A Corpse on the Beach

by Benedict Brown

  She paused to think before answering, once more inspecting me with her attacking gaze. “You can help them, if you must.”

  I nodded subserviently and left the room. As I was crossing the foyer to look for Ramesh, Officer Handsome caught up with me.

  “It is not important to me what she has said in there,” he told me in his endearingly sincere tone. “I want you to help us. I want to make sure that we find Maribel’s killer. And I’m not convinced that Marco Romanelli is so innocent like the Inspector insists.” What is it about men with faltering English that I find so insanely attractive?

  It suddenly occurred to me that ten seconds had gone by without me saying anything. I won’t lie; I was looking at his muscles again. If I saw a man staring at a woman’s chest, instead of paying attention to what she was saying, I’d call him out as a misogynistic dinosaur. I’d start an online petition to make him apologise. I would most likely raise the issue with my member of parliament. But, sadly, I am a bad, bad hypocritical person and I hope you can forgive me, as this will not be the last time it happens.

  Phwoar! I’d peel him like a banana!

  Stop it this second. I’m bad enough already without you getting involved.

  I’d shell him like a nut!

  I forced myself to say something, anything! “I’ll do whatever you command.”

  “Pardon?”

  To save myself, I found the one safe part of his body that didn’t turn me into a drooling idiot when I looked at it. I stayed squarely focussed on his chin. “I mean, I’ll help however I can.”

  He glanced over his shoulder to look back at the conference room and, as there was no one on duty in reception, led me over there to make sure we weren’t overheard. “I don’t trust Bielza,” he said, his eyes flicking about the foyer. “She will not be enough hard on Romanelli. She went to his conference yesterday. I think she is a fan.”

  “Perhaps if you tell me more about the victim, I can help you.” I waited for his reply and received a serious nod for my trouble. “What do you know about Maribel? Could she be connected to Romanelli?”

  He glanced around to check that his colleagues weren’t listening. “I was never close with her, but we are from the same small village and our mothers are friends. I’m sure she was just a normal girl. She finished university last year, some kind of science, I don’t remember what. She’s sweet, popular and has had the same boyfriend for years.”

  His voice grew hoarse and he had to pause to collect himself. “She could not be involved with these fascistas if it is what you are thinking. Maribel was the opposite of them. I know because she used to go on protests in Madrid. She loved any social cause. She was against domestic violence, pollution, tax cuts for hospitals. Whatever you can think of, she did get excited about it.”

  Raw emotion coursed through his voice once more. “I have to talk to her mother now. She will want to hear it from me. This is the hardest thing I have to do as a police.”

  I searched for something to say to comfort him but there was nothing in either language I speak that would do the job. During one of my trips to Spain when I was at uni, I spent the summer in a village on the Costa de Almería. It was probably not so different from his. Everyone knew everyone until the whole place felt like one great big family. He was mourning the loss of a cousin and about to tell his aunt that her daughter was dead.

  “Good luck, Torres,” was all I managed to come up with and even that sounded cold and impersonal.

  “Jaime,” he told me, smiling because there wasn’t much else he could do. “You can call me Jaime.”

  I watched him leave the foyer then pause on the steps outside to send in one of the officers who was standing there. If I hadn’t felt bad enough already, I certainly did now. One of the few criticisms I think it is fair to make about my beloved Dame Christie, is that she often doesn’t have enough compassion for her murder victims. Poirot is so caught up in solving a case and Miss Marple so sure of those around her that they sometimes forget the harsh reality of death.

  Says the woman who has spent the morning dribbling over el Agente del amor.

  Shhhh! I’m making a serious point.

  A young woman was gone from our world and, if I was feeling this bad about it, I could only imagine what her friends and family would soon be going through. For a little while after Jaime left, I desperately longed to be as tough as Poirot or the old maid of St Mary Mead.

  Chapter Eleven

  In an ideal world, I would have gone to my bedroom, cuddled up to Elton John and had a good old cry. But then, in a perfect world, Maribel Ruiz would not have been killed. I went looking for Ramesh in the dining room but the only person in there was Delilah Shaw.

  She was still sitting at her table, surrounded by a vast selection of food when she saw me and called over.

  “I told the police… I said, you can arrest me if you want, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m not doing anybody any harm here and I don’t want to be locked up in my bedroom. It’s a question of civil rights.”

  “I’m sure they’re just doing their job.” I found her very difficult to talk to.

  “No doubt they are, Miss Palmer. And I’m just eating my breakfast.” She gave me a wink then and started to laugh. “It’s not my fault if it takes me a little longer than normal this morning.”

  The woman really rubbed me up the wrong way. She’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who is worse sober than drunk – and she was pretty bad when she was drunk. I thought of what Jaime had gone off to do and the anger darted up inside me.

  “What are you even doing here, Delilah?” I could no longer hide my revulsion. “If you didn’t come for the conference, what brought you to this place?”

  She raised one of the many glasses of juice in front of her but did not drink. “I’m on holiday, Izzy.”

  “Yes, but who are you?” As I watched, I felt like the mythical Greek king who was doomed to spend eternity just millimetres away from the promise of refreshment. I had no idea how thirsty I was until I saw her not drinking.

  “Oh, what a disappointment.” She put the glass back down and it almost broke my heart. “I know who you are. Oh, yes, I’ve read all about the great Izzy Palmer. I hoped that you would at least recognise my name.”

  Delilah Shaw? It does ring a bell, sort of. Wasn’t there a Delilah on Britain’s Got Talent once?

  Thanks for your help brain. And actually, no, there wasn’t.

  It finally clicked. “The columnist? You write for that rag back home don’t you?”

  She sneered, before taking a malicious bite of her croissant. “Got there in the end! And I wouldn’t call our bestselling newspaper a rag. Just because your perspective might not agree with mine, that doesn’t mean you can diminish it.” A tone of officious self-righteousness had entered her voice and I remembered where I’d heard it before.

  Delilah Shaw was the token ideologue on the phone-in show that my mother used to listen to when she drove to work in the morning. She was famous for saying whatever it would take to shock and offend people. She didn’t believe in free hospitals, interracial marriage, or helping the poor and once claimed that cancer had been sent down by God as a punishment for human obesity. She was not my kind of person.

  “I’ve been coming here for years, you know. I can’t help it if somebody’s been murdered. I’ve been haunting these halls longer than anyone.”

  “So you’ve got nothing to do with Marco Romanelli, whose political views just happen to tie in neatly with your own?”

  That awful smile hadn’t left her face. “Nothing whatsoever. I’d barely heard of this Next Phase thingy before I got here.” She leaned forward and continued in a whisper. “All a bit too European for my liking!”

  Already tired of the conversation, and aware that it wouldn’t help me find out what happened to Maribel, I decided I’d had enough. “Have
you seen Ramesh around?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen him.” She emitted another lustful cackle.

  I turned my back to her as huffily as I could manage and went off to the kitchen.

  “No chocolate. No lemon merengue!” Cook screamed at me in Spanglish as soon as I was inside.

  “Hi there, Cook. Have you seen Ramesh?”

  “No cake. No cake!” She was not happy to see me.

  I figured it was safer to look elsewhere so cut back through the dining room, without a glance towards the notorious Miss Shaw, and up the foyer stairs.

  “Oh, this is embarrassing,” the old Spanish woman, Sagrario, said, peering about her as she wandered around the first floor landing.

  She looked lost and I was about to escort her back upstairs to her room, when her husband arrived to do just that.

  “I’m very sorry. My wife she confuses some time,” he said and I switched to Spanish to calm them both down.

  “Don’t worry about it. But make sure the police don’t see you. You could get in trouble being out of your room.”

  Celestino nodded appreciatively and his wife glanced around at the gilt-framed paintings of Cantabrian hills and beaches which were hung on every wall. “I got the wrong floor again, didn’t I? They all look the same.” She giggled then and there was something very girlish in it that I couldn’t fail to admire.

  “Come on, Sagrario,” I took her free arm and directed her to the stairs. “Let’s get you back to your room.”

  “What a very nice girl,” she smiled widely, her eyes full of optimism. “You’re not from Spain though are you?”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “I’m from London. In England.”

  “She knows London,” Celestino told me. “Our daughter lives there.”

  “She’s about your age. Do you know Rosa Martinez?” That cheeky glint shone in her eye and I could tell she was teasing me.

  I smiled back at her. “Not personally. London is a big place.”

  She continued to charm me like this until we got upstairs and I said goodbye to them both. As far as I could tell, everyone else was safely shut away in their own rooms. I finally found Ramesh in my suite, stuffing himself with food from the maxi-minibar.

  “I had to hide here, Izzy. Uncle Kabir would have made me help prepare lunch otherwise and you know what I’m like in the kitchen.”

  He was sitting on the floor in front of the gigantic television. Elton was at his side, helping himself to the plates of cold meats, crisps and cake that Ramesh had laid out.

  “I don’t blame you.” I grabbed a lemonade from the fridge and sat down on the floor with him. “It’s too hot to do anything anyway.”

  We sat there saying nothing. “World’s Grumpiest Animals” was playing a highlight reel of its best moments on the TV before us and we cracked up at every sarcastic moo and sleepy bark we heard. Even Elton seemed to be enjoying it. It had been a long morning and I hadn’t eaten anything, so the sandwiches I made using two slices of cake and a piece of ham were very much appreciated.

  Urmmmm…. Izzy?

  Yes, brain?

  Why are we sitting in front of the telly when there’s a murder to solve?

  Because… we’re on holiday?

  My brain gave me the silent treatment and I knew it was an argument I couldn’t win.

  At that exact moment, Ramesh grabbed the remote control and muted a koala who was having an argument with a pig. “Izzy, I think we should talk about the case?”

  “Oh, not you too.”

  He ignored me. “You’ve got a responsibility to work out who killed that girl. Not just for your reputation, but for the future of the IP PI agency.”

  “That’s not what I’m going to call it and, the thing is, there’s all this pressure on me now. Jaime – the gorgeous police officer – and Álvaro and even that horrible Delilah Shaw read about me in the paper and they all expect me to solve the case. But we don’t know anything about the girl who died, we have no evidence to work with and all the suspects are shut away in their rooms, so what can I do?”

  He crossed his arms, unimpressed. It was unnerving because that’s just the kind of thing I do when he says stupid things. “Actually, Iz, you’re wrong. There’s tons of evidence to consider. We might not know anything about the victim, but we’ve got plenty on the suspects.”

  He’d made a good point, so I tried a different line of attack. “But it’s sunny out, it’s too hot to think, and I bet that, if Miss Marple had lived in a warmer climate, she would have been much more reluctant to go poking around in murder inquiries.”

  “Oh yeah? So how did she manage so well in ‘A Caribbean Mystery’?” I knew I should never have encouraged him to watch the Christie shows on TV. “Stop being lazy, and get on with it.”

  I let out a sigh like the disgruntled llama we’d just seen. “Okay… so if we dismiss the possibility for the moment that any of the kids are involved, that narrows it down to… ten people. Ten people! We’re never going to solve this. Five or six suspects should be the absolute maximum.”

  “Izzy!”

  “Fine. What do we know? We’ve got an extreme right-wing pundit who just happens to be here at the same time as a dubious lifestyle guru with a racist following. There’s Ian Dennison, the current holder of “World’s Most Boring Man”, not to forget his wife who lacks the capacity of speech. Then there’s the Spanish journalist who won’t spit out everything he knows. Two suntanned Austrian stunners who love Marco Romanelli for his mind not his ridiculously well-toned physique. There’s Romanelli’s super serious wife and two sweet little old Spanish holidaymakers who I might have to adopt as my grandparents. Is any of this helping?”

  Ramesh raised one finger triumphantly. “Yes, because you forgot about my uncle and me. You never ever take me seriously as a suspect in your murder inquiries, Iz, and I’m really not happy about it.”

  I barely registered what he said because I was in shock. “Twelve suspects! Twelve! That’s impossible. There’s more chance of me winning an Olympic medal for synchronised swimming than solving this.”

  Having filled his tummy, Elton came to lie down on my feet. He was all warm and fuzzy and I buried my toes right into him. It made me wonder where his buddy Kiki had disappeared off to.

  Ramesh looked as grumpy as the giraffe that was glaring at me from the TV. “Oh, come on, Iz. I never get to be involved in anything, this is my chance to be a proper sidekick. You know I’ve always dreamed of playing second fiddle to a more capable investigator. Let me be the blank surface you reflect off and I’m sure we’ll crack this case-”

  “All right, all right,” I interrupted him. “But what we need is to be methodical.” I stood up to pace up and down the pastel living room. “Poirot is always complaining that Hastings has no method. We need structure and order. We need a plan if we’re going to work out who killed this girl.”

  Ramesh failed to conjure up the words of encouragement I required. “Don’t look at me. My only hunch at this point is that my uncle did it because he’s a heartless, opportunistic slave-driver.”

  “Then let’s try to knock some of those suspects off the list. Whatever you say, I know you didn’t kill some random girl on the beach. Unless you’re suggesting you murdered her because she woke you up in the middle of your nightshift?”

  He looked a little depressed again, then huffed and gave in. “Fine, the pressure’s too much for me. I admit it! I didn’t kill her. I kind of wish I had now, just to prove you wrong.”

  “Okay, eleven!” I allowed a little smile to take over my face. “Things are looking up. What about your uncle? Could he have been having an affair with the young lovely on the beach?”

  Ramesh narrowed his eyes and tilted his head somewhat dubiously. “My uncle is gayer than Elton John’s hairdresser so I very much doubt it.”

  “The real E
lton John’s hairdresser or your cat’s hairdresser?”

  Ramesh thought about it for a second, then shrugged. “Either.”

  “Right, that’s not the only reason Kabir might have wanted someone out of the picture, but let’s forget about him for the moment. And Mrs Dennison can go too, she’s far too busy with those monstrous kids and I doubt she’d have the energy to get up in the middle of the night and make it all the way to the beach just to kill someone. What about Gianna Romanelli, do you think she could be involved?”

  “She does wear trouser suits,” Ramesh said as if the significance was obvious.

  “And?”

  “Really, Izzy? Do you never pay attention when I’m reading Vogue? How many times have I told you? Never trust a woman in a trouser suit. Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, Victoria Beckham.” He counted them off on his fingers. “They are all dangerous individuals.”

  I looked at him, still dumbfounded by his opinions after five years of friendship. “Uhhh, okay… We’ll leave her in. So what are we down to? Nine suspects now?”

  “Yeah… But, I was thinking, can we really dismiss the possibility that one of Ian Dennison’s barbarian children didn’t sneak out of their rooms last night to kill the poor girl? At breakfast yesterday morning, the boy spilt scalding hot tea on me and I swear he did it on purpose. Plus Romanelli’s oldest daughter must be at least fourteen; she’s practically an adult.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath and totted up the final number. “That’s twelve. We’re back up to twelve suspects!”

  Ramesh’s face split open in a very smug grin. “Yes, Izzy but we’ve refined that list substantially. It may be the same number we started out with, but I have great faith that the names upon it are of a higher quality than before.”

  I considered killing him for a moment but, just then, there was a scream from the suite across the hall. Ramesh jumped to his feet with enormous excitement and raced to the door. I tried to be a little more discreet about it by casually strolling after him.