A Coffin For Two ob-2

by Quintin Jardine

  I grunted. ‘You can certainly say that about the guy who sold Gavin Scott that picture. For a start, he isn’t Ronald Starr. The real Starr was murdered, almost a year ago. We think he painted the picture that you saw at the auction. And our guess is that the guy who sold it bumped him off.’

  ‘Fucking hell!’ David Foy slumped back in his cane chair, all of the colour gone suddenly from his face. Then, just as suddenly, he jumped to his feet. ‘I think you’d better go. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Eh?’ Prim and I stared at him, stunned by the change in his manner.

  ‘You heard me. Hop it. Get the fuck out.’ He jerked his thumb towards the door, menacingly.

  Automatically I stood up, but Prim sat her ground. ‘If you won’t talk to us, Mr Foy,’ she said quietly, ‘would you speak to the Guardia Civil?’

  ‘You wouldn’t go to them.’

  She looked up at him, with her sweetest, most beatific smile. ‘Too fucking right we would,’ she countered. ‘Murder, fraud, maybe art theft: oh yes, they’ll want to talk to you. They might even give you a bed for the night.’

  He stared down at her, his forehead knitted, then across at me. Finally, he sat down again, in the cane chair. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But none of this goes back to Gavin. Okay?’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Prim.

  Foy ran his hands through his thick hair and looked across at us. ‘The whole thing was a set-up. It started off as a laugh really. I bumped into Trevor at the club earlier on this year, just before Easter, and I bought him a drink. After we’d had a couple of bevvies, and got a bit relaxed, he started to talk about this chap he knew who’d come by this picture. It was a forgery, he said of a Dali, but so good that even an expert couldn’t put his hand on his heart and swear it wasn’t the real thing. He said his mate had asked him to get him a few quid for it.

  ‘He offered it to me first off, for seventy-five thou, sterling. I told him to fuck off. Then I thought about Gav. The auction was my idea. You know what Gav’s like with pictures. Thinks he’s a connoisseur, a real ace. I told Trevor about him, and I suggested that if the thing was that good, and he accepted it as genuine, then if we could get him bidding for it, he’d go through the roof.’ He paused. ‘A couple of days later, Trevor called me and said his chum wanted to talk about my idea. We met in the place at Peretellada. Trevor introduced the guy as Ronald Starr.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

  ‘Ordinary. Around forty. Medium everything. There was nothing about him that stood out.’

  ‘Would you recognise him again?’

  ‘Too right!’ said David Foy, emphatically. ‘I’d recognise anyone who owes me money.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The bastard stiffed me, didn’t he. We talked my idea through. Then the guy Starr took me out to his car and showed me the picture. I’m no bleeding expert, but even I could see it was the business. I began to regret not giving him his seventy-five grand. Not enough to change my mind, though. We agreed that we’d set up the auction, and that I’d fit Gav into it.’

  I looked at him. I don’t think I was smiling at the time. ‘Some pal you are. So the meetings with Trevor at the golf club, they were all prearranged?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other people at the auction?’

  ‘All hired hands. The whole thing worked a treat. Mind you, Starr went further than I intended. Our deal was that he would fold at two hundred and fifty US, but Starr and his phoney Swiss took a chance and carried on up to four hundred.’

  I shook my head. ‘But why? What did you have against Scott?’

  Foy shrugged. ‘Gav thinks he’s a real player. I just wanted to show him he was still small-time, that’s all.’

  ‘And what was in it for you?’ asked Prim.

  ‘Twenty per cent … which I never got.’

  I smiled at him. ‘Appropriate in the circumstances. What happened?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Starr since that night in Peretellada. We had agreed that the three of us would meet up there again, a fortnight after the pay-off, to divvy up. Trevor and I showed, but there was no sign of the other fella. Only a message that dinner was on him, and that he hoped we’d enjoy it.’

  ‘Have you tried to find him?’

  Foy grinned, ruefully. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start. I did employ some local talent to ask around, but they came up empty. Like you said, I suppose it serves me right.’

  Prim and I nodded, simultaneously, and stood up to leave. Outside, the short, heavy storm was over. Foy called after us as we walked down the drive. ‘You won’t tell Gav, right?’

  Prim looked over her shoulder. ‘You haven’t given us a single reason why we shouldn’t. What do you think we’ll do?’

  We left him, staring after us, with a king-size worry that hadn’t been there half an hour earlier.

  35

  Next day we took a stroll round the marina in L’Escala. It was quieter than in July and August, many of the boats having been taken out already for the winter. But there were still hundreds moored in the big basin, and so looking for a single boat was like searching for one anchovy among the shoal.

  It didn’t help either that La Sirena turned out to be the most popular name for a small boat in all Catalunya. We must have found a dozen of them before we happened on what we guessed must be Trevor Eames’ boat, moored sharp end in against the quay furthest from the shore.

  It was an eighteen-foot sail-boat, with a single mast and a classic wheel, behind the steps leading down to its cabin. La Sirena Two was emblazoned on either side of the bow, and a pair of small pram dinghies were lashed, not to the cabin roof as Gary had said, but to the sides.

  Everything else was lashed down too. We tried the cabin door, but it was locked, and the windows were curtained. It was pretty obvious that Trevor was still at sea.

  On the way back to St Marti, Prim had an idea. ‘We really should check out the place at Peretellada, shouldn’t we. Just in case the phoney Starr was daft enough to have booked the dinner using his real name.’

  ‘Fat chance, but yes, you’re right.’

  ‘Then why don’t I,’ she said, ‘take Davidoff along there with me tomorrow, to ask some questions?’

  I looked at her, right eyebrow cocked. ‘Oh yes! After some more courtship.’

  She grinned. ‘And why not. A lady likes to be wooed. You still don’t quite realise that, do you?’

  All of a sudden, I was miles away, thinking of Jan and my impulse buy in Laing’s. All of a sudden, I was torn in two.

  Prim dug me in the ribs. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Sorry. Of course I do. I’m just not very good at it, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, it’s time you put in some practice.’

  My conscience must have pricked me, for as soon as we reached St Marti, I dropped Prim off and without warning, headed back the way we had come. She was on the terrace when I returned, looking tense. ‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘Why the huff?’

  ‘No huff,’ I said, and handed her a small brown box. She opened it. Inside, on a white satin cushion, were the gold dolphin earrings which she had admired, pointedly, in a designer jeweller’s window in L’Escala a few evenings before. From behind my back, I produced a single red rose.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve been a bugger lately.’

  Holding the rose in one hand and the earrings in the other, she rose up on tiptoe and kissed me.

  ‘You may not be in the Davidoff class as a romantic,’ she whispered, ‘but I suppose you do your best.’

  Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better.

  36

  As good as her word, my partner headed off for Peretellada just after noon next day, to pick up Davidoff from Shirley’s en route. The rest of our Sunday had been slightly strange, with Prim preening herself in her new earrings and me feeling increasingly tense and guilty.

  Fortunately, she had her period, for if she had been expecting me to make love
to her, I think I would have been struggling to do her justice. That evening, we dined on pizza at Casa Minana. Miguel wasn’t there, but his father told me that he had gone for a drink with his wife’s nephew in L’Escala.

  Left on my own next morning, I was writing up reports on the two projects which Shirley had helped us research, when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard the fax tone. It connected and five pages were excreted. Four of them were new business enquiries from our second ad the previous Friday, and the fifth was an explanatory note from Jan.

  Less than a minute after the transmission had stopped, the phone rang again. This time, there was a voice on the line. Jan’s.

  ‘Hi there. Did all that stuff come through okay?’

  ‘Yeah, clear as a bell.’

  ‘So how are you?’

  ‘I’ve been better.’

  There was a silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, eventually. ‘I was home at the weekend, and Mac collared me. He said he’d given you a sort of a bollocking … his words. It made me realise that it was really me who deserved it, and that I’ve been an unthinking bitch. I should have told you about Noosh and me as soon as it happened, and asked your permission to use the loft. I’m sorry.

  ‘What I shouldn’t have done was sleep with you. Prim’s a great lass, Oz, and the two of you are perfectly happy. You don’t need, and Prim doesn’t deserve, me messing your life about.’

  She paused again, then went on in a cold, flat, matter-of-fact voice I’d never heard before. ‘You probably can’t talk now. The only other thing I want to say is, forget that night ever happened, and forget all that stuff I came out with next day. You’re with Prim, and it’s for the right reason … you love her. I’ll see you at the wedding … both of you.’

  I sat there, my heart pounding, and a cold feeling gripping me. I had never heard her like this before, not even in the tense times in our twenties, when we were drifting apart. ‘I can talk okay,’ I said. ‘Is that how you want it to be, Jan?’ A vision of her, naked in the light of morning, appeared in my mind.

  ‘Yes. That’s how I want it to be. See you four weeks on Friday.’The words snapped out, then the line went dead.

  There was nothing to do after that but go for a beer, even though it was still only lunchtime. I dragged myself down to the square, in something close to a daze. Half an hour before, I had thought I was as confused as I could get. I had been wrong.

  I was gazing into my empty glass, my mind still bouncing between Edinburgh and St Marti, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Hey Oz, you alone today?’

  I looked up, brought back to my surroundings. ‘Oh, hi, Miguel. Yes, Prim’s away. So was I, just then.’

  ‘If you like, I leave you alone.’

  ‘No, no. Please join me.’ I looked around. All the other tables were empty. ‘You don’t seem to have anything else to do.’

  He pulled up a chair, and waved to the other waiter to bring us two more beers. ‘Is good I see you. I was going to come up to the apartment. My wife’s nephew Santi is coming to see us. What he told me last night, I could hardly believe, so I asked him to come today and tell you himself. He finish work at one, and he come here for lunch. He be here any minute now.’

  Miguel was right. Less than five minutes later we heard the scream of a moped with a straight-through exhaust, and a young man swung into the village in a cloud of dust. He parked at the edge of Casa Minana’s array of tables and shambled across towards us, pulling his crash helmet off as he did so.

  Santi looked to be aged around twenty-five. From the colour of his jeans and shirt, I guessed that he worked on a building site. His thirst reinforced that guess. The first beer which was set before him disappeared in around ten seconds. Eventually, after we had ordered bocadillos for lunch, his uncle told him to begin his story.

  He spoke no English, but his enunciation in Spanish was clear and I could follow most of what he said. Whenever I looked puzzled, Miguel filled in the blanks.

  As I listened to what he told me, I could feel a smile spreading slowly across my face. After a while, I stopped him and turned to Miguel. ‘Let me get this right so far,’ I said, in English, knowing that Santi couldn’t understand us. ‘The day after I helped you evict our bony chum from up there beside the church, a farm worker found him and went to the local police.’ My pal nodded.

  ‘Santi’s wife and another officer went up to look. They checked that it was true, and they reported back to their boss. When they did, the local mayor was in the room, and he went crazy over the idea of a body being found in his town.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Miguel, chuckling. ‘He thinks like I do, that a thing like that in the papers get the town a bad name, that it bad for the tourists.’

  I grinned at Santi as I spoke to Miguel. ‘So he gives the farm hand some money to keep quiet, and he tells Ramona and her pal to bundle the skeleton up and move it somewhere else?’

  ‘Si. The poor guy, he being passed around like a parcel. At this rate he could wind up in Barcelona. Come to think of it, that where we should have taken him. They find lots of dead bodies there.’

  I shook my head, helpless. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I chuckled. ‘So what did they do?’

  Miguel finished the story himself. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘Ramona was going to take him to Estartit. But the mayor, he say, “No, that not fair.” Instead he tell them to take it to Ventallo, eight kilometres along the road to Girona. They have no tourists. There, if they find a body, it not matter.

  ‘So Ramona and her friend, they take a sack and they put the body in it. Then when it gets dark they take it to Ventallo. Not by the main road. There is another before that, a farm track. They leave it there, not far from the road and close to the town.’

  ‘And they’ve heard nothing since?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He paused, as the pair of us took in the latest stage in the odyssey of the late Ronnie Starr, and as Santi stared at us, absolutely bewildered. ‘Did Ramona say anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘Si, she said that she took a good look at the body as they were picking it up. She said that it looked as if the back of the skull had been smashed in. She say that someone must have hit him with something.’

  ‘Aye,’ I muttered, ‘unless you stood on him in the dark.’ My friend’s mouth fell open, as he looked at me. ‘You don’ think …’

  ‘No, don’t be daft. Someone caved his head in all right. And I know why.’

  There was no more funny side. ‘What will you do now?’ asked Miguel. I made a mental note of the ‘you’.

  ‘I’ll need to think about that. But I guess we’ll wind up taking a run along to Ventallo.’

  37

  ‘I think we’re in the wrong business, Oz.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked Prim, curious. I had been asleep when she came in, but the sound of the shower had wakened me.

  She stood in the doorway of our en-suite bathroom, grinning as she towelled herself off. ‘It came to me today, that as investigators, in this country at least, we leave a lot to be desired.’

  I frowned, feeling wounded by her slight. ‘We’ve got a result in every commission we’ve had so far, and there are four more waiting to be tackled. I call that pretty good work.’

  She tossed the towel into the big clothes basket and pulled on her robe. ‘Maybe so, but it’s tame compared to what I saw today. I tell you, Davidoff could make a horse talk … and in any one of several languages at that.’

  She followed me out on to the balcony, and sat down facing me. ‘Those people today! When we walked in they greeted me in English. But as soon as I started asking questions, the manager appeared and they ran out of vocabulary. The manager’s French dried up as well.

  ‘Then Davidoff stepped in. He was speaking in Catalan, so I hadn’t a clue what they were saying, but I could tell that he was laying down the law. Pretty soon the manager went off and came back with his bookings register. The dinner was there. A private room for nine, reserved
by Mr Starr, as we thought.’

  ‘How did he pay for it?’

  ‘The manager said he settled the bill in cash. He would, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘So you’d guess. Did Davidoff ask the manager whether he had ever seen this Starr before?’

  She nodded. ‘He told me that he hadn’t.’ She took my hand. ‘So, was my trip worth it?’

  ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘It was something we had to do, even if it doesn’t take us any nearer the mystery man. You went there, and you found out what you had to. You got the result by the best means available, so don’t sell yourself short as a detective.’

  Prim laughed at my defence of our profession. ‘Don’t be so precious. How was your day anyway? This business of ours seems to be a success, so far, at least. I saw Jan’s fax when I came in, and the four enquiries. Did she phone as well?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Fine, as far as I could tell. She sent her best. Said she’d see us at Dad’s wedding.’

  Primavera looked at me archly. ‘Oh, so I am invited, then.’

  ‘Of course. Stop being silly.’

  ‘I’m not, it’s just that whenever you’ve mentioned it so far it’s always been in “I” terms. You and Jan, best man and bridesmaid. I was beginning to wonder whether I figured or not.’

  Inside I was squirming. ‘Look, don’t be daft. Okay?’

  She pouted. ‘Who stole your scone?You’re always like this when you have a sleep in the afternoon.’

  ‘Och, I’m sorry,’ I said, seizing my chance to change the subject. ‘I had a couple of beers at lunchtime, with Miguel … and with his wife’s nephew, the policewoman’s husband.’ Spinning it out as long as I could, I told her how the bones of poor Ronnie Starr had been run out of yet another town.

  ‘My God,’ she whispered, when I was done. She didn’t see anything funny about it. Nor did I now that the beer had worn off. ‘If you believe in restless spirits, his must be pretty frantic by now. What are we going to do?’