As Easy as Murder (11 page)

Buoyed by my win on the eighth, I headed for the next tee with undiminished determination and new hope. Three down, sure, but ten holes left and a generous shot concession coming my way, I wasn’t out of it: par three at the next, win it with my shot and maybe Jonny would start to get rattled.

I was still thinking that way as we walked forward to red tees . . . okay, I was playing a shorter course than him, but he’s a pro . . . despite him having knocked an eight iron to within a couple of metres of the target, when my phone vibrated in my pocket. (Any attempt to ban the things from courses in Spain will be doomed to failure.)

I dug it out, in case it was Tom: most of my calls and messages are from him. But it wasn’t.

‘Primavera.’ Alex Guinart was using his ‘all business’ voice, one I’d heard very rarely. ‘Where are you?’

I told him, in my own ‘all business’ voice. He isn’t much of a golfer, but he and I play occasionally, so he knew what he was interrupting. I assumed that he’d ask me to call him back once I was finished, but I was wrong. ‘I need you,’ he said.

‘Darling,’ I replied archly, loudly enough for the guys’ eyebrows to rise, ‘many men have said that, but damn few have set me running.’

He wasn’t in a joking mood. ‘I’m not kidding. This is urgent.’

I felt a quick pulse of panic raced through me. ‘Is something wrong with Tom?’

‘No. Not at all. It’s nothing like that, but I would appreciate your help.’

I sighed, out of frustration. ‘I’m on the verge of something big here, chum; but for you . . . ahh, where are you?’

‘I’m in L’Escala, almost. Do you know a street called Vall d’Aran?’

‘Near Shirley’s house? Yes.’

‘That’s the one. I want you to go there, right to the end to where the woods begin. One of our people will meet you there and bring you to me.’

‘We’re on the ninth, Alex. It’ll take me the best part of an hour.’

‘I appreciate that. As soon as you can, please.’

I was gutted; the hot blood of competition was still flowing
through my veins. But when the cops, even the friendly ones, invite you seriously to help with their enquiries, it’s best not to decline. When I told them I had to go, the boys assumed that their day was done too, but I told them to carry on. ‘If I’m not back by the time you finish,’ I said, ‘wait for me in the clubhouse. Mine’s a spritzer.’

‘What’s all this about?’ Jonny asked.

‘I have no idea,’ I confessed. I hadn’t bothered to ask. I knew that for my friend to call me in the way he did, it had to be as urgent as he’d said, but there was no point in fretting on the way there. I’d deal with it when I came face to face with whatever it was.

It took me a little less than that hour, thanks to a helpful course ranger, who gave me and my clubs a lift back to the car park in his buggy. I called Alex before I set out, with a new estimate of my arrival time. Sure enough, when I made my way up Carrer Bassegoda and along Vall d’Aran, I saw a Mossos vehicle at the road end, with a uniformed woman officer, a local that I recognised, leaning against it.

I parked behind her, a little way from the last house in the street; its presumptuous owner had tried to put a little distance between himself and the general public by constructing a makeshift barrier of stones and felled branches, but the cop had ignored it and driven her Nissan straight over it. The guy was glowering at her through the bars of his gate, but whatever he was thinking, he was smart enough to keep to himself.

‘This way,’ my escort instructed, making her way down a slope and taking a path that led into the woods, assuming that I would
follow. Her name was Magda, and I read the fact that she didn’t seem in the mood for chat as a further indication that Alex had not asked me along to show me a new species of mushroom that he’d discovered.

We hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred yards before we reached, and crossed, the unmarked track that is the boundary between the townships of L’Escala-Empuriès and Torroella de Montgri-L’Estartit, to give them their formal and imposing Catalan names. More cops, six of them, mingled in front of a derelict stone building. They were municipals; two from L’Escala and four from the other side, I reckoned from their badges. They didn’t seem to be doing much, but I wondered as we passed them if a turf war was looming.

That seemed less likely the further we walked through the thickening woods, and the further we left L’Escala behind. My assumption was that they were there to keep the public away. But from what?

‘How much further?’ I asked Magda, but she still wasn’t for chatting.

After half a mile or so, the track forked in two, and we bore left. I was becoming disorientated, glad I had company, and wondering how many people had wandered into those woods over the years, to become missing person statistics. Then, suddenly, we were in unfettered sunlight once again, in a wide circular clearing. There was a green signpost in the middle, with four route markers, each pointing at a different gap in the trees, including the one from which we had just emerged.

There was something else there too, a big, square, white tent.
Alex Guinart was waiting outside it; he was wearing a blue disposable crime scene one-piece. ‘So, it’s not the annual Mossos barbecue,’ I said. ‘And that isn’t to keep the sun off the wine.’

‘No.’ It wasn’t him who replied, but another man, identically dressed, who stepped out of the enclosure just as I spoke. I hadn’t seen Intendant Hector Gomez, Alex’s boss in the criminal investigation division, for a couple of years, not since he and I had stood on each other’s toes in a very messy business that I’d been sucked into. My friend had assured me that everything was square between us, and that there were no hard feelings on the cop’s side, but I’d never heard that from him.

‘Good afternoon, Primavera.’ So far so good; first-name terms. He didn’t smile, but the environment wasn’t exactly mirth-provoking, so I didn’t hold that against him.

‘And to you, Hector,’ I replied. ‘Now, will one of you guys please tell me why you hauled me off the golf course and brought me here?’

‘We need you to look at something,’ Gomez volunteered.

‘Something?’ I repeated, with heavy verbal underlining.

‘It is now,’ Alex muttered, the first sign of anything approaching levity.

‘Do I have an option here?’

‘Of course you do,’ the intendant insisted. ‘We’d ask very few people to do this, only those we think have the stomach for it. But if you’d rather not, we’ll understand.’

I held out a hand. ‘Gimme,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘One of those paper suits; I assume you want me to wear one.’

He smiled, for about half a second. ‘Yes. Thank you.’ He snapped his fingers, and pointed; Magda picked a fresh tunic from a pile on the ground and handed it to me. ‘We’re usually right about people,’ he added. He hadn’t been a couple of years before, but I let that go unsaid.

I got myself inside the garment, feeling like a Smurf as I fastened it and tucked my hair inside the hood. I’d worn sterile clothing often enough as a nurse to know that anything left uncovered can make the exercise effectively useless. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘lead on.’

Gomez glanced at Alex. ‘You do it. I need a cigarette, to clear my nostrils.’

That didn’t add to the party atmosphere either, but by that time I knew they had a real good one for me. A good what? Well, let me put it this way. It doesn’t matter where you are, when the local criminal investigators arrive and put up a tent, you know pretty much what’s inside it. The only matter in doubt is its condition.

The specimen they had summoned me there to view was in pretty bad nick. It was male, it was white, it was naked, it was dead, and it wasn’t surprising that Gomez had wanted a Marlboro after spending some time with it. It wasn’t easy to tell what had happened to the man, for animals had been at him, and maybe birds too, but my guess was that he had been shot, a couple of times, with a shotgun or something very like one, at close range. The abdomen had been ripped open, and most of the intestines had spilled out or had been torn out by predators. The face was a real mess too; in truth, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left of it. There was so much blood and other matter in the hair that it was difficult to tell what colour it was. Whoever had killed him had taken everything from
him, and not just his clothing. He wore no jewellery, but there was a very faint circle round his left wrist; he hadn’t sported much of a suntan, but enough for a watch to have made the skin beneath it slightly paler than the rest.

‘How long has he been there?’ I asked.

‘At least one full day, probably not two, the pathologist says, but he’s still guessing at this stage.’

‘Who found him?’

Alex winced. ‘A group of schoolkids from Torroella, out on an orienteering day with their teachers.’

‘Jeez! That’ll be the talk of the playground for a while. I assume that they didn’t take his clothes as souvenirs.’

‘No. That’s how he was found.’

‘Why strip him?’

‘Hector and I believe that it was to make him difficult to identify. It’s no big task to trace someone through clothing labels and bar codes. He may have been shot in the face for the same reason.’

That pushed my scepticism button. ‘So you don’t know what he looked like and you don’t know where he shopped. Whoever killed him left you his hands, though; you’ve got fingerprints.’

‘Yes we have,’ Alex agreed, ‘but that could indicate that whoever killed him doesn’t expect us to find anything that way. However, you say that we don’t know what he looked like. That’s why you’re here. Parts of the face are still intact; we’d like you to take a look at them and tell us what you think.’

‘Specifically?’

‘The chin and the mouth.’

‘Okay.’ I crouched down beside the corpse, leaning forward, as close to it as I could get. The sun was high and clear above the tent and more than enough light came through its fabric for me to see clearly. I stared at the wreckage for a couple of minutes, puzzled, still with no idea why I was there or what I was supposed to find, until . . . I spotted a mark on the chin. It was blood-smeared, but it was clear to see, a small scar, crescent-shaped. And with it a memory returned and the connection was clear.

The top lip had been shredded and the teeth smashed, but enough remained to let me see that one of them had been gold.

‘You think this is the man who tried to nick Patterson Cowling’s wallet?’ I asked, knowing the answer, but being unsure how to spell ‘rhetorically’.

‘What do you think? The image you gave me isn’t good enough for us to confirm it, but Tom’s description matches.’

‘Fine, but I didn’t see him that closely. I can’t say “This is the man”, not categorically.’

‘Maybe not, but Tom . . .’

‘No!’ I snapped. ‘A thousand times no. You are not asking Tom to look at that.’

He held up both hands, as if to fend me off. ‘Primavera, Primavera! What do you take us for? I wouldn’t dream of doing that, and neither would the boss. But we thought that if we showed him a sketch of the scar, a drawing, and he said that it matches, that would be enough for us to take to the prosecutor’s office and get authority for a search that goes beyond criminal records.’

I considered the request for a while. ‘Okay,’ I agreed, eventually. ‘You can do that. But you better come up with a cover story, a
reason why you’re asking him to do it, other than the real one. I don’t want him even thinking about this mess.’

‘Understood. I’ll tell him that the man’s been found, that’s all, just found, and that rather than have Tom look at a line-up, all we need is for him to confirm that the scar matches what he saw.’

‘I can live with that; technically, it’s the truth, even if it does have holes in it. Get it under way and come to see us this evening.’

‘Will do.’

I was still a wee bit doubtful. ‘Alex,’ I ventured, ‘this wider search. It’ll be pretty futile, won’t it?’

‘Not necessarily. We’ll run the image against all Spanish nationals within a certain age group, looking for a match; also all the white male ex-pats we have on our criminal records. We won’t rule any nationality out,’ he chuckled, ‘for all our boy’s certainty that his man wasn’t any of the usual. We’ll also try immigration if we have to, in the hope that if he is foreign, he arrived in Spain by air. If so, our government will have a record of his passport information.’

‘I have a vision of a whole stack of haystacks and a very small needle,’ I told him, ‘but good luck to you.’

‘We are lucky sometimes.’ Alex grinned, ruefully. ‘Primavera, there’s one other thing,’ he continued. ‘This friend of Shirley’s, the man who asked you not to call us. We should speak to him; the only question is whether we should use discretion. What do you think?’

I stared at him. ‘Why are you asking me?’

‘Because I value your opinion.’

‘That’s flattering; it’s also bullshit. Why should you want to speak to him at all?’

He shrugged. ‘A man tried to rob him, failed, but got away. A couple of days later that man is found dead, killed in a cold and professional way. We have no reports of the guy trying to rob anyone else, so . . . Mr Cowling is of interest to us, it’s clear.’