As Easy as Murder

Five

Pals was quiet next day, so I didn’t have to muscle my way into a starting time. In fact the club superintendent was very pleased to see us, even more so when Jonny showed him his European PGA membership card. These days pros are offered the courtesy of the course by most good golf clubs around the world; it’s only a few, the nineteenth-century relics, the sort that still don’t admit women as members, that won’t allow them to play.

When I tee-ed off at the first, it was for the sake of appearance; I hadn’t meant to play all the way round, but the boys insisted. As it turned out I’d have been bored if I hadn’t, for Uche was meticulous in calculating the yardage for each shot, using the course guide and flag placement chart that the starter had given us, so that he could give Jonny the right club every time. I know the caddie is a team player, but I hadn’t appreciated until then that it was a practice round for him as much as for his boss.

Although I’d watched Jonny hit a few hundred balls by that time, it wasn’t until then, until I saw him in the context of my home course, that I realised how long he was. I’d played with his grandfather and his uncle often enough, and they could send it out a fair distance, especially Oz, but Jonny, he seemed to be knocking it into another province.

‘It’s not only about distance,’ Uche replied, when I remarked upon this, as we set off down the long par five eighth after another rifling tee shot. . Jonny’s not mine; that one had gone a hundred and twenty metres. ‘It’s about hitting it the same distance every time with each club in the bag, and it’s about accuracy.’

‘And how good is Jonny at that?’

‘He’s up there with the best. The trouble is, there are a hell of a lot more of the best than there used to be.’ He grinned. ‘They’re in for a shock this week, though. We’ve arrived.’

‘You think he’ll make the cut all right?’

‘I know he will. I’ve been watching the other guys on the practice range. We weren’t out of place there. We’re going to make money.’ He smiled. ‘Ninety per cent to Jonny, ten per cent to me; I’ve got a real interest in giving him the right club every time.’

‘Is that after this Brush character has taken his twenty per cent?’

Uche shook his head as we stopped at my ball. Jonny’s was miles ahead; he was standing twenty metres away, engrossed in the yardage chart. ‘Nope. Mr Donnelly isn’t on the course, so he doesn’t earn there. His commission comes from all the ancillary deals he does.’

I hit a fairway club in more or less the right direction; when it stopped it still hadn’t caught up with my nephew’s. I glanced at him, noting the logos on his clothing. The boy was a walking sales pitch.

‘He’s got some good sponsors,’ I said. ‘Do all young players turn pro with that sort of backing?’

‘Some do. For example, there’s a young American guy who was on the college circuit with us until a year ago. He looks like a rainbow on legs. But most of them? No, they need private money behind them, someone to stake them, and to carry the losses they’re going to make. . and quite possibly never recover them.’

‘So why has Donnelly done so well for Jonny? Yes, he played in the Walker Cup, but so did quite a few other guys, and I haven’t seen anyone else from our team lighting up the circuit. I know he’s good, but I’m biased; I’m his aunt. Those badges he’s wearing, they’re all top companies. How did this man Brush get them on board when he hasn’t even hit a shot yet, professionally?’

We’d reached my ball. I pulled out another club and clipped it forward again. A good one: another like that and I’d be on the green. As I set off towards my playing partner’s tee shot. . I read a distance marker on the fairway and worked out that he’d hit it two hundred and eighty-two metres. . I sensed an unusual hesitancy in his caddie.

‘Come on,’ I insisted. ‘No bullshit. How did he do it? Or is all this for show? Has Jonny just bought the gear?’

‘Work it out,’ Uche whispered. ‘It’s not just what he can do, it’s who he is.’ He left me gazing after him as he stepped towards his pro. ‘Take a little off a three metal,’ he called out, ‘rather than a five. You want to hit it low. We’re sheltered down here; you don’t know for sure what the wind’s doing above those trees. Watch for the bunker front right, otherwise it’s a clear approach.’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ Jonny replied. ‘I may need that shot a lot this week.’

As he took the club he was handed, and surveyed the distant flag, I lined up a few things myself, in my head. The fact that he was Oz Blackstone’s nephew was, it seemed, still a highly sellable attribute. And why shouldn’t it be? I realised. I, of all people, ought to have known that.

Oz might have been dead, but his career was still alive. He’d had three posthumous movie releases, all hits, including the one he’d been working on when he’d done that last fatal stunt. That, of course, had lent it added marketability, even if the last few scenes had been shot in shadow with a body double and his lines voiced over by an impersonator. Then there were DVDs; some of his films, most notably the cricket blockbuster Red Leather, had done huge business in that format, and sales showed no signs of slowing. On top of that the download market was just beginning to take off, and was being exploited very well by his near genius agent, Roscoe Brown. Yes, my late ex was still very big business, and consequently, anything to do with him just had to smell of money.

I knew all this, because I see the figures, twice a year. I didn’t believe for a second that Oz foresaw his own early death, but he’d have been crazy not to have made a will, and he was more calculatingly sane than anyone I’ve ever known. Apart from individual bequests to his nephews, and a tithe that went to a small charitable foundation administered by Roscoe, his estate had been divided equally between his three children, Tom, and his two by Susie, Janet and ‘wee Jonathan’. That split applied equally to all future income; ten per cent to the foundation, thirty per cent each to the three kids. The money was all tied up in trusts, a complicated structure put together by some very expensive accountants, and the will specified that the trustees should be ‘the children’s legal guardians’. I don’t believe that he envisaged me being one of those when he signed off on it, but that’s the way it had panned out: another reason why Susie and I should stay on good terms, whatever the rest of the Blackstone family thought of her.

For all that Tom and I go on about careers, the fact is that my son will never have to do a day’s work in his life, unless he chooses. He doesn’t know that, though; nor does anyone else outside our tight little family group. The last thing I want is for him to grow up complacent, or worse, under the constant eye of a bodyguard.

Jonny hit his three, with a little off. I couldn’t see exactly where it finished, but the boys seemed satisfied. Their eyes were twenty years younger than mine, after all. We walked forward to my ball, I hit another fairway metal. . Mac still calls them woods, for some reason. . into the middle of the green, not too far from the pin. We took two putts each; birdie four for Jonny, bogey six for me, a result, since I was getting a shot at the par three holes, two at the par fours and three at the par fives. Eight holes played and I was only three down, not at all bad, since my ‘opponent’ was four under par at the time.

I must explain that I don’t regard life as a competition. I’ve always hated being idle, and if I see something to be done I’ll do it: for example, the tourist information service that I set up in my early days in St Martí. However, I’ve never felt the need to be better, only to be as good as I can. I was that way when I was nursing, to the extent that some people thought I was pushy. In truth the person I was really pushing was myself, but if I saw someone with a laissez-faire attitude to standards, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. As a mother, I don’t care how Tom compares with the rest of his school class, only that he does his best. (Mind you, she added smugly, that’s pretty damn good.)

All that changes when I step on to a golf course.

There I become the most competitive bitch you will ever see. Even Shirley says that my talons come out as soon as someone puts a score card in my hand, or as soon as a match-play opponent tees off. Not even my son is exempt from this. I don’t swear or chuck clubs when he’s around, but when we play for real, other than for fun, as we do more and more, the older he gets, I Do Not Let Him Win! (More often than not, he does anyway; if my evil side didn’t dematerialise as soon as the last putt drops, or misses, as is often the case, he’d have gone to bed without any supper many a night.)

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.’

‘What would you do normally?’

‘I’d pick him up.’

‘Then why do differently in his case?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you.’

I decided to be difficult; I was doing Alex a big favour, and I wasn’t having him go all coy on me. ‘Why?’ I persisted.

He paused, as if he was having trouble explaining his motivation, even to himself. ‘I suppose it’s the fact that you went along, even for a little while, with his wish that you didn’t report the incident. You’re my close friend and you know that what he asked you was irregular. You hardly know this man, and yet he persuaded you to go against what I know to be your instincts. That makes me wonder whether there’s more to him than it appears. So, do you know something about him?’

I was boxed in, firmly; I couldn’t prevaricate any longer, even suppose it had been Hector Gomez who’d been quizzing me, rather than Alex. ‘Honest answer, no,’ I told him. ‘He told me the first time we met that he’s a retired British civil servant.’

‘But. .?’

‘No buts. That’s what he is.’

He grinned at me. ‘So you checked. I knew you would.’ He paused. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll start smoking again myself if I have to spend much longer in this man’s company.’

We slipped out of the tent, back into the clearing. Magda had gone, leaving only a couple of crime scene officers, who appeared to be searching the area, square centimetre by square centimetre, looking for … anything that didn’t belong there, I supposed. I looked around and saw Hector Gomez, leaning against a tree, taking a long drag on what would not have been his first cigarette.

‘So,’ Alex continued, his tone questioning, once more, ‘I can tell the boss we should pick up Mr Cowling and interview him formally? That’s what you think?’

Bugger! was actually what I thought. Not what I said, though. ‘I think that Patterson was a victim of an attempted crime,’ I replied, a little testily. ‘I don’t see what you’d gain by interviewing him other than ticking a couple of boxes.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ he countered. ‘There is that connection between him and the victim, and Shirley’s house is no more than a couple of kilometres from here.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Alex,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s ridiculous. Quite apart from being a pleasant, peaceable human being, the man is portly and pushing seventy. He’s not Daniel bloody Craig or Jason bloody Statham.’

‘You don’t have to be, to rip someone open with a shotgun.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ I snapped in English, even more exasperated. ‘Go ahead then, pick him up and clamp electrodes to his testicles, or whatever it is that you guys do. But you’ll still get no more good from it than those same ticked boxes. On the other hand, you have no idea of the shit you might bring down on yourself!’

As soon as I’d said it, I knew that I’d underestimated my friend. He didn’t need to electrify people to get results. All he needed was quiet, indirect cross-examination for them to eventually tell him everything they knew. . or in the case of me and Patterson Cowling, didn’t know.

‘Indeed?’ he murmured. ‘And where would that fall from?’

‘Look, Alex,’ I sighed. ‘I’m not going to spell it out to you, because nobody spelled it out to me. You do what you believe you have to do, or whatever Hector orders you to do, but look out for yourself at the same time.’

‘We will,’ he promised. ‘Hector doesn’t even know about Mr Cowling’s connection with the dead man. All I told him was that the scar and the gold tooth made me think of your report and Tom’s description. From what you say, there’ll be no harm done to anyone if I leave it that way.’

‘Good.’ I glanced at my watch. Time was getting tight; I had to pick Jonny up from Pals and get back to L’Escala for five. ‘Can I go now?’

‘Sure. Thanks for your help, for all of it. There’s an artist I know who lives near here and isn’t squeamish. I’ll ask him to do a sketch from a photograph and bring it round for Tom to look at. We should go too; we need to get as much manpower as we can to organise a wider search of the area in case the dead man’s clothing, and maybe even the murder weapon, was dumped somewhere near.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’

‘Not at all. But I need to get Hector out of here as well. He’s not as tough as he pretends, and at the rate he’s smoking, he’s liable to set the forest on fire.’