A Coffin For Two (Oz Blackstone Mystery)

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘When did he grow it, Shirley? The beard, I mean.’ My question was almost a shout, as I looked at her, over my shoulders, her shocked eyes swam back into focus, and looked at me, trying to comprehend what she had just seen.

  ‘Last summer,’ she moaned, at last. ‘Why?’

  ‘Was it unusual for him to wear one?’

  ‘Yes, he’d never had one before. Why? What the bloody hell’s this about? Oz, who killed my brother?’ Exploding suddenly into tears, she tore her hands from Fortunato’s grasp, turned to me and threw her arms around my neck, weeping on my shoulder.

  I looked past her at the captain. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He nodded and led the way, out of the garage, through the castle’s small courtyard and into the souvenir shop. He found a chair in the corner and brought it into the centre of the floor, for Shirley.

  ‘Just before eight this evening,’ said Fortunato, ‘one of my men received an anonymous telephone call. The caller spoke in Catalan. That was why I addressed you in Catalan when you came in, Senor Blackstone. If you had understood me, you would have been in big trouble, but clearly you did not.

  ‘The man on the phone said that we should come here, and look in the boot of the Cadillac. My guy had the sense to make him repeat the message, so that we kept him on the line long enough to trace the call. It was made somewhere in this area, on a Cellnet mobile telephone, sold in England and listed under the name of a company called CSG Products, Limited.’ He stopped and looked at us.

  ‘That’s my company,’ said Shirley. ‘The caller must have used Adrian’s phone. I was always telling him to programme a security code into it.’

  ‘How long has he been dead?’ I asked the captain.

  ‘About a day, we think. As you can see, he was shot, at point-blank range.’

  ‘How did you know to call Mrs Gash?’

  ‘There was a business card left on the body. The name on it was Adrian Ford, and the Senora’s number was written on the back. It was as if the murderer had left us instructions.’

  Fortunato paused again, and his eyes narrowed. ‘Why did you ask the lady about a beard?’

  ‘Because until yesterday, her brother wore one.’

  The policeman looked at me in astonishment. ‘That’s amazing. We found this in the Cadillac, with the body.’ He reached into his jacket, produced a Phillips rechargeable shaver, and handed it to me. I examined it until I found a button beneath the blade assembly. I pressed it and the shaving surface, with its triple foiled cutters, swung up on a hinge. The chamber beneath was full of dark bristle. I showed it to Fortunato.

  ‘This is fucking crazy,’ he whispered, stepping away from Shirley. ‘The killer brings his victim here, but before he shoots him, he makes him shave off his beard. Why, in god’s name, would he do that?’

  When I answered, it took him by surprise. ‘So that I would know who he really was, and what he had done.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’ll tell you the whole story, but Shirley has to hear it too.’

  There were still one or two curious locals in the bar of the restaurant across the street when we walked in. Fortunato cleared them out and ordered the owner to bring three coffees and three large brandies, before sitting down with Shirley and me at a table by the fireplace.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  As quickly as I could, I explained how Gavin Scott had been set up at the auction, how he had paid four hundred thousand dollars for the purported lost masterpiece, and that my commission from him had been to prove the picture genuine or fake, one way or another.

  ‘Pretty soon,’ I said, ‘but don’t ask how, or we’ll be here for a year, I discovered that the man calling himself Ronnie Starr at the auction in Peretellada had been an impostor. I learned that the real Ronnie had been murdered, and buried, about a year ago, and also that his body had been discovered but moved to Ventallo. Like you said last night, those local coppers had been at it.

  ‘I found Ronnie’s girlfriend, in La Pera. She told me that she had seen Ronnie with Trevor Eames and a third man, whose name she didn’t know. She told me also that Ronnie had been in possession of the work which Scott bought, the alleged Dali. He didn’t paint it, though. He seems to have been given it.

  ‘Shortly after that, he disappeared. Nine months later, the picture was sold by the impostor, at the auction set up by Trevor Eames and David Foy. A few weeks before that, Eames sold a picture which Ronnie Starr certainly did paint, to Shirley’s son, John. Work it out for yourself. Eames, or Adrian, or both of them killed Starr, for the picture bearing the signature of Dali, and for what they could get for it.’

  ‘Was this man Foy in on the murder?’ asked Fortunato, sharply.

  ‘I doubt it very much, but if you want my advice, you should squeeze the bastard till he bleeds anyway.’

  He nodded. ‘I will, don’t worry. So let’s carry on. You go looking for Eames, but you find him dead. Then Starr’s body turns up. Did you know that Senor Ford was the third man?’

  ‘Honest to god, it never entered my head, not until tonight. I didn’t think we’d ever find the phoney Starr. Prim and I were coming to you tomorrow’ - I tweaked the truth a wee bit there, okay - ’with the story as we knew it. But someone beat us to it.’

  I looked across at the big, handsome, tear-streaked woman in the chair. ‘Shirley, I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘This must all be a terrible shock.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and no. Though I loved my brother dearly, I always knew he was a rogue. But I can’t believe that he could ...

  ‘Adrian was always just a bit ... a bit chancy, if you know what I mean. Although we gave him a job with the company, we were always wary of him. We never let him become a shareholder, and when Clive died, I never thought for a moment of letting him take over. Maybe if we had given him a share of the business, and some wealth of his own, he wouldn’t have been so greedy for it that he’d decide to get mixed up in something like this.’ She wrung her hands. ‘I loved my brother, and he was good to me. But both of us knew, without it having to be said, that I didn’t trust him.

  ‘Years back, Clive banned him from playing cards at any of my parties, after we found that he had cheated one of our friends out of two grand in a game at his bridge club. Adrian always had an eye out for a mug that he could take money off, at snooker or at golf. But the odds had to be weighed in his favour. He used to kid us on he couldn’t play, but we’d heard all about him.

  ‘When John bought that picture from Trevor, I had a nagging suspicion that Adrian was behind it. I’d known that the two of them knew each other. I never thought he’d go as far as this, though. And I still can’t believe he’d kill anyone. That must have been Trevor Eames.’

  I took her hand. ‘Almost certainly,’ I said, not really believing it.

  ‘So who killed Ford and Eames?’ Fortunato asked me.

  ‘You’re the detective, mate. I’m only a private enquiry agent.’

  ‘What about the girlfriend? Maybe she did know who the third man was? Maybe she decided that the other two had to go?’

  ‘In revenge for Ronnie,’ I said. ‘Hardly, she has his kid to look after now.’

  ‘No, no. Not in revenge. For protection. You civilians, you see a pretty face and you think, “Poor girl, what a tragedy.” You never ask yourself, “Could she have been behind the whole thing?” Maybe Ford and Eames were her partners, and she killed them before you could get too close. Maybe you and your girl are next on her list. You never think of that?’

  I sucked in my breath. I never had, but there was a chilling ring to it.

  50

  Shirley spent the journey back to L’Escala with her head on my shoulder, sobbing occasionally, and tugging at her fingernails. She went straight indoors when we reached the villa. I had offered that we would stay with her for the night, but she preferred to be alone.

  I went round to the garden, after she had gone inside. All the lights were out, but the night was still bright enough for me to
find my way round to the sofa loungers by the palm trees. They were deserted. I looked around, puzzled, until I heard a smooth lapping sound from the pool.

  Prim was swimming, slowly and rhythmically. I leaned against a palm tree, half-hidden by it, and watched her as she swam, length after length. Eventually I stepped out of the shadows, but still she didn’t see me, not until I knelt by the edge of the pool.

  She looked up, startled, her mouth slightly open, until she found her feet. ‘Oz, I thought ... I ... Oh, you gave me a fright, that’s all.’ She stood and I saw that she had been swimming naked. I lent her my hand as she climbed up the tiled steps in one corner of the pool, and watched her as she dried herself on her skirt, struck all the time by her strange silence.

  ‘What was the phone call about?’ she asked, at last. ‘Why did Fortunato want to see you?’

  As I told her, her face grew more and more shocked. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Poor Shirley. We should stay with her.’

  ‘She doesn’t want that. Besides, the old chap’s here.’

  ‘No he isn’t. He’s gone. And stop calling him the old chap.’

  ‘When did he go? And why?’

  She began to dress. ‘A while back. Before I had my swim. I think John’s coming early tomorrow, and Davidoff won’t stay here at the same time as him.’

  ‘He must be a real charmer, this John,’ I said. ‘He’d better be on his best behaviour tomorrow.’

  We were half-way home before she asked me, ‘Who does Fortunato think killed Eames and Adrian? David Foy?’

  I shook my head in the dark. ‘No, he’s not quoted. He’s too rich, for a start. This thing was about money, and for now the captain is putting his cash on Reis. He thinks she could have been in it from the start. And he could be right. We only have her word about the visit from Trevor.’

  ‘No,’ she said, violently. ‘No way. That poor girl. And her baby. She loved the man, Oz. I know that.’

  And in the dark, she began to cry. She was still crying when we got home, and later as I kissed her face after she had made unexpected, furious love to me, I could still taste the salt of her tears, where they flowed soft, hot and wet.

  51

  I didn’t believe it was Reis either, not for an instant. I knew who did it from the moment I saw the photograph in Shirley’s kitchen. When I looked into the trunk of that Caddy, I knew I would see Adrian there, and in my blood, I knew who had executed him.

  Fortunato held the girl for a couple of days, then let her go, as convinced finally of her innocence as I was.

  He came to see us on the following Thursday, the day after we had seen Shirley and John off from Girona Airport, with Adrian’s body in their chartered aircraft. We met him for lunch at one of the few tables which was still set up outside Casa Minana, with the dying of the season.

  ‘There’s nothing you’re holding out on me?’ he asked. Behind him, in the doorway, Miguel watched us, nervously.

  ‘No. What we know for certain, you know for certain,’ I replied, truthfully. ‘Have you developed a theory yet?’

  Fortunato shook his head. ‘It wasn’t the girl; I accept that now. And like you said, I squeezed that man Foy until he sweated blood. He’s a fool, and a bad friend to have, but no more than that.

  ‘I did think that it might have been your Mr Scott, getting even for being conned. The Scottish police interviewed him yesterday, and reported that he can prove that he was nowhere near Spain at the time of either murder. Then of course there was you two. You were in the thick of it, but I realised pretty quickly that you couldn’t have killed Adrian Ford.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Primavera. ‘What made you see that?’

  ‘Simple. At the time he was being shot, you were in Ventallo, helping to discover Starr’s remains.’

  ‘I suppose you could have killed Trevor Eames, though. You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right, then.’

  ‘So where do you go from here?’ Prim asked.

  ‘Back to my office, to sit and wait for something to turn up that I haven’t thought of. Only, Senor Oz and Senora Prim, I don’t think that it will. Of all the people who knew Starr well, only his girlfriend is left alive. I have spoken to everyone in La Pera, and in Pubol.

  ‘Some of them remember him, but none well. Most never even knew his name. I know that the picture which your Mr Scott bought is the key. If I could discover who painted that, or who gave it to Starr, the mystery might be solved. But I don’t see how I ever will find that out.’

  ‘What about Scott,’ I asked him, ‘and the way he bought the picture? Will there be any comeback on that?’

  Fortunato laughed. ‘I’m no fucking tax man,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a shit about Scott, or the goddamn picture. Spain is not so cruel, Senor, that if a man is stupid enough to pay four hundred thousand dollars for a phoney Dali, she would expect him to pay tax on it as well. If he has a problem, it is in Britain.’

  He finished his Cortado and stood up. ‘Thanks for lunch, and thanks for your help, when you finally got round to giving it. I got to go now.’

  ‘What’ll happen to Starr’s body?’ asked Prim.

  ‘Senora Sonas has claimed it. She is having him buried next Monday; properly, with respect, in La Pera.’

  52

  Of course, Prim and I went to Ronnie Starr’s funeral. We had expected to be the only people there, other than Reis, but we were wrong. Mrs Adams, the principal of the Cardiff Art College, had flown over to pay her respects. She took me by surprise; from her voice, I had expected her to be an Amazon, but in fact she was a small, fat woman with bad hair, the kind you would always walk past in a crowd.

  The discovery of Starr’s body had made news in Britain, and as a result, the media outnumbered the mourners by two to one. They stood back silently as the coffin was slid into its hole in the white wall of the mausoleum, and as we filed out of the cemetery, but as soon as they were through the gates, they pounced on Reis.

  Only one reporter approached us, a spotty wee girl in her mid-twenties. She had a Welsh accent, and she grinned all the time, as if she was enjoying her unexpected swan in Spain, regardless of the circumstances.

  ‘What’s your connection with the deceased?’ she asked, without an ‘excuse me’, or a ‘please’, just the arrogant assumption that she had a right to an answer.

  I told her that her mother was a hand-maiden of the whore of Babylon and that her father was a wild boar, and then I invited her to fuck off. Since I told her all this in Spanish, she simply grinned some more and walked away, to find someone who would understand her stupid questions. I watched her go with a feeling of accomplishment: my Spanish was improving all the time.

  As I watched her, I took a long look around for someone else, someone whom I thought just might have shown up, but I saw no one, save Reis, the principal, the TV cameraman, the reporters and the undertakers.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Prim, ‘Let’s go along to Pubol.’

  We drove the half-kilometre or so, and had a snack in the bar where I had sat last with Fortunato and with a stunned Shirley Gash. We were the only people there for a while, then an English family arrived, dad, mum and two loud, overindulged kids, over for half-term at the villa, as they announced to the owner.

  I waited for a little longer, in case I caught sight of someone else, but eventually, we headed back to L’Escala, to devote more time to our expanding business.

  The growing work-list was done on time, good and full reports were submitted to our clients, and invoices were prepared. It was good, healthy, stimulating activity, and as it proceeded, Prim seemed to recover from her shock over Adrian’s death, and possibly from delayed reaction to our encounters with the remains of Eames and Starr.

  But for my part, I went through life as if I was in a bubble of unreality. Captain Fortunato had gone back to his office to wait for nothing to happen. Prim, even if she might be a little strange and distant, seemed to be
putting the bizarre events behind us. Shirley Gash, who returned from England on the Friday after Starr’s funeral, came to us for dinner next day with her grief under control.

  Looking at them across the table, making their small talk, I saw them suddenly as someone had once noticed some people on a famous football pitch. They thought it was all over. I knew it wasn’t.

  I went back to Pubol three times in the week after Ronnie Starr’s funeral. Once, I told Prim that I was going to make sure that Reis was all right. On the other occasions I simply went, unannounced. Each time, I sat in the bar, looking at the street outside. Each time I paid my money and I went into Gala’s castle, into her garden, with its weird animals, into the garage, where the Cadillac stood on view to the tourists, roped off again as if it still had contained only one body in its lifetime, and into the Delma, where the stuffed giraffe and the statuary still stood guard over her lonely tomb, and over the redundant slab beside it.

  I was looking for someone, but I never really expected to find him. Rather, I hoped that he would find me, but that didn’t happen either. Eventually, leaving an empty feeling, my certainty began to slip away.

  There were only three days left before Prim and I were due to fly back to Scotland for my dad’s wedding, when at last I found the key. It was Tuesday morning, and Shirley had taken Prim to Girona to buy a dress for Saturday. I was sitting at the table on the balcony working alone on a report, when the thought fired itself like a bullet into my brain.

  My wallet was in my jacket in the wardrobe. I rushed into the bedroom, and searched through it until I found the business card that Adrian Ford had given me, just after he had finished cleaning my clock at the snooker table.