Page 25 of We Chase Shadows

‘I don’t know,’ says Steve.

‘Murderers don’t just go around murdering people all day,’ says Rosie. ‘If a murderer has a toothache, they don’t murder someone, they go to the dentist.’

‘I never go to the dentist,’ says Steve, feeling a hole in a back tooth with his tongue.

‘That’s because you’re British,’ says Rosie.

‘You’re British too,’ says Steve.

‘You take that back,’ says Rosie. ‘I’m just saying, you can volunteer in a food bank and still shoot a bodyguard in the head.’

Steve nods. Why else would Vern send them on this chase? He must have reasons to be suspicious of Georgie. Unless it’s misdirection? But Vern would have no possible reason to ask them to investigate Esteban’s murder simply to lie to them. Would he? Best not to rule anything out. If twenty-five years in the police taught Steve anything, it’s that other people can be very weird. And also that petrol stations do the best food.

Perhaps Steve himself is weird? He doesn’t think he is. Sure, he speaks to his dead wife every day, but it would be weirder not to do that. Yes, she talks back, but why wouldn’t she? His heart is still her heart.

Georgie exits the pottery shop and walks back to her Škoda. She actually is very pretty, if women being pretty is your thing. They follow her at a safe distance (a ‘boring’ distance, according to Rosie), and it appears that she is heading home.

Steve is thinking. The Škoda, when you really start getting into it, is interesting. It’s not a cheap car exactly, but it’s not the sort of car you’d expect Vern’s ex-wife to drive. You’d think something bigger, surely? Something flashier? Is that why Georgie is looking for Vern’s money? Georgie pulls into her road and stops outside a very pleasant, if nondescript, semi-detached house. Same thing as the Škoda. Georgie clamps her key ring in her teeth as she carries her bags to the front step, puts them down, opens the door and goes in.

‘The house doesn’t fit,’ says Steve. ‘Blackwood in that villa, and Georgie in suburbia?’

‘Perhaps women don’t need to buy big houses,’ says Rosie. ‘Ever thought of that?’

‘Rosie, your house in Dorset has two moats,’ says Steve. ‘Your moat has a moat.’

‘You’re obsessed with my moats,’ says Rosie. She opens the passenger-side door. ‘Come on, then.’

‘Come on what?’

‘Let’s introduce ourselves,’ says Rosie. ‘I’m not going to sit out here while she crochets a blanket for the homeless. Let’s see if she’s a murderer.’

Rosie is out of the car, and Steve feels duty-bound to follow her. He has made her sit still all day, and he knows that’s torture for her. He follows her up the small path to Georgie’s front door.

‘What will you do if she recognizes you?’ Steve asks.

‘Darling,’ says Rosie, turning and clutching a hand to her chest. ‘What will I do if she doesn’t recognize me?’

14

Ernesto Manuelo Santiago de Sousa de Cuéllar is still working. He is smoking a cigar, laptop on his lap – its rightful place – and thinking about what he has just seen in the photographs.

Could it be a coincidence? Come on now.

He had a boss once, a Belgian man, but not Poirot, not this guy. Where Poirot was neat and methodical and always right, this man, Leopold, was an untidy firework and, more to the point, always wrong. It was, once they had got used to him, very useful that Leopold was always wrong, as it enabled them to narrow down many cases immediately, simply through suspecting the precise opposite of what Leopold suspected. It was, in its own way, as useful as working with Mr Sherlock Holmes himself.

Leopold didn’t believe in coincidences, he had probably read somewhere that a good cop shouldn’t. He would drill it into them: ‘No such thing, no such thing.’

But it seems to Ernesto that there are coincidences everywhere, if you really want to look for them. So many things happen in the world, all day, every day, that the chances of two unlikely ones bumping into each other every now and again are very high indeed.

When Ernesto was in the Special Forces he was once part of a team asked to raid a property belonging to an arms smuggler in northern Ecuador – don’t ask why, you don’t want to know. After arresting, or, if you really insist on calling a spade a spade, shooting, the inhabitants, he was doing a final sweep of the property when he poked his head up through a hatch into the attic and found himself under immediate fire. Swinging back underneath the attic ladder, Ernesto strafed the ceiling with bullets and, after hearing a thud, poked his head back up to find a dying man, eyes wide in fear, hand reaching out for help. He was too far gone though, and this is where he would die. But the point being that this man, heart beating for the final time, over five thousand miles from Spain, was Mr Herrera, who once lived three doors down from Ernesto’s grandmother in Bilbao. Tell me now, Leopold, that there are no coincidences.

Leopold himself died at an Interpol conference maybe two years ago, after driving the wrong way around a British roundabout. And then his coffin fell out of a helicopter above the North Sea.

Ernesto misses the guy.

How nice to see Rosie D’Antonio again. Wherever she is, fun follows, and Ernesto likes fun. You might ask who doesn’t like fun, but, in Ernesto’s experience, plenty of people don’t. Fun scares people a little, he thinks. Perhaps the lack of control? Having fun means being open to new ideas and new opportunities. Being open to letting your guard down.

Speaking of which, is that what Jakob Eriksson has done here? Most of Europe’s finest criminals, and there are some very fine ones, are exceedingly careful. Jakob Eriksson has been too up to now. But dumping a corpse on an Italian doorstep? That’s fairly showy.