of slip-roads that fed the pueblos. Trying to orientate myself, I pulled into the forecourt of a filling-station. While a young Frenchwoman topped up my tank I strolled past the supermarket that shared the forecourt, where elderly women in fluffy towelling suits drifted like clouds along the lines of ice-cold merchandise.

      I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds – British, Dutch and German – were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations. I sensed that the Costa del Sol, like the retirement coasts of Florida, the Caribbean and the Hawaiian islands, had nothing to do with travel or recreation, but formed a special kind of willed Umbo.

      Although seemingly deserted, the pueblos contained more residents than I first assumed. A middle-aged couple sat on a balcony thirty feet from me, the woman holding an unread book in her hands as her husband stared at the surface of the swimming pool, whose reflection dressed the walls of a nearby apartment house with bands of gold light. Almost invisible at first glance, people sat on their terraces and patios, gazing at an unseen horizon like figures in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

      Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.

      I returned to my car, reassured by the distant sounds of the coastal highway. Following the Frenchwoman’s instructions, I found my way back to the Malaga signpost and rejoined the motorway, which soon skirted an ochre beach and revealed a handsome peninsula of iron-rich rock.

      This was Estrella de Mar, as generously wooded and landscaped as Cap d’Antibes. There was a harbour lined with bars and restaurants, a crescent of imported white sand, and a marina filled with racing yachts and cruisers. Comfortable villas stood behind the palms and eucalyptus trees, and above them was the liner-like prow of the Club Nautico, topped by its white satellite dish.

      Then, as the motorway turned through the coastal pines, I saw the gutted eminence of the Hollinger mansion on its hill above the town, the charred roofing timbers like the remains of a funeral pyre on a Central American mesa. The smoke and intense heat had blackened the walls, as if this doomed house had tried to camouflage itself against the night to come.

      Traffic overtook me, speeding towards the hotel towers of Fuengirola. I turned off on to the Estrella de Mar slip-road and entered a narrow gorge cut through the porphyry rock of the headland. Within four hundred yards I reached the wooded neck of the peninsula, where the first villas stood behind their lacquered gates.

      Purpose-built in the 1970s by a consortium of Anglo-Dutch developers, Estrella de Mar was a residential retreat for the professional classes of northern Europe. The resort had turned its back on mass tourism, and there were none of the skyscraper blocks that rose from the water’s edge at Benalmadena and Torremolinos. The old town by the harbour had been pleasantly bijouized, the fishermen’s cottages converted to wine bars and antique shops

      Taking the road that led to the Club Nautico, I passed an elegant