by Jill Downie
“No, it isn’t. We must have the transaction take place, and then we can move in.”
“We?” Garth’s voice shook. “Don’t mean to be insulting, Ed, but by ‘we’ do you mean the likes of PC Brouard, and that pretty sidekick of yours? You’ve told me nothing.”
“No, because I don’t trust you.” Moretti cut off Garth’s wail of protest. “Why do you think I’m here risking my own neck? Sergeant Falla — I presume that’s who you mean by my sidekick — is coordinating everything, back at Hospital Lane. I will be contacting her soon. And you are right, this is far too tricky to handle by myself, so I have involved some experts in this sort of thing. Less you know about them the better. In the next few minutes, I’ll be leaving you here to meet your pals, and hiding on the yacht. And you needn’t have bothered to tape your conversation, because your office, your phone, everything, is now bugged.”
As Moretti stood up to leave, his mobile rang.
His first reaction was annoyance, because he had arranged with Liz Falla that he would contact her. She was in direct touch with those running the operation, and they had not been happy about his “pretty sidekick” being the point person. He had assured them she would follow instructions to the letter, and here she was, breaking the rules.
“Falla. What —?”
“Had to do this, Guv. There’s a fly in the ointment.” He could hear the anxiety in her voice.
“A fly in the ointment? What fly?”
“Who, Guv, who. I know where the South Africans are, and I know who sent them there. Trouble is, we don’t know if your visitors know, but they probably do.”
“Who sent them where?” The gentle motion of the yacht strengthened into something more intense, as if the wind had come up, or a vessel was approaching. “Quick, Falla. We may be about to have visitors.”
“The fly —” Falla’s voice quavered “— is Denny. Denny Bras-de-Fer.”
Denny Bras-de-Fer loved a big story, and was quite willing to invent one, if necessary. It had got him into trouble in the past. This time there was no need for creativity, just ingenuity and cunning, and those were qualities he had in spades. Already there were stringers and freelancers sniffing around the yacht murder, but the fact that Masterson was a Canadian, operating outside the British Isles, had slowed down the interest of the fourth estate. Denny could smell big money — by his standards — if he could beat everyone to the punch.
Masterson’s connection to Beaufort-Jones was only known to a handful of insiders, and Denny Bras-de-Fer was jumping in the deep end of a very murky pool without a lifebelt. But intelligent analysis had never been Denny’s strong point. He acted on instinct, charm, and self-interest, with self-preservation as a top priority.
Besides, he did not like being rejected by women, and when Liz Falla told him to get lost, he became even more interested in the Just Desserts murder as a matter of principle. The satisfying furor caused by his article in the Guernsey Press had spurred him on to continue his investigations and, since he had no police contacts — quite the opposite, in fact — all he could do was keep an eye on the yacht.
After hours spent on a bench overlooking the Just Desserts, to the detriment of his beauty sleep and his social life, he was finally rewarded. He watched the arrival of a glamorous older woman and two young men, delivered by police car, and his first thought was to target the woman. His speciality, after all. But she disappeared out of sight into the bowels of the vessel, and never reappeared. Just as he was considering walking up the gangplank and presenting himself as a reporter for the Guernsey Press, the two men emerged. They were talking together, relaxed and cheerful, carrying what looked like shopping bags. They exchanged a joke of some kind with the solitary policeman on the pier, who appeared to be pointing them in the direction of the shops. Denny decided to follow them, which would require wheeling his Vespa along with him.
Denny loved his Vespa, a powder blue LX 50 4V. He had chosen powder blue, because it went down well with the birds — only blokes with machismo were unafraid of such a feminine shade. In his mind it created the image of a debonair, continental member of the paparazzi, the sort of sophisticate who always said “Ciao,” like he did, and never “Cheerio,” or “Goodbye.” To be sure, this model was not very powerful, but who needed that on an island this size, and it was the iconic image that mattered. He had no intention of leaving it unattended, and he soon saw that having wheels was a stroke of luck.
The two men continued along the Esplanade and, to his surprise, did not turn up any of the streets that would lead them to the shops. When they reached the foot of St. Julian’s Avenue, they hailed a cab and got in. After a moment’s delay, presumably as they gave the driver directions, the taxi set off up the avenue. Quick as a flash, Denny was on his Vespa following them.
Denny Bras-de-Fer was in his glory. Here he was, acting out in real life his childhood dreams and grown-up fantasies, in pursuit of his quarry. Who the quarry was, he did not know, but it was clear they had misled the copper on the pier, so possibly he was tailing the bad guys. What a coup for him if he tailed them to their hideout! Certainly they had come on the yacht, but this was no scenic excursion. Maybe they had accomplices. At some point he would phone the cops, but he wanted to see this through to the end.
The taxi turned off Les Gravées and headed south, twisting and turning along the narrow lanes, through St. Andrew and into the parish of St. Martin. The bends in the road made it tricky for Denny not to lose sight of them, so he risked following more closely, and he had to come to an abrupt halt when he saw the taxi had stopped outside the sort of gussied-up cottage only the well-heeled could own. Getting off the Vespa, he tucked it under the hedge and waited for the taxi driver to deliver his fares. A few moments later the two men emerged, and started walking up the driveway to the front door of the cottage. He could now hear them talking, casually, relaxed, in what sounded like German.
Denny waited for the taxi to leave. Then, stealthily creeping along against the hedgerow, he turned into the driveway. He was going to have to risk exposure, because there was no hedge up to the house, so he waited until they had rung the bell, and the door of the cottage opened. He heard voices, a yell, then the sound of the door closing, and silence.
The yell was worrisome, but Denny hesitated only for a moment, then started to creep up the exposed driveway, scurrying from bush to bush. When he reached the cottage he was panting, sweating, his heart beating like a bass drum in his chest. Crouching beneath the windows, he crept along the wall until heard voices. They were coming from a corner room to the right of the front door, and the windows on the side of the house had bushes close to the wall, which afforded him some cover. He scuttled around the corner, squatted beneath the window, and listened.
It was not hard to hear what was going on, although the man doing most of the talking kept his voice low. But the man he was questioning was doing the exact opposite, he was screaming, and Denny could hear every word he was saying. Over and over between the screams he was saying, “No, no, I know nothing — I killed nobody — no, I don’t know who did — Christ, I’d tell you if I knew, I’m no hero — what woman? Her? — I didn’t kill Masterson, and I didn’t kill her — aaah!”
At this point, Denny decided he’d had enough. But, before sneaking back down the driveway and reaching the safety of his beloved Vespa, he risked a quick look through the window, raising his head a few inches above the sill.
The man screaming was a mess. His arms were tied to a chair with what looked like his trouser belt, but in spite of his bloodied face and broken nose Denny recognized him. He had seen him often enough with some dolly-bird or other in the jazz club. He was a doctor, or a surgeon or something. Nichol Watt, that was his name. Before Denny ducked down, the interrogator struck Nichol Watt again, so hard his head smacked back against the chair on which he was strapped.
But where was the other man?
He had barely formed the thought when he felt a cold, hard pressure against
the back of his neck.
“Get up. Make a move and I pull the trigger.”
The pressure against his neck increased. Denny had often said to his coterie when laughing about some jape or other, some trick he had pulled on some unsuspecting sucker, “I nearly peed my pants.” It was not an expression he would use lightly again.
He was nudged in the direction of a door near the back of the cottage, and pushed through. Inside he found himself in the same room as Nichol Watt and his interrogator, who was lighting a cigarette as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, which, for these two men, was probably the case.
“Here,” said his escort to the other man, then something in what sounded like German, but wasn’t.
The blond man smiled. “A word of advice, you who are about to die. Only amateurs tail professionals on shiny baby-blue bikes. Who are you?”
His escort shoved him from behind toward the other man, and Denny’s knees gave way. He fell on the ground, and started to grovel. “Please, I’m just a reporter, I’m not with the police, I’m only trying to get a story. I’m good at keeping my mouth shut, if you just let me —”
He was silenced by a kick in the small of his back, the pain travelling the length of his spine.
“We don’t have time for this.” The tall, fair-haired man smiled through the cigarette smoke at him, and the dark-haired man kicked him again. This time his back went numb. “We need to know before we leave what the doctor knows about who else is — in on this. We cannot have that. Too much to lose. Come, reporter — what do you know?” The fair-haired man inhaled, hard, until the end of the cigarette glowed, and held it out.
It was with terror that Denny realized he had nothing he could tell them, because he knew nothing, and he was sure Nichol Watt would have spilled his guts if he knew anything. He couldn’t even fabricate who killed who, because he had no idea what woman they were talking about. Coralie Fellowes? The papers had been told it could be natural causes, but it had to be La Chancho. Unless he could think of something, their ignorance would be their death warrant.
At that point, Denny’s creativity and, above all, his instinct for self-preservation kicked in.
“I know who’s behind it,” he trilled, his voice an unrecognizable falsetto. “It’s not him. It’s another man, a guy who was in the secret service. He’s been in on the case from the beginning. If anyone killed anyone, it’s him, and not him.” He pointed to Nichol Watt and was rewarded with a blow from a gun butt around the back of his head.
“Cut to the chase, reporter.”
“He lives close by, and I can take you there, get you in the door, past his dogs. They’re vicious, but there’s no need to worry about him, he’s an old man now. His name is Ludovic Ross.”
Just before they left the room, the fair-haired man took the dark-haired man’s gun and smashed it against Nichol Watt’s head so hard that he and the chair fell sideways. He lay on the floor without moving. As the interrogator pointed the gun at Watt’s body, the other man said, “No more bullets. We have no more bullets.”
The interrogator nodded, bent down, and took Nichol Watt’s car keys from his pocket.
Benz and Mercedes were restless. Ludo Ross could hear them moving around the house as he sat listening to Brubeck playing The Last Time We Saw Paris with his quartet. He remembered they had disbanded shortly after recording the album.
Shame that all good things have to come to an end. Outside, the island was bursting into bloom after its gale-swept winter, but Ross had the feeling of things ending, rather than beginning.
“The sere, the yellow leaf,” he said out loud. “Coralie, Coralie.”
I’d better stop drinking, he thought, or I’ll be crying again. Perhaps the dogs sensed his mood. Perhaps that was all, but, like them, he was restless. It was like the old days, he felt as if he was being watched. Paranoia, a familiar bedfellow.
The thought of bedfellows brought Liz Falla to mind. Not that she had been in his bed, and he’d ruined any remote chance of that by his egregious insults. Some time, the next time he saw her, he would tell her what he felt about her voice. Magic.
There be none of Beauty’s daughters with a magic like thee.
Such a pity that desire never left, never let you sink gently into that good night. Or so it had been for him. He reached out his hand for the bottle on the table and, as he did, he heard the two ridgebacks making their warning growls. They were trained not to bark full throttle immediately.
“Benz, Mercedes.”
But they did not come to him. They ran past the sitting room and up to the next floor, and he followed them. They were not heading for his bedroom, but for the narrow, foot-long spy hole set in the windowless wall overlooking the lane behind the house, and the sealed door that had at one time led on to the second-floor balcony. Benz was standing on his hind legs, pawing at the wall.
Ross took his old Zeiss binoculars from the hook by the spy hole, where he always kept them, and looked out. Just visible on the lane below was a car, and someone was getting out of it, from the back seat. Which meant that whoever it was had been driven there. With the two dogs snarling beside him, he watched as the passenger started to walk, quite openly, around to the front of the house. He waited a moment, and saw who had driven his unknown visitor. Getting out of the car were the two crew members of the Just Desserts.
Ross ran to his bedroom, took a gun out of his bedside table drawer, and slipped it into his pocket. Then, taking the two dogs by their collars, led them back downstairs.
One of the ways Ludo Ross had passed the hours that hung heavy on his hands was training the two ridgebacks for the kind of situation he never, in his saner moments, thought would actually happen. The knowledge that they were what he had made them comforted him in his paranoia. He knew for certain the two crew members were trouble, and that a decoy was going to ring his doorbell at any moment. The advantage he had was that they would also have to come in through the front door, but the disadvantage was he needed the decoy alive, to find out what the hell was going on.
As he reached the hallway, the doorbell rang.
Ross let go of the dogs’ collars, bent down, stroked them, and whispered, “Wait. Wait. Wait until I say the word.”
The dogs crouched down beside him.
Pulling the gun out of his pocket, Ross exhaled deeply, threw the door open, and hauled his unknown visitor inside, throwing him to the floor as he wailed, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
“Shut up.”
He barely had the words out of his mouth when he saw the two crew members running up the driveway, one of them carrying a gun. As a bullet whistled past him he shouted at the two dogs, just one word: “Kill.”
He watched as they did exactly what he had trained them to do, all those years. Unerringly, flawlessly, they went for the jugular, dropping the two men in their tracks. He heard them screaming as Benz and Mercedes finished their task.
At school Ludo Ross had always loved the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, and the one about the old Sardinian widow avenging the murder of her son was his particular favourite. He had never forgotten it, never thought he would have the opportunity to try out her chosen method against her son’s killers. In what strange and unforeseen ways a good education can come in useful. He turned to the whimpering figure on the floor.
“Not a move, not a sound, until I call off my dogs. Then I have a phone call to make, and you and I are going to have a little talk.”
Chapter Seventeen
One advantage Moretti had was that he knew the layout of the yacht and they didn’t. Crouched down in the dining area, with its sliding glass door open into the main salon where Garth waited, he knew he had a chance of getting out. A tethered goat is what Garth had called himself, and that is what he was, with about as much chance of escaping. Not that he would be killed immediately. His co-conspirators still needed him, after all. But Peter Walker and Janice Melville had made it clear there were to be no heroics and, once SIS w
ere involved, they were just as likely to finish him off, if he got in the way. Garth’s fate meant nothing to them. It was Van der Velde and, above all, Beaufort-Jones they wanted.
But good horn players were hard to find.
All he could do now was wait. The most likely scenario was that they would arrive beyond the harbour limits and transfer to a smaller vessel, and SIS’s plans were to pick up the waiting boat as well as Game-Boy and the South African. Chief Officer Hanley had briefed the harbour master, so there would be no unwanted interruptions from harbour security.
In the open dining area he heard them when they arrived, the small boat bumping against the side of the yacht, a muttered curse in an English accent, so probably Beaufort-Jones, the posh talker. They were obviously in very good shape, slithering up on one of the ropes over the side, landing lightly on the deck, close to the doors from the salon. So maybe they knew the yacht’s layout, after all. No surprise they had come prepared. Moretti could not see them, but he heard an exclamation from Garth, quickly suppressed.
Moretti strained to hear what they were saying. Both men sounded dangerously edgy. Masterson’s dabbling in many pies had exposed them, and this particular high-wire act was not part of their preferred way of doing business. They seemed to want information as to where Garth was planning to buy diamonds, and Moretti knew he had been provided with some names.
Top of the list was a Toronto-based South African who had recently designated himself as head of a mining company by the simple process of removing the names of its directors on a government database and substituting his own. Chances were that Game-Boy and Double V already knew about him, and it would give Garth credibility. Assuming, that is, that the conspirators did not yet know Interpol was on to him. He heard Garth answer, at some length, and then say, “Thank you,” like the well-mannered banker that he was. Presumably they had handed over the cash.