by James Green
‘I got a few things from the house and brought them here. You’ll have to stay here until you’re fit to walk. The doctor said you shouldn’t be on your own until the wound has knitted enough not to be a problem.’
‘Then I’d better try walking.’
Jimmy began to get up.
Suarez hurried to him and gently pushed him back into his chair.
‘No, not too soon, there’s no hurry, there’s nobody else here.’
Jimmy sat back.
‘Where do I sleep?’
‘There’s a spare room. It’s all fixed.’
‘How did you swing it? I’m not fit to be out of hospital.’
‘I told the doctor we were worried there would be another attempt on you. We needed you where we could look after you and we didn’t want the world to know about it so he should make sure it wasn’t made too well known among the staff. I guess I made it all sound a bit dramatic. Anyway, he let you go so here you are.’
‘And was that your idea or your boss’s?’
‘God, not my boss, he knows nothing about it.’
‘And if he finds out?’
‘It would be better if he didn’t until you can walk and talk, so my advice is get better soon, then neither of us need worry about my boss.’
Jimmy sat back and decided she was right, he should try and get better as soon as possible then her boss wouldn’t be a problem. But there would be other problems if he was living in her apartment. He felt sure there would.
Chapter Fourteen
Two days later Jimmy walked slowly and gingerly to the balcony and carefully eased himself into a chair. The balcony had room for a small table and two chairs and a terracotta flowerpot with some sort of plant growing in it. Jimmy looked at the view. He liked it even if it was only other apartment blocks, all much like the one they were in. There was no sea anywhere, no beaches, and no bloody ferry. It was peaceful, domestic. An awning stretched out above the balcony but it wasn’t necessary. Suarez’s apartment was on the second floor and the sun in the late afternoon sky made the shadow of the block opposite fall across where he sat. It was still hot, but not punishingly so. On the table were two glasses. One held brandy, lemonade and ice; in the other was orange juice, also with ice. Jimmy picked up his orange juice, swirled the ice round, and took a drink.
Suarez came out with a plate of cooked meats and a bowl of salad sitting on two plates with knives and forks balanced on the edge of the plates. She laid everything out on the table and sat down. She picked up her drink and took a sip.
‘I don’t like it, Jimmy.’
He held out his orange juice.
‘Then don’t drink it, swap with me. I don’t like orange juice.’
‘Idiot,’ she smiled, but the smile didn’t last. ‘I don’t like how all this is shaping up. And my boss doesn’t like it either. In fact I can’t think of a single person who does like it.’
‘What’s there to like? I’ve been stuck with one of my own kitchen knives and the man who stuck me is in the morgue.’
‘That’s the problem, you. How long have you been here? Hardly any time at all and we’ve got two dead men that are connected to you. That’s a high body count by our standards.’
‘Jarvis was dead before I could have got near him and if some bloke breaks into my house and tries to stick a knife in me I don’t see how I can be held responsible.’
‘Oh, you can be held responsible all right, because you killed him. You broke his neck, remember?’
Jimmy remembered.
‘Do you know anything yet?’
‘He flew in from Madrid the morning of the day he broke in, didn’t check into any hotel that we can find, and he appears to have had no luggage. He obviously came to do a job and expected to be gone as soon as it was done. You, it seems, were the job. He must have waited somewhere until two in the morning, broke into your kitchen to get a knife, and then went upstairs to finish you off.He had a return ticket to Madrid on a nine o’clock flight. If things had gone to plan he’d have probably been on his way before anybody found anything. He had his passport in his jacket. It says he’s Romanian but it’s a phoney, a good phoney, but still a phoney. We’re checking the name in the passport on flights into and out of Madrid and we might turn up something but it’s a hub airport, that means a lot of people passing through from all over. We might find where he came from but even if we do it probably won’t get us anywhere.’
Jimmy carefully reached down and picked up his plate, put a couple of slices of meat and some salad onto it, then picked up his fork and ate a couple of mouthfuls.
‘You’ve covered the ground but it sounds like you haven’t turned up much.’
‘Jimmy, for God’s sake, it was a contract. Somebody wants you dead and it seems that they can arrange for that to happen at short notice. I’d say that makes the connection between you and Jarvis quite a bit stronger. Jarvis dies on the day you arrive, you start asking questions and somebody sets it up for you to get killed. Yes, I think I could safely say there’s quite a connection.’
Jimmy didn’t waste time disagreeing. If the hit-man had come in by plane that would explain why he had to get a knife and came in through the kitchen instead of coming through the open bedroom window. It looked like a contract all right, but who the hell wanted him dead and was prepared to pay someone to do it? Even in Romania, if the bloke was from Romania, it couldn’t have come cheap.
Suarez used her fingers to fill her plate and took a mouthful before speaking. ‘So, Jimmy, who wants you dead?’
Jimmy shrugged and winced as the stitches stabbed him with pain. He carefully and slowly put his plate back onto the table. He suddenly found he wasn’t that hungry.
‘No-one that I can think of. Once, a while ago, there were people who might have organised something, a contract, a professional, but that all got straightened out in Copenhagen. At least I thought it had.’
‘What people?’
‘It’s an old story, something that happened long ago?’
It wasn’t so very long ago but Jimmy wanted to think of it that way, something in his past that he could forget about.
‘Forget long ago, who was after you?’
‘I told you, that got straightened out. If it had been them I’d be dead. They don’t climb in through kitchen windows to get the murder weapon out of a kitchen drawer.’
Suarez picked up her glass and was silent for a while. Then she took a drink and put the glass down and ate some more.
‘Is it all true, what we were told about you?’
‘I don’t know, you were a bit vague on details.’
‘Come on, Jimmy, you know what I mean. To me you seem an all right sort of guy, but we were told to expect someone who was anything but all right, probably a killer among other things. Just tell me it’s not true.’ Jimmy sat in silence. He didn’t have the answer she wanted, but she still wanted an answer ‘It’s true?’ Jimmy continued to sit in silence. Suarez took another drink. ‘So, when was the last time you killed someone, Jimmy, apart from last night?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘If you’re staying in my apartment I think that entitles me to ask, don’t you?’
Well, thought Jimmy, if she wants to know she might as well know.
‘The last time I killed anybody was a long time ago. He was a villain and I was a copper, a bent copper as it happened, on the take. When I wouldn’t take his money he said he would go after my kids, they were just little then. So I killed him.’
Suarez thought about it.
‘Just like that?’
‘No, not just like that. I made it look like an accident. I did a good job and it got put down as an accident.’
‘And that’s the last time?’
‘No, not really. I could say it was, but I’d be doing the same as McBride, telling you half the truth so you would see things the way I wanted you to.’ He took a sip of his juice, it didn’t help. He didn’t expect it to, it was orange jui
ce. ‘Not so very long ago there were people who wanted me dead and they were the sort who could get it done. Like I said, they didn’t climb in through kitchen windows to get knives. They brought their kit with them and they didn’t miss. McBride arranged for me to disappear and I finished up in Denmark. But the past caught up with me and people got killed. Depending on how you look at it you could say I killed them. It wasn’t my finger on the trigger but I was the reason they died.’
‘How many?’
‘Two that I know of?’
‘The two in Lübeck?’ Jimmy nodded. ‘My God, Jimmy, what the hell are you?’
Jimmy didn’t look at her. He looked straight ahead.
‘I’m a bloke, I had a wife, a family and a job. I was a bad husband, a bad father and a bad copper and I have to live with that. Now I’ve got nothing except that I’m alive, though God knows why, and I mean that, God knows why and I don’t. I work for Professor McBride because she saved my life. She screwed me up but she also saved my life. I try, that’s what I do, I try, try to do the best I can but …’
But the words ran out. Words didn’t make it right or sensible or anything else so he stopped using them.
Suarez took a drink then finished what was on her plate. She stood up.
‘I’ll say this for you, Jimmy, you certainly have a past.’
‘But do I have a future?’
It had come too quickly and it had come out wrong. Or had it?
Shit, he hadn’t felt like this since he was a teenager and now he was old enough to be her fucking dad. What was happening to him? He looked at her. She was looking at him in that funny way again. Oh, Christ, he thought, just let her laugh. Let me see that she thinks it’s all a load of bollocks. One good laugh at a stupid old bastard who’s made a fool of himself.
But Suarez didn’t laugh, she did worse.
She smiled.
Chapter Fifteen
Jimmy waited. Was he pleased or not? Did saying it out loud make any difference? Did her smile mean anything?
Suarez broke the silence that had suddenly come between them.
‘You did it for money, these killings?’
It wasn’t what he had expected.
‘No.’
‘Did people ever pay you to kill?’
Jimmy’s thoughts were now thoroughly jerked back from what he’d said and how he felt.
‘No, not really. I did a lot of things for money, but not killing, I was never a professional in that line.’
‘Well, the way your visitor friend down at the morgue died could say different so let’s stick with that for the time being. Let’s stick with snapping his neck like a breadstick. Where did you learn that charming trick? Think about it and tell me when I come back.’
Suarez took her plate and her empty glass through the open sliding doors into the living room. Jimmy picked up his orange juice, swirled it, and put it down on the plate amongst what was left of his meal. He didn’t want orange juice and he wasn’t hungry. He sat looking out at the balconies of the other apartments. On some of them people, normal people with normal lives were sitting talking about normal things, or doing whatever normal people did on balconies in the late afternoon. After a few minutes Suarez came back out with a fresh drink and sat down.
‘OK, I’m settled, tell me all about it.’
‘I explained all about that at the hospital. It was an accident. I just meant to put him out of action. I got my hands in the wrong place and he just sort of snapped. It’s been a long time since I rough-housed with anyone and you need to keep in practice. I was out of practice so I made a mistake.’
‘Jimmy, you’ve killed someone. This investigation was already beginning to look like it could turn messy and now you could have turned it into a disaster.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘Someone who is supposed to be liaising with the police while they are working on a murder uses excessive force against a burglar and breaks his neck. You wouldn’t say it will be a disaster when the media gets hold of it?’
‘He had a knife. I should have just lain in bed and let him stick me?’
‘They’ll say you put him out of action when you hit him. That you could have disarmed him. That you didn’t have to finish him off. And the way you did it looked too professional.’
‘I’ve told you –’
‘Yes, I know. It was an accident. The problem is that it doesn’t look like an accident.’ She took a sip from her drink and looked into space for a moment. ‘What exactly do you do in Rome, and who is this Professor McBride?’
‘I told you, I’m just an errand boy. Jarvis came up with that cock-eyed story and I was asked to talk to him and report back. It’s not my fault he took a bullet in the head the same day as I arrived.’
‘Take some advice, don’t keep saying it’s not your fault. It damn well looks like your fault and you should be able to see that even if you don’t like it and even if it’s not true.’
‘OK, maybe some of it is my fault, but only some of it. I had no idea who this Jarvis character was until I was sent –’
‘It doesn’t wash, Jimmy. No-one in Rome would take Jarvis’s story seriously. How could Jarvis have got any terrorist information, even supposing it were true.’
‘It’s not true, it’s nonsense, Perez told me that. He said Jarvis barely spoke Spanish, never mind Basque. There’s no way he could have got that kind of inside information.’
‘So why did he spin the story to Perez?’
‘God knows. Maybe he liked to make things up, make people think he was some kind of important bloke. He told Perez he used to be a university lecturer and that now he made his living writing crime thrillers.’
‘None of which is true.’
‘No, but there’s an element of truth in it. He was a teacher, remember.’ Jimmy saw his chance to get the conversation well away from himself. ‘Which brings me back to the call I put into you. Did Jarvis do time?’
‘We’re trying to find out.’ They sat for a moment. Jimmy could see that Suarez was thinking but he didn’t want to know what she was thinking about. Or did he? Then she turned to him. ‘Look, Jimmy, forget Jarvis, forget Mercer and Henderson. Just concentrate on getting well and getting out. Out of this apartment, out of Santander, and out of Spain. My boss knows you’re here now and he’s taken it badly but at least I’m not suspended. He’s taking legal advice about how to deal with the killing of your intruder. At the moment it’s just an intruder, a struggle, and an accidental death. You were in a holiday let so we’re letting the papers assume you’re a tourist. Maybe our people will decide to throw the book at you or maybe they’ll get in touch with your people in Rome and try to sort something out. Just hope the right choice gets made.’
He couldn’t stop himself from asking.
‘You worried about me?’
She looked at him in that odd way again and then it was gone.
‘No, I’m worried about the body count. Two is already too many. I want you on your way, back to Rome doing whatever it is you do for your professor. I want you somewhere that’s far away from here.’
It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear but he knew it was the right answer for them both.
The phone rang. Suarez got up and went inside to answer it. After a short while she came back and sat down.
‘That was my boss, he wants to see you.’
‘At the station?’
‘No. I told him the doctor said you couldn’t move around a lot until the wound healed but that you could leave hospital if you had someone to look after you. I had to tell him you were here.’
‘How did he take it?’
‘He didn’t fire me.’
‘But he’ll know it’s all wrong, that you’re bullshitting him. You’re a working copper, how could you look after me?’
And he got the look again.
‘Never mind what my boss thinks. He’s coming here.’ She looked at her watch. ‘He’ll be here in about half an hour. He t
old me something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘You were right, Jarvis did time. For having sex with consenting but under-age girls at his school.’
‘Was he an English teacher?’
‘What the hell does it matter what he taught?’
‘I think it matters. How about whether he and Mercer did time together?’
‘We’re working on it.’ She paused. ‘My chief said it was good thinking on my part to check if Jarvis had a record. I sort of didn’t get round to telling him it wasn’t my idea.’
Jimmy grinned.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not like you did anything bad, like killing someone. You only lied to get me out of hospital. And any credit wouldn’t do me any good, so why not take it?’
Suarez smiled at him and picked up her drink.
‘Were you any good as a detective?’
‘Best in my year, I was told.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘McBride.’
‘How would she know?’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised what she knows.’
‘Well you made a good call on Jarvis, thanks.’
‘Just exchanging favours.’
‘Exchanging favours?’
‘I’m staying here aren’t I?’
Jimmy hoped for the look or a smile but nothing came, She just took a drink and looked straight ahead when she spoke.
‘Where else was there? Your place is currently a crime scene and there’s a spare bed here.’ She put her glass down and stood up. ‘If my boss is coming I better get going again. I’ll phone and try to find out where we stand on finding out whether Mercer and Jarvis did time together.’
Suarez went into the living room to make her phone call.
Jimmy sat for a moment then picked up his glass and tried to swirl the ice in his orange juice again, but it had almost melted. He put his glass back. He felt empty and flat, like a disappointed child who expected a treat which hadn’t materialised. He reached across the table, grimacing as the stitches pulled, and picked up the glass of brandy and lemonade that Suarez had left. He took a big drink then reached back onto the table and pushed it back to where it had been. The stitches pulled again.