by Jill Downie
“DS Falla, get on to Hospital Lane about Mr. Smith, will you, and then continue this with Ms. Kerr in her office.” Moretti indicated the empty hotel lounge to one side of the lobby. “We’ll use this, Ms. Letourneau. I have some more questions I need answered. And gentlemen —” he looked at the two Germans “— if you could stay in the hotel for the time being?” The tone of voice made it clear this was not a request.
The hotel lounge was a small room at the front of the hotel, filled with flowery chintzes and flower paintings. There were no games and no television, just a small writing desk and a telephone. Moretti pulled out an upright chair from the desk, and turned one of the armchairs around to face it.
“Bear with me, Ms. Letourneau.” He smiled at the housekeeper.
Adèle Letourneau said nothing. She leaned back in the chair, hands resting on the padded arms, face expressionless. Equilibrium regained, Moretti thought. Let’s see what we can do about that.
He took out his mobile. “PC Brouard? That report come in? Good. Give me the gist.” He listened to the constable’s voice, watched the housekeeper’s face. Her eyes met his, cool and unflinching.
“Thanks. Have you had any joy with that password? Great. And —?”
At “password” the merest flicker of something moved through those disconcertingly pale eyes.
He put his mobile away. “So, Ms. Letourneau, the Mounties believe you are the brains of the business — for sake of a more accurate word to describe whatever it was that you and Mr. Masterson did.”
“Cochons.” Her anger seemed to Moretti to be displaced, directed against something other than her true concern. “Shouldn’t you be doing something about Martin Smith? Doesn’t it look as if the little bastard may be the one you want? We’ve only his word for it he didn’t get the gun back from Bernard, right?”
“Right. And since he’s an expert on firearms, the likelihood is that he’s scattered it, if not to the four corners of the island, then possibly to the four corners of the bottom of the harbour. So, Ms. Letourneau, tell me this — if you’re the brains, why did your deceased boss download virtually everything he could find about the hawala financial system on the net?”
“Hawala?” The housekeeper’s brow knotted in apparent confusion. “You’ve lost me, Inspector.”
“I doubt that. I’m sure you know it’s a way of moving money from one country to another based on trust, used for centuries in countries like Pakistan, India, and the Middle East.”
“Oh.” The knotted brows now unfurrowed. “Bernard was an international entrepreneur. What could be more natural than an interest in how others managed their money? What is so surprising about that?”
“His area of interest. Much of the information he was looking at dealt with the uncovering of illegally obtained funds from racketeering of various kinds, transferred by hawala. Cigarette smuggling, credit card forgery, cheque fraud.”
Adèle Letourneau looked earnest. “You have to be so careful in Bernard’s line of work, not to get caught in such schemes. He always made sure he had up-to-date information about such things.”
I’ll bet, thought Moretti.
He continued. “There were also a series of numbers on one of his files. Just numbers. Might they be bank accounts?”
“I don’t think so.” Adèle Letourneau looked amused now. “Bernard was not a whiz on the computer, but even he knew about hackers, that the Internet is not entirely safe. He loved to gamble, and often used the same combination of numbers. Perhaps that is what they are.”
“Perhaps. We will, of course, check them out.”
“Of course.”
Whatever had bothered her when she heard the word password was now under control, or what she had heard so far had put her mind at rest. They would have to send the computer away, to see if anything had been erased.
Moretti stood up. “Thank you, Ms. Letourneau. That’ll be all for now.”
“The hotel manager said something about us getting our passports back.”
She was lounging back, relaxed against the cushions of the chair, her smile now almost contemptuous.
“Not now, I’m afraid. The disappearance of Mr. Smith changes all that.”
Moretti watched with some satisfaction as Adèle Letourneau’s long, square-tipped nails clenched against the arms of the chair.
“What did the amorous Ms. Kerr have to say for herself?”
Liz Falla looked away from the road and grinned.
“Well, they were in the sack all right, and she managed to pin down the time as somewhere around six o’clock this morning. Mind you, she mightn’t want anyone to know she was carrying on during office hours. I said we’d send someone to get a statement from Shane. And Hospital Lane has sent over two constables who will stay at the hotel. No sign of Martin Smith on or around the yacht.”
“That is no surprise. Martin Smith the firearms expert is a loose cannon. I have a feeling he has miscalculated, and runs the risk of meeting his nemesis.”
“Goddess of retribution, right? Don’t look so surprised, Guv. You said that once before on our first case, and I looked it up. I always liked those Greek gods and goddesses myself. Sometimes I felt they were a lot more likely a bunch than an almighty single deity that stood on the sidelines and allowed war, famine, and pestilence to carry on regardless. Once shocked my mother to the core by saying that out loud on a Sunday.”
As they approached Glategny Esplanade, Liz Falla slowed the car.
“Looking for Brutus?” Moretti asked.
“No, actually. I was going to suggest we stopped off at my place for a sandwich or something before we get to headquarters and meet our nemesis. You know who I mean.”
Moretti hesitated before replying. Accepting the invitation crossed a line, a line he had put in place at the beginning of a partnership not of his choosing, or hers. He saw a flicker of a smile cross her face, and took it as a challenge.
“Good idea. My lunch was a couple of cupcakes. It’ll give me a chance to go over what Brouard told me on the phone.”
Liz Falla pulled the BMW alongside the crescent of houses.
“Here we are, Guv. This one’s mine.” She pointed to an olive-green door.
Falla’s flat was on the second floor up a narrow flight of stairs. She unlocked the door that led into a small living room with a large window overlooking the Esplanade, with a kitchen alcove tucked into one corner. Presumably the other doors opposite the window led to bedroom and bathroom. While she put the kettle on and got rolls, cooked meats, and cheese out of the fridge, Moretti looked around.
Presumably the room reflected its owner, although he knew virtually nothing about his partner’s private life. Aside from it including the likes of Denny Bras-de-Fer, and Ludo Ross, perhaps. He thought it was eclectic. That was what the magazines who specialized in such things as interior decorating might call it. None of the furniture matched and yet it did. The sofa was covered in a leafy print in various greens, and two armchairs were in a plain bronze fabric with a slight nacreous sheen. There was a large, kilim-covered cushion on the floor by the window on top of a square wooden frame, and a low circular brass-topped table. A high-quality sound system stood in one corner, with CD-stacked towers on each side.
Liz Falla’s guitar lay alongside its case on a narrow table against the wall near the kitchen area. It was a beauty, a Martin, with a mahogany body from the look of it, and a rosewood headplate. Moretti bent down to take a look at some of the CD titles. Much folk, some jazz, some classical, little pop. The classical, he noticed, was mostly piano.
“In case you’re wondering,” Liz Falla put down mugs and plates of food on the low table, “I do read. My bookshelves are all in the bedroom. It’s how I get to sleep at night, reading.”
“Beautiful guitar. A Martin.”
“Of course, you’d know something about guitar. I always think of you as — well, not as a pianist, if you see what I mean. My precious baby, that guitar, my one and only. Sweet as honey, a r
esonance to die for. Heaven. Help yourself.”
Liz went back to the kitchen and returned with a teapot.
“I like this.” Moretti pointed at one of the pictures on the wall nearest him.
It was of a woman in a white Victorian dress and broad-brimmed hat, standing in a verdant tropical landscape. Behind her, huge peach-like fruits hung in the trees, and pink disks centred the spidery flowers that rose behind towering ferns on each side of her, threatening to engulf the slender figure. Yet she seemed, somehow, in control, confident in her jungle setting. The signature in the corner was easily read, the artist’s identity unmistakeable.
“Rousseau. This is new to me.”
“A school friend of mine who went to the States sent it to me. It’s in some collection there. It’s called Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. I love it.”
“You see some reflection of yourself perhaps.”
“Perhaps.” She changed the subject. “What did PC Brouard have to say?”
“The Mounties got back to us about the Offshore Haven Credit Corporation. Bernard Masterson’s name appears on the letterheads of the outfit as principal financial advisor. It’s a tax shelter for the very wealthy — or, at least that’s what it’s supposed to be, only Revenue Canada won’t play along. At the moment it looks as if a few hundred investors stand to lose millions of dollars instead of being able to write them off on a fleet of floating palaces, none of which actually appear to exist.”
“Were there big names involved?” Liz Falla cut herself another chunk of cheese. “I really like this stuff. It’s called Chaume. I looked it up. It means ‘humble abode.’ Perfect, I thought.”
“Thanks.” Moretti took the piece Falla handed to him from the tip of the knife. “Yes, very big names, and some of them are dangerous customers, and all of them are very, very cross.”
“Hmm. We’d better check recent arrivals by air and by sea, hadn’t we.”
“I’ll get Brouard to do it, although if this was a professional hit man he may well have arrived on someone’s private Trilander. Hanley will be tickled pink if this is an outside job, which is what it looks like.”
“Appearances,” said his partner sagely, “can be deceiving.”
As she spoke, Moretti’s mobile rang.
“PC Brouard, speak of the devil — he is? Where? We’ll go straight over.”
Closing the mobile, Moretti picked up the rest of his roll.
“Grab your lunch, Falla —”
Before he could finish his sentence, his mobile rang again.
“Ah, Chief Officer Hanley — yes, most unfortunate, I agree — yes, I might indeed put it more strongly myself, sir, but we have other priorities at the moment. The body of Martin Smith has just been found — yes, sir, the bodyguard — and it’s certainly not an accidental death. Looks like he’s been shot with the same gun as his boss.”
On the other side of the brass-topped table, his partner’s brown eyes were as large as saucers.
“Nemesis, Guv,” she said, as he put his mobile back in his pocket. “You were right.”
Moretti stood up and took a last mouthful of Chaume.
“Well, Falla, you’ve been saved for now from Hanley’s wrath by the death of the little shit. From your point of view you could say that nothing so became le petit salaud in his sordid little life as the leaving of it.”
Chapter Seven
“What a place for a toe-rag like this to end his days.”
Moretti looked around him.
Martin Smith lay flat on his back in a flower bed of pink geraniums. Beneath the bullet hole in the centre of his forehead, his unseeing eyes seemed as nonplussed as Moretti at finding himself on the front lawn of one of the multi-million-pound homes in the exclusive enclave known as Fort George.
In Guernsey all residential properties are either “local” or “open” market, with tight restrictions on who can own what. When the offshore financial business started to boom in the eighties, a solution was found to the problem of housing those who administered it by building an enclave of lavish homes within the walls of the old seventeenth-century fort, constructed to protect the island during the Napoleonic Wars.
Even a casual visitor coming in through the gate of the old fort, or approaching by the Fermain Road entrance off Val des Terres, the steep, winding road that leads to St. Peter Port from the south, would sense its apartness from the outside island world. The speed limit is twenty miles an hour, all dogs have to be leashed, there is no street parking, no vans allowed on properties. For manicuring the lawns surrounding each bastion a gardener is a requirement, not an option. Not a child in sight, not a sign of life.
At least the lifeless body of the little shit did not disturb that particular norm, lying there in track pants and hooded jacket, which lay partly open to reveal a T-shirt with the word Bruiser writ large across his barrel chest.
“Whose property is this? Do we know?” Moretti asked PC Brouard, who was standing on the path leading to the front door of the house. The constable must have upset the entire neighbourhood when he arrived in a police van with Jimmy Le Poidevin and his team, and parked it on the street, thus breaking two bylaws.
“A Mrs. Amsterdam, Guv. She phoned us when she found him. She’d come outside to pick flowers, she said, and there he was. She’s in the house with PC Priaulx. I brought her with me when I heard where it was and that it was a female calling, if you see what I mean.”
“Good thinking, Brouard. No sign of the weapon, I suppose.”
“Not so far, but it’s a big property. The back garden stretches down as far as the cliff path above Soldier’s Bay.”
“How is the lady of the house taking it?” Liz Falla asked, standing up and brushing off her skirt. The impact of the bodyguard’s fall had displaced some of the soft, weedless soil of the flowerbed, sprinkling the enamelled green of the grass with small chunks of earth.
“Shocked. Embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” Moretti and Falla said in unison.
“That’s what it sounded like to me — you know, what will the neighbours say?”
Moretti was aware of a curtain across the road moving, but no one appeared outside the walls of his or her personal fort to question their presence on Mrs. Amsterdam’s lawn.
“Do you mind? I’m assuming you are as interested in footprints as I am, and we’re losing the light,” Jimmy Le Poidevin shouted in their direction. He and an assistant were unrolling SOC tape around the front lawn. “Nichol Watt’s on his way.”
“See how he fell?” Moretti said to Liz Falla, pointing at the body. “Right across the length of the bed. Whoever shot him came toward him from the direction of the house next to this one. He’s facing the other property. Brouard, check if there’s anyone home and, if not, find out who lives there.”
PC Brouard moved his hefty body with athletic alacrity out of the way of a constable banging a supporting pole into the pristine grass, and made his way next door.
Moretti and Falla crossed to the front door, which was locked in spite of the presence of a policewoman on the premises. The constable opened it when he rang the bell. Moretti took in the spy hole in the centre of the door, and what looked like a speaking device of some kind on a side wall. Behind the front door stretched a reception hall into which you could have dropped the whole of Falla’s humble abode. Moretti wondered if she was thinking that also.
“Sir, PC Priaulx, sir. She’s — Mrs. Amsterdam — is in here.”
“Here” was a smallish sitting room at the end of the hall, looking out on to the garden behind the house through a wall of glass. It was expensively furnished, upholstered, and decorated, yet managed at the same time to be impersonal, like a five-crown hotel suite. As they approached, Mrs. Amsterdam stood up, slowly and shakily, from a satin-covered sofa, glass in hand. Brandy, from the look of it.
“Are you in charge?” It was said in the tone of one used to being in charge herself.
Mrs. Amsterdam was a woman small in st
ature, but generously proportioned. She was fair-skinned, but the high colour in her cheeks suggested not only present emotion, but a tendency to tipple even when not confronted by violent death on her front lawn. Her hair was of an even tint not unlike the gold satin of the sofa from which she had risen. She was dressed quite formally for the time of day in a paisley-patterned silk dress and she teetered ever so slightly on her very high heels before regaining control of her balance.
“I am Detective Inspector Moretti, Mrs. Amsterdam, and this is Detective Sergeant Falla. You have had a shock.”
“I most certainly have. Sit down, Detective Inspector. I’ll sit down myself. What a dreadful sight!”
Not her kind of corpse, thought Liz Falla, and then silently reproached herself. At least Mrs. Amsterdam was not hysterical, which she might reasonably have been in the circumstances.
“Can I get you medical help, Mrs. Amsterdam?” she asked. “Phone your doctor?”
“No, but you could pour me another brandy. The decanter’s over there.”
Liz Falla fetched the heavy cut-glass decanter from a side table, where it stood on a massive silver tray with a stoppered sherry decanter and a bottle of single malt whisky. She poured a generous dollop into Mrs. Amsterdam’s glass and handed it to her. Not having been invited to sit down, she stood where she could watch Mrs. Amsterdam’s face as she answered Moretti.
“Tell me how you found him.”
“Well —” Mrs. Amsterdam fortified herself with a gulp of brandy “— I have people coming in to dinner tonight, and I’m going with the rose and gold Spode, so I wanted the pink geraniums for my Chelsea Bird.”
“Your —?”
“The china pattern, Inspector. Around a hundred pounds a plate if someone is butterfingered, but there you are. I like to do the flower arrangements myself, because we have an excellent cook who can ice a cake and cut a perfect pastry flower for a pie, but is hopeless with table decorations. One flower in a vase with one stalk of something or other is not my idea of adornment. I’m a bit rococo, and Fritz is all for minimalism, you see, so out I went with my secateurs, and there was this — person, looking straight up at me.” Mrs. Amsterdam’s voice shook, and she fortified herself some more.
