Last Resort (18 page)

In a big law firm, you have to account for almost every minute of your working day; you’re judged more than anything else by the fees you bring in, and as much of your time as possible has to be chargeable.

Freed from that pressure, I’ve rediscovered my interest in the law for its own sake, and I enjoy the cramming to which I’ve committed myself.

I do most of my work in the Signet Library, of which I’m a full member, but that closes at four thirty, so I dug out my own textbooks and immersed myself.

By seven o’clock I was a little wiser, and also hungry; time was a consideration, so I stuck a two-minute rice dish in the microwave and sufficed with that, washed down by an energy drink.

That done, I turned myself into Lexie Martin. I was amused to discover that I enjoyed being her. She may have been a part of me that I’d suppressed for years, or she may have been a projection of my image of my mother, to whom I’m closer than anyone could imagine, for all that she’s more than a quarter century dead. Whatever, Lexie’s gaucherie was fun, and a contrast to the serious worldly-wise woman that I’ve become.

Since my meeting with Coyle, I’d begun to fantasise that I might actually try to turn the shamefully pirated ideas that had formed my synopsis into a full-length manuscript, and see how it read. I know enough about the law of copyright and plagiarism to know if I stepped over the line.

I took a quick shower and dressed in Lexie-style clothes . . . with the addition of a bra . . . smothered myself in scent that my lovely brother Mark bought me for my last birthday, and set off to meet Linton Baillie.

My bag matched the Afghan coat, more or less; it was soft and floppy, not huge but big enough to hold my purse, keys, another printout of my outline, a digital recorder with a microphone sensitive enough for covert use, and of course my pepper spray.

I knew roughly where Portland Street was, but before leaving I checked it out on street view, to get a feel for the place. It looked as if it had been built this century, and was made up of three-storey blocks of flats on either side.

Parking is less of a problem in the evening in Edinburgh, and so I took the car. When I reached my destination I found a space on Slateford Road, and walked the final few hundred yards. I reasoned that Baillie was expecting a naive, star-fucking, would-be writer; if he happened to be looking out of a window and saw her climb out of a swish sporty model, he might begin to wonder.

Number twenty-seven slash two slash c was on the first floor. There was no secure entry at street level, and so I walked straight in and up one flight of carpeted stairs.

There was no name tag, only the flat number, by Baillie’s door. It was half-glazed and I saw light inside, not in the entrance hall itself but spilling in there from another room. I reached into my bag and switched on my voice recorder, then pushed the bell button. I heard the first few bars of the
Star Trek
theme ringing out inside the flat.

I waited for a minute but there was no sign of Mr Spock. On the basis that even a Vulcan might be in the toilet, and might not have heard the first time, I tried again, but again, no response.

I was on the point of calling Coyle and asking him in my best Lexie voice whether he’d been pulling her chain, when I noticed that the door was very slightly ajar. Less than half an inch, but it was unlocked, no question.

‘Leave it alone, Alex!’ Three voices spoke in harmony in my head: Dad’s, Andy’s and my own sensible self. I ignored them all, and pushed one of the glass panels. The door swung open, very gently.

‘Mr Baillie,’ I ventured, Lexie-like. There was no reply, but I could hear a sound, a man’s voice, then a woman. As I listened more closely, I heard him counter, ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.’

Not casual conversation in Slateford; no, a line from
Twelfth Night
. Linton Baillie liked Shakespeare; I wouldn’t have guessed that from his bland prose style.

I stepped inside the flat, closing the door behind me, and headed for the source of the light, as the play unfolded. The first thing I saw in the living room was a Bose radio, on a sideboard. The sound was as good as the maker claims.

‘Mr Baillie,’ I called out again, a little more firmly than before.
He must be lost in it
, I thought, for again I went unanswered.

Tentatively, I stepped through the door.

The room was capacious, big enough for a dining table to the left and for a two-seater couch and a swivel chair in the centre of the room, facing a wall-mounted flat screen TV between two windows.

The chair was occupied. A man was sitting in it. He had a leaf-shaped birthmark on top of his bald head, which lolled sideways on to his right shoulder. His arm hung over the side, the hand touching the carpet. His neck was exposed, showing a raw red circle, the skin broken in places.

‘Mr Baillie,’ I said yet again, but by then I had no hope of an answer.

I stepped close behind him, standing on something dark and rodent-like as I put my hand on the black leather, and swung it round.

Glazed dead eyes stared up at me. The eyes of Thomas Coyle.

Eighteen

‘
W
hat’s happened here?’ Xavi asked, of nobody in particular, as I finished my call to Amanda Dennis. I doubt that he’d even noticed me making it.

‘Seems rather obvious to me, mate,’ I grunted. ‘Wait here.’

I left him and did a quick check of the place, to make sure that Bernicia Battaglia was the only dead person there; she was. The apartment had two bedrooms; one was untouched, but the other was a mess, with drawers left open as if someone had grabbed clothes in a hurry. It was in stark contrast to the neatness of Hector Sureda’s
atico
in Begur.

When I re-joined my friend the situation had caught up with him; he was starting to hyperventilate.

The big man had seen violent death before, up close and very personal, but he wasn’t nearly as inured to it as I was. He was shocked and trembling as he stared at the figure on the floor. I took hold of him by the arms and made him look at me instead, waiting for his heart rate to get back to normal.

‘What do we do?’ he asked, when he was steady and in control of himself.

‘One of two things: either we fuck off out of here and get back up to Girona, or we call the Mossos d’Esquadra. The first of those options is tempting, but you in particular are not a guy that even the most casual observer is likely to forget, and the car we’ve got parked outside, that’ll draw attention too, even in a city this size. Besides, it would run against all my instincts. So we make that call.’

I looked up at him. ‘Do you have your friend the comissari’s number stored in your phone?’

He blinked. ‘Yes, but it’s not his territory.’

‘All the better. Look, Xavi, we should assume that we’ve been seen coming in here. If we call one one two, we could have first responders on scene in a couple of minutes. Report it through Canals and it’ll take longer. That way we’ll have kept ourselves on the angels’ side, and I’ll still have time for a quick look round.’

Xavi nodded. ‘I’ll make the call.’

‘Tell him who I am, and lay it on thick. It’ll save time having to explain it to the people who turn up.’

‘I will . . .’ He paused. ‘But Bob, like I said, what’s happened? Who killed her?’

‘I’m a detective, Xavi, not a bloody psychic, but we have to start by looking at your man Hector.’

‘Surely you can’t think . . .’

‘Jesus, Xavi, it’s the only thing I can think at this moment. We’re standing in his flat having followed him down here. We know that he came with a woman, having bought her a dozen red roses in Girona. Look on the floor and join the fucking dots.’

He stared at the body, his mouth hanging open ‘Not Hector, surely. I can’t believe it.’

Even in those grim surroundings I was able to laugh at the shocked incredulity of a man who had once opened a parcel in his office in Edinburgh to find a pair of severed human hands.

‘I have a teenage son I didn’t know about six months ago,’ I reminded him, ‘who’s currently in jail for killing his granny. I’ll never be surprised in my life again. You’re a journalist: neither should you be.’

‘Why would he?’ Xavi protested.

‘We’ll ask him when we find him. Make that call.’

I left him to it, while I got on with what I do best.

I began by taking a more detached look at the crime scene, as if I’d walked in cold, as the local investigators would do, sooner rather than later. Battaglia was on the floor; the angle at which she lay told me that she’d been killed with her back to the door, and that if she’d ever known what hit her, it was only as her brains were exiting through her forehead. Beyond any doubt she’d been holding the flowers at the time, so she couldn’t have been long in the flat before she was shot.

‘After you, dear,’ I murmured. ‘Bang!’

I crouched beside the body and looked for the entry wound in the back of her head. Her hair was so dark, thick and glossy that it was hard to spot, but the blood that had matted around it acted as a marker, around a small hole at the base of the skull. It was close to the hairline, but the skin was unblemished, with no sign of scorch marks.

I forced myself to turn the dead woman’s head slightly to see the exit wound; it was where I’d anticipated, smack in the middle of her forehead.

I glanced up at Xavi. He had just finished his call to Comissari Canals. ‘You met the woman,’ I said. ‘How tall was she? I can’t assess her height properly like this.’

‘Even with those heels, no more than five eight.’

‘And Hector. How tall is he?’

‘He’s six feet, give or take an inch. Why?’ he asked.

‘Because the bullet seems to have taken a slightly upward trajectory through her skull, and it isn’t a contact wound. Do you know if Hector has ever done any shooting? Did he do army service?’

‘No, he missed out by a couple of years. It wasn’t a hobby of his either. The only guns he ever fired were on Playstation, of that I’m sure. Does that help?’

‘It might,’ I said. ‘This was either a very good shot or a very lucky one.’

I left him to chew on that and went through to the bathroom. The first thing I saw was a hand towel on the floor, in a corner by the shower, lying there as if it had been used and then discarded, the way you might in a hotel room. I picked it up and saw telltale blood-red smears.

‘Think, Skinner, think,’ I murmured. ‘How was this done? Battaglia had taken about three steps into that room, carrying her rose bouquet, when she was shot in the back of the head, almost certainly by someone standing in the doorway. If it was Hector, how the hell did he get blood on him? He wouldn’t have been that close.’ I frowned. ‘But suppose he went into the room first . . . what did he do?’

I put myself in there, in Hector’s place, assuming his innocence for the purpose of the exercise. What did he do? What did he say?

‘We need something for those flowers,’ I said, aloud, on the move already.

The kitchen was off the dining room, separated by double doors; one was closed, the other lay half open. It had been refurbished fairly recently, possibly by Hector when he’d bought the place. The sink was against the far wall, and beside it, on a work surface, stood a heavy crystal vase; it was half full of water.

‘He didn’t do it,’ I called out to Xavi. ‘The way I see it, someone was waiting for them in the flat, or much more likely followed them in, very quietly, via the newly unlocked front door. Hector went to fill that vase and the gunman stepped into the doorway and shot Battaglia.’

‘But what the fuck was he doing with the bloody woman in the first place?’ Xavi yelled, in an unusual show of temper and frustration.

‘I fear, my friend,’ I replied, ‘that he might have been selling you out.’

‘Where is he now?’ he demanded, as if I would know.

‘He’s not here, that’s for sure. Either the intruder took him with him . . . At gunpoint, into a busy city centre? Unlikely . . . or job done he ran for it, leaving Hector here with the body, and a choice to make.’

‘Okay,’ Xavi said, interrupting me. ‘Hector didn’t shoot her, but could he have set it up? What if he knew the gunman was here? What if they left together?’

I shook my head. ‘I might buy that but for a couple of things. He got blood on himself, for he washed it off in the bathroom, and left some on a towel. How did he do that? By kneeling beside Battaglia, I’d say, to check that she was dead, to see if he could revive her. Also, his bedroom is a mess, as if he’s packed a case in a great hurry.

‘Apart from that.’ I added, ‘there’s motive. Why in God’s name would he want to kill the woman? No, Xavi,’ I continued, ‘this was an ambush and she was the target, not him. That raises a question. How did the shooter know she was here?’

‘How could he have known?’ he asked. ‘Whether Hector planned to bring her here or not, how could he have known?’

‘I have no idea. My best guess is that they were followed all the way from Girona.’

‘Why bother? Why didn’t he kill her there?’

‘He may not have had an opportunity. She stayed in Girona on Thursday night, having arrived from Italy. How did she get here? She didn’t use her aircraft, and she didn’t have a car here, so she must have taken the train, a very public form of transport.

‘Where did she sleep last Thursday? It must have been a hotel, five star for sure. The best hotels have CCTV coverage all over. So he followed her, next morning, to the station. He saw her meet Hector, again . . . you can bet he trailed her to the restaurant . . . and he saw them buy tickets to Barcelona. He did the same, then he followed their taxi from Sants to here. The rest . . . is lying on the floor.’

‘But why not kill Hector too?’

I shrugged. ‘We have to assume that he wasn’t paid to kill Hector. If he’d had to, to get to Battaglia, he probably would have, but if I’ve read it right, he had a clear shot, and with Hector in the kitchen he was able to get away without being seen.’

Xavi frowned. ‘I suppose that works,’ he conceded. ‘But it still doesn’t explain why Hector’s missing now, and why he didn’t call the police himself.’

I nodded. ‘Agreed. That’s what any half-rational, innocent man would do, once he’d got over the shock. But he didn’t. Instead he got out of here, as fast as he could, without even bothering to lock the door. Look,’ I pointed to the table, ‘his keys are still there.’

As he glanced across at them, a large metaphorical kite offered itself to me, but before I had a chance to fly it, we heard the door swing open. A few seconds later the room was full of cops, pistols drawn and our hands were in the air.