As Easy as Murder

by Quintin Jardine

  He checked his watch; his large, multi-buttoned sponsored watch. ‘I’m not due on range for another fifteen minutes,’ he said. He glanced at Uche. ‘See you there, mate, okay?’

  He and Tom left, and I found myself alone with two generations of Wigwes. I recalled the serious discussion they’d been having when I’d arrived and thought it best to let them resume it. ‘See you later, guys,’ I chirped.

  ‘Please don’t go, Primavera,’ Kalu exclaimed. ‘I hoped we might have lunch.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I lied, sort of. ‘I have to meet friends.’ He was an interesting man, no question, but he was radiating interest in me as well. He wasn’t unattractive, a bit more than that indeed, but I thought of the absent ‘companion’ and decided that if he was advertising a temporary vacancy, it wasn’t one I saw myself filling.

  I headed for the retail tent hoping that Shirley was in shopping mode, but if she was she was doing it somewhere else. Still I killed a quarter of an hour looking for her, then headed for the practice ground. When I got there, Jonny and Tom were waiting, alongside Lena Mankell, looking not her usual frosty, but downright glacial. I could guess why: no sign of Uche. As for my boy, he was wearing a nice new pair of shoes, with cotton liners that didn’t quite qualify as socks, and he was carrying a bag that I guessed contained his trainers.

  Shirley and Patterson were in the stand, watching the action. I didn’t think that Lena was nice to be near at that moment, so I headed towards them. I passed close enough to hear Tom ask, ‘Would you like me to go and find him?’

  Jonny started to nod, then stopped, frowning over Tom’s head. I followed his eyes, and there was Uche, toting the massive bag and smiling, probably as close to apologetically as he could manage. Kalu was following behind him, on his way to join us in the bleachers, or so I thought until he stopped, said something to his son, and stepped back out through the entrance to the arena. I carried on, and settled myself down beside my chums.

  Shirley pointed in the direction from which I had come. ‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘The black guy in the Savile Row suit?’

  ‘Uche’s dad,’ I replied. ‘He flew in for the big day; on his own jet, no less.’

  She whistled. ‘Bit of all right,’ she pronounced. ‘And Uche’s mum?’

  ‘She’s in the arms of another; our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, to be specific.’

  ‘What a shame. Uche never said his mother was dead.’ No, he hadn’t, I thought. ‘Leaves a clear field, though.’ She winked, lasciviously.

  ‘Which I will not be cultivating,’ I declared.

  ‘No?’ she exclaimed. ‘And him with a private jet? Could be your chance to join the mile-high club, and you probably wouldn’t even have to do it in the toilet.’

  I frowned at her, severely. ‘No thank you very much. Anyway, I am a member, several times over.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You are?’ she gasped. ‘You dirty little bitch. Come on, spill the beans.’

  ‘Aspen, Colorado,’ I revealed. ‘Oz and I went on holiday there once, oh, must be twelve, thirteen years ago. That’s well over a mile high.’

  ‘Gawd! You must have been out of breath.’

  ‘Not once, my dear, not once. We weren’t in any rush.’ I smiled as some very vivid memories came back. ‘You should try it,’ I advised her.

  ‘You hear that,’ she said, turning to Patterson. But he wasn’t there; nature must have called while we were talking, or he’d had a severe case of the munchies. While Shirley had been wheedling my sexual exploits out of me, he’d slipped out, without either of us noticing.

  Below us, Uche was on station and Jonny’s practice was under way. Lena’s expression had gone back to mildly severe, so she must have been content that his swing hadn’t altered overnight. The Irish kid and the other main contenders were lined up on either side of him, each with his own distinctive technique, each one hitting the ball straight and true, as if they were combining to show the new lad . . . and me, for that matter . . . what he was up against. But the new lad wasn’t watching; he was concentrating entirely on his own game. ‘Your best is all you can be, Auntie P,’ he’d said to me the night before. ‘The trick is to make that a little bit better every day.’

  Still . . . I won’t say that my faith in him was waning, but young Irish really did look unbeatable.

  I was in danger of succumbing to nerves and maybe even despondency, when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I couldn’t answer it on the stand, so I whispered an apology to Shirley, and slipped down from the stand. There was a ‘missed call’ message on the screen by the time I was able to take it out: Alex Guinart.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered. ‘What now?’ I remembered my undertaking. ‘He’s not expecting daily reports on Patterson’s movements, surely?’

  I considered, quite seriously, deleting the call from the list, and acting the daft lassie (self-explanatory Scottish saying) if Alex asked me about it. Probably that’s what I would have done, if it hadn’t started to tremble again as I held it in my hand. I looked at the screen: him again. I tutted, impatiently, as I pressed the green button. ‘Yes, Inspector Guinart?’ I said. ‘Don’t you normally have Sundays off?’

  ‘Normally, yes,’ he conceded. ‘But normal went out the fucking window a few days ago. Where are you, Primavera?’

  ‘You must know where I am, surely. I’m at the golf tournament, waiting for my nephew’s big moment.’

  ‘Of course,’ he sighed. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  He sounded so out of kilter that I began to worry about him. ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Forget it,’ he replied, but without any sincerity. ‘I don’t need to involve you. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘But you will, at some point?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  I persisted. ‘Do you need me?’

  ‘No, but . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  ‘Will it take all day?’

  ‘No, just a couple of hours.’

  I knew from experience that Alex never said too much over the phone, but I could work things out. It was indeed Sunday, and he sounded very different from his normally phlegmatic self. A friend in need . . . I completed the old, ambiguous, saying, then added in the fact that the needy friend was a cop. ‘Okay, where are you?’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘No I’m not, so out with it quickly. Where do I find you?’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ he said. ‘We have people where you are. I’ll have one of our cars bring you. It’ll be faster that way; we can do it under blue lights. What are you wearing?’ I told him, leaving out the black thong and the pop-up bra.

  ‘Then go to the clubhouse and wait by the steps. I’ll have a car there inside five minutes.’

  ‘And will there be one to bring me back?’ I asked, pointedly.

  He chuckled. ‘Unless I arrest you.’

  I headed for the meeting place and beat the car there by about thirty seconds. Just one officer, the driver, unsmiling behind his shades, but courteous; he opened the back door for me, and didn’t put his hand on my head when I got in, as you see them do on the news and in the movies.

  We left the course at normal speed, then headed north, my first clue to our destination. As soon as we were on the main road, the lights went on and the foot went down. I didn’t speak to my driver at all . . . at that speed, I didn’t reckon it was a good idea to distract him . . . just watched the road and ticked off each exit as we passed it. We left the motorway just north of Girona, then took a quiet road, one I use often when I go to the city. That made me assume that we were going back to L’Escala, or even St Martí. I carried on thinking that until we went past the turn that would have taken us there and instead drove on towards Torroella de Montgri.

  The options were lessening; in the small town, we turned off the central roundabout, headed down the leafy ramblas and eventually crossed the River Ter. Pals? I wondered, until the driver made a left turn, into a narrow road that I’d driven past a fe
w hundred times, but never along. I wasn’t sure where it led, other than eventually to the sea, but there were a couple of restaurant signs at the beginning, so I knew that it wasn’t entirely uninhabited territory.

  We drove on for maybe a kilometre, through absolutely flat land, before we took another turn, into a camino, a track rather than a proper made-up road. A few hundred metres ahead, I saw cars; three of them and, ominously, a dark, unmarked van. I’d seen it, or its brother, before, and I knew what it was for.

  Until that very moment, I hadn’t attempted to guess why Alex wanted me. He’d been his usual cautious self on the phone, I knew it couldn’t be a family crisis, nothing wrong with Gloria or Marte, for he’d used police transport, and if anything had gone wrong at my place I’d have had a call from my alarm monitoring service well before he’d know about it. I certainly hadn’t considered, not for one second, that he’d want me to look at another stiff.

  That must have been written all over my face as I stepped out of the car, for he came towards me, in another paper tunic, with hands outstretched as if to ward me off. In the background, I could see the obligatory white tent; until then it had been hidden behind the mortuary wagon. ‘Alex,’ I said as he reached me, ‘the last time was once too often.’

  ‘I know,’ he admitted, ‘and I’m deeply grateful. You’ll never have another speeding ticket in Catalunya, I promise.’

  ‘I want Hector’s signature on that one as well,’ I told him. ‘Where is he, by the way? Intendants don’t have their Sundays interrupted, is that it?’

  ‘He’s off sick.’ Alex’s reply was barely more than a whisper. ‘He had chest pains in the office on Friday, late in the afternoon. I took him to the Trueta, and they kept him in, for investigation. He’s still there; they think he’s going to need bypass surgery. It’s not generally known, but it will be very soon.’

  At the rate Gomes had been smoking when I’d seen him last, that news didn’t surprise me too much. He was in a good place though; the ‘Trueta’, named after a Catalan nationalist doctor who was exiled in Britain during the civil war, and became a professor in Oxford, is a teaching hospital, Girona’s biggest and, by general agreement, its best.

  ‘That’ll be bad news for Marlboro,’ I ventured. ‘I hope he’ll be all right soon.’

  Alex nodded. ‘He will be . . . unlike the patient we’ve got here. Again, Primavera, thank you for coming.’

  ‘Okay, but why did you want me?’

  He smiled. ‘Honestly? I don’t know, for sure. I just did, given the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances? What have you got here?’

  ‘Come and see, if you want.’

  ‘I don’t, but that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

  I put on a sterile suit and boots and went with him, into the tent. It was bigger than the one in the woods, but it had to be, for there was a thorn bush taking up a lot of the space inside. A body lay at its base, a white woman, naked, stripped of all clothing and adornments, and with no face. ‘Jesus!’ I whispered. ‘The same.’

  ‘As our victim outside L’Escala,’ he added. ‘Stripped and mutilated, I assume, for the same reason: to make identification as difficult as possible. It’s very effective too, for we still are no nearer knowing who the other one is.’

  I crouched beside the body as he spoke and leaned forward for a better look. Whoever had used the shotgun had done an even better job second time around. Most of the head was missing . . . actually it wasn’t, but it was scattered all around, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could try all they liked, but Ms Humpty was fucked, permanently. I peered at the part that remained, the left side, from the jaw to just above the temple. And as I did, a shudder ran through me.

  ‘Our pathologist believes that she was strangled first,’ Alex was saying, above me, ‘and that she was dead when the gun was put to her head.’ He sighed. ‘What a mess. I suppose I wanted you here because you were at the other scene, and so I hoped that you might see something that I don’t, something that connects in some way. It’s not very professional of me, I know, and not very kind either. Stupid also, because why the hell should you? I’m the bloody detective. What could have I expected you to tell me?’

  I could have kept my mouth shut. Indeed, if there had been anyone else in that tent, even the photographer who had stepped outside to give us room, I might have, for that moment at least. But there wasn’t, it was just Alex and me, and I’d held his daughter at her baptism. So I said, ‘How about if I tell you who she is, or was, if you’re feeling pedantic?’

  ‘Eh?’ he gasped.

  ‘That’s the woman you threatened to run out of town on Friday, at the golf course, the TV reporter with the Irish passport. That’s Christine McGuigan.’

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ he croaked.

  ‘I wish I was.’

  ‘But how can you possibly know, from . . . from that?’

  I beckoned him, and he joined me, crouching. When he was in position I reached out and pointed. ‘See that mark?’ I asked. ‘There on her temple. That abrasion.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. The pathologist said she must have struggled with her killer, got it then.’

  ‘Then your pathologist is wrong.’ I pushed myself to my feet, paper tunic rustling, and he followed suit. ‘You know that big dress ring I have, the one with the red gemstones that look like rubies but aren’t, in a gold setting?’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured, cautiously, as if he wasn’t sure that was the right answer.

  ‘I think you’ll find it matches that bruise. You didn’t scare her as much as you thought. Alex. She wasn’t going to give up that easily.’

  I told him about my confrontation with Christine, about me catching her in the act of taking long-lens pictures of Tom, for sale to the highest bidder, and about me knocking her bow-legged.

  ‘Oh my,’ he whispered, when I’d finished. ‘When I said earlier, about arresting you, I was joking. But now . . . Why the hell did you have to go and tell me that?’

  ‘Because you’re my mate and you know I’m not a bloodthirsty killer.’ I paused. ‘But just in case you have to convince anyone else, what time was she killed?’

  ‘The pathologist says between ten and midnight last night. But not necessarily at this place; the mutilation was done here, clearly as you can see, but he believes that it must have happened some time after death, because of the absence of blood.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you can take me off your suspect list. I was in Mike’s Restaurant with Jonny and Tom and quite a few other people until just before ten. From there I went home and phoned my dad. When we were done, I went online and wrote an email to my sister, telling her all about my week, and my new family member. I finished and sent it at ten minutes to twelve, and then I went to bed. The transmission time will be logged into my computer and there’ll be a record of the call on my phone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, sincerely. ‘We’re both off the hook.’

  ‘So what have you got to go on?’ I asked, as we left the tent.

  ‘Nothing, other than I’m certain that the murderer is local.’

  I frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s left the bodies in two remote areas. It was pure luck that they were found so quickly. This one was discovered by the chef in one of the restaurants along there, walking his dog. Only a local has that sort of knowledge.’

  ‘Tell me you’re kidding,’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t you heard of Google Earth? That will take you anywhere, and usually show you nice pictures as well. For example, you’re in your front garden in Google Earth’s street view.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, but . . .’ His eyes widened. ‘They can’t do that, Christ; I’m a cop.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I assured him. ‘They pixelate all the faces, and car registration numbers. But what it means is that everyone’s a local, everywhere, when it comes to knowing the lie of the land.’

  He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Thanks,
’ he moaned. ‘Now I have nothing to go on. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to be a suspect after all?’

  ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.’ He looked really down, and so I did my best to raise his spirits. ‘Come on; it’s not all that black. You know who this victim is. The two were both killed in more or less the same way, by the same person.’

  ‘I can’t prove that,’ he muttered, gloomily.

  ‘Spoken like a defence lawyer.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, spoken like our new prosecutor. She’s a hard woman to please.’

  ‘Then don’t go to her until you have to. What I’m saying is that when you look into Christine McGuigan’s background, she might point you at the identity of the first victim. They have to be connected; they must be. Fuck it, they are! They have a murderer in common. So it could well be that they knew each other and that when you look into McGuigan’s life you’ll find the first victim. And when you do, the next step is to find who else they had in common.’

  He peered at me, from under his frowning eyebrows. ‘Since when were you a detective?’ he chuckled, if a little grudgingly.

  ‘You’re forgetting,’ I retorted. ‘I was once. There was a period in our lives, when Oz and I lived together in Glasgow, when we ran a private inquiry agency.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to take it up again, would you? I’m up against it. With Hector on the sick list for God knows how long . . . and maybe tied to a desk for the rest of his career . . . I’m acting intendant, with two murders on my hands, and bosses in Barcelona who don’t listen to excuses.’

  ‘They’ll give you help, though, an extra pair of hands.’

  ‘They have done already. Magda’s been pushing for a move to criminal investigations; I’ve been told to use her, for now.’

  ‘Magda,’ I repeated. The sullen woman from the woods, the one who had tried to talk down to Tom, the Mystery of the Missing Personality.

  ‘Exactly,’ he murmured.

  I looked around the crime scene, in vain. ‘So where the hell is she?’

  ‘She has a little girl. She couldn’t come at short notice, she told me.’