Seventy-Eight

  Wright met the taxi-driver in the reception area of the police building. Tall, lean, fair hair mixed with grey, at first he seemed familiar until she realised that he bore more than a passing resemblance to Bob Skinner.

  ‘Thanks for coming to see me, AJ,’ she said, as she led him to a seating area behind the front desk. ‘You’ve saved me a trip.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I’ve just dropped a customer at the Western General, so this is handy for me. Besides,’ he added, ‘my dad had a long association with this building, but I’ve never been in it.’

  ‘Was he a cop?’ the DS asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’ His smile could only have been described as mysterious. Wright decided not to press the point.

  ‘This is about the Gullane homicide inquiry,’ she told him. ‘We understand that the victim was a client of yours.’

  ‘Gavin, yes, he was. It’s a real stunner, what happened to him.’

  ‘Did he use you often?’

  ‘Any time he didn’t feel like driving. Usually that meant to and from restaurants, or to dinners at Witches Hill. I’d pick him up at the airport too, when he flew in.’

  ‘We’re interested in someone else in his circle,’ Wright continued. ‘A woman. Her name is Geraldine Black.’

  ‘Geraldine? Yes, I’ve carried her several times. She was a fairly regular visitor once the house was habitable, and before, come to think of it. She turned up with Gavin on an inspection visit in February. They stayed in the Watchman Hotel in Gullane for a couple of nights. Then she was here again in June . . . Gavin was away that time . . . with an older guy, in his sixties. I think she called him Gilbert, but he never spoke a word. I know they stayed at Gavin’s. I picked them up from the airport and took them there. Same trip, one of my drivers took them to the Open Arms in Dirleton.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘The week before last,’ AJ replied. ‘I had a short notice call for an airport pick-up.’ He searched his memory. ‘Thursday afternoon it was, the day before Gavin died, now that I think about it.’

  ‘And you took her to the house?’

  ‘No, that was the strange thing. She put the fare on Gavin’s account . . . with which I might be stuck,’ he added, ‘but she said she didn’t want to stay there.’

  ‘Why do you think that was?’

  ‘She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I pick them up and I drop them off, that’s it. Discretion’s important in my business. In her case, I took her to the Castle Inn in Dirleton. She assumed she’d just walk into the Open Arms or the Watchman in Gullane, but they were both full. As it happens, I know Jim Dobson, the manager of the Castle; I called him and he had a room spare.’

  ‘And when she left?’ Wright continued. ‘Did you pick her up?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her since,’ AJ said. ‘As far as I know she could still be here.’

  Seventy-Nine

  The constable driver took the most direct route north. Following it on Maps, Mann saw that it was a C road, until they passed a municipality named Ripoll when it became part of the N trunk road network. The climb was steady, but less dramatic than she had expected, and the views as they drew nearer to the mountains were spectacular.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Roza said as they closed on a small town. ‘¿Dónde nos reunimos los ripollanos?’ she asked the sergeant.

  ‘Hotel Los Cacadores, senora.’

  ‘We’re meeting the team from Ripoll at a restaurant. Lunchtime,’ she added with a grin.

  ‘What are Cacadores?’ Mann asked.

  ‘There are two translations. The polite one is “Hunters”. The other, you do not want to know; it would take too long to explain.’

  ‘Okay, but maybe one night before I go back we’ll have a couple of drinks and I’ll teach you some Glaswegian.’

  The hotel and its restaurant were in a narrow one-way street on the edge of the small town; Mann would have called it a village. A lieutenant and a corporal, both male, were waiting outside beside their car, beyond which another parking place was vacant. As they approached, the corporal removed a red cone and waved them in. Once they were installed, he opened the rear door for them and stood to attention as they emerged. It occurred very quickly to Mann that the lieutenant, who introduced himself as Josep Prat, was exceptionally deferential to Roza, and by extension to her. This is like me chumming Mario McGuire in Scotland, she thought. That’s how senior she is and she’s been chumming me.

  The restaurant offered a three course Menu del Dia, but Roza said that all she wanted was tomato bread and anchovies. ‘Eso es normal para mí, teniente,’ she assured him. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘And me,’ Lottie added.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ the comissari asked Prat, once the waiter had taken the order. The other three uniforms had opted for sandwiches in the bar. He nodded. ‘Then we’ll speak it. What have you done so far?’

  ‘First, I have impounded the car. When the alert for the number came to my office, I passed it on to all the municipal police. One of them spotted it but only after he had put three tickets on it. He called it in; it’s still there. It will be no small matter, towing it out of this place.’

  ‘Has it been opened?’

  Prat smiled and touched his nose. ‘With a key no, because we don’t have one, but one of the locals is old school. I had a look inside . . . wearing gloves,’ he added. ‘There is nothing there; apart from the documents and the insurance, as you would expect.’

  ‘And Geraldine Black? Have you looked for her?’

  The lieutenant nodded. ‘We have checked every hotel. She has never spent as much as a night in any of them. But that’s not the end of it. In this tiny little place there are fourteen Airbnb’s; we’re going to have to check them all.’

  ‘If we have to, we have to,’ Roza said, ‘but there may be other places where she left a trace.’

  ‘Comissari,’ Prat ventured, ‘are we certain that she was the driver of the car? The documents show that the owner is someone else, Senor Gilbert Land. Could it have been him?’

  ‘No,’ she assured him. ‘It was her, for sure. How many shops are there in this place?’ she asked.

  ‘Not many. Food stores, a tabac, tourist places where they sell guide books and days-old French and British newspapers. It takes that long for them to get here, and the locals don’t bother any more. They get their news from TV. I saw one other shop,’ he volunteered, ‘in what looks like the main street. It sells activity gear; things for tourists and for winter sports. It’s open, but I don’t know how it survives in the summer. People who come here on walking holidays surely bring their own equipment.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we will check it.’ She looked up. ‘Hey, here comes our lunch.’

  Eighty

  ‘I’m staying here into next week, Sauce,’ Skinner said. ‘I’m personally invested in this thing both here and at home, but there’s too much going on in Girona right now for me to leave it. Instead, Sarah’s flying here tomorrow, for a few days. She has things to sort out in Barcelona; she might as well do it now.’

  ‘You are okay yourself, yes?’ Haddock asked, solicitously.

  He laughed. ‘Are you wondering if she’s coming here to do my autopsy? I’m fine, son, just fine. I wasn’t for a bit, but I’m over it now. How about you? What’s happening at your end?’

  ‘Jackie’s got a lead,’ he replied. ‘We’ve discovered that Geraldine Black flew into Edinburgh the night before Gavin Ayre’s murder. There’s a coincidence for you. We’re trying to find her.’

  ‘A double coincidence,’ Skinner told him. ‘So are the Mossos d’Esquadra, and, from what I hear, with more success than you. Lottie’s bang in the middle of it, so she might not have had a chance to update you. If you keep on following that trail, you should join up and a single pattern emerge.’

  ‘What about the Gilbert Land person? He crosses over with Ayre too, and we know he was here last June.’

  ‘He’s not there now, that’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Skinner sighed audibly in his friend’s ear. ‘That’s all I can tell you,’ he repeated. ‘Get it?’

  ‘Are you withholding information, Gaffer?’ Haddock murmured.

  ‘Yes,’ he said blandly, ‘and you’ve known me long enough to let it lie. You’ll never hear that name again, and you should remove it from the record wherever it comes up. That’s what the Spanish are doing at the very top level.’

  ‘But he exists, Gaffer.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t, and he never did. Just as the cadaver in Sarah’s mortuary was never actually Gavin Ayre.’

  Eighty-One

  ‘She was a strange woman, Ms Black,’ James Dobson, the manager of the Castle Inn volunteered. He had been dealing with a beer delivery when Jackie Wright had phoned the hotel, but had returned her call quickly. ‘Some guests don’t stick in the mind,’ he said, ‘but she did. I had a call from AJ, from the Gullane taxi firm, asking me if I had a room that night . . . Thursday, week before last. I told him she was in luck, but only for that night because I had a group of golfers from Greenland coming in on the Friday.’

  ‘Greenland?’ Jackie Wright repeated. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes, they’re regulars, they come here twice a year. There are a few Danes among them, but mostly they’re Greenlanders. They love it here; as you can imagine they don’t have too many courses there. In fact, I think there’s only one in Nuuk. They showed me photos once; where we have rough, they have rocks. Anyway, Geraldine Black: yes, a strange woman, as I said. American by the sound of her, but her passport said she was from Singapore. I’m a stickler for that with overseas guests,’ he added. ‘I always insist on seeing the passport.’

  ‘In what way was she strange?’ the detective asked.

  ‘She was agitated, nervous. I asked her if I could help her find accommodation for the weekend but she said she didn’t know how long she’d be staying. “Family emergency.” That’s right, she said that. Truth is, I thought she might be the emergency herself. I did wonder about her mental stability. I mean she’d just come off an international flight, with nowhere to stay, but booked a local taxi driver and headed for East Lothian. That’s not normal, is it, Sergeant? If I’d been full, she’d probably have had to sleep on the beach, only she’d hardly any luggage, just a cabin bag.’

  ‘When did she check out?’

  ‘I don’t know; I never saw her again,’ Dobson replied. ‘She paid in advance, dinner, bed and breakfast; I gave her a deal, ninety-nine quid, so it was a contactless transaction. Breakfast ends at nine through the week and she was late. I thought I might have forgotten to tell her, so I went up and knocked on her door. There was no answer. I admit, I panicked a wee bit. A few years back I was in another place and I had a guest hang himself in his bathroom. She’d been so flaky I thought she might have done something similar, so I used the master key and went in. She was gone: the bed had been slept in and there were damp towels in the bath, but she was off. Why are you looking for her, Sergeant? What’s she done?’ He paused, but before Wright could feed him the standard ‘Routine enquiries’ reply, he exclaimed, ‘Here, it was the next morning that bloke was found murdered on the beach at Gullane. She wasn’t involved in that, was she? Is that it?’

  ‘Routine enquiries, Mr Dobson,’ she said, although the same thought had been in her mind. ‘Just routine enquiries.’

  Dead fucking end, she thought, frustrated, as the call ended. And then, to her surprise, she saw that she had voicemail. It would be from no one in the office; everyone on duty was in sight, including Sauce, deep in conversation with Singh in his glass-walled room. She dialled the three digits to retrieve the message.

  ‘DS Wright, this is AJ. I told you that, as far as I knew, Geraldine Black could still be here. To double check that I asked my other drivers if any of them had picked her up without letting me know. Nobody had, but one of them who’d driven her before told me that he’d seen her. Early afternoon, on the Friday, the day after I picked her up. She was boarding a bus, the Edinburgh-bound X5, at the stop past Dirleton Toll at the entrance to the Archerfield Estate. It looks like it was a short visit, for she was carrying her cabin bag.’

  Smiling, Jackie walked into Haddock’s office. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, and played the message again.

  ‘She arrives the night before,’ she told her senior colleagues, ‘books into a hotel that’s walking distance from Gullane, has dinner and isn’t seen there again. Next morning, Gavin Ayre is murdered. A few hours later, she boards a bus and leaves town. Have we got a prime suspect?’

  Her colleagues gazed at each other for a few seconds. Finally, Haddock nodded. ‘We have a prime person of interest, let’s put it that way. What about the murder weapon, Jackie?’

  ‘She’s been here before. She could have planked it then, and disposed of it afterwards. She was with Gilbert Land. They could be in it together.’

  ‘No, Land’s no longer in the picture.’

  ‘Okay,’ she conceded, ‘on her own.’

  ‘The shot was Olympic class,’ Singh pointed out.

  Wright bristled visibly. ‘Are you saying a mere female couldn’t have pulled it off? Don’t go sexist on me, Detective Inspector. We know nothing about the woman; she could be an Olympian herself.’

  ‘But most likely not,’ he countered. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Children,’ the superintendent chuckled. ‘Come on now. Okay, Jackie, she’s prime, let’s agree that much, and we need to track her down. I happen to know that the Spanish are doing exactly the same, as we speak. Let’s see if we can manage it between us. Step one, I know it’s Saturday, but you and Tarvil get on to East Coast Buses and find out who was driving that X5 on that day. If you have to drag the CEO off the golf course, so be it. This’ll be the second competition I’ve missed in as many weekends, so nobody else is using that as an excuse.’

  Eighty-Two

  ‘Did you like the tomato toast?’ Roza asked.

  Mann nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, indeed. Do you always have it with anchovies?’

  ‘No, they’re an optional extra.’

  ‘What’s on it, apart from tomato? Is there a knack to it’

  ‘There is a very specific way. First, toast the bread, obviously, then you rub on ajo, garlic. Next you halve a tomato and rub it all in. Then drizzle on the oil. The anchovies come last. Some restaurants will bring everything to the table and let you do it yourself. It’s very simple, very basic, but of course the most important thing is that the bread is strong enough.’

  Lottie nodded. ‘I can see that. It’s not going to work with Asda own brand sliced wholemeal, that’s for sure.’

  ‘If we eat together tonight, I will introduce you to our national dessert,’ the comissari promised. ‘Crema Catalana: it’s like crème brulee, only it involves a blowtorch. Come,’ she continued, rising from the table, ‘let’s check out the sports shop. Lieutenant Prat, lead the way. The uniforms can stay here, otherwise we’ll look like an invading force.’

  The presumed main street was no more than sixty metres away, through a narrow passageway. All of the shops, with the exception of the tabac, were closed for lunch, but as they approached their target the shutter over the display window was rolled up from within. A few seconds later, the door was unlocked and opened.

  The store was called País Alt, ‘High Country,’ Prat explained, although the visitor had worked that out for herself.

  Roza gave him a tiny nod as they approached, indicating that he should lead. ‘Again, three of us, the shopkeeper might be intimidated.’

  ‘Plus,’ Mann volunteered, ‘this place likely has its social media newsgroups like everywhere else these days. We’re probably on them already.’

  ‘We may be,’ Prat agreed. ‘But all they’ll be able to say is that we’re looking for a woman. We haven’t given a name anywhere that we visited, simply showed the image.’

  ‘Which isn’t great,’ the Scot observed, ‘so maybe this whole exercise is a waste of time. She could have been here but not be recognisable from that. It’s the best we’ve got, though, so good luck, Josep.’

  He stepped into the shop, leaving his colleagues to window-shop. ‘Dan would love this,’ Lottie said. ‘Those boots, those walking poles. Personally, I think they look daft, but he’s always on about getting a pair.’

  ‘You should buy him something from there,’ Lita suggested.

  ‘I’ll do better. I’ll bring him here next summer; Jakey’ll want to go to a beach, but he won’t be given a vote, not this time.’

  Her planning was interrupted by the return of Lieutenant Prat. His expression was animated, his eyes lit by the glow of a result. ‘She was here,’ he announced. ‘She bought a pair of hiking boots, a backpack and a heavy jacket. The owner says she’s going to the top of the mountains; he says that only somebody doing that would buy a thing of that weight at this time of year. What do we do, Comissari?’ he asked.

  ‘You know what we do,’ Roza told him. ‘We go up to Vall de Núria; it’s the only place she can have headed.’

  Mann looked at them, puzzled. ‘What’s Vall de Núria?’

  ‘It’s a resort and a centre,’ Prat replied, ‘hiking in the summer, skiing in the winter. It’s a very significant place for Catalans. Our Statute of Autonomy was written there almost a hundred years ago, in the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Núria.’

  ‘I don’t imagine she’s gone to pray, so why?’

  ‘There can be only one reason,’ Roza said. ‘She’s planning to cross into France and disappear. We may be too late already but we need to get up there.’ She looked at her colleague’s footwear. ‘Lottie, go in there and buy yourself a pair of boots, or at the least shoes as solid as mine.’

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘I see now why you wanted a four-by-four vehicle.’

  The comissari laughed. ‘Ah, we don’t go there by road; there is none past Queralbs. Other than on foot, which would take a while because it’s a thousand metre climb that’s almost vertical in places, there’s only one way to get up to Núria, and that’s on the Cremallera, the rack railway.’