As Easy as Murder

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ he replied. Of course he did: he understood that he was being spun a line, and Alex, being a family friend, probably realised that. But he knew also that if he told him the whole story, my wrath would fall upon him, and he didn’t fancy that.

  ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he said. He was prepared to leave it at that, but my son wasn’t, not quite.

  ‘It’s nothing. Will I have to be a witness if you do catch him?’

  ‘I can’t see that being necessary.’ More carefully chosen words. He sniffed. ‘Are you cooking fish, Primavera?’

  I nodded. ‘And tomatoes, chopped garlic, and some lightly sautéed potatoes.’

  He smiled at my guys. ‘Lucky you. It’ll be a while before I get to eat. Come on, Magda,’ he said, ‘let’s go. We’ve got what we came for.’ He patted Tom on the shoulder. ‘Thank you again, my friend.’

  He almost headed for the door, but his cop’s reflexes kicked in and stopped him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, offering his hand to Jonny. ‘We haven’t been introduced. Are you visiting Primavera?’ he asked, as they shook.

  I hoped that he wasn’t wondering ‘Toy boy?’ then realised that the Magda person almost certainly was. ‘Tom’s cousin,’ I said, briskly, ‘my nephew; Jonathan Sinclair. He’s going to be living with us for a while, as he gets his new career off the ground. You’ve met their grandfather, Oz’s dad.’

  ‘Of course,’ he exclaimed. ‘It all fits now. I remember Mac mentioning you. You’re a golfer, aren’t you, which explains why . . .’ he almost continued, ‘. . . why Primavera was so pissed off when I hauled her off the golf course,’ but stopped himself just in time to leave that can of worms unopened. ‘Alex Guinart. Primavera’s my daughter’s godmother; that makes us family, of a sort. Nice to meet you; see you around.’

  He timed his exit perfectly, just as the oven alarm sounded. The monkfish was pretty damn good, I have to say. (I don’t really have to, but I will.) I wish that I’d been in a better mood to enjoy it, though; as it was, my mind was running ahead, to my date later in the evening. Jonny offered to clean up after we were done, but I told him that his time would be better spent studying his yardage charts and getting his head right for day one of the Catalan Masters. So I packed the dishwasher, while Tom got on with his task. We have a ritual every time we eat baked monkfish. Afterwards, he boils the heads and bones in a big stock pot; it makes the basis of a great fish soup. Stinks the kitchen out, but it’s worth it.

  By the time I’d showered, using my most expensive body wash to ensure that I’d rid myself of the last vestiges of fishy smell, one of my pet hates, and prettied myself up, I was running slightly late, but only by Scottish standards. Fifteen minutes’ slippage in L’Escala is still classed as being on time.

  Shirley and Patterson were still on their dessert when I arrived. The restaurateur offered me a menu, but I declined . . . for a couple of minutes, then succumbed to a bowl of pistachio ice cream. The place was busy; the evening had turned cool, as it does quite often at the end of May, and so the diners had opted for inside tables rather than the terrace. Ours was in a corner by the window. It was the closest thing to a private booth that La Clota has . . . but when I surveyed the other customers I spotted an English lady, who knows both Shirley and me, and who is so relentlessly inquisitive that she makes Tomás de Torquemada seem like a chat show host.

  ‘Let’s move on for coffee,’ I suggested. Patterson looked puzzled, but Shirl had done her own looking around and got the message. They paid the bill and we left. We didn’t go far, only a few hundred metres, to a night bar called Octopuss; it tends not to get busy until later on and isn’t a haunt of the British ex-pat chattering classes. It does have a corner table, and we took it, even though the place had just opened and we were its only customers.

  ‘Well?’ Shirley said, with an expansive beam, once a coffee and a large goblet of Bailey’s had been placed in front of her. ‘Out with it, Primavera. What was all that fuss about this afternoon? Someone told me after I’d spoken to you that they saw an ambulance driving away, and that the woods have all been closed off by cops, lots of them. But that’s all I’ve heard.’

  I ignored her and looked directly at Patterson. ‘A body was found there this morning. A man. He was killed there, then stripped of all his clothing and possessions. But it wasn’t a robbery, that wasn’t what it was about. Whoever did it blew most of his face off too. You can guess why, can’t you?’ I asked. I hoped that I wasn’t going to bring anyone’s wrath down on the head of John Dale, but I had another friend to protect, and she was closer.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, quietly. ‘To prevent identification, or to hinder it as much as possible.’

  Shirley looked at us from one to the other. ‘Why’re you asking him?’ she murmured.

  ‘Because he’s got a passing interest in the stiff, a personal interest, even.’ I switched my gaze back to him. ‘It was the guy who tried to steal your wallet the other night.’

  Patterson saw the complete picture, at once. ‘And the police wanted you there to help them confirm that?’ I nodded. ‘Which means that you reported the incident after all?’

  ‘Yes. I live here, mate; I have friends in the police. I couldn’t let a thief run around here with a free hand. I’m sorry, that’s not how I work. I gave them Tom’s detailed description and Stan’s mobile image . . . the same one I saw you copying on to your phone. They called me because the person who took a shotgun to his face left a couple of pieces intact. It was him; no question. They still don’t know who he is, though. How about you? Have you managed to identify him?’

  My friend laughed. ‘How could he?’ she gasped.

  ‘Because he used to be a spook, Shirl. Is Patterson Cowling the name you were born with?’ I challenged.

  He sighed, then smiled. ‘It’s the name on my birth certificate, Primavera, I promise you.’ He turned to Shirley. ‘I’m afraid I’ve given you a slightly edited version of my past, dear. But it is my past,’ he added, ‘I promise you that. I am completely retired. I’ve moved on to a new life, even if I’ll never be able to talk about the old one.’ He looked back at me. ‘I was warned that you’ve been asking about me, but they assured me that you’d be discreet.’

  ‘As I have been,’ I told him. ‘So bloody discreet that I’ve even kept the cops from picking you up.’

  He winced. ‘For which I thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. So? How did your trawl go? Do you know who the dead guy is?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, which means that he’s probably nobody, other than what he seemed at the time, a rather inept pickpocket, Eastern European, maybe, rather than British, as Tom thought.’

  ‘In that case,’ I asked, ‘why’s he in a fucking morgue in Girona, with the shreds of his face that they picked off the trees in a box alongside him?’

  ‘Probably for reasons completely unconnected with me,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know why the hell whoever killed him didn’t simply burn the body.’

  ‘Because they’d have burned the woods down with him,’ I pointed out. ‘The ground’s covered in pine needles. They can spread fire as fast as you can run away from it, faster with a wind blowing. If they’d tried to cremate the poor bastard, the flames would have spread right up to Shirley’s door.’

  His partner was looking at him in the way that characters do at the end of a Poirot on television, as they look at the perpetrator of the crime of the week once he’s been unmasked by the preening little Belgian. I guess they’d be having a conversation once she got him home, but I had a feeling they’d survive. Shirley’s a very understanding lady, and she’s been my friend for long enough to be able to take the unexpected in her stride.

  ‘So,’ I continued, ‘you promise we can still call you Patterson?’

  ‘Absolutely. That’s my name; it’s on my passport, on my bank accounts, attached to my National Insurance, NHS record, state and civil service, everything.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Shirl intervened. ‘I
thought you guys were pretty much public figures these days.’

  Patterson nodded. ‘At the very top level, yes. The heads of the intelligence and security services aren’t called by a single initial these days; they’re publicly accountable to a parliamentary committee. But the rest of us, those of us lower down the ladder? Hell, no. We work in the dark.’

  ‘Like the man in the woods?’ I murmured.

  ‘Not in the same way at all.’

  ‘So you were management, rather than field level.’

  ‘Senior management latterly, but always an office worker.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Shirley asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you any more than I have already, love, honestly. And please, you can never talk about it to anyone else.’ He looked at me, directly. ‘Either of you. Are you all right with that?’

  ‘I am,’ I told him. ‘I’ve already spoiled your scent for the police. As for this old trout here, I trust her with my secrets, and you can do the same. How’s your Russian?’ I added.

  ‘Crumbled, through disuse. I can still understand some, but that’s it.’

  I pushed it a little further. ‘And your Arabic?’

  ‘Non-existent. It never existed. Now please, Primavera.’

  ‘Okay,’ I promised. ‘I will probe no further, and I won’t ask any more questions.’

  He smiled. ‘There would be no point. Your friend Mr Kravitz doesn’t know about me. I’ve never appeared on his radar, and when I was active I never had occasion to make use of his skills and services.’

  If he said that to shake me up, he succeeded. Mark Kravitz was a guy I’d known for years. Oz and I met him when he provided minder services for Miles on a movie project. After that he did some discreet stuff for Oz on occasion and he’s been more than useful to me from time to time. For most of his career he’d styled himself a ‘security consultant’, a broad-brush picture of what he actually does. Mark was a fixer, and an intelligence gatherer; he operates on the edge of that community.

  Patterson had meant to make a point by mentioning his name, and I took it. He was letting me know that when he’d been tipped off that I was checking up on him, he’d had the same job done on me, and that he was much better placed in that respect than I was.

  ‘I never even thought of speaking to Mark,’ I told him. ‘He can’t afford to go rattling cages in MI5. Besides, his MS limits him pretty badly these days.’

  ‘So I understand.’ He grinned. ‘You have a limitation yourself, of course. When you accepted your attachment to HM Diplomatic Service, you signed the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘I don’t have that job any longer,’ I pointed out.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. That signature doesn’t go away, and its meaning can be interpreted very widely.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘God, no,’ he protested. ‘One of the things I was told about you was that threatening you would be a waste of time. Indeed it might even be counterproductive. But there are some people in my former walk of life who aren’t as circumspect as me, and who have no sense of humour.’

  ‘I know. About three years ago I met one of them, a woman who called herself Moira.’

  He smiled. ‘Yes, I believe that she did threaten you, and that a friend of yours made sure that it backfired on her. It’s all on your MI5 file. You may be interested to know that she’s now an administrator in GCHQ . . . and she hates Cheltenham with a passion, it’s said. But there are others like her, only a lot more subtle; old guard who do not believe in freedom of information. So no, it’s not a threat, just a word of caution.’

  ‘I’ll take it on board. You appreciate that all I was doing was looking out for Shirley’s interests, just as she’d do for me. The last thing I want to do is compromise you.’ I paused. ‘Mind you,’ I continued, ‘I still think that for the dead guy to choose your pocket to pick, out of all the people in St Martí that night . . . that’s a hell of a coincidence.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’d still like to know who he was.’

  ‘And who killed him?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to know that.’

  ‘You don’t think that you might have caused it, do you?’

  ‘You don’t mean that I might have ordered it, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, defensively; that had never occurred to me. ‘But could someone in your old service have been . . . how do I put it . . . a wee bit over-protective?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, no; not for a second. I’m not that important, Primavera.’ He smiled as he said it, but there was something in his eyes that suggested to me that he might not have been as convinced as he was trying to sound.

  Seven

  I’m not going to sit here and claim that by next morning I’d forgotten all about the man with no face; I’m probably as squeamish as you are. I’ve been able to hide it when necessary, but no kidding, my close-up view of that guy is still burned into my brain, and it always will be.

  However I did have a diversion, to stop me from dwelling upon it. Jonny had to be fed, watered and got ready for the first day of his new professional life. His ‘new boy’ late starting time was something of a blessing, in that we didn’t have to be up and about any earlier than was normal on a school day. In fact, Jonny might have been better staying in bed until Tom had left for school, for he was quizzed mercilessly over breakfast about his chances, so much that I could see faint cracks appearing in his super-confident image, and told my son, fairly sharply, to shut up and concentrate on his own forthcoming day at the office. I did give him one concession, though. I wanted to stay with Jonny right to the end of his round, and so I told Tom that he could take Charlie along to Vaive after school, and stay on the beach until seven, under the careful and caring eye of the xiringuita owners, friends of ours. After that, if I wasn’t there when he got home, he could set the table for dinner.

  Jonny left for the course at nine thirty; my plan was to go down around midday, meet Patterson and Shirley for lunch, and then with or without them, as they chose, be my nephew’s gallery for the whole of his round . . . or until my presence started to make him nervous and he asked me to leave. (I’d made him promise that if that happened, he would.)

  I busied myself with housework (a word you don’t hear me use too often, but I’m not a slut, honest) for a couple of hours, did some preparation for the evening meal, then went down to the beach and swam for a while. I was ready to go, when the house phone rang.

  ‘Primavera.’ It was Alex. ‘How’re you doing? I thought I’d give you a call to let you know how badly we’re doing. We can’t find a trace of our murder victim, not anywhere. The post-mortem’s been no help either. Other than the scar, the man had no distinguishing marks and no signs of any medical interventions during his lifetime, no surgical history to offer any leads. The only thing that’s definitive is a report by a forensic dentist. Judging by his teeth, his opinion backs up Tom’s, that the man wasn’t British . . . or, to be more precise, that his dental work wasn’t done there.’

  ‘That’s no help at all, is it,’ I sighed ‘if it means you can’t identify him by his dental records.’

  ‘There never was any chance of that,’ he replied. ‘Our expert didn’t have a complete mouth to look at. He couldn’t say where the guy’s dental work had been done, only where it hadn’t. Not Britain, not Russia, not Spain, but we’re left with the rest of Europe as a possibility. No blame to him. The upper left jawbone was missing completely, and there was other damage. You saw that for yourself.’

  ‘An unwelcome reminder,’ I murmured. ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘We’re going with the little we have. We’re going to ask all our Catalan newspapers and TV to publish the picture. With luck, that will be done over the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Only in Catalunya?’

  ‘Primavera, do you have any idea how many open murder cases there are in Spain with unidentified victims?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘You realise
what’ll happen, even with that limited circulation? You’ll have a thousand candidates; filtering them out will be a nightmare.’

  ‘I know; but we’re hoping that we’ll be able to eliminate most of them immediately.’

  I checked my watch; time to go. ‘Poor Alex,’ I sympathised. ‘I’m sure you’re doing all you can.’

  ‘And one thing that I shouldn’t have.’ He paused. ‘Well, not me; Hector.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He called London and asked for a computer check on your friend Mr Cowling. Now I understand why you talked me out of picking him up. He had a call back; from our director general, no less. I didn’t hear what he said, but Hector was very quiet for a while afterwards.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ I filled him in on my own inquiry, and John Dale’s panicky phone call in response. ‘I couldn’t tell you before, Alex, not outright, but I hoped you’d got the message.’

  ‘I had got it, but I neglected to pass it on to the boss. In the circumstances,’ he chuckled, ‘I’ll be keeping that to myself.’

  I didn’t mention Gomez’s embarrassment when I met Patterson and Shirley in the championship’s tented village. Their relationship seemed undamaged by the grenade I’d lobbed into it the night before. Indeed, I sensed a little extra buzz about Shirl; I reckoned I’d spiced up her life even more.

  That encounter came after I’d checked on Jonny in the practice ground. His swing looked absolutely grooved to me, and judging by the way Lena Mankell nodded after most of his shots, the most approval she ever seemed to show, she was happy too. The viewing stand wasn’t full, but it was a lot busier than it had been three days earlier. Uche spotted me and gave me an expansive wave. Since he was probably the most eye-catching bloke on the range, it drew attention to me that I could have lived without.

  ‘You family, then?’ a fat, fifty-ish bloke asked. He was two seats along, dressed in shorts and a Lacoste shirt, and his beer gut shifted as he turned towards me.