Quintin Jardine - Blood Red

I watched them for a few seconds, as they walked up the hill towards Alex’s police vehicle, a four-by-four, which he had parked in front of the church, then turned my attention back to the menu. A couple of minutes passed before the mayor returned, her expression sombre, and then some.

‘Alex needs me to go somewhere. Given what’s happened recently, I thought that you might want to come with us.’

I was surprised, but I was intrigued too. ‘If you think so, and it’s OK with Alex. How about Tom?’

She shook her head, firmly. By that time I wasn’t smiling either.

‘OK,’ I said. I handed my son a fifty. ‘Have your lunch, then either wait here till I get back, or pay for what we’ve had, then go down to Ben’s shop and see if you can help out there.’

‘Can I have an ice cream too?’ Tom knows when he’s in a good negotiating position.

‘The biggest one they have, if you want.’

I spoke to Joaquim, to let him know what was happening. . with him and Ben as minders, and with the added insurance of Charlie, who might be dumb but is loyal and can be formidable, Tom was in the safest hands possible. . then headed towards Alex’s vehicle, wondering what the hell could have happened to have him wearing his sternest cop face on a Sunday.

On the way, I asked Alex where we were going, but he kept his eyes firmly on the road. Justine was no more communicative; her forehead was set in a deep frown.

We drove out of St Martí and back towards the main road. I assumed that he was taking us to L’Escala, but we were barely halfway to the junction where one of the tourist information centres is when he made a sharp left turn, on to a dirt track that I’d seen many times but never gone up, not even when I was running, or cycling, not even when Oz and I lived there in what I’m beginning to call ‘the old days’. It has a name, but I’d never paid any attention to it, and that afternoon we were past it before I could read the sign. I still couldn’t tell you what it’s called.

I knew that there were houses up there, in the fields behind the ruins of the ancient Greco-Roman town, but I had never met anyone who lived there, so I knew nothing of them. The road rose gradually; the ground is quite high up there. I counted three houses as we passed, two on the left and one on the right, before Alex drew to a halt behind two other police vehicles and an ambulance. They were all lined up alongside a high stone wall, in which there was a double gate, partly open. I could just see the pitch of a roof from my raised position in the back seat of the car.

If the length of the wall was anything to go by, it enclosed a pretty substantial plot of land. ‘Whose house is this, Alex?’ I asked, as I stepped out of the cool of the vehicle, into the heat of the day.

‘You’ll see in a little while.’ He led Justine and me through the gate into a garden that was mainly lawn to the front, apart from the swimming pool to the right. The house itself was splendid, as fine as any I’d seen in the area. It was two storey, stone built also, with a loggia over the entrance, and wooden shutters framing each of the small windows. Older Spanish houses were built to keep the sun out; now that there are things like air-con and heat-reflecting glass, the country’s architects have been liberated.

We followed a paved path round the side. As we turned towards the back of the house, we stepped under a pagoda frame with a canvas cover that was set up to shade a small patio. I almost tripped over a chair, a solid wooden white-painted thing, but grabbed its leg to save myself, then trotted on to catch up with Alex.

As I looked around, I saw that the ground at the back sloped downwards, and that the stone wall enclosed the property completely, save for a gate at the back. Only the area of the garden along the length of the house was level, with a mixture of lawn and paving. It was defined by a small wall, of white cast concrete pillars, with plant pots set on top at regular intervals a few metres apart. A middle-aged man was sitting on the wall beside one of them, sweat forming dark patches under the armpits of his green uniform shirt. I recognised him. His name was Gomez and he was an intendant from the Mossos d’Esquadra criminal investigation branch.

He blinked when he saw me. ‘Senora Blackstone,’ he exclaimed. ‘What connection have you with this?’

‘The mayor suggested that she come,’ Alex told him. ‘And. . well, she’s the mayor, OK.’

‘Connection with what?’ I asked.

‘Come and see.’

Gomez beckoned me forward. I approached him and as I did I could see over the wall, into the lower garden. Four crime-scene officers, in sterile tunics, were on their knees, searching the ground, square metre by square metre. Two paramedics stood off to one side, holding a stretcher, as if waiting to be called into action. At the foot of the steps that led down to the area, I saw a second uniformed officer: I had met him before too, Inspector Garcia, the intendant’s more abrasive sidekick. He and I exchanged not very friendly glances; and then the smell hit me, that and the buzzing of what sounded like a thousand flies.

I stood against the pillared wall and looked down. Beneath me, maybe three metres below, there was a rockery, with cactus plants in the sandy soil, and in its centre, teeth bared as if he was snarling, glaring up at me as he had in his office, lay the unmistakably dead form of José-Luis Planas.

Justine came to stand beside me, and gasped in horror, even though she had been told what she had been brought to see. ‘When was he found?’ she asked Gomez.

‘About two hours ago,’ he replied, ‘by his gardener, when he came in to check the watering system. Apparently it had been faulty for the last week or so.’

‘He’s been there for a while,’ I said. ‘You’d better move him pretty quick. I’ve seen this; I nursed in Africa for a while in a combat zone. Decomposition has a different timetable in the heat.’

‘So how long would you say he’s been here?’ asked Garcia, who had climbed the stairway. ‘Our medical examiner. . he’s gone back to his barbecue. . says at least three days.’

‘Then he’s a fucking idiot. . pardon my English. If he’d been here for three days in these hot weather conditions he’d be starting to go black; he might even have burst open. I’d say less than two days, that he died Friday night or Saturday morning.’

‘And you know better than our doctor, do you?’ he sneered. ‘It’s possible; his housekeeper comes in three days a week; her husband says that she was here on Friday, but that she has her own keys and often comes when he’s not here. So he could have been lying here all that time and she might not have known. The husband, the gardener, he was last here on Wednesday.’

‘In this instance, I do know better than your medic. I had a meeting with Senor Planas in his office. .’ I checked my watch; it showed 2 p.m., ‘. . exactly two days and two hours ago.’

‘And I had a visit from him in mine two hours after that,’ Justine added. ‘And I promise you he was alive when he left, frustrating as I may have found that.’

Alex winced. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘The doc reckons that he probably had a heart attack and fell over the wall. The back of his head’s smashed in.’

‘He fell backwards?’

‘Seems that way. Accidental death.’

‘Yes, Sub-inspector Guinart,’ Gomez conceded. ‘That’s what we thought when you left to collect Senora Michels. But after you had gone, one of the technicians found this, grasped in his hand.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a transparent evidence bag, and held it up.

All I could see was white plastic. ‘What is it?’ I murmured.