Never in my life would I have let a bloke do what she did next. She kicked me with the toe of her small, black-shod left foot. She missed what she was aiming for, but she did catch me on the inside of my thigh, sending a spear of pain shooting through it, followed by numbness.
My grip on her loosened; she wrenched herself free and started past me, after the gun. Xavi was useless; speed was never his strong point. Hector wasn’t, though. He was still on the floor, but he grabbed her ankle, delaying her long enough for me to do my best to ignore my dead leg and get some movement going.
She kicked Hector too, on the jaw, then stamped on his wrist to free herself. By that time the only way to the pistol was through me. She tried it too; her right hand went to the pocket of her chalet maid’s tunic, and came out with a flick knife, the sort of weapon that was banned in Britain fifty years ago, the sort of weapon that Carrie McDaniels’ Moroccan had pulled on me a few days before.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ I warned her as she feinted a thrust with the blade. ‘You’ve picked the wrong man to pull a knife on. Drop it now, and you can walk away from this. Come at me with it, and you won’t like what happens.’
Her eyes blazed at me. A movement behind my back told me that Xavi had recovered the pistol.
‘Come on,’ I murmured. ‘You’re a pro. You’re beat and you know it, so don’t be silly.’
‘I’m never beaten,’ she whispered, then lunged at me, lightning fast.
She expected me to step outside the line of the thrust as most people would, so when I stepped inside, and twisted my body round, it threw her off guard, and off balance. I seized her by the elbows, immobilising her arms, and then lifted her clean off her feet, as I turned and stepped through the open doorway, on to the terrace.
‘Don’t say you weren’t warned,’ I whispered, as I looked her in the eye. Then I threw her, up and outwards.
Maybe I’m stronger than I realise, or maybe the distance was less than I thought; or maybe I knew exactly what I was doing.
She flew backwards until her calves caught the timber guard rail, then she tumbled backwards out of sight, soundlessly, without a whimper, far less a scream.
I stepped up to the edge of the terrace and looked over. Hector and Valentina hadn’t been kidding when they told Pilar that the chalet was built into the side of the mountain. In fact it stood on the edge of a precipice, a sheer drop of at least three hundred feet, probably more.
The killer woman was still falling. As I watched she smashed into an outcrop of rock, bouncing off it and on to another, head first, then finally through a tall snow-laden tree at the foot of the cliff, before disappearing from sight into the Andorran forest.
When I turned, the two guys were staring at me. I shrugged as I stepped back into the chalet, leaving the doors open behind me.
‘What would you have done?’ I asked. ‘She wouldn’t have stopped until she killed me, and then you two and Valentina.’ I looked at Xavi, the gentle giant. ‘Could you have shot her, my friend?’
He lowered his eyes, then shook his head.
‘What do we do now?’ Hector asked, his voice tremulous.
‘You leave everything to me.’
Twenty-Five
I called Julien Valencia, on Xavi’s phone. He was at home, anticipating an afternoon at the football with his son . . . the poor sod turned out to be an Espanyol supporter . . . but when I told him my story, he arranged for the kid’s granddad to take him instead.
‘We found them in a chalet in the mountains,’ I said. ‘We hadn’t been there long when we were interrupted by the killer. It was a woman; not what we were expecting, but her height matched the forensic clues from the Battaglia murder.
‘She was dressed as a chalet maid, so Hector let her in. She held us at gunpoint, and she would have shot Valentina, but the poor lass panicked and jumped off the balcony.’
‘What happened to the killer?’ he asked.
‘She ran for it. She stole a car, as far as we can see.’
‘What have you done? Have you reported this to the Andorran police?’
‘I thought you might like to do that, then get the fuck up here. You must have a helicopter at your disposal, yes?’
He did. By the time he arrived, we had been joined by a sizeable chunk of the local constabulary, but not by the top man himself, who was, as it transpired, a Barcelona follower and en route at that time to an away game in San Sebastian.
The local detectives took statements from Hector and Xavi, in which they told the same story I had fed to Valencia. They took nothing from me, since there wasn’t an English speaker among them and once again I’d conveniently forgotten all the Spanish and Catalan I’ve ever known.
It didn’t take their dogs long to find the body in the forest. It had been stripped almost naked by the trees, so there were no questions raised by its being dressed in a maid’s uniform. The face had been smashed beyond recognition and beyond dental identification . . . even supposing that Valentina Barsukova’s records had been available for comparison.
However it didn’t come to that; the body was taken to the morgue tagged as ‘Barsukova V, Russian national. Suicide.’ I heard later that the honorary Russian consul in Andorra arranged for it to be cremated, and attended the ceremony as a mark of respect.
He didn’t have much choice in the matter, for something else had happened before Julien Valencia’s arrival. Using Hector’s laptop, Xavi had written his first story in years, and filed it as an exclusive on every digital newspaper in the InterMedia group.
It was a detailed account of how and why Valentina had been hunted and hounded to her death, and of the collateral murders of Bernicia Battaglia and Jacob Ireland.
He named the killer as Ana Kuzmina, a reasonable guess since that was the name on the driving licence that we’d found in a bag in the chalet supplies building, and handed to the police. He added the assertion that she had been sent on her mission by ‘powerful interests in Moscow’, stopping just short of saying ‘the Russian government’.
The message got through regardless. Twenty-four hours later, the Russian Embassy in Madrid issued a statement condemning the death of one of its nationals, and promising all assistance in the hunt for Kuzmina.
And the real, live, Valentina; what about her? By the time the police arrived she had crossed the border, heading south in her Skoda Yeti, registered in her new name . . . which I will not share with you . . . back to her new life and her new job as a bookkeeper in the city of Segovia, just north of Madrid.
In a few months’ time she will be admiring Guernica in the Reina Sofia gallery when her eye will be caught be a charming man in his early thirties.
They will get talking, do the things that new couples do, a drink, a quiet dinner in a nice restaurant . . . but definitely not Fatigas del Querer . . . and will go on to live happily ever after, I hope most sincerely.
Hector went back to Barcelona with Julien Valencia, in his helicopter. Since the Battaglia murder investigation had a ‘success’ tick against it, his interview was a brief formality, and he was able to visit his recuperating father and his mother in hospital, before taking a taxi north, as we had done twenty-four hours earlier, to be reunited with his ostentatious Porsche Boxster.
As for me, I did, as you can imagine, brood for a time over my duel with Ana Kuzmina, and its outcome. Heading away from the snowline in the passenger seat of the Range Rover, I searched within myself for a scrap of guilt over the fact that I’d tossed her off the balcony, accidentally or otherwise, instead of knocking her unconscious, tying her up and handing her over to the Mossos d’ Esquadra.
I couldn’t find any. She was a murderer and a torturer. She could also handle herself pretty well, so trying to restrain her could have gone fatally wrong. And if I had been compassionate, the world would have had to discover that Valentina was still alive, and another hit man would probably have been set on her trail.
I can live with the way it ended, and so, happily, will everyone els
e . . . apart from Ana Kuzmina.
Xavi was preoccupied too on the way south. He said very little for most of the way, and it wasn’t until we reached Vic that he started to open up. I’d assumed he was brooding over what he’d seen me do, but I was entirely wrong.
‘Am I a dinosaur, Bob?’ he asked me, out of the blue.
‘You’re bigger than quite a few of them,’ I chipped back.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Are you hidebound in your business thinking?’ I said. He nodded.
‘I don’t know enough about it to be definitive,’ I told him, ‘but I do know that what Hector said, about people other than its owners having an interest in a company, that’s spot on. When I was a kid in Lanarkshire I saw the steel industry disappear up its own arse; a great deal of the blame for that could be laid on its management’s lack of foresight.’
‘How do you think I should have handled Battaglia when I met her?’
‘Come on,’ I laughed. ‘I’m a simple plod.’
‘Then give me your simple view.’
‘If you insist.’ I paused. ‘First off, I’d have asked her to put it all in writing, before giving any sort of response. While she was doing that, I’d have done a lot of research. Some of it would have been on her, to find out how strong her business really was. The rest would have been on my own position. Then when a formal offer came in I’d have put it to the board and to the senior staff.’
‘That’s all very good, but what would you have done when she threatened to take your life?’
‘You saw that a few hours ago.’ I frowned. ‘In circumstances like those I’d have gone to her major shareholders and sounded them out about a reverse bid. What I wouldn’t have done was stay sat in my comfy chair and laugh her off.’
‘Mmm,’ he murmured, his brows forming a single thick black line.
‘My profession has never been dynastic,’ I continued. ‘Yours could be. What do you want for Paloma, down the road, or for Ben?’
‘Between you and me,’ Xavi growled, ‘I don’t like Ben very much, so I don’t dwell too long on his future. I’ll do anything for him that his mother asks me to, but that’s all. My daughter, however, yes, you’re right. I’d like to pass something on to her.’
‘Then listen to Hector, and to his father, because they see the future a lot more clearly than you do.’
He promised that he would, and then we carried on, to Girona and back to the park where I’d left my car.
He asked me if I’d like to come back to the masia for dinner and one more night. I thanked him, for the prospect was attractive, but I felt that I’d been out of contact with my life and family for too long, and being under my own roof was part of that.
Then he asked me, awkwardly, to send him an invoice for the time I’d spent on the hunt for Hector.
I told him, without a hint of awkwardness, that I don’t have a private investigator’s licence, and that even if I did, he could fuck off, that friends were friends and that we’d been out of each other’s lives for too long.
We parted with a handshake and a promise to keep in touch, and I drove back to L’Escala.
I got there at eight fifteen on that Saturday evening, travel-soiled and hungry. I stuck my used clothes in the washing machine, then had a shower and dressed decently, for I didn’t fancy freezer food and had decided to eat out. Finally I was able to put my phone on charge, and so I did that too, before reaching for the landline to call Sarah.
All the adrenaline had gone from my system. I felt drained, lonely, and I wanted to be at home with my kids, the surest way of banishing an image I knew I’d see very soon in the night, a replay of the look in a woman’s eyes as she realised that she had indeed chanced upon the wrong bloke to threaten with a knife.
I picked up the handset and as I did, I saw the ‘message waiting’ symbol in the LCD window. Hoping that Sarah hadn’t been worrying about me, I hit the button and listened.
But it wasn’t her. No, it was Alex, and she sounded as close to frantic as I’d ever heard her.
‘Pops, how long are you staying in bloody Madrid? Your mobile’s on permanent voicemail. I need you to get in touch with me, for something bad’s happened here. Like they used to say on telly . . . there’s been a murder.’
Twenty-Six
I ran for it.
I backed away from the body in the chair, my foot slipping on the rodent-like thing that turned out to be Coyle’s dislodged hairpiece, then turned on my heel and legged it out of there.
I didn’t stop until I was back in my car, in Slateford Road. I sat there, wide-eyed, working to control my breathing and waiting for my heart to stop trying to pound its way out of my chest.
As soon as I was steady, and back in control, I called my father . . . what else would I do? . . . but his mobile came up as unavailable. It sent me to voicemail, but there are some messages that can’t be left.
What I should have done next, indeed what I should have done first, was dial the three nines.
I should have, but I didn’t. I’d gone there to find out about Linton Baillie, thinking of myself as a tough lady who was ready for anything, only to bolt like a startled rabbit when I found that I wasn’t.
‘Come on, girl,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re better than that.’
I eased myself back out of my car, and headed back to Portland Street. I looked around as I walked for anyone and anything that didn’t seem right, but nothing was moving and no shadows lurked in doorways.
When I returned to Baillie’s front door, I realised that I’d shut it behind me as I fled. That might have stopped me in my tracks, but when I tried the handle, using the sleeve of my Afghan to keep from messing up the forensics, I found that it was off the latch.
I went back inside. I didn’t believe that anyone else would be there, but on the off chance I kept my hand on my pepper spray, while my other rested on a thin high-intensity torch that doubles as a baton. (A present from my father. He’d have given me an extending baton, but they’re illegal . . . he’d point out that most weapons used in the commission of crimes are illegal, but criminals don’t mind that.)
Coyle was still in the big chair when I went back into the living room, and he was still just as dead. Twelfth Night was still unfolding on the Bose radio, but it was wasted on him. However, I noticed something I’d missed before: a bottle of white wine, opened, on a low table, with two glasses, one half full, the other empty.
I’ve seen enough stuff not to be squeamish, so without standing too near, I leaned towards him and took a closer look.
I hadn’t imagined the mark around his neck, it was red and it was vivid. He’d been garrotted, by a wire, or something else fine and strong enough for the job.
Dad never gave me blow-by-blow accounts of crime scenes when I was growing up, but I know enough to realise that the complete absence of marks on his fingers meant that he’d been taken by surprise by the strangler. He must have been wholly wrapped up in his Shakespeare, or whatever else he’d been listening to when he’d met his end.
But what the hell was he doing there? There were only two possibilities. One was that Tommy had fancied his chances of getting into gullible, ever-so-grateful Lexie’s quick-release knickers and had made up the meeting with Baillie, inviting me to his place rather than his own.
The other was that Tommy Coyle actually was Linton Baillie.
Beyond doubt, I should have called the police at once, as soon as I found the body, or, allowing for my panicky exit, as soon as I’d recovered my composure in my car. I knew that I couldn’t delay it for much longer, but I decided to take a couple more minutes to look around, to see if I could nail down those answers.
Before I started, I went into the kitchen and found a pair of disposable gloves; no need to leave evidence of my curiosity.
The first thing to strike me was the impersonal look of the place. There was nothing on view to give any clue to the person who lived there; not a single family photograph, no pict
ures on the wall, none of the favourite things that we all collect and keep around us.
Whoever lived there didn’t seem to want to be known.
I went back into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was nothing in it but some eggs, a tub of butter substitute, half a dozen bottles of Miller Draft, and one of the same Tesco white wine that stood opened on the coffee table next door. Nothing short-term. No vegetables, no fruit, no milk. I looked in the cupboards; I saw plenty of tins, but no bread.
I touched the second wine bottle; it was nowhere near refrigerator cold, so it couldn’t have been there long.
If it was indeed Tommy Coyle’s place, and Linton Baillie was an alter ego, it didn’t look as if he’d been living there lately; neither had anyone else, for a while.
I rummaged through the kitchen drawers, and through a sideboard unit in the living room, looking for utility bills, or anything else bearing the occupant’s name.
There were none to be found, but that wasn’t completely surprising; I don’t have any either since all my household business is done online, with paperless billing. The fact is, it’s entirely possible to live these days without leaving a paper trail behind you.
There were two bedrooms. One was pristine; the bed was made up, but didn’t look as if it had ever been used, and the wardrobe was empty, save for a man’s light raincoat and a black tuxedo.
The other was much more lived-in. There was a clock radio by the side of the bed, and a couple of books. One caught my eye: a true crime story about a Glasgow hoodlum, not by Linton Baillie, by another writer whose name I did recognise from bookshop browsing.
I thought of my own putative synopsis. Had Mr B been picking other people’s brains? I wondered.
I moved into the bathroom, and that’s where it started to get interesting. It was a man’s place for sure, with Gillette blades and Nivea toiletries in a cupboard below the washbasin.
The toothbrush was electric, on a stand with a container. I flipped the lid open and looked inside; there was only one head and it looked almost new.
Last Resort Page 28