As Easy as Murder by Quintin Jardine Page B

toes in a very messy business that I’d been sucked into. My friend had assured me that everything was square between us, and that there were no hard feelings on the cop’s side, but I’d never heard that from him.
    ‘Good afternoon, Primavera.’ So far so good; first-name terms. He didn’t smile, but the environment wasn’t exactly mirth-provoking, so I didn’t hold that against him.
    ‘And to you, Hector,’ I replied. ‘Now, will one of you guys please tell me why you hauled me off the golf course and brought me here?’
    ‘We need you to look at something,’ Gomez volunteered.
    ‘Something?’ I repeated, with heavy verbal underlining.
    ‘It is now,’ Alex muttered, the first sign of anything approaching levity.
    ‘Do I have an option here?’
    ‘Of course you do,’ the intendant insisted. ‘We’d ask very few people to do this, only those we think have the stomach for it. But if you’d rather not, we’ll understand.’
    I held out a hand. ‘Gimme,’ I said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘One of those paper suits; I assume you want me to wear one.’
    He smiled, for about half a second. ‘Yes. Thank you.’ He snapped his fingers, and pointed; Magda picked a fresh tunic from a pile on the ground and handed it to me. ‘We’re usually right about people,’ he added. He hadn’t been a couple of years before, but I let that go unsaid.
    I got myself inside the garment, feeling like a Smurf as I fastened it and tucked my hair inside the hood. I’d worn sterile clothing often enough as a nurse to know that anything left uncovered can make the exercise effectively useless. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘lead on.’
    Gomez glanced at Alex. ‘You do it. I need a cigarette, to clear my nostrils.’
    That didn’t add to the party atmosphere either, but by that time I knew they had a real good one for me. A good what? Well, let me put it this way. It doesn’t matter where you are, when the local criminal investigators arrive and put up a tent, you know pretty much what’s inside it. The only matter in doubt is its condition.
    The specimen they had summoned me there to view was in pretty bad nick. It was male, it was white, it was naked, it was dead, and it wasn’t surprising that Gomez had wanted a Marlboro after spending some time with it. It wasn’t easy to tell what had happened to the man, for animals had been at him, and maybe birds too, but my guess was that he had been shot, a couple of times, with a shotgun or something very like one, at close range. The abdomen had been ripped open, and most of the intestines had spilled out or had been torn out by predators. The face was a real mess too; in truth, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left of it. There was so much blood and other matter in the hair that it was difficult to tell what colour it was. Whoever had killed him had taken everything from him, and not just his clothing. He wore no jewellery, but there was a very faint circle round his left wrist; he hadn’t sported much of a suntan, but enough for a watch to have made the skin beneath it slightly paler than the rest.
    ‘How long has he been there?’ I asked.
    ‘At least one full day, probably not two, the pathologist says, but he’s still guessing at this stage.’
    ‘Who found him?’
    Alex winced. ‘A group of schoolkids from Torroella, out on an orienteering day with their teachers.’
    ‘Jeez! That’ll be the talk of the playground for a while. I assume that they didn’t take his clothes as souvenirs.’
    ‘No. That’s how he was found.’
    ‘Why strip him?’
    ‘Hector and I believe that it was to make him difficult to identify. It’s no big task to trace someone through clothing labels and bar codes. He may have been shot in the face for the same reason.’
    That pushed my scepticism button. ‘So you don’t know what he looked like and you don’t know where he shopped. Whoever killed him left you his hands, though; you’ve got fingerprints.’
    ‘Yes we have,’ Alex agreed, ‘but that