Last Resort Read online

  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 glan
ced 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.

  Nineteen

  The man in charge was an intendant; a slightly built guy, around the forty mark, with a look of Rhett Butler, right down to the pencil moustache. He came in after the footsoldiers had secured the scene, and calmed things down.

  ‘Who is Señor Aislado?’ he asked, in Catalan, as we lowered our hands. The big fellow nodded.

  ‘My name is Reyes, señor,’ the officer said, in a respectful tone, then added something in which I caught the name Canals, and my own.

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ Xavi said in English, for my benefit, then switched languages again and said something about me being police chief in Scotland. In the circumstances I didn’t object to that, even though it was somewhat out of date.

  With my friend’s help I explained to Reyes that we’d done as little as possible to fuck up his crime scene. That wasn’t quite true. We should really have backed out of there as soon as we found Battaglia’s body. He accepted our good faith, though, and then asked us to minimise further damage by accompanying him to somewhere we could talk while his CSIs got to work. That turned out to be a bar across the street; it was fairly busy but his uniform ensured that we had plenty of space around us.

  Xavi’s call to Canals had been brief; he had given him no more than the address and the fact that we’d found a woman’s body there, so we had to start from scratch. We gave him the basic facts that we had come to Barcelona on the trail of a missing colleague, and that we were still looking for him.

  We talked him through the timeline, and were doing fine until he asked if we knew who the dead woman was. When Xavi told him, and explained where Bernicia Battaglia stood in the Italian hierarchy, his eyes narrowed and his moustache dropped a little as he spoke.

  ‘Intendant Reyes says this has suddenly gone way above his pay grade,’ the big man explained. ‘He thinks we should all go to the director general’s office.’

  ‘That would seem eminently sensible,’ I remarked.

  It was going on for midnight before we were clear of Barcelona.

  I hadn’t wanted to pull rank on Reyes, so I hadn’t mentioned the fact, but I know the head of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Julien Valencia, having met him at a policing conference two years ago. We’d hit it off then because of my special interest in Catalunya, and had kept in touch afterwards.

  Julien greeted me like an old pal, in English, then had his most senior available officer take formal statements from the two of us. I avoided speculation, but offered my theory that Hector Sureda had been in the kitchen when the woman had been shot.

  I volunteered nothing else, though. Instead I suggested that it would be unhelpful to name Hector at that stage of the investigation, or to put out any public appeal for sightings. The murder of one of the highest-profile media figures in Europe would give the press plenty of meat to chew, while his forensic investigators looked for traces of the unknown little man who’d stood in the doorway of Hector’s living room, sighting his pistol on the back of Battaglia’s head.

  Valencia went with that. Indeed he ordered that no formal statement was to be made until the following morning, when he would hold a press conference himself.

  ‘Something funny happened, Bob,’ he said, as his deputy left us. ‘I just called Italy, to tell them what we got here, an’ they knew already. How could that be?’

  ‘Maybe they had her killed,’ I suggested, with a smile. I didn’t believe that, but it did no harm to throw that pebble into the pond.

  He didn’t react at all; Julien’s a good cop, open to all possibilities until they’re proved to be impossible. So am I, but my thinking was that if the Italian security apparatus wanted her dead, they’d have done it on their own ground, in a much more subtle way, rather than make a big mess in another country.

  He gave us dinner in his office, then took us back to Xavi’s Range Rover in his own car, complete with driver. Just before I stepped out, I had a quiet word with him.

  ‘We’re not going to give up looking for Hector,’ I told him. ‘We won’t get in the way of your investigation, that’s a promise, but I’d appreciate being kept informed of your progress. Young Sureda is very important to Xavi’s business, and more, he’s almost family.’

  ‘I’ll arrange that,’ Valencia said, ‘on the understanding that if you find him, I want him.’

  ‘You’ll have him,’ I promised, ‘if only to prove his innocence.’

  The director general smiled. ‘Or his guilt, my friend. None of us are infallible; you could be wrong about him. Is there anything I can do to help you look for him, since it is in both our interests?’

  ‘There have been places I haven’t been able to go,’ I replied, ‘while we’ve been looking for him, information that hasn’t been open to me. For example, it would be useful to know if his personal credit cards and bank debit cards have been used. So far the only things I’ve had to go on are a couple of card slips that I found. You can access that stuff; I’d appreciate it if you could share it.’

  ‘I have no problem with that,’ Valencia said. ‘I’ll keep you informed.’

  Neither Xavi nor I had anything to say on the way out of the city. In fact it wasn’t until we passed the prison, on our right as we headed for the Granollers autopista station, that either of us spoke.

  ‘Where has he gone, Bob?’ my friend asked. ‘And who’s he running from?’

  ‘He could be almost anywhere in Europe,’ I replied. ‘We know that his passport is still in Begur, for I saw it in one of his underwear drawers, but he wouldn’t need it to go to any of the Schengen countries. When Valencia accesses his card activity that might tell us.’

  I paused, as that metaphorical kite came back into my mind, the one I’d been about to fly when the police burst into the apartment.

  ‘As for the who, Xavi . . . the gunman ran away from him, so I can’t imagine that the threat of immediate physical danger made him go. But consider where he was; in Barcelona, having a fling with Bernicia Battaglia.’ I studied his profile in the dark. ‘When she approached you and offered to buy you out, did you share that with the rest of the board?’

  ‘I told Sheila, Pilar and Hector. We laughed about it, about the sheer cheek of the bloody woman, and her colourful threat.’

  ‘Are you sure that all four of you laughed?’

  ‘Mmm. Now that you ask,’ he murmured, thoughtfully, ‘maybe not. Where are you going with this?’

  I didn’t answer directly. ‘You told them, and they knew how you felt, yet a few months later we find Hector having dinner with Battaglia and then taking her to his fuck-pad in Barcelona. As I said earlier, that suggests that he was considering selling you out.’

  ‘How could he? He doesn’t have a controlling interest.’

  ‘Come on, sunshine. You told me yourself that he runs the growth areas of the company and that he’s invaluable to you. If Battaglia bought Hector Sureda, with his skills and his unique knowledge, and had him set up a rival Spanish digital network, what would happen?’

  ‘We’d probably be fucked if he got it right,’ Xavi admitted.

  ‘It’s not going to happen now, but if it had, would that have made you angry?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he murmured, his face a blue shadow in the light from the instrument panel, ‘it would have made me very angry indeed.’

  ‘And maybe you don’t know how formidable you can appear,’ I said.

  ‘Now consider this,’ I continued. ‘There he is, in his apartment, potentially about to fuck both Battaglia and you, simultaneously, when there’s a shot, he goes back into his living room and she’s dead. A few scenarios must have run though his mind, Xavi, but which one scared him the most? I believe that I know. I suspect, my scary big pal, that Hector’s running from you.’

  Twenty

  I stayed at Xavi’s pla
ce for a second night. Sheila was still up and wide awake when we got there, well after one o’clock. She hadn’t been told what had happened in Barcelona, only that we had been delayed, but when she saw how tired we looked she wouldn’t be fobbed off any longer.

  As a result, my head didn’t hit the pillow until two thirty; it proved to be a waste of time, for I doubt if I managed more than two hours’ sleep. It doesn’t matter how many dead people you find in a career, they always hang around for a while.

  We were all up and about by eight. I was uncomfortable, as I hate wearing the same clothes two days running, but I hung around, for there was a lot to discuss.

  As soon as Ben had left for the school run with Paloma, we got down to it over breakfast, with Sheila sitting in.

  ‘You have to see Pilar,’ she said, ‘and straight away too, before Señor Valencia has his press conference. It’s bound to be live on the news channel.’

  ‘He promised to keep Hector’s name out of it for now,’ Xavi countered. ‘She won’t be too bothered that Battaglia’s dead, but there’s nothing to link him to her.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh no, Mr Journalist? Every crime reporter in Barcelona will be covering this story, including ours. They will know already that there’s a crime scene at an address in Carrer de Trafalgar, and as soon as the city offices open for business, they’ll know who owns the place. Our staffer will know for sure who Hector Sureda is, and it won’t take the rest long to make the connection.’

  ‘True,’ he sighed. He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve been management too long, honey. When this is sorted, I think I’m going to put myself back on the news desk.’

  ‘I will go and see Pilar,’ I volunteered, ‘as soon as we’re done here. I have to get back to L’Escala, and it’s more or less on my way. It’ll give me a chance to pick her brains. If anyone’s likely to know where Hector’s potential boltholes might be, it’s his mother.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Sheila laughed. ‘Ask me the same thing about my son and I wouldn’t have a bloody clue. Nonetheless, Bob, it’s very good of you. We all appreciate the help you’ve given. I am so glad that Xavi wasn’t on his own when he walked into that apartment.’