Suspects All ! Read online

  Suspects All!

  The Mulgray Twins

  In Memory of

  Frances Hanna

  who never lost faith in us

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  END GAME

  By the Same Authors

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to our agent, Frances Hanna, Acacia House Publishing Services Ltd, 82 Chestnut Avenue, Brantford, Ontario for her advice and hard work over the years on our behalf.

  Grateful thanks also to all who have aided us in the research of this novel, and in particular to:

  Mariano Medda and David Menzies of Glasgow Botanic Gardens who let us into the secrets of orchid propagation.

  The Royal Dick Vet Hospital for Sick Animals, East Bush, Roslin and Dr Alexander Campbell, Manager of the Veterinary Poisons Information Service, London, who very kindly gave of their time to answer our questions on the correct emergency treatment for Gorgonzola.

  Harry Cummings, retired Chief Superintendent Lothian & Borders Police for helping us to determine a site for the English Criminal Courts where the guilty were weighed in the scales of justice and found wanting.

  Our editor, Gill Jackson of Robert Hale, for her patience when dealing with the problems we cast in her way.

  For those readers interested in the phenomenon of cats that paint (or find the idea totally incredible), we refer you to the amazing works of art in ‘Why Cats Paint – a theory of feline aesthetics’ by Burton Silver and Heather Busch, published by Ten Speed Press, Toronto.

  CHAPTER ONE

  They call Madeira ‘The Floating Garden’, but it wasn’t a flower that was floating in Funchal harbour. Face down, the body rocked gently in the swell, the black jacket and trousers traditional Portuguese funeral attire. Dead men tell no tales, they say. Not true. Not true at all. That last meal, how death came and when – through the medium of forensic science, these things the dead tell us as clearly as if their cold lips had whispered the words. But for the moment, Luís Gomes wasn’t saying anything, unless he was communing with the fish.

  I don’t suppose that Luís Gomes, barman at the Massaroco Hotel, had expected to be a corpse by three o’clock in the afternoon. Nor was I expecting him to die. When earlier this morning Gomes had leant over the bar and whispered that he had something to tell me, I felt like kissing him on both cheeks and toasting his health in poncha, the local rum-based drink. Of course I did neither, merely nodded and stirred the large glass of milky coffee he’d just handed to me.

  ‘Meet me in the Beerhouse on the harbour at três á tarde. I tell you something then,’ he’d muttered, casting a nervous glance round and moving quickly away.

  Premature rejoicing is not something I’m prone to, but I must say I had high hopes of that meeting at three o’clock in the afternoon. What Gomes had to say could be the pulled thread that would unravel the web of evasion and subterfuge inextricably linked with any drug network. I saw myself knocking triumphantly on Comandante Figueira’s door with something at last to report….

  I was in Madeira as the result of a tip-off to HM Revenue & Customs. An English-run drug ring, it seemed, was making use of the Massaroco Hotel in Funchal, so HMRC had requested the cooperation of the Portuguese equivalent of the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. For the past month they’d arranged for me to pose as the English employee of the Agençia, a Madeira travel agency based in the hotel – ideal for snooping into any murky goings-on. But to date my gleanings had been negligible, or to be painfully honest, zilch, zero, nada.

  As a result, my twice-weekly meetings with steely police comandante, Justinia Figueira were becoming strained. She was making it increasingly clear that my unproductive presence and all the paperwork it generated were causing an intolerable disruption to her department. Portuguese is a squishy, squelchy language lending itself well to the expression of scorn. And it surfaced once again when she’d addressed me this morning in her almost perfect English.

  After I’d admitted that yet again I’d nothing to report, she’d hissed, ‘What evidence do you have that this English-run drug network exists? Why is London thinking you will be finding anything in the Massaroco Hotel, Deborah J. Sshmit?’

  These soft Portuguese sibilants were indicative of her attitude to DJ Smith, lowly officer from HM Revenue & Customs. Not once in the past month had she bothered to pronounce my name correctly.

  A blood-red fingernail stabbed the desk calendar. ‘I give you twenty-one days. Are you listening? Twenty-one days. If you do not have by then, how do you say, a breakthrough, it will be a case of goodbye to you, Sshmit.’

  Twenty-one days, when I’d been unable to dig up anything in the last twenty-eight. I’d used the Portuguese police files to enquire into the backgrounds of the hotel staff, I’d forwarded to London the passport details of new arrivals at the hotel, I’d made copious notes on each English guest checking in – and what had I come up with? Nada, nothing, zilch. Until Gomes set up our meeting.

  As is standard practice in my line of work, I arrived half an hour early for my appointment at the Beerhouse, a restaurant-bar on a pier jutting out into the harbour at the western end of the palm-lined Avenida do Mar. The glass walls were topped by a shiny white roof rising into a strange collection of conical peaks, calling to mind a double row of baked meringues. The overall colour scheme was white – white tables, spindly-legged metal chairs and sun umbrellas, today furled against the stiff breeze.

  I ordered a drink at a table with a view over both the inner marina and the main harbour. A thin scarf of grey smoke drifted up, swirled and dispersed from the squat, black-rimmed funnel of the latest cruise liner to dock. Canvas sails puffed out by the wind, the tiny Santa Maria, an exact replica of Columbus’s ship, was gliding past the liner’s towering sides. In the distance, traffic thrummed softly along the busy avenida. I sipped my beer. Soothed and lulled by the melodic plink plank from the tangle of slender masts of cabin cruisers, catamarans and other small sailing boats in the inner harbour, I let the minutes drift by.…

  At 3.15 I wasn’t worried. On the whole, the Portuguese don’t make punctuality a high priority. For Luís to be quarter of an hour, even half an hour late for our appointment was neither here nor there. But by four o’clock I had to accept that he wasn’t going to turn up, that he’d chickened out through fear of reprisals. I signalled to the waiter and paid the bill. ‘Back to square one,’ I sighed. I pushed back my chair.

  It was then that I saw the small crowd peering over the railings. A crowd gathers a crowd. I wandered across to see what was going on. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it certainly wasn’t a body floating face-down in the water.

  A fast-flowing river tumbles down from the hills above Funchal and drains between high concrete walls into the outer harbour. About fifty metres out, where the brown silt of the river merged with the faded blue-green of the harbour water, a black rounded hump was wallowing sluggishly.

  We watched sombrely as the orange and black socorro do mar lifeboat nosed up to the corpse and arms reached down to heave the body aboard. As t
he head and torso rose from the water, the pale face stared back at its audience. Beside me an old woman muttered a prayer. With a roar of opened throttles, the boat arced back towards the entrance beacons of the inner harbour, churning the brown waters and sending angry waves slapping against the seaweed-covered rocks beneath the Beerhouse pier. As it shot past, I could see directly down into the boat.

  My breath caught in my throat, my heart thumped and pounded in my chest as the dark eyes of Luís Gomes stared sightlessly up into mine. I gripped the railing with such force that the rough metal cut into the palms of my hands. Luís had served his last drink. And I had just lost the only lead I had.

  Comandante Justinia Figueira didn’t wave me to a chair. Things were serious. Out of her hearing, those who worked at Police HQ referred to her as The Ogre and at this moment her glare was directed at me.

  ‘Useless! Utterly useless, Sshmit!’ The sibilants scythed through the air with the swish of scimitar blades.

  I stared at the vase of orange and blue Bird of Paradise flowers on the corner of her desk. Spikily beautiful, these Strelitzia reginae signalled ‘Admire but do not touch’. The same could be said for Justinia Figueira with her shoulder-length midnight-black hair, lustrous dark eyes, perfect olive complexion and fiery Latin temper.

  ‘Luís Gomes was your best lead. Your only lead. And you have, as you English say, blowed it.’ With sinking heart I noted the lapse in her English, further evidence that she was in a towering rage.

  I transferred my gaze from the spiky blooms to the equally spiky comandante. ‘Perhaps if I go over my report.…’ I indicated the single sheet of paper lying disregarded on her desk.

  ‘The report is clear, Sshmit. It is the essential detail, yes, the essential detail, that is lacking.’ She plucked up the sheet and waved it aggressively, dangerously close to shredding it on the sharp beaks of the Bird of Paradise flowers. ‘You state here that you ordered a coffee and Gomes poured it for you. As he put the cup down, he said to you.…’ She rasped an elegant finger down the page till she found the place. ‘Yes … his words were, “Meet me três á tarde at the Beerhouse on the harbour. I tell you something then”. After that you leave the hotel and the next time you see Gomes he is dead.’ She looked up and I nodded. ‘Obviously someone must have heard this conversation. Where is the list of those who were there?’

  That was a difficult one. In my undercover role as a client liaison for a travel company with a chain of hotels on the island, my daily office hour in the Massaroco Hotel could be pretty hectic. Today had been fairly typical. Just who had been in earshot when Luís had muttered these words? I played for time.

  ‘As you know, Comandante,’ I said, ‘after the office hour I have established the routine of having a leisurely coffee in the Massaroco’s Mimosa Bar with the barman, Luís. It’s an ideal opportunity to steer the conversation round to the current crop of guests and their bad habits. There’s nothing people like more than a discreet gossipy moan.’

  The Ogre drummed impatient fingers on the desk. ‘What I want to know is whose eyes were watching and whose ears were listening. And what we must then establish’ – she reached out, snapped the head off one of the strelitzias and jabbed its point ferociously in my direction – ‘is whether some careless action of yours, Officer Sshmit, has led to the death of this man and jeopardized the success of the operation. I will expect your completed report at 1800 hours.’ A curt nod of dismissal signalled the end of the interview.

  That gave me barely an hour. Back in the office assigned to me for the duration of my deployment with the Madeiran Drug Squad, I stared at the blank sheet of paper in front of me and tried to recapture the scene in the café-bar of the Massaroco Hotel six hours previously. I had been writing up my client notes and mentally filing away snippets that might tie in with the tip-off on HMRC’s confidential hotline for reporting smuggling or other suspicious activity, information that had brought me all the way from London to Madeira. So I had only a hazy recollection of who was still there and who might have overheard Luís making his rendezvous with me.

  With a marker pen I drew a crescent shape to represent the bar and circles for the nearby tables. A red blob denoted Luís behind the bar, and another, myself on a bar stool. At eleven o’clock this morning, how had it been?

  … Most of the tables were empty. Sunny weather and a popular excursion to the wine lodges had combined to make it a slack time for the Mimosa bar. Charles Mason, nicknamed by me The Playboy, bleached and spiky gelled hair a foil to that golden tan and carefully cultivated dark designer stubble, had been standing at the far end of the crescent-shaped bar, elbow propped on the black marble top.

  In an assured manner verging on the arrogant, he was chatting up pretty but empty-headed Zara Porter-Browne. The powerful Madeira rum they were tossing back seemed to be cementing their relationship in a rosy glow. His punchline had evidently scored a hit, for her high-pitched giggle soared up to the timber roof, bounced off and came tumbling back. They’d soon reached the intimate stage of sipping their drinks through intricately intertwined arms. She was hanging on every word as he launched into another tale of prowess (his). The words ‘hooked a shark’ drifted along the bar….

  Who else was there? I frowned in concentration…. Yes, artist Celia Haxby.

  ‘If I could just interrupt your thoughts for a teeny moment …’ she’d said, as she unfolded a map of the island and smoothed it out on the bar top.

  Although slatted blinds blocked out the bright rays of the sun from the café bar, she was wearing a floppy chrome-yellow sun hat, a seemingly essential accessory to that brightly coloured artist’s smock and blue-and-white striped calf-length trousers. If Charles Mason was working hard on his playboy image, she was working equally hard on hers as the flamboyant Arty-Crafty Artist.

  She’d stabbed a finger down on the map. ‘… and if you could just point out the picturesque village that the old bulldog Winston Churchill favoured for his paintings, I’ll just bag a taxi, pop along there and complete a few canvases myself.’ Her tone intimated a supreme confidence that her work would one day be equally sought after.

  ‘That’s it here, Câmara de Lobos.’ I’d underlined it on her map. ‘It’s only a few miles from the Massaroco. You can easily get there by taxi or bus.’

  My ignorance of artistic ways drew a snort of derision. ‘Bus? That’s no use! I’ll need’ – she ticked off each essential item on fingers that still bore traces of paint – ‘my easel, stool, paint box, tube of brushes and, of course, canvases.’

  There’d certainly be some difficulty dragging all that gear onto a bus. I’d smiled and said something like, ‘Well, get the taxi to drop you beside the Churchill Restaurant. The view over the harbour to the village on the hill is much the same as when The Great Man sat and painted there, very picturesque.’

  Then…? She’d picked up the map and stowed it in a bag slung round her waist, and muttering, ‘Now I think I’ll go and cheer up poor Dorothy Winterton. What we both need is a good cup of tea,’ she’d sailed off, her brightly coloured smock billowing out like a taut spinnaker. In the curved bar mirror I’d watched her heave-to at a nearby table where Mrs Winterton, middle-aged, recently widowed, sat greyly toying with a slice of the heavy black Madeira honey cake.

  For the next five minutes or so I’d been busy writing up the day’s client business, in my mind the forthcoming tall glass of coffee and the possibly fruitful exchange of gossip with the cleaning staff who would soon come clattering in on their lunch break. What had happened after that?

  If I looked at the desk diary that I’d been writing up, the notes should help me remember…. Two brown stains disfigured the current page. Celia Haxby had been responsible for one of them when she’d banged down the teapot on the bar in front of the startled Luís. Clunk splat! A watery brown splodge spread over the paper as tea spurted from the spout.

  ‘The water is not boiling!’ she’d boomed. ‘It is absolutely essential that the water is bubbling
before you pour it into the teapot.’

  Mesmerized, Luís had stared at her like a snake cornered by a mongoose.

  She’d flicked open the teapot lid and eyed the faintly steaming contents, lips pursed in a moue of distaste. ‘Bubb-ling. You understand? If the water is not boiling, the tea is not tea. It is dishwater!’ She’d pushed the offending pot across the counter.

  As if suddenly awakening from a trance, Luís grabbed the teapot and scuttled off to the sink.

  Celia leant toward me lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Dorothy’s a leetle down.’ She’d rolled her eyes to indicate the mouse-like Mrs Winterton. ‘I thought it might cheer her up a bit so I asked her to come with me to that Churchill place. You know, she was pathetically grateful….’

  In the curved glass of the bar mirror Mrs Winterton had seemed quite perky. She was nibbling animatedly at the wedge of thick dark cake and washing it down with the previously neglected glass of sweet Madeira wine.

  Daa daa da-da da da-da. The chirping ringtone notes of Land of Hope and Glory warbled on and on. Daa-daa da-da da daa. Oblivious to the malevolent glances being cast in his direction, or merely ignoring them, David Grant, Exotic Flower Importer & Exporter, hadn’t been in a hurry to answer his phone. The crumple-suited figure lolling on a barstool had taken a leisurely sip or two of his drink before answering the call.

  Celia Haxby hadn’t bothered to lower her voice. ‘If there’s one thing worse than having to listen to those frightfully inane mobile phone conversations, it’s being disturbed by them when one’s relaxing over one’s cup of tea.’

  ‘Grant here,’ he’d shouted into his phone. ‘Yes, I left a message about that orchid delivery you made yesterday. I wanted phrags, not paphs. No, they’re not the same … I’m not paying for stuff I didn’t order. I’ll go over that list again….’