A Coffin For Two

49

From the moment the car pulled away, Shirley asked the same question, over and over again.

‘Where are we going?’ she snapped at the driver, in Spanish, until she realised that his silence meant that he had been ordered not to speak to us at all.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked me, in my turn.

I told her, as I had in the villa, ‘We’re going to meet the regional commander of the Guardia Civil. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know where.’

I was pretty certain that I had told her one lie. As the car reached Verges, and turned left towards La Bisbal, I had a feeling that it might be two. When it turned right on to the road for Flaca, La Pera and Pubol, that suspicion hardened.

The driver raced recklessly along the twisting road to La Pera, then swung right. I expected him to stop in the Pubol car park, but he didn’t. Instead, he drove right up to the entrance to Gala’s castle, and screeched to a halt, giving a blast on the horn as he did so.

A green-uniformed officer at the top of the steps which led to the house beckoned to us as we stepped out. The approach was lit, but the building was still in darkness. ‘Round there,’ he said, in Spanish as we reached him, pointing not into the house, but to the garden.

We turned the corner, and saw a blaze of light coming from the garage doorway. Another uniformed policeman stood outside, waving to us to approach.

‘What the ’ell’s going on?’ said Shirley. It was the first time she had spoken in fifteen minutes and she was ready to explode. We stepped inside the garage.

The Cadillac was still there, as it had been on my earlier visits to the castle, only this time the great lid of its cavernous trunk was raised. Captain Fortunato stood beside it. He smiled at me and called out something in Catalan. I stared blankly back at him.

‘Eh?’

‘I said three in a row can be bad luck, Senor. Come here.’

I moved towards him. Shirley followed me, but the detective held up his hand. ‘Not you, Senora,’ he said.

She glared back and kept walking. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she spat. ‘It could be embarrassing. Now what the bloody hell …’

Fortunato shook his head and stepped back, allowing Shirley and me to look into the boot of the Cadillac. I knew it would be him. The man in the photo in the kitchen, the man who had staged the auction, the man who had killed Ronnie Starr to lay his hand on a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of Dali.

I was expecting him. Shirley wasn’t. She looked into the boot and she screamed. Then she turned and went for the Captain, snarling and spitting. She was as tall as he was, and powerful. She flailed at him with both arms, heaving big, sledging blows at him, until he was able to grab her hands and use his man’s strength to restrain her.

I was barely interested in their struggle. I couldn’t drag my attention away from the body in the car. I recognised him by the colour of his eyes and the line of his nose rather than anything else, just as I had in Shirley’s kitchen. Even dead, with three bullet holes in the front of his polo shirt, one right in the centre of the golf club crest, he managed to look ordinary. Fortyish, dark hair greying, medium build, medium everything. The odd thing was that the last time I had seen him, and on every other occasion that we had met, Adrian Ford had been wearing a beard.

‘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.