Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

On the off-chance I asked our host, who knows everyone in L‘Escala, if he had seen Trevor Eames lately, but he said that he hadn’t. ’I hear he was crewing a German boat,‘ he volunteered. ’That Trevor, he is always crewing,’ e added, backing the whispered innuendo with a heavy wink, out of Prim’s sight.

Leaving the Frontera parked across the road we went for a leisurely walk round the marina, in the direction of La Sirena Two’s mooring. From a distance, it looked just as we had seen it on our last visit, locked up secure for the winter. When we reached it, that impression was confirmed. The dinghies were still strapped to the side, the classic wheel was lashed and immobilised, the cabin curtains were drawn.

‘Bugger’s not home yet,’ I growled, frustrated. ‘It’s just like it was last time we looked.’

‘Yes,’ said Prim, ‘except …’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Look at the wheel. Last time we were here, I’m sure that it wasn’t tied like that.’ She pointed to the cabin. ‘And there, that curtain’s open just a fraction. If he isn’t here now, he’s been back.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s go on board and give the door a knock.’

‘Careful,’ Prim advised.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not as daft as all that. If he’s in, I’ll try to get him out on the deck, so that we can be seen from the quay when we’re talking to him.’

‘Do we mention Ronnie Starr?’ she asked. ‘I mean the fact that he’s dead.’

‘Hell, no! We don’t know that, remember. No, we tell the truth more or less. We’re working for Gavin Scott, looking for more info on the Toreador. We want to trace the Ronald Starr who staged the auction.’

‘Do we mention the Cadaques picture?’

‘No. Let’s just try to win the guy’s confidence.’

She looked doubtful: not scared, you understand, just doubtful. ‘Oz, are you sure about this?’

‘No. That’s why I want to talk to him out in the open. Mind you, the chances are he’s buggered off again, back to sea. Come on.’

I led the way, jumping on to the deck of the yacht, Prim landing lightly behind me. I leaned across and knocked on the cabin roof. ‘Mr Eames,’ I called. ‘Can we have a word?’

There was no reply, not any sound after the crack of my knuckles on the plastic roof panel. I walked on and stepped down into the well in front of the tied wheel.

The cabin door was ajar: very slightly, hardly enough to notice, but ajar nonetheless. I rapped on it, calling again. ‘Mr Eames.’The door swung open, into the darkness below decks.

The gulls were crying, the water was lapping against the sides of La Sirena Two, and boats all around were creaking at their moorings, but all of those sounds seemed to be drowned out by the silence of the cabin. It seemed to rush out to meet me, that silence; and the smell, one that I’d encountered before.

Primavera stood at my shoulder. ‘Wait here,’ I said. For once she obeyed me without an argument.

A short, four-step stair, almost steep enough to be called a ladder, led down below decks. It was panelled on either side and at the foot there was a second door, without lock or handle, swinging gently with the movement of the boat. I jumped down the steps and crashed into the cabin, into the heart of the silence.

For a second as the door lay open there was light, then it swung shut on its hinges and the darkness returned. But in that second I had seen the chair, and the shape of someone in it.

I fumbled my way along the walls till I found a curtain, and ripped it open. The evening outside was grey, and the cabin was still gloomy, yet I could see at once that Trevor Eames was dead. From the way his arms hung by his sides; from the way his left leg stretched out before him, with the right twisted under the chair; from the way his head lolled back, eyes staring at the ceiling, jaw hanging slack; from the dark blood which soaked the front of his blue-and-white hooped T-shirt, the crotch of his jeans, and the Ship’s Wilton floor-covering: from all these things I could tell that he was dead.

I’m not sure how long I spent staring at him with my heart thumping — it always does that when I find a body — before the cabin door opened, framing Prim’s silhouette. ‘Don’t come in!’ I said, quickly.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. But she stayed in the doorway.

‘How did he die?’ she asked.

I stepped up to the body. The light was better with the door open. ‘I’d say he was stabbed. There looks to be a single puncture wound in his shirt, and there don’t seem to be any signs of a struggle. He looks to have been quite powerfully built, so whoever did this couldn’t have given him a chance.’

‘And who could have done it?’ she asked.

‘It has to be a very short list,’ I answered. ‘Right at the top has to be the guy who killed Ronnie Starr: but we’re further away than ever from tracking him down.’

The chug of a diesel-engined fishing boat on its way out of the harbour gave me a sudden sense of urgency. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. She had no argument with that; I followed her up the stairway, and across the deck, so scared that for once I barely noticed how well her jeans fitted round her bum. We stood on the quay, looking back at the floating mortuary.

‘What do we do?’ Prim asked. ‘Leave him for someone else to find?’

I ruled that one out in an instant. ‘No. Someone’s bound to have seen us going on board. Look at all those apartments on the shore. There could be people watching us right now, in any one of them. No, I’ll wait here. You run round to the Trattoria and have them call the police.’

She nodded and hurried off. I called after her. ‘Hey, honey. Make sure they call the Guardia Civil, not the Municipal Police. I don’t think they could smuggle this one out of town, but you never know.’

The Guardia Civil live up to their name, and after spending four hours with them, in their big yellow brick office on the outskirts of L’Escala, we were thankful for it.

Their investigators, Captain Fortunato and Sergeant Mendes, were meticulous, but meticulously polite, as they went over our story time and time again. Fortunato told us that he had spent a year on secondment with the Met, yet to be on the safe side, he had an interpreter sitting in to make sure that everyone understood everything absolutely and that at the end, everything was written down as it should be.

We fell back on the cover story we had given in Gary’s restaurant as our reason for boarding La Sirena Two, hugely relieved in retrospect that we had come up with the throwaway line about booking sailing lessons for ourselves and Steve Miller. With a roomful of witnesses to back it up, our account was never going to be questioned seriously.

While we had waited for the police to arrive, Prim and I had agreed privately that it would be hugely dangerous to mention the name Ronald Starr. Had we started that hare running, we reasoned, it could have led straight back to our client, to the Toreador of the Apocalypse, and to criminal charges for poor old Gavin Scott in Spain and in Britain.

So we lied. We sat, all evening and into the night, with one of the most serious-minded police forces in the whole of Europe. We looked them in the eye, and we told them bare-faced porky pies. When it was over, they thanked us profusely, they extended their sympathy over our ordeal, and they wished us goodnight.

It was after midnight when we emerged from the police station. We were both high as kites, so we headed for La Lluna and found a table in the games room. We were just beginning to relax when Paco came across, to ask whether we were still pleased with our purchase of the previous week, and probably to assess whether we might be in the market for another.