A Grave Waiting (13 page)

“Perhaps. We will, of course, check them out.”

“Of course.”

Whatever had bothered her when she heard the word
password
was now under control, or what she had heard so far had put her mind at rest. They would have to send the computer away, to see if anything had been erased.

Moretti stood up. “Thank you, Ms. Letourneau. That'll be all for now.”

“The hotel manager said something about us getting our passports back.”

She was lounging back, relaxed against the cushions of the chair, her smile now almost contemptuous.

“Not now, I'm afraid. The disappearance of Mr. Smith changes all that.”

Moretti watched with some satisfaction as Adèle Letourneau's long, square-tipped nails clenched against the arms of the chair.

“What did the amorous Ms. Kerr have to say for herself?”

Liz Falla looked away from the road and grinned.

“Well, they were in the sack all right, and she managed to pin down the time as somewhere around six o'clock this morning. Mind you, she mightn't want anyone to know she was carrying on during office hours. I said we'd send someone to get a statement from Shane. And Hospital Lane has sent over two constables who will stay at the hotel. No sign of Martin Smith on or around the yacht.”

“That is no surprise. Martin Smith the firearms expert is a loose cannon. I have a feeling he has miscalculated, and runs the risk of meeting his nemesis.”

“Goddess of retribution, right? Don't look so surprised, Guv. You said that once before on our first case, and I looked it up. I always liked those Greek gods and goddesses myself. Sometimes I felt they were a lot more likely a bunch than an almighty single deity that stood on the sidelines and allowed war, famine, and pestilence to carry on regardless. Once shocked my mother to the core by saying that out loud on a Sunday.”

As they approached Glategny Esplanade, Liz Falla slowed the car.

“Looking for Brutus?” Moretti asked.

“No, actually. I was going to suggest we stopped off at my place for a sandwich or something before we get to headquarters and meet
our
nemesis. You know who I mean.”

Moretti hesitated before replying. Accepting the invitation crossed a line, a line he had put in place at the beginning of a partnership not of his choosing, or hers. He saw a flicker of a smile cross her face, and took it as a challenge.

“Good idea. My lunch was a couple of cupcakes. It'll give me a chance to go over what Brouard told me on the phone.”

Liz Falla pulled the BMW alongside the crescent of houses.

“Here we are, Guv. This one's mine.” She pointed to an olive-green door.

Falla's flat was on the second floor up a narrow flight of stairs. She unlocked the door that led into a small living room with a large window overlooking the Esplanade, with a kitchen alcove tucked into one corner. Presumably the other doors opposite the window led to bedroom and bathroom. While she put the kettle on and got rolls, cooked meats, and cheese out of the fridge, Moretti looked around.

Presumably the room reflected its owner, although he knew virtually nothing about his partner's private life. Aside from it including the likes of Denny Bras-de-Fer, and Ludo Ross, perhaps. He thought it was eclectic. That was what the magazines who specialized in such things as interior decorating might call it. None of the furniture matched and yet it did. The sofa was covered in a leafy print in various greens, and two armchairs were in a plain bronze fabric with a slight nacreous sheen. There was a large, kilim-covered cushion on the floor by the window on top of a square wooden frame, and a low circular brass-topped table. A high-quality sound system stood in one corner, with CD-stacked towers on each side.

Liz Falla's guitar lay alongside its case on a narrow table against the wall near the kitchen area. It was a beauty, a Martin, with a mahogany body from the look of it, and a rosewood headplate. Moretti bent down to take a look at some of the CD titles. Much folk, some jazz, some classical, little pop. The classical, he noticed, was mostly piano.

“In case you're wondering,” Liz Falla put down mugs and plates of food on the low table, “I do read. My bookshelves are all in the bedroom. It's how I get to sleep at night, reading.”

“Beautiful guitar. A Martin.”

“Of course, you'd know something about guitar. I always think of you as — well, not as a pianist, if you see what I mean. My precious baby, that guitar, my one and only. Sweet as honey, a resonance to die for. Heaven. Help yourself.”

Liz went back to the kitchen and returned with a teapot.

“I like this.” Moretti pointed at one of the pictures on the wall nearest him.

It was of a woman in a white Victorian dress and broad-brimmed hat, standing in a verdant tropical landscape. Behind her, huge peach-like fruits hung in the trees, and pink disks centred the spidery flowers that rose behind towering ferns on each side of her, threatening to engulf the slender figure. Yet she seemed, somehow, in control, confident in her jungle setting. The signature in the corner was easily read, the artist's identity unmistakeable.

“Rousseau. This is new to me.”

“A school friend of mine who went to the States sent it to me. It's in some collection there. It's called
Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest
. I love it.”

“You see some reflection of yourself perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” She changed the subject. “What did PC Brouard have to say?”

“The Mounties got back to us about the Offshore Haven Credit Corporation. Bernard Masterson's name appears on the letterheads of the outfit as principal financial advisor. It's a tax shelter for the very wealthy — or, at least that's what it's supposed to be, only Revenue Canada won't play along. At the moment it looks as if a few hundred investors stand to lose millions of dollars instead of being able to write them off on a fleet of floating palaces, none of which actually appear to exist.”

“Were there big names involved?” Liz Falla cut herself another chunk of cheese. “I really like this stuff. It's called
Chaume
. I looked it up. It means ‘humble abode.' Perfect, I thought.”

“Thanks.” Moretti took the piece Falla handed to him from the tip of the knife. “Yes, very big names, and some of them are dangerous customers, and all of them are very, very cross.”

“Hmm. We'd better check recent arrivals by air and by sea, hadn't we.”

“I'll get Brouard to do it, although if this was a professional hit man he may well have arrived on someone's private Trilander. Hanley will be tickled pink if this is an outside job, which is what it looks like.”

“Appearances,” said his partner sagely, “can be deceiving.”

As she spoke, Moretti's mobile rang.

“PC Brouard, speak of the devil — he is? Where? We'll go straight over.”

Closing the mobile, Moretti picked up the rest of his roll.

“Grab your lunch, Falla —”

Before he could finish his sentence, his mobile rang again.

“Ah, Chief Officer Hanley — yes, most unfortunate, I agree — yes, I might indeed put it more strongly myself, sir, but we have other priorities at the moment. The body of Martin Smith has just been found — yes, sir, the bodyguard — and it's certainly not an accidental death. Looks like he's been shot with the same gun as his boss.”

On the other side of the brass-topped table, his partner's brown eyes were as large as saucers.

“Nemesis, Guv,” she said, as he put his mobile back in his pocket. “You were right.”

Moretti stood up and took a last mouthful of
Chaume
.

“Well, Falla, you've been saved for now from Hanley's wrath by the death of the little shit. From your point of view you could say that nothing so became
le petit salaud
in his sordid little life as the leaving of it.”

“W
hat
a place for a toe-rag like this to end his days.”

Moretti looked around him.

Martin Smith lay flat on his back in a flower bed of pink geraniums. Beneath the bullet hole in the centre of his forehead, his unseeing eyes seemed as nonplussed as Moretti at finding himself on the front lawn of one of the multi-million-pound homes in the exclusive enclave known as Fort George.

In Guernsey all residential properties are either “local” or “open” market, with tight restrictions on who can own what. When the offshore financial business started to boom in the eighties, a solution was found to the problem of housing those who administered it by building an enclave of lavish homes within the walls of the old seventeenth-century fort, constructed to protect the island during the Napoleonic Wars.

Even a casual visitor coming in through the gate of the old fort, or approaching by the Fermain Road entrance off Val des Terres, the steep, winding road that leads to St. Peter Port from the south, would sense its apartness from the outside island world. The speed limit is twenty miles an hour, all dogs have to be leashed, there is no street parking, no vans allowed on properties. For manicuring the lawns surrounding each bastion a gardener is a requirement, not an option. Not a child in sight, not a sign of life.

At least the lifeless body of the little shit did not disturb that particular norm, lying there in track pants and hooded jacket, which lay partly open to reveal a T-shirt with the word
Bruiser
writ large across his barrel chest.

“Whose property is this? Do we know?” Moretti asked PC Brouard, who was standing on the path leading to the front door of the house. The constable must have upset the entire neighbourhood when he arrived in a police van with Jimmy Le Poidevin and his team, and parked it on the street, thus breaking two bylaws.

“A Mrs. Amsterdam, Guv. She phoned us when she found him. She'd come outside to pick flowers, she said, and there he was. She's in the house with PC Priaulx. I brought her with me when I heard where it was and that it was a female calling, if you see what I mean.”

“Good thinking, Brouard. No sign of the weapon, I suppose.”

“Not so far, but it's a big property. The back garden stretches down as far as the cliff path above Soldier's Bay.”

“How is the lady of the house taking it?” Liz Falla asked, standing up and brushing off her skirt. The impact of the bodyguard's fall had displaced some of the soft, weedless soil of the flowerbed, sprinkling the enamelled green of the grass with small chunks of earth.

“Shocked. Embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?” Moretti and Falla said in unison.

“That's what it sounded like to me — you know, what will the neighbours say?”

Moretti was aware of a curtain across the road moving, but no one appeared outside the walls of his or her personal fort to question their presence on Mrs. Amsterdam's lawn.

“Do you mind? I'm assuming you are as interested in footprints as I am, and we're losing the light,” Jimmy Le Poidevin shouted in their direction. He and an assistant were unrolling SOC tape around the front lawn. “Nichol Watt's on his way.”

“See how he fell?” Moretti said to Liz Falla, pointing at the body. “Right across the length of the bed. Whoever shot him came toward him from the direction of the house next to this one. He's facing the other property. Brouard, check if there's anyone home and, if not, find out who lives there.”

PC Brouard moved his hefty body with athletic alacrity out of the way of a constable banging a supporting pole into the pristine grass, and made his way next door.

Moretti and Falla crossed to the front door, which was locked in spite of the presence of a policewoman on the premises. The constable opened it when he rang the bell. Moretti took in the spy hole in the centre of the door, and what looked like a speaking device of some kind on a side wall. Behind the front door stretched a reception hall into which you could have dropped the whole of Falla's humble abode. Moretti wondered if she was thinking that also.

“Sir, PC Priaulx, sir. She's — Mrs. Amsterdam — is in here.”

“Here” was a smallish sitting room at the end of the hall, looking out on to the garden behind the house through a wall of glass. It was expensively furnished, upholstered, and decorated, yet managed at the same time to be impersonal, like a five-crown hotel suite. As they approached, Mrs. Amsterdam stood up, slowly and shakily, from a satin-covered sofa, glass in hand. Brandy, from the look of it.

“Are you in charge?” It was said in the tone of one used to being in charge herself.

Mrs. Amsterdam was a woman small in stature, but generously proportioned. She was fair-skinned, but the high colour in her cheeks suggested not only present emotion, but a tendency to tipple even when not confronted by violent death on her front lawn. Her hair was of an even tint not unlike the gold satin of the sofa from which she had risen. She was dressed quite formally for the time of day in a paisley-patterned silk dress and she teetered ever so slightly on her very high heels before regaining control of her balance.

“I am Detective Inspector Moretti, Mrs. Amsterdam, and this is Detective Sergeant Falla. You have had a shock.”

“I most certainly have. Sit down, Detective Inspector. I'll sit down myself. What a dreadful sight!”

Not her kind of corpse,
thought Liz Falla, and then silently reproached herself. At least Mrs. Amsterdam was not hysterical, which she might reasonably have been in the circumstances.

“Can I get you medical help, Mrs. Amsterdam?” she asked. “Phone your doctor?”

“No, but you could pour me another brandy. The decanter's over there.”

Liz Falla fetched the heavy cut-glass decanter from a side table, where it stood on a massive silver tray with a stoppered sherry decanter and a bottle of single malt whisky. She poured a generous dollop into Mrs. Amsterdam's glass and handed it to her. Not having been invited to sit down, she stood where she could watch Mrs. Amsterdam's face as she answered Moretti.

“Tell me how you found him.”

“Well —” Mrs. Amsterdam fortified herself with a gulp of brandy “— I have people coming in to dinner tonight, and I'm going with the rose and gold Spode, so I wanted the pink geraniums for my Chelsea Bird.”

“Your —?”

“The china pattern, Inspector. Around a hundred pounds a plate if someone is butterfingered, but there you are. I like to do the flower arrangements myself, because we have an excellent cook who can ice a cake and cut a perfect pastry flower for a pie, but is hopeless with table decorations. One flower in a vase with one stalk of something or other is not my idea of adornment. I'm a bit rococo, and Fritz is all for minimalism, you see, so out I went with my secateurs, and there was this — person, looking straight up at me.” Mrs. Amsterdam's voice shook, and she fortified herself some more.

“Did you see anyone? A car? Anything at all?”

“Well, no, I didn't exactly stay to look around. I picked up my secateurs — I'd dropped them, you see, the shock — and then ran, literally
ran
, back into the house, locked myself in, and phoned for you people.” She closed her eyes briefly, then continued. “My husband always says don't rock the boat and not to overreact, it attracts attention, but what else could I do?”

“Should we phone your husband for you?” Liz Falla asked. “Is he at the office?”

“No, as a matter of fact, he's not. He's in the hospital, having his gall bladder removed. I didn't like to bother him with
this
.”

Don't bother the man with the death of a little nobody,
thought Moretti. “Is the dead man known to you?” he asked.

“Good God, Inspector, no! I have never seen him before, and he is the most unlikely person to end up here, in one's flowerbed, don't you think? I was going to ask you the same question — is he known to the police?”

“We know who he is.” Moretti chose his words carefully. “He is a recent visitor, arrived on a yacht.”

“A yacht! Not his, I presume.”

“No. He was the owner's bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard! Dressed like that! Oh, Gareth will be so upset!”

“Your husband?”

At the corpse's lack of dress sense? At the body's choice of profession?
Liz Falla wondered.

“Yes, my husband. I assumed the man was a drifter, who'd got into bad company, that sort of thing.”

Moretti stood up. “I think we can fairly say he got into bad company, Mrs. Amsterdam, but no, he was not a drifter. We shall have to bring in more police, go over your garden. It extends as far as the cliff path, I believe?”

“Yes, but there's a high wall, with broken glass along the top. I really don't think anyone could have got in that way. Gareth has been talking about enclosing the front garden and installing a gate with electronic security, but he put it off because of his gall bladder.”

“Why was he planning to increase your security? Have you had any problems?”

“Oh no, but you can never be too careful, Inspector. Gareth is with Crédit Genève and safety is their middle name, so of course we made it ours. Surely this is just a random shooting, Inspector, and this man ended up by chance on our property.”

“We cannot answer that yet, Mrs. Amsterdam. By the way, who lives next door, to the left of your house, near the flower bed?”

Mrs. Amsterdam looked surprised. “I have no idea. Someone like us, I imagine.”

As they left the room, Mrs. Amsterdam finished the last of her brandy and rose to replenish her glass.

“So, Falla, what are your gut feelings about Mrs. Amsterdam?”

Liz Falla glanced briefly at Moretti, and then redirected her attention to Val des Terre's hairpin bends.

“Lives in a bubble, doesn't even know the someone-like-us next door. Why was she having a dinner party when her husband was in hospital, Guv? Was it a hen party? Didn't sound like it to me, but perhaps a girls' night out — or in — for this crowd does require the best china. She'll have to change her colour scheme, won't she, because Martin Smith has pretty well flattened her pelargoniums. We'll have to talk to the staff, since they probably know who was coming.”

“Especially the minimalistic cook who's no good with flowers. Something else, Falla. About the corpse. About his face.”

“It was a neat, expert job, wasn't it?”

“Yes, like the death of his employer. Now, think about Ms. Letourneau's story. She had to fight him off, she said, tooth and nail. Did you see the length of her nails?”

“Her nails!” The BMW took a twist in the road with extra velocity. “There wasn't a mark or a scratch on him, except for the hole in the middle of his forehead.”

“Exactly. Now, maybe the little shit was a quick healer —”

“— or maybe Ms. Letourneau was lying through those teeth she supposedly fought him off with.”

“And if so, why? That's the interesting question, Falla. Why would she lie about fighting him off?”

“Because there wasn't a real fight in the first place, and maybe it was staged for Betty Kerr's benefit — and ours — and maybe he wasn't supposed to have said what he said to Shane. ‘I'm going to see a man about a yacht.' That's what he said to him, right?”

“Right. And what better place to go than Fort George if you are looking for a well-heeled somebody who might be involved with floating palaces. I doubt he arrived on foot, so we'll have to do a door to door enquiry about vehicles, etc.”

“That'll go down like a lead balloon, I imagine. The sound of the gun, Guv. Surely someone in that particular neighbourhood would react to a gunshot.”

“They must have used a silencer — I assume one can be used on a Glock. I think we can call off the divers, because clearly this gun is not on the harbour bottom, and I don't think we have a third weapon.”

“Time of death?”

“Nichol will be able to tell us. Whether it was a crime of opportunity, or carefully planned, it took nerve on the Amsterdams' front lawn in broad daylight.”

Moretti's mobile rang. It was Brouard, sounding animated. “I found out who lives next door, Guv. Friend of yours.”

“A friend of mine in Fort George? I think not, Brouard.”

“He's in your band, Guv. Garth Machin. I just spoke to his wife.”

The music always played in Moretti's head. Snippets of Cole Porter while looking at the dead body of Martin Smith, snatches of Dizzy Gillespie when talking to Mrs. Amsterdam, segments of “An American in Paris,” played on the piano by Gershwin, whenever Sandy Goldstein crossed his mind, which was happening from time to time.

Pieces coming together, like fragments of music, into some sort of coherence, or semi-coherence. Garth, Gareth, Gareth, Garth. Coincidence? Or confusion because the names were so alike. Had Martin Smith meant to end up at the Machins'? Masterson's insistence on being in Victoria Marina, where his Vento Teso was close to Garth's boat. Not to forget Nicol's Capri, and the scene in the club between the two men.

The music still played, but the soundtrack had changed. Still Gershwin, but now it was “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the wail of Garth's horn that rang through Moretti's head.

Garth Machin worked for a company called Northland Private Banking, whose offices were in a small enclave of similar businesses quite close to the police station and Government House Hotel, one of the premier hotels on the island. All the buildings in the area were new, but designed to blend in with St. Peter Port's traditional architecture. Behind a false front of becomingly aged stone in pale ochres, greys, and creams, the bank discreetly announced its presence on a small brass plate to the right of the main entrance, alongside two other similar plaques for banks in the same building. From the corners of the structure CCTV cameras looked down on all who left or arrived, like angular, featureless gargoyles.