The chug of a diesel-engined fishing boat on its way out of the harbour gave me a sudden sense of urgency. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. She had no argument with that; I followed her up the stairway, and across the deck, so scared that for once I barely noticed how well her jeans fitted round her bum. We stood on the quay, looking back at the floating mortuary.
‘What do we do?’ Prim asked. ‘Leave him for someone else to find?’
I ruled that one out in an instant. ‘No. Someone’s bound to have seen us going on board. Look at all those apartments on the shore. There could be people watching us right now, in any one of them. No, I’ll wait here. You run round to the Trattoria and have them call the police.’
She nodded and hurried off. I called after her. ‘Hey, honey. Make sure they call the Guardia Civil, not the Municipal Police. I don’t think they could smuggle this one out of town, but you never know.’
45
The Guardia Civil live up to their name, and after spending four hours with them, in their big yellow brick office on the outskirts of L’Escala, we were thankful for it.
Their investigators, Captain Fortunato and Sergeant Mendes, were meticulous, but meticulously polite, as they went over our story time and time again. Fortunato told us that he had spent a year on secondment with the Met, yet to be on the safe side, he had an interpreter sitting in to make sure that everyone understood everything absolutely and that at the end, everything was written down as it should be.
We fell back on the cover story we had given in Gary’s restaurant as our reason for boarding La Sirena Two, hugely relieved in retrospect that we had come up with the throwaway line about booking sailing lessons for ourselves and Steve Miller. With a roomful of witnesses to back it up, our account was never going to be questioned seriously.
While we had waited for the police to arrive, Prim and I had agreed privately that it would be hugely dangerous to mention the name Ronald Starr. Had we started that hare running, we reasoned, it could have led straight back to our client, to the Toreador of the Apocalypse, and to criminal charges for poor old Gavin Scott in Spain and in Britain.
So we lied. We sat, all evening and into the night, with one of the most serious-minded police forces in the whole of Europe. We looked them in the eye, and we told them bare-faced porky pies. When it was over, they thanked us profusely, they extended their sympathy over our ordeal, and they wished us goodnight.
It was after midnight when we emerged from the police station. We were both high as kites, so we headed for La Lluna and found a table in the games room. We were just beginning to relax when Paco came across, to ask whether we were still pleased with our purchase of the previous week, and probably to assess whether we might be in the market for another.
He was still at our table, when his wife came over with word of Trevor Eames’ murder, newly arrived courtesy of an off-duty Guardia Civil private. We explained that we had first-hand knowledge, and how.
‘Did you know the guy?’ I asked Paco, casually.
‘He come in here now and again, looking for people to teach to sail.’
‘Do you know if he dealt in pictures?’
He looked at me as if I was daft.
‘The reason I ask,’ I said, quickly, ‘is that Shirley Gash told me her son bought a painting from him this year.’
Paco scowled. ‘Hah! That is what they were doing, was it. I remember now, in the spring, I see Trevor and John Gash talking in this very room. I think then they make an odd couple. If I know Trevor was selling a picture in here, maybe I kill him myself.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, I didn’t know.’
It was almost three o’clock before we made it home. Even then we sat on the balcony for an hour before going to bed.
The sound of a rainstorm battering our bedroom windows woke us eventually. I looked at my watch. ‘Jesus, it’s two in the afternoon,’ I mumbled.
‘Good,’ said Prim, giving one of her finest stretches beside me. ‘I like a lie-in on a Saturday. And it means that the police haven’t kicked our door in.’
It was still chucking it down half an hour later. Showered and dressed, we stood and watched the weather through the glazed balcony doors. The storm was coming in off the sea, in a great grey wave, but behind it we could see a line of clear blue sky, stretching to the horizon. ‘It’ll blow itself out soon,’ I said, as if I was an expert on the local weather after three months.
Prim wound an arm around my waist. ‘Oz,’ she said, slowly. ‘I’ve been wondering. Why was Eames killed?’
I looked down at her. ‘To close off the trail to the phoney Ronnie Starr, I suppose.’
‘If that’s so, apart from Davidoff — who couldn’t be the mystery man, on account of being twice his age, being Spanish, and having one eye — who would know that anyone was looking for the phoney Starr?’
Every so often Prim would say something that would catch me really off balance. This was one of the times. I thought about her question for a while, as the rain began to slacken. ‘Reis Sonas, for one,’ I offered at last. ‘She knew about the picture, for a start. We only have her word for it that she handed the things over to Trevor, and she was careful to say that she didn’t know the name of his chum. She could have been in on it. She could have set Starr up for murder.’
‘But got herself knocked up by him first?’
‘Accidents will happen. Besides, maybe the kid isn’t Starr’s.’
‘Ha,’ she laughed. ‘How many wee, fair-haired Spanish babies have you seen? Also, how long did the police say Eames had been dead?’
‘Twenty-four hours, at least, maybe a bit more.’
‘Exactly, so by the time she finished with us on Thursday, she’d have been struggling for time to get along to L’Escala and knife him. Even if you think a woman could have done that.’
She had me, on all counts. ‘David Foy, then,’ I proposed. ‘He’s already admitted setting up Scott. Maybe he was in it all the way. Maybe he did know who the phoney Starr was all along. Maybe the story about he and Trevor being done out of their shares was a lot of cock.’
Prim nodded. ‘That’s more like it. I didn’t like Foy at all.’
‘There is another option, though. Maybe the phoney Starr didn’t know that anyone was looking for him. Maybe Trevor found him, and was pressing him for his cash. Or maybe he just decided that having Trevor around as a witness to murder was too risky, and put him out of the way.’
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘But if he does know about us, let’s hope he doesn’t decide that we’re too big a risk as well.’
She may have been joking, but I was still worrying about that one when we arrived in Ventallo at around eight. The rain and the wind were long gone, and the evening was calm, warm enough for a few tables to be set out in the garden of the farmhouse restaurant.
‘Sure,’ said the owner, in fractured English. ‘I can give you table. But no food till nine o’clock. You can have drink in the bar, though.’
We agreed that we would go for a stroll around the quaint village for a while and come back around eight-thirty for an aperitif. I remembered their house red from our previous visit, and didn’t want to be left alone with it for an hour on an empty stomach.
Idly, we headed back out into the unpaved street, as if making for the heart of the village, but as soon as we were out of sight we turned on our heels and headed back up the dirt track which led from the highway to the restaurant, and by which Ramona and her partner had dropped the remains of Ronnie Starr.
We had gone barely any distance before we realised that it was useless. It was too dark, the ditches were deep and full of water from the afternoon’s storm, and the fields were rutted. It would have been dangerous to venture off the track, and very messy. ‘Christ,’ said Prim, ‘we’d need a sniffer dog. Let’s take that walk round the village after all.’