She tilted her head like she thought I was a simpleton. “What would you like to talk about, dear? Britain’s healthcare problem or the scourge of free breakfasts for the poor? Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not against children eating per se. I just don’t think it should be funded by the taxpayer.”
I grabbed a menú del día from the neighbouring table and was scanning the options. What a dilemma. Not only did I have to choose a witty comeback to her diatribe, I had to make my mind up between minestrone soup, goat’s cheese salad and melon with ham as a starter.
“How about you tell me where you were when Álvaro Linares was murdered?”
“How about you mind your own business?”
“Just answer the question, Delilah. Or do you have something to hide?”
As she allowed a tense silence to whirl around us, I set about choosing my main course.
Izzy, if you don’t go for the paella I won’t speak to you again for a week.
Oh, fantastic!
I waved the menu in the air to get Ramesh’s attention. “Ra, I’ll have the melon followed by the monkfish please.” I turned back to Delilah Shaw. “Now, I think you were about to tell me what you were doing at the time of the murder.”
“Fine,” she took a sip of sangria. “I’d gone for a swim, I don’t like swimming in the sea because the sand and scum gets all over me, so it was wonderful to have the pool all to myself. I snuck off there when the police weren’t looking and it was pure heaven.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“I just told you,” she spoke as if I was nothing more than an inconvenience to her. “The wonderful thing about it was that I was alone the whole time.”
“Did you hear the shots from the pool?”
“Yes.”
“So why did you take so long to arrive in the foyer?”
Just then Ramesh delivered her first course. She took a piece of melon in one hand and sucked on it so that the juice ran down her fingers. It was gross, noisy and strangely aggressive. “Oh,” she replied breathlessly, like she’d come up from a very long kiss. “I thought it was just kids playing.”
“So you’ve got no alibi, could easily have run down from upstairs and you expect me to believe you weren’t involved?”
She pouted her puffy lips coquettishly. “I would hope that my previously sterling character would be enough for people to believe that I am not a murderer.” She licked her thumb clean and then moved on to the fingers. “Did you know that white people are far less likely to be murderers?”
“How strange,” I had to bite my lip to stop myself saying what I really thought. “In Agatha Christie novels, all the murderers are white.”
This time, she was the one without a comeback as my own first course arrived.
Everyone was sitting down by now and it felt odd to be eating all together but far apart. It wasn’t like the previous nights, we were united by recent events and, as much as I disliked many of the people there, my mother’s love of community must have rubbed off on me. I was half tempted to stand up and say, Come on, everybody, why don’t we shove the tables together and make it one big party?
Instead, the only communal element to the experience was the fact that we all had to put up with Ian Dennison’s ten-year-old son moaning that there were no sausages on the menu and all the food was weird. When he was done, the sound of cutlery on our dinner plates was almost too depressing to bear.
I decided to keep on at Delilah, to at least break the silence. “I don’t suppose you’d met Álvaro before?”
She put the shrivelled skin of her melon down and pouted once more. “How would I have come across some random Spanish bloke?”
“You’re both journalists, aren’t you?”
“Opposite ends of the scale, Izzy.” She let out a tittering laugh. “By all accounts, he was some liberal lefty and I’m… Well, I’m a little different from that.”
“I thought you said he was some random Spanish bloke? Sounds like you know him a little after all.”
The amusement fled from her face. “One hears things, in my line of work. It’s my job to know who people are and what’s happening.”
“So that you can criticise them and disapprove of everything?” I answered her. “Yes, you do that so well.”
Delilah glared at me and, despite the fact I was white, middle-class and British, I had clearly made it into the not very select group of people she despised. She fell into a spiteful silence and, with every chunk of food she bit off, eyed me as if I was the next course. It was like eating dinner with Hannibal Lecter, only the conversation was less engaging.
I was glad when Jaime peeked into the dining room to get me and I could finally escape her company.
She delivered her parting words of discouragement with a grimace. “You know what you are, Izzy Palmer?”
“A detective? A woman of above average height? Go on, I’m sure you want to tell me.”
“Like every last millennial on the planet, you’re a flash in the pan. You’re having your fifteen seconds of fame right now, but it won’t last. The problem with you kids is that you don’t expect to work for anything. It took me twenty-five years to get where I am. All you had to do was date a murderer to get a few column inches. My advice: start your own Instagram or sell some racy photos to the tabloids while you can. Because in a couple of months, no one will remember who you are.”
It was hard to know how to respond to such bile.
Izzy, stab her with your fork. The police will understand why you did it. No one will blame you.
Trolls like her live for that sort of a reaction. So, instead, I went for, “Well, it’s been a genuine pleasure, Delilah. What are your plans for dinner?”
Chapter Sixteen
The only good thing about my lunch date was that, as we were in Spain, the food was delicious and nutritious. Sadly, I’d only got through the starter when Jaime called me so I was still starving.
“I don’t know what to make of this, Izzy,” he explained in Spanish as he accompanied me upstairs. “I mean, I can understand someone wanting to get rid of a journalist; they’re always causing trouble. But what could connect Álvaro to Maribel?”
I stopped in the first-floor corridor to talk to him. “Actually, when I told him what the body on the beach looked like, he recognised Maribel. I can’t be sure, but I assumed he was using her for his investigation into Next Phase. Everything that’s going on here, it has to come back to Romanelli.”
“I think you must be right,” he replied and continued down the hallway towards Álvaro’s room. “Bielza said you can have two minutes before they take the body away.”
There must have been sixty rooms in total but, with hardly any guests, the hotel appeared hollow and fake. Walking past all those empty rooms was unsettling because it felt as if anything could be behind those quiet doors. The stolen goods, a lurking killer or yet more fresh corpses to discover. That fear of the unknown was far greater than my apprehension on approaching my second murder scene of the day.
Jaime opened the door to me and the officers inside greeted us before stepping out to wait in the hall. They gave us our shoe covers and gloves and we entered the room.
“Like I said, two minutes.”
Álvaro’s body was slumped over the end of his bed. The back of his head looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it and his blood had splashed all the way across the sheets. I don’t know that much about splatter or blood patterns, but I got the impression he’d been shot standing up then fell forward onto the mattress. He looked like a child at bedtime prayers. His knees were bent and his hands close together but he would not speak another word.
From the look of it, the bullet had exited through the top of his head as there was blood on the ceiling and…
Yuck, do you have to go into such disgusting details?
I ignored my brain and tried to sound professional. “He must have unlocked the door, let the killer follow him into the room and been shot from behind as soon as they got inside,” I said and Jaime nodded quietly in agreement. “I wonder if he thought he was welcoming a friend when he let them in.”
“It’s impossible to say, but one of my colleagues is talking to the telephone company to find out who he’d spoken to before he died. His phone is missing.”
Álvaro’s remaining possessions had been scattered across the room. Whoever had killed him was clearly looking for something. There were papers and photographs lying in piles on the floor on the other side of the bed and a laptop cable plugged in, but no computer in sight.
“Have they taken any evidence away?” I asked.
Jaime looked distraught once more and I wondered if these two bodies were his first on the job.
Amateur!
“Not yet. I think you must have won inspector Bielza around. They’ve taken photos of the scene but she told the team not to remove anything until you arrived.”
While I couldn’t help but take this as a compliment, it also made me wonder what was going on with the senior detective on the case.
I walked around the edge of the room without disturbing the scene. The photos by the bed were a selection of the shots I’d seen on the Next Phase Facebook page, mixed in with old pictures of Marco. There was one of him in a gang of boys in an Italian marketplace, the ten of them posing with great confidence and Marco at the front of the pack showing off a tattoo on his arm. But there were more prints which I could not connect him to, photos of the local parties in a Spanish town. Under the banner “Fiestas de Santa Maria del Mar 1992” another group of young people were huddled. There were a series of photos from that time but Marco wasn’t in any of them.
“Is that your village?” I asked Jaime. “Santa Maria del Mar?”
He nodded and joined me to look over the photos.
“Do you recognise anyone in that group?”
He was silent for a moment, then, with something approaching a smile, said, “That’s my aunt Carolina. She hasn’t changed. But some of the younger ones are harder to recognise.”
“What about Maribel’s parents? Do you see them there?”
He pointed down to a photo of two guys in their twenties who were waving at the camera. “I think that’s the father, he was a character. He died in a car accident a few years after that was taken. Maribel was only little when it happened.”
The father was wearing the cross that Maribel had been found with. It was small, gold and unremarkable except for a purple stone in the middle of it which glinted even in the photograph.
“What about the mum, can you see her anywhere?”
He shook his head. “No, I’d recognise Susana. She’s not there. But what I don’t understand is what Álvaro is doing with these photos.” He leaned closer to look at the group picture where his aunt was holding a sign saying Free Hugs. Everyone around her looked carefree and exhilarated. My own limited experience told me that, if there’s one thing that Spanish people love, it’s their local fiestas.
I went back to the doorway and crouched down to look the victim in the eye before I left.
“I’m sorry, Álvaro.” I found myself saying out loud. “I should have believed you from the start.”
Part of the problem with being a detective (or even just reading a ton of mystery novels) is that you begin to suspect everyone of having bad intentions. Instead of considering Álvaro to be a potential ally, I’d been overly suspicious of his motives. Rather than pursuing him to find out what he knew, I’d let my opportunity pass and now it was too late.
The morticians had arrived with a stretcher and body bag to cart the journalist away. The forensics team would be in next to cart off anything worth taking and Bielza was already out in the corridor to move me along.
“So, any new theories?” She stood with her arms folded over her neat blue uniform.
I wasn’t in the mood to spar with her. “Not yet. Just a lot of questions and the feeling that Álvaro’s death could have been avoided.”
She looked as though she wanted to answer back, then changed her mind. I wasn’t trying to criticise her and I could see that she knew that. I said goodbye to Jaime and left them to their work, with a feeling of futility once more permeating my thoughts.
Wow, it’s a rollercoaster being in your head today.
I thought you weren’t talking to me?
On the positive side, that’s the fifth body we’ve seen and you barely flinched at the blood and brains and skull bone sticking out all over the place.
Actually, thinking about it now makes me a bit queasy.
I am not Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. Every dead body I see gets to me in some way. Even horrid old Bob, who deserved exactly what he got, was no great joy to find. But I liked to think that this weakness in me – this sensitivity – was a gift. I could feel the sadness of each event and I was sure that it helped me to understand how such things could happen in the first place.
With the sorrow of Álvaro and Maribel’s deaths at the front of my mind, I decided I needed time to myself somewhere. Walking and thinking has to be the greatest tool in a detective’s arsenal and there were so many questions floating about in my head that I figured such a break was overdue.
A whole list of mysteries had written itself out for me. I desperately needed to know why Maribel had come to the hotel. This was the obvious one that had been rattling around inside me all day, but, in the periphery, plenty of other questions lingered. I had to find out why the Austrians were putting on an act, what Álvaro had known about Marco Romanelli, who was stealing from the other guests and what Delilah Shaw was really doing at the hotel.
What about, who the murderer is? That would be a good one to work out.
I had theories to each but no definite answers and so, before going out to clear my head in the garden, I decided to focus on a question that was in my power to resolve.
In addition to the lift beside reception, there were two sets of stairs in The Cova Negra hotel. The main staircase in the foyer was the obvious one to use, but there was a second smaller one at the back of the hotel. I knew that nobody could have used the lift at the time of Álvaro’s death because we would have seen them from the dining room. But, until I tried for myself, I couldn’t be sure whether Delilah Shaw could have got all the way from Álvaro’s room, through the hotel leisure suite and out to the foyer without being seen.
I followed the staircase down to the ground floor and discovered that it came out right by the indoor swimming pool, which was just as luxurious and over-the-top as the entrance to the hotel. There were Doric columns rising up from the water and the ceiling above it was dotted with tiny lights like a starry night’s sky. In one corner, a water nymph was holding an overflowing pot which splashed down melodiously into the main pool.
The whole place was spotless. Not a lounger was out of place and the towels in the cupboard by the door were in perfect order. Either Ramesh had suddenly become good at his job or no one had been in there that morning. And even if she had been there, Delilah could have run upstairs to Álvaro’s room in less than a minute.
That’s not quite true. You can do it in about a minute. A person with normal-length legs might take a little longer.
It’s irrelevant anyway. Delilah’s hair was dry when she came downstairs, I can’t imagine her messing up her perfectly styled locks with a swimming cap either so it’s pretty clear she was lying.
It helped to have an idea of the layout of the whole hotel so I explored a little further. Between the leisure centre and the dining room there were several meeting spaces but they were locked when not in use. I looked into the spa and it was still steamed up from whoever had been in there last. I wasn’t sure that any of this would be important, but I was trying to be methodical again. I
needed to establish the facts as clearly as possible, instead of relying on haphazard chance.
As I came out from the corridor to the swimming pool, I spotted Marco and Gianna talking by the lift. I hung back to watch them but their conversation barely lasted ten seconds when Gianna kissed her husband and pushed the button to open the doors.
I was a little over-excited to see him alone and bounded over enthusiastically.
“Mr Romanelli, I was going for a walk in the gardens, would you like to come with me?” I sounded like a stalker, auditioning my next celebrity target.
I had him trapped in against the lift and there was no getting away.
“Well… I was supposed to be leaving this morning so I can’t say I have any other plans.” He paused, perhaps trying to think up another criterion that could rule the possibility out. “Okay, Miss Palmer. After you.”
He pointed outside with his usual gentlemanly charm and I nodded and walked ahead. I went about twenty steps before realising how weird it was to be racing away like that so I waited for him to catch up.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” I asked once we were outside.
He made another gallant gesture of acknowledgement. “They called you Signorina Marple in the Italian papers. I read all about the way you solved the murder of Aldrich Porter, it was very impressive.”
I was getting more used to this sort of compliment but still found my cheeks warming up a little when it came from Romanelli.
Don’t fall for his charms, Izzy. Remember, he could be a Nazi!
Nobody is perfect, brain. You once convinced me to steal a chocolate bar from Woolworths.
“It’s very kind of you.” We descended the steps from the terrace to the formal gardens behind the hotel. “But I’m afraid that, this time, you’re my main suspect.”
He did not seem concerned and laughed at this. “Well, I can understand you thinking that. I am no murderer, but I can see why it would suit you to believe this thing.”
A Corpse on the Beach Page 11