“You poor thing.” To be fair to Mum, she had her arms around the woman and, with the police once more busy interviewing suspects, was the only one there to provide sympathy.
“Sorry, Mum,” I interrupted. “I need to talk to Mrs Dennison.”
“She’s your mother?” Sharon replied and Bu-Bu looked nervous.
“That’s ridiculous, I’ve never met this person before. But being the gracious person I am, I will allow Izzy to talk to you.” With a guilty expression, she stood up and shuffled off to have breakfast.
There was no time for messing around. I got straight to it. “I know there’s a connection between your husband and Marco Romanelli. What did you come here for? Why all the secrecy?”
Sharon had one of Mum’s handkerchiefs and was dabbing her eyes and nose. “We’re broke!” She said and another string of tears jumped out into the world. “Ian’s business is a disaster. People aren’t importing classic cars the way they used to and we’ve taken a big hit.”
“But what’s that got to do with Marco?”
Another loud sob, another runny nose. “Ian thought that, if he could come here and get close to Marco, that… Well, he wanted to change the business and become the official agent for Romanelli cars in the UK. He thought, if he didn’t make a big deal about it, if he did it all subtle like, he could convince Marco that he was the man for the job.”
Her words knocked the wind out of me. “Is that it?” I asked, unable to believe that I’d pinned all my hopes on some killer link between Maribel, Álvaro and Ian and only ended up with a potential deal between car salesmen.
She put her head in her hands so that her usually mumbly voice was almost indecipherable. “Marco wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t give Ian the time of day.”
I remembered who I was talking to and, instead of pressing her for more information, tried to be sympathetic. “Oh, Sharon. I’m really so sorry for what’s happened.”
Looking up at me, she opened her arms and brought me in for a hug. It seemed like the least I could do. A snotty shoulder from her crying was no price to pay if it made her feel a little better.
She eventually pulled back. “You don’t think that’s what did it, do you? He was always so hard on himself, never felt like he achieved enough, but I told him we loved him no matter what. If he killed himself, just because of money… I… I don’t know what I’d do.”
The man I’d seen dancing with his idol Bu-Bu La Mer after dinner the night before really didn’t look like he was about to commit suicide, but I didn’t want to tell her my theory and get her hopes up.
“I’m sorry, but I have one more question for you. Whatever you tell me, I won’t mention it to a living soul.” She dried her eyes one last time before I spoke. “Is there any way that Ian could have been involved with the burglaries in the hotel?”
Her face grew serious and, just for a few seconds, she stopped crying like the distraction had helped. “Ian a thief? That’s impossible. He’s the straightest man I’ve ever met. He’s never got so much as a parking fine in all the years we’ve been married. And besides, if he’d nicked the kids’ computer games and they’d found out, they’d have murdered him for it.” The words she’d just used must have clicked in and she let out a shrieking cry.
I gave her another hug. I needed it almost as much as she did. The killer blow that I hoped she would be able to deliver had turned out to be a feint and I was back to square one.
Chapter Twenty-Six
When the team of officers returned from the beach, Bielza made the announcement I’d been expecting.
“I’m sad to inform you that another body has been found. However, I can confirm that we will no longer require you for the investigation. I’m confident of what went on here and, once you’ve given your statements to one of my officers, you’ll be free to go.” She offered her inhuman smile and went off to write up the fantasy she’d concocted for herself.
It was hard to know what was driving her. Was it the lazy desire to avoid an unsolved triple-murder on her territory or something more sinister? Was she really so set on helping Romanelli that she’d pin the blame on poor dead Ian? I added these to the list of questions I still had no answers to.
Suddenly possessing as much energy as Ramesh, as he lethargically distributed the cooked breakfasts, I decided to speak to Valentina at the buffet counter.
“Did you see your dad leave first thing this morning?” I asked in as subtle a voice as possible as I piled an unhealthy amount of sliced cheese on a piece of toast.
“Sorry, Izzy. I can’t help you.” Even her frown was youthful and attractive. “I woke up late. By the time I came down, everyone had heard about the dead man. But I don’t believe Dad really knew him, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“Thanks,” I replied truly unenthusiastically and she clearly felt sorry for me as, no longer worried who might see, she put her hand on my arm and I stopped hogging all the cheese.
“I wish there was something I could tell you to help, but I simply don’t know.”
I nodded and she walked back to her family with a very reasonable portion of bread and meat. I know I was behaving like a spoilt teen right then but the whole morning had left me feeling empty. I sat back down at my table, where my cooked breakfast had turned cold, and stuffed slice after slice of cheese down my gullet.
This time, when people looked at me, it wasn’t with fear, it was with pity. Look there’s that girl who thinks she can solve murders stuffing her face with cheese. I heard she’s a rubbish detective and will soon be really fat, they all no doubt thought.
Come on, Izzy. Stop being so defeatist. Poirot never gives up!
And Poirot never pigs out on Manchego. So that’s two ways we’re different.
Even as I was suffocating my sorrows with those neat cheesy triangles, the facts of the case were still dancing around my head. The unresolved threads were tying themselves around me. They were getting tighter and tighter until I could hardly breathe. I had no idea what Maribel had been doing at the hotel.
Only we do, because of those photos in Álvaro’s room.
Or why the killer weighed her down with stones.
Surely, that’s obvious. It was their first kill. They knocked the girl out but couldn’t bring themselves to finish the job, so they weighed her down and watched the tide come in.
Well, I can’t say who robbed the other hotel guests.
Come on, you worked that out even before anything was taken.
And I certainly couldn’t tell you how someone could be in two places at the same time.
No maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you can’t see a way to explaining it. Don’t forget the silencer.
Would you stop contradicting me?
No.
Fine, then answer me this. What evidence do we have that could possibly prove Marco was responsible for the killings?
There isn’t any. And that tells us all we need to know.
Well, you could have pointed all this out earlier.
Sorry, I thought you’d get there on your own.
I let out a sigh and considered what to do next. I still hadn’t begun to process Ian Dennison’s death. I was looking at the case as if two people had been murdered when, in all likelihood it was three. With each murder I’d been able to narrow down my list of suspects, so perhaps there were more people I could dismiss.
I went to see Jaime to find out what the police knew. He was at the front of the hotel chatting with his colleagues.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to get him away from them. The female officer beside him laughed and one of the others punched him on the arm so I had to follow up with, “I don’t fancy him, if that’s what you’re thinking!” which not only made me look like an idiot, but totally made it sound like I fancied him.
Which you do.
“What h
ave you found out this morning?” I asked when we were alone in the hotel games room.
He was stiffer and less open than he’d been the night before. “The Inspector is fairly certain that we’ve found the killer. The pathologist thinks the time of death was around eight o’clock. Most people were still in their rooms at that time but Heike was up with the Romanellis getting her last pay cheque.”
“So Marco’s got an alibi then?”
He shook his head miserably. “It looks that way, yes.”
I plonked myself down on the pool table. “I still don’t buy it. There’s absolutely no reason for Dennison to have acted that way. Killing some random girl, it doesn’t make sense.”
Something changed in Jaime right then and I could tell that Inspector Bielza’s reasoning had begun to work on him. “You know in all those mysteries you read where the only possible solution is so complicated and contradictory that you’d need a PhD in mathematics to understand it? Well in real life, that never happens. In real life, the simplest solution is usually the right one.”
“Oh, come on, Jaime. That’s not what’s happening here. Are you really going to give up and tell Maribel’s mum it was just some madman? Do you think that will give her any kind of peace?”
His soulful brown eyes looked more conflicted than they had all weekend. “I don’t know what to tell you, Izzy. It’s the only explanation I can see.”
I waited for a new argument to spring to mind that would convince him, but nothing came.
“We’ve done our best, but it’s over. Not every tragic case like this can have a satisfying ending.” He turned to leave and I thought I’d lost him for good.
Come on, brain. Give me something.
I already told you. The photos! What was it that you couldn’t see in the photos? Or rather who.
“Her mum…” I shouted with far too much enthusiasm and my good old brain went into overdrive. “Jaime, I need you to do one more thing for me and, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll accept that Dennison was the maniac responsible for everything. I need you to go to Maribel’s mum and ask her two questions. First, and this is unlikely but it’s better to check, I need you to find out whether Maribel could have come here to the hotel on Thursday night, the day before she was killed, and secondly, ask the mother if she’d ever met Marco herself.”
He hesitated but I knew he’d give in. “Okay, Izzy. I’ll go. But that’s the last of it. I’ll only be messing with the poor woman’s head if I keep visiting her.”
I gave him my phone number and he promised to contact me as soon as he heard anything. He walked off with a perplexed expression on his face and left me alone with the ping-pong table, the pool cues and a rather worn looking table football. I wasn’t giving up just yet. As long as I had that glimmer of a chance to work out what had happened, I would never give up.
The photos weren’t the only thing my subconscious mind had dredged up. Though I hadn’t given it nearly enough thought, it was true that I already knew who the thief was. Well there were two of them actually and at that very moment, they were sipping orange juice on the terrace.
“What did you do with the gun?” I asked and they stared back at me with an identical guilty look. “I don’t care about anything else you stole but you have to tell me what happened to the gun.”
For once, it was Sagrario who was the first to reply. “That’s crazy. Why would you think it was us?”
“You were the only ones bumbling about the hotel on the day everything was taken. Now tell me what you did with the gun.”
Celestino suddenly looked younger, there was a snappiness about him as he answered. “What we told you about the recession was true. After the bank took our shop and our home – that we’d been living in for forty years – we had no other option. We try to steal from people we don’t like. We focus on conferences and posh hotels because no one ever suspects us. Who would imagine that such a sweet pair of grandparents could be professional thieves?”
“How did you get into the rooms then?”
“With the right equipment, it’s easy enough to clone the key cards at these places.” Celestino sounded rather proud of himself.
“That’s right,” Sagrario added. “We rob from the rich to give to ourselves. It’s their own fault for assuming that we’re past it.”
I let out a frustrated moan. I didn’t have time for any of this. The Romanellis would be leaving at any moment. “I don’t care why you do it. I don’t care about the phones or the cameras or even the diamonds. What did you do with the gun?”
“We didn’t take any gun,” Sagrario responded like I was accusing her of something terrible. “We only steal what we can sell easily. We wouldn’t be so stupid to take a weapon.”
Fair enough. That’s vindication if ever I heard it.
“Thank you for your honesty. And here’s a little tip for you, if you want to keep up the frail little old couple act, I’d give up on the tennis sessions.” I moved to leave, then another thought occurred to me. “Wait, what about the Bluetooth speaker from the Romanellis’ room. What happened to that?”
They looked at one another in a cartoon double take. “What’s a Bluetooth?”
This was more like it. I’d stored up all my good luck till the final moments of the investigation and I was on a roll.
Time to stick your evidence right in Marco’s face!
Not yet.
The Inspector then? Shove what we’ve found out right in her smug mouth.
Nope, there’s still work to be done. And until we hear from Jaime, we’ve got nothing.
I went back to the foyer where bags were already lining up for departing guests. It looked like Heike and Lio would be the first to go. It made me a little sad to see. I’d come to like Heike – the real person I’d got to know over the last day, not the act she’d put on before that.
“I’m sorry we started off so badly,” she told me as I walked over to see her. “It’s been nice spending time with you.”
I don’t like farewells. Never have. When my mum and dad broke up, I cried for a month. “Yeah, you too.” Considering what I already knew about her, I wasn’t just sad to say goodbye, I was worried where she’d end up. “What do you think you’ll do now?”
A gigantic grin stretched both cheeks on her perfectly bronzed face. “I’ll be alright. It turns out I’ve got a benefactor of my own. I’ll get a flat somewhere like I’ve always wanted. It’s time to settle down.”
I thought we would just wave goodbye and never talk again but she stepped forward and wrapped me up in an extra tight hug. “Thank you, Izzy. You’ve helped me more than you could know.”
She picked her bags up, passed through the police officers at the entrance and went out through the rotating door to the taxi. The girls got in and I watched the car pull away through the window. For some reason, nothing she’d said struck me as strange until the car was out of sight.
“Wait!” It was a silly thing to shout, they were never going to hear me.
I was still tired from my trek up the beach but managed to get my arms and legs moving once more to propel me from the hotel and down the path.
“Heike,” I shouted, wishing I had asked for her phone number so that I could have simply rung her and not got all tired and sweaty again. I made it past the fountain, I made it all the way down the gravel drive and, just as I got to the gate, the taxi pulled into the road.
I bent over, my lungs on fire, my every muscle cramping.
We should probably do more exercise.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
How could I have been so stupid? I couldn’t even blame a hangover or a late night for my slow reactions. Heike had practically confessed her secret and I’d been too dumb to cotton on. It didn’t matter though. I’d got her meaning and in a few minutes time, everything would be in place.
Sadly, the hotel was at t
he top of a slope and the walk back up was even more exhausting than the run down had been.
We should probably do more exercise.
You already said that.
I know, but I wanted to make sure you’d heard.
By the time I got back inside, Danny had appeared. He was looking rather sore-headed in his crumpled bodyguard costume. I guess that my mum had given up on her celebrity act too as she was yet to break out in a song or spin some unlikely narrative and, when not comforting Sharon, had spent most of the morning reading the paper. Ramesh had ground to a halt and, slumped down on either side of the artist formerly known as Bu-Bu La Mer, both he and Danny were practically comatose.
“Ra, when you were cleaning the empty rooms yesterday, didn’t you come across a portable speaker?”
He looked like he’d just gone ten seconds with Mike Tyson. His head wobbled dozily and his eyes were only half open. “Urmmm… maybe?”
“Come on, it’s important. It would have been somewhere near where Álvaro was murdered. Did you find one?”
“A speaker? Yeah. There was a black one with a cross on it and a phone too. They were in one of the rooms on the first floor. I handed them into Kabir in case someone calls for them. It’s amazing the things people leave behind. I found a set of false teeth yesterday. Can you imagine-?”
“Thank you, Ramesh,” I cut him off as there were slightly more important things to think about than the contents of The Cova Negra lost property box.
I had a quick check about to see where everyone had got to. The remaining Dennisons were in the foyer with the police. I could see that Bielza had revealed her suspicions as the two kids and their mother were in fits of tears. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Ian was dead, now they had to get used to the idea that he was actually a sleazy, murderous thief. Well, it wouldn’t be for long if I had my way.
I caught sight of the Romanellis taking one last walk around the grounds before their departure, Delilah was yet again tucking into an all-day breakfast, the Spaniards must have gone off to pack and, just then, I received the text I’d been waiting for.
A Corpse on the Beach Page 19