A Coffin For Two

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 sauce 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 amp; Spencer, so he could be British.’

‘Or French, or Spanish, for M amp;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.

‘Mind you, it’s not usually bodies. Mostly it’s cars. A couple of years ago, we found a Porsche which had ben stolen in Paris a week before. It was dumped inland, around twenty kilometres from where anyone who stole a Porsche in Paris would want to go. When he saw it, one of my guys recognised it as a car he had seen on the beach in Ampuriabrava. The local cops, they had moved it on. It’s the same with this guy.’

Prim shook her head in sympathy. ‘How are you getting on with the Trevor Eames investigation?’

‘About as well as we will get on with this one. The truth is Eames was a smuggler. Last week he was away crewing a boat which was moving drugs from Corsica to the Balearics. He mixed with some very bad people; any one of them could have been mad with him.’

He paused. ‘Maybe you’re lucky you didn’t walk in on them when they caught up with him. Sleep on that thought. Now good night, and I hope that the next time I see you, there are no bodies around. There had better not be!’