Fatal Last Words

Fifty-nine

The restaurant was called Cento Venti. ‘I thought Italian was appropriate,’ said Inspector Giarratano as he led the way into the square dining room, not huge, but crammed with tables, of which half were occupied, ‘and this is the best. Is your hotel room OK?’

‘It’s fine, thanks, Michael. I’m sorry I kept you waiting, but I had to check in with Paula. She’s taking this interruption pretty well, and I want to keep it that way. I told her I still plan to be on a plane back to Sydney tomorrow.’

‘What about your other investigation in Edinburgh? How’s that going?’

‘No arrest, and not even the sniff of one, that’s all I know.’

The head waiter appeared before them and showed them to a window table. ‘Would you like a drink?’ Giarratano asked, as the man handed them menus.

‘I’ll try some of that Squire’s Pilsner, if they have it.’ He glanced at the list. ‘As for food, I’ll have spaghetti the way a whore would make it.’ The Australian’s eyes widened; the waiter smiled. ‘Ah,’ said McGuire, ‘so the name’s just for show. You don’t speak the language.’

‘Prego and grazie; that’s my limit,’ the other man admitted. ‘I’ve never been to the northern hemisphere, never mind Italy.’

‘Spaghetti alla puttanesca,’ the Scot explained, ‘or any other sort of pasta for that matter. What I just said is what the name of the sauce means, literally. It originated in Naples, and there are a few theories about why it’s called that. One is that it’s a cheap meal that prostitutes could make quickly, between punters, so to speak. Did you know, by the way, that in Italy, brothels were once state owned, which made the hookers civil servants? This place isn’t too precious to have it on the menu. Some are, or if they do they choose to call it “Pasta alla buona donna”, that’s “Good woman’s pasta” in English, but there’s a lot of irony in that name.’

‘I better have it too,’ Giarratano decided. ‘It’ll give me bragging rights in the office tomorrow.’

The head waiter left, reappearing almost instantly with McGuire’s beer, and with a Victoria Bitter for Giarratano, and explaining that since the sauce was freshly prepared, it would take a few minutes.

‘That’s fine,’ the big DCS told him. ‘That’s the way it should be.’ He took a mouthful of his lager. ‘You weren’t kidding me,’ he declared. ‘This is damn good.’

‘We’re proud of it,’ the inspector replied. ‘Bet you don’t get that in Edinburgh.’

‘No, mostly it’s Fosters.’ He smiled at the reaction. ‘I’m serious. We do; that and four X.’

‘Edinburgh’s pretty cosmopolitan, is it?’

‘Very. I’m a walking example; the half of me that isn’t Italian is Irish.’

‘But which are you, mostly?’

‘Actually, I’m entirely Scottish. I was born there and brought up there. My parents were both second generation. My Italian grandmother’s still alive; Nana Viareggio, a fearsome old lady.’

‘Didn’t you say your partner’s name was Viareggio?’

‘It is. We’re cousins; her dad. . he’s dead now. . was my mum’s brother. Paula says she carried a torch for me all her life, and that a couple of years ago it finally set fire to my shirt tail.’

‘And you?’

‘I was married for a few years, to another police officer. It didn’t work out. Finally, I figured out why, and Paulie and I got together.’

‘Funny,’ the inspector murmured. ‘I’m married to a cop, and we’re fine. The job didn’t have anything to do with your problems, did it?’

‘Not at all. Mags outranked me for most of the time we were together, but that was no big deal. We’re both chief superintendents now, but I suspect she may get ahead of me again, when she goes back to work. . she’s just had a daughter, by another detective.’

‘So that marriage worked; that’s a relief.’

McGuire’s face darkened. ‘That marriage was perfect, but he was killed on duty.’

‘Oh no. I’m sorry.’

‘Me too.’ He realised that his beer was finished and signalled the waiter for another. It arrived with the food.

The two men ate in virtual silence, broken occasionally by questions from the Australian about the visitor’s first impressions of his country.

‘I’m told you have a saying,’ McGuire responded, ‘that Sydney’s like your tarty sister and Melbourne’s like your mum. I can see what they mean about Sydney. There’s something else we have to do before I go, so maybe if I’m here long enough tomorrow, I’ll get to see how this place feels.’

Giarratano waited until they were both finished before going on. ‘So what is it?’ he asked, as the Scot wiped the last traces of the puttanesca sauce from his mouth. ‘This thing we have to do.’

‘We need to have a look at the late Mr Mount’s hotel room. Do you know where he was staying?’

‘The Festival puts its guests up in the Sofitel, just along the road. Mount’s room’s been sealed, so hopefully no housekeepers will have been in there, touching anything. Are we looking for anything specific?’

‘Yes, and this is where I come back to my clever partner. Paula and I are both great readers of crime fiction. The guy who was murdered back home, Ainsley Glover, he was a big favourite of mine. Paulie, she’s read the entire Henry Mount catalogue, and she’s got it filed away in her big brain.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll get there, but let me stay with Glover for now. When he was found dead, the first thought was “heart attack”; and that’s what it seemed like until the pathologist took another look and found exactly what had happened to him. But the odd coincidence was that in one of his books, there was a storyline which might have described his death exactly, and it was a murder. He’d been drugged and injected with a fatal dose of glucose, not insulin. He was diabetic,’ McGuire explained. ‘Moreover, after his death, someone broke into his house and stole his computer, with all his work on it.’

Giarratano’s eyes narrowed; he leaned across the table. ‘Go on,’ he whispered.

‘Right. So early this evening I have a call from my mate, my deputy, telling me that Mount is dead in Melbourne and asking me to get down here and report. A scenario of two top Scottish crime writers being bumped off within three days of each other, with no connection between them, strikes us both as highly unlikely. Paula was with me at the time, and when she heard what had happened, she dug into her Mastermind-sized Henry Mount database and remembered something from a book called Havana Death. Before I tell you what it was, I should also tell you that the guy didn’t make it up. He borrowed the idea from things that actually happened, in Vietnam, and other places. In it, there’s this guy, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who upsets the Mafia. But he’s powerful, and he’s well-protected so they can’t get to him. Then, one night, he’s at home, in his study, behind bullet-proof glass; his wife goes in and he’s dead, shot. Turns out the guy was a cigar smoker, and that he always bought his supply, the same brand, all the time, from the same store. When they examine him, and the forensic people go to work, they discover that one of his cigars was rigged. There was a cartridge inside it, bullet pointing inwards, and when the cigar burned down to a certain point. . bang!’ He slapped the table and Giarratano jumped.

‘Michael, when the pathologist does the post-mortem tomorrow, he’s not going to find a bullet inside the cranium, because what we saw tonight was an exit wound, not entry. On the other hand, he will find traces of burnt tobacco inside the man’s mouth, and in the wound itself. Trust me, these devices exist and they work. The Vietcong used them in cigarettes, thirty years ago, to take out American soldiers. So did the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia. Simple, nasty, deadly. Your people didn’t find Mount’s cigar butt, because it disintegrated. But if they’d looked, as I did in the morgue, they’d have seen that the first two fingers of his right hand were scorched on the inside from the flash when the detonator was triggered.’

The inspector frowned. ‘I’m trying to recall whether there were any other cigars on the body.’

‘Maybe yes, maybe no. That’s why we need to look at his room. In the hotel, I made a call back home from my room, for an update. There are two new developments. Just like with Glover, Mount’s computer and his records have been stolen from his office. Also, I’m told he always smoked the same brand of expensive Cuban cigar. Now I don’t believe he’d come out here on a trip like this assuming that he could find them here. I reckon he brought his supply with him. If there’s any left, and we find it in his room, we can possibly trace the source, and we’ll be that much closer to his killer.’

‘So whose investigation is this?’

McGuire smiled. ‘That, my friend, is a hell of a good question. Mount died here, yes. But the crime was committed by the person who put the device in the cigar, and I’m as certain as I can be that happened in Scotland. So what do you want to do? Toss for it?’