I gave her a quick hug. ‘It’s not the end of the world, Zara. So he bought a fake watch to show off, and you caught him out. Embarrassing for him, but someone who can’t laugh it off is not worth bothering about. He’s either a conceited balloon or not what he seems.’
‘Not what he seems?’ Zara was staring at me, shocked into semi-sobriety. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘What do you mean?’
I blinked, taken aback by the intensity of her reaction. ‘I mean he could be a conman, a gold-digger – after your money.’ As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. It would be awkward if she started doing a Sherlock Holmes job on Mason. ‘Only joking,’ I added hastily.
Zara stared at me for a few moments longer, then slid down in the seat with her eyes closed.
I got no more out of her. She remained slumped and semi-comatose until we arrived at the hotel, where I managed to heave her out of the taxi and with the help of one of the staff, deposit her in her room.
CHAPTER THREE
Thanks to Zara Porter-Browne it was later than I’d planned when I arrived at police headquarters for the scheduled Monday morning meeting with the comandante. I’d left Gorgonzola, appetite restored, making herself quite at home on a cushioned seat on the veranda of the casa. I planned to use her to make some unobtrusive searches, but first I’d have to get the official go-ahead from The Ogre herself – and I had the feeling it wasn’t going to be easy.
A constant worry was that one of my suspects might link me with the police. There were thirty steps up to the entrance of police HQ and it must have been on the unlucky thirteenth that I cannoned into a man who had come to a sudden stop.
‘Sor—’ I looked up to see Charles Mason’s familiar designer stubble. ‘Oh hello, Charles. Sorry, didn’t see you. My mind was on other things. I’m on my way to sort out another holiday predicament, a lost passport crisis,’ I said, thinking quickly. That should satisfactorily explain my presence. But why exactly was he here? Cultivate each one individually. Everyone has his secrets. I did some fishing. ‘You’ve not lost your passport, I hope?’
Interestingly, he looked shifty, very shifty indeed. ‘No, no, nothing as drastic as that. Just my watch. Should have seen to that loose link on the bracelet.’
‘A Rolex, isn’t it?’ Now, how was he going to handle that?
Smoothly as it turned out. ‘Well, yes, losing it is a bit of a blow.’ The accompanying rueful grin was perfectly done. ‘But to be honest, it’s the sentimental value more than anything … my dead father.…’
I was impressed. I really was. In a couple of sentences he’d managed to imply he lived a millionaire lifestyle in which a watch worth thousands of pounds was considered a minor trinket and at the same time he’d cast himself in the role of loving son who valued an object as a memento rather than for its monetary value. What’s more, at a stroke he’d rid himself of the embarrassingly misspelled Rollex and by reporting the loss could claim the insurance money! I had to hand it to him. He certainly had … what was the word … chutzpah.
Charles was saying, ‘… on my way to ask if my watch has been handed in. But if it hasn’t, I suppose I’ll have to fill in some forms for the insurance. You couldn’t help me with any translation problems, could you?’
Perhaps I’d get the chance to peel away some of those layers. I was fairly sure he was a con-artist rather than a drug dealer but …
I led the way through the glass doors. ‘The first thing to do is state your business to that officer over there and then you’ll have to sit on one of these benches round the walls until you’re called. The duty officer will speak some English, but I’ll hang around.’
I wasn’t going to leave without finding out what his game was, so took a seat, rummaged in my bag and flicked through a sheaf of papers, ostensibly taking little interest in the proceedings as he walked over to the dark oak desk behind which a grey-haired, bushy moustached officer was gazing into a computer monitor and giving an occasional one-fingered tap at the keyboard.
I watched him speak to the officer, then cross back across the expanse of marble floor to sit down beside me. I continued scribbling meaningless hieroglyphs against random paragraphs on the page I was studying.
I heard Mason mutter, ‘There’s a bit of all right,’ and I looked up to see two skimpily clad girls, tourists by dress and behaviour, giggling behind their hands and eyeing him lustfully through the curtains of their long blonde hair.
On the bench to our right a stout woman was talking earnestly to a teenaged boy, probably her son, and an old man in a black suit was staring vacantly into space.
‘Looks like you won’t have to wait long, Charles. There’s not much of a crime wave here, compared with big cities like London or New York.’ I eyed him covertly. ‘But there are some serious incidents – even the odd murder or two. Just the other day a body was found floating in the harbour.’
Charles Mason looked deeply unimpressed. ‘I expect the guy fell over the edge of the quay when he was drunk.’ He crinkled his eyes at the two girls.
Most people might assume that a body was male, so there was no significance in that. Certainly, the lack of reaction, lack of interest in a murder, was a trifle unusual. Of course, he could have already read about it in the Portuguese newspapers. After all, they had covered the story of the body in the harbour. But Mason didn’t speak Portuguese – he’d just asked for my help with translating – or was that a double bluff?
Bushy Moustache had stopped tapping at his keyboard and was now beckoning Mason forward.
‘You’re in luck, Charles. You’re getting preferential treatment. Losing a Rolex must have made quite an impression. I’ll come over with you in case there are any difficulties when they take a statement.’ This was going to be interesting.
‘Er …’ A flick of his eyes betrayed his unease. ‘I don’t want to take up any more of your time, Debbie. When I spoke to the officer a few minutes ago, I made myself understood pretty well. He speaks quite good English, actually.’
So Mason was trying to get rid of me? Intriguing.
‘Come on.’ I bounced to my feet as if I hadn’t heard. ‘Can’t keep him waiting or we’ll be back at the end of the queue.’
For someone anxious to report a loss, Charles was displaying a curious reluctance to set things in motion.
‘Er.…’ he mumbled again.
I flopped down beside him. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No, no …’ He shuffled his feet nervously. ‘Well … you know how it is…. Insurance companies are always trying to wriggle out of responsibility by saying that you’ve been negligent, so I spun a bit of a yarn – told him that I’d been mugged, that somebody had snatched the watch off my wrist.’
The Moustache beckoned again, more brusquely.
Sad to say, honesty would have to give way to expediency. Protecting an insurance company from a fraudster was of secondary importance to my investigations. I gave the self-styled mugging victim a conspiratorial wink. ‘That’s the only way to make sure insurance companies pay up.’
The old man in the black suit had levered himself to his feet and was shuffling spryly across to the desk. I eyed his retreating back. ‘Come on. If we don’t get a move on, that old man will beat us to it.’
And he did. His quick shuffle beat our smart walk by a couple of paces – it would have been too obvious a tactic to run. At the desk he launched into an interminable complaint about the rampages of a neighbour’s dog among his chickens. This was received by the desk officer with much nodding of the head and a rapid tattoo of fingers on his keyboard. Strange, Bushy Moustache didn’t look like the kind of guy who would tolerate queue jumping and, what’s more, his typing skills seemed to have undergone a quantum leap in speed.
Curious, I edged round the right-angle of the desk and squinted at the monitor. The top third of the screen visible over Bushy Moustache’s shoulder was full of assorted letters, numbers and symbols as his fingers hit random keys with machine-gun rapidity.
‘Excuse me,’ Mason said loudly, his public-school drawl edged with impatience.
The machine-gun rattle and the old man’s quavering monologue continued unchecked, ‘… and that scumbag César Gonçalves just laughed like the hyena he is!’ The old man’s bristly grey chin quivered with unsuppressed rage.
Mason’s ‘Excuse me!’ was repeated, this time at full volume. For added measure the flat of his hand smacked down on the desk with the crack of a pistol shot.
I jumped. The monitor went black as the officer’s convulsed fingers hit several conflicting keys. The old man’s stick clattered to the floor and he began to buckle slowly at the knees.
My own knees grew weak at the vision of the comandante leaning towards me over her desk spitting out the words, ‘So, Sshmit. This is the second death for which I point the finger. I think you must explain.’
A wave of garlic engulfed me as the old man spluttered something drowned out by the heated altercation raging above us as Mason and Bushy Moustache shouted and waved fists at each other.
‘… outrageous behaviour in a police station …’
‘… complain to your superior officer …’
‘… disturbing public order …’
‘… every right to expect …’
The old man’s fumbling fingers latched round the shaft of his stick. He heaved himself upward using the stick as a lever.
‘Bloody interfering foreigner!’ He poked his stick viciously into Mason’s back. ‘Gonçalves is paying you to prevent me making a formal complaint, eh?’
‘See—’ Charles half turned from eyeballing the minion of the law on the other side of the desk.
‘You admit it!’ With a scream of rage the old man brought his stick slashing down on the foreign mercenary’s fingers splayed temptingly on the wooden surface.
Mason’s howl of pain was followed seconds later by another sharp crack of the stick on the polished desktop.
‘You heard that? He confessed!’ The old man cackled triumphantly. ‘Senhora, you are my witness. And you, Raimundo Paulo,’ – he swivelled towards Bushy Moustache – ‘it is as a police officer that you hear him admit he is working for Gonçalves. That Gonçalves is behind it all. Arrest them both!’
‘Let’s just get out of here!’ I hissed, hustling Charles past the sniggering police officer on duty at the front door. Taking hold of his arm, I shoved him none too gently outside.
‘I can’t think why that crazy old coot turned on me like that,’ Mason whined. He skidded to a halt and half turned as if to rush back to continue the encounter.
I summoned up my reserves of charity – his purpled fingers did look extremely painful.
‘Really, Charles, you brought it on yourself, pushing in front of the old man like that. He had just accused you of being in the pay of a thieving neighbour of his, and you, with rather unfortunate timing, shouted out what sounded to him like the Portuguese for “Yes, I am”.’ I tried to keep the laughter out of my voice.
He eyed his swollen fingers. ‘I think the old buzzard’s smashed them,’ he moaned. ‘Puts paid to the plans for tomorrow. I had it all set up to show Zara how to water ski without planks.’
I had to hand it to him again. You can’t keep a conman down. There he was, bouncing back to latch on to another image-enhancing opportunity that couldn’t be checked out.
‘Hard luck, Charles. And I think you should let things cool down a bit. Report your missing watch tomorrow.’
He blew on his fingers. ‘You’re right, Debbie. Couldn’t trust myself not to grab his walking stick and break it over his thick skull.’
‘Well, I came here to see about a lost passport. I’d better get round to it. And what those fingers of yours need is ice. I’d nip along to the fish market, if I were you.’
I stood at the top of the steps and watched till his blond, gelled head disappeared round the corner. With Mason’s luck, he’d plunge his fist through a heap of ice into the gaping jaws of a spiky-toothed espada fish.
I made my way back into the building. Before that meeting with the comandante I’d still have time to write a brief report on David Grant and Mason. Hopefully, that should soften up The Ogre before I revealed that, without consulting her, I’d brought in a new colleague from HMRC – and, worse still, that the new colleague was a cat. Back home, I was well used to reactions of disbelief and hilarity when instead of the expected sniffer dog, a sniffer cat got to work. But I’d the strong feeling that the comandante would take a dim view of this challenge to her authority and, far from being amused, would dismiss out of hand the whole concept of a sniffer cat.
When I entered her office, she was standing beside her desk rearranging the strelitzias in their vase. Whether by chance or design, an aggressive array of beaks was targeting the visitor’s chair.
‘Ah, Smith.’ She tweaked a recalcitrant spike into submission. ‘I hope you have made some progress in your investigations.’ Her tone indicated that she had no hope, no hope at all, that I had, or ever would, come up with anything. She turned her attention back to the flowers, gave a nod of satisfaction and moved round the desk to sit in her chair.
I gave her my hastily compiled report. ‘As you will see, Comandante, I’ve made some interesting discoveries about two of the suspects.’
She studied the sheet of paper, one hand motioning me to sit. In the silence I became aware of the muted roar of buses grinding up the narrow twisting road to the Botanic Gardens and the villages on the heights above.
I cleared my throat. ‘As I’ve said, I think that as far as the death of Gomes is concerned, we can discount Charles Mason. However, Grant has behaved in a way that warrants further investigation.’
Overwrought Zara Porter-Browne, flamboyant artist Haxby and refined pensioner Winterton might also be worth investigating, but I’d keep that to myself. Concrete evidence was all that counted with the comandante. Intuition, conjecture and surmise were not words that featured in her vocabulary.
The blood-red fingernails drummed a brief tattoo on the desktop. ‘So, the man Grant lied. Perhaps he was with a woman. You say that he tries to impress. Perhaps he was wishing to hide the fact that he slept late. Such a man would not wish to admit this. Are these not possibilities, Sshmit?’ She leant back, eyebrows raised.
I nodded. She was right. I’d taken a dislike to him, so perhaps I was reading too much into what was nothing more than an image-saving fib.
She pushed the report across the desk towards me, a signal that it was not worth filing. Damn, I’d hoped I was on to something. Worse, I’d failed to soften her up for what I was about to say.
I got slowly to my feet. ‘Er, there’s something else, Comandante. I’m convinced that one or more of our suspects is implicated in the Gomes death. Revenue & Customs have already established that drug organizations make use of the Massaroco Hotel where he was a waiter. There’s a strong possibility, therefore, that drugs are a factor in the murder of Gomes, so I’ve asked for an expert in drug detection to be sent out from England to assist me.’
‘And this expert, he is so clever he can succeed when you have failed?’ The eyebrows elevated themselves into a sceptical arch.
‘Not he, she, Comandante.’ Now was the time to disclose, to tell all, but I chickened out. I hurried on, ‘My plan is to let her search the places these people hang out. She’ll be able to detect any trace of drugs.’
With luck, The Ogre would be satisfied with that and then, if Gorgonzola came up trumps, the subsequent revelation that my new colleague was a cat wouldn’t make the comandante blow her top. My luck was out.
‘This woman, she has specialized equipment?’
‘Er,’ I floundered, ‘er, smell. She detects the presence of drugs by smell.’
‘I have not heard of such a machine. Tell me more about this wonderful device.’ The comandante leant forward expectantly.
I racked my brain for a suitable smokescreen, but only dug myself in deeper. ‘She doesn’t use a machin
e. Her sense of smell is very highly developed. It’s the same with a wine or fragrance expert. In English, we describe such a person as “a Nose”.’
‘Who is this lady? I must meet her.’ She picked up a pen and held it poised over her desk diary.
I made a last ditch attempt to gain that extra moment in which there’d be a miraculous knock at the door, or a phone call to divert the comandante’s attention to some urgent case.
‘She’s known as G and er.…’ There was no way I was going to get out of this. I surrendered. ‘And er … she’s a cat …’ I tailed off.
‘Cat? Cat, Ssshmit?’ Her face flushed. ‘This is the strange English humour?’ At the hwack of the flat of her hand on the polished surface of the desk, the strelitzias quivered in their vase, their steely grey beaks crossing and tangling as if some deadly skirmish had broken out.
‘I can assure you, Comandante, that the cat is held in high regard by HMRC. Only last year, she was instrumental in—’
Hwack. ‘Enough, Sshmit. I do not wish to hear more. I remind you, you have eighteen days left to solve this case.’
The two neat rows of perfectly matched teeth snapped shut. My audience with The Ogre was at an end.
CHAPTER FOUR
That afternoon found me perched on the high stool at the counter of the Massaroco’s terrace bar sipping a leisurely coffee. A few couples were sitting around engrossed in newspapers, paperbacks, or travel guides of Madeira. Behind the bar, Márcio, the replacement for Luís, was standing half-asleep waiting for his shift to end and rubbing perfunctorily at the beer rings on the polished bar top, the sullen droop to his mouth evidence that he was not enjoying his work.
To the casual observer it might have seemed a repetition of the scene three days ago, but there were discrepancies, small changes as in a Spot the Difference competition. Celia in flowery smock, minus the chrome yellow sunhat, was pouring tea for Dorothy Winterton. David Grant, mobile phone now hidden in an accessible pocket but ready to be whipped out at the first beep of Land of Hope and Glory, was once again lazily propping up the far end of the bar. On the stool beside the jardinière of orchids where she and Charles had giggled together under the effect of the powerful Madeira poncha, Zara sat, this time alone, morosely sipping at a gaudy blue cocktail. Notably absent, of course, was Luís, his ready smile and bright eyes replaced by Márcio’s downcast gaze and down-turned mouth.
Suspects All ! Page 4