Dead Clever (7 page)

Ware stared into the distance, frowning slightly, then he relaxed. ‘Even if you’re right to be so pessimistic, we can be ninety-nine per cent certain we now know what happened.’

‘But my superior chief is only just content with one hundred per cent! . . . I have forgotten to mention that we may just have one more lead. When the bedroom was finally cleared by Carmina, she found an English paperback had been left behind. It’s a recognized perk of chambermaids to collect up any books left behind and to sell them to a bookshop which specializes in foreign ones for the tourists. If we could trace it, there’s the slight chance it might offer a lead—I’m thinking of a point-of-sale label, or something of that nature. Unfortunately, though, she can’t remember the title of the book, only that the cover shows a naked woman whipping a man. There are, perhaps, not so many people who buy a book with such a cover?’

‘Depends on how many ex-public schoolboys have stayed in Stivas recently.’

Twenty minutes later they took a taxi—Alvarez declined to walk—down to the front road. The bookshop offered escapist entertainment rather than intellectual stimulation; the thousands of paperbacks, on revolving stands, stacked up on tables, and filling endless shelves, were printed in English, French, German, Dutch, and Swedish.

Alvarez spoke to the owner, who sat at a counter on which were so many books that he was only visible through the small, and necessary, gap by the till. ‘You buy books from the staff at the Hotel Grande?’

The owner, who had a long, thin, complaining face, spoke in antagonistic tones. ‘I buy books from the staff of all the hotels.’

‘Do you know Carmina?’

‘I don’t know the names of any of’em.’

‘She came in here at the end of last week and sold you several paperbacks.’

‘So?’

‘I’d like to know where those books are now?’

‘With the rest of’em, of course.’

‘It’ll save you a lot of trouble if you can remember whereabouts among all the others.’

The owner looked even more morose. ‘You said they came in at the end of last week? Then like as not, I’ve not been through ‘em yet.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That they’ll still be in the back room, waiting for sorting and pricing.’

‘I’d like to see where.’

Reluctantly, the owner climbed down from the stool. He unlocked the counter flap, after moving a number of books off this and swearing as he did so, and Alvarez and Ware went through and into the room beyond which smelled of old dust. Everywhere there were books, mostly paperbacks, stacked in piles which in many cases had collapsed so that it seemed to be a scene of confusion, yet the owner unhesitatingly led the way over to two piles, still intact, that were near the dirt-stained, fly-speckled window. That’s where they’ll be; can’t say which ones.’ He left them.

Alvarez pointed to one pile. ‘Will you take that one and I’ll look through the other?’

Ware’s had been the smaller pile and he was the first to finish. He straightened up. ‘Naked and near-naked ladies by the score, but none of them enjoying herself with a whip.’

Alvarez had three more books to check. The second one had a cover which depicted a naked and very generously endowed lady who was about to strike a naked man who knelt beyond her, his honour carefully screened by her right leg. ‘I think we’ve found it!’ He examined the paperback. Its condition suggested it had been bought recently and only read once. There was no point-of-sale tag and no writing on any of the front or back pages. He held out the covers and shook and a slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the ground. He picked this up and saw that it was a receipt, issued by Campsa, at Palma airport, dated Saturday July 15 and timed at 2108 hours, for four hundred litres of fuel. He handed the receipt to Ware. ‘I can now tell my superior chief that we are a hundred per cent certain.’

When Ware’s father had died, he’d left behind him as many debts as friends; he’d been a man who’d stand drinks all round in the clubhouse while in his pocket was a letter from his bank manager reminding him that his overdraft had risen above the agreed limit and would he please take immediate steps to reduce it. At the time of his death, Ware had been old enough to understand that the reason for the straitened circumstances in which the family suddenly found itself was his father’s improvidence and this knowledge had had a very great effect on him. By nature of the same happy-go-lucky, devil-take-tomorrow character, he would probably have lived a heedless life had he not been forced to appreciate that the cost of selfish happiness came high and it was a cost which often had to be met by others. Now, there were times when Heather, his wife, wondered how he could be two such different people. He would suggest in all seriousness an exotic and expensive holiday in some far-off place and yet on the same day worry at length because their electricity bill had risen slightly. Paradoxically, this contradiction helped him in his job. He had the imagination to visualize possibilities that would never occur to a sobersides, yet would conduct an investigation with a perseverance and attention to detail a more carefree investigator would scorn.

He and the claims manager of the Crown and Life Insurance Company sat on opposite sides of the long, well polished table in the conference room on the fourth floor of the Edwardian building in Eastley Street.

Parrot—to his annoyance, his nose was slightly beaked —tapped the four-page report in front of himself. ‘You don’t think that perhaps the evidence is somewhat stronger than you’re suggesting?’

‘That depends, of course, whether you’re talking in terms of fact or law. I don’t doubt that he faked his own death, was picked up in Bennett’s boat, landed in Stivas, spent the night at the Hotel Grande, had a constitutional whipping in the morning, and then took off to parts unknown. But try to prove all that in a court of law and counsel would be very quick to point out how everything’s virtual supposition.’

‘Not the fuel receipt you found in the paperback.’

‘We can’t prove that the man in the hotel was Green, only that he was travelling on a false passport and probably had light or blond hair and a moustache; we can’t prove that the paperback in the bookshop was left behind by him; we can’t prove that the receipt was used as a bookmarker by the same man who bought the fuel . . . A clever counsel would revel in all those negatives. As I see things, until we can prove beyond all legal doubt that Green survived the air crash, we cannot say that if taken to court we must win the case.’

‘Even so, you don’t reckon that our best bet is to wait for a claim to be made and then to refuse to pay it? After all, when the other side sees the strength of our case they might very well drop out because if we present the evidence we have this might very well attract the attention of the police, who’d carry out a much more thorough investigation than you ever can, which could easily uncover the missing proof ‘I still think it’s worth my digging a little deeper. If I could find his girlfriend, there’s the chance I’d be able to get a lead on where he’s hiding out and that would settle everything, once and for all.’

Parrot fiddled with a pencil. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘See if you can track her down.’

In her early twenties, Joan Carling had been physically very attractive and so had had a large number of boyfriends. Unfortunately, she had accepted their homage as her due and such self-satisfaction had cooled their ardours even more quickly than her rapidly expressed distaste for ‘mucking around’. Consequently, on her twenty-eighth birthday she had looked in a mirror and had seen a woman who was obviously beginning to age and all of whose contemporaries were married. She had panicked.

Born and brought up in Wimbledon, her tastes were refined, her manners impeccable, and her values irreproachable. She carried her shopping in a Harrods bag, was invariably polite to the lower orders, and voted Conservative. Despite all this, when Timothy Green—who clearly had not been even to a minor public school—suggested a dinner date, she had not refused him. And when, a few meetings later, he had begun to fondle her breasts, she had consoled herself with the thought that at least on her twenty-ninth birthday she would not still be unmarried.

Being so conscious of her background, after they were married she had not hesitated to show him in which areas he lacked breeding. That he was a salesman was a cause for apology, that he was a very successful one who made a great deal of money in no way mitigated the social solecism; that he made a noise when he drank soup from the end of the spoon instead of the side was of far more concern than that he was so generous-hearted that he did all he could to please her despite her attitude towards him.

After he had lost his job and his large income, there had been little reason to continue to suffer him since it was the state of marriage that was important in her circle, not the success, or otherwise, of it. She had demanded a separation. Her father—Harrow, Lloyds, a silent soup-drinker—had, despite many years of heavy drinking, gambling, and expensive mistresses, left her enough money to be reasonably financially secure, but naturally she had demanded the house and made certain she got it. Some time later, he’d asked if she’d agree to a divorce, only to learn that if he thought she was going to give her blessing to his luring another woman into his disgusting embraces . . .

His death irritated her because it raised a question to which she did not know the answer. What was the correct degree of mourning to observe in respect of a prurient, adulterous husband?

Ware arrived at her house at a quarter past eleven and she was reasonably welcoming since he spoke without a regional accent and was well, if a shade informally, dressed.

‘I’ll be as brief as I can,’ he said. ‘I represent the Crown and Life Insurance Company with whom your husband took out a fairly large life insurance roughly three years ago.’

‘He did what?’

‘Then you didn’t know about it?’

She shook her head.

He hid his surprise; she had struck him as a woman who would have made certain she knew everything about her husband’s affairs. ‘As I’m sure you’ll understand, in connection with that policy, certain facts have to be verified.’ He spoke carefully because he did not want to have to be the person who told this sharp-eyed, straight-mouthed woman that her husband was, in fact, alive, living with a girlfriend, and probably not intending to share any of his fraudulently acquired insurance money with his estranged wife. At the conclusion he said: ‘I imagine you have a copy of his will?’

‘Naturally.’

‘May I have a look at it?’

She left the room, to return with a long, brown envelope which she handed to him.

It was a short, simple will made immediately after the marriage. Everything Green owned was to go to his wife and, surprisingly, there was no proviso should she predecease him. Ware noted the name and address of the solicitor on the back of the envelope before returning it. He thanked her and left.

It took him twenty minutes to find the solicitor’s offices, largely thanks to a misdirection which sent him down to the wrong end of the high street and thence into a maze of one-way streets. The rambling building was in need of decoration and the carpet in front of the information desk was nearly threadbare. This reminded him of some advice he’d once been given. ‘If you want a smart lawyer in central London, go to one who has smart offices; in the suburbs or the country, to one whose offices need money spent on them.’

He met a partner who dressed and spoke as if he regularly rode to hounds.

‘Let me see, Mr Ware, if I have the facts correctly. The Spanish authorities are at the moment satisfied he died in the air crash arid so are in the process—likely to be drawn out for normal administrative reasons—of issuing a death certificate. You, however, contend that he did not die in the crash?’

That’s right.’

‘Your interest in the matter is clear. If he is alive, the company you represent will not be liable to pay out the sum assured on his life. You are unconcerned with the criminal aspect of the matter?’

‘Unconcerned, if that means that I have no interest in whether or not he is ever prosecuted for attempted fraud.’

‘I ask because the distinction does raise an interesting point. If he died in the crash, his valid will—in due course of time—becomes open to public inspection; in the circumstances, I might be able to find the justification for letting you read it now. If he is alive, his will is secret and there cannot be any justification for my divulging any of its details. Mrs Green has informed me of his death and I had begun to set in motion all the usual steps. Now, you tell me he may well be alive which brings all such steps to a stop . . . I think I must refuse your request, Mr Ware. Until the position is absolutely clear, my duty now must be to act as if he were alive.’

Ware said ruefully: ‘I was afraid of that.’

The partner smiled briefly. ‘Had you not made the strength of your belief so evident . . . I gain the impression that you assume he will have made a new will relatively recently?’

‘He must have done. Mrs Green showed me one, made immediately after their marriage, in which she gets everything. He’ll have cut her out in favour of his girlfriend. The insurance money must be paid to a named person whom he can trust not to run off with it and it’s difficult to think of anyone else he’d be willing to trust in the face of such temptation.’

‘You would appear to have rather a poor opinion of people’s honesty.’

‘I’ve been a loss adjuster for several years.’

‘Quite! Assume you’re correct, if you knew the name of the beneficiary, and his or her address, would you expect Mr Green to be living with such person now?’

‘He’s smart; very smart except when he becomes either too greedy or too pressed for time. So I very much doubt that he’s living with her yet, just in case someone turns up to question her about him. He’ll be keeping out of sight, but in contact, and that’s how it’ll be until the money’s paid out. Assuming it ever is.’

‘Then if you knew where his friend lives, you would no longer have a pressing interest in his valid will?’