As Easy as Murder (32 page)

‘And maybe not just him,’ I whispered, as I considered the caution of the man who was after Palmer, and his ruthlessness in closing down any potential threat. ‘If Patterson’s mate even suspects that he might have told Shirley about him . . .’ I whistled. ‘Going on a cruise is the smartest thing she could have done. Mark, did Metcalfe and his boss know about her, and their relationship?’

‘Of course they did. The Central Witness Bureau actively encouraged it. The reasoning was that he’d be even safer as part of a couple of obscure nobodies with a nice quiet backwater lifestyle. After Palmer picked your friend from all the lovelies on the website they vetted her before they let him make the approach. Don’t worry about her. She’ll be regarded as under protection, just as much as he is, probably even more so, since she’s completely innocent. On a cruise, you say? Give me the details: I’ll tell the minders where she is and she’ll be looked after discreetly wherever she is.’

‘For how long?’ I exclaimed. ‘For ever? This isn’t just about your employers bringing Palmer back inside the safety net. They’ve got to find this partner of his and deal with him, through the courts or otherwise.’

‘Agreed, but that dictates we have to find Palmer first, and find him alive. When we do, I’m sure he’ll realise that the rules have changed, and that he has no option but to help us nail the guy. But
if we don’t, if the other side get to him and kill him, the threat to Shirley won’t go away.’

‘Then shouldn’t we go to Alex Guinart? His interests are the same as ours. He has two murders to solve, and we’re both heading in the same direction. He’s looking for Palmer too, if only as a witness. We’re all after the same man.’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I have a pretty broad remit from my clients, but one thing I’ve been specifically forbidden to do is involve local law enforcement. This thing is out of control because of systemic corruption. Robert Palmer’s partner had a paid informer within Interpol, for Christ’s sake. If he could penetrate them, he could have sources within any police force. If I contact your friend, he could find out about me. And through me, you’d be brought into the web.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re saying that by telling me all this you’ve put me at risk?’

‘No, my dear, you did that yourself when you started asking questions about the man. If I’d let you carry on stumbling around in the dark, you might well have walked into the path of a shotgun and wound up with half your head missing.’

I wasn’t so sure about that: I’d only wanted to kick Patterson Cowling’s arse on my friend’s behalf. I’d had no interest in Robert Palmer, or in undetectable performance-enhancing drugs, or even in dead DEA agents. But there was no point arguing, not then anyway. The game was afoot and I was in it.

‘Well,’ I persisted, ‘if you’re not going to link up with the best cop I know in these parts, what are you going to do next?’

‘I’m going to report back to Graham Metcalfe, who’s controlling
me on behalf of all the agencies involved, his own, Interpol and the DEA, and fill him in on what’s been going on here. He’ll investigate Christine McGuigan’s past in Ireland; he’ll look into her known contacts, bank statements, phone records, everything that’s traceable. He’ll also get hold of that photograph of the first victim and try to identify him.’

‘How will that help?’

‘We’ll know that if it does. Alongside that, though, he’ll pull in all the resources at his disposal and do a very big computer job. He’ll look at flight records and hotel bookings in Malaga on the day of Beau Lucas’s murder and then we’ll do the same for this area, over the last couple of weeks, and find out how many names pop up twice.’

I nodded. It made sense. And then I thought of something that made even more. ‘Perhaps you can narrow it down a little,’ I suggested.

‘How?’

‘Where was Robert Palmer when he took off?’ I asked. ‘He was at the golf tournament. And consider this: he didn’t leave home that morning planning on doing a runner, because he left his passport on Shirley’s dressing table. So, instead of looking for one person in a whole region, why not establish who was at the Catalan Masters, all of them if that’s what it takes, even spectators who paid their entry money by credit card, then see which of them was in Malaga?’

Mark’s facial mask seemed to stretch as he beamed. ‘Your old man would have been proud of you,’ he said.

I
offered Mark a bed for the night . . . even with Jonny in residence I still had a couple of spare rooms . . . but out of politeness only, for I didn’t expect him to accept. His presence would have begged too many questions, but also, there was the potential problem of the stairs. While his remission was remarkable, given the lows he had experienced, he carried the stick for a reason.

‘Thanks, Primavera,’ he said, ‘but I’ve checked into a hotel in L’Escala; the Nieves Mar. It has a lift, so everything’s on one level, effectively. Suits me.’

He headed for it, to contact his controller, while I headed home to cook for my boys, and one more, since I’d told Jonny to bring Uche for dinner. I’d picked up some steaks on the way back from my business visit, so there wasn’t a lot of preparation to be done, just some baking potatoes to wrap in tinfoil and stick in the oven, and some onions and peppers to be chopped ready for frying in oil. Mind you, my fingers were at risk as I did the chopping, for my mind was still whirling with everything Mark had told me.

Until that afternoon, Robert Palmer had been a rock singer,
dead way too soon, one of my favourites; sometimes, when I threw a moody, as I did with monthly regularity in those days, Oz used to call me Sulky Girl, after one of his songs. But suddenly he was someone else, someone with a shady past and an endangered present.

The man had quite a story; pity it could never be told. Some life, some rebirth. Quite a glib talker, Mr Cowling had been; he’d taken me in, and when it comes to people, experience has made me hard to fool. Patterson the Second was so glib that he’d even talked his way into a new life. Yet why did he need it? That was the one problem I still had with Mark’s account. Once the second witness had been taken out of play, why hadn’t he simply led Interpol and the Americans straight to his former partner? ‘That man’s arm must be very long indeed,’ I mused.

Such contemplation came to an end when Tom arrived back from his run with Charlie, closely followed by Jonny. Yes, Uche was coming, he said, but he’d gone home to shower first.

‘How’s your new practice base?’ I asked. ‘Excellent. Lena gave it her seal of approval, so everyone’s happy.’

‘Lena’s still here?’

‘Yes. Lars isn’t playing in this week’s tournament either, so they’ve kept the rental house on for another week.’

Dinner was delayed. I’d rubbed tomatoes and garlic into the cut loaf I’d bought, and I was ready to put all the rest together, but one ingredient was missing. Uche. After the third check of my watch, I frowned at Jonny. ‘You did tell him seven thirty sharp, not seven thirty for eight?’

‘Yes,’ he insisted, heading for the door. ‘I’ll go and chase him up.’

He returned ten minutes later, unaccompanied. ‘I’m sorry, Auntie P,’ he said sheepishly. ‘He’s not there. He’s probably pulled; he was on the phone to those Swedish girls we met yesterday on the beach. He’s a bastard for that. His cock works like a divining rod, only it’s not water it sources. He follows wherever it points.’

‘An observation I hope you won’t share with your cousin,’ I told him, with an attempt at severity. Then I shrugged. ‘Bugger him. Wherever he is, the menu won’t be as good. Come on, let’s eat, before the tomato bread dries out.’

For once, our dinner table discussion wasn’t all about golf. Very little of Jonny’s shop was talked, in fact; instead, Tom started to quiz me about my trip to the winery, and I found myself giving them a rundown on the product range and then on the production process. I even found myself opening a bottle of one of the high-end reds, although Tom wasn’t allowed a demo of that, only a sniff.

He didn’t ask about Mark until we were almost finished. I’d known that he would, eventually, and when he did, it was straight out. ‘Why is Mr Kravitz here?’

I can’t lie to my son. If I ever do, something will break, irreparably. ‘He’s on business,’ I replied; the answer that I had prepared.

‘What does he do, this chap?’ Jonny asked.

His cousin chuckled. ‘He’s a secret agent.’

‘Tom!’ I protested. ‘Don’t exaggerate. Mark’s a security consultant. He’s here on assignment, that’s all, and he looked me up.’ See? Not a word of a lie.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured; that’s my son’s way of saying, ‘And the rest!’

Uche was still absent without leave the next morning. Jonny got no reply when he went to knock him up. He was more than a little angry, for his clubs were in the penthouse, but I persuaded the owner to open it with a back-up key, so that they could be liberated. ‘We are going to have serious words, Mr Wigwe and I,’ he declared as he lugged the massive bag back up to my place. ‘He’s on ten per cent of a chunk of money, and he’s got to realise that you don’t just earn it at the weekend. Wednesday morning on the practice ground is as important as Sunday afternoon on the course.’

I calmed him down with a promise that when Uche showed I would tear a piece off him myself, then sent him on his way to Pals.

I’d arranged to meet the ‘security consultant’ for coffee at his hotel. As it turned out, the coffee was for one; Mark isn’t allowed any strong stimulants, so he had plain water. He was hyper nonetheless. I could tell that he had news and that he was keen to share it with me.

‘Your pickpocket’s been identified,’ he said, quietly, as soon as I’d been served at our terrace table, beside the hotel pool. ‘He is, or was, Bulgarian, and he hadn’t been seen for over a year, not since the raid on Robert Palmer’s factory. His name was Ilian Genchev, he was an agent of Interpol in the Sofia bureau and he was assumed to have been the leak, given the timing of his disappearance.’

‘That’s quick work,’ I commented. I could tell that he was
pleased with his team’s progress, and that praise was in order . . . but only so much. ‘I assume that he left his name behind along with his country.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Have your people come up with the identity he assumed, or with a last known address?’

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but give them a chance.’

‘Fine, but until they establish those things, does knowing who he was take us one step forward?’

‘Not yet, but come on, Primavera, it’s confirmation that he wasn’t just some fucking petty thief. It rules that out completely.’

‘Okay, so we’ve shuffled an inch or two forward, but essentially we’re still stuck on square one.’

‘That’s a pretty negative way of looking at it.’

‘But not incorrect?’

He sighed. ‘No.’

‘What about McGuigan? Have they made any progress with her?’

‘No. It’s still early days there. You have to remember that the game’s changed in the last twenty-four hours, and my task with it, thanks to you. I was brought in to warn you off searching for Robert Palmer, but the information you gave me stood that on its head. Now we need to find him.’

‘If he’s still alive.’

‘I’d bet that he is,’ Mark said. ‘He’ll be hidden away somewhere.’

‘What makes you so confident?’ I asked.

‘He strikes me as the sort of guy who’d follow advice. People like Palmer aren’t simply given a new passport and credit card and told to get on with it. There is a certain amount of training; absorption of every detail of the new persona’s background, education, career history, family names and professions, and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. Subjects may also be told what to do if their cover is blown and they’re out of reach of their handlers.’

‘For example?’

‘As a rule, they’d be advised to have a bolt-hole identified and ready for emergency use; a safe house by another name. Ideally the witness protection people will know where it is, so they can locate the client once he’s gone to ground and get him to safety.’

‘From which I guess that Palmer doesn’t have one, or you’d be heading there right now.’

His face shifted into something that might have been a smile. ‘He doesn’t have one that Metcalfe knows about, but . . . everything you’ve told me he’s done, the way he made his escape and what he did once he was clear of the course, it says to me that he did have a plan.’ He looked at me. ‘Primavera, what can you tell me about his movements when he was here?’

I stared back at him. ‘Not a lot,’ I replied. ‘I only met the man the weekend before last, then our Jonny turned up out of the blue and I was swept up in looking after him and in the golf tournament. The only movements I know about were between L’Escala and the course and back again, and to St Martí for dinner a couple of times.’

‘Can you remember anything he might have said on those dinner dates, about places he’d been to or seen around here?’

I thought about his question for as long as it took me to draw a complete blank. ‘Nah, nuffink. Sorry, Mark, can’t help. We need Shirley for that and she ain’t here.’

‘No, but . . .’

Whatever it was that he was about to say was cut off short. His eyes moved from me to a point over my right shoulder, and registered annoyance.