As Easy as Murder

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘No,’ I barked at her, not caring about the live camera, ‘you hang around places like this looking for gossip. Which golfer’s shagging which tennis player, stuff like that.’

  She ignored my jibe. ‘Is he living with you, Mrs Blackstone?’ she continued. ‘Or are you touring with him? Are you part of his entourage?’

  ‘He doesn’t have an entourage, woman, he has a caddie and a coach!’

  ‘Where do you live, Mrs Blackstone? In Britain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the US?’

  ‘No.’ I took a step to my right, ready to brush past her. I looked over her shoulder, but Shirley had made herself scarce, gone into hiding probably. I’d have set off in search of the silly cow, but the guy with the camera had stepped in front of me.

  ‘So you live in Spain,’ Christy Mann exclaimed, as if she’d exhausted all global alternatives. ‘In that case we’d love an exclusive with you and Jonathan at home. The Blackstone saga goes on; it’ll appeal to all of Oz’s fans. They miss him so much; his memorial website has over a million hits a year, you know. And now that you and his nephew are together . . . The world needs to know that, Mrs Blackstone. It’ll all be done in the best possible taste, I promise.’

  I looked her in the eye. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘if your brains were gunpowder and someone lit the fuse, the explosion wouldn’t ruffle your hair. First, I repeat, Jonny and I are not together in the way you imply. Christ, I’m twice his age.’

  She jumped in. ‘That’s no barrier these days.’

  ‘It is for me. Okay? Now, second, if you harass me, or my nephew, or my son in any way, I’ll have you arrested. If you don’t believe I could do that, just try me.’

  Her expression changed. Her eyes narrowed. I thought I’d put a stop to her, but I was wrong. All she was doing was thinking, a process that took a little time. ‘Your son?’ she murmured. ‘You have a son? Would that be that Oz’s child, Mrs Blackstone?’

  There’s this thing called Wikipedia. It’s a self-building global internet encyclopaedia, and anyone with a little computer savvy can post an entry there. These days, you’re nobody if you’re not on it. I don’t know who began Oz’s bio page, but whoever did it researched his life very thoroughly. It lists his birthplace, his parents, the schools and university he attended, his career, step by step, and his three marriages. What you won’t find there is any reference to his children. Susie and I monitor the content, and any attempt to post material about the kids, we delete. As far as we’re concerned, they’re off limits to any media.

  We’ve found, over the years, that the legitimate press, even the red-tops, respect that, but Ms Christy Mann, her crude approach, and her intrusive camera didn’t strike me as legitimate in any respect. I’ll leave you to imagine what I wanted to do with her microphone, but I realised that however much we might both have enjoyed that, it wouldn’t be very sensible. So I swept the red mist aside, took a deep breath and lowered my voice. ‘Do you have a boss?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s irrelevant,’ she said. ‘Will you answer my question?’

  ‘Not until you answer mine.’

  ‘If you insist,’ she sighed. ‘Spotlight is owned by a company registered in London, and that’s part of an international media group, American owned. Why do you need to know that?’

  ‘I don’t like to waste my time,’ I replied. ‘Now I’ll tell you what you want to know. Yes, I have a son, Oz’s son. But if you come within a country kilometre of him, I will use all the power and influence I have to have you crushed. If I have to do that, I’ll go straight to source. And if you think that’s a wild threat for a single Spanish parent to be making, you go and look me up on Wikipedia, sunshine. Primavera Phillips Blackstone; key that in and click the search button.’

  She stared at me, and her painted smile turned incredulous. ‘The camera’s still running, Mrs Blackstone. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Now watch what I’m going to do.’ I turned to the cameraman. I’d sized him up; he was a freelance, local. No way did this paparazzo chick travel with a regular TV crew. Her low-budget company hired them by the hour, wherever she and her like went. ‘How much is she paying you for this gig?’ I asked him in Catalan.

  He switched off and lowered his weapon, a model that had been around for a while. ‘Five hundred euro,’ he answered, in the same language.

  ‘In cash?’

  ‘With her? Absolutely.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll buy your cassette for seven.’

  He grinned. ‘Deal.’

  I always carry a reasonable float in old-fashioned money. Not secure, perhaps, but you never know when your car’s going to break down, or when you’re going to be in an accident and wind up somewhere where cash is king. That day I had just under a thousand on me. I took my wallet from my bag, stripped out fourteen fifties, and handed them to him. He ejected the cartridge and handed it over, thanked me, then turned and walked away.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ Christy Mann screamed.

  ‘We just did, honey,’ I told her. ‘Now fuck off.’

  ‘Give me that tape back,’ she insisted, ‘or I’ll get the police.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I pointed along the pathway, towards the clubhouse. ‘There’s a cop.’

  She followed the direction of my finger, towards the dark-haired man in uniform who was heading in our direction. ‘Officer,’ she wailed, ‘this woman’s stolen my tape.’

  ‘And if I go after my friend Jaume,’ Alex Guinart said as he reached us, ‘who was your cameraman, will he tell me the same story? He works for us on occasion.’ He looked at me. ‘Has this woman been giving you trouble, Primavera?’

  ‘None that I couldn’t handle.’

  ‘That’s as well.’ He frowned at the reporter. ‘Papers, please,’ he snapped.

  ‘Papers? What papers?’

  ‘Your press pass for this event. We’ll start with that.’

  ‘I don’t have one,’ she replied, still truculent. ‘I’m general press.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be here. This is a closed event.’ He held out a hand. ‘Your passport, please.’

  She frowned, sizing him up, then decided that further argument would not be a good idea. She delved into the vast shoulder bag that she was carrying and handed over a plum-coloured booklet. Alex opened it at the photographic page, studied the image, then looked at her.

  ‘Christine McGuigan,’ he murmured. ‘Irish citizen, age twenty-seven.’

  ‘She told me her name was Christy Mann,’ I volunteered.

  ‘That’s my professional name.’

  ‘Or I could class it as deception,’ Alex growled. He returned her passport. ‘Where are you living? Don’t even think of lying to me.’

  ‘In the Novotel at the airport,’ she murmured, grudgingly.

  ‘Then here’s what you do. You go back there and you find some other way of going about your business. You do not come back here and you do not accost this lady again, or the families of any other golfers. You do, and I’ll throw you in jail. Please leave, now.’

  She did as she was told, albeit after throwing me one last malevolent glare, far removed from her earlier sugary approach.

  ‘Thanks for that, Alex,’ I said, as soon as she was out of earshot. ‘Now would you like to tell me how you happened to be there, right on cue?’

  He grinned. ‘Shirley told me you were having trouble,’ he explained.

  ‘Shirley’s the one who’s in real fucking trouble,’ I retorted. ‘I reckon she set that cow on me. But that’s not what I meant. What are you doing here, now, at this event? You’re criminal investigation.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be here? I’m a golfer, even if I am shit at the game. This is a chance to see the top guys play, so why shouldn’t I be here in my off-duty hours?’

  ‘Because you’re in uniform, Alex.’

  ‘I’m grabbing a couple of hours off. I’m based in Girona; you know that. It wouldn’t be practical for m
e to go home and change.’

  I laughed. ‘Hey, this is me you’re talking to, remember, Primavera. She who knows that all you CI people keep a change of gear in the office in case you have to go plain clothes unexpectedly on an investigation. But you and Gomez have a murder investigation on your hands, a hot one. You don’t have a couple of hours to spare. So, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Nothing you need worry about,’ he murmured.

  ‘You’re getting lamer by the minute. Has there been a robbery here? Is one of the players under threat?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Then . . .’ No incident, and the dead man in the woods had to be at the head of his workload. ‘Patterson Cowling,’ I exclaimed. ‘Are you here because of him?’

  ‘Jesus, Primavera, let it go. I’ve just done you a favour with that television woman. You know as well as I do that I was bullshitting her. I couldn’t have arrested her, not just for being pushy.’

  ‘So? That’s us square for the favour I did you in the woods. You’re here because of Patterson, aren’t you?’

  He shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  I pressed on. ‘Is he a suspect after all?’

  ‘No. Why should he be? I wanted a look at the man, that’s all. I like to know who’s who; to be able to put a face to every name. It’s a cop thing. I know we were probably at the wine fair at the same time, but I have no recollection of seeing him there.’

  ‘You’ve seen him now?’

  ‘Yes.’ He grinned. ‘Unless Shirley has a different man with her today.’

  ‘So you just happened to bump into them, accidentally like?’

  ‘Actually Shirley bumped into me. I wasn’t going to interrupt their day, but she saw me and called across to tell me you’d been waylaid by a pushy television reporter.’

  ‘I see.’ I paused, to let him think he was off the hook; but he wasn’t. ‘That only leaves one other question. How did you know they were here? I don’t recall telling you anything about them coming to support Jonny.’

  ‘I suppose I just assumed,’ he said.

  I laughed out loud. ‘Cops don’t travel twenty kilometres and join a crowd of a few thousand people, on assumptions. You knew he was here, Alex, because you’re having him followed. Go on, admit it.’

  He put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me. He was smiling, but serious at the same time. ‘Primavera, my dear friend, you must let me do my job without questioning me over every detail. Okay, I’m keeping Mr Cowling under observation, because he is a person of interest to me, or rather to us.’

  ‘And Hector Gomez knows about it?’

  ‘Of course he does. He’s my boss.’

  ‘But didn’t you say he was warned off by his boss?’

  ‘Yes,’ He nodded. ‘And he didn’t take kindly to it. No investigator likes to be told that someone’s off limits.’

  ‘So you and he are ignoring your director general,’ I murmured. ‘Isn’t that a bad career move, chum?’

  ‘No, we’re not ignoring him as such. We’ve been specifically ordered not to bring Mr Cowling in for interview, so we haven’t done that. We were told to lay off him, and we have done, but I don’t interpret that as forbidding us from keeping him under observation. That’s all we’re doing.’

  ‘But why? He’s just a retired bloke who didn’t have his pocket picked.’

  ‘By a man who wound up dead,’ he reminded me. ‘Look, your description of him is probably spot on. As far as we know, he’s a newcomer to our town, and he doesn’t know anyone here outside of Shirley’s circle of friends. As far as we know,’ he repeated. ‘I’m prepared to take it as read that he couldn’t have killed the man himself; Shirley would have noticed his absence and if she made a connection she wouldn’t keep it from us. I trust her that much. All I want to do is be aware of the outside possibility that Mr Cowling might have an acquaintance locally that we don’t know about, that’s all, someone from a former life who’s watching his back. That’s why we’re keeping an eye on him, just in case he makes contact with somebody we don’t know about. Now, you’re not going to tell him that, are you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I snorted. ‘Did Shirley introduce you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘she did, and I must say he seemed just as pleasant as you described him.’

  ‘Fine. Let me tell you, now: from your casual presence here, Patterson will have assumed everything you’ve just told me. So if this comes back and bites your arse, don’t assume that I’ve said anything to anyone. Not that it will,’ I added. ‘If by some miracle your outside possibility is on the mark, your big flat feet have just squashed any chance of any contact being made.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘I trust the guy, and I don’t believe he has any involvement in that man’s death . . .’ I interrupted myself. ‘You haven’t identified him, I take it?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘No, I didn’t think so. But listen, Alex, I’m serious, you have to assume that Patterson, if he chose, could run rings round you and Hector, so your surveillance is a waste of time, unless you bring in plain clothes people that he couldn’t possibly know. So, how about laying off, and letting me keep an eye on him, as far as I’m able? If I’m wrong and he isn’t as benevolent as he seems, then Shirley needs to be protected, but I’m probably better placed to do it than you in these circumstances.’

  He frowned. ‘I can’t involve you in police work, Primavera.’

  ‘Bollocks you can’t!’ I laughed derisively. ‘You have done in the past when it suited your book. You did on Wednesday, as a matter of fact, when you hoiked me off the golf course. You let me look down this blind alley for you, and you can get on with the priority job of finding out whose body it is that you’ve got in your cooler.’

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘But you will.’

  ‘I’ll ask Hector.’

  ‘No, you’ll tell Hector. If I do this, you’ll be square with your director general, for no way will he ever find out.’

  He gave in. ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘but keep in touch. And if something unexpected does happen, don’t expose yourself.’

  ‘I’m not given to exposing myself, sir . . . not in public at any rate.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Sure.’ I rose up on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. ‘See you later, officer.’ I left him and headed for the car park. I’d just reached my jeep when I spotted something buxom in tartan standing beside hers, a few rows away. I bore down on her.

  ‘You!’ I boomed as I approached. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, setting that twat on me?’

  She held her hands up, as if she was warding me off. Beside her, Patterson exploded with laughter; I’d never seen him more animated. ‘It was the tartan!’ she protested. ‘She spotted it and started to ask me about Jonathan. I told her you were the one she should talk to, that’s all.’

  ‘You should have stopped her,’ I scolded Patterson.

  ‘I’d made myself scarce,’ he admitted. ‘I run a mile from TV cameras, and you don’t need to ask why.’ I nodded. ‘Go on, Shirley,’ he chortled, ‘tell her all of it.’

  His ‘Significant Other’ turned a fetching shade of pink. ‘I said he was your toy boy,’ she confessed. ‘But I was kidding, honest!’

  ‘Jesus! And how exactly was she to know you were?’

  ‘You sorted her out, though. So no damage done.’

  I told her how I’d sorted her, digging the cassette from my bag and waving it in her face. ‘Seven hundred euro that cost me!’

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll buy it off you.’

  ‘Sure. And then you’d probably ask Tom how to put it on YouTube. No, I’ll keep it. If she’s daft enough to give me any more trouble it’s evidence, of a sort.’

  I can never stay mad at Shirley for long. In fact, she’s usually a calming influence when I do get steamed up about something. Friends like her are to be cherished, not scolded. That’s wh
y I’d offered to keep an eye on Patterson for Alex; to keep the cops out of her hair, more than his. That, and also . . . I don’t know for sure this far after the event, but I reckon I still had a small nagging doubt about him myself. That’s probably why, on the spur of the moment, I invited Shirl and him to eat with the boys and me at Casa Blackstone that evening. He wasn’t an enemy, but still, I felt that it would be no bad thing to follow the advice of General Sun Tzu (or Don Corleone, depending on which version of the phrase’s origin that you believe) and keep him as close as I could.

  Having done that I decided that I’d better tell Jonny of the arrangements, so I went back to the press area, and waylaid him as he left after finishing his round of interviews. By that time he was no longer the tournament leader. The Irish kid was six under par for his round in progress, two in front of Jonny, and the former US Open champion had moved up the board into second place. He wasn’t worried, he assured me. ‘I didn’t expect to lead at minus eleven, not with a field of this quality.’ He said that Uche was waiting for him on the range, but promised to be back home in time for dinner. ‘I might even make room for a swim,’ he added. ‘Maybe Tom can show me the best place.’

  I looked at him, at his serious Oz-like face, its expression older than his years, and found myself understanding why the Mann/McGuigan person had swallowed Shirley’s line so eagerly. If I had been in the market for a toy boy, I could have done a lot worse. I focused on being maternal.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.

  ‘Solid,’ he replied, firmly. ‘I played a good round today, but that’s it. Tomorrow’s another challenge, and the course will be set up to be even harder. If I can shoot another sixty-eight, I’ll be well placed.’

  I left him to join his caddie on the practice ground, and headed back to the car park. When I got there my day took another downward turn. I hadn’t noticed before, but the trusty old jeep seemed to be slightly off balance. I took a closer look and saw that my rear left-side tyre was flat. My reaction was multilingual and probably best not repeated.

  I’m a member of the RACC, and my insurance covers me for roadside assistance, but there was no knowing how long help would take to arrive, so I decided to sort the mess out myself. Changing a wheel on a big heavy off-roader isn’t particularly easy even on a flat, made-up road. When you have to do it in a field, it’s all the more challenging. It took me a while to fit the jack and raise the vehicle up, and then even longer to undo the security bolts, but I was up to the job. My spare was unused, but fortunately I’d checked the pressures of all five wheels only a week before. I took the load off the jack, replaced it in its slot and was packing away the flat, when something caught my eye. The puncture wasn’t hidden away inside the tread, as they usually are. It was in the side wall, a rip about an inch and a half long.