As the call ended, Haddock frowned again: out of curiosity until he understood Sureda’s inference. Answers? Oh my God. He can’t keep his hands off.

  Thirty-Six

  ‘Are you sure you have enough charge?’ Alex asked a little nervously as they drove quietly up the mountain road.

  ‘Mr Musk says this model will give me five hundred kilometres,’ her father replied. ‘We have three quarters of that left.’

  ‘Are you sure? I don’t share your faith in electric cars.’

  Her father laughed. ‘I’ve had faith in you for over thirty years and you’ve never let me down.’

  ‘Oh no? What about when you found out about me and Andy?’

  ‘I never blamed you,’ he replied. ‘I blamed him. I still do; making a move on a friend’s teenage daughter was never going to sit well with me.’

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that I might have made a move on him?’

  ‘Did you? Make the first move?’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘I can’t remember, truth be told. I think it was probably a case of us both having the same idea at the same time.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter; the principle’s the same. He shouldn’t have, end of.’ He sighed. ‘Actually, the person most to blame is me. I knew what Andy was like with women.’

  ‘A bit like you, you mean? You and Alison Higgins were together when you had your fling with Mia and my half-brother Ignacio got made.’ Her sigh was almost a match for his. ‘I liked Alison,’ she murmured. ‘I liked Mia too, but I could see from the start that she had a bit of darkness about her.’

  ‘The widow McCullough, as she is now. And Sauce Haddock’s stepmother-in-law. What a complicated tree we’re growing.’ He glanced at her sideways. ‘Now that we’re up here, alone, something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you got plans to add any branches? Short-term or long?’

  ‘Christ, are you on about me and Dominick too? First Sarah, now you?’

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘I wasn’t thinking about him, or about anyone in particular. It was a general enquiry.’

  ‘Then the answer’s no,’ Alex insisted. ‘You and Sarah keep producing babies for me to nurture, but I’m quite happy to leave them at the end of the day and go back to my place, or to Dominick’s. I don’t see it in my future, Pops.’

  ‘These things can happen by accident. Just like Nacho did.’

  ‘Not in my case. I might be living a quiet life but I’m still on the pill, just in case Dominick and I forget ourselves . . . not that we ever have,’ she added. ‘Aunt Jean calls him my “handbag”, you now.’

  ‘That sounds like her,’ Bob said. ‘For the record,’ he added, ‘I don’t care if you do. You make a nice couple.’

  ‘Have you told him that?’

  ‘Hell no,’ he laughed. ‘However, you being with him should stop Andy Martin sniffing around again, should he ever think about it.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. He called me when he was elected to the Scottish Parliament. Sir Andrew Martin, MSP, potential Tory leader. I’m not sure what he wanted really. A pat on the back or an invitation for dinner when the Parliament’s in session . . . and he’s on the other side of the country from Karen.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Congratulations but we won’t be bumping into each other. That was pretty much what I said. I think I added that he’ll be too busy on the Opposition front bench to have any leisure time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bob drawled. ‘Maybe busier than he thinks. The political editor at the Saltire gave me a tip last week. After she lost her Westminster seat in the last wipe-out, Aileen is thinking about a comeback in Holyrood.’

  ‘As in Aileen de Marco, your ex-wife? Wow! What will Sarah think about that?’

  ‘Sarah won’t spend a minute thinking about her.’

  She stared at him. ‘What fucking planet are you from, Pops? The woman split you and Sarah up first time around! Of course, it’ll get her attention.’

  ‘Then she needn’t worry . . . if I even have to, I’ll tell her that. Besides, as far as I know Aileen’s still with Joey Morrocco, the actor, the guy she was seeing while we were married. Plus,’ he added, ‘if she does return, she’ll be fully occupied undermining the current leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She’ll want her old job back.’

  ‘What did you ever see in her, Pops?’ Alex asked. ‘Apart from the obvious, that is.’

  ‘Her eyes. That was the first thing I noticed about her. I thought they were honest and kind. But I ignored or I underestimated one fundamental: she was a fucking politician and they all work on looking honest and kind. It’s part of the trade; being all things to all people.’

  She grinned. ‘You could say that about defence counsel too.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he conceded, ‘but you’re a prosecutor now. How does that work?’

  ‘We work on looking severe. You know that from experience in the witness box. But,’ she added, ‘my stint in the Crown Office ends in a month. They asked me to stay on for another year, but I will probably say, “No thanks”. I’ve been lucky so far, I never had to prosecute someone I believed was innocent. I’d have had trouble if that had . . .’ She stopped in mid-sentence. ‘Hey, that sign we just passed, didn’t it say Masia Coll? Back up, Pops.’

  Skinner did as she instructed for a hundred metres until they reached the sign she had spotted, on a post that was topped off by a post box. It was small, but clear: the address and an arrow, angled upwards beside a narrow opening that led into a cami, a narrow road without tarmac. ‘Shit,’ he murmured. ‘Not the best surface for this thing. We should have brought the Jeep from L’Escala. Sorry, love, it could be bumpy.’

  He drove carefully along the winding road, looking out for ruts in the rough roadway, but happy to find none serious enough to impede their progress. They climbed slowly and steadily for fifteen minutes, until finally they reached a thirty-degree bend at the end of which Masia Coll came into sight.

  ‘My God,’ Alex murmured, ‘what a view.’

  The house stood on a summit facing west, with an outlook across a spectacular wide canyon, rivalling its grand equivalent in America in its geology, if not in size. A low fence seemed to mark the boundary of the plot on which the masia was built but there was no gate, simply a point where the cami became yellow-dyed concrete. The Tesla cruised silently towards the red stone building, coming to a halt twenty metres from the heavy studded wooden entrance door, alongside a patio which opened out into a swimming pool. As they stepped out, Skinner glanced towards it; the water was dark, almost black.

  ‘Nobody’s been here for a while,’ he observed, ‘or the pool guy’s doing a terrible job. The algae have taken over.’

  ‘It feels deserted,’ his daughter said.

  ‘If I’m right about Mr Land, and the two names aren’t just a massive coincidence, we know where he is.’ He reached back into the car and blasted the horn, shattering the silence of the mountain top. ‘If there is anyone around, that should fetch them.’

  They stood by the car and waited. Each of them was dressed in the same way, shorts and a T shirt. The sun was at its highest in the sky, but the temperature was less fierce than it would have been at sea level.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ Alex asked. ‘All in all, I don’t think I fancy a swim, so what’s the grand plan, Pops?’

  As she spoke her father straightened his back, his gaze bypassing her. She turned to see a white-haired, lean, leather-skinned man approaching. ‘Ningu aqui,’ he called out. ‘L’home fa dues setmanes que no es aqui. La dona durant deu dies.’

  ‘Qui ets?’ Skinner asked him.

  ‘Josep, el vei. I tu?’

  ‘Amics de la cuitat. Massa dolent, va dirque seria aqui. Ens refredarem una estona abans de marxar.’

  ‘Be, adea.’ The man turned and shuffled off, disappearing into a small plantation behind the masia.

  ‘Well?’ Alex demanded.

  ‘His name’s Joseph; he’s the neighbour. Says there’s nobody here, hasn’t been for a few days, since the woman left. The man’s been gone for a fortnight. I said we were friends from the city, that we’d chill for a while then go.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said, ‘although “chill” isn’t a word I’d have used. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Have a look around. We haven’t come all this way just to admire the view.’ He set off, walking beyond the pool. The area beyond was flat, almost unnaturally so, as if the land had been levelled off or built up. She saw him stop, look around, then make a whirling motion with his left hand as he strode back towards her. ‘That’s a helicopter pad round the corner,’ he said as he reached her, ‘out of sight, with a big X for landing. I need to call Girona.’ He stepped away once more as he took his phone from his cargo shorts. She saw him find then call a number, hearing a buzz as he made a connection. ‘I’ve asked Hector to have our reporter find out if there’s a chopper registered in Spain to Gilbert Land, and if so, where it is right now.’

  ‘Maybe he uses an air taxi service?’

  ‘If he does, we’ll find it. Come on.’ He headed for the masia’s front door.

  ‘Pops,’ she called after him. ‘You’re not thinking about breaking in, are you? Although we’re in Spain, I’m still an officer of the court.’

  He stopped and turned to face her. He was smiling. ‘Of course not, but if this place happens to have a keypad entry system like the one in Scotland and I happen to know the code, I’ll regard it as an invitation.’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘Yes, what do you think that box is on the doorjamb?’

  ‘And do you know the code?’

  ‘No, but Sauce Haddock told me the one for the Scottish house. If Gavin Ayre and Gilbert Land are one and the same, how likely do you think he is to have two?’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ she moaned as he reached the door.

  He took out his phone once again, checking the code that Haddock had texted to him, then entered the numbers slowly and carefully, smiling as he ended with ‘two’ and the door swung open.

  As it did, Alex saw him stiffen, then hold up a hand. ‘Don’t come any closer!’ he shouted, as the forerunners of a swarm of heavy black flies buzzed past him out into the open air. He closed the door firmly and took a step back. ‘Got any tissues?’ he called out.

  ‘No, sorry. Pops,’ she exclaimed anxiously. ‘What is it?’

  Skinner’s mouth was a tight line, his face screwed up in the vain hope of expelling a foul odour from his nostrils. He stripped off his T shirt, used it to wipe every surface he had touched, each number on the keypad, one by one but out of sequence, then backed away until he was beside her.

  ‘What?’ she repeated.

  He shuddered. It occurred to Alex that she had never seen her father so shocked, even though they had shared some bad moments in her lifetime. ‘What do you think?’ he murmured.

  ‘Is it Land?’

  ‘Could be, if he and Ayre aren’t one and the same. It could even be the woman. From the very quick sight I had, I can’t rule it out, but I don’t think so. My instant impression was male. Whoever it is, whatever it is, it’s been there for days. There’s no aircon running so the place is like an oven, even though the shutters are down. You saw the flies, but this is fucking Spain, so there’ll be ants as well, millipedes and Christ knows what else. Come on,’ he said, sharply. ‘Back to the car. I need water and I need to gather myself. Christ, love,’ he muttered as they walked, ‘I must be going soft. I’ve seen people blown to pieces, like Alison, I’ve seen them burned to a crisp, like Jackie Charles’s wife, I’ve picked bits of them off moorland after a plane crash, but nothing has ever got to me like that.’ As they reached the Tesla, he pulled his T shirt back over his head.

  Inside the car, they were silent for over a minute. Alex watched her father as he leaned back against the headrest, eyes closed, sipping water while he strove to regain his composure. It occurred to her that for the first time in her life she was seeing what he was, a man in his middle years, experiencing the first loss of confidence that ageing can bring, a man realising perhaps that he was no longer invulnerable. And then his eyes opened wide and he was Bob Skinner again.

  ‘Right,’ he declared. ‘What are we going to do? One thing for certain, I never opened that fucking door. Agreed?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Part of me is saying, let’s get the hell out of here and let Sauce follow due process, ask the Mossos to check out the address, and let them discover that frightful thing in there, or what’s left of it. Half of it will be in a fucking anthill by then, if it isn’t already. I think he might have burst, from expanding gases.’

  ‘He?’ Alex repeated.

  ‘Yes, I am sure it’s a male. I’m back together; I know what I saw. If it is a man called Gilbert Land, he was older than our Gavin Ayre. The body was angled towards the doorway, so all I really saw was the head. White hair, although there was a dark streak that might have been blood. Left arm thrown out, right by his side. Short-sleeved shirt, that could have been blue at one time but it’s stained now, as you don’t want to imagine.’

  ‘The blood,’ she said. ‘Could that have happened in a fall? Might he have had a heart attack, a stroke, or even a simple faint in the heat and hit his head on something as he fell?’

  ‘If he crawled for a bit afterwards,’ he conceded. ‘He wasn’t near anything that would have done anything like that. Watch,’ he said, suddenly, ‘he was wearing a watch, a gold Rolex Submariner. I’m sure of that; remember Eden Higgins? Alison’s brother? He had one; the dead guy’s was the same.’

  ‘What are we going to do, Pops?’ Alex asked. ‘Get out of here like you said and toss it back to Sauce in Edinburgh?’

  ‘I would, but . . . we’ve been seen here, by Joseph the neighbour. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to talk to him and he’s going to remember the friends who came to visit. So I’m going to make a call to my friend in Barcelona, the politician who oversees the Mossos d’Esquadra. I’m going to tell him that the Girona paper has been investigating a tip from an anonymous source about a resident ex-pat named Gilbert Land. Because I was in the area visiting you, I volunteered to check out the address. Now we’re here, I find that the place is deserted, that the pool is black with algae and that there are signs at the back that someone’s been trying to force an entrance.’

  ‘So maybe they’d better check it out?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about the signs of an attempted break-in?’

  He grinned. ‘Once I’ve made the call, I’ll take care of that small detail. Meantime, you’d better call Dominick, and tell him we might be late for dinner.’

  Thirty-Seven

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Nadine Markle told Noele McClair. ‘My search for Mr Gilbert Land took hardly any time at all.’

  You’re right, the surprised detective thought. I’m only just home from Tesco.

  ‘You found him?’ she asked.

  ‘My passport office did,’ the vice-consul confirmed. ‘In all of Canada, there is one passport held by a citizen of that name, just one. It’s due to expire in nine months’ time, but by then the holder may have expired himself. Mr Land is ninety-one years old. His listed address is number seven Acorn Hill, Oxbridge, Ontario. The rest I did myself. I found him in the online telephone directory and called that number. His granddaughter answered my call. Grandpa Land is a resident in a Toronto care home and has been for the last eighteen months. Does that help you?’

  ‘It does,’ McClair said. ‘Very much. On the basis of that success can I ask you for one more favour? Can you check your death records over a period of let’s say five years, with the mid-point thirty-four years ago, for an infant or childhood mortality with Gilbert Land on the death certificate?’

  Thirty-Eight

  ‘Why did you ever leave the police service, Gaffer?’ Haddock wondered aloud, his voice crisp in the car speakers.

  ‘Not again,’ Skinner growled. ‘I didn’t leave it, son. It left me when it started serving the penny-pinchers rather than the people.’

  ‘Maybe Andy Martin will take us back to the old set-up if he ever becomes First Minister.’

  ‘There’s more chance of Dean Martin doing that. Andy was the first beneficiary of the new system, the first chief constable of all Scotland, so he won’t turn the clock back . . . not to mention that he’s a Tory, and as such unlikely ever to be First Minister.’

  ‘Who’s Dean Martin?’ the superintendent asked.

  ‘Fuck me.’ Reminded of his age, Skinner sighed. In the seat beside him, his daughter smiled. ‘Never mind that,’ he said, testily. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying to you? If not, I’ll repeat it. You need to make official, high level contact with the Mossos d’Esquadra, and tell them you have an interest in a resident ex-pat named Gilbert Land in connection with an on-going murder investigation. Give them the address and tell them that you got the details from Land’s bank. Do not, whatever you do, mention me. Your interest in Land should appear to be entirely separate from the local press interest.’

  ‘You said you’ve made a call already,’ Haddock pointed out. ‘Won’t that have made a connection?’

  ‘No, it won’t. My contact’s a member of the Catalan government. He knows me only as the chair of InterMedia, an organisation he needs to keep on his side politically. Listen, on second thoughts, don’t you make that request; get McGuire or McIlhenney to do it, chief to chief. The point is, sooner or later, the timing being dependent on the skills or the equipment of the responding officers who’ll be on their way here right now, the house that we’re sitting outside is going to be opened. When it is, all hell will break loose and a major criminal investigation will begin, one that I’m certain’s going to overlap with yours. You need to be part of it, Sauce, from the start. You need to have a presence in that house, but it’ll probably take somebody of chief constable or deputy rank to make that happen. Understood?’