Hour Of Darkness

Five

I’m not addicted to television, not by a long way, but someone in my position does have a need to keep up to date with current affairs, and events. That’s why I have UK satellite television in my Spanish place, as most Brits do, whether they’re resident ex-pats or occasional visitors like us.

Not that I was thinking of home.

Sarah and I had just come home from a late breakfast in Casablanca, a café down in the old part of L’Escala, and a couple of hours reclining on the town beach, which it overlooks. Holidays are my time for catching up on my reading list (normally I’m one of those people who take forever to get through a book, since I consume it in ten- or fifteen-minute bursts, in bed, last thing at night, before my eyes go blurry and sleep catches up with me), and that morning I’d finished the latest tale of the recently unretired DI Rebus. . unconventional or not, with his clear-up rate he’d have gone a lot higher in my force, trust me. . and moved on to a novel called As Serious as Death, the latest in a series that’s set in an authentic Spanish village that I can see from our house.

‘You know what?’ I said to her as we settled on our sunbeds beside the pool.

‘What?’ she murmured.

‘I love you.’

‘Nice. I love you too. Now what else were you going to say?’

‘Ach, nothing really, I’ve been thinking all morning about last night at La Clota and what we wound up talking about.’

‘That young waiter?’

‘Who?’ I frowned for a moment; I’d forgotten all about the lad. ‘Ah him,’ I said. ‘No, not him, the job; as always, the bloody job. You know, if the new board in its doubtful wisdom decided that they wanted someone else to do it, I’ve decided that I wouldn’t give a fuck. There are other things in. .’

‘Ahh,’ she said, cutting me off in the wise-woman tone that always brings me down to earth whenever she thinks I might be floating above it. ‘We’re back to buying that boat, are we?’

‘What boat?’

‘You know damn well. Alex told me about it. When she was a kid, you and she went for a weekend’s sailing in the Clyde estuary, with your girlfriend of the time. Before it was over you were all for giving up your career, buying a boat of your own and doing chartered cruises for a living.’

‘Mmm,’ I whispered. ‘That boat.’ That weekend, that warm, lovely woman: poor dead Alison, another cop, who was even more career-driven than me, and might have overtaken me, if she hadn’t got into the wrong car at the wrong time and. .

‘What is it about women, cars and me?’ The thought escaped without my realising it, and once it was out there I had to finish. ‘Myra, she died in a car, on her own. Alison, so did she.’ I looked at Sarah. ‘Can we arrange it so that we always travel in the same vehicle from now on?’

She rolled off her sunbed and on to mine, pressing her body against me. ‘Lover, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned that; I’d forgotten it was her.’

She was upset, so I stroked her hair, and kissed her. ‘It’s all right,’ I assured her. ‘Shit happens. And another reason why I won’t care if that job doesn’t.’

‘But you will. For the same reason that one phone call blew your boat right out of the water; it’s what you are. Anyway, it’s all academic, because the job will happen.’

She sat up, put her feet on the ground, and pushed herself upright. ‘Now, before you get horny, I’m off to consider what we might have for lunch.’

I followed suit. ‘And I’m off to swim, and think.’ I do some of my best thinking in the pool.

I took a step towards the chair where I’d left my trunks to dry off after my early morning exercise, then stopped. They weren’t there.

‘Hey,’ I called to Sarah, catching her halfway through the doorway, ‘did you move my swim shorts?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Why would I?’

‘No idea, but somebody has.’

‘Maybe they blew back into the pool.’

‘Good thought,’ I conceded and went to check. On the bottom I saw three leaves and what must have been a very careless gecko, but absolutely no garments. I swore quietly and went indoors for a replacement.

As I crossed the living area, the wall clock told me that it was just short of two twenty-five. I picked up the TV remote, hoping that the timepiece wasn’t slow and that I hadn’t missed the Scottish news.

I headed upstairs and changed into a new pair of Speedos. When I came back down, Sarah was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the television.

‘Look at this,’ she said, without taking her eyes off it. ‘Hold on, I’ll go back to the beginning.’

Our satellite decoder has two feeds, allowing us to pause and rewind live programmes. That’s what she did, until she had found the start of the item she’d been watching.

‘It’s a press briefing in Edinburgh,’ she said, ‘about the autopsy I performed on Friday.’

I stepped alongside her as the presenter led into the piece, then felt my eyebrows rise as another face appeared on screen. ‘What the. .’ I took the remote and froze the image.

‘That’s David Mackenzie,’ I exclaimed, ‘the Bandit. He’s the Command Corridor exec. What the hell’s he doing there?’

She looked up at me, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know? Maggie’s moved him into Neil’s old job, as Edinburgh CID coordinator. Sammy Pye told me on Friday.’

‘Bloody hell!’

Since Maggie Steele had been appointed as my successor in the Edinburgh job, I’d been avoiding any professional contact, so I couldn’t be accused of influencing her thinking. . not that I could have done that anyway. I knew she’d handle some things in a different way from me, but that one took me by surprise. I’d always have put a proven team player in that job, and our David was, unfortunately, the opposite; poaching him had not been one of my better moves.

‘It could have been worse, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘She could have made him head of CID; that would have been a real risk. Sammy told you, you said. That means Mackenzie didn’t come along to post-mortem, yes?’

‘Yes, no, whatever; he wasn’t there. I don’t blame him; I wish I hadn’t been myself. She’d been in the water for two to three weeks and quite a bit was missing.’ She drew a line across her chest with her finger, from alongside her right breast to the edge of her left collarbone. ‘That much, plus the left arm just below the elbow. She got tangled up with a fairly large vessel.’

Until then she hadn’t told me any details about the job, but she didn’t need to for me to know that it had been messy.

She reclaimed the remote and pushed the play button. ‘Let’s hear what he’s got to say. Maybe they’ve found the rest.’

Fat chance, I thought. The prop probably minced it.

Indeed they hadn’t. What Mackenzie came out with was, essentially, the losing gambler’s last roll of the dice, an appeal for any information about late middle-aged women who hadn’t been seen for a while, the kind that usually attract hundreds of calls to the hotline and do no good at all. When he said, ‘A murder investigation,’ I glanced at Sarah and she nodded.

‘She was stabbed,’ she explained, as Bandit wound up.

On the face of it. . unfortunate choice of words. . there was little or no chance of a result. In all probability the partial cadaver would stay in the freezer until the prosecutor’s office authorised its burial or cremation. I knew it, and so did Mackenzie, although I knew equally well that if we were both wrong, he’d grab all the glory that ensued.

‘He seemed earnest and impressive,’ Sarah said, as the presenter moved on to the next item.

‘Oh, he’s all that on the surface, is David,’ I agreed. ‘We could do with him over here.’

Her frown expressed bewilderment.

‘Why?’

‘He might find out what happened to my swimming trunks.’