Free Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page A

deny it, of course, so no point in telling anybody. But when the police finally caught up with Carlos and began to build up their case …
    That girl, and his carelessness in letting her bag fall into the water, nagged at my mind again that night. It was in the small hours, lying awake and thinking of her stretched out naked in that refrigerated tin box, that I remembered how she had suddenly referred to what I now knew to be the Disappeareds. It was just after we had come out of the Blackwall Tunnel and she could see young Carlos following us. ‘So many killed,’ she had murmured, staring into the rear-view mirror.
    â€˜What’s that got to do with it?’ I had asked her and she had turned on me. ‘Eduardo is one of them,’ she had said. ‘Eduardo is my brother. My younger brother. And that little bastard –’ She nodded at the reflection in her rear mirror – ‘Why is he here? Why does Ángel send him?’ And she had gone on about her half-brother, how evil he could be.
    Something else she had said came back to me then. ‘He hated Eduardo.’ And when I had asked her why, she had said, ‘Because he is a good man, a Connor-Gómez. Not Sicilian. My father has told him Eduardo –’ Her mouth shut tight on whatever it was she was going to say. ‘That is before they burn down the store.’ She swung across the truck we were passing into the left-hand lane and then made the sharp turn left where it was signposted Isle of Dogs.
    That was when we had lost sight of the car behind. Her mood had changed then, the tension gone. I should have mentioned all this to the Inspector, but I hadn’t remembered at the time. I had been too shocked at the sight of her body, everything else blotted out. And then Victor Wellington reminding me of it. Had she meant her half-brother was one of those responsible for what had happened to the Disappeareds? Or was she simply saying he had been a supporter of the Junta, the military regime that had caused the terror, or at least condoned it? I knew very little about it, only what I had read in the papers after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, and anyway it was no concern of mine – except that I had met Iris Sunderby and had been brought down to London to try and identify her body.
    To get it out of my mind I took the following day off, borrowed a friend’s boat and sailed it out to Blakeney Point, anchoring under the shingle there. It was one of those cloudless East Coast days, the sun blazing down and a bite in the wind, which was north-east force 3 to 4, the sort of day when even visitors from hot climates suffer from sunburn. I stayed out overnight, caught some fish, and after making a splendid breakfast of them, sailed back in the dawn to find that Iain Ward had phoned in my absence.
    The message on my Ansaphone said he had seen the papers that morning and would I phone him urgently. And he gave his telephone number. By ‘that morning’ he obviously meant the previous morning’s papers. I didn’t take any papers myself, but my next-door neighbour let me have a look at his Express and there, under the heading ‘DOCKLAND KILLING’, I found my name referred to as one of those who had been called in to identify the body. Inspector Blaxall was quoted as saying that positive identification would probably depend on dental evidence and as a resident of the Argentine it might be some time before the police in Buenos Aires were able to trace her records. Even then the condition of the body would make it difficult to check the dental information. There followed the names of those who had been called in to identify the body, among them mine: Peter Kettil, a wood preservative consultant, who had also talked to Mrs Sunderby at the conference on board the Cutty Sark last week, seems to have been fairly sure the body in the dock was hers .
    The report went on to give something of Iris