As Easy as Murder

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘For a start,’ he began, pausing as Antonio placed a bottle and a glass on our table, then beneath it a bowl of water for Charlie, ‘he isn’t even Patterson. The real Mr Cowling died from viral meningitis over a year ago. The man you met went, until recently, by the name of Robert Palmer.’

  ‘Then I have to let Alex know that,’ I declared.

  ‘Who’s Alex?’

  ‘He’s a friend of mine. He’s a cop and he’s looking for Patterson, Robert, or whoever the hell he is today.’

  ‘You can’t tell him,’ Mark said firmly. ‘You can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But I must; he’s involved in a double murder investigation, and he is the guy in the firing line if it isn’t cleared up.’

  ‘Then maybe I can help him, but not directly. This has to stay with us, Primavera, for the moment.’

  I took a drink. ‘Tell me why,’ I said quietly.

  ‘The two guys who came to see me; they’re attached to the Central Witness Bureau. It’s a unit that supports and co-ordinates the work of witness protection units up and down the country. Robert Palmer is one of their clients.’

  It took me some time to absorb that new twist in the tale. When I’d analysed the information in my head, I asked, ‘What’s his story? Can you even tell me, since you want to keep it from the Spanish police?’

  ‘I can tell you, but, at this stage, you alone. I’ve been hired by the Bureau to come out here, investigate and do what’s necessary to maintain Palmer’s cover, but I’ve been given very limited discretion to recruit local help as I need it. That’s you, Primavera. You did sign the Official Secrets Act when you took that consulate job, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s fine; it binds you for life.’ The advice was unnecessary. I’d already been reminded of that fact, fairly recently. ‘In the beginning,’ he continued, ‘Robert Palmer was a business executive. He was sales and distribution manager for a large pharmaceutical firm, until he was well into his forties. Then he had an idea; he turned entrepreneur. He started his own drug company, UK registered, but with its factory in Bulgaria, thanks to very generous start-up grants in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and he developed markets all around the world. At first his products weren’t very sexy: aspirin, ibuprofen, antacid tablets and liquids, free market stuff, all nice earners enough to get him established and known. However, after a couple of years he moved on to what had been his real intention; he stepped across certain lines. He began to copy other products, the kind that were covered by international patents, and sold them out of Bulgaria, through a second company he’d set up there, into areas of the world where regulation and copyright enforcement is lax or non-existent.’ He paused. ‘With me so far?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, he’s a crook.’

  ‘Mmm. Not really, not at that stage. But . . . this new activity brought him to the attention of someone he hadn’t anticipated; someone who very definitely was a crook. He was made an offer which he decided he couldn’t refuse. He expanded his facility in Bulgaria and began producing recreational drugs, some legal in certain markets, but others outlawed everywhere, of which ecstasy was the most common. Once he was set on that road, he couldn’t get off.’

  ‘But he was a willing partner?’

  ‘He had a few million reasons to be willing,’ Mark said. ‘The new activity was also successful. The products were high quality. Palmer was never involved in distribution; his associate handled that side of it and his network must have been good, because nothing illegal or even dubious was ever traced back to Bulgaria.’

  He smiled. ‘Now we get to the really interesting part. About three years ago, his new partner encouraged, or coerced, if you believe him, to move on from there. He told him that he’d found a remarkable young chemist who had developed a new way of synthesising human growth hormone that made its use absolutely undetectable by anti-doping agencies, and therefore, you can imagine, of enormous commercial value. Palmer started production immediately. The stuff was a huge success; he couldn’t make enough of it.’

  ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘Interpol guessed that it was sold globally, but even now, they don’t know for sure.’

  ‘But is the stuff illegal?’ A reasonable question, I reckoned. ‘It might be outlawed in sports, but is it against the law?’

  ‘Its manufacture isn’t; there are recognised HGH brand names. However Palmer’s product isn’t licensed anywhere in the world, and if it was its sale would be controlled, for sure. Off-prescription sale of HGH gets you five years in federal prison and a quarter-million dollar fine in the US. Carry it undeclared internationally in your luggage, and you’ll wind up in the slammer in many countries. Whatever, the stuff that Palmer’s factory produced was a black market drug, and because of its unique property, it would never have been licensed.’

  ‘But he got away with it for a while?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mark conceded, ‘because he was based in Bulgaria, and because it was all under the radar. He was only detected, and the product was only discovered, because one of his Bulgarian managers swiped some of the HGH, took it across the border and sold it to the coach of a Greek football team, who, as luck had it, was under police surveillance as a suspected doper. Honest to God, the stuff was so good and so effective, that nobody even knew it existed until then.’ He paused. ‘The smuggler thief talked his head off, and the thing became an Interpol investigation, Greece and Bulgaria both being members. The trail led straight to Robert Palmer. He was arrested in Hove, where he lived . . . alone, by the way: he didn’t have a wife, let alone two daughters.’

  ‘What about the genius chemist?’

  Mark smiled. ‘Ah, he got out from under. The Bulgarian factory was raided, and the production of the stuff was shut down, but he was long gone. There had been a tip, a leak from the Interpol office in Sofia. The only people they found were production staff who thought they were making multivitamin pills and phials, not ecstasy and HGH. In fact the chemist was never there. The production process was set up on the basis of written instructions to the local staff. Nobody ever saw him; they still don’t know who he is.’

  ‘And Palmer?’

  ‘When he saw that he was in deep trouble, he started to bargain. He claimed not to know anything about the distribution network, but he was able to tell Interpol that the business had gone transatlantic by that time and that the growth product was being sold in volume into the USA, across several sports, from college level up. You can imagine how excited that made the American Drug Enforcement Agency.’

  I nodded; having lived there for a while, I surely could.

  ‘They weighed into the investigation, heavily. However, Palmer was able to persuade them that he was just the producer . . . he wasn’t doing anything against Bulgarian law, but small details like that don’t deter the DEA . . . and that the big prize was his partner, whose interests, he said, stretched into Central and South America, and included major money laundering for drug cartels, plus other stuff. Palmer said that this man had a network of distributors and informants across the western world. He said that he himself hadn’t been worried about being nailed in Bulgaria because several government officials, police officers, and a key Interpol agent had been on the guy’s payroll. This was borne out, of course, by the leak before the raid.’

  He took a sip of water, before continuing. ‘Palmer was lawyered up by this time. His brief proposed a deal; he said that Palmer would name the partner and testify against him, in return for immunity from prosecution . . . the ecstasy and sodium oxybate, the date rape drug also known as GHB, were his Achilles heel, as it turned out . . . protection and a new identity when it was all over. There was a conference in Lyon, at Interpol headquarters, and not least because of American insistence, that deal was done, and signed off, all legal and unbreakable.’

  I sensed that Mark was tiring; he’d had a hell of a journey. ‘Do you want to take a break?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I must f
inish this. After that, Palmer was installed in a safe house in East Anglia, and given two handlers, one American, a DEA agent called Beau Lucas, and one Brit, a senior secondee to Interpol from the Met, called Graham Metcalfe. The whole thing was kept desperately secret, for there was one thing still to do. For any prosecution to succeed, the investigators needed a second witness, and Palmer would not reveal his partner’s name until that person was secured.’

  ‘Did he have somebody in mind?’

  ‘Oh yes. He told his interrogators, after his arrest, while he negotiated his deal, that there was one person and one person alone who could help bring his partner down, but that the only way to reach him was for Palmer to make contact and set up a meeting. That he would do after the deal was signed; nothing before, not a word.’

  ‘And they bought that?’

  ‘Of course they did,’ he laughed. ‘The Americans were bricking it. The HGH chemist was still out there. There was nothing to stop Palmer’s buddy setting him up in business somewhere else, and putting the integrity of global sport at risk.’

  ‘The Stars and Stripes rule, okay,’ I murmured. Ever the cynic. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘From the safe house, Palmer made the contact; in confidence. His handlers weren’t involved in it.’

  ‘How did he manage that?’

  ‘Through Facebook, would you believe. They used fake identities to communicate. When it was sorted he told Lucas and Metcalfe that a meeting had been arranged. The three of them would fly to Malaga and go to a hotel called the Silken Puerta; the witness would be waiting in room 106, which they would have booked in Palmer’s name.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘We’ll probably never know, not for sure. The handlers wouldn’t go along with all of Palmer’s arrangement. They explained to him there’s a reason for calling a place a safe house. They insisted that only one person would go to bring the witness in, because that’s all it would need, and it wouldn’t be Palmer. In fact, Graham Metcalfe assumed it would be him, but Lucas pulled agency rank and went.’ He drew a deep breath and I sensed tension in him. ‘It was kept so tight that they didn’t tell anyone outside the loop, not the Spanish bureau of Interpol, not the Guardia Civil, not the local cops, nobody. If they had . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Beau Lucas might still be alive. They might have cracked the whole operation. But they didn’t. They kept it undercover. Lucas was supposed to call Metcalfe at a certain time, to confirm that contact had been made and they were heading home. He didn’t, but that didn’t set the alarm bells ringing, not right away. In fact nothing did, until a chambermaid let herself into the room, and found what was left of the guy. He’d been shot, close range, with a sawn-off. The room was covered in feathers; turn up the sound on a telly,’ he said, ‘and a pillow makes a pretty effective silencer.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I ventured. ‘His face was blown off.’

  Mark stared at me. ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘Lucky guess. You finish yours, then I’ll tell you mine.’

  ‘It was as you said. There was nothing left to identify the body, nothing at all; his wallet, watch, clothes, face, were all gone. So they assumed that he was Mr Palmer, the man who’d booked the room. They’d have gone on thinking that if Graham Metcalfe hadn’t called the Guardia after the third missed checkin call, to ask if anything had occurred at the Silken Puerta.’

  ‘What about the witness? Was he killed too?’

  ‘Almost certainly, but Lucas was the only body found in that room. Dead American, though, so you can imagine the fall-out from that. The DEA shoved Interpol and everyone else aside. They closed the hotel and put their own CSI team in there, everyone but Gil fucking Grissom, but maybe him too. They analysed everything; practically tested the feathers for fingerprints. After three days, they established that there were two different blood types in the room.’

  ‘The previous guest cut himself shaving?’ I suggested, wryly.

  ‘If he did, it was deep enough for it to spray on the wall. They searched the entire hotel after that, inch by inch, item by item, until they found a laundry trolley with blood smears inside, matching the others in the room. So the witness was killed there, it seems, but the body was taken away. Next question. Why take the risk?’

  That was a no-brainer even for me. ‘Whoever did or ordered the killing couldn’t afford to leave it behind; that would have been a bigger risk. Defacing . . . literally . . . Lucas was a delaying tactic, or maybe no more than the killer’s trademark. Eventually, he’d have been identified, even if Metcalfe hadn’t blown the whistle straight away. But no way could the other body have been left, because it would have led investigators straight to the target: identification couldn’t have been ruled out.’ I paused as I saw the flaw in my thesis. ‘But no, Palmer knew, knows, who the witness was.’

  ‘That’s right. And Palmer wasn’t, isn’t, saying anything. He refused to accept the certainty of his contact’s death. He saw Lucas’s killing as a warning to him to stay silent. He may well be right too.’

  ‘And Interpol? How do they see it? They can’t be happy about Palmer’s silence.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Primavera. Without that second witness, Palmer’s testimony would be worthless. Sure, they’re desperate to know who his partner is, but the deal he was given was legally drawn up and witnessed, and it wasn’t contingent on him naming him, something he’s consistently refused to do without the guarantee of him being taken out of play, permanently.’

  ‘Couldn’t that be arranged?’

  ‘Hah! Are you suggesting that the Americans might take direct action? No; another US administration might have, but this one doesn’t seem to have the balls for that sort of thing. Anyway, too many other nations are in the know. Instead, Uncle Sam’s gone home to watch his own back yard and Robert Palmer’s been dropped into the witness protection programme. Patterson Cowling died at exactly the right time. Because of the career he’d followed, he was a non-person. With the cooperation of MI6, the Home Office and the Justice Ministry, the Met witness unit took over his identity, and gave it to Palmer.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked; something in me was offended that the original Mr Cowling hadn’t been allowed to stay dead.

  ‘Simple,’ Mark replied, bluntly. ‘Because it was a hell of a lot easier than creating a new one. He stayed in the safe house for a while, getting used to his new self, then they turned him loose to get on with his life. Graham Metcalfe transferred from Interpol to the Central Witness Bureau as his handler, to keep an eye on him, just in case at some time in the future a new witness turns up, and Palmer can be pulled in to earn his freedom properly. Metcalfe was one of the two guys who visited me yesterday morning, by the way.’

  ‘Do the Cowling daughters know about this?’

  ‘Yes. They had to be told. But they have no idea who Palmer was or where he is.’

  ‘Did they give him a new face as well?’

  ‘No, they just fattened him up and gave him a different hair colour, and contact lenses that make his eyes blue instead of the distinctive brown they were.’

  ‘I see.’ I frowned. ‘So someone who’d known him before, and saw him again, might think they recognised him, but couldn’t be sure?

  ‘I suppose. Why?’

  ‘That’s part of my story,’ I said, then checked my watch and saw that it had just gone five. ‘But first things first; any minute now . . .’

  Right on cue, a brown figure crested the hill on his bike, skidded to a halt at our front gate and jumped off. ‘Hey,’ I called to him. So did Charlie, in his own way, and ran to greet him.

  Tom came across to join us, his face a-glisten with a light sheen of perspiration. There’s a speed limit on the cycleway from L’Escala to St Martí, but it means nothing to him, unless it’s busy, in which event he keeps it more or less in sight. ‘Hello, Mr Kravitz,’ he exclaimed, forestalling an unnecessary introduction. I’d forgotten that they’d met, in London, three years before.<
br />
  They shook hands, like adults, and he dropped into a chair. Our visitor said nothing at first; he just gazed, that was all. When he did speak, it wasn’t the usual platitudes about being big for his age, or looking like his father, or like me, both being the case; no, it was a question. ‘What do you want to be, Tom?’

  ‘Mum’s always asking me that,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mark told him. ‘Neither did your dad, until the day he died.’

  I cut into the exchange. ‘Are you taking Charlie for a run as usual?’ I asked him.

  He nodded, then jumped up. ‘Yes. Come on, boy. Where’s Jonny, by the way?’

  ‘Still at work, I suppose; him and Uche both.’

  ‘He didn’t even ask why I’m here,’ Mark observed, as he watched him remount his bike.

  ‘That’s like his father too,’ I said. ‘Oz was curious about everything, but often he kept it to himself.’

  ‘Or hired people like me to satisfy it for him.’

  ‘True, but Tom doesn’t have that luxury. When he gets round to it, he’ll ask me about you, and he knows that I’ll tell him. No secrets in our house.’

  ‘None?’

  Sharp question; Kravitz had helped me out of some difficulty I’d got into a few years earlier, involving my cousin Frank. I’d never told Tom about that; he’d been too young, and for some of the detail, he always will be. ‘None that involve him,’ I retorted.

  ‘Ready to spill this story to me?’

  He caught me off guard; my mind was still somewhere else, in Shirley Gash’s swimming pool, three years before, as it happened. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your story?’

  Back to the present crisis. ‘Yes, sorry. How did I guess that Beau Lucas had his face blown off, you ask? Because that’s what seems to happen when your Mr Palmer’s involved.’ I gave him a rundown of everything that had happened in the eight days gone by, from Patterson Cowling’s introduction as Shirley’s new partner, to the attempted theft a few metres from where we were sitting at that very moment, and the dramatic incidents that had followed, leading to Patterson’s disappearance, and to his unveiling as Robert Palmer as was.