The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  As far as the demise of the Portuguese was concerned, the coroner recorded an open verdict, and the police began a very slow and inefficient investigation. The Justice authorities concentrated their attention on his laptop and the address book. They were more interested in Rodrigo’s life than his death. It transpired that he had no traceable descendants.

  SEVEN

  Sunday, April 13th, 2008

  Marbella, Spain

  At 7:00 am, before his golf game, Charlie Bishop walked up the stone staircase to the lake on the land above his house to throw some fish food onto the water. After he and Ellen had finished building the house about five years ago, they’d held a garden party for almost two hundred people. Cecilia, a friend from the golf club, brought as a gift, three tiny goldfish in a plastic bag full of water. When they put them into the lake, he never imagined that in a few years he’d be feeding fifty or sixty enormous carp. Blue, gold, red, silver, white, these beautiful fish just kept on growing and reproducing year after year.

  Nature is an amazing thing, he reflected. Eat, shit and have sex. Nothing else to do, I suppose, if you’re stuck in a garden pond.

  The lake was fed with fresh water by a stream which meandered down the slope of the upper garden area towards the house from a natural spring near the perimeter wall, a hundred metres higher. A series of waterfalls and ponds broke the stream’s course, each one raucous with the sound of dozens of frogs, calling to each other, day and night.

  I’ve become a breeder of carp and frogs. Could be a new business opportunity. A retirement project.

  Charlie went up to the very top of the garden where the spring had been tapped to feed the stream. There were even some smaller fish in the top pond. He wondered how on earth they got up there. He looked down over the gardens, full of flowering plants, eucalyptus trees, bushes and many varieties of palm trees. A large part of the western side had been planted with fruit trees and left in an unkempt state, like the old fashioned orchard they’d had at the previous house. It was a bright, clear morning and from his vantage point he could see over the gardens to the swimming pool, and beyond the pool, across the golf course to the Mediterranean.

  He remembered vividly the first time he and Ellen had come here. The hillside had been marked out in parcelas, lots, of about two thousand square metres each. They had scrambled up from the bottom of the hill all the way to the top, through bushes, scrub, undergrowth and trees. They weren’t dressed for mountain climbing and arrived at the top of the small wilderness breathless, hot and dusty, scratches on their bare legs. Charlie looked over the uncultivated hillside at the view below. The golf course was already open and a hotel was under construction with a few villas being built around it. The main perimeter wall was being erected and there was a temporary guard house, with a security man already installed.

  “Let’s buy it, Ellen.”

  “Which plot do you have in mind?”

  “The whole hillside!”

  That was seven years ago. Once the main house was under way, about half way down the hill, Charlie turned his attention to the land above. He flattened out a plateau above the level of the house that would accommodate several short golf holes and a small lake. He hired a tractor and brought it onto the top of the land, sat in it and released the handbrake, letting the tractor find its own way down the line of gravity. When he reached the plateau he looked back up the hill. The tractor had marked out the line for a stream to run down the hill.

  It took almost two years to finish the house, the gardens, the lake, the waterfalls. Then…Ellen disappeared from his life the following year.

  I was still a young man when we built this house. Hardly sixty. What happened? Charlie suddenly felt very old. He strolled back down the long staircase to the pool, mounted the top step and threw off his bath robe. Under the robe he was naked, because neither Juan, the gardener, nor Leticia, the housekeeper, worked on a Sunday. So at least once a week he got to enjoy the feeling of warm fresh water against his skin, without the sight of his sixty-eight year-old body being the cause of any domestic upheaval.

  Like everything else about Charlie’s property, the pool was very large and the water was pleasantly heated. But he never swam for longer than ten minutes, just enough to freshen him up for his golf game, tee-off at eight thirty. Since the triple bypass he didn’t dive anymore, but he pushed himself down and swam a circuit of the pool, returning to the shallow water by the steps. He did this a couple of times, doing a flat breast stroke with his face in the water, stretching his shoulders and chest, as the physiotherapist had advised. Got the blood running through his system, lifting his head out of the water to breathe deeply between strokes.

  He surfaced at the edge of the pool, rubbed the slight prickle of oxidised water from his eyes and ran his hands through his still thick, curly hair. He heard a soft voice behind him. “Good morning, Charlie.”

  He stiffened and let out a deep breath. “What? Who’s that?” he rasped, “What the hell is..?” He looked up to see a hand, gripping a short cudgel aimed at his head. He had no time to react, the weapon caught him exactly on the temple above the right eye and he fell back onto the steps. The intruder grabbed hold of Charlie’s head and carefully banged it against the tiled edge of the pool exactly on the mark of the wound, then let the limp body slip back to drown in ninety centimetres of crystal clear water. There was virtually no blood, but after a few minutes the dark rinse from Charlie’s hair began to colour the water brown.

  The intruder looked carefully around, then walked up the staircase to the terrace level and slipped into the house by the kitchen door. After about thirty minutes, he re-emerged and climbed the staircase alongside the stream and the waterfalls to the top of the garden. Stepping onto a tree branch, he slipped over the wall where it became the perimeter wall, surrounded by the forest and out of sight of the security cameras. He walked carefully through the trees to his waiting car and drove out by the unguarded dirt track at the rear of the urbanisation. Turning back onto the main road several kilometres further along, he headed down to access the highway, on his way to Malaga.

  Without a sound, a creature emerged from the flowering bushes that surrounded the end of the pool and leaped down from the decorative wall onto the tiled surface. The long haired cat crept forward and crouched by the steps. Its thick, lustrous fur was jet black, only the tip of the tail marked with a white flash. Stretching its head towards the water the animal lapped up some of the fresh liquid, its pink tongue flicking in and out. Its huge green eyes seemed to be fixed on the body hanging in the water in front of it. After refreshing itself, the cat strolled back to leap up onto the wall and disappear into the spacious garden.

  The sun was already warm in the Costa del Sol. Another beautiful day had begun.

  At nine fifteen, Charlie’s body was found floating by Juan, who had come in on his day off to water the upper gardens. He managed to pull the eighty-five kilos dead weight out of the water and tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate his employer. Then he called the security service and Leticia, the housekeeper, on his mobile phone.

  The local security guard arrived within a few minutes and also vainly attempted to revive the body. The housekeeper arrived ten minutes later, followed by a green car with two Guardia Civil officers. Then two officers of the Policia Nacional drove up, accompanied by an ambulance. The police took statements from the two servants and the security guard and looked at the body. There was a tiny fragment of blue mosaic tile on the wound. They found a corresponding smudge on the edge of the pool. The investigation seemed conclusive.

  The body was taken to the morgue in Marbella, laid out on a slab and pushed in the freezer. A report was sent to the Comisaría of the Policía Nacional in Malaga.

  EIGHT

  Monday, April 14th 2008

  Ipswich, England

  At three thirty in the afternoon, UK time, Jenny Bishop was in the kitchen preparing a pot of tea when she received a phone call from a Sergeant Harris, the duty officer
with the local police in Ipswich. He asked to speak to her husband, Ronald Bishop.

  Jenny went into a blind panic. “What the hell are you talking about?” she shouted into the phone. “Is this a practical joke? My husband passed away last December. You’re supposed to be looking for his murderer, not making stupid phone calls.”

  The policeman was apologetic. He wasn’t aware of Ron’s death, he’d only been with the Ipswich force for a few weeks. He explained that they’d been contacted by the Malaga police department. Ronald Bishop was registered with the Spanish authorities as the nearest of kin to a Mr. Charlie Bishop. He was sorry to report that he had apparently died from an accident in his pool in Marbella the previous morning.

  Jenny’s mind went numb at this news. Charlie’s dead, so soon after Ron, she registered. Suddenly, she couldn’t think any more, she couldn’t continue with the conversation. “I just told you that my husband is no longer here, so I don’t see how this concerns me.”

  The officer apologised again and said he’d call back when he’d made further enquiries.

  Jenny put the phone down. She was in a cold sweat. It was three months since she’d had to discuss Ron’s death on the phone with anyone. It was hard to continually face up to the fact that she’d been widowed at the age of thirty-six by a hit and run driver. It was even harder to get up every morning, knowing that there was a murderer out there who had knocked down her husband and left him dying in the street like an animal and then disappeared into the night.

  She sat in the living room with a cup of tea and tried to practise the deep breathing and calming thoughts that were getting her through therapy since Ron’s death. Four months later and she still couldn’t sleep without a sedative. The empty bed at her side was a constant reminder of his absence and she missed the feel and the smell of him next to her. Every night as she lay there, waiting for the unconscious state induced by the sleeping pill, she would relive the day of Ron’s death, searching for answers. Then after finally falling asleep, her mind would be invaded by vivid, frightening dreams, until she awoke, exhausted, in a sweat. Her mother was reputed to have a kind of sixth sense, dreaming of events before they occurred and from a few similar experiences it seemed that Jenny had inherited this gift, or curse. But now her dreams were not of future happenings, but of past events. Unhappy, black dreams, ending in frightening scenarios, which, fortunately, her memory failed to retain when she awoke.

  Two years ago Ron had gone through his ‘silly season’, having an affair with a young secretary at the garage. When Jenny was told about it, typically by her best friend Audrey at the tennis club, she went into a rare rage and rushed home to confront him.

  She screamed insults at him when she saw from his face that it was true. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, making us both look like idiots in front of our friends? Am I so bloody repulsive that you can’t keep your hands off the office girls?”

  After he confessed and swore that it would never be repeated, she went out with Cooper, her six year old Westie. It was a warm, clear night and as they walked along by the river, Jenny realised it wasn’t the end of the world. Ron provided for her well and apart from his occasional childish moods he was a good husband. He didn’t deserve to be kicked out because of a twenty year-old tease who wanted to brag to her friends about sleeping with the boss.

  Jenny had spent four years tutoring difficult youngsters at the Teesside Secondary School in Sunderland and she had soon learned that it paid to tackle problems head on and not avoid them so that they returned later on in a more virulent form. She went home and gave Ron a severe talking-to as if he was an unruly adolescent, and it worked. She never heard any more of the matter. Life got back to normal and it was fine.

  But now it was no longer fine. It was horrible and miserable and lonely and there seemed to be no end to it. Will it be like this until they find his killer? She had to force herself not to keep thinking about his death on a dark street, on a wet and cold night, his body left broken and bleeding, to be found by a young woman cyclist who almost ran right over it. Poor thing. What a sight to discover on a dark night.

  It was ten days before Christmas, the saddest and most unhappy Christmas she had ever spent. The funeral had been on the day they were due to fly off to Dubai, to get away from the freezing weather in Ipswich. Afterwards, Cyril, Ron’s salesman, had arranged with the travel company to refund the cost of the holiday. As if that was any consolation. She had gone through the New Year in a daze, impervious to the activity around her, hardly stirring out of doors except to walk Cooper. He seemed to miss Ron too.

  Now, he jumped up onto her lap and she stroked him absentmindedly, thinking about the phone call. An unknown voice telling her that Charlie had died, in his swimming pool, thousands of miles away in Spain. She had only met him four times in her life and although he was Ron’s father, she didn’t like him. And now he was dead, so soon after her husband. By another fatal accident. She shivered. Father and son, both killed in accidents, she thought. A strange coincidence. Maybe. Jenny didn’t believe in coincidences. Everything happened for a purpose.

  Ron had adored Ellen, his mother, but he said he’d never been at ease living with his father, leaving for England as soon as he left school. He hadn’t talked much about him, or his background. There seemed to be something there that he didn’t want to discuss and she had never pressed the point. Then after the wedding, although his mother had visited frequently, Charlie had never been to see them. And she and Ron had been together to his house only for the housewarming party and then sadly, just a year later, for Ellen’s funeral.

  The only other time that Jenny had seen Charlie was in December, when he came over for Ron’s funeral. He seemed to her to be greatly diminished from their previous meetings. He was a large, imposing man and she had always thought him rather arrogant, fit and in control of things, seeming younger than his age. But suddenly she saw an old man, worn out by a heart condition and the loss of his wife and son in just a few short years.

  “I don’t know what to say, Jenny. You don’t deserve this, nobody deserves it. I’m so terribly sorry.” For the first time she saw Charlie cry. He hadn’t cried at Ellen’s funeral, but now his wife and his only son were gone. Jenny hadn’t produced any grandchildren, so for him it was the end of his whole family. He wasn’t crying for her. She didn’t figure in it, she wasn’t a Bishop. Even though she had lost her husband it was Charlie who had suffered the greatest loss. His relationship with his son had never been easy but he must have loved him a great deal.

  Although Christmas was just a week away, he left on the day after the funeral, telling her that he would be there if she needed him. But she knew that he was just saying the words. He was returning to his home in Spain, truly alone in the world, and that was the way he would continue. It seemed that Charlie had never easily made friends and it was now too late to start.

  “Goodbye, Jenny. Look after yourself.”

  “Goodbye, Charlie, you take care too.”

  After half an hour, the officer called back. Jenny was calmer and he was gentle and understanding. “I’m only ten minutes away by car. Why don’t I pop around and we can sort this matter out? It seems to be a bit complicated.”

  She went upstairs to change into a skirt and blouse and was at the door when the bell rang a few minutes later.

  Sergeant Harris was a big, bluff, old fashioned looking police officer with kindly brown eyes and a little sandy moustache. Jenny decided he was probably what is described as a ‘gentle giant’, a big, soft teddy bear. He was accompanied by a female PC, about half his size, wearing a smart cap over her short, tinted blonde hair. She hardly looked old enough to be a police officer, chewing gum and carrying a red file embossed with the police department motif, labelled Charles W. Bishop, Marbella. They sat in the lounge and both accepted a cup of tea.

  One more cup won’t kill me, Jenny thought as she carried the tray into the room. Cooper jumped up on the settee beside the policeman,
who stroked him affectionately.

  “Officer Dawson is here to, er, provide company and comfort.” The policeman coughed apologetically. “It’s standard police procedure in the case of advising a death in the family.”

  “Tracy will do fine,” the policewoman said. “We don’t want to be too formal, do we?”

  Diplomatically, the sergeant didn’t quiz her about Ron’s death. He mentioned that he’d only been in Ipswich for a few months, but she surmised that he must have been brought up to date by the other members of the force. The traumatic events crowded back into Jenny’s mind.

  A futile inquest resulting in an open verdict.

  An unsolved death, hidden in a dossier ten inches thick, with no answers.

  A murderer, still at large, with the death of her husband on his conscience.

  She jumped slightly when he suddenly broke the silence.

  “Well, Mrs. Bishop,” he began rather formally, putting aside his tea-cup.

  “Call me Jenny, it’s what everyone calls me,” she interrupted, from force of habit.

  “OK, right then, Jenny. Anyway, the thing is, it seems from everything we can find out that you are now the only surviving relative of Mr. Charles Bishop. Were you aware of this?”

  Jenny realised this could well be true. Ron was an only child, and his mother had died four years before. Perhaps because he’d been born in Spain, she’d somehow never thought about any relatives in the UK and he had never mentioned any, apart from his grandparents who had passed away before she met him. And now it seemed that there were none to disclose.

  “Can you think of any other family?” PC Dawson helped her by listing the possible relationships in order. First, on Charlie’s side. No uncles that she’d heard of, but an aunt, yes. She recalled that he had an older unmarried sister who had died in a nursing home that he had paid for. A surprisingly out of character, generous gesture, she thought. Or maybe she had just never bothered to find the real person behind the tough, rather distant façade. Who could tell?