A Coffin For Two (Oz Blackstone Mystery)

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s go on board and give the door a knock.’

  ‘Careful,’ Prim advised.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not as daft as all that. If he’s in, I’ll try to get him out on the deck, so that we can be seen from the quay when we’re talking to him.’

  ‘Do we mention Ronnie Starr?’ she asked. ‘I mean the fact that he’s dead.’

  ‘Hell, no! We don’t know that, remember. No, we tell the truth more or less. We’re working for Gavin Scott, looking for more info on the Toreador. We want to trace the Ronald Starr who staged the auction.’

  ‘Do we mention the Cadaques picture?’

  ‘No. Let’s just try to win the guy’s confidence.’

  She looked doubtful: not scared, you understand, just doubtful. ‘Oz, are you sure about this?’

  ‘No. That’s why I want to talk to him out in the open. Mind you, the chances are he’s buggered off again, back to sea. Come on.’

  I led the way, jumping on to the deck of the yacht, Prim landing lightly behind me. I leaned across and knocked on the cabin roof. ‘Mr Eames,’ I called. ‘Can we have a word?’

  There was no reply, not any sound after the crack of my knuckles on the plastic roof panel. I walked on and stepped down into the well in front of the tied wheel.

  The cabin door was ajar: very slightly, hardly enough to notice, but ajar nonetheless. I rapped on it, calling again. ‘Mr Eames.’The door swung open, into the darkness below decks.

  The gulls were crying, the water was lapping against the sides of La Sirena Two, and boats all around were creaking at their moorings, but all of those sounds seemed to be drowned out by the silence of the cabin. It seemed to rush out to meet me, that silence; and the smell, one that I’d encountered before.

  Primavera stood at my shoulder. ‘Wait here,’ I said. For once she obeyed me without an argument.

  A short, four-step stair, almost steep enough to be called a ladder, led down below decks. It was panelled on either side and at the foot there was a second door, without lock or handle, swinging gently with the movement of the boat. I jumped down the steps and crashed into the cabin, into the heart of the silence.

  For a second as the door lay open there was light, then it swung shut on its hinges and the darkness returned. But in that second I had seen the chair, and the shape of someone in it.

  I fumbled my way along the walls till I found a curtain, and ripped it open. The evening outside was grey, and the cabin was still gloomy, yet I could see at once that Trevor Eames was dead. From the way his arms hung by his sides; from the way his left leg stretched out before him, with the right twisted under the chair; from the way his head lolled back, eyes staring at the ceiling, jaw hanging slack; from the dark blood which soaked the front of his blue-and-white hooped T-shirt, the crotch of his jeans, and the Ship’s Wilton floor-covering: from all these things I could tell that he was dead.

  I’m not sure how long I spent staring at him with my heart thumping - it always does that when I find a body - before the cabin door opened, framing Prim’s silhouette. ‘Don’t come in!’ I said, quickly.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. But she stayed in the doorway.

  ‘How did he die?’ she asked.

  I stepped up to the body. The light was better with the door open. ‘I’d say he was stabbed. There looks to be a single puncture wound in his shirt, and there don’t seem to be any signs of a struggle. He looks to have been quite powerfully built, so whoever did this couldn’t have given him a chance.’

  ‘And who could have done it?’ she asked.

  ‘It has to be a very short list,’ I answered. ‘Right at the top has to be the guy who killed Ronnie Starr: but we’re further away than ever from tracking him down.’

  The chug of a diesel-engined fishing boat on its way out of the harbour gave me a sudden sense of urgency. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. She had no argument with that; I followed her up the stairway, and across the deck, so scared that for once I barely noticed how well her jeans fitted round her bum. We stood on the quay, looking back at the floating mortuary.

  ‘What do we do?’ Prim asked. ‘Leave him for someone else to find?’

  I ruled that one out in an instant. ‘No. Someone’s bound to have seen us going on board. Look at all those apartments on the shore. There could be people watching us right now, in any one of them. No, I’ll wait here. You run round to the Trattoria and have them call the police.’

  She nodded and hurried off. I called after her. ‘Hey, honey. Make sure they call the Guardia Civil, not the Municipal Police. I don’t think they could smuggle this one out of town, but you never know.’

  45

  The Guardia Civil live up to their name, and after spending four hours with them, in their big yellow brick office on the outskirts of L’Escala, we were thankful for it.

  Their investigators, Captain Fortunato and Sergeant Mendes, were meticulous, but meticulously polite, as they went over our story time and time again. Fortunato told us that he had spent a year on secondment with the Met, yet to be on the safe side, he had an interpreter sitting in to make sure that everyone understood everything absolutely and that at the end, everything was written down as it should be.

  We fell back on the cover story we had given in Gary’s restaurant as our reason for boarding La Sirena Two, hugely relieved in retrospect that we had come up with the throwaway line about booking sailing lessons for ourselves and Steve Miller. With a roomful of witnesses to back it up, our account was never going to be questioned seriously.

  While we had waited for the police to arrive, Prim and I had agreed privately that it would be hugely dangerous to mention the name Ronald Starr. Had we started that hare running, we reasoned, it could have led straight back to our client, to the Toreador of the Apocalypse, and to criminal charges for poor old Gavin Scott in Spain and in Britain.

  So we lied. We sat, all evening and into the night, with one of the most serious-minded police forces in the whole of Europe. We looked them in the eye, and we told them bare-faced porky pies. When it was over, they thanked us profusely, they extended their sympathy over our ordeal, and they wished us goodnight.

  It was after midnight when we emerged from the police station. We were both high as kites, so we headed for La Lluna and found a table in the games room. We were just beginning to relax when Paco came across, to ask whether we were still pleased with our purchase of the previous week, and probably to assess whether we might be in the market for another.

  He was still at our table, when his wife came over with word of Trevor Eames’ murder, newly arrived courtesy of an off-duty Guardia Civil private. We explained that we had first-hand knowledge, and how.

  ‘Did you know the guy?’ I asked Paco, casually.

  ‘He come in here now and again, looking for people to teach to sail.’

  ‘Do you know if he dealt in pictures?’

  He looked at me as if I was daft.

  ‘The reason I ask,’ I said, quickly, ‘is that Shirley Gash told me her son bought a painting from him this year.’

  Paco scowled. ‘Hah! That is what they were doing, was it. I remember now, in the spring, I see Trevor and John Gash talking in this very room. I think then they make an odd couple. If I know Trevor was selling a picture in here, maybe I kill him myself.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, I didn’t know.’

  It was almost three o’clock before we made it home. Even then we sat on the balcony for an hour before going to bed.

  The sound of a rainstorm battering our bedroom windows woke us eventually. I looked at my watch. ‘Jesus, it’s two in the afternoon,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Good,’ said Prim, giving one of her finest stretches beside me. ‘I like a lie-in on a Saturday. And it means that the police haven’t kicked our door in.’

  It was still chucking it down half an hour later. Showered and dressed, we stood and watched the weather through the glazed balcony doors. The storm was coming in off the sea, in a grea
t grey wave, but behind it we could see a line of clear blue sky, stretching to the horizon. ‘It’ll blow itself out soon,’ I said, as if I was an expert on the local weather after three months.

  Prim wound an arm around my waist. ‘Oz,’ she said, slowly. ‘I’ve been wondering. Why was Eames killed?’

  I looked down at her. ‘To close off the trail to the phoney Ronnie Starr, I suppose.’

  ‘If that’s so, apart from Davidoff - who couldn’t be the mystery man, on account of being twice his age, being Spanish, and having one eye - who would know that anyone was looking for the phoney Starr?’

  Every so often Prim would say something that would catch me really off balance. This was one of the times. I thought about her question for a while, as the rain began to slacken. ‘Reis Sonas, for one,’ I offered at last. ‘She knew about the picture, for a start. We only have her word for it that she handed the things over to Trevor, and she was careful to say that she didn’t know the name of his chum. She could have been in on it. She could have set Starr up for murder.’

  ‘But got herself knocked up by him first?’

  ‘Accidents will happen. Besides, maybe the kid isn’t Starr’s.’

  ‘Ha,’ she laughed. ‘How many wee, fair-haired Spanish babies have you seen? Also, how long did the police say Eames had been dead?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours, at least, maybe a bit more.’

  ‘Exactly, so by the time she finished with us on Thursday, she’d have been struggling for time to get along to L’Escala and knife him. Even if you think a woman could have done that.’

  She had me, on all counts. ‘David Foy, then,’ I proposed. ‘He’s already admitted setting up Scott. Maybe he was in it all the way. Maybe he did know who the phoney Starr was all along. Maybe the story about he and Trevor being done out of their shares was a lot of cock.’

  Prim nodded. ‘That’s more like it. I didn’t like Foy at all.’

  ‘There is another option, though. Maybe the phoney Starr didn’t know that anyone was looking for him. Maybe Trevor found him, and was pressing him for his cash. Or maybe he just decided that having Trevor around as a witness to murder was too risky, and put him out of the way.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘But if he does know about us, let’s hope he doesn’t decide that we’re too big a risk as well.’

  She may have been joking, but I was still worrying about that one when we arrived in Ventallo at around eight. The rain and the wind were long gone, and the evening was calm, warm enough for a few tables to be set out in the garden of the farmhouse restaurant.

  ‘Sure,’ said the owner, in fractured English. ‘I can give you table. But no food till nine o’clock. You can have drink in the bar, though.’

  We agreed that we would go for a stroll around the quaint village for a while and come back around eight-thirty for an aperitif. I remembered their house red from our previous visit, and didn’t want to be left alone with it for an hour on an empty stomach.

  Idly, we headed back out into the unpaved street, as if making for the heart of the village, but as soon as we were out of sight we turned on our heels and headed back up the dirt track which led from the highway to the restaurant, and by which Ramona and her partner had dropped the remains of Ronnie Starr.

  We had gone barely any distance before we realised that it was useless. It was too dark, the ditches were deep and full of water from the afternoon’s storm, and the fields were rutted. It would have been dangerous to venture off the track, and very messy. ‘Christ,’ said Prim, ‘we’d need a sniffer dog. Let’s take that walk round the village after all.’

  We wrote off any further reconnoitring and explored Ventallo, discovering that it had a second restaurant, a town hall, a small, bizarre zoo and sod all else. Our table was ready when we returned to the farmhouse, and the kitchen had been cranked into action, even though it was only eight forty-five.

  We had almost finished our pork, with apples and Calvados sauce, and our first bottle of house red when I noticed the animal in the far corner of the garden. Even as Spanish dogs go, it was quite big: mostly Alsatian, it seemed. I recognised it from our earlier visit and guessed that it belonged to the place.

  I thought no more of it, nor would I have to this day, had it not come into Prim’s line of vision as it moved across the spotlit wall.

  She stiffened and sat bolt upright in her chair. Her eyes, big at the best of times, became huge and completely round. She stared at the hound, and pointed, speechless. The owner was standing beside us, serving the next table. He laughed, in an apologetic sort of way. ‘I sorry for my dog. Is bad manners to carry a bone into a restaurant.’

  ‘It sure is,’ Prim gasped at last, revealing the benefit of her years of nursing and her six months in an African war-zone. ‘Especially when it’s a human thigh-bone!’

  The young proprietor looked at her, bewildered. She dropped her bombshell again, in French this time. He shrieked, and dropped his tray.

  The rest of it was like a movie farce: the dog leashed, the bone taken from him, then given him again to scent, the five of us - the owner, the couple at the next table, Prim and I - FOLLOWING the straining animal, three of us with flashlights. We were barely out of the village before the mostly Alsatian veered off the track, and across the ditch that had become a small river. His master, the bloke from the next table, Prim and I all leapt over into the field beyond, leaving the second lady teetering on the edge, afraid of the jump.

  I tripped twice over ploughed ruts, and was lagging behind when the short hue and cry came to a silent halt. When I caught up, covered in mud and waving my torch, the other three were standing in a semi-circle, with the mostly Alsatian held on a very tight leash. Two beams shone on the ground, on something white.

  I flashed my light in the same direction, and fought off the urge to say, ‘Hello again!’ as the gleaming skull of Ronnie Starr grinned up at me. The rest of him was there too, apart from the major bones of one leg. Most of the scraps of clothing had been lost in transit, but he still wore his leather belt.

  We all stared at him in silence for a while. Once the young restaurateur tugged at his curly hair, as if reaching for a hat to remove. At last he said, in English, to me, for some reason. ‘We should call the police.’

  ‘I think we should,’ I agreed. ‘You should call Captain Fortunato, of the Guardia Civil, in L’Escala. He’s the head man for this whole area. If you fetch your local people, there’s no saying where the poor bastard will end up.’

  He nodded sagely, as if he understood me, then tugging at the dog’s leash, turned back towards the village, with Prim and the second man at his heels. I followed hard behind, but only after, with no one looking, I had bent over the skeleton, and slipped Ronnie Starr’s shiny Giorgio watch, wiped clean of fingerprints with the napkin which I had stuffed in my pocket as we left the restaurant, back on his shiny, bony wrist.

  46

  Captain Fortunato gave me the strangest look I’ve ever had from another human being. ‘What are you, my friend?’ he asked, in his slow English. ‘Some kind of a fucking magnet?’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, staring back at him defensively across the restaurant bar, and pointing at the owner. ‘It was his bloody dog found the thing. We only came here to eat!’

  The Guardia Civil detective laughed. ‘I don’t care whose fucking dog it was, when someone is as close as you to two bodies in two days, then I start to think he must be a very special person.’ But in almost the same moment, he made a shooing gesture with both hands. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get outta here, you and your girlfriend. I see enough of you last night.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ I said, pushing my luck. ‘But if it’s all right with you, we’d like to finish our meal. Maybe, while we’re doing that, you could interrogate the dog. He’s probably the best witness you’ll find.’

  So while the captain and his assistant went back to the field, Prim and I went back to our table. The owner brought us some more pork, apples and s
auce as a reward for our efforts. We had polished off that and two portions of seasonal fruits, when Fortunato returned alone.

  He came over to our table and sat down, a tall, wide-shouldered man with black hair, dressed in the same lightweight tan suit that he had been wearing the night before. I asked for a third glass and poured him some wine. He sipped it and nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good here, the wine. If you want to buy some, it comes from a place in San Pedro Pescador.’ However, a sour look soon returned to his face.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Prim asked.

  ‘I can tell you one thing for sure about the man in the field,’ said the detective.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He’s dead!’ he snorted. ‘The rest, we’ll find out if we’re lucky.’ He reached into the left-hand pocket of his jacket, and tossed the Giorgio watch on to the table. ‘That’s his.’ He reached into the right-hand pocket and produced the belt, rolled up. ‘So’s that. On the inside it says Marks & Spencer, so he could be British.’

  ‘Or French, or Spanish, for M&S have stores there too,’ I said, just to cheer him up. ‘Or he could have been a foreign visitor to Britain.’

  ‘Sure, but that is where we’ll start nonetheless. There is a number on the watch: that may help us. Then, of course, there are his teeth.’ He gritted his own, and muttered. ‘Bastards!’ under his breath.

  ‘Who?’

  Fortunato shot me a look. ‘Whoever it was dumped those bones in that field. The guy’s been dead for at least a year, but he can only have been there for a day or two, otherwise the dogs would have spread him all over town.’ He scowled. ‘These bastards in the local police. Either in L’Escala or Ampuriabrava; it was them, I know it. You would not believe it, but it happens all the time. They find a body like this one, with a big hole in the back of his skull. Do they call us in? Oh no, they move it on, out of their hair, to a place like this. Nothing gets in the way of the tourist business.