Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘Just before eight this evening,’ said Fortunato, ‘one of my men received an anonymous telephone call. The caller spoke in Catalan. That was why I addressed you in Catalan when you came in, Senor Blackstone. If you had understood me, you would have been in big trouble, but clearly you did not.

‘The man on the phone said that we should come here, and look in the boot of the Cadillac. My guy had the sense to make him repeat the message, so that we kept him on the line long enough to trace the call. It was made somewhere in this area, on a Cellnet mobile telephone, sold in England and listed under the name of a company called CSG Products, Limited.’ He stopped and looked at us.

‘That’s my company,’ said Shirley. ‘The caller must have used Adrian’s phone. I was always telling him to programme a security code into it.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ I asked the captain.

‘About a day, we think. As you can see, he was shot, at point-blank range.’

‘How did you know to call Mrs Gash?’

‘There was a business card left on the body. The name on it was Adrian Ford, and the Senora’s number was written on the back. It was as if the murderer had left us instructions.’

Fortunato paused again, and his eyes narrowed. ‘Why did you ask the lady about a beard?’

‘Because until yesterday, her brother wore one.’

The policeman looked at me in astonishment. ‘That’s amazing. We found this in the Cadillac, with the body.’ He reached into his jacket, produced a Phillips rechargeable shaver, and handed it to me. I examined it until I found a button beneath the blade assembly. I pressed it and the shaving surface, with its triple foiled cutters, swung up on a hinge. The chamber beneath was full of dark bristle. I showed it to Fortunato.

‘This is fucking crazy,’ he whispered, stepping away from Shirley. ‘The killer brings his victim here, but before he shoots him, he makes him shave off his beard. Why, in god’s name, would he do that?’

When I answered, it took him by surprise. ‘So that I would know who he really was, and what he had done.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’ll tell you the whole story, but Shirley has to hear it too.’

There were still one or two curious locals in the bar of the restaurant across the street when we walked in. Fortunato cleared them out and ordered the owner to bring three coffees and three large brandies, before sitting down with Shirley and me at a table by the fireplace.

‘Okay,’ he said.

As quickly as I could, I explained how Gavin Scott had been set up at the auction, how he had paid four hundred thousand dollars for the purported lost masterpiece, and that my commission from him had been to prove the picture genuine or fake, one way or another.

‘Pretty soon,’ I said, ‘but don’t ask how, or we’ll be here for a year, I discovered that the man calling himself Ronnie Starr at the auction in Peretellada had been an impostor. I learned that the real Ronnie had been murdered, and buried, about a year ago, and also that his body had been discovered but moved to Ventallo. Like you said last night, those local coppers had been at it.

‘I found Ronnie’s girlfriend, in La Pera. She told me that she had seen Ronnie with Trevor Eames and a third man, whose name she didn’t know. She told me also that Ronnie had been in possession of the work which Scott bought, the alleged Dali. He didn’t paint it, though. He seems to have been given it.

‘Shortly after that, he disappeared. Nine months later, the picture was sold by the impostor, at the auction set up by Trevor Eames and David Foy. A few weeks before that, Eames sold a picture which Ronnie Starr certainly did paint, to Shirley’s son, John. Work it out for yourself. Eames, or Adrian, or both of them killed Starr, for the picture bearing the signature of Dali, and for what they could get for it.’

‘Was this man Foy in on the murder?’ asked Fortunato, sharply.

‘I doubt it very much, but if you want my advice, you should squeeze the bastard till he bleeds anyway.’

He nodded. ‘I will, don’t worry. So let’s carry on. You go looking for Eames, but you find him dead. Then Starr’s body turns up. Did you know that Senor Ford was the third man?’

‘Honest to god, it never entered my head, not until tonight. I didn’t think we’d ever find the phoney Starr. Prim and I were coming to you tomorrow’ — I tweaked the truth a wee bit there, okay — ’with the story as we knew it. But someone beat us to it.’

I looked across at the big, handsome, tear-streaked woman in the chair. ‘Shirley, I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘This must all be a terrible shock.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and no. Though I loved my brother dearly, I always knew he was a rogue. But I can’t believe that he could …

‘Adrian was always just a bit … a bit chancy, if you know what I mean. Although we gave him a job with the company, we were always wary of him. We never let him become a shareholder, and when Clive died, I never thought for a moment of letting him take over. Maybe if we had given him a share of the business, and some wealth of his own, he wouldn’t have been so greedy for it that he’d decide to get mixed up in something like this.’ She wrung her hands. ‘I loved my brother, and he was good to me. But both of us knew, without it having to be said, that I didn’t trust him.

‘Years back, Clive banned him from playing cards at any of my parties, after we found that he had cheated one of our friends out of two grand in a game at his bridge club. Adrian always had an eye out for a mug that he could take money off, at snooker or at golf. But the odds had to be weighed in his favour. He used to kid us on he couldn’t play, but we’d heard all about him.

‘When John bought that picture from Trevor, I had a nagging suspicion that Adrian was behind it. I’d known that the two of them knew each other. I never thought he’d go as far as this, though. And I still can’t believe he’d kill anyone. That must have been Trevor Eames.’

I took her hand. ‘Almost certainly,’ I said, not really believing it.

‘So who killed Ford and Eames?’ Fortunato asked me.

‘You’re the detective, mate. I’m only a private enquiry agent.’

‘What about the girlfriend? Maybe she did know who the third man was? Maybe she decided that the other two had to go?’

‘In revenge for Ronnie,’ I said. ‘Hardly, she has his kid to look after now.’

‘No, no. Not in revenge. For protection. You civilians, you see a pretty face and you think, “Poor girl, what a tragedy.” You never ask yourself, “Could she have been behind the whole thing?” Maybe Ford and Eames were her partners, and she killed them before you could get too close. Maybe you and your girl are next on her list. You never think of that?’

I sucked in my breath. I never had, but there was a chilling ring to it.

Shirley spent the journey back to L’Escala with her head on my shoulder, sobbing occasionally, and tugging at her fingernails. She went straight indoors when we reached the villa. I had offered that we would stay with her for the night, but she preferred to be alone.

I went round to the garden, after she had gone inside. All the lights were out, but the night was still bright enough for me to find my way round to the sofa loungers by the palm trees. They were deserted. I looked around, puzzled, until I heard a smooth lapping sound from the pool.

Prim was swimming, slowly and rhythmically. I leaned against a palm tree, half-hidden by it, and watched her as she swam, length after length. Eventually I stepped out of the shadows, but still she didn’t see me, not until I knelt by the edge of the pool.

She looked up, startled, her mouth slightly open, until she found her feet. ‘Oz, I thought … I … Oh, you gave me a fright, that’s all.’ She stood and I saw that she had been swimming naked. I lent her my hand as she climbed up the tiled steps in one corner of the pool, and watched her as she dried herself on her skirt, struck all the time by her strange silence.