Broken Faith

by James Green

  ‘So, what did you make of Henderson’s little performance?’

  ‘Mercer has him scared witless, his wife has him scared spineless, I don’t see that we’ll get anywhere by joining in and frightening the stupid bastard shitless as well.’

  Suarez laughed.

  ‘Not how I’d have phrased it for my report but I agree. Still, we need him to talk to us, unless you think we would be better off having a go at Mercer.’

  ‘No, Harry’ll be no help, not unless he’s sure we can send him away for a long time, then he’d deal, but we’re not even close to anything like that.’ They walked on each with their own thoughts. With Suarez it was the case, with Jimmy it was Suarez and, unfortunately, the heat. The sky was clear blue and Jimmy felt as if he could simply reach up and touch it. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. It came away damp. I must look like bloody Henderson, he thought, and the thought didn’t sit well. He stopped. ‘I’m sorry, I thought it might be OK but do we have to be out here? This bloody heat is frying me.’

  Suarez looked at him.

  ‘Yes, you do look a bit well-done. I should have remembered the heat bothered you. You should have said.’

  ‘The heat bothers me.’

  ‘OK, let’s go to the bar and get a cold drink.’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  And they turned back towards the car.

  They drove to the bar where they had first met. Suarez stopped by the grove of trees and Jimmy got out.

  ‘Get us some beers. I’ll park up and be back in a minute.’

  Suarez drove off and Jimmy looked through the trees at the tables with the parasols and the sea beyond. Very holiday brochure: in a magazine he would have liked the look of it. He turned his back on the holiday postcard scene and walked into the welcoming cool of the bar’s shady, air-conditioned interior. Inside the bar it wasn’t busy and the waiter came straight to the table.

  ‘Welcome back, sir.’

  Either he remembered Jimmy as a previous customer or as someone who got visited by the police.

  ‘Two beers.’

  The waiter left and Jimmy set about trying to get his mind into gear. Henderson had been very frightened when they turned up but they weren’t the reason. That had been Harry’s work. Whatever Henderson and Harry were mixed up in was serious enough to get Henderson sweating, drinking and clamming up behind a weak story. That might make it even murder serious. The beers came and a couple of minutes later Suarez walked in.

  ‘What are you doing back here? Why not sit outside? There’s plenty of shade. You don’t have to be in the sun.’

  ‘We could, couldn’t we? And you know what, we could look at the sea again. That would make a nice change. Maybe the ferry will put in an appearance and make our day.’

  Suarez grinned and pulled out her chair.

  ‘I guess the heat can be hard work if you’re not used to it.’ She sat down while Jimmy took a long pull at his cold beer. ‘OK, now you’re out of the sun, what did you make of Henderson’s story?’

  He put down his glass.

  ‘It sounded thin to me, like something you’d make up on the spur of the moment if you’d suddenly realised you were being watched. But I doubt Henderson has the imagination or guts to do it, so I suppose Mercer spotted your man behind the bar and told Henderson what to say when the police turned up.’

  ‘Yes. But if they both tell the same story it will do the job. We can’t fault it so I can’t pull either of them in for questioning.’

  ‘What about Mercer? He’s got heavy form, sixteen years he told me, and the last time it was for armed robbery. Couldn’t you pull him and question him on the strength of that?’

  ‘And how do I explain pulling him in? Why should his form bother us now if it hasn’t before? Anyway, what’s the point? If it’s like you say then he’s been round the ring often enough to know all the moves. He’d just admit his record and say, so what? He’s done his time, there’s nothing currently against him and now he makes his living as a respectable writer so where would it get us?’

  She was right. Harry was bomb-proof as things stood.

  Funny, thought Jimmy, he’d never marked Harry down as a clever one, yet here he was in Spain, obviously doing well and, according to the story, an established writer of crime fiction. But Jimmy didn’t buy into it. It was fiction all right and somewhere there was crime, but it wasn’t happening in any books that Harry wrote. Arthritic hands or not, Harry the villain was still for real and he was still violent.

  ‘No, it doesn’t hold together. Harry’s wrong, he’s up to something and it isn’t writing about crime, it’s crime pure and simple. Did you unlock Jarvis’s computer yet?’

  ‘Yes, apart from his own stuff there was hard porn, children, rape, lots of it, and like I say very, very nasty. If he was alive, Vice could have put him away for a stiff stretch according to the boys who saw the stuff.’

  ‘Porn means money, and the nastier the porn the more the money. Jarvis obviously had a source. The question is, was it for his own use, or to distribute to other like-minded individuals?’

  ‘Mercer as the supplier, Jarvis as distributor?’

  ‘It’s a thought, and I don’t have any others. Mercer’s in the frame, so is Jarvis, so is the porn. Jarvis’s money had to come from somewhere and if he had access to plenty of the real nasty kind of porn it could mean he didn’t buy it, he sold it.’

  Suarez took a drink and thought about it.

  ‘With Mercer’s background he’d probably have no trouble in making contacts with people who could make what was wanted.’

  ‘Henderson was an accountant so he could look after the financial side. Mercer sees to supply, Henderson fixes the money and Jarvis is the delivery boy. A neat and profitable little business if true.’

  ‘It would certainly tie them all together and if they fell out, if Jarvis got greedy or wanted out, then pop, Mercer puts a bullet in his head.’

  ‘It’s possible. Harry’s got bad hands but he could still pull a trigger without any difficulty.’

  ‘It makes a line of enquiry.’

  ‘What do we know about Jarvis before he came to Spain?’

  ‘He was a teacher. That’s what he put down on the forms.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Fifty-one, and he’d been here for just over three years.’

  ‘And from the autopsy no health problems except being dead. A fit teacher under fifty who can afford to pack it in and retire to Spain. Nice going. Did he do any work here?’

  ‘Not officially, none that we could turn up.’

  ‘So how was he fixed for money?’

  ‘The bills we found at his house seem to have been paid on time and he had statements showing just over two thousand euros in the current account of his bank, and a pass book for a deposit account where he had a balance of over twenty thousand.’

  ‘Fixed up OK then, and it wasn’t from any teachers’ pension fund.’

  ‘From his bank statements there was a regular monthly payment of three thousand euros into the current account from the deposit account.’

  ‘So how did the deposit account keep up with that?’

  ‘Cash deposits. Various sums, nothing regular and nothing so big questions might get asked.’

  ‘A teacher leaves his job in the UK and comes to Spain. He’s not taken on a pension so he’s not taken early retirement, has no job that anyone knows of, but he’s comfortably off with a steady but erratic income. What was his house like?’

  ‘Neat, clean –’

  ‘No, I mean what sort of house was it, big, small, in a good area?’

  ‘Comfortable, two bedrooms, all the fixings and it’s in a nice enough area, residential, quiet, handy for town and the beaches if you don’t drive.’

  ‘So not at the cheap end of the market?’

  ‘No, not the cheap end.’

  ‘Did he own it?’

  ‘No, he rented it.’

  ‘From?’
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br />   ‘From a company that has properties in different parts of Spain, Iberian Property Holdings. It operates out of Gibraltar and only deals on-line. We didn’t look at it closely but it looks genuine.’

  ‘Gibraltar?’

  ‘Probably a tax thing. Also it means they can bypass a lot of UK and European regulations. It doesn’t mean anything, lots of small companies do the same.’

  ‘An ex-teacher who moves to Spain, rents a nice house and lives comfortably with a decent supply of money which comes from nowhere at all.’

  ‘Who ends up dead in his own kitchen with a bullet in the back of his head.’

  Jimmy finished his beer. ‘Another one for you?’ he asked Suarez.

  ‘No thanks.’

  He beckoned the waiter. ‘One more beer, please.’ The waiter left. A group of four elderly people speaking English loudly came in and sat at a table by the window, obviously relieved to be out of the Spanish sun. Having paid to get it they were now busy avoiding it. They must have liked the look of the pictures in the holiday magazine as well. Jimmy pulled his mind back to the business in hand.

  ‘What about Henderson?’

  ‘Fifty-four, owns an accountancy business in the UK, Coventry. Semi-retired and came over here five years ago with his wife. He goes back to England about six times a year to keep an eye on things. They had a house in town when they arrived, then two years ago they moved out and bought the place where they live now.’

  ‘Did they sell the other house?’

  ‘Nobody checked, why?’

  ‘When I was a copper you checked everything. Times must have changed.’

  ‘OK, I’ll check. And before you ask, I checked to see if Mercer really does write crime thrillers. I went on Amazon and there are four under his name. He is a writer OK?’ The beer came and Jimmy took a drink. Suarez waited until he had put his glass down. ‘If we’re right about these three and they’re together in some porn thing, I think the connection won’t surface here, I think it will be in England. They’ve been very careful to make sure there was nothing to tie them together since they arrived but maybe they weren’t so careful before they came. If we could turn up something in the UK we might get a line on how the business was set up. If we can get reasonable grounds that they’re in it together we’ll have something here to turn the screw with, especially on Henderson.’

  ‘If the porn is as nasty as you say, why not stay with that? If you get something and try to use it as leverage on Jarvis’s killing you just make work for yourself. Why not bang them up for the porn if you can and settle for that.’

  But Suarez wasn’t interested in the suggestion.

  ‘If we can fix the porn on them, fine, but the murder comes first, Jarvis’s killing is what this is all about.’

  Suddenly Jimmy felt angry. What was he doing? He wasn’t a copper any more. He’d been sent here to do a job. How the hell had he got mixed up in a police investigation?

  ‘It might be what it’s all about for you but I didn’t come here to sort out any murder or uncover a porn ring. I was sent to look into whether a senior Catholic cleric was mixed up with terrorists, remember?’

  Suarez look a little surprised.

  ‘I thought we were working together on this?’

  ‘Maybe we are, but not for the same reasons.’ Suarez pushed her chair back, crossed her legs and looked at him in an odd sort of way. Jimmy didn’t like the way she was looking at him, it disturbed his thinking. In fact, his thinking wasn’t the only thing it disturbed …

  ‘Look, I’m going for a walk. I need to think about a few things.’

  Suarez nodded.

  ‘Sure.’

  But she kept on looking.

  Jimmy didn’t get up. He didn’t want to go back into the sun but he couldn’t think properly with Suarez there. That was why he’d got angry. She bothered him, got in amongst him somehow. She was becoming too much of a distraction. It was her legs mostly, he kept wondering where they ended.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I blew up like that.’

  ‘That’s OK. Everyone blows up now and then.’

  ‘And this bloody heat bothers me.’

  She got up.

  ‘OK, Jimmy, you stay here. If you want to think you won’t do it so well in the sun, not if it bothers you. You sure it’s just the heat?’

  Jimmy looked up. Was she laughing at him?

  She was still looking at him in that odd way and it still disturbed him but, no, she wasn’t laughing at him.

  ‘Just the heat.’

  ‘Fine. You sit tight and drink your beer, I’ll go and set things in motion to find out if there was any special reason why Jarvis left his teaching job and if the Hendersons sold their first house.’

  ‘Thanks, I wasn’t looking forward to the sun again.’

  ‘No, I could see that.’

  Suarez left the bar heading for her car and Jimmy began to think. First he thought about her legs, then her figure, then –

  No, he wasn’t looking forward to going out in the sun again. But he was looking forward to something. What? He wasn’t sure he knew the answer to that. Or maybe he wasn’t ready just yet to admit that he knew the answer all too well.

  Chapter Ten

  Jarvis. He had been the start of all this, and now he was dead. But why was he dead? He’d told the priest, Perez, about the ETA thing. But if killing Jarvis was to stop that information getting passed on, if it ever existed, then Perez would have to be killed as well. And if ETA knew about Jarvis, if they knew he had told …

  Jimmy stopped. This was no good. He tried to clear his mind. It wasn’t easy but he tried. If any ETA information did exist the only reason Jimmy could see for Jarvis to die was to protect the source, whoever had given Jarvis the information. But that didn’t make sense either. Why wait to kill him until he had passed on the information? No, that side of it all had to be rubbish. It had to be. So he left it alone and moved on.

  Jarvis was connected to Henderson and Mercer, that had to be why he was dead, with Mercer or Henderson as the trigger and Jimmy’s money was firmly on Mercer. So, what should he do? Suarez thought there was a better chance of turning up a connection in the UK. That made sense. If –

  His phone rang and, when he answered it, he recognised the voice. It was a monsignor from Rome, the one McBride had sent to pull him out of Copenhagen.

  ‘Professor McBride wonders why you have not been in contact.’

  Jimmy was glad of the distraction, and he decided to make the most of it.

  ‘Because I’ve become romantically involved with a stunning blonde who desires my body. It keeps you busy that sort of thing, cuts into your time.’

  ‘I see you don’t change, Mr Costello, you still have the same sense of humour.’

  ‘That’s me, always the same.’

  ‘Can you give me some idea of what progress, if any, you are making?’

  ‘Well, soon I hope we’ll be holding hands – ’

  ‘Please, Mr Costello. Spare me any more of your low comedy. A small amount goes very far I assure you.’

  ‘Yes, but will she go very far … all right, all right. I haven’t been in touch because there’s nothing to report, nothing concrete. I was sent to talk to Jarvis but he’s dead, no one knows why or who did it. I’m working with a local Inspector who thinks Jarvis may have been involved with a local porn ring. Also there’s an ex-con named Mercer living here who could be into something –’

  The Monsignor’s voice cut across Jimmy’s flow.

  ‘Mr Costello, you were sent to Santander to do a very simple task. You were certainly not sent to look into any porn ring or discover ex-criminals. Have you spoken yet to Fr Perez?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet what to ask him.’

  ‘Ask him about the information Jarvis gave him. Surely that’s simple enough.’

  ‘That’s the problem, it’s too simple. I don’t see that just asking him about that get
s me anywhere.’

  ‘It gets you finished, Mr Costello, and it gets you back to Rome and that is what Professor McBride now wants. She has decided, and I agree with her, that the whole business is becoming too involved, so just go and talk to Fr Perez then come back here. Is that understood?’

  ‘But my stunning blonde looks at me shyly from downcast eyes, surely that means something. Dare I hope, do you think?’

  But the phone had gone dead so he put it away.

  He liked the monsignor, he didn’t change either, he still had no sense of humour. But Jimmy wasn’t really convinced that his clowning had been just a joke at the monsignor’s expense. He had a sneaking suspicion there might actually be a bit more to the stunning blonde than that. He pulled out his phone again and made a call.

  ‘It’s me. I’ve had a think and what I think is that it’s time to talk to Fr Perez. I’ll be in touch.’ Jimmy rang off and then dialled the number Professor McBride had given him for Fr Perez. ‘Fr Perez? My name is Costello, James Costello. I would like to meet with you and discuss a letter which you sent to the Bishop via his secretary and which the Bishop forwarded to Rome. No, I am nothing to do with the police. I was asked to make enquiries into the matter unofficially on behalf of someone in Rome. No, I quite understand that you would want to confirm who I was and why I want to talk to you. Have you a pen? Then if you phone this number you will get all the confirmation you require.’ Jimmy gave him the contact number for Professor McBride. ‘My number is,’ Jimmy gave him his mobile number, ‘I look forward to hearing from you.’

  He put away the mobile, finished his beer, went to the bar, paid then left. He crossed the road, went through the trees, past the tables and on to the walkway above the beach. A slight breeze had started coming in from the sea and it didn’t seem so hot any more. He started to walk, finally his brain was back in gear and a small idea was beginning to form in his mind.

  It would be a real help if Jarvis had taught English and been caught with his trousers down. Yes, that would be a real help.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Another coffee, Señor Costello?’

  ‘No thank you, Father.’

  The old priest leaned forward and refilled his own cup and then sat back.