Free Last Resort by Quintin Jardine

Ignacio?’
    ‘The MD does; I told him my whole life story as soon as we began talking seriously about the job. But nobody else knows, and nobody here has ever linked me to the case or to my mother’s death. I’m on the payroll here as Mia Spreckley; all the coverage referred to her as Bella Watson. Her maiden name was never used.’
    She had a point: almost. When Ignacio Centelleos, a Spanish national according to his birth certificate and passport, appeared in court charged with the culpable homicide of Bella Watson and with disposing of her body, the trial judge, Lord Nelson, and the prosecutor, Moira Cleverley, knew the full story, but it was never told in open court.
    It had been presented as a family dispute in which Bella had gone berserk with a cleaver and had been stabbed by the boy in his mother’s defence. Mia’s name had never been mentioned; neither had mine, but I had come clean to Archie Nelson and to the Lord Advocate, both of whom were due me a couple of favours. The affair had been kept as discreet as possible, for Ignacio’s sake, not ours, but it wasn’t watertight.
    ‘But it was known,’ I sighed. ‘That’s what her neighbours called her; all her household bills had that name too. If anyone wanted to find out who you were, it wouldn’t take long. Even the world’s slowest search engine would turn you up inside a minute.’
    ‘Who would want to?’ she wailed. ‘This Linton character: does that name mean anything to you, Bob?’
    ‘It does now,’ I growled. ‘If it’s any consolation, I think that call was a message, but to me, not to you.’
    ‘What sort of a message?’
    I took a few seconds to think about that, and about the events of the afternoon, not least the timing of my encounter with Carrie McDaniels. That had happened a couple of hours before the call to Mia.
    ‘A threat; the clear implication is that Linton – it’s a forename, by the way; the other one’s Baillie – thinks he knows who Ignacio’s dad is, namely, yours truly. The guy’s interested in me, for some reason; I believe that he got to know that I’d found out, and decided to send me a warning. It might even have been his way of introducing himself to me.’
    ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Mia asked. ‘Find Mr Baillie and put the fear of God in him?’
    ‘That would be difficult for me right now, since I’m in Spain. When I’m back, I’ll deal with him, but as things stand, I don’t believe it’s in his interests to go public with the story that I’m Ignacio’s dad. There wouldn’t be enough money in it for him.’
    ‘This is about money?’ she gasped.
    ‘Most things are,’ I growled. ‘Baillie will have to show his hand eventually. Until he does, he’s not my biggest concern.’
    ‘Then what is, for God’s sake?’
    ‘For one, a missing man here that I’m trying to find. For another, unless he’s taken a wildly inspired guess and it’s come off, I want to know how the hell he found out the truth about you, me and our boy.’

Six
    L inton Baillie hadn’t used his own phone to call Mia’s programme. As soon as her text arrived with the number the station had logged, I couldn’t resist dialling it, but something told me that if he was playing games, he wasn’t going to deal me a good hand.
    I let it ring for half a minute; just as I was about to give up it was answered. A male voice said, ‘Hullo,’ tentatively.
    ‘Is Mr Baillie available?’ I asked.
    ‘How the fuck would Ah ken, mate?’ the man replied, laughing. ‘This is a phone box in John Lewis.’ I killed the call, leaving him with a story to relate to his pals in the pub.
    Did I consider withdrawing my offer to Xavi to help find Hector, and heading straight back to Scotland to pursue Mr Linton Baillie?
    Well, yes I did, but only briefly. As I told Mia, I didn’t believe there was an imminent threat to Ignacio’s security in Jail. However, I’m far from omniscient; if all the mistakes I’ve made in my life