by James Green
‘I could arrest you, Mr Costello. We could talk at the police station.’
Jimmy tried a smile, it almost worked.
‘No need to get tough, Inspector, it doesn’t suit you.’
He got a smile back.
‘Don’t let appearances give you the wrong impression.’
Jimmy believed her. She wasn’t big, but she was solid enough and looked to be in good shape. In fact, her shape looked very good. He wondered if she was trained in some sort of martial art. These days the muscle end of things was probably all scientific and factored into the training manual, it wouldn’t be just using your fists and your boots in a cell any more.
‘Arresting me would probably mean involving politicians. I’m not official but the information, if and when I get it, will be passed on and when it gets where it’s going it will become official. If I get kicked out before I get my information then questions will get asked. Do you want to get the politicians involved?’
She took another drink.
‘No, they are not usually helpful.’
‘Then why don’t you just sit back and drink your beer before it gets warm and let me make a call and then we’ll see if I can co-operate?’ She didn’t answer, she put her sunglasses back on, picked up her beer and looked out to sea. Jimmy waited a moment. ‘Make your call, Mr Costello.’
Jimmy pulled out his mobile. The woman carried on looking out to sea pretending she wasn’t there and that she wasn’t listening.
Jimmy put the number in then held the mobile to his ear.
‘I need to speak to Professor McBride. Yes it’s important, at least, it’s important if my being here is important. Personally I don’t give a shit one way or the other.’ Somebody at the other end took offence. ‘I know, I’ve been told before, I grieve over them at night. Look, just pass on the message. I’ll give McBride half an hour to get back to me then I’ll use my own judgement.’
He put the mobile down on the table. The woman returned to those present.
‘I don’t have half an hour.’
‘If I’m right you won’t need it. I’ll get a call. Why not get me another beer while we’re waiting?’
The suggestion got him another smile.
‘I thought the man did the buying on a first date.’
Jimmy smiled back and he didn’t have to make an effort this time. He liked her.
‘No, you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re a tough guy in a bra and you buy the drinks, or you’re a good-looking blonde chatting me up and I buy the drinks. It’s your choice.’
She took off her sunglasses. This time Jimmy looked at her eyes. They were dark and she had a dark complexion so maybe her blonde hair came out of a bottle. It wasn’t something he knew much about, but that was his guess. She raised a hand to a waiter who was clearing a nearby table. He came across and she ordered a beer. Then she put her sunglasses on again and looked out at the sea. It was still there. When the beer came the waiter put it down in front of her. She picked it up and passed it to Jimmy.
‘You not having another?’
‘No.’
Jimmy drank his beer and they both sat in silence. Then his phone rang.
‘I’m sitting at a table outside a bar looking at the sea and having a beer with a local police Inspector who knows my life story and says her bosses want me tarred and feathered and run out of town and out of Spain. How should I know, maybe they object to my aftershave? There’s been a lot of checking up on me and my friend here says they don’t like what they know about my past, at least that’s the reason they’re telling me. Yes, I know it could be true, but then again, maybe it isn’t. If they’ve checked as thoroughly as they seem to have done then either they’ve been taking a close look at me for a long time or someone’s been feeding them information. It also means they knew I was coming. How should I know who told them?’ He took the phone away from his ear. ‘Who told you I was coming?’ Suarez stayed silent so he put the phone back to his ear. ‘No, she didn’t. I didn’t think she would. So, what do you want me to do? Leave, tell them why I’m here, what?.’ Jimmy listened for a moment. ‘OK, just as you say.’ Then he put the mobile away. ‘I’m here to talk to a Mr Arthur Jarvis. He’s English and retired here about three years ago.’
The sunglasses came off again. He wasn’t sure whether they annoyed her or she meant it to annoy him. Maybe it was just a habit. And when she spoke the tone of her voice changed, whatever she had been doing, she definitely wasn’t chatting him up now.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Costello, but you can’t talk to Mr Jarvis.’
‘It’s a Church matter. A Catholic Church matter. As far as I know it is nothing to do with the Spanish authorities, certainly not the police.’
That was a black lie, of course, but she wouldn’t know that.
‘You’re wrong. It is very much a matter for the authorities, especially the police. Mr Jarvis died two days ago.’
‘Died? How?’
‘A single shot to the head.’
That got all his attention. That, he had not expected.
‘Suicide?’
‘Suicides don’t usually shoot themselves in the back of the head and then hide the gun so, no, I don’t think suicide. Do you see now why we want you out of Spain? Your arrival coincides with a dead body, a resident Englishman. Like I said, bad thing keep happening around you, Mr Costello, and I’m Spanish which makes me a deeply superstitious person. Also I don’t believe in co-incidences.’
‘When did he die?’
‘The day before yesterday.’
‘What time?’
‘Shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning.’
Jimmy shrugged. That let him out.
‘I flew in two days ago, but I didn’t land until shortly after 10.45, so I don’t see that I had time to have anything to do with it. Maybe I’m just a coincidence after all. They do happen.’
‘No, Mr Costello, I cannot bring myself to believe you are a coincidence. Jarvis was killed for no obvious reason. There was no break-in. Nothing so far as we know was taken. There was quite a bit of money in a drawer of his bedside table. Nobody seems to have searched the house, nothing was disturbed. He lived quietly and there had been no trouble of any sort. If he had any enemies locally nobody knew about them. What we do have is that you come to Santander, and on the day you arrive Jarvis gets a bullet in the back of his head. Added to that, on being questioned, you admit to coming here to see him. You were once a policeman, a detective, wouldn’t you say there was a connection?’
Jimmy shrugged. OK, he’d say there was a connection , but he certainly wouldn’t say it out loud, especially not when he was being questioned by the police about a murder.
‘I see now why my superiors were concerned at your presence.’ Suarez continued.
‘No, that won’t work any more.’
‘No?’
‘Well, if you think I’m involved with a killing, shouldn’t I be kept here and properly questioned, not kicked out? When I was a detective we followed up on things like that.’
‘You are a foreign national with what I think are important friends in Rome, and I have my orders. Unless they change I will follow them. Santander is a nice town, Mr Costello, a resort, a place people come to enjoy themselves and have a good time. It’s bad for us here when someone, a foreign national like yourself, gets brutally murdered. It upsets people. It upsets me. If the choice was mine I would indeed make you tell me what the connection was. Even if I had to beat it out of you in a police cell.’
Jimmy looked down at his glass. Maybe that side of things hadn’t changed so much after all. He looked up at her again and guessed she would be good at it too. Certainly she looked as if that was what she wanted to do right at this minute. He understood the feeling. She’d just had a suspect for a fresh murder dropped into her lap and it looked like she might have to pass it by. But her difficulty was his as well. He didn’t want to stay and maybe get put in the frame for a murder, but he didn’t want to
get kicked out either.
‘But the point is, I am a foreign national. And, as you say, I have friends in Rome, so I’m afraid hammering the shit out of me might cause eyebrows to be raised. It might even get questions asked out of our Embassy, you know how they like things kept official and orderly. If you’d like to put me alongside anything that happened to Jarvis you’ll have to do it the hard way, by police work.’
The Inspector stood up. The sunglasses were back on and there would be no more smiles.
‘It cuts both ways. I can ask our Embassy people to make you persona-non-grata and then you’d have to leave. The information we already have on you even without Jarvis’s death would be enough to get you kicked out in short order without any help from police work. What do you think of that, Mr Costello?’
‘I think you speak very good English, Inspector.’ She began to leave. Jimmy called after her. ‘Inspector.’ She stopped and turned. ‘Come back here at three this afternoon. If I can help you, I will, but you’ll have to give me a couple of hours to make a few calls and check a few things.’
Inspector Suarez paused and thought about it. She still had her orders, but she was also a copper with a solid suspect.
‘OK, Mr Costello. Make your calls and I’ll be back at three. But be packed and ready to leave just in case.’
‘I’ll have a beer ready for you. I’ll buy, it’ll be our second date.’
The inspector turned and walked away through the trees to the road. A black SEAT pulled up. She got in beside the driver and the car drove off. Jimmy watched it go. He liked the inspector, they would be able to work together – if he got the OK from McBride, and if she could persuade her bosses to let him stay. He had a drink from his glass then took out his mobile and made his first call.
Chapter Three
Inspector Suarez was punctual to the minute. Jimmy watched the black SEAT pull up behind the palm trees where it had picked her up. She got out, said something to the driver, then closed the door and the car pulled away. Jimmy turned back and looked out to sea where the big white ferry was imperceptibly shrinking in size as it moved away from the shore and headed back towards the horizon, and England. England, almost a foreign country now, although he had once called it his own. Did he miss it? He wasn’t sure. Would he ever go back? Probably not.
Suarez walked through the trees to his table and Jimmy pulled his attention away from the ferry. This meeting was business, the ferry-watching was just nostalgia. Suarez sat down, took off her sunglasses and put them into the neat, black handbag on a long strap which hung from her shoulder. Thank God, he thought, no more pissing around with sunglasses.
It was, if anything, hotter than when they had first met, but she still looked the same, the heat didn’t seem to affect her. Crisp white shirt, black skirt, high heels, fresh as dew on a morning lawn. A cool blonde. Someone in control. She hung her handbag over the back of her chair, sat down and looked at the table, then at Jimmy.
‘No drinks? I thought you were buying,’ she gave him a false smile, ‘to celebrate our second date, remember?’
It was a good beginning. Jimmy hoped it would last after what he was going to tell her.
‘I told the waiter to bring them when you arrived. In weather like this I thought you’d prefer your beer cold.’
The smile became genuine and she sat back.
‘Weather like this isn’t weather like this. When it gets really hot it’s what we call weather like this.’
Better and better, thought Jimmy, or was she just a very clever copper? But he decided he didn’t care. He liked her.
‘You should have told me that before, it might have saved us both some time and effort. If I thought it could get any hotter than it is already I’d have been happy to leave.’
She was in no hurry, she was prepared to shoot the breeze for a time.
‘What’s the matter? Have you got something against sunshine?’
‘Not in moderation, I’m a great believer in moderation.’
‘Like not killing more than a couple of people at any one given time? That kind of moderation?’
The waiter came to the table with their beers. Jimmy let what she’d said pass. He’d made his calls, she was here to listen and it was time to get down to business, so he took a drink and began to talk.
‘I was sent to see Jarvis about something he told a local priest, a Fr Xavier Perez. Fr Perez is retired now but it seems Jarvis had struck up an acquaintance with him when he first came out here looking at property and Fr Perez was still a local parish priest He used to go to Mass at Fr Perez’s church. I was told that when Jarvis came out here to live, they became friends, and when the priest retired Jarvis used to visit him. On his last visit Jarvis said that he had stumbled across some information, information that was both serious and dangerous. A very senior Catholic cleric in the Basque region was an inner member of the ETA Army Council, actively involved in strategy and policy.’ Jimmy could see from her eyes that he had her full attention. That would have popped your sunglasses off, he thought, pity you put them away. ‘Jarvis told Perez he was frightened, said he didn’t know what to do. For some reason he refused to go to the authorities, also he wouldn’t tell Perez how he came by the information. Jarvis wanted Perez to arrange for him to talk to someone from the Catholic Church, someone who could advise him. The priest said he’d see what he could do. He wrote the whole thing down and sent it to the Bishop’s secretary who must have passed the letter on to the Bishop who in turn sent it to Rome. Once there it was passed on to my boss, who was told to send someone reliable to talk to Jarvis and find out what, if anything, was going on.’
‘They took it seriously?’
Jimmy gave a slight shrug.
‘Seriously enough to follow it up. How seriously that is I couldn’t say. I was told to come and check, see if it was anything more than an ageing, British ex-pat going gaga in the heat and imagining things.’
‘I see.’ Suarez took a slow drink and looked out to sea. Jimmy waited, he’d given her what he had and now it was up to her. She put down her glass, looked at him and gave a small shake of her head. ‘No, it’s crap, it doesn’t work. No one would believe that some English nobody, an ex-pat, a newcomer, had really managed to find out anything about ETA, never mind that there was a senior Catholic cleric at the heart of a major terrorist organisation. How could he?’ Jimmy could see her mind was made up. She took another drink but ignored the sea this time. ‘No, it’s all wrong, and you know it’s all wrong.’
‘That’s right. It has to be baloney.’
‘Which brings us back to why you are here.’
‘Perez, in his letter to the Bishop, said there was something about Jarvis which made him almost believe what he was saying. In his opinion Jarvis was genuinely frightened, he wasn’t putting on an act. The priest said he couldn’t believe that Jarvis had indeed found what he claimed, but that the man obviously believed it himself. The priest said he thought someone ought to do something. It wasn’t much, but it got the Bishop to send it to Rome and that was enough to get me sent here and make discreet enquiries. As things have turned out I don’t have to be discreet because now it’s a murder case.’ Jimmy sat back. ‘I arrived two days ago. I didn’t try to contact Jarvis or Perez because I wanted to look around and get a bit of a feel for the place. Today you turned up and told me Jarvis was dead.’ He took a drink. ‘And that’s it, all of it. At least all that I have.’
‘Meaning?’
‘In my experience my boss is about as straight as a spiral-staircase. If I had to make a guess I’d say I’ve been put in to see what I can make run out, like a ferret down a rabbit hole. You understand ferrets and rabbit holes?’
‘Yes, I understand ferrets.’
‘And when it comes to telling me what’s going on I tend to get the facts in such a way that I go in the direction my boss wants instead of the way I should be going.’
‘Meaning what exactly?’
‘Meaning what I’ve tol
d you is what I’ve been told. How much of it you believe has to be up to you.’
He waited while Suarez thought it over.
‘OK, Mr Costello, if your boss might be twisting the facts why do you think you were sent to talk to Jarvis? What’s your opinion?’
Jimmy sat back and spread his hands.
‘Me? I don’t have an opinion. I got told what I got told. I came to Santander, found a hotel, looked around and got my bearings. I was told to be discreet so I wasn’t about to rush in anywhere. I would have made contact with Jarvis or Perez tomorrow or the next day, but you popped up and told me the news. I didn’t know what to expect when I got here, but I certainly didn’t expect Jarvis murdered. Nor did I expect to find out that your lot had been digging into my past.’
‘But now that you do know, what’s your opinion?’
‘My opinion is that somebody in Rome tipped you off that I was coming and that same person told you where to look to find out all about me, but I have no idea why anyone should have done that. And that’s it, all of it, what I know and any guesses I might make and none of it makes any sense. As to what I was supposed to get from Jarvis and Perez, I don’t have an opinion.’
‘So what are your instructions now? I assume this boss of yours gave you some.’
‘I was told to stay and assist you in your enquiries. Fullest co-operation etc., etc.’
‘And what if we don’t want your co-operation?’
Jimmy expected the question, he’d been told to expect it. This was where any budding friendship took a nasty beating.
‘Then you won’t get it. I’ll fly back to Rome and report to my boss that you didn’t want any help. My boss will talk to whoever placed the job and say you didn’t want any help. That person, whoever they are, will talk to someone in the Church down here and you’ll find you’ll get exactly what you want, no help. Every door the Catholic Church can close round here will be slammed in your face. I guess you would know better than me how many doors that would be and how it would affect this enquiry or any other they chose to get involved in.’ He’d made his point, he’d delivered the threat, now he had to hold out the carrot. ‘When I came I thought I was on a wild-goose chase. But Jarvis is dead, so I’d say I was wrong and whatever’s going on is wild all right, but nothing to do with geese.’
