As Easy as Murder

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘A couple of hours ago,’ Alex continued, relieved to be free to speak his own language, ‘he was kidnapped at gunpoint from his aircraft, in the private section of Girona Airport. His absence wasn’t discovered until forty-five minutes ago, when ground staff went on board to find out why the plane was making no move to meet its booked departure time, and why the crew weren’t responding to radio messages. They found them tied up and gagged. When they were freed, they told us what had happened. They were expecting Mr Wigwe, at eight thirty. Fifteen minutes before that his son arrived, pointed a gun at them, made them lie down and secured them. He bound them hand and foot then dumped them in the galley, which is lockable. The rest they didn’t see but heard well enough. Kalu Wigwe arrived, voices were raised, and then there was silence. Nobody saw them leave but one of the airport workers told our people that there was a car parked on the concourse by the steps; an old battered Seat Ibiza that had once been white. It didn’t occur to him to ask the driver what the hell it was doing there, but he did give us a description of the man who was waiting behind the wheel. A white man, oldish, but still with dark hair, wearing a blazer with gold buttons.’ He frowned at me. ‘Who the hell does that sound like, Primavera?’

  I stared at him, absorbing what he had just told me and coming to terms with the implications. ‘Who does it sound like?’ I mimicked. ‘You know bloody well,’ I replied, ‘but forgive me if I deal with the “what” of the situation. My nephew’s pal, his bagman, has turned out to be a gun-toting kidnapper, and I’ve let him mix with my son. I’ve made him welcome in my house, treated him like family. I’ve been betrayed; let me deal with that for a little, Alex.’

  Then I looked at Mark and I could tell that his mind was exactly in synch with mine and that we had reached the same conclusion. It looked as if one very big question had just been answered, but for sure, it had been replaced by a whole new set of riddles. ‘Well?’

  My friend nodded. ‘I reckon my remit has just been overridden,’ he murmured. He looked at Alex. ‘Same basis?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I’m about to tell you is between us,’ he said, ‘okay?’

  The acting intendant frowned. ‘I’m a police officer, Mr Kravitz. I can’t make that promise.’

  ‘With respect, Mr Guinart, you’re an investigator, so you’re bound to have confidential discussions all the time, with informants and the like. Just listen to what I have to tell you and we’ll see where we go from there.’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured, cautiously. ‘We’ll see.’

  Alex took off his uniform hat and sat back in his chair, as Mark launched into the story of the colourful background of the man he had known as Patterson Cowling. He told it from the beginning, meticulously, ensuring that every chapter was understood before moving on to the next. He omitted only one piece of information, the background of the man whose identity Robert Palmer had been given, but that really wasn’t something that ‘local law enforcement’ needed to know.

  When the tale was told, Alex took a single huge breath, then exhaled, loudly. ‘And you want me to keep this thing among the three of us,’ he said. ‘Not tell my bosses. Are you crazy?’

  Mark nodded, affably. ‘Probably. But how would their being in the loop help us at this stage?’

  His eyes widened, then he laughed. ‘Help “us”?’ he repeated. ‘Mr Kravitz, Mark, I hate to remind you, but this is Spain, my territory, so there is no “us”, just me, and my investigation; my double murder investigation which has just been complicated still further by a kidnapping.’

  ‘Sure, Alex, this is your patch. But you’re wrong; I do have a locus here. I’m working for two agencies, one of them being Interpol, of which Spain is a member; I think you’ll find that gives me a fair bit of clout. I don’t want to be rude, threatening even less, but I could make a phone call and within half an hour you would be taken out of the game. Trust me, I could, but I don’t want to; because other people would get involved and we don’t have time to wait for them, because you’re Primavera’s friend, and because from what she’s told me, you’re a damn good cop.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Alex said. ‘But I’m a cop with a career and a family. I don’t want to join the private sector, as a security guard in a bank, or driving an armoured car. I have a problem with this.’

  ‘Or an opportunity, depending on how you view it. You’re the man in charge here, yes? The senior investigator?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you call the shots?’

  ‘To an extent,’ he conceded, warily.

  ‘Then work with me on this. What I’ve just told you, about Robert Palmer; the great mystery, the secret he’s keeping, has been the identity of his partner, the man from whom he’s hiding, in fear of his life. Now, put these facts together: last Sunday, he disappeared from the viewing stand at PGA Catalunya, at the very moment that Kalu Wigwe walked into the driving range. This man, this rich and powerful man, has just flown into Spain, ostensibly to support his son’s player in the championship, but also in the wake of the murders of Ilian Genchev and Christine McGuigan, two people believed to have been hired to confirm Palmer’s identity.’

  Alex raised a hand, palm out, like a traffic cop. ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on,’ he exclaimed. ‘Who the hell is Ilian Genchev?’

  ‘That’s not really important,’ Mark said, dismissively. ‘This is. Now, three days after Palmer fled, a man who fits his description as closely as you’d need for a provisional identification, at worst, is involved in kidnapping Wigwe from his plane. So,’ he continued, ‘Mr Senior Investigating Officer, what are we entitled to suspect from that?’

  He sighed, a concession of sorts. ‘I get it,’ he murmured. ‘Mr Wigwe may well be the man Palmer’s partner, or so close to him that he will recognise him for sure, even as he is today.’

  ‘May be?’ I protested. ‘Alex, it’s a bloody certainty.’

  ‘No,’ Mark intervened. ‘It’s not; Palmer may have had other enemies. But it’s highly likely. If we ever want to know for sure, we’ll have to find Kalu fast, for I don’t believe he’ll survive this. But there are other questions, Primavera, you know that.’

  ‘Too right. What the hell is Uche doing snatching his father from his plane? Could we be wrong? Could Uche be Palmer’s partner?’

  ‘No chance, he’s too young.’

  ‘Then why is he hand in hand with Palmer?’

  ‘Yes, that one’s valid, and one more. Why did they take him off the plane at all? They had a gun on the crew; they could have flown out and taken him anywhere, but they chose to stay in Spain. Something else is going on here. Alex, if we track them down, you get all the answers and you close off all your investigations. Will you work with us, for now?’

  He frowned. ‘For a very little while,’ he decided. ‘If only because I see nothing else to do. What do you need from me?’

  ‘Contact your office; tell them that the matter of the kidnapping is in hand, that you have new information and that you’re following it up.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes. While you’re doing that, I’ll make a call, and Primavera, so will you. I want to know as much as I can about Uche. Clearly there’s more to him than first impressions tell you.’

  ‘Do you want me to speak to Jonny?’

  ‘Let’s keep him out of it. I reckon that Graham Metcalfe can find out more than Jonny knows. No. Remember what I was saying about bolt-holes? Well, I want you to track down Shirley Gash, wherever she is, to see if she can help with that. Can you do that?’

  I nodded. ‘With luck. She should be in Singapore just now; her cruise liner isn’t due to sail until tomorrow. If I contact the company she’s sailing with, they should be able to tell me what hotel she’s in.’

  And then my common sense switched itself on. I checked my watch and realised that where Shirley was it was late afternoon. As Alex went outside to call in from his car, and Mark went inside to phone from his room, I took out my mobile and hit her entr
y.

  There were a few more clicks that usual, but I got a dialling tone, rather than straight to voicemail, usually a good sign. She picked up a few seconds later. ‘Girl,’ she squealed, ‘you’ll never guess where I am. I’m in the bath.’

  ‘I didn’t think that was your “on the toilet” voice. You got company?’

  ‘Don’t be daft; I’ve had enough of that for a while. I’m happy because I’ve got this wonderful room with a bath that lets you see right out over the marina.’

  ‘Go on then; stand up and wave to the sailors.’

  ‘I just did, but I’m way too high for anyone to wave back. Now,’ she went on, ‘have I got news for you. You’ll never guess who I’m having dinner with tonight.’

  ‘Patterson.’

  ‘Huh. Cow. Try again.’

  ‘Mac Blackstone.’

  There followed a couple of seconds of atypical silence. ‘How the . . . How did you know that? Ah, I can guess. He’s been in touch with Jonny.’

  ‘Maybe he has, but not since I saw him last. That was a shot in the dark by me. I remembered that he and Mary have just been cruising, and that he was heading back there.’

  ‘Yes, and they’ve just got off the ship I’m on. I sail tomorrow, they go home. He’s had a great time. She looks as if she’d only enjoy an execution.’

  ‘Her step-grandson would agree with you. But I didn’t call you for your social diary. I need to ask you something.’

  ‘If it’s about him,’ she said, firmly, ‘I’ll make a point of not remembering.’

  ‘Shirl,’ I said, ‘hear me out. This is serious. If I tell you it could be a matter of life or death you’ll think I’m being melodramatic, but I’m not.’

  ‘Whose life or death?’

  ‘Uche’s father. Maybe Uche’s too. Maybe your bloke’s. We don’t know for sure.’

  I had her attention. ‘What do you need to know?’

  ‘I want you to think about anywhere you were with Palmer, probably not in L’Escala, but maybe not too far away, somewhere different, somewhere he was interested in.’

  ‘Excuse me, but who in the name of Agatha Christie is Palmer?’

  ‘Slip of the tongue, sorry. I have a CD of his in the car just now.’

  ‘Just as well. I don’t think I could have taken another secret. Let me think.’ I heard water ripple in the background. ‘We went to Mas Torrent. How about that?’

  Mas Torrent is a very posh, very public and very expensive hotel. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Mmm. In that case, there’s only really La Central.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a spa hotel, up near Darnius, close to the reservoir. We went up there for a couple of days, week before last, while I was getting ready to show Patterson off in L’Escala high society.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised; it’s quite hard to get to, five kilometres along a very dodgy road. Mind you, it gets worse beyond the hotel. I’d think twice about taking a car up there, all ruts and bumps and rocks.’

  ‘But you went up it?’

  ‘Yes, on our first morning there. We walked up it following a sign that said there was a restaurant up there. We were on the road for an hour and more, uphill all the bleedin’ way, but somewhere we must have taken the wrong turn, for we never found the bloody restaurant, only this old abandoned house. The track was windy all the way, until we came to a fork; we reckoned that we went right when we should have gone left. We should have known, ’cos it got even worse after the split.’

  ‘House?’ I repeated.

  ‘It had been, at one time; it was an old stone building.’

  ‘How did you know it was abandoned?’ I asked.

  ‘Holes in the slate roof, half the windows broken, no electricity, no proper sanitation, no running water, just a well outside; I have an instinct for these things, my dear. The odd hunter might have stopped there, in fact that’s probably what it was, a hunter’s lodge, but it hadn’t been occupied since Franco’s time.’

  ‘Did Palm . . . Patterson say anything about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she chuckled, ‘he made me laugh. He said it was a pity Robin Hood wasn’t Spanish, ’cos the sheriff would never have found him there.’

  Sixteen

  Mark was gone for so long that I asked for another coffee, and Alex joined me. ‘You’re not going to let me blow my job with this, are you, Primavera?’ he asked, quietly, as he ripped his way into the wrapping of the obligatory biscuit that came with his double espresso.

  ‘No,’ I told him, making a promise to myself that I wouldn’t. ‘Mark knows what he’s doing, and he is as well connected as he says, but at the first sign he’s reached a dead end, you and I will drive to Girona and I’ll put everything that I know and that he’s told you on the record, and after that, if you like, we’ll go to your headquarters and tell the whole story there.’

  ‘That might not get me out of trouble.’

  I smiled. ‘We’ll be economical with the timeframe if we have to.’

  ‘This Genchev. Who’s he?’

  I told him. ‘So you see, it is international. Also, we’ll be able to link the two murders here with the killing of the American DEA man in Malaga last year. That will give the Mossos big bragging rights over the Guardia Civil. You won’t be in trouble, you’ll be teacher’s pet.’

  As I spoke, I saw Mark making his way around the poolside, steadying himself on his stick, but looking thoughtful as well. ‘Pleased with yourself?’ I murmured.

  ‘Pleased with Graham Metcalfe,’ he told me. ‘He must be plugged into every database in the world on this thing. It took him ten minutes to produce Uche Wigwe’s life story. He’s aged twenty-five, the eldest son and heir of Kalu Wigwe, Emir of Kanaan in Nigeria, and of Sonya, family name Odalonu. Uche was educated in England, at a prep school in York from the age of six, and then at Charterhouse School. From there he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he majored in and graduated summa cum laude in . . .’ he winked at me. ‘Guess what, Primavera?’

  ‘Chemistry.’

  ‘Go it in one. His tutors at MIT said he was near-genius level. They had him marked down as a potential Nobel Prize winner, and universities the world over just love to produce those. They offered him the chance to do a PhD, and yes, you guessed it, on the synthesis of hormones, only for him to turn them down. He dropped out of sight for a while after that, surfacing again two years ago as an MBA student at Arizona State University, with the stated ambition of getting on the golf team, which surprised the coach there, because he wasn’t exceptionally gifted at the game, despite having a personal tutor. Instead of playing, he hung about the team, caddying for a few of them, before settling for the bag of the brightest and best, Jonathan Sinclair. The rest we know.’

  He smiled at me, expecting praise no doubt, but all he got was a frown. Something he’d said had thrown a switch. ‘His personal tutor?’ I repeated. ‘Did Metcalfe put a name to him?’

  ‘Hey, come on,’ he protested. ‘The database isn’t that good.’

  I got to my feet and walked around the pool. My back was to them as I dug out my mobile, and selected Jonny’s number. I wasn’t sure he’d reply; I thought he might have been switched off on the range, but he must have had it on vibrate, for he picked up. ‘Auntie P,’ he greeted me. ‘Has the bastard shown up? If not, when he does, you might like to tell him he’s fired. I suspect you’ll be better at it than me.’

  ‘Sorry, Jonny; that’s a job you can’t delegate. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep on it?’

  ‘No. You know I’ve been thinking about the longer term? Well, I’ve been speaking to Clive Tate. He’s found me a guy who’s looking for a bag. He’s free now, but won’t be for long, and he’s giving him a big build-up.’

  ‘You have to make the decision that’s right for you,’ I said. ‘But no, Uche hasn’t turned up. It seems he had family business to take care of. But I don’t want to talk about him. There’s so
mething I need to ask you. It’ll seem odd, but nonetheless. Remember you told me that Brush Donnelly found your coach for you?’

  ‘No,’ he contradicted me, at once. ‘If I said that, it’s not quite what I meant. Brush approved Lena, but that was never an issue, for she’s one of the best. Strangely enough, it was Uche who introduced us. He said that his dad had hired her to work with him.’ He paused. ‘Does that help?’

  ‘Does it ever. You go hit another few hundred balls.’

  I went back to the guys, feeling more than a little smug. I was going to tell them what I’d just learned, but Mark didn’t give me the chance. ‘Did you find Shirley?’ he asked, urgently.

  ‘With the greatest of ease,’ I replied. ‘The call was worth every euro too.’ I recounted her story, complete with Robert Palmer’s comment, then added one of my own. ‘Sounds like a bolt-hole to me.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Mark agreed. ‘Do you know that area?’ he asked Alex.

  ‘Yes. I went hunting up there when I was a kid.’

  ‘Fancy doing it again?’

  The cop face returned. ‘Hold on. If there’s a chance that’s where they are, I can get a whole squad up there.’

  ‘Just what we don’t need: a Catalan SWAT team.’

  ‘Come on, man. We’ve got a kidnap victim there and a probable double murderer, triple counting the American in Malaga.’

  ‘Who?’ I exclaimed, intervening.

  ‘Uche Wigwe, who else?’

  ‘Uche never killed anybody,’ I protested. ‘Why the hell would he?’

  ‘Good question,’ Mark agreed. ‘Uche never met Robert Palmer, so how could he have recognised him? He didn’t send Genchev and McGuigan to try to identify him, so how could he have killed them?’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘That’s the big question. Maybe Kalu gave them their orders, from Nigeria, but he didn’t get here until after the second murder, so he didn’t shoot anyone either, not personally.’

  Alex shrugged. ‘So I send in a team, we arrest everyone who’s there, and we get the answers.’

  ‘You get bodies; that’s the only certainty. We have a man with a gun, we have a man with a secret, and we have a man with whom they both seem to have a grievance. If you send people in there with big boots, Kevlar helmets and assault rifles, someone, maybe all of them, will die. I was sent here to secure Robert Palmer, and to make him safe. That’s still my objective. I don’t care about the Wigwes, father or son. I propose that you and I go up there, Alex; first to establish if they’re in the building at all, and then to find out why.’