Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘I think we should,’ I agreed. ‘You should call Captain Fortunato, of the Guardia Civil, in L’Escala. He’s the head man for this whole area. If you fetch your local people, there’s no saying where the poor bastard will end up.’

He nodded sagely, as if he understood me, then tugging at the dog’s leash, turned back towards the village, with Prim and the second man at his heels. I followed hard behind, but only after, with no one looking, I had bent over the skeleton, and slipped Ronnie Starr’s shiny Giorgio watch, wiped clean of fingerprints with the napkin which I had stuffed in my pocket as we left the restaurant, back on his shiny, bony wrist.

Captain Fortunato gave me the strangest look I’ve ever had from another human being. ‘What are you, my friend?’ he asked, in his slow English. ‘Some kind of a fucking magnet?’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, staring back at him defensively across the restaurant bar, and pointing at the owner. ‘It was his bloody dog found the thing. We only came here to eat!’

The Guardia Civil detective laughed. ‘I don’t care whose fucking dog it was, when someone is as close as you to two bodies in two days, then I start to think he must be a very special person.’ But in almost the same moment, he made a shooing gesture with both hands. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get outta here, you and your girlfriend. I see enough of you last night.’

‘Thank you, Captain,’ I said, pushing my luck. ‘But if it’s all right with you, we’d like to finish our meal. Maybe, while we’re doing that, you could interrogate the dog. He’s probably the best witness you’ll find.’

So while the captain and his assistant went back to the field, Prim and I went back to our table. The owner brought us some more pork, apples and sauce as a reward for our efforts. We had polished off that and two portions of seasonal fruits, when Fortunato returned alone.

He came over to our table and sat down, a tall, wide-shouldered man with black hair, dressed in the same lightweight tan suit that he had been wearing the night before. I asked for a third glass and poured him some wine. He sipped it and nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good here, the wine. If you want to buy some, it comes from a place in San Pedro Pescador.’ However, a sour look soon returned to his face.

‘How are you doing?’ Prim asked.

‘I can tell you one thing for sure about the man in the field,’ said the detective.

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s dead!’ he snorted. ‘The rest, we’ll find out if we’re lucky.’ He reached into the left-hand pocket of his jacket, and tossed the Giorgio watch on to the table. ‘That’s his.’ He reached into the right-hand pocket and produced the belt, rolled up. ‘So’s that. On the inside it says Marks amp; Spencer, so he could be British.’

‘Or French, or Spanish, for M amp;S have stores there too,’ I said, just to cheer him up. ‘Or he could have been a foreign visitor to Britain.’

‘Sure, but that is where we’ll start nonetheless. There is a number on the watch: that may help us. Then, of course, there are his teeth.’ He gritted his own, and muttered. ‘Bastards!’ under his breath.

‘Who?’

Fortunato shot me a look. ‘Whoever it was dumped those bones in that field. The guy’s been dead for at least a year, but he can only have been there for a day or two, otherwise the dogs would have spread him all over town.’ He scowled. ‘These bastards in the local police. Either in L’Escala or Ampuriabrava; it was them, I know it. You would not believe it, but it happens all the time. They find a body like this one, with a big hole in the back of his skull. Do they call us in? Oh no, they move it on, out of their hair, to a place like this. Nothing gets in the way of the tourist business.

‘Mind you, it’s not usually bodies. Mostly it’s cars. A couple of years ago, we found a Porsche which had ben stolen in Paris a week before. It was dumped inland, around twenty kilometres from where anyone who stole a Porsche in Paris would want to go. When he saw it, one of my guys recognised it as a car he had seen on the beach in Ampuriabrava. The local cops, they had moved it on. It’s the same with this guy.’

Prim shook her head in sympathy. ‘How are you getting on with the Trevor Eames investigation?’

‘About as well as we will get on with this one. The truth is Eames was a smuggler. Last week he was away crewing a boat which was moving drugs from Corsica to the Balearics. He mixed with some very bad people; any one of them could have been mad with him.’

He paused. ‘Maybe you’re lucky you didn’t walk in on them when they caught up with him. Sleep on that thought. Now good night, and I hope that the next time I see you, there are no bodies around. There had better not be!’

I wakened that morning with what the psychologists would call a feeling of closure. We had gone as far as we could with Gavin Scott’s commission. We had found the real Ronnie Starr, linked him to the picture, and established … for we both believed Reis Sonas … that he had not painted it. What we couldn’t tell our client for sure was whether the picture was a fake or not.

Since that was why he had hired us in the first place, all we had to report were our suspicions and our failure.

So the only thing on the agenda for the first part of the day was a call to Gavin Scott, to tell him that we had found Ronnie Starr, that Trevor was dead and that his pal Foy, who had after all, set him up to buy the Toreador of the Apocalypse, was on our list of candidates for the post of killer, and might wind up on the list of the Guardia as well.

And with that thought, it came to me suddenly, half way through my morning run in fact, that I was knee-deep in ordure.

All of a sudden the next sequence of events fell into place. If Prim and I had been able to identify Ronnie Starr, trace him back to La Pera and Reis Sonas, then so, beyond doubt, would the very capable Captain Fortunato. From that he would make the connection to Trevor Eames, and from that he would discover that we had beaten him to it, asking questions about Ronnie Starr, and about a certain picture.

Fortunato might have come across as a nice guy, but not as a softy. I had no doubt what he would do after that. There are certain circumstances in which I would be prepared to go to jail to protect a client; but they don’t extend to include a situation where said client has broken the law, still less to one in which Prim might end up in the next cell.

As soon as I was back in St Marti, rather than cooling out in front of the church as usual, I pounded up the stairs to the apartment. Prim looked at me from the balcony with a degree of disapproval as I sweated my way out to join her.

‘Jan called,’ she said. ‘She’s doing our invoices today. She wants a note of hours and expenses for Gavin Scott.’

‘Does she indeed. How did she sound?’

‘All right, as far as I could tell. Mind you, she didn’t say much. I asked her how Noosh is doing, she just mumbled, “Fine,” and hung up.’

‘Okay. Look I’ll call her back later. Meantime there’s something I have to talk to you about. We’ve been so stupid I can hardly believe it. All this playing boy and girl detective could land us in jail. We have to go to see Fortunato, and tell him everything.’

‘Why? What’s brought this on all of a sudden?’

‘My idiocy in telling the guy at the farmhouse to call him, rather than the local plods. I’ve engineered it so that he’s investigating the murder of Trevor Eames, and he’s trying to identify Ronnie Starr. He’ll do that within a couple of days, just like we found him, by tracing the watch. Then he’ll follow the same trail we did. As soon as he speaks to Reis, we’re in the shit.’