Stealth by Margaret Duffy Page A

relating the whole conversation to me just about word for word.
    â€˜Just get me the evidence.’
    â€˜I shall need a search warrant.’
    â€˜You won’t – and we haven’t discussed it.’
    â€˜I will, there are security cameras and you don’t want SOCA brought into disrepute.’
    Greenway had sworn vividly and slammed out of the office.
    The other report had been the results of tests on samples taken from the woman’s body. There was quite a list including those conducted on stomach contents, toxicology tests of the blood and urine, but all could be summarized very simply. Miss Smythe had been healthy for her age, had not been poisoned or under the influence of alcohol when she died. Heavy bruising to her upper arms had resulted from her having been gripped, probably to manoeuvre her into a position to be pushed or thrown down the stairs, other bruising a result of knocks she had received as she fell. The writer of the report felt that she had been strangled afterwards when the killer had realized she was still alive.
    Early in the morning, after I had been apprised of this, Greenway rang me.
    â€˜There’s been a development,’ he began by saying. ‘Are you free to come up?’
    I was, very much so, between novels and in a kind of limbo of my own.
    â€˜I – er – don’t know whether he’s mentioned it to you but I’ve apologized to Patrick for my thoroughly unprofessional behaviour yesterday,’ he went on diffidently. ‘It’s just as well he kept me on the straight and narrow.’
    â€˜A role-reversal, I would have thought,’ I said.
    There seemed to be no lingering reverberations of this when I entered the commander’s office late that morning, having caught the train. Patrick was already seated, drinking coffee as he read what looked like a report of some kind.
    Greenway handed me a photograph, a printout on A4 paper from his computer. ‘Patrick gave the Cannes
gendarmerie
his card when he was there and they’ve sent this through. You’ve seen him before.’
    I gazed into the dead face: swarthy, dark-eyed, dark brown hair, Spanish-looking. Horribly battered. ‘Of course, it’s the man who changed his mind about attacking us in the marina in Cannes. The one Patrick had previously witnessed falling into the water and who we had an idea had been snooping on us for Clement Hamlyn.’
    â€˜His body was fished out of the sea off Cannes yesterday morning having been spotted from an anchored dredger,’ Patrick told me. ‘Alonso Morella, Spanish citizen, did odd jobs around the marina and hotels and lived in a small basement flat that he shared with a railway station cleaner. Any spare money he had, which wasn’t much, he spent on booze and cigarettes. Hadn’t actually crossed swords with the law but suspected of being likely to do anything iffy for a few euros. Hamlyn wouldn’t have had any trouble hiring him.’
    â€˜To snoop on us at the hotel too then,’ I said. ‘I presume that he drowned after being beaten up and his body was washed out to sea.’
    â€˜Not necessarily. Some or even all of the facial injuries were almost certainly caused by the corpse being buffeted against the bottom of the harbour, moving with the tide and battering against rocks and sunken detritus. As you know, bodies always lie face down in water with the head hanging. There were other quite deep, parallel cuts to the back caused by the body having been hit by a boat’s propeller. That might have happened when it was rising to the surface as decomposition set in and was floating just below the surface.’
    â€˜How long had he been dead?’
    â€˜Three to four days, perhaps five.’
    â€˜And was it likely that the currents would have washed the body out to sea if he’d fallen, or been pushed, off the harbour wall?’
    â€˜Dunno. The email is in English – well,