Death Warmed Up

by John Paxton Sheriff

  ‘Exactly. My idea,’ Charlie said, ‘is to talk to a scruffy feller I know in La Línea. He walks around in rags, but he’s got property. So we move into one of his anonymous apartments we’ve used before now, get in a stock of beer, frozen paella and chips – for Adele,’ he said, grinning, ‘then put out feelers.’

  Wick nodded slowly, sipped his lukewarm beer, and allowed the noise to wash over him as Charlie watched his reaction then went into a huddle with Adele. Wick, in his turn, wasn’t quite sure what he should be feeling, though shell-shocked was probably close to the mark. He was certainly intrigued by Charlie’s assertion that the cloud had a silver lining, and not a little awed by what he had done, and what he proposed. Thanks to Adele’s brother’s flapping tongue they were forced to move out of Eleanor’s flat, yes, and so they needed safe, alternative accommodation – but surely driving more than a thousand miles through three countries to rent a scruffy flat in southern Spain was taking precautions a little too far?

  Then the wry smile at his own unintentional pun was wiped off Calum’s lips as Jokers Wild’s door clicked open and evil blew in on the chill autumn breeze.

  Wick reached across and touched Charlie’s sleeve.

  ‘In your other life in Gibraltar,’ he said, ‘when you no doubt mixed with various villainous individuals, did you ever come across those two chappies who are over here doing Rickman’s dirty work? The ones who were getting drenched on a Welsh mountainside while watching you through binoculars, and have recently – we assume – been talking to Ron?’

  ‘Never saw them, did we?’ Charlie said.

  ‘In Wales? No, that’s true. All right, then what bothers me is that as they’re hunting you there’s the possibility they might have photographs. Which would enable them to recognize you if they saw you.’

  ‘Doubtful,’ Charlie said. ‘A bit camera shy, me and Adele, and anyway, at this time tomorrow we’ll be racing across Europe in a flash black Merc.’

  ‘Indeed you will,’ Wick said, ‘and as I’m pretty sure those guys don’t know me from Adam, we could get through the immediate crisis without loss of blood. You see, while you and Adele were canoodling away in the corner like a couple of love-sick canaries, two men of menacing demeanour walked in the door. Just now they are at the bar talking earnestly to Stan. One’s black and shiny and very well muscled. The other’s wearing a hat that’s seen a lot of sun, and looks accustomed to wrestling crocodiles with his bare hands.’

  Charlie’s mouth fell open. Adele gave a little mew of fear.

  Wick reached out and touched her hand reassuringly.

  ‘Relax,’ he said softly. ‘It’s going to be okay. Stay in the corner, the two of you. Become as one with the shadows. I’m going over to the bar to give Stan some money. I will casually engage those two beauties in conversation. When you can be sure they’re otherwise engaged, slip out of this wee booth and turn yourselves into something resembling that drab wallpaper. It’ll make you invisible. Then go confidently but cautiously along the wall to the entrance, and bugger off out of here.’ He grinned. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Charlie said, with an answering grin that looked suspiciously like a grimace. He was holding Adele’s hand. He pulled her back even further into the shadows, leaned close and kissed her ear. She squirmed, pulled away and looked at Calum with enormous dark eyes as he left the booth.

  The black man had turned and was standing with his back against the bar. He watched Calum’s approach without interest and without removing his shades. Black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket. A suspicious bulge under the left arm. What was it Jack had said, an old Heckler and Koch P7?

  Calum nodded to him, got the kind of response he would have expected from a stone wall, and went to lean on the bar alongside the other man. Close up, he was older than he’d appeared. Mid-fifties, Calum estimated, his skin lined by age as much as the searing rays of the Australian sun. The blonde hair was coarse, not clean. The eyes, when they slipped sideways at Calum’s approach, were the lightest of blue. The Aussies called the interior of their vast country ‘the great bugger all’, and from what Calum could judge that was what lay behind those eerily pale eyes.

  ‘All right, mate?’ the blonde man said.

  ‘I’m beginning to think I’ll survive,’ Calum said, cryptically.

  The Aussie nodded, clearly picking up the accent but not the meaning. Stan wandered over, self-consciously smoothing his flap of hair; his upper lip had a tic that made one side of his thin moustache jump. Calum handed him twenty quid in notes, watched him walk over to the till, glanced at the Aussie.

  ‘I haven’t seen you or your pal in here before.’

  The blonde grinned. ‘Bloody long way to come for your grog, mate. For both of us.’

  ‘Aye, I know the feeling,’ said Calum, suddenly the professional Scot. He paused. ‘You know, if you’re looking for excitement, maybe a bit of action,’ he said, staring directly into the other man’s eyes, ‘they play cards round the clock in the back room.’

  ‘We’ve got a couple of very special rooms all ready and waiting for us,’ the Aussie said, ‘and other very tasty fish to fry.’

  ‘A saying, I imagine, that can be taken any number of unpleasant ways.’ Although his unspoken question had been answered, Calum put on a knowing look and narrowed his eyes confidentially. ‘I did notice your friend was rather watchful. You’re looking for someone – am I right? Maybe a wee score to settle?’

  ‘You’re quite a sticky beak, ain’t ya?’ the blonde man said. Then he shook his head. ‘We were, mate, but not any more. The telephone’s a wonderful thing. A friend of a friend whispered in my ear from a far distant shore, and as of thirty minutes ago our search is over.’

  And then, as if to plant an exclamation mark alongside the Australian’s appreciation of modern technology, Calum Wick’s mobile phone began trilling and drew just about every eye in the room.

  Eighteen

  Nothing much happened for the next five days.

  Sian and I lived like a couple of middle-aged holidaymakers high up on the hill in Eleanor’s delightful bungalow, revelling in the bright, clear mornings; in the evenings relaxing in the warm sun with highlights glinting on tall glasses of something ice-cold and mildly alcoholic enhanced by the tartness oozing from thin green slices of citrus fruit.

  Sian went back to the gymnasium she’d been using when we were living on the Rock, and got in touch with a businesswoman called Rosa with whom she had liaised and lunched during our twelve months or so working as security consultants. Rosa was delighted to hear from her. She was taking a break from her own PR business, so they met most mornings for coffee at the Copacabana then went café-crawling and window-shopping in the sunlight and shadows of Main Street before taking an alfresco lunch in Casemates Square.

  From time to time I got text messages from Calum, from which I was able to track his southerly route across Europe. He’d mentioned Charlie’s cunning use of Adele’s brother’s loose tongue to leak Eleanor’s address and get them moving. I’d told Calum that any leak had come not from Adele’s brother but from Rickman’s anonymous tip off. Quickly realizing that one leak could lead to another, there was, he said, no sign of a Land Rover with a battered bumper hot on their tail. I suggested villains could easily steal a better, faster car and, remembering my own encounter and Clontarf’s brutal use of anything on four wheels, warned him to be on the lookout for vehicles rocketing up behind them on hairpin bends through the Pyrenees.

  The day after Sian and I spoke to Rickman on board Sea Wind, I drove up Europa Road to Reg’s house – we’d hired a Fiat Punto – and over morning coffee in the suspended sun room had a word with Eleanor. Tactfully. If she had, in all innocence, casually mentioned to an acquaintance that Charlie and Adele Wise were staying at her flat in Liverpool, she would have been horrified to learn that she might have put lives at risk. So I questioned her without mentioning possible consequences of her actions, but it mattered not anyway because she was q
uite sure she had told nobody.

  ‘Why would I?’ she’d said. ‘I told you when you asked could they stay there that I knew what was going on. The jewels, and that. I’m hardly likely to tell every man and his dog, am I now?’

  Tough words, spoken in the Liverpool accent that was always thickened by anger, but no more than I’d expected. Tall and white-haired, delightfully elegant in a long shot-silk dress that fell with grace over her lightly-boned frame then tumbled to brush the soft Indian sandals she always wore – or Indian sandal, for one ankle was still encased in plaster liberally scrawled with graffiti – Eleanor Scott had been a widow for twenty-five years and retired for ten. She had lost her younger son Tim to a brutal murder just a few months before, and had borne her grief with fortitude. The flip side of her character would see her moved to tears by the simplest of gifts; on other occasions her brown eyes would laugh at you, dancing with good humour. But she was a strong and independent woman – despite her attachment to Reg – who had never suffered fools gladly, and so my next words were said with some trepidation.

  If she’d not said a word to anyone about the use of her flat, I suggested she had told Reg, who was away in Spain, and he might have let the information slip out. I got a similar response, but this time there was a much sharper edge to her tongue.

  ‘Of course I bloody told him. Call it pillow talk or whatever you like, but if you think he blabbed then you’ve got another think coming. It was the diplomatic service he was in, Jack. And he’s an old-timer, isn’t he, so he remembers that wartime saying: Be like Dad; keep mum. And he abides by it.’

  The plaster was annoying her, and she was noticeably limping when she walked with me up the steps. I asked her why she hadn’t cadged a stick from the hospital.

  ‘Didn’t want one,’ she said.

  ‘Pride,’ I said, ‘is known to come before a fall.’

  ‘Yeah, well, my fall came first, didn’t it, so what’s the point in havin’ a stick?’

  ‘Steps led to your fall, and the ones we’ve just climbed are a lot trickier. Anyway, you could borrow Reg’s, couldn’t you? Hasn’t he still got that presentation stick he got when he retired? Malacca cane, a big silver head.’

  ‘No. Soft bugger broke it swiping at some weeds on these very same steps. And steps or no steps, I fell ’cos I was pushed.’

  She grinned at the stupidity exhibited by both the men she loved and kissed my cheek, and I knew she’d be watching as I zoomed away down Europa Road in the nippy little Punto. Though I was delighted with the chat and the excellent ground coffee, I’d got no further ahead. Somebody had learned that Charlie and Adele were making for Eleanor’s flat in Booker Avenue, and had passed that knowledge on to Bernie Rickman, who in turn had informed his heavies – he said. But had he been lying? Eleanor certainly wasn’t to blame. If there had been a tip-off, it had been anonymous. Clontarf and Ebenholz could be anywhere, and as Rickman’s was the only name I had to play with in Gibraltar I naturally called on Luis Romero.

  Romero was one frustrated police inspector, getting nowhere with any of his open cases.

  Photographs taken by a young woman, now dead, had linked Bernie Rickman to the suspected jewel thief, Karl Creeny, but Creeny had disappeared and Rickman – as Romero had pointed out at our last meeting – had committed no crime. The murdered man at the airport had walked off his plane and been clubbed to the ground in a narrow passageway. There had been no witnesses. As his wallet and the small holdall he had carried as cabin baggage were missing, it looked like a clumsy mugging gone wrong.

  As for his being a courier carrying the stolen diamonds into Gibraltar for Karl Creeny, well, that was wild speculation, but a possibility. Creeny had been in Gibraltar, that was a fact. Charlie and Adele strenuously denied any knowledge of diamonds, but could be lying. Had Charlie murdered the courier? Were they conning Calum Wick, getting him to ferry them across Europe so that they could recover the diamonds they had stashed somewhere in La Línea?

  Their daughter, Prudence, was dead, and while Clontarf and Ebenholz were suspected of killing her, any evidence was circumstantial. Hardly that. Chimeric was probably a better description, but even then it was academic because the two men were notable by their absence. We couldn’t even be sure that they’d known of, or been anywhere near, Eleanor’s flat, because Calum and his charges hadn’t stayed long enough to find out.

  They were two men clearly working under false names, and as such were virtually untraceable. Françoise Rickman, on the other hand, should have been easy to find – or at least, by keeping a watch on ports, Eurostar and airports, easy to lock into the UK. The trouble was, there was no record of a Françoise Rickman arriving or departing, so the obvious assumption was that she too was sailing under a flag of convenience. Again, this was a likelihood Romero had voiced when last we met.

  Short of facts, professional and amateur investigators were falling back on vivid and lively imaginations. It was always interesting to see what popped up when a number of intelligent people put their heads together and concocted elaborate scenarios to explain the unexplainable. What emerged might be wild and wonderful, completely off-the-wall, but such methods had been known to work. It was sometimes called lateral thinking, at other times brainstorming.

  Eleanor, in her usual blunt fashion, would have put it another way.

  ‘It might be clever and all that,’ she’d have said, ‘but really it’s all pie in the sky, isn’t it?’

  On the fifth day, Sian and I had a late dinner in Bianca’s.

  Bianca’s restaurant was popular with holidaymakers and locals, always noisy as evenings wore on, and in a wonderfully picturesque location on the edge of the marina. The windows looked out over a wide front patio with potted plants, and beyond that the concrete walkways stretching out into waters reflecting the bright lights of restaurants, nightclubs and high-rise residences. Alongside those walkways the big yachts were berthed. My brother Tim’s yacht, El Pájaro Negro, had been there for a long time, rocking and creaking gently at its moorings, and for much of that time ownership had been in dispute. As far as I knew, Tim had bought it from the ex-pat crook Ronnie Skaill – for whom he had once been a part-time smuggler and wannabe buccaneer – but had paid very little of the purchase price. Skaill had been after him for the rest, and that wasn’t a good position to be in. My brother had died, shot in the head by Skaill or one of his men, then Skaill himself had died on Gibraltar’s rocky heights at the hands of his own son while Sian and I watched, horrified, in the driving rain of that violent summer storm. So now El Pájaro Negro was up for sale and, on the opposite side of the concrete strip there was an even bigger yacht owned by yet another crooked ex-pat. Sea Wind was a symbol of violence that, from Bianca’s, I found it impossible to avoid.

  ‘A penny for them,’ Sian said.

  ‘Too noisy to think.’

  ‘Then talk to me.’

  ‘Ah, but in an atmosphere like this that’s always risky. For you to hear a word I’d have to be shouting. What if there’s a sudden lull, and I’m left bellowing something very rude into the stunned silence?’

  ‘You’d raise a titter, and a grinning barman would probably bring you a free drink. Anyway, you’re exaggerating. If you won’t talk, I will, because we’ve some unfinished business.’

  ‘Is this to do with something I said?’

  ‘In the heat of the moment. When you thought I was asleep.’ Sian smiled. ‘And now, even though you’re ex-military, you’re scared out of your socks.’

  I’d dined on steak with chips, huge onion rings and the usual trimmings, Sian had a calamari salad with some exotic dressing that coated green leaves with a pink slime and tickled my nostrils. But the plates had been taken away, we’d declined afters, and all that stood between us now were tall glasses half full of a rich red Rioja, and cups of steaming liqueur coffee.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m like that French soldier, Marshal Ney. Napoleon nicknamed him Le Brave des Braves. And,’ I went on, lea
ning across the table and so perilously close to cups and glasses they clinked a warning, ‘in noise like this the most intimate of conversations can be conducted without fear of being overheard – so fire away.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Sian said, ‘about the big differences in our personalities.’

  ‘Sexes, too. If you’ve noticed, we’re exact opposites.’

  ‘Will you be bloody serious? What we are is a couple of odd characters who are opposites in every respect. We’re even quirky in the way we’re opposite – arse about face, if you like – and where it stands out a mile is in the way we approach criminal investigation.’

  ‘Our attitude to risk, to danger – is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m sure you know what’s coming next.’

  ‘Well, I know I hate violence. The nature of the work we do means I can’t always avoid it, but I go after those villains because I want to stop then visiting their nasty forms of violence on any more innocent victims.’

  ‘As do I,’ Sian said, ‘emphatically. The difference is, I go after them not trying to avoid violence, but looking forward to a good punch-up; I’m never happier than when I’m beating them to a pulp.’

  ‘As in the feller who was left spitting out teeth on board Sea Wind. Me sitting down thinking things over; you kicking out like a long-legged chorus girl.’

  ‘Hence arse about face.’

  ‘Yes.’ I grinned. ‘I should be the one who inflicts damage, pain, I should be that high-kicking chorus girl.’

  Sian rolled her eyes, finished off her wine and started on the coffee. A rim of white froth beaded her upper lip. I reached across and removed it gently with the light brush of a fingertip. And suddenly her eyes softened, the blue became deeper, she lowered her head a fraction causing a lock of blonde hair to slip forward, which she brushed aside absently with a hand that was far from steady.