by Jill Downie
The yacht shifted suddenly, and there was silence from the salon. Moretti heard Beaufort-Jones say, “What was that?” He sounded jumpy. Garth’s reply was unclear, but he gave a laugh so full of terror it seemed to infect his two visitors.
“What’s wrong with you?” Van der Velde’s voice.
Beaufort-Jones’s voice: “We leave first. You wait thirty minutes before you leave.”
Van der Velde spoke again. “How do we know you haven’t set us up, Machin? Maybe we should take a look around.”
To his horror, Moretti heard Garth start to stutter.
Christ almighty. Garth’s improvisation under stress was a talent limited to his horn-playing. Van der Velde repeated his question, this time accompanied by what sounded like a fist in the face. Garth cried out.
Moretti was unarmed. His choice, but also that of the experts, who wanted to know how recently he had fired a weapon. His answer had confirmed their decision, but now he wished he had one. How long could he crouch there, doing nothing, while Garth got beaten up trying to protect him? As Garth moaned again in pain, Moretti started to get up.
As he did so a hand came out of the darkness across his mouth and, with it, the faintest whisp of a familiar aroma: apricot essence and honey, a touch of Turkish latakia.
A familiar voice muttered in his ear. “No.”
Ludo. Ludo, wet and smooth against his body as a seal, reeking of harbour water.
“Wait.”
He pushed Moretti away and down, and started to move toward the open glass doors, his body flat against the floor. A moment later, it was all over.
“I could do with some of that, Garth. Pass me the bottle.”
Ludo tossed his gun on to the coffee table and started to strip off the wetsuit he was wearing. Garth, hand shaking, held out the bottle to him.
“For God’s sake, Ludo,” Moretti protested, “SIS must have heard the shots. They could be here any minute.”
Moretti looked at the two bodies lying on the floor. Beaufort-Jones’s face was turned toward him. He looked as if he were grinning. Joke over, Game-Boy, thought Moretti, he had you both in seconds. What a killer Ludo must have been. Still was.
“Not likely. They’ll be waiting for these two SOBs to come to them. Yes, they’ll have heard the shots, and they’ll be thinking it was Garth dead, or you dead, or both of you. They’ll wait a bit before they do anything they haven’t planned, which is why I want you both to shut up and let me talk. Okay?”
Moretti shrugged his shoulders, the tension in them making them feel like lead weights. The bump on his head was hurting like hell. “Whatever you want. You’re the guy with the gun, and you’re the one on the firing line, so to speak. You had the gun under the wetsuit? Risky.”
Ludo took a swig from the whisky bottle. “That’s good stuff,” he said, sounding as relaxed as if the three of them were in his sitting room. “Yes, but their wetsuits are superb quality, so I left mine here and took one of theirs on my earlier visit.”
“You were here before. I wondered.”
“I know you did. You got some of it right, and some of it wrong.”
Ludo ran a hand through his wet, rumpled hair and over his face. Moretti could not see his own face, but if he looked anything like Garth he had aged a decade. Ludo, on the other hand, looked years younger, the dark shadows under his child-bright eyes erased.
“What did I get wrong?” he asked.
Ludo laughed. “Motivation. All this —” Ross swept his hand around the room, gesturing at the two bodies on the floor “— is not because this gang couldn’t shoot straight, or because money is the root of all evil, or —” looking at Garth “— a horn player’s greed. All that might well have worked out just fine in the end. These are all by-products of two big mistakes made by Masterson.”
“Coming here would be one of them.”
“Exactly. Nowhere in this world is the back of beyond any more.”
“And his other mistake was to underestimate the power of memory.” Moretti stretched across the table and took the bottle. Drinking good Scotch with Ludo was something they had both enjoyed. “I think I got that right, Ludo. You killed Masterson for Coralie. That looks like a Glock to me.” He indicated the gun on the table between them.
“It is.” Ludo appeared delighted. “Almost, but not quite, Ed. Right about the power of memory, but much too unsatisfying to do it myself. Too easy. It was like the old days, planning to kill him.”
“How the hell did you find out he was coming here? I knew, because I was supposed to collect the money from him, for the diamonds.” Garth’s voice was slurred, but he seemed more under control, looking Ludo straight in the face as he spoke, no longer huddled into the corner of his chair.
If anyone looked in the window of the salon, it would look like three chums together, sharing a bottle of Scotch, and a few good stories. If you overlooked the bodies on the floor between them, that is.
“Chance. I was talking to the harbour master — he’s a bird watcher, like me — and he happened to mention the Just Desserts, and Masterson. I knew who he was, because Coralie had told me about him. When I told her, she said, ‘If this was still the war, I would kill him for killing Ronnie.’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ I knew how I could get on board without being picked up by the CCTV cameras, but Coralie was the problem. Swimming in a wetsuit was impossible for her, of course.”
“What was all that with the Baby Browning?”
“Her idea. Hiding in plain sight was something she did so well in the bad old days. We planned it to the second, the visit to the Landsend, the area on the dock where she could get on board the yacht outside the camera range. Those cameras focus on the pier, not the gangway.”
“And, within the range of the cameras, she gave one of her finest performances,” said Moretti. “A frail old woman, frightened out of her skin, throwing the wrong gun into the harbour.”
“Didn’t she though!” Ludo stood up suddenly, and startled his audience by picking up his gun and starting to pace about the salon. “She even planned her wardrobe carefully. ‘My Poiret,’ she said. ‘There’s no mistaking a Poiret.’ She already had the Baby Browning, a gift from Ronnie before he died.” Ludo laughed, and waved the gun with cheerful abandon. Garth shrunk back again into the corner of his chair.
“Did she just turn up at the yacht?”
“No. She had a note hand-delivered, with her phone number. Masterson called her back, tried to warn her off, then agreed to see her that night. I assume the meeting with these boyos —” indicating the two men on the ground “— was much later on, and she threatened to screw everything up. I imagine he hadn’t planned to stick around after the meeting. He was already in their bad books from what he said to her before I came on the scene.”
“Then you handed over the gun to her. I guessed that.”
“You guessed right, Ed — and, guess again whose gun this is?”
Ludo did not give Moretti time to reply. He was pacing around the salon, reliving the moment when he and Coralie Fellowes had orchestrated the final act of Masterson’s life. “I arrived in here, much as I did just now. Masterson was spinning his Glock around as if he were Clint Eastwood. ‘Silly old bitch,’ I heard him saying. Such a pleasure to see his face when I caught the gun in mid-flip and handed it over to Coralie.” Ludo chuckled. “Candy from a baby, Ed. Candy from a baby mothball.”
“How did you get him to the bedroom, and why?”
Ludo laughed and sat down again, resting his hands on his knees, cradling the gun. “Simple. She backed him up into his bedroom, the old lecher, and shot him there. Always loved to add her own original twist, did Coralie, and bedrooms were her battleground, where she fought the enemy, in the old days. She asked me to say some last words over him, as he lay there begging for his life. So I did.”
“What did you say, Ludo?” Garth reached out for the bottle again, and drank the last drop. He seemed genuinely interested, drunk enough now to be calm.
“The grave’s a fine and private place. But none, I think, do there embrace.” Ludo laughed again. “Coralie loved it. ‘Perfect,’ she said. Then she shot him, clean as a whistle. I was amazed she could still hit the target from that distance.”
“Then you came back in here and drank champagne,” Moretti said. “Wasn’t there the danger his visitors would turn up?”“
“Yes.” Ludo smiled. “It added to the moment, for both of us. Then I watched her leave to do her performance for you all, swam back to where I had left my car, drove it to our prearranged rendezvous, and took her home.” He was reliving the moment, the adrenalin rush. “She was tired, but happy — God, it was such fun!”
“The lipstick stain was deliberate, I assume.”
“Yes. She wore gloves, but the lipstick was a nice touch. ‘Coralie was here, Ronnie,’ she said when she pressed her lips against the glass. ‘Coralie was here.’”
“What happened to her gloves and her bag?”
Ludo’s smile was tender. “A gift for me, a memento. A souvenir.”
A souvenir. A blank space on a small table, a photograph of a glorious, naked Coralie, a faded inscription.
“It was you.” Moretti stood up. In the distance he could hear an approaching craft of some kind. “You took the photo off the table.”
“Yes. She wanted me to take it, after I did what she asked me to do. It was one of Ronnie’s favourites. She was very tired, very sleepy when she phoned me.” Ludo was still smiling, stroking the gun as he answered.
“You loved her, Ludo. How could you?”
“How could I not, Ed? I could never refuse her anything.”
Ludo also seemed to become aware of sounds outside. He put his hand into an inside pocket of the zippered jacket he was wearing under the wetsuit and pulled out an envelope. “This is for Liz. Give it to her, would you? Not much time left, but she knows what happened at my place and can fill you in, and that there’s a young idiot there, locked in my very secure bathroom. There’s a key in the envelope, and a safe combination. And something I want her to do.”
Moretti took it, put it in his pocket. Garth began to sob, and Ludo went over and knelt down in front of him. Speaking gently, as if to a child, he said, “Not to worry, Garth. Being a decoy for MI6 can be used in your defence, a good lawyer will see to that. And I have saved them the problem of disposing of these two, without a public enquiry. But that still makes me a triple murderer.”
“Ludo —” Moretti looked at the two bodies lying between them “— no need to say you killed Coralie Fellowes. We have two likely suspects who cannot answer.”
“No.” Ludo sounded angry. “I don’t want that. Don’t ask me to explain.”
“You don’t have to. It was her last wish, what she wanted from you. You could never refuse her anything, and it would be a betrayal. Here —” Moretti held out his hand “— give me the gun. You don’t need that anymore. Best not to be holding that when SIS arrive.”
Ludo hesitated, then handed the gun to Moretti. “I thought of ending it all myself, the final, grand gesture, but I am not as brave as Coralie. I think I’d rather face the music, Ed.” He grinned. “Should be fun, and fun is in short supply in my life.”
Moretti took the gun from him, checked it, removed the remaining bullet. “I know who the idiot in your bathroom is, but how do we get past your hounds? What are the secret commands you use with them? We’ll need to know.”
“No secret commands, Ed. Like me, they were trained to kill when asked, and that’s all I needed to say to them. Kill. You won’t need to worry. I’ve seen to that. They would never have obeyed anyone else.”
Even in the soft lamplight of the salon, Ludo now looked like a very old man, his face worn and creased with pain.
“One of the hardest things I have ever done in my life,” he said.
Then he walked out of the salon, hands in the air, and faced the music.
Chapter Eighteen
The aftermath seemed to take forever. In actual fact, it took about a week. Intelligence services do not like hanging around in public places while onlookers stare, comment, and, worse still, take photographs. The bodies — all the bodies — the yacht, Adèle Letourneau, and Ludo Ross were swiftly removed from the scenes of their crimes. No one was happier about that than Chief Officer Hanley.
But for Moretti, there was one loose end he was anxious to clear up, a loose end that was of no importance to either MI5 or MI6, but that was nagging him.
Offshore Haven Cred.
The dead could not speak, and Ludo insisted he had not pulled the brochure from the magazine rack.
“Not even to provide us with a red herring?”
“Never entered my mind, Ed. My word of honour,” he said, which had made them both laugh.
Which left only Adèle Letourneau.
“Yes,” she said, “I removed it.”
Sitting in his office, just before she was to leave the island, she looked her age. More than that. She looked empty, almost vacuous, a sense of loss clinging to her. Finally, the jig was up.
“Why?” Moretti asked.
“Because it was yet another of Bernard’s grand schemes that had put us at risk. You’ll put us in an early grave, I told him, more than once. Ulbricht and Baumgarten were our babysitters, keeping an eye on us for those three bastards and, as far as I knew, they didn’t know about Offshore Haven and I wanted to keep it that way. But he’d talked about it to that cretin, Martin Smith. Just before I left the yacht that night, I pulled the brochure out of the magazine rack and destroyed it. I thought then he had a chance of making it through, because they needed him, and it would take time to — replace him.” Adèle Letourneau laughed, her face contorting with what looked like grief. “What I didn’t know was that he had set up a meeting with a madwoman. And a madman.”
“But he didn’t know about the madman, did he?”
“No. That was Bernard’s trouble. He had balls of brass, and the foresight of a baby, my bébé boule à mite.” Her voice was caressing. She leaned toward Moretti, confidentially. “And she — she did what she was always good at, she got a man to do what she wanted.”
Moretti thought about Ludo’s words. It was just like the old days. And, more chillingly, the murder of a woman he had once loved. I could never refuse her anything, he had said.
Masterson’s housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. “He was mad, you know, that Ross. Like Ulbricht and Baumgarten, he was a killer. That was not about love, Detective Inspector. That was not about love.”
Moretti and Falla sat drinking coffee in the Commercial Arcade after a lengthy debriefing at Hospital Lane, prolonged by Jimmy Le Poidevin’s complaints about lack of cooperation, lack of foresight, and lack of input. He had finally been silenced by Chief Officer Hanley himself.
“I suggest, Jimmy, that you take your complaints to MI6. I have no names, but I can give you their address.”
It had given them both something to laugh about in the car, but neither of them had felt much like laughing since then. Liz was unusually quiet in the cafe, looking out of the window at the shoppers and the first tourists in the arcade, the warm, beautiful day reflected on the cheerful faces passing by. In a month or so, the tourists would return en masse.
It was Moretti who broke the silence. “How is Nichol doing? Have you spoken to your cousin?”
Liz smiled, and took another bite of her chocolate-filled croissant. “He’s doing well, considering what they did to him, and how long it was before he got medical help.”
Moretti nodded. “From what Bras-de-Fer says, they were holed up there a while, while Ulbricht and Baumgarten — or whoever they really are — tried to make contact for instructions on what they should do next.”
“Yes. They just left Nichol for dead on the floor. Dr. Burton says he must have a skull like concrete, but myself I think he’s suffered brain damage. Apparently he has found God, so one of the nurses tells me, and is trying to get back together with his wife. My cousin is weep
ing and wailing — she has no idea how lucky she is.”
“God help the ex Mrs Watt, but perhaps she has more sense than your cousin. How is the idiot in the bathroom? They knocked him around pretty badly.”
Liz groaned. “Considering what a blubbering, weak-kneed cretin he is, he’s doing brilliantly. He’s regrouped, and reinvented himself as the hero of the moment. All kinds of women are lining up to lick his wounds for him. He’s the man who saved the day, would you believe?”
Moretti laughed. “Denny Bras-de-Fer will come out of most of life’s hornet’s nests unstung and smelling of roses.”
He looked at Liz across the table. She was running a finger around the rim of her cup, her head bent forward, so he could not see her expression. There was a sadness about her today that was totally out of character, and he assumed it was not about Denny. Tentatively he asked, “Ludo’s ‘something I want her to do for me’ — is that giving you a problem, Falla? Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” She looked up and Moretti saw to his dismay there were tears in her eyes. “Yes. Guv, I wish I could talk about it, but I’m supposed not to do that. When I’ve done — it, I’ll make my own decision.”
Moretti would have been only too happy to stop asking questions at that moment. His and Falla’s was a working relationship that — well, worked, and he wanted to keep it that way. A quiet time professionally would suit him nicely for a while, as he decided what to do about Sandy Goldstein.
He knew what he wanted to do about Sandy Goldstein. It kept him awake at nights. But the devil, as usual, was in the details. And the most disturbing detail of all was Julia King. Sandy would never move in with him, never leave her friend and colleague on her own. But perhaps that was what he wanted in a relationship, and certainly his ex-partner back on the mainland would say it was. All sex and no commitment, Val would say. Since he had not slept around while they were together, and they had been living under the same roof, he was not sure what she meant. She seemed to want from him something more, something of himself he could not give.
