Dead Clever (3 page)

She spoke even more aggressively when he entered the kitchen. ‘You know why you couldn’t get up when you should, don’t you? You drank too much last night.’

‘I did not.’

‘Then why were you snoring so loudly in the middle of the night that you woke me up?’

‘Because you’re a light sleeper. In any case, snoring has nothing to do with drinking . . . And if you must know, I had dinner with an English señor who would never drink too much and all we had was a little wine. After we’d finished the meal, I came straight home.’

‘I doubt very much it was straight.’ She carried a mug of hot chocolate over to the table and put it down in front of him. ‘I’m off now. You’ll be the last to leave the house, so don’t forget to lock up.’

‘Just before you go, where’s the coca?’

Her tone was scornful. ‘You think I have the time to make a coca for a man who demands his breakfast when it’s almost lunch-time? . . . If you want something to eat, there’s bread in the bin.’ She walked out of the kitchen with her head held high, her expression one of haughty disdain.

He drank some of the chocolate, then went through to the dining-room and across to the large and ornately carved cupboard from which he brought out a bottle which he used to top up the chocolate with brandy. Breakfast was an important meal for a busy man.

Alvarez and Ware met at the airport, outside the new control tower. The guard on the main entrance directed them over to a lift and this took them to the lower of two floors which were immediately below the main control area. There was a central, octagonally shaped lobby and off this radiated offices. They entered the one on the door of which was printed ‘Co-ordinator’.

Murillo was only in his middle forties, but a receding hairline and a heavily lined face, in which one eyelid drooped, made him look considerably older. He shook hands briefly, as if he found prolonged physical contact distasteful, returned to his seat behind a large and rather ugly desk. The roar of a jet caused him to look through the large window and he watched an Aviaco 727 climb, leaving a dirty trail of exhaust smoke, then he turned back and said:

‘How can I help you, Inspector?’ Both his tone and manner asked them to be as brief as possible.

‘Señor Ware has come from England to make inquiries about the crash last Saturday night.’

‘So I understood from your telephone call.’

‘He’d be most grateful if now you’d give him all the known facts regarding that crash.’

Murillo nodded, turned over some papers on his desk and found the one he wanted, read quickly, then said, clipping his words short: ‘The plane was a twin-engined, turbo-prop Fleche with long-range fuel tanks. It arrived at fourteen thirty-five on the Thursday, landing at the old airport. Green, the pilot and only occupant, cleared customs and immigration very soon afterwards.’ He waited, impatiently, while Alvarez translated.

‘On the Friday—in accordance with regulations—he gave notice of his intention to fly off on Saturday evening and he handed in his flight plan and asked for refuelling the next day. His declared destination, Shoreham, meant a flying time which came a long way inside the period before the next engine service was due.

‘At twenty-one hundred hours, on Saturday, he reported to customs and emigration and received a meteorological and flight briefing. He checked that the plane had been refuelled and paid the account.

‘He took off at twenty-two thirty-five. Conditions were good—winds southerly, force three, eight-tenths cloud, excellent visibility, and no change expected. Ground staff confirm that on take-off both engines were working perfectly. Radar noted that he kept to his route.

‘At twenty-two fifty-five, he sent out a mayday. He reported that his starboard engine had suddenly died and his port one was misfiring and he was turning back. Two minutes later he said that the misfiring on the port engine was becoming worse; after this, radio contact was lost. Radar showed the plane descending gradually, then abruptly plummeting. The image was lost twelve minutes after the last radio contact, when the plane was at roughly two hundred metres height.

‘Rescue services were alerted and a full search was mounted and this continued throughout the night; at midday on Sunday the air search was called off and at dark, the sea search. No sign of wreckage was found . . . That is everything.’

After Alvarez finished translating, Ware looked up from his notebook. ‘Radar lost the plane at two hundred metres —why’s that?’

‘The radar set on the mountains cannot track below that height above sea level.’

‘Then is it possible that the plane could have dropped below the two hundred metres, levelled out, and continued on its way?’

‘In the dark, señor, no pilot would be so foolhardy as to try to fly that low.’

‘Not if he’d some pressing reason for doing so? And since the sky was two-tenths clear, there must have been a certain amount of moonlight to mark the sea.’

Murillo tried not to speak too scathingly. ‘It would seem, señor, that you do not know too much about flying?’

‘Change that to nothing,’ replied Ware cheerfully.

‘Then permit me to explain something. Moonlight and the sea form a deadly combination which can render a man’s judgement of height useless. He may think he’s a hundred metres above the water, but in truth he may well be skimming it so that if he loses only a few metres, he hits.’

‘I can understand that, but sometimes a man’s willing to take a risk that any sensible person would refuse. Do you know what sort of cloud cover there was at the time of the crash?’

‘I will find out.’ He used the internal phone to speak to a member of the meteorological office and after a longish wait, during which he drummed on the desk with his fingers, his query was answered. He replaced the receiver. ‘The nearest time at which there was an observation was twenty-three hundred hours. Then, cloud coverage was still eight-tenths.’

‘Presumably, that observation was taken here. Out at sea, there might have been more moonlight?’

Murillo gestured with his hands. ‘señor, that is so, but there is little relevance to the fact. As I said, radar contact was lost at about two hundred metres; it is estimated that at that point the plane was making around two hundred knots and so it is impossible that the pilot could have levelled out before the plane struck the sea.’

‘Then there is no doubt that the plane did crash?’

‘None whatsoever.’

Ware thought for a moment, then said: ‘The plane had been properly serviced and its engines were sounding good when it took off, so is there any suggestion why one engine abruptly cut out and the other misfired badly?’

‘No. There is no explanation.’

‘Could the fuel have been the trouble?’

‘We do not supply faulty fuel.’

Belatedly, Ware realized that while so direct a question was normal in Britain, it was not in Spain. ‘señor, I was not for a moment suggesting there could have been any inefficiency on the part of anyone here.’

Despite the fact that it was difficult to see how the question could escape such an implication, Murillo accepted the denial.

‘Presumably, other planes have been refuelled from the same source since then?’ Ware asked.

‘And the fuel has proved to be faultless.’

‘Then we’ve covered everything. Thank you for giving me so much of your valuable time.’

Ware was silent until they were in the lift and then, as Alvarez pressed the button for the ground floor, he said: ‘That would seem to be that. The plane definitely crashed into the sea.’

‘Certainly there can be no other conclusion.’

‘So this is a claim that’s genuine, despite the surrounding circumstances, and the company’s going to have to pay.’

Alvarez telephoned Palma and asked the secretary with a plummy voice if Superior Chief Salas was in; to his regret, she said that he was.

‘Señor, I have just returned from the airport with señor Ware. From the inquiries we’ve made, it’s clear that the Englishman, Green, was piloting the plane when it crashed into the sea.’

‘Are you saying that you can be certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Englishman is dead?’

‘Yes, señor.’

‘Then undoubtedly he is alive and well,’ said Salas bad temperedly before he replaced the receiver.

Unless he considered that there were too many pressing cases in hand—and he seldom did—Alvarez did not work on Saturday afternoons. Man, he was fond of saying, could not live by work alone. He was seated at his desk late Saturday morning, contemplating the pleasures of the coming meal and the subsequent prolonged siesta, when the telephone rang. He wondered whether to ignore it, but there was always the chance that the caller was Salas who would be only too aware of the fact that the time was, as yet, not appropriate to having stopped work. He lifted the receiver.

‘Enrique, I’ve some news that’ll interest you!’

He recognized Ware’s voice.

‘I’ve just had a call from England to say that although Timothy Green does not have a criminal record, he was once very close to being arrested for fraud.’

‘I can see, of course, how that might have been important before we spoke to Señor Murillo, but surely now . . .?’

‘I know what you’re thinking. If he had had ten convictions for defrauding insurance companies it doesn’t alter anything because his plane quite definitely crashed into the sea. But having learned his history, there’s something I’d like to talk over with you and since I’ve never seen your end of the island, what say I hire a car and drive across and we can have dinner together at the restaurant of your choice and on my expense account?’

‘That would be very pleasant. But I’m afraid I can’t meet you until after six.’

‘They’re making you work over the weekend in weather like this? . . . Let’s say half six, then. Where shall we meet?’

‘How about the car park on the front down in the port?’

After ringing off, Alvarez locked the fingers of his hands together and rested them on his stomach. It was strange how northern Europeans had never discovered that the secret of a happy life lay not in pursuing the Holy Grail, but in not pursuing it.

As Alvarez parked, Ware came up to his car. ‘I’m dying of thirst. What would you say to a drink before anything else?’

‘I can’t imagine anything better.’ Alvarez climbed out of the car.

‘Then let’s walk along the front. There are several cafes with tables set outside and for me the epitome of life on the Continent is to sit at an outside table, watching the world go by.’

‘The front cafes charge twice as much as the ones a road back.’

‘The Crown and Life Insurance Company made a record profit last year; they can afford to treat us generously.’

They walked past the eastern arm of the harbour and along the road, closed to traffic, until they reached the first cafe outside which were set a number of tables, each with a sun umbrella.

Ware sat, facing the bay. After a moment he said: ‘The island must have been an absolute jewel before all the development started.’

‘It was.’

‘Who on earth was so blind as to allow so much of the coastline to be spoiled?’

‘An envelope filled with pesetas makes most men blind.’

‘I know. It’s the same all over the world. And when I get too holier-than-thou about such things at home, Heather always asks me if I owned a piece of beauty which someone wanted to develop, would I keep on saying no however fat the envelope became. If I’m honest, I don’t know the answer.’

The waiter came up to the table and they ordered drinks.

Ware offered cigarettes, then said: ‘I wasn’t surprised this morning when my news left you cold. But the thing is, I sometimes get a hunch that a claim is false and right from the start I’ve had a hunch that this one is. And on top of that, by now there are a lot of unanswered questions. Green hired a plane in England, flew here and was only here for a couple of days. Why go to all that very considerable expense when he wasn’t a wealthy man and there are such good commercial air services? Why did he fly out after dark? If the engines of the plane were in good order—which they were—why should both give trouble when we can be reasonably certain that the fuel was OK? Is it chance that the plane crashed at sea and not on land, where the wreckage could have been found and his body examined?’

‘But you agree that the plane did crash at sea?’

‘Yes. What I’m saying now is, was Green in it when it crashed? . . . Suppose radio contact was lost because he wanted it to be and not because the emergency had overwhelmed him?’

‘Were there parachutes aboard?’

‘I’m not sure, but in any case he could have loaded a steerable one before he flew out of the UK.’

‘But there was a full-scale search of the crash area and he was never sighted.’

The waiter brought the drinks. Ware raised his glass. ‘If I said, the first today, I’d be a liar!’ He drank. ‘This afternoon I phoned a contact in the UK and talked to him about the twin-engined Fleche. He described it as a very well built plane with an impressive safety record and he’s never heard of both engines failing. It has a cruising speed of a hundred and ninety knots—roughly two hundred and eighteen statute miles—and it’s pressurized up to twenty thousand feet. Equipment includes the latest Nebacco autopilot which has three trim tabs and one on/off switch.

‘Remember the sequence of events? Green leaves Palma and twenty minutes later sends out an SOS. He’s now roughly seventy miles out from the island, so he turns back rather than trying to make the mainland. Two minutes later he sends a second message and after that there is silence. The plane crashes twelve minutes later or perhaps thirty-three miles out and naturally the search is carried out at this last position.

‘Now assume that just before his first message he sights his rescue craft. He circles round, makes a second radio call, throttles back sufficiently to give a speed commensurate with a plane suffering engine trouble, sets the auto-pilot and activates a timer which in so many minutes will disengage it—this can either be a mechanical device attached to the on/off switch or a small explosive charge which will wreck everything. He jumps. The auto-pilot compensates for the sudden loss of weight and the plane flies on until the auto-pilot is disengaged and then, either quickly or after a while depending on air conditions, it crashes into the sea. The object of all this is, of course, to make certain that the rescue operations are concentrated well away—at least thirty miles—from the position where he jumped and was picked up.’