After the showdown at the bar with Ricardo, I kind of forgot about the whole thing and indeed congratulated myself on getting some work done for nothing. It made a change us owing someone else money rather than the other way around.
Patrick, who lived near Ricardo and had the occasional drink with him later filled us in on a few facts about Ricky, notably that he had joked with Patrick that he saw it as his job to part the guiris from their money. To help him in this quest he would fawn around every British person he came into contact with, playing the part of the local peasant and buying them beers in the hope of winning their trust, so that he could later fleece them. Before I knew this, I would occasionally be found propping up the bar with him.
A month after we'd seen him with his son and Sid, we arrived at the casa after dropping the children off at school only for Benjamin to say that the sand delivery hadn't come at eight that morning. He offered to ring the suppliers.
'Que pasa? It was ordered for today,' he was saying.
'Que? It was cancelled? Who cancelled it? Ah...'
Ricardo had offered to arrange sand deliveries for us; he would order the sand and then wait at the bar at 8am, get the receipt and give it to us. We would then arrange payment. I assume now that this was some kind of scam, whereby he got back-handers. And now he had cancelled it to try and disrupt our work.
'No te preocupes,' Benjamin said. 'Don't worry. We'll get on with something else today and I've arranged for them to bring it tomorrow. I've told them I'm in charge of ordering it from now on and not to listen to anything Ricardo says.'
By now, Ricardo's cousin had told us that the whole procedure of taking the stone to our piece of land so that it could then be brought back in via dumper truck was a ploy by Ricardo to make more money out of us. People in the know would be thinking we were fools.
He clarified:
'Why would you get it delivered outside the village? It's just loco! As long as you get it taken straight down of course it can be left in the street above the house.'
So we arranged for the next delivery at a designated spot where it would get in nobody's way and from where we could get the Romanians to wheel-barrow it down. We met the lorry driver on the main road, paid the 140 euros and the labourers started shifting it. A quarter of an hour later, there was a knock on the door. The village policia local Juan, was standing there.
'I understand you've had a load of stones left on the road. That's not allowed and you'll have to move them immediately,' he said.
'Que casualidad!' I said to him. 'What a coincidence! That's the first time we've ever done anything like that and you know about it immediately! But don't worry, because it's being brought straight down to us as we speak.'
'Christ,' I said to Adrian when Juan had gone. 'Isn't it amazing that you can never find that guy when you need him, he never has time to do anything you ask him to do - in fact, he's flipping useless, but the minute we do something slightly dodgy he's on us like a ton of bricks?'
When we bumped into Patrick later that day, he said:
'Ah, I wondered what Ricardo was up to this morning. He was standing at the entrance to the village, like he was meeting someone there, which I thought was strange. And then I saw him talking to Juan the copper and pointing. You know Juan's one of Ricardo's cousins, don't you? He must have been telling on you!'
The final straw came when, one day around 11am we came out of the casa to find Ricardo, his son and Sid had parked their van to block in our car. They were standing there like a bunch of mafiosi.
'Get out of the way!' Adrian said and they sniggered.
'Hey, you think you're the big guy, do you?' I said to the son, as he wagged his finger at me and demanded that we pay his father a thousand euros.
'There's no way we're paying it,' I said. We were on a slope, which made his six foot something seem even bigger, so I moved my five foot three to be above him and said, 'Look! I'm taller than you now!'
'Come on Adrian,' I said then, 'let's get in the car, before they try anything.'
We climbed in and Adrian beeped a few times, but they wouldn't move the van. In the end he put his hand on the horn and kept it there. A few neighbours came out to see the fun. in the end Ricardo and the other two got in the van and drove off.
(A year later they nearly killed the lot of us. We were performing a three-point turn to get onto the track to our cortijo which was the only way to do it, when their larger work van came right up behind us, and if Adrian hadn't quickly manoeuvred they would have smashed into the four of us, hitting the back of the car first, where our five and six-year olds were.)
To see the end result of all the work on the casa, take a look at the house now:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271