Chapter 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.
Ernesto is in his office, which overlooks the harbour in Barcelona.
He once went to a police station in Great Britain that overlooked the recycling bins of a supermarket.
Ernesto likes British people very much indeed, but if he lived in Britain the first thing he would have to do is buy curtains, and the second thing he would have to do is close them.
Sipping a coffee and watching a jet-skier, Ernesto has opened every file with Jakob Eriksson’s name even vaguely attached.
Tommy Griffin and the ex-wife don’t interest him, but Eriksson is what the British call a very large fish.
The mentions start, just as he had told Steve and Rosie, in 2001.
A report on the factory in Morocco, a blurry photo of Eriksson leaving through a loading bay, sent in by, presumably, a rival.
There is nothing before then, so you have to wonder why he started when he did.
Ernesto has been around long enough to know that if Interpol can’t catch Jakob Eriksson, then maybe a woman in a diamond tiara and a man in a Van Halen T-shirt can.
Sometimes the job is just about the angle at which you look at things.
So he will help Rosie. And, of course, if she brings him Jakob Eriksson, then that will help him.
What a coup it would be! Sometimes they don’t take Ernesto too seriously here.
There is a lot of snobbery about a boy from Bilbao, whatever he might have achieved elsewhere.
Some money had gone missing once from a drugs bust. Quite a lot of money, €300,000 or so.
And who did they suspect of stealing it?
His commander, who went to the right school?
No. They suspected Ernesto, who had gone to the wrong school.
Eventually they concluded that Ernesto had done nothing of the sort, but he has never forgotten that their suspicion went straight to him. Snobbery, pure and simple.
The three photos he is looking at now might be a coincidence, never rule it out – poor Mr Herrera could tell you that. But all three? I mean two, maybe, but three? Come on now.
There he is, the same man. In two of the photos, the airports in Helsinki and Minsk, the man stands two places behind the egg-bald Jakob Eriksson.
Not looking at Jakob Eriksson, not engaging, but there.
In the third photo, Bratislava, he is directly in front of him, and if you stared for long enough, and you wanted to believe hard enough, you could swear that Jakob Eriksson has his hand on the man’s elbow.
Three airports, three cities, three murders.
Jakob Eriksson present at each one. But this other man present at each one also.
Is he Eriksson’s hitman perhaps? That would make a lot of sense.
Would Eriksson really risk pulling those triggers himself?
Did he pull the trigger at Vern Blackwood’s villa?
Doubtful. But he’s there each time to oversee things.
Keeps his eyes open, but his hands clean of blood.
Ernesto has run the images of this new mystery man through every piece of software they have and has drawn a blank.
Whoever he is, he has never troubled their radar.
But if Rosie and Steve, and the daughter-in-law, are really going after Jakob Eriksson, this man might prove very useful.
If Jakob Eriksson is hard to catch, perhaps this second man will not be?
And, once they have him, they might be a step closer to Eriksson?
You circle and circle. You close in and close in.
Ernesto emails the three images to Rosie.
The same man on the same flight as Jakob Eriksson three times?
Ernesto thinks more about coincidences, and the fact – the fact – that sometimes they do happen.
You could argue, if you wished, that the killing of Mr Herrera was not a coincidence at all, of course.
You could. Yes, Mr Herrera lived three doors from his grandmother, but everyone on his grandmother’s street was involved in crime in one way or another, it was that sort of neighbourhood.
And, yes, Ecuador is an awfully long way from home, but don’t a lot of Spanish criminals end up there?
When they’ve lost a yard of pace, or when the Spanish authorities take too close an interest?
So the odds come down again. Ernesto understands all that.
But that it was Ernesto himself who poked his head through the ceiling like a golf ball on a tee, and that it was Ernesto’s bullets that tore through every one of Mr Herrera’s major organs, well, that does feel like a coincidence.
He thinks back to that neighbourhood in Bilbao. He lived two blocks away with his mother. His father disappeared soon after he was born, reappearing as if by magic when Ernesto signed terms with Barcelona and disappearing again when the knee injury forced him into less lucrative work.
His background has always worked against him.
If we’re telling the whole truth, Ernesto actually had stolen that €300,000 from the drugs bust. Bought a quiet little house with the money.
But the point was his superiors had absolutely no evidence that he’d done it, but had suspected him regardless.
And that’s just pure snobbery. That sort of thing drives Ernesto crazy.
They said there were only three ways to get out of his neighbourhood: football, the army and crime. Ernesto must be the only kid to have tried all three.
He takes a puff on his cigar, blows out a perfect smoke ring and smiles. There are not many who have achieved everything he has achieved. Even if his bosses still choose to look down on him, Ernesto knows he has much to be proud of.