by Robert Daws
‘Ms Novacs is not in a good place at the moment,’ the producer whispered. ‘As I’m sure you can imagine, this has been a traumatic experience for her.’
‘Of course,’ Sullivan said.
‘She’s with her PA, Wendall, and make-up designer, Tani,’ Isolde continued. ‘There was real concern that the red paint used in the attack was oil based, with the horrendous possibility that Ms Novacs would have to have it cut out of her hair. Tani now believes it will wash out and cause no further problems. I don’t need to tell you what a relief that has been for everyone concerned.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Broderick replied. ‘Will it be possible to see Ms Novacs any time soon?’
‘Wendall will let us know as soon as she’s ready, Chief Inspector.’
‘I see,’ Broderick continued. ‘So let’s start with you, shall we, sir?’
‘By all means.’ Isolde sat down on the sofa opposite the detectives.
‘Can you think of any reason why this assault took place, sir?’
‘Nothing specific, I’m afraid,’ Isolde answered. ‘The world is full of lunatics and stalkers, as I’m sure you’re only too aware. As far as I know, there have been no threats made to Ms Novacs prior to the commencement of the shoot.’
‘What about threats made about the making of the film?’ Broderick continued. ‘After all, this may not have been specifically aimed at Ms Novacs. The literature the assailant left behind seems to be about the real so-called “Queen of Diamonds”.’
‘There have been no threats to myself or my production company, Chief Inspector,’ Isolde said. ‘As you probably know, the film is a fictionalised account of the Queen of Diamonds war-time spying operations. No one has raised the slightest objection to that, as far as I’m aware.’
‘Am I right in saying that the Queen of Diamonds is a fictional character?’ Broderick questioned.
‘“Mythical” is the description most often used, Chief Inspector. But we believe she very much existed.’ Isolde became defensive. ‘We have no definitive proof, but our extensive research has led us to believe that the myth of the Queen of Diamonds was based on a real-life operative. No smoke without fire, et cetera. Our film may involve a certain amount of artistic licence, but we think it will prove a fitting tribute to a brave and sadly unsung war heroine.’
‘That’s as may be, sir, but it seems that someone out there isn’t too happy about it. I’d ask you to make a thorough check of both your records and your memory. Even the smallest detail may prove useful. The assailant avoided capture, Mr Isolde, and may even now be planning something more unsettling than a change to the colour of Ms Novacs’ hair.’
Before Isolde could respond, Wendall Phillips entered the room. The tall, flamboyant New Yorker presented himself with an air of cultivated self-importance. A one-time model and would-be actor, the forty-two-year-old had been with Novacs for the best part of five years and protected her as though she were his baby sister. Sullivan’s first thought was that he bore a striking resemblance to Denzel Washington.
‘This is Chief Inspector Broderick and Detective Sergeant Sullivan, Wendall,’ Isolde informed him. ‘They’re here to ask Julia a few gentle questions.’
‘She’s just taking a shower. You’ll have to wait,’ Wendall told the detectives, then turned to Isolde. ‘Her hair will be fine, Gabriel, but she’s exhausted. She just wants to know what the assault was all about.’
‘We all do, Mr Phillips,’ Sullivan said. ‘We won’t keep Ms Novacs longer than we have to.’
‘She also wants to know where the hell Josh has got to,’ Wendall continued, ignoring Sullivan’s interjection.
‘Me, too,’ Isolde replied. ‘Me, too.’
Broderick’s mobile phone sprang to life, playing its old-fashioned ring tone. The name on the screen was ‘Massetti’.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, taking the call. ‘Yes? … We’re waiting to interview Ms Novacs, ma’am … I see. Where? … Of course, we’re on our way. I thought you were in hospital, ma’am … I see. Understood.’
The call ended, Broderick stood to go.
‘We have to leave, I’m afraid, Mr Isolde. If you could ask Ms Novacs the same questions we put to you, I’d be grateful. Sorry about this, but something’s come up.’
‘Something that’s more important than what’s just happened to Julia, Chief Inspector?’
‘No, sir, but it may be related. I can’t say any more at this stage, I’m afraid.’
Seconds later the detectives were out of the Winnebago and being escorted from the unit base.
‘What’s going on, guv?’ Sullivan whispered to her boss.
‘A body’s been discovered at one of the Atlantic Marina Plaza apartments. Massetti’s having a fit. Even discharged herself from St Bernard’s. She wants us on it straight away.’
‘I’ll get to meet Julia Novacs some other time, I suppose,’ Sullivan mused.
‘Probably sooner than you think, Sullivan. The body belongs to the film’s screenwriter, Josh Cornwallis.’
28
By the time Sullivan and Broderick arrived on the tenth floor of the Atlantic Marina Plaza, Josh Cornwallis’ apartment was already a full crime scene. Putting on protective gloves and overshoes, both moved through the small hallway and into the large open-plan sitting-room. The first thing to greet their eyes was the young man’s body stretched out on the large sofa in the centre of the room. On the small table in front of it was a near-empty wine glass and two tea cups. Next to this, a movie magazine lay open with a half-eaten piece of cake carelessly left on its centre pages. A police photographer was going about his business, recording the scene with the methodical precision of a professional. Nothing visible to the naked eye would be left out of his pictures.
Detective Inspector Ed Mintoff , the first senior officer to arrive, had already interviewed the distraught young maid who had discovered the body during her late afternoon rounds. Massetti had called soon after to tell him that Broderick would be arriving to take over the scene. Already working alongside Mintoff were two crime scene investigators in white overalls, both collecting and logging possible evidence from around the room. Standing at the large dining table on the right side of the room was Police Surgeon Hannah Portillo, the RGP’s new forensic medical examiner. Having finished her initial examination of Cornwallis, she had then expressed her concerns about the cause of Cornwallis’s death, thus setting in motion the current procedures. She now reconfirmed her worries to Broderick and Sullivan.
‘Unusual this one,’ the thirty-eight-year-old Gibraltarian doctor informed the duo. ‘He appears to have been asphyxiated sometime this afternoon. Within the last four or five hours, I’d say. Looks like whoever did it used the purple cushion that’s beside the body. The victim has fibres from it in his mouth. Something’s not right, though. No real bruising or signs of struggle. Almost as if he was asleep when it happened. He’d clearly been drinking, and his pupils suggest some chemical intake. I’ll know more when the blood tests and tox screen come back.’
‘But definitely not suicide, you think?’ Broderick asked.
‘I’d be most surprised if it was. I think you have a murder on your hands here.’
‘Thank you,’ Broderick replied, with unusual formal courtesy. ‘Settling in okay, I hope?’
Portillo smiled warmly. ‘Just fine, thank you, Gus.’
The highly regarded doctor had taken to her new position well. Even Broderick treated her with respect. Sullivan suspected he had a soft spot for her – something she did not feel able to tease him about. Not yet, anyway.
Both Sullivan and Broderick began their own walk-through of the scene, methodically taking notes about the corpse and then working outwards in sections to take in the whole room. From there, they moved further afield, checking the two bedrooms, the kitchen and the main bathroom. At first sight, nothing seemed to be out of place, but Sullivan had a question for the crime scene investigators.
‘Have you found a mobile or a lapto
p of any kind?’
They hadn’t.
Moving out onto the balcony, both detectives compared notes.
‘No phone and no lap top. Strange that, for a writer whose film has just started production,’ Sullivan observed.
‘Other than that, nothing stands out as being particularly out of place. In fact, it looks as though the apartment’s been cleaned up a bit,’ Broderick replied.
Their attention was suddenly drawn to a low-flying helicopter close to the marina and then climbing northwards.
‘That’ll be Novacs and Isolde, I should imagine,’ Broderick said. ‘Marbella bound.’
‘Shouldn’t we notify them about this, guv?’ Sullivan asked.
‘Apparently not,’ Broderick replied. ‘Masetti wants this kept under wraps for as long as possible. Give us a chance to find some answers ahead of the press frenzy.’
Mintoff stuck his head out of the balcony door. ‘We’ve got CCTV footage from the cameras in reception and the basement car park, sir. I’ve just spoken with the daytime receptionist. He says a foreign-sounding gentleman was making enquiries about both Cornwallis and Mr Isolde earlier today.’
‘Get a description?’ asked Sullivan.
‘Big man. Red baseball cap –’
‘That’s our guy,’ Sullivan interrupted.
‘Should have him on camera then,’ Mintoff continued. ‘They’re ready to review downstairs. One other thing: the guys found this in the pocket of a jacket hanging by the main door of the apartment.’
Mintoff handed Broderick an envelope addressed to Cornwallis. Inside was a handwritten note instructing the young man to meet someone outside the church of Santa María La Coronada in San Roque at one in the morning.
‘The postmark shows that it was sent the day before yesterday in La Línea, but the note’s unsigned,’ Broderick observed. ‘We need to find out who sent this and if they met. In the meantime, Sullivan, you go down and check the tapes. We need an image of our suspect for circulation ASAP. Massetti’s got no choice but to go public with this. The man who attacked Novacs is most probably responsible for what’s happened up here, too. He could easily strike again and soon.’
29
Ten minutes later, Sullivan was in reception, looking at the playback of the security tapes. The daytime receptionist had said that the foreigner had come in after 9.00 in the morning and asked to speak with Mr Cornwallis or Mr Isolde. He had been informed by the receptionist that both gentlemen were out of the building. It took Sullivan just a few minutes to find what she was looking for.
The computer screen showed clearly the very busy reception area, with several PR people preparing for the afternoon launch of the porn channel Blue Job X. At 9.17 on the clock, a tall man wearing a light green zip-up jacket and red baseball cap entered the building and walked directly to the reception desk. Sullivan’s heart immediately quickened as she recognised him as the man she had chased from the Convent to the building site a couple of hours before. Zooming in on his face, she took a shot of it with her phone camera. The result wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a good enough likeness to email across to police HQ and circulate from there. That done, she began the longer task of checking for the man later in the day. If he had been Josh Cornwallis’s murderer, he would have to have returned to the apartment building at some point. Finding him would involve her methodically checking through hours of surveillance footage. It would have been easier to use the facilities at New Mole House, but as time was of the essence, she had no choice but to buckle down to the job on site. A few minutes into the task, she was interrupted by Broderick.
‘Leave that for Mintoff,’ he ordered. ‘We’ve just got a possible ID of our man on the other side of the border. Someone from the crowd this afternoon has spotted him over in La Línea. We need to get over there right away.’
Minutes later, both officers were back in Broderick’s Mercedes and speeding across the airport runway towards the frontier crossing to Spain.
30
Colin and Eileen Hoare had been waiting nervously in their Renault Clio for the best part of an hour and three quarters. Most of that time had been taken up with Eileen persuading her reluctant husband to go along with her plan. Once agreed, Colin trudged back over the border and reported to the Gibraltar police officers on duty there.
It was now nearly 9.00 in the evening, and the light was fading from the sky. They had parked outside the Kang Fu Chinese restaurant, directly opposite the border crossing from La Línea to Gibraltar. The Spanish town, although much safer than it had once been, was still feared by a certain generation of British ex-pats who remembered the bad old days. The Hoares had lived in Spain for nearly twenty years, and tales of drug wars, muggings and murder were still vivid in their imagination. This meant that the couple, now in their mid-sixties, rarely ventured from their apartment villa complex after dark. The last eight years of their ex-pat lives had seen them enjoying an increasingly insular life in a gated luxury ‘urbanisation’ twenty minutes up the coast near Duquesa. It was run and mostly occupied by Germans, which, to their great surprise, suited them perfectly: ‘The place is so much cleaner than Estepona, where we were before. And the Germans speak such good English.’
As they waited for officers from the Royal Gibraltar Police, the Hoares asked each other if it might have been better to have kept quiet about what they had seen earlier. If only they had not chosen today to visit the Rock, Colin reasoned, they would now be safely back on their patio, sipping the remains of a bottle of Chardonnay and reading the latest Danielle Steel novel or Jeremy Clarkson anthology. If only they hadn’t been passing the Convent at the exact moment Julia Novacs had been sprayed from head to toe with paint, they lamented. If only they hadn’t found themselves directly in the path of the man who had subjected the star to such an attack.
But they had been.
Only fate, they concluded, could have contrived for Eileen to have recognised the same man an hour later – minus cap and jacket – crossing the dual carriageway on the Spanish side of the border. And Eileen being Eileen, she had felt it her public duty to notify the authorities. If she had not insisted on that, Colin argued, they would most definitely not be waiting nervously in La Línea now. She had embroiled them in a search for a fugitive on the run. The initial excitement had prompted them to action – well, it had prompted Eileen at any rate – and now there was no escaping the situation.
‘What in God’s name have you done?’ Colin asked his wife accusingly.
Help finally arrived for the couple in the shape of Sullivan and Broderick. The detectives had left their car by the airport and crossed the frontier on foot. Within seconds, Sullivan had spotted the Hoares’ parked Renault. After approaching the couple and identifying themselves, they took them to a nearby cafe.
‘I knew it was him straight away,’ Eileen Hoare launched enthusiastically. ‘Even without his cap. It was his eyes. A bit mad. Not quite right.’
‘And the way he walked. Like he was about to bump into something all the time,’ Colin added, not wishing to be left out now that things were becoming exciting. ‘Not drunk, you understand. Just a bit off centre.’
Eileen pointed to the grass verge that separated the dual carriage way that ran alongside the border fence. ‘Walked right past us over there, he did, out of the blue,’ she continued. ‘We’d only just got over from Gib ourselves. Bit shocked by all the bother with Julia Novacs, to tell the truth. We were heading for the car and there he was. Walked by and stopped for a bottle of water at that newsagent place just over there.’
‘Cool as a cucumber, if you please,’ Colin said. ‘Next thing I know, Eileen here has got her Samsung phone thingy out and is filming the blighter.’
‘“Stop that!” Colin tells me,’ Eileen said. ‘“Don’t want him catching on he’s being spied on. We’ve seen what the brute’s capable of.” But I said, “No, Colin, no! I have to have proof that it’s him or nobody will believe me.”’
‘Quite right,’ Su
llivan assured her. ‘May we see it?’
‘Of course you can, my dear.’
Playing the recording back, Sullivan saw for the third time that day the bulky figure of their suspect. Enlarging the image to the maximum, both she and Broderick could see that the man had close-cropped hair and a rugged and bearded but not unhandsome face.
‘All a bit exciting for us really,’ Eileen said. ‘Felt as though I was one of you chaps. Gone all undercover and everything –’
‘Well, you’ve been very helpful,’ Sullivan interrupted before her boss could respond to the woman’s last comment.
‘Nearly three hours ago now, though. God knows where he might have got to,’ Eileen said. ‘We should have followed him really …’
‘No, we shouldn’t!’ her husband blurted out in alarm. ‘We’d be dead in an alleyway by now if we’d done that.’
‘We’re glad you didn’t pursue him, Mrs Hoare,’ Broderick said. ‘You’ve given us valuable information, however. We now know he’s in Spain, for one thing. We can focus on that and allocate resources accordingly.’
Eileen Hoare blushed with pleasure at this endorsement of her actions.
‘Well, if there’s anything else I can do to help you, Chief Inspector …’
‘We’ll be sure to let you know,’ Sullivan swiftly interjected.
After making sure that Eileen’s video recording had been sent successfully to Sullivan’s phone, the detectives paid for the coffees and escorted the couple back to their car.
‘Thank you, officers!’ Eileen called to them through the open car window as her husband drove them away. ‘One of the most exciting nights of our lives!’
‘I can well believe that,’ Broderick observed as the Hoares disappeared from view. ‘“Gone all undercover”, my arse.’
31
Massetti had been back at her desk for nearly an hour. With a fractured ankle and enough painkillers inside her to numb an angry rhino, she was desperately trying to co-ordinate the latest developments and placate the press that was hounding the force at the doors of police HQ.