An Artistic Way to Go (7 page)

CHAPTER 8

Alvarez drove back to the field in which Caimari was working and parked in front of the bottom gate, leaving just enough room for another vehicle to pass. He climbed out of the car and stared at the scene, so drawn by the sights and sounds that for a while he was not conscious of the burning heat of the sun. Cicadas shrilled, starting and stopping as if to a conductor's baton; in the field beyond a rough line of prickly-pear cacti, a small flock of sheep were, with ridiculous optimism, grazing stubble, marking their progress with the unrhythmic, flat-toned clanging of the bells around their necks; a flock of pigeons rose, with clapping wings, from another field; the piping calls of unseen guinea-fowl suggested they were even more worried than usual; chained dogs whose job was to guard fields (though no one knew quite how a field could be stolen) barked in an intermittent but interminable chorus; a kestrel hovered, wings beating, tail swerving, then flew off in a curving sweep. Alvarez drew in several deep breaths and convinced himself that not only could he distinguish the pungent, bittersweet smell of the orange trees, but also the rich muskiness of the newly turned earth. His thoughts, ever susceptible to memories of his youth, soared into pretentious mode. Man's umbilical cord to true happiness was to be found in participation in the endless cycle of the soil. But modern life, which had taken so many men away from the soil, taught that happiness lay in amassing ever more, ever bigger riches and so men never understood their growing discontent …

He walked up the half-metre strip of unploughed headland that ran alongside the stone wall until he came level with Caimari. The mule plodded towards him, head down, looking as if about to run out of all energy, yet continuing at the same even speed; drawing, as much from its own skills as Caimari's, a furrow almost as straight as an arrow.

Caimari brought the mule to a halt, released the reins. ‘You ain't found anything to do yet?'

‘I don't mind taking a turn to give you a break.'

‘And smash my plough?'

‘I can still draw a neat furrow.'

‘When there's not a tree to run into.'

Alvarez took a pack of Celtas from his pocket. ‘D'you smoke?'

Caimari took a cigarette. He had always been a small man; age was beginning to shorten him still further. Lines in his face formed a map of hardship and suffering, and the quiet cunning that had enabled him to overcome both.

Alvarez flicked open a lighter, held it out. ‘How are the oranges looking?'

They both stared at the nearest trees, whose fruit could only just be distinguished. ‘Could be better,' Caimari said.

Alvarez had not really expected any other answer. Only a farmer who was a fool allowed that his crops were good – the gods of drought, rain, wind, and pest, were always ready to punish optimism. ‘I've been told Javier's giving up. Says he can't make money out of sheep any more, not with all the lamb coming from abroad that's in the shops cheaper than it costs to rear.'

Caimari snickered. ‘He's giving up because he's taking so much money from the government he doesn't need to work any more.'

Alvarez was not surprised to hear that. It had not taken the local farmers long to discover that the Common Agricultural Policy was a horn of plenty – there were grants for more sheep than one owned, for buying tractors that were never delivered, for modernizing barns that didn't exist. ‘What's he going to do with the land?'

‘Leave it fallow. The only person willing to rent it was Virgilio and Javier wasn't having any of him!'

‘Why not?'

‘You can ask? You didn't know that his grandfather and Virgilio's came to blows?'

The rich mixture that was the peasant, Alvarez thought, proud to see himself as one. The traditionalist and the opportunist. The grandsons who prolonged a feud even though they'd probably no clear idea what it was about, who made a fortune out of bureaucrats so stupid they would pay others to do what had always been done.

They smoked, the air so still that the smoke hardly rippled until a metre above their heads.

‘There's something I'd like to know,' Alvarez said.

Caimari's expression became blank.

‘You told me earlier you were surprised Señora Cooper had bothered to report her husband was missing. Why?'

‘How should I know why he's disappeared?'

‘I'm asking why you're surprised?'

Caimari smoked. Alvarez waited, knowing that impatience would merely earn the other's amused contempt.

‘Did you know Narcis Serra?' Caimari finally asked.

‘To talk to, that's all.'

‘Who'd want to do anything more when someone's daft enough to gamble away his land?' Caimari spoke with brief anger. To lose one's land through stupidity was the ultimate sin. ‘His place was bought by a German who spent more pesetas than there are stars in the skies on a house and swimming pool. He wanted a huge garden and Jorge looked after it. When the German sold, Jorge stayed on.'

‘Jorge?'

‘Amoros. He talked to Eduardo and Eduardo talked to me. The señor was away and only the señora was there. Jorge went to fetch something he'd forgotten – more like to pinch some flowers to sell – and saw the señora in the swimming pool.'

‘What was unusual about that?'

‘She'd no costume on.'

‘That must have cheered him up!'

Caimari sniggered. ‘Not much he could do about it.'

‘He's not that old.'

‘Maybe he ain't, but the man in the pool with her was a lot younger.'

‘Was he naked?'

‘Would you keep your clothes on if she was flashing it around?'

So his intuition, imagination, call it what one would, had been correct.

*   *   *

Despite his best efforts, Alvarez could not find a reason for not phoning.

‘Yes?' said the superior chief's secretary in her superior, plummy voice.

‘May I speak to Señor Salas, please?' He was not surprised when she failed to offer him the politeness of asking him to wait. Her manners were a reflection of those of the superior chief.

As he waited, he stared through the window at the wall of the building on the opposite side of the road and tried not to imagine Rachael in the nude.

‘What is it?'

Salas was a man of moods; bad tempered and very bad tempered. It sounded as if he were suffering the latter.

‘Earlier today, señor, I received a report of a missing man and I have made a preliminary investigation. I judge there is cause…'

‘Did you by any chance think to ascertain the name of the person?'

‘Yes, of course, señor.'

‘Regrettably, where you are concerned there can be no such certainty. What is it?'

‘Cooper. He's an Englishman and…'

‘With such a name, he is hardly likely to be a Spaniard. Who reported him missing?'

‘His wife.'

‘Why does she think he's missing?'

‘Because he has not returned home and…'

‘If a wife reports her husband is missing, do you find it strange that he has not returned home?'

‘What I was about to add, señor, was that although there can be circumstances when a man's absence is explicable, in this case…'

‘Circumstances such as what?'

‘Perhaps a lady friend whose company he has enjoyed for an overlong period.'

‘Alvarez, this is not the first time I've been forced to comment on the most regrettable urge you suffer, that of introducing a libidinous motif into a case.'

‘I've only mentioned what is already there.'

‘You know as fact, then, that Señor Cooper has a mistress?'

‘No, señor, but…'

‘Then why introduce the possibility unless it is because you derive a perverted pleasure from doing so?'

‘It was you who introduced it, señor, not I.'

‘How the devil do you mean?'

‘Well, maybe not directly. But you had said that if a man was missing he could not have returned home and so I was trying to explain that circumstances might show that if he was missing from home, he wasn't missing despite his wife's belief that he was. If this were so…'

‘I've had a very heavy day. Try not to increase its weight beyond all endurance. If such a thing is possible, tell me the facts simply and without any elaboration or explanation.'

Alvarez began to detail the brief course of his investigation. He was interrupted when he described how Amoros unexpectedly visited Ca'n Oliver and had seen Rachael and an unknown man swimming …

‘Are you suggesting that there is any significance in that fact?'

‘I think there has to be.'

‘You really find it impossible to envisage that a married woman can invite a male friend for a swim without eagerly assuming she is indulging in an adulterous affair?'

‘It is difficult when one knows that both were naked.'

There was a long pause. ‘I would find my job considerably less wearing had you ever learned even the rudiments of logical reporting.'

There were no further interruptions.

‘So I think,' Alvarez concluded, ‘that we should ask Traffic to identify the registration number of the señor's car and then ask all patrols to keep an eye out for it. Remembering that he was due to fly from the island this evening in order to go on an expensive cruise, I think one must assume that he has suffered seriously, perhaps fatally.'

‘Then I have no doubt that within the next forty-eight hours he will reappear, unharmed.' Salas cut the connection.

CHAPTER 9

‘You're late,' Dolores snapped.

‘I'm very sorry,' Alvarez replied humbly.

‘The meal is probably ruined.'

‘Never, with you doing the cooking.'

‘Only a man could say something so foolish.' But the implied compliment was sufficient to prevent any further complaints. She returned into the kitchen.

Alvarez sat at the dining-table, picked up one of the tumblers. ‘Shove the coñac over.'

Jaime turned sideways to look at the kitchen doorway.

Alvarez leaned across and picked up the bottle. ‘Is this all that's left?' he asked, as he stared at the few centimetres of brandy.

Jaime turned back, reached under the table and brought up a second bottle of Soberano, three parts full.

‘What the hell's going on?'

‘She's on again about drinking.' He jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Watching television and some bloody fool doctor says that half the family problems are caused by people who drink. Doesn't add that the other half are caused by people who don't drink. That's started a donkey galloping about in her brain. Told me that from now on I'm not having more than one drink before a meal. So I leave the nearly empty bottle on the table and every time she looks in to see what's what, there's the same amount left.' He winked. ‘There's always a way if you're smart enough to find it,' he said boastfully.

Alvarez poured himself a large brandy, passed the bottle back. Jaime hid it under the table.

‘Have you really been busy or was that just to shut her up?' Jaime asked, as he straightened up.

‘A husband's gone missing and I've been trying to find out what's happened to him.'

‘A foreigner, I suppose? None of us would ever get away with it.'

Alvarez dropped three ice cubes into the tumbler. ‘A rich Englishman.'

‘Then he's found himself someone young and willing and forgotten how time flies when one's enjoying oneself.'

‘With a wife like his, that seems unlikely.'

‘What's so special about her?'

‘Ever imagined yourself in a Ferrari?'

Jaime, his perplexity obvious, stared at him. ‘What's that got to do with anything?'

‘How d'you feel when you realize you'll never drive around in anything but a Fiesta?'

‘You've not been working late, you've been drinking early.'

‘She's the woman of your dreams.'

‘You don't know my dreams.'

‘Swims in the nude.'

‘You're telling me you've seen her?'

‘Jorge Amoros, who does their garden, has.'

Jaime shed his air of sophisticated indifference. ‘What's he ever done to be so bloody lucky?' he said bitterly.

*   *   *

Alvarez had not been sufficiently long in the office to prepare himself for work when the phone rang. The green BMW owned by Señor Cooper had been found two kilometres west of Contaix, at a point where the coast road ran within metres of the cliff face. The car had been searched. On the front passenger seat was a copy of
The Times,
open at page four. One of the two men in the patrol car was reasonably fluent in English and he said that the article in the middle of the page reported the suicide of a businessman who had thrown himself off a cliff in Wales after learning that his small engineering company had been bankrupted by the fraudulent actions of a trusted employee. In the glove box was a gold signet ring and a wallet containing just over forty thousand pesetas in notes, several credit cards, and an English driving licence. In the rear well was an empty bottle of Teacher's Highland Cream whisky and three exhausted foil strips, of the kind used to hold medicinal pills.

The sea came right up to the cliff face and there would only be traces of his having fallen if he had done so in too shallow an arc and struck the rock face during his descent; even then, it might be virtually impossible to detect these.

What action was to be taken? He said the car was to be kept under guard until he had examined it.

After the call was over, he settled back in the chair. Contaix was on the north coast, at a point where the jagged, stark cliffs were a hundred, or more, metres high. When oar or sail had been the only form of marine propulsion, ships had frequently been driven ashore by adverse winds, with the usual result that whole crews had been drowned. There were villagers who claimed that in a gale from the north, the cries of drowning men could clearly be heard above the howling wind. Because the village had once been all but isolated, the inhabitants were much more inward looking than most – it was said that they would always greet a stranger with a scowl rather than a smile and there was the expression, as bloody-minded as a Contaixian. It was a village, indeed an area, that he hardly knew, not so much because of the nature of the inhabitants, but because it was a land of heights and depths and both these terrified him.