She had been half expecting a call in the morning but none had come, and so Nigel had been written off to experience. There might be an awkward encounter on the next school run but she could live with that.
The business of the weekend was finally back on her mind as she stepped into the unfamiliar CID office. There was one other person in the room, female, mid-twenties, dark hair, plain clothes.
‘Good morning, DC Wright,’ Karen said. ‘DI Pye told me you’d pulled the overtime this weekend.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, so bright-eyed and brisk that the DS almost winced. ‘He said our priority is that number plate the monitoring people found for us. I’ve been looking at how we go about tracking down the registered owner of a Spanish vehicle. It’s not going to be easy.’
‘The older I get,’ the DS murmured, ‘the more I realise that nothing in life is as easy as you think it’s going to be.’
Her colleague grinned. ‘Ouch! That’s pretty cynical for a Saturday morning. Man trouble?’
‘You would not believe it, so let’s not go there. What’s the problem?’
‘It’s that Spanish numbers don’t work the way ours do,’ Wright told her. ‘You’d think that in this day and age there would be a standardised European system, but there isn’t. They tell us in Brussels we can’t buy food in pounds and ounces, but they let us do our own thing in areas that really need centralising. You know how with our number plates the first two letters tell you the area where a car or a van was registered?’
Neville nodded.
‘Well, it’s not like that in Spain.’ She pushed an image across her desk for the sergeant to inspect. ‘That’s the van,’ she said. ‘Look, you’ve got four numbers, and then you’ve got these three control letters, H, N and J. In the real world, that would tell us roughly where this van was bought and first registered, but not in Spain, it doesn’t.
‘Their system is national. The initial control letter, H in this case, is used until all the possible letter and number combinations are exhausted, then they move on to the next. But when it comes to registration, that’s done with the local authority and you pay your vehicle tax to them.’
‘Where did you find all this out?’
‘From the consular section of the Spanish Embassy. They say that the number can be traced, but it’ll take a while. And they won’t be able even to begin before Monday.’
‘Bloody hell! Is there no way we can short-circuit it?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Wright sighed.
Neville swore softly, in frustration, picking up the image from the DC’s desk. As she did so, her mobile vibrated in her pocket. She took it out, and checked the caller’s name on screen. ‘Nigel’.
‘I think not,’ she murmured, and rejected the call. As she did so, her eye was caught by something in the picture. ‘Jackie,’ she said, ‘do you only have a hard copy of this?’
‘No. It came as an email attachment.’
‘Can you blow it up?’
‘I should be able to.’
‘Then do it, as big as you can. There’s a sticker on the back of the van, on the lower right quarter, and I’d like to be able to read it.’
‘Give me a minute.’ The young DC pulled her computer screen closer to her and reached for her mouse. She called up the image and opened an edit programme, frowning with concentration as she went though a series of on-screen adjustments.
When she was ready she nodded. . and then laughed out loud. ‘I don’t know if this will do us much good. It has to be a joke: look.’
Neville leaned forward, over her shoulder, and read, ‘www.moronrenault.es. What the hell is that?’ she wondered. ‘I think you’re right,’ she decided, ‘it’s a Spanish boy joke, but let’s make sure. Google it.’
She straightened up as Wright went to work, and returned to her phone, finding ‘Nigel’ in her contact list and deleting the entry. As she finished, she felt the young DC tugging at her sleeve.
‘Look at this, Sarge,’ she urged. ‘It isn’t a joke after all. There is actually a place called Moron de la Frontera; it’s in Andalusia, between Seville and Marbella, and it has a Renault dealer. It’s all there on its website, along with a phone number. If they supplied that van, they can tell us who bought it.’
‘Well done, Jackie, well done us. There’s only one small problem: language. Where are we going to find a Spanish speaker on a Saturday morning?’
Her younger colleague smiled, diffidently. ‘You’re looking at one. I did Spanish in my degree. I was hoping it would help me in my police career. . I’d like to join Interpol eventually.’
‘Then put it to work,’ Karen told her. ‘Give them a call.’
She left her to her task and installed herself behind Sauce Haddock’s desk, where the Bella Watson murder book was waiting for her. She opened it and started to speed-read through entries that she thought might be relevant, focused on the word ‘Daughter’, doing her best to ignore the flow of Spanish from a few yards away.
Fifteen minutes went by, and yet she was no more than a third of the way through when Jackie Wright hung up her phone and turned to her with a look of triumph on her face.
‘Gotcha!’ she exclaimed, giving a small fist-pump. ‘The dealer came up trumps. The van was bought two years ago, by a woman called Maria Centelleos. She lives in a town called Utrera, closer to Seville, in a street called Calle Mar del Coral, number one hundred and seventeen.
‘Hey,’ she exclaimed, suddenly, ‘that surname’s familiar. Can I have a look at the file, Sarge?’
She came across to Neville’s desk and flicked though the murder book, until she found the page she had sought.
‘Yes,’ she murmured, pressing her index finger to an entry. ‘The trawl we did of the areas near Patrick Booth’s drug drops, looking for fuel bought with Spanish cards: it threw up one payment, made in a filling station just south of Durham, on a card in the name of Ignacio Centelleos, issued by Cajamar, a rural savings bank. We haven’t sourced the details of the holder, but it can be done.’
‘Then do so. Ignacio; that’s a man’s name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, and quite common. The surname isn’t, though; it’s very unusual. If I remember right, it means “Sparkles” in English.’
Karen stared at her. ‘Repeat that, please, Jackie. You’re telling me that Maria Centelleos in Spanish is Maria Sparkles in English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, you beauty!’ She snatched her mobile from the desk and called the first name on her list of ‘favourite’ numbers.
‘Karen,’ Andy responded. ‘What’s up?’
‘Absolutely nothing, my dear. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone,’ she laughed.
‘What the hell are you on about? Did you get laid last night and want to crow about it?’
‘Close but no cigar. That’s not to say that I did get laid, but. . och, to hell with him. My ingenious Spanish-speaking DC and I have traced the owner of that van.’
‘Yes, her name’s Maria Centelleos.’
‘You know?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry to spoil your triumph but I just had a call from the Guardia Civil national drugs team. We’ve been working with them trying to trace the source of manufacture, and thanks to our forensics people they’ve found it.
‘It’s a small sherry-producing bodega near a town called El Cuervo, and she’s listed as the owner. However, the only thing it seems to have been producing lately are methamphetamines.
‘The feedback I’m getting is that the place was only ever marginally profitable, and that it went tits up at the start of the recession. They seem to have fought back by changing their product line. There’s one small problem, though. The place was burned to the ground, a couple of weeks ago. They found the meth traces in a vat, but it’ll be difficult to prove physically who made the stuff.’
‘Have they arrested her?’
‘No. The Centelleos woman and her son have been away from home for quite some time, according to their neighbours. Unfortunately, tracing them doesn’t figure very high on the Guardia Civil’s list of priorities. They’re looking, but not very hard. It was small-time and the place is destroyed. They have much bigger targets and limited manpower, so if anyone’s going to catch her it’ll have to be us.’