The gates opened to let the car through and then closed again. Larry slipped out from his place of concealment and moved nearer to the gates, getting a closer vantage point on the car. He saw Von Joel lean over the side. One of the dogs jumped up to lick his face. He got out and knelt on the gravel, fussing with the animals, talking to them as if they were children.
“Hello, boys, hello. Who’s a good boy, then, who’s my big fella? Stay down now, Bruno, that’s naughty. You too, Sasha... Down, now, be good boys.”
Lola came forward from the shadow of the arched doorway. She wore one of the tiniest dresses Larry had ever seen. She held her arms out wide and Von Joel embraced her. As he did, she whispered something. He nodded against her neck, turning slowly as he held her, staring toward the gates. He issued a soft command to the dogs.
Larry leapt back as the animals came running and snarling toward the hedge. They scrabbled at the earth on the other side of the wall, as if they were ready to dig their way through to get him. He tried to step clear of the hedge and realized he had caught his sleeve. He was still untangling it when Von Joel appeared at the gate.
“Do you want something?”
Larry jerked his sleeve free and legged it down the road to his jeep. He leapt behind the wheel, started the engine, and threw it into gear. He had gone five yards when he saw the lane was a dead end. As he reversed past the gates Von Joel was still there, staring at him. There was no way to tell if he recognized Larry or not.
Late that evening, as he sat waiting in the corridor outside Comisario Dominguez’s office at police headquarters, Larry was still intermittently cursing himself.
Idiot, idiot, bloody idiot!
Superstition had driven him. He admitted it, though he tried to excuse himself. He had been the victim of an unreasoning fear, one that afflicted most diligent police officers, an intimation deep in his bowels that the distance between him and the quarry was too great, it was too wide for a link to take shape on the basis of suspicion and investigation. Keeping an eye on a suspect was not entirely a logical procedure, it had its voodooistic element. As often as not it was a submission to the mumbo-jumbo rules that operated in spite of logic and reason.
And it was all bullshit. Bullshit!
He bit his lip, convinced he had said it out loud. He glanced around to see if anyone had heard. There was no one in sight. He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
Surrender to whims and flights of fancy, he reminded himself, was the worst bullshit of the lot. All it had been aimed at, in this case, was filling in the waiting period while a legal reason was found to take a villain’s freedom away from him. Larry knew he should have stayed cool, he should have gone down to the beach with his wife and kids and played with a ball. He should have floundered around in the water and made a complete fool of himself like any other dad on vacation. He should have done anything at all, really, except what he actually had done, viz, dwell on the case, worry about it until he set his guts in an uproar, and then practically dynamite his chances of getting a result.
He expected retribution to visit him for being such a clown. In his job it was easy to bring down bad luck on yourself — that was more bullshit, but he couldn’t help thinking it.
“Come on,” he muttered, “please, come on...”
He crossed and recrossed his legs, staring at the office door, willing it to open as he had been doing for more than an hour.
It opened suddenly. Dominguez appeared, a cigar clenched in his teeth. He held up a fax sheet.
“Am I right?” Larry got up and walked toward the office, fearing the worst.
Dominguez beckoned him inside and handed over the fax. Larry looked at it, watched the words dance before his eyes for a second. Then they settled identification established on the basis of 10 points of individuality on thumbprint and points on index fingerprint. Confirm subject is EDWARD THOMAS MYERS.
“I knew it!” Larry clutched the paper as if it might try to fly away. The certainty of failure evaporated as sweat rolled down his cheeks. “I bloody knew it!” he told Dominguez. He thrust a victorious fist in the air. “I’ve got him! Yes!”
4
Detective Inspector Jimmy Falcon and Detective Constable Donald Summers arrived at Malaga airport the following morning, along with a huge Saturday intake for the Costa resorts. Larry met them with the Suzuki and on the way back to Marbella he brought them up to date on the situation. Neither Falcon nor Summers missed the fact that Larry was agitated, bordering on hyperactive.
“Myers is at the gallery right now. I’ve got two locals covering the Monterey and the speed boat.” He shook his head like a man confronting something incredible. “He’s rolling in it. His villa’s worth two million, the boat’s worth three hundred and fifty grand, and wait till you see his women...”
His energized state persisted throughout a visit to the police station in Marbella. After that it began to drop away as the red tape piled up. They were eventually told they would have to pursue their business in deeper bureaucratic detail at a nearby government building.
Extradition, it transpired, was not straightforward. It began to look as if it belonged in the category of near-impossible procedures. One sheaf of paper promptly generated another, and each set of regulations they signed — without being offered options — effectively reduced their functional flexibility as police officers on foreign territory. After an hour in the government building Larry said he was going to call the Foreign Office in London and complain. Falcon restrained him.
“Come on now, Larry,” he soothed. “Calm down. We’ve got to go through the procedures—”
“But they agreed! It’s him!” Larry could see victory sliding out of his grasp. It was retribution, the penalty for being a fool. “How many more bloody papers have we got to sort through?”
The bureaucratic marathon finished a few minutes after two-thirty. As the three men were shown off the premises they were given a parting piece of information tailored to send Larry into a spiraling depression. Twenty minutes later, kneeling by Susan on the beach, he tried to explain.
“It’s unbelievable,” he told her, shaking his head. “They won’t let us arrest him. They have to—”
“I don’t want to hear.” She was on her belly, her bathing suit pulled down at the back. The skin across her shoulders had gone deep pink. “I just don’t want to hear. Have you got that?”
“Aw, come on,” he cajoled, “this’ll mean promotion. I knew it was him! I mean, just think what that’ll mean, me spotting him and setting all this in motion...”
DI Falcon appeared, still wearing his tie, carrying his jacket over his arm. He was a young man, only a couple of years older than Larry, with the tailor’s-dummy tidiness of the career policeman. He dropped down on the sand beside Susan, first slackening the knees of his flannels.
“These bastards have got it sewn up over here,” he announced. He had come from ten arduous minutes on the hotel telephone, being updated on the case by Comisario Dominguez. He squinted at Larry. “You remember they picked up Frankie Day? Six months they held him and then let him go. He was on that bullion raid — we know it, they know it, but he’s still here sunning himself. It’s a ruddy fiasco!”
“So what about Myers?” Larry said.
“They’re gonna get a search warrant, charge him with using a false passport. Shit, it’s hot...” Falcon thumbed open the neck of his shirt and flapped a hand in front of his face. “Whatever rap we’ve got, it comes second in line.” He frowned darkly at Larry. “I doubt if we’ll get him out, you know.”