by Nick Louth
‘Never mind that. Townsend says we can get a flight there this evening. He’s arranged for a liaison officer to meet us, and go straight there.’
‘What? You’re bloody kidding me. I want paella, I’m famished.’
Kincaid continued to grumble as he went back upstairs to pack, and again while Gillard drove them back to Malaga airport.
‘I’ve got good news and bad,’ Craig said, pleased with the information he had held back.
‘What’s the bad?’ Kincaid asked, his face downcast.
‘There’s unlikely to be any CCTV, again.’
‘Big deal. We already know who we’re looking for. And the good news?’
Gillard laughed. ‘The good news is that Reus is a suburb of Tarragona. As you’re starving, it seems you’re going to get your T after all.’
* * *
The flight was crowded, and involved a change in Madrid before heading onwards to Barcelona, the nearest sizeable airport. Kincaid, desperate for food, had bought a small but deadly in-flight microwaved snack, a grenade of boiling cheese cunningly wrapped in cool pastry, and had burned his mouth.
It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening when they touched down at Madrid. Gillard and Kincaid wearily trundled their luggage along a busy glassed-in arrivals corridor, looking for the transit desk. Through the big windows to the left, giant aircraft were nosed up to the gates below them, passengers gathered around the desks where final ticket checks were taking place. On the right-hand side the corridor gave a view out over an atrium full of glitzy shops. Kincaid stopped when he saw a snack vending machine and began to fiddle with change in his pocket. He returned with a triangular vacuum pack of sandwiches: thin, barely filled with a sliver of pink, and unappetizing. ‘No comparison with a sodding paella,’ Kincaid said, leaning on the handrail and staring two floors down into the crowds percolating through the mall on the right.
‘Jesus, will you take a look at this,’ Kincaid said, through a mouthful of bread. He pointed down to the seating area. A curvaceous woman in her 20s with a mass of dark curly hair was bending over her luggage, revealing a deep and suntanned décolletage. ‘Not many of those to the pound, eh, Craig?’
With a weary sigh, Craig glanced at the girl. She soon turned away, and Craig’s eyes were drawn to the woman sitting next to her. She was in her 40s, wearing a royal-blue trouser suit and white blouse. Her luxuriant hair was white as snow, held in a French plait that reached down to her shoulders. She had sunglasses perched on the top of her head, which she adjusted with a delicate hand, while she read some hefty hardback. Some level of subterranean recognition seemed to surface in him. Those hands were just like Liz’s. The shape of the head was familiar too.
Surely, it couldn’t be.
It was. Liz. She was alive.
And she was here.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gillard was totally stunned by the vision he had just seen. He needed corroboration to prove he wasn’t going mad. ‘Look, Paddy. The woman next to Miss Busty.’
‘Which woman?’
‘There!’ Craig pointed impatiently. ‘With the plait.’
‘Where?’
‘She looks just like Liz Knight.’
‘Her? You’re imagining things, Craig.’
The woman looked up at the flight display screen above her, and Craig got a better look at the side of her face. Then she glanced in his direction. It was just a moment. Their eyes connected and his body turned to ice. She blinked expressionlessly, then turned away.
‘Liz,’ he shouted and banged on the glass. ‘Liz, up here!’ The only sound he could make on the double-paned security glass was a soft thrumming noise. Passing passengers in his corridor turned to stare at this madman banging on the glass. Craig paid them no attention. It was Liz Knight. New hairdo, new hair colour, lost loads of weight. It was impossible, but she was right there. And she had seen him. She stood, grabbed her wheeled suitcase and started to walk past Unicaja and Swarovski. She was wearing slight heels, but her walk was utterly distinctive.
‘Craig, what the fuck has got into you?’ Kincaid was staring at him. ‘She’s dead. We’ve got her gnashers in an evidence bag in Surrey, most of her spine is in a chiller with Dr Delahaye, plus at least six pints of her blood, all confirmed by DNA.’
Craig grabbed for his smartphone. He set it for zoom but when he turned back to the glass to look for her, she had gone. ‘Paddy, where did she go?’
‘She went underneath us,’ Kincaid said. ‘You might as well give it up. That mall is in international departures. It’ll take half an hour to get through security.’
‘Paddy, do me a favour. Take a picture of the departures board, I want to know where she might be going to. I’ll see if I can find her, get security to get her.’ He ran off, pushing his way past the throng of passengers who had just arrived on another domestic flight.
Kincaid watched him go. ‘He’s got it worse than I ever thought,’ he muttered. He sighed, got out his smartphone and took a picture of the departures board. It was 15 minutes later when he caught up with a breathless Craig Gillard in the domestic arrivals hall, where he was entangled in a confusing conversation with two young security officers, one of whom was staring at Craig’s police card. ‘All going smoothly, then?’ Kincaid asked.
Gillard scowled at him. ‘Not really. This one doesn’t speak English, and the other does, but he’s new. They’ll only hold departures for an imminent terrorist threat.’
‘Quite right, I should have thought. Look. We can put in a request for the CCTV footage when we get home.’
‘Paddy, that’s too late.’ Kincaid had rarely seen Gillard look so animated. ‘If I can get an officer to come with me, I’ve got my passport and there shouldn’t be any trouble getting me quickly through security into international departures.’
‘And are you just going to visit every bloody gate until you find her? Do you have any idea how many gates that might be?’ Kincaid asked.
The new security officer offered an answer. ‘One hundred and four from this terminal alone,’ he said proudly. He had a wispy moustache and looked like he was too young to leave school, let alone provide security at a major airport. ‘Why don’t we make a public announcement for this lady?’
Craig shrugged. ‘She wouldn’t cooperate. I suspect she’s travelling under a false name. I need to stop her boarding.’
‘Look, Craig. Can you imagine if they did hold the flights for you, the busiest airport in Spain, because you thought you’d seen someone who we, of all people, know to be dead. Can you imagine what Alison Rigby would do to you?’
Craig imagined the jar on her desk. He knew it was no use arguing. ‘I don’t know, Paddy, maybe Liz and Martin cooked this whole murder thing up together.’
‘If you go to the ACC with this cock and bull story, the first thing she is going to ask is whether I corroborate your description of that woman as Liz Knight. And Craig, I’m really sorry. I may not have known her like you did. But I would say it wasn’t her. To me she looked nothing much like the pictures I’ve seen. So if I was you, I should keep schtum about the whole thing, all right?’
Getting no reply, Kincaid turned to the young security officer. ‘Thanks for your help, lads. I think we’re all a bit tired, it’s been a long day. We’ll be in touch later through official channels.’ He handed them his business card.
It was midnight when they arrived at Tarragona. The liaison officer, a tired-looking and portly fellow called Gomez briefly showed them the cash machine, a lonely branch of Caja Rural in a desolate and windswept modern plaza. The CCTV lens and much else besides had been covered in spray paint graffiti. He then dropped them at an anonymous modern motel near the E15 motorway. Kincaid said he was off to check some paperwork before bed, and took the official evidence briefcase with him. Gillard sloped off to his own room, along the woodchip wallpaper corridor with its scuffed skirting, passing doors through which snatches of TV soap or sports were amplified. His thoughts turned to Liz Kni
ght. Was he really so smitten that he’d started to see ghosts? Or project her image onto others? Liz was dead, lost, murdered, her family torn asunder, and he had to confront how little progress he had managed to make in finding the culprit. He felt that he’d not only failed himself and Surrey Police, but failed her.
He rang Claire Mulholland at home, probably the only one to whom he could confess his conviction that Liz was alive. He woke her up, but she gave him a sympathetic hearing. ‘Craig, it’s very easy to make these mistakes. We all do it. The scientific experiments show again and again how we are unreliable witnesses. You’re probably just projecting the face you know—’
‘But Claire, what if it actually is her?’
She paused. ‘Well, if Martin didn’t kill her, why has he run away? Anyway, we both know what you suggest is impossible. She’s dead and buried everywhere but in your head.’ She bade him a gentle goodnight and hung up.
Sleep came with difficulty for Gillard. The night was punctuated with loud conversation in the echoing corridors, and the slamming of doors. He was awakened in the morning before seven by a couple upstairs having noisy sex, a female making demands in breathless Spanish. Annoyed and aroused in equal measure, he levered himself out of bed, lurched into the en suite and showered, keeping the hot water at its thunderous maximum, scouring his skin of doubts and worries, determined to throw himself into the new day. When he emerged, upstairs were still at it, so he dried and dressed rapidly, enthused about the idea of an early meeting to get the show on the road. With one hand over his free ear, he rang Kincaid’s mobile, which went straight to messages. Craig padded down the corridor, looking for the motel’s inclusive desayuno. There was a breakfast room, with stale coffee in a press-pump flask and a single anonymous pastry per person, brought around by an elderly woman. When he’d finished he rang Kincaid’s mobile again, which seemed to be switched off. He hauled himself back up to his room to pack, and the neighbours upstairs were still at it. Or perhaps this was a new session. He carried his luggage down to the hire car, and then went back to his room. This time he rang Kincaid by dialling the room extension. He distinctly heard the phone ring in the room above him, and the woman, whose previous vocalizations included a repeated joyful ‘Si, mas!’ went quiet. There was some male muttering, then the phone was answered. ‘Kincaid.’
‘Don’t mean to spoil your fun, but Gomez will be here at nine. That’s in 20 minutes.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Er, you don’t have time, sir. Not for any more.’ Gillard heard Kincaid laugh.
It was a very self-satisfied Detective Superintendent Kincaid who eased himself gingerly into the passenger seat of the car at ten past nine, and spent a long time delicately rearranging his groin. ‘Ah. Bit tender now. Still, it was worth it, I can tell you.’ Kincaid looked like he was girding himself up for giving out the full gory details when Sargento Gomez’s car pulled into the car park. As the detectives got out of the car to greet him, a buxom, African-looking woman in a bright green dress, absurdly high heels and enormous matching handbag came clattering out of the motel. She blew a cheery kiss goodbye to the assembled detectives, which Kincaid returned. She then slid herself into a sleek red Porsche Panamera, easily the most expensive vehicle at the motel, roared out of the car park and pipped the horn as she passed them.
‘Not on expenses, I trust?’ Craig whispered.
Kincaid tutted at him. ‘Do I look that stupid?’
* * *
It was eleven in the morning and Gillard and Kincaid were in the Spanish ANPR control room in Barcelona, looking in vain for any number plate matches to those accumulated around Paris. ‘Bollocks to this,’ said Kincaid. ‘Let’s see if there’s been any more card activity.’
He rang Rob Townsend, and Gillard saw him take down some details.
‘Got anything, have we?’ Gillard asked.
‘Not much. Professor Knight’s been shopping, that’s all.’
‘Where?’
‘Not clear,’ Kincaid shrugged. ‘It was a cardholder-not-present transaction. Could be anywhere. Doesn’t help us much.’
Gillard stared at him. ‘What did he buy? At what time? And how much did he spend? Have you got the merchant ID so we can trace it?’
Kincaid shrugged. Gillard reached for the phone, and Kincaid put a heavy hand on his. ‘Best let this one lie, Craig.’
Craig stared at him, a look of incredulity forming on his face. ‘Paddy. Please tell me that you didn’t use Knight’s card details to book that hooker last night.’
‘Cerise is a high-class escort from a very reputable Barcelona agency,’ Kincaid said, his eyes going a little misty. ‘Ángeles Oscuros. Dark angels. It just seemed a terrible shame to waste that pre-approved credit.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this, Paddy,’ Craig said. ‘I really don’t. Are you crazy?’
‘Are you crazy, sir, is what you meant to ask. This particular agency is very discreet. It will not cough up the name of the escort, nor the location where the service was provided without a magistrate’s order. I know because they were caught up on that city banker case back in 2011. And of course you are not going to apply to a magistrate, Craig, are you? Instead, you’re going to come back to Blighty with me, to work out where the fuck Knight really is and who that woman is who is protecting him.’
Craig said nothing, his face tight with anger.
Kincaid then pointed a belligerent finger into Craig’s face. ‘And you are never, repeat never, to breathe a word of this to Muriel or anyone else. Understand?’
For a few seconds they just stared at each other. For the first time, Craig Gillard began to reconsider some of the unsubstantiated allegations made against Kincaid in the 1990s, when he was a DI. Accusations by a small-time drug dealer that Kincaid had beaten him up in a cell, claims that he had stamped on a detainee’s face in the back of a police van, and that when removing a female demonstrator from the fence she was clinging to, he had bent back her fingers so far that they broke. Craig had always assumed the allegations were false. Now he realized that in all likelihood they were true. The man was capable of anything.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
December arrived, with no further sightings of Knight or his supposed girlfriend, nor any fresh cash withdrawals. Craig Gillard was dispirited. He’d had all Liz Knight’s body parts retested for DNA by an independent commercial lab, but the results had confirmed everything. Her blood, bones, teeth, hair samples all matched between the Coulsdon home, the Dungeness house and the hair samples recovered from her chair at the school office where she worked.
Gillard was reluctantly drawn back to the original line of inquiry, that Liz was dead and her husband had killed her. The only problem being that the only remaining lead was the property scam that cheated the Knights of most of their wealth. The Spanish Policia Nacional had now emailed to him PDFs of the original document the Knights had signed. To help interpret them, he had arranged a Skype call to Spanish property agent Miguel Vila. With him in the Caterham incident room were Paddy Kincaid, DC Shireen Corey-Williams and DS Claire Mulholland.
‘Before we talk to Vila, let’s step back,’ Craig said. ‘Normally this would be a civil matter. And it is certainly complex. But if the Knights have been defrauded of four million quid, we have a strong motive for murder. Would you agree?’
‘Isn’t there a slight problem?’ asked Claire Mulholland. ‘I’m coming cold to this part of the investigation, but it seems to me that if they were defrauded, it was back in June, right? Neither Mrs or Mr Knight had disappeared. No one had been murdered. So if whoever it was had already got the money in June, why kill anyone in October?’
There was some nodding of heads, and everybody looked at Craig. ‘I agree, it’s not obvious. Unless the fraudster was on the verge of being discovered by someone in the family,’ he said.
‘They should have killed Oliver Knight, then,’ said Kincaid. ‘He’s the legal eagle.’
‘It doesn’t easily fit with Liz Kni
ght being killed in her own bedroom with no non-family DNA found,’ said Claire.
Craig shrugged. ‘I can’t fault your logic. Okay, let’s see where this leads us anyway.’ He connected the Skype call to Vila. After greetings, Vila leaned in close to the computer and said. ‘I have discovered what has happened.’
‘Okay, let us have it.’
‘The Knight family have indeed bought a property with seven hectares of land almost exactly at the address on the documents.’
‘You cannot have two different seven-hectare properties in exactly the same place, surely,’ Gillard said.
‘Oh yes you can,’ Vila said. ‘What the Knights have bought is the Casita Alta de Marriego and the seven hectares to the south of the grid markers shown on the ownership documents.’ He lifted up a sheaf of papers. ‘What they thought they were buying is the Casa Alta de Marriego and its associated land to the north. The original deed is clear, but the copies you have are of documents that had been subtly altered in both Spanish and English to substitute ‘norte for ‘sud’ and ‘casa’ for ‘casita’. Whoever did it also appended a page with the description of the internal facilities of the casa, which of course do not apply to the casita.
‘So the Knights just own that tumbledown shepherd’s house and the rough lands beyond?’ Kincaid asked.
‘That’s right. In fact the southern land which the Casita sits on is of no development value. It is steep, unstable and completely unsuitable for building.’
‘So can we assume the vendor perpetuated the fraud?’ Craig asked. ‘They clearly came out millions of euros ahead.’
‘It seems likely. The vendor company bought that land six months previously for 30,000 euros, through a sociedad limitada registered in Panama. It’s a symptom of secrecy. I’m not a lawyer, but my brother is. We spent a bit of time researching this over the last week. In Panama, directors have to be listed, but they are usually nominees. The true owner’s name doesn’t appear, and there is no way of finding it out. So that’s where it ends. The money, I am sure, is irrecoverable.’ He gave a huge shrug that filled the screen.