‘How about the restaurant where Ayre was seen with his girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes, there too. You should go back to Mrs Hornell as well, although it’s a long shot.’

  Wright nodded. ‘Will do. That’s a weird one right enough,’ she said. ‘His semen being found in his half-sister’s pants.’

  ‘You’re making an assumption, Jackie,’ Haddock pointed out. ‘We only have a familial link to the bikini thong. We don’t know for sure that the knickers belonged to the same woman. Hornell says they’re not hers, fair enough, but Ayre could have had a platoon of girlfriends apart from her. The only thing that’s certain is that the sister was there.’

  ‘No, Sauce, if that’s her in the photo and they’ve got the enhancement right, there is one other certainty.’

  He frowned, puzzled. ‘And what would that be?’

  Wright grinned. ‘It’s right there in the lab report from the Crime Campus,’ she replied. ‘In common with ninety per cent of the woman I’ve encountered so far in my journey through life . . . she’s not a real blonde!’

  ‘In that case,’ he laughed, ‘you’d better show the photo in Boots and all the other chemists, just in case her roots started to show when she was here.’

  Forty-Six

  ‘He’s a deep one, that Dominic Jackson,’ Lottie Mann observed as Skinner turned on to the C31 highway, heading for Figueres. She had been silent since they left his house after a quick breakfast.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ he agreed. ‘But the question is, do you like him?’

  ‘Yes, Gaffer, I do. I doubt that I’d have liked the man he was before, but this version is calm, hyper-intelligent, thoughtful and caring. Also he worships Alex and the ground that she walks on, but he’s careful not to let it show.’

  ‘Why not, do you think?’

  ‘Because he’s got massive respect for you. Have you ever read The Godfather?’ she asked.

  He smiled at the unexpected question, glancing to his right, catching her eye. ‘I’ve seen the movie, more than once. Why?’

  ‘Because Jackson strikes me as Luca Brasi to your Don Corleone. You should read the book, don’t just be happy with the film; it has more depth. The character is much more developed there. Don Vito is the man Luca respects more than anyone else in the world, the last man he would ever want to kill him. That’s how Dominick sees you . . . it’s why he hides his feelings for Alex.’

  ‘Are you telling me that I’m a mafia boss?’ he laughed.

  ‘In another universe, you probably are.’

  ‘And you? What are you in that universe? Chief Constable? First Minister?’

  ‘Me? I’m a hudden doon big lump that stayed at home and kept house while her crooked husband walked all over her until he pissed off with a better prospect.’

  ‘In consequence of which she put an axe in his head?’ he suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ she agreed, ‘but not until her son was grown and able to fend for himself.’

  ‘And Dan? Where does he figure?’

  ‘He doesn’t, not in that one. Dan only belongs here. He’s a one-off, an intelligent, caring man who spent years pretending to be an apathetic idiot. I’m the real idiot for not seeing through the disguise before I did.’

  ‘And in this one,’ Skinner asked, ‘what happens with Dominick and Alex?’

  ‘How would I know, Gaffer?’ she replied. ‘I don’t tell fortunes. I only deal with the present. Like, for example, I can see right now he’s not a hundred per cent well.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s something about him, the careful way he moves. Did you notice the plaster on his finger last night?’

  ‘Yes, he cut himself chopping the lettuce.’

  ‘Yes, and not for the first time. When he and I shook hands, he winced. I saw another recent wound on another finger, and maybe another couple of scars. A wee bit later on I saw him on the move; for a second I’m sure there was a very slight tremor. I didn’t say anything to Alex, though,’ she added.

  ‘No, best not,’ Skinner agreed. ‘Are you certain? I’ve never noticed anything like that. How come you did?’

  ‘It’s my job, Gaffer,’ Mann said, ‘noticing things. And I never switch off, I’m always on duty.’

  ‘In that case,’ Skinner sighed, ‘you’re a better detective than I ever was.’

  Forty-Seven

  ‘No,’ the counter assistant said. ‘I can’t say I recognise her. Mind you, I don’t serve everyone who comes in here.’

  ‘Okay. I wasn’t expecting any other response, really,’ DS Jackie Wright acknowledged. ‘The photo isn’t the best, and I know how busy North Berwick gets in the summer.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ the man sighed. ‘Try parking here in the winter, let alone just now. Those exclusion zones in Edinburgh? They’ve got it all wrong; they should be starting out there.’

  Wright expressed her sympathy with a nod; she was parked on a yellow line. She had left a ‘Police business’ card displayed, but even that did not guarantee protection from a parking warden intent on filling a quota of tickets issued.

  She left the pharmacy, the last of the frustrating calls she had made in the seaside town. Seated once again in her un-ticketed car, she took out her phone and called DC Benjamin. ‘How are you doing, Tiggy?’ she asked. ‘Any better than me?’

  ‘No, Sarge,’ her young colleague replied. Wright could hear road noise in the background and a hands-free echo. ‘I’ve done everywhere in Gullane, the chemist like you said, both golf clubhouses and all the bars and restaurants . . . including La Potiniere. It might have helped if we’d had a photo of Gavin Ayre as well, but I doubt it.’

  ‘We could have had,’ Wright said, ‘but there isn’t one where he looks anything other than very dead. Where are you now?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m on my way to Dirleton, to the Castle Inn.’

  ‘I’m ready to leave North Berwick, so I’ll meet up with you once you’ve done that. It occurs to me that there’s one place in Dirleton that I forgot to put on the list; the Open Arms. I’ll see you there.’

  The DS connected her phone to CarPlay, then eased slowly into the traffic, under the glare of a parking warden in a hi-viz jacket with an open notebook. Waving him farewell with her idle finger extended, she made her way steadily along the High Street in a line that was moving at well below the twenty-mile speed limit. It picked up a little pace after the traffic lights, but it was not until she reached the filling station at the outskirts of the town that she was able to put her foot down.

  When she reached the Open Arms, Benjamin was waiting for her, standing by her car on the opposite side of the road beside the ruined castle, a monument that had been closed to the public by its own servants, on grounds of health and safety. Wright turned into the last available space outside of the hotel and waited for her young colleague to join her. ‘This doesn’t need the two of us,’ she said. ‘There’s a café back there, where I came in. You go down there and get us a table. Mine’s a flat white, by the way.’ Benjamin rubbed her thumb and fingers together. The sergeant sighed and handed over a ten-pound note. ‘And a slice of millionaire’s shortbread if they’ve got it,’ she added.

  As the DC left on her mission, Wright entered the hotel, by the main entrance rather than the door that led directly into the restaurant. There was a reception area on the right; it was empty, but after a few seconds a man appeared, compact, neatly dressed and with a manner that said ‘Welcome’, without any need for the word to be spoken.

  ‘How can I help you, Officer?’ he began.

  She stared at him. ‘How did you know I was police?’ she asked.

  ‘When you’ve been in this business for as long as I have,’ he replied, ‘you just know. Plus,’ he added, with a small shy grin, ‘ten minutes ago I had a call from a business friend in Gullane telling me that a CID officer had asked him if he could identify a woman in a photograph. He thought you might be heading this way.’

  She smiled back. ‘That’s an effective grapevine you have. I’m DS Jackie Wright, and this is the photo in question.’ She produced the print from her pocket and held it in the beam of a ceiling light. ‘I don’t expect you’ll have seen her, but we have to ask. She could be connected to a major investigation.’

  He stepped closer to her, peering at the photograph, studying it for some time. ‘You know,’ he murmured, ‘I may confound your lack of expectation. I think I may have seen her. Here. Yes. I have.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I am. The hair colour I’m not sure about, but it’s the angle of her jaw that I recognise. She was here a couple of months ago; on June the twenty-second in fact. I remember because she and I had a discussion about whether that was the longest day of the year or whether it’s the twenty-first. They ate in our Library restaurant, she and her companion.’

  ‘Can you put a name to her?’

  ‘I should be able to. It’ll be in the book and it’ll be the last on the list because they got the last table. Come with me, Sergeant.’

  He led her through a lounge, into the restaurant she had seen from outside, and then to a small antechamber with a coat rack and a bar counter, on which she saw a large diary with the year engraved in gold on the cover. He picked it up and flicked through the pages, until he found the date he was seeking.

  ‘Black,’ he read. ‘Geraldine Black, it says, table for two, Lib . . . short for Library. She was American.’ He smiled. ‘It doesn’t say that, but she was.’

  ‘Who paid?’ Wright asked.

  ‘He did,’ the hotelier replied. ‘If you’re going to ask if I have a record of the transaction, well I do, somewhere, but it won’t give you any more information. He paid in cash. Crisp fifty-pound notes, three of them. I remember that because he told the waiter to keep the change; the bill was about a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘The man,’ the sergeant ventured. ‘Was he tall, fit, in his mid-thirties?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, you’re way off the mark there. She was in her thirties but he was grey-haired, bulky, and least twenty years old than her, probably more. Old enough to be her father, I would say.’

  Forty-Eight

  ‘I’m beginning to regret having to wear this uniform,’ Lottie Mann confessed. ‘Your car’s nice with its air conditioning, but I’m liable to melt when we step outside. That might not be a pretty sight.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Skinner reassured her. ‘We’re a few hundred metres above sea level here; that makes a big difference to the air temperature. Plus, it’s late August; we’re heading into autumn.’ He glanced to his right. ‘The uniform’s about respect, Lottie; it saves explaining to everyone what you are, and those three pips on your shoulder tell them you’re not to be messed with.’

  ‘Do you wish you still had yours?’ she asked.

  He laughed. ‘Why? I’m your driver and your translator, that’ s all. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘how many times did you see me in uniform back then?’

  ‘Not very often, I’ll grant you.’

  ‘Like never,’ he said firmly, ‘in the brief period I was chief in Glasgow. In Edinburgh, only when the Queen showed up, God bless and keep her.’

  ‘You said it was about respect. Didn’t you want that?’

  Skinner smiled, wistfully. ‘Respect has to be earned among your peers, Lottie, for it to matter. It isn’t something you wear. You know that as well as I do. I like to think that when I was in the police I had some. I’ll tell you this; any officer who disrespected me had limited career prospects, even the odd one who might have been senior to me at the time. There was a bloke called Jay in the Edinburgh days. Somehow he made it to chief super before I overtook him, but his sins found him out in the end. See,’ he laughed, ‘I’m flawed: piss me off and I take it personally. Ask me to hole a two-foot putt on the golf course and you’ve made an enemy for life’

  ‘Luckily, I don’t play,’ she reminded him. ‘What about here, in your new life? Is that different?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. The same principle applies. I have a sign on my office door in Girona that says I’m the jefe, the boss. It means eff all. I know that when Xavi withdrew from the chair and asked me to take over, the guys on the shop floor so to speak, the rank and file, had no idea who I was. They do now. Senior management? With one or two exceptions, no more than that, they thought I was just the boss’s mate, drafted in to hold his jacket while he went for an extended toilet break. I had to prove to every one of them that I could actually do the job, that my time as chair of the UK subsidiary had counted for something. I had to prove it to myself too, although I like to think that if I’d had any doubt that I could do the job I’d have turned it down. Now, I’m settled into the chair; it fits me, my senior colleagues can see that, they treat me accordingly, and word has trickled down. And yet, it’s still a temporary appointment, it could end tomorrow if Xavi chose to return. It’s his company.’

  ‘Will he? Choose to return?’

  Skinner shook his head. ‘I doubt it. He’s happy as the supreme leader in exile, so to speak, like that old Chinese bloke was, the one after Mao. It suits him. His name, Aislado, in English that means isolated, alone, and it’s always been fitting. No, he’ll stay on the estate that his brother Joe left him, and I’ll hold the fort until Paloma, his daughter, has enough experience to take over. And you know what?’ he exclaimed. ‘That suits me. I’ve grown into the job, Lottie, and to be completely frank, I want it to go on for a few years yet. Commuting is easy, so I can spend half my life in Scotland with the family and in the holidays they can come over here. I was at a loose end until this came up; now I have a future.’ He gazed at the road ahead, as he took a corner and a long stone wall came into view. ‘But back to the present,’ he said. ‘We’ve arrived.’

  He turned the Tesla through an open gate and cruised slowly along the driveway. There was one other car parked in front of the masia. As he drew up alongside it, a woman in uniform appeared from the back seat. Skinner whistled softly. ‘A comissari,’ he murmured to Mann. ‘The major’s sent a deputy. This is being taken seriously.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘Major Teijero is the commander of the Mossos,’ he explained. ‘I don’t know this one, but her epaulettes say that she’s a comissari, one level down from him. Come on.’ He stepped out of his car, stretching to take the kinks out of his back.

  ‘Good day,’ the officer said in a crisp accent. ‘I am Lita Roza. You must be Sir Robert. My boss said you had offered to give us assistance in this matter.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he replied, turning as his passenger emerged. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Charlotte Mann. She’s a senior officer in the Serious Crimes division of the Scottish police service.’

  ‘You think we have a serious crime here?’ Roza asked.

  ‘We know that the owner of this property is linked to one in Scotland,’ Mann responded. ‘We think he might even be the victim,’ she added.

  ‘That is a big assumption, surely. Based on what?’

  ‘Our dead man, Gavin Ayre, had a false identity,’ she said. ‘When your man, Gilbert Land, came up in our investigation, we looked at him and found that his is phoney too.’

  The comissari nodded. ‘So did we, after Senor Skinner’s reporter started nosing around. We found the same.’

  ‘Hopefully what’s in that house will answer at least some of our questions. How do we get in?’

  ‘Our forensic team are due here in the next three minutes,’ Roza told her. ‘I’ve been following their progress on Maps. In fact . . .’ She paused, turning at the sound of tyres crunching on gravel.

  A people-carrier pulled up ten metres behind them and an eight-strong squad emerged; two were in uniform . . . Skinner read their insignia; an inspector and a sergeant . . . the rest in sterile tunics. The senior officer moved to the door and pressed the entry buzzer. He waited for a full minute then repeated the process, to satisfy himself that the property was indeed empty.

  ‘I can’t imagine that you turn out at too many scenes like this,’ Skinner said quietly to Comissari Roza, as they looked on.

  ‘I don’t,’ she admitted, ‘but when my boss gets a call from his boss and your name is mentioned . . . he has too much dignity to jump himself, so he sends his kangaroo.’

  ‘I’d been wondering about your English accent. Am I right in what I’m guessing?’

  She smiled. ‘When I was a lieutenant, I spent two years on secondment in Sydney. The accent is all I gained from the experience, apart from a love of surfing that I brought home with me.’

  ‘I don’t imagine the surf’s as good in the Mediterranean.’

  ‘Very rarely,’ she admitted, ‘but my partner and I go to Morocco in the winter. Do you surf?’

  ‘Only the internet. Are you going to open the house yourself?’

  ‘No. I’ll leave that to Inspector Avila, or one of the blue suits.’ She issued an order in Catalan: the team moved towards the shuttered building. Roza, Mann and Skinner followed a few metres back; he stood behind the comissari, with a clear view of the entrance over her head.

  He watched and listened as the inspector dictated a series of numbers to one of the SOCOs as they were punched in. He braced himself as the door swung open . . . to reveal a pristine cream-tiled floor where before there had been putrefying human wreckage.

  What the f . . . he gasped inwardly. As the squad moved into the house, he moved forward without a thought for the two women. ‘Luz,’ he barked, with such authority that the inspector turned on the lights instantly, flicking a switch by the door. ‘Persianes,’ he ordered, and the powered shutters were raised, flooding the space with sunlight.

  ‘Sir Robert.’ Comissari Roza was by his side, ‘is something disturbing you?’

  He frowned at her, and at Mann, who was equally puzzled by his reaction. ‘Look at the place,’ he said. ‘We know that there’s been a very expensive refurb. We know it was lived in. But look at it,’ he repeated. ‘It’s as if an estate agent’s set it up to photograph it for sale. Look at that bowl. Is that fresh fruit? It looks like it. Look out there.’ He pointed through a window to the pool. ‘It’s sparkling. Two days ago it was gone, almost black with algae.’