As Easy as Murder by Quintin Jardine Page A

to where the woods begin. One of our people will meet you there and bring you to me.’
    ‘We’re on the ninth, Alex. It’ll take me the best part of an hour.’
    ‘I appreciate that. As soon as you can, please.’
    I was gutted; the hot blood of competition was still flowing through my veins. But when the cops, even the friendly ones, invite you seriously to help with their enquiries, it’s best not to decline. When I told them I had to go, the boys assumed that their day was done too, but I told them to carry on. ‘If I’m not back by the time you finish,’ I said, ‘wait for me in the clubhouse. Mine’s a spritzer.’
    ‘What’s all this about?’ Jonny asked.
    ‘I have no idea,’ I confessed. I hadn’t bothered to ask. I knew that for my friend to call me in the way he did, it had to be as urgent as he’d said, but there was no point in fretting on the way there. I’d deal with it when I came face to face with whatever it was.
    It took me a little less than that hour, thanks to a helpful course ranger, who gave me and my clubs a lift back to the car park in his buggy. I called Alex before I set out, with a new estimate of my arrival time. Sure enough, when I made my way up Carrer Bassegoda and along Vall d’Aran, I saw a Mossos vehicle at the road end, with a uniformed woman officer, a local that I recognised, leaning against it.
    I parked behind her, a little way from the last house in the street; its presumptuous owner had tried to put a little distance between himself and the general public by constructing a makeshift barrier of stones and felled branches, but the cop had ignored it and driven her Nissan straight over it. The guy was glowering at her through the bars of his gate, but whatever he was thinking, he was smart enough to keep to himself.
    ‘This way,’ my escort instructed, making her way down a slope and taking a path that led into the woods, assuming that I would follow. Her name was Magda, and I read the fact that she didn’t seem in the mood for chat as a further indication that Alex had not asked me along to show me a new species of mushroom that he’d discovered.
    We hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred yards before we reached, and crossed, the unmarked track that is the boundary between the townships of L’Escala-Empuriès and Torroella de Montgri-L’Estartit, to give them their formal and imposing Catalan names. More cops, six of them, mingled in front of a derelict stone building. They were municipals; two from L’Escala and four from the other side, I reckoned from their badges. They didn’t seem to be doing much, but I wondered as we passed them if a turf war was looming.
    That seemed less likely the further we walked through the thickening woods, and the further we left L’Escala behind. My assumption was that they were there to keep the public away. But from what?
    ‘How much further?’ I asked Magda, but she still wasn’t for chatting.
    After half a mile or so, the track forked in two, and we bore left. I was becoming disorientated, glad I had company, and wondering how many people had wandered into those woods over the years, to become missing person statistics. Then, suddenly, we were in unfettered sunlight once again, in a wide circular clearing. There was a green signpost in the middle, with four route markers, each pointing at a different gap in the trees, including the one from which we had just emerged.
    There was something else there too, a big, square, white tent. Alex Guinart was waiting outside it; he was wearing a blue disposable crime scene one-piece. ‘So, it’s not the annual Mossos barbecue,’ I said. ‘And that isn’t to keep the sun off the wine.’
    ‘No.’ It wasn’t him who replied, but another man, identically dressed, who stepped out of the enclosure just as I spoke. I hadn’t seen Intendant Hector Gomez, Alex’s boss in the criminal investigation division, for a couple of years, not since he and I had stood on each other’s