Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

He shared one secret with us, but only one. He bent towards Prim once again, and picked up a tiny crustacean. ‘You must have these, my darling,’ he said. ‘You don’t find them in the fish shops but on the quayside. The fishermen who catch the prawns throw these away. I gather them and cook them in my paella, for the extra flavour. Look.’ He put the crab between his teeth and bit it, hard enough to crush the shell, then he sucked. ‘Like that. Don’t eat them. Just crack them for the juices and the taste.’

He had made enough for six at least. We finished it, disregarding even the Krug until we had whacked our way through the lot.

Davidoff grinned, as he looked at us, one by one. Then, lightning fast, he slapped his stomach. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted. ‘The best I can do.’ He jumped to his feet and fetched a fruit bowl. ‘This is to finish. God makes a better dessert than I do, but when it comes to paella, I can whip his ass.’ He paused. ‘As for coffee, well, we’ll just have another bottle of Krug.’

I watched him as he leaned back in the moonlight, savouring his champagne and making small talk with Prim and Shirley. There was a grace about him, an economy of everything, as though his whole metabolism had been set up with an eye to longevity. When night came he seemed to be at the height of his powers, fascinating, charming and somehow provocative, and on that night in particular, I thought him the most amazing man that I had ever met. Nothing has happened since to change that view.

Shirley had gone to the bathroom, walking with a degree of concentration, when the phone rang in the villa.

Davidoff gestured to me. ‘You better answer it. It could be Adrian, full of contrition, or better still, the awful John calling to say that he is not coming after all.’

I nodded and ran round the edge of the pool towards the house. The kitchen was dark, but I found the light switch in a second. The phone was on one of the work surfaces, and it was still ringing insistently. I strode across and picked it up.

‘Hola, este residencia Senora Gash,’ I said, in the best Spanish I could manage.

There was a long silence at the other end of the phone line. I waited for it to go dead, but instead, after a while, I heard a low rumbling sigh. ‘Tell me, Mr Blackstone,’ said Captain Fortunato, evenly, ‘that I am having a bad dream, and that I have not just heard you trying to speak Spanish with an appalling Scottish accent. Tell me, please, that isn’t you.’

I knew at once that the evening had taken a very unpleasant turn. ‘I have a terrible feeling,’ I muttered into the phone, ‘that I should be saying much the same to you. But the trouble is, I don’t think either of us is dreaming.’

‘In that case, Senor, this is what I want you to do. I want you to wait at the villa of Senora Gash, until one of my cars gets there. Then I want you and she to get in, and let it bring you here to join me. Don’t ask any questions of me, but between now and your getting to where I am, you should be thinking very carefully of what it is you were going to tell me two days ago, but which slipped your mind.’

‘I’ll wait for your car,’ I croaked, and replaced the phone. I leaned against the surface, heart pounding, legs shaking, and looked out of the window, at Shirley, leading Prim and Davidoff towards the group of sofa loungers beneath the moonlit palms, he with his arm wound round my partner’s waist, laughing softly in her ear.

I don’t know why, but just then, my eye was caught by a photograph, one of a number pinned to the window-frame. I stared at it, and as I did, I saw Ronnie Starr’s murderer: more than that, I knew instinctively in my gut, who, in turn, had killed him.

From the moment the car pulled away, Shirley asked the same question, over and over again.

‘Where are we going?’ she snapped at the driver, in Spanish, until she realised that his silence meant that he had been ordered not to speak to us at all.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked me, in my turn.

I told her, as I had in the villa, ‘We’re going to meet the regional commander of the Guardia Civil. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know where.’

I was pretty certain that I had told her one lie. As the car reached Verges, and turned left towards La Bisbal, I had a feeling that it might be two. When it turned right on to the road for Flaca, La Pera and Pubol, that suspicion hardened.

The driver raced recklessly along the twisting road to La Pera, then swung right. I expected him to stop in the Pubol car park, but he didn’t. Instead, he drove right up to the entrance to Gala’s castle, and screeched to a halt, giving a blast on the horn as he did so.

A green-uniformed officer at the top of the steps which led to the house beckoned to us as we stepped out. The approach was lit, but the building was still in darkness. ‘Round there,’ he said, in Spanish as we reached him, pointing not into the house, but to the garden.

We turned the corner, and saw a blaze of light coming from the garage doorway. Another uniformed policeman stood outside, waving to us to approach.

‘What the ’ell’s going on?’ said Shirley. It was the first time she had spoken in fifteen minutes and she was ready to explode. We stepped inside the garage.

The Cadillac was still there, as it had been on my earlier visits to the castle, only this time the great lid of its cavernous trunk was raised. Captain Fortunato stood beside it. He smiled at me and called out something in Catalan. I stared blankly back at him.

‘Eh?’

‘I said three in a row can be bad luck, Senor. Come here.’

I moved towards him. Shirley followed me, but the detective held up his hand. ‘Not you, Senora,’ he said.

She glared back and kept walking. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she spat. ‘It could be embarrassing. Now what the bloody hell …’

Fortunato shook his head and stepped back, allowing Shirley and me to look into the boot of the Cadillac. I knew it would be him. The man in the photo in the kitchen, the man who had staged the auction, the man who had killed Ronnie Starr to lay his hand on a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of Dali.

I was expecting him. Shirley wasn’t. She looked into the boot and she screamed. Then she turned and went for the Captain, snarling and spitting. She was as tall as he was, and powerful. She flailed at him with both arms, heaving big, sledging blows at him, until he was able to grab her hands and use his man’s strength to restrain her.

I was barely interested in their struggle. I couldn’t drag my attention away from the body in the car. I recognised him by the colour of his eyes and the line of his nose rather than anything else, just as I had in Shirley’s kitchen. Even dead, with three bullet holes in the front of his polo shirt, one right in the centre of the golf club crest, he managed to look ordinary. Fortyish, dark hair greying, medium build, medium everything. The odd thing was that the last time I had seen him, and on every other occasion that we had met, Adrian Ford had been wearing a beard.

‘When did he grow it, Shirley? The beard, I mean.’ My question was almost a shout, as I looked at her, over my shoulders, her shocked eyes swam back into focus, and looked at me, trying to comprehend what she had just seen.

‘Last summer,’ she moaned, at last. ‘Why?’

‘Was it unusual for him to wear one?’

‘Yes, he’d never had one before. Why? What the bloody hell’s this about? Oz, who killed my brother?’ Exploding suddenly into tears, she tore her hands from Fortunato’s grasp, turned to me and threw her arms around my neck, weeping on my shoulder.

I looked past her at the captain. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He nodded and led the way, out of the garage, through the castle’s small courtyard and into the souvenir shop. He found a chair in the corner and brought it into the centre of the floor, for Shirley.