Murder Begets Murder (19 page)

‘I’d like to see this briefcase.’

The manager said doubtfully: ‘This will be part of his estate. I really ought to have some kind of authorization from the family or the solicitors . . .’

‘All I want to do is find out what it contains. If you’re going to become all sticky about it I’ll have to go off and get an official order, which means a great deal more trouble for both of us.’

The manager sighed. ‘There’s enough trouble around without adding to it . . . All right, I’ll get it.’

The pigskin briefcase was a large one, capable of being greatly expanded. It was locked.

‘Give me a paperclip, will you?’ said Alvarez.

‘You’re surely not going to force the lock?’

‘Well, I haven’t got the key.’

‘I don’t think I can stand here and let you do that, Enrique.’

‘Then go away and don’t come back until I shout it’s all right.’

The manager stayed and watched with fascination as Alvarez first straightened out the paperclip, then bent one end, inserted this end and worked on the lock, forcing it within three minutes.

Alvarez opened the briefcase and looked inside. He saw several bundles of thousand-peseta notes.

Alvarez faced Denise. ‘Señora, I have discovered that your husband deposited a briefcase at his bank. In this is a large number of thousand-peseta notes: their total value is seven hundred and sixty-five thousand pesetas.’

She was uninterested.

‘Did you know he had all this money?’ She shook her head.

‘It’s a fair judgement that originally there were a million pesetas. Señora, the money your husband earned was all paid into his bank account. So where did this million come from?’

‘I don’t know.’ She fidgeted with a button on her dress.

‘Don’t you realize that if I can’t find out where it came from I’m bound to start wondering if perhaps he was paid it for providing the poison?’

She looked at him with renewed contempt. ‘You can still think he’d sell poison to kill someone? Don’t you understand the first thing about another human being?’

‘If there are . . .’

‘If he’d been offered ten million pesetas his answer would have been the same. Never. And yet you keep on and on asking the same questions, understanding nothing. Oh God, is there nothing left now to prove the kind of man he was? Has he completely disappeared with death?’

He sighed. She had discovered what to the living was the final tragedy of every life, no matter how strong his or her belief. ‘The money is being held at the bank, señora, until we can discover its source. If it proves to have been quite legitimately obtained, then of course it will be handed over to the estate.’ He stood.

‘Who murdered my husband?’ she demanded.

He shook his head. ‘We can’t be certain that he was murdered. If the money in the briefcase . . . If the money is easily explained, then perhaps the car crash was a terrible accident, however we now think. But if your husband kept the money hidden because it was earned illegally, then we can be all but certain that the crash was deliberately engineered.’

‘Where did the money come from?’

‘But that is what I have been asking you. From some­ where your husband obtained a million pesetas which he kept in a briefcase in his bank. From where or from whom could he have got this money in March?’

She just stared at him. After a while, he left.

People, Alvarez thought, often talked about facts as if they answered everything: yet there could be facts galore and they could still fail to spell out the story.

How much reliance did one place on a wife’s assessment (backed by a receptionist’s) of her husband whom she loved totally? A cynic would say that love is notoriously blind. But he couldn’t believe that Denise could be totally wrong about her husband’s character, even if she could be about his actions. But if that million pesetas hadn’t come from the sale of the poison which had been used to murder first the dog and then Betty Stevenage, where had it come from? And why?

It was all beyond a peasant’s wits.

It was late September and still the weather had not broken as it usually did and the days remained hot and sunny. In the bars, restaurants, and shops down in the Port, the flow of tourists remained high and owners marvelled at their fortune and put up their prices.

Rosalind Jepson’s parties were, according to her, social events. Not only was she closely related to a tide, she had also married a wealthy husband who, ever an accommodating man, had died quickly and quietly, thus ending a marriage which she had always described as sensible and he, had he ever been asked, would have called bloody cold. She was a composed, stately woman who gave composed, stately parties. It was a measure of the respect and dislike in which she was held that no one ever got really drunk in her house.

Jessica Appleton had dressed with extra care in her very best frock. It was a long, flowing creation in silk which dated from the ‘thirties and suggested druidical rights at the summer solstice: a suggestion enhanced by her sharp, rather sour and jaundiced features. She swept out on to the patio, accompanied by a miasma of cheap perfume, and was immediately greeted by a painter who suffered permanently from a bitter, resentful self-pity that Picasso had been born before he had. ‘Hullo, Jessica.’

‘Hullo, Tom.’ She studied the other three who were in the same group. ‘Fancy seeing all of you here.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said the sulky blonde, ‘if anyone was giving a better party.’

A maid came up with a tray on which was a bowl of garlic and cheese dip and a large number of bread sticks. They helped themselves very generously.

‘Jessica, darling,’ said the man with a profile, ‘tell me what’s been happening in Llueso. I always rely on you to keep me
au fait
with all the news which no one will print.’

Jessica simpered. ‘Well, I did hear something rather interesting this morning.’

‘Good! Good!’

‘Hugh’s given up his flat and left the island.’

‘I don’t call that interesting,’ said the blonde. She yawned. ‘He said time after time he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life on this piddling little island.’

‘But it’s who’s gone with him that makes it interesting,’ said Jessica triumphantly. ‘Denise.’

‘Who?’ asked the brunette.

‘Denise Roldán. She was the wife of the doctor who was killed in that terrible car accident up in the urbanizacion. Just imagine, going off like that so soon after her husband’s death!’

‘Darling,’ said the man with the profile, ‘don’t you think that now you’re being just a teeny-weeny bit suburban?’

Waynton, on the settee in Diana’s house, stared out through the picture window at the distant, mountain­ ringed bay. How much was he going to miss the beauty, the sun-splashed colours, the lazy air of peace?

Diana returned to the room. ‘Sorry to have left you for so long, but I had to put a load of washing in the machine or I’d have had nothing to wear tomorrow.’

He watched her sit. ‘I’ve heard a piece of news which may interest you.’

‘News — or malicious gossip?’

‘I’ve checked up on it. Hugh’s left the island and pretty clearly doesn’t intend to return.’ He watched her face for signs of regret.

‘He always said he wouldn’t stay.’ She appeared to accept the news without any definite emotion.

‘He didn’t go on his own. Denise Roldán, the widow of the doctor who was killed in the car crash, went with him.’

‘Good God! . . .Although maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since I saw them together in the town more than once. She looked rather nice.’

‘Is that all?’

‘What more do you expect me to say?’

‘I don’t expect you to say anything. It’s just that . . .

Well, I’ve never been absolutely certain how much you liked him.’

‘He was great fun and when I was with him life was always bubbly. But things never moved on from there.’

‘I wondered . . . Di, I’m going back home soon. I reckon I’ve been rehabilitated out here: people are beginning to speak to me again.’

‘Of course. Even the stupidest of them has finally realized that if you had been guilty of murdering Betty, you’d have been arrested by now.’

‘It must have been very disappointing for them.’

‘Their grief will have been short-lived. The gin and the brandy don’t leave much room for long-term emotions.’

He suddenly stood up and crossed to the window. ‘I was thinking about how much I’m going to miss everything here when I go back.’

‘So are you having second thoughts on that score?’

‘No. It’s been fun drifting with the wind, but I’ve got to rejoin life. I just hope it’s not going to be too painful.’

‘Not for you, Harry — you’ve always really been out of place here. This island is home for the retired or the spineless. You’re far too much of a fighter for it.’

He turned away from the window and faced her. ‘I’ve no job waiting for me.’

‘You’ll find one soon enough.’

‘I’ve nothing in the bank.’

‘Who has, other than overdrafts?’

‘But, suffering from all these disadvantages, will you marry me?’

She began to finger her wedding-ring, twisting it round on her finger. ‘As it’s a day for confessions, I’d better make a few. When I told you I’d hand back all the money my husband settled on me if I married again, I meant exactly that. So I won’t own a house or have a large private income and my only capital will be a few hundred pounds an elderly aunt left me. But speaking as one of the new poor, why in the hell has it taken you so long to ask me for the second time?’

Women. Were they born to deceive or did they learn deceit at their mothers’ knees? How could Denise Roldán have so betrayed the memory of her love for her husband? Alvarez felt a bitter disillusionment. He had placed her on a pedestal and she had kicked that pedestal over and run away, skirts held high.

He remembered so clearly how she had looked at Roldán. A lie? He remembered her tearing grief over his death. A lie? Was she a consummate actress, able to summon up any emotion at will?

Had she known Roldán was to die? Was there here much deeper and dirtier streams than he had imagined?

Had she loved the English señor from their first meeting and had they plotted to rid themselves of the man who stood between them?

He crashed his clenched fist down on the desk. Fool! To believe that even the finest actress ever born could have simulated the love that Denise had shown for her husband . . . Yet if she had loved so deeply, how could such love have been destroyed and replaced within a mere two months?

And suddenly, shockingly, he remembered that love had the opposite, dark face of hate. And when one had loved intensely, then one would hate intensely — so intensely that no sacrifice would be too great in the name of revenge.

Alvarez walked up the dirt track on which cinders had from time to time been spread to try to stiffen the surface when the rains came. He saw almond, fig, orange, lemon, pear, and algarroba trees, beneath which grew potatoes, peppers, beans. He saw a well with a bucket and chain, worked from a spindle, the only source of raising water since electricity had not been brought to the land. He saw the small caseta, made from blocks of sandstone which had been weathered from honey-colour to mottled greys: there was no glass in the windows, only solid wooden shutters, now shut as if no stray beam of sunshine must be allowed to enter. He saw to the side of the caseta a lean-to in which several chickens scratched among the dust and a chained goat nibbled at some stalks. Time could have slipped back fifty years. This was how families had lived when a man’s wages were five pesetas a day and he was lucky to work four days in seven.

A woman, old and leathery, her head half lost inside a very wide-brimmed straw hat, was drawing out irrigation channels with a mattock. When he spoke to her she straightened up slowly, as if this action needed great care, and then she stared at him with tired, but stubbornly independent watchfulness. When he asked her where her husband was, she nodded at the house, but gave no other answer.

The caseta’s interior was as simple as its exterior. There was a centre room, in one corner of which was a fireplace, and leading off this were a kitchen and a bedroom, both much smaller. The walls and the floors, made from pebbles on end, were scrupulously clean.

Gomez was sitting up in bed, his back propped up by a bare pillow. It seemed he was content to do nothing because the bottled gas light was not lit and there was insufficient daylight for him to have read, even had he been able to.

Alvarez sat on the rush-seated, wooden-framed chair, the only other piece of furniture in the room. He asked how Gomez was. If God willed it, Gomez answered, he would get better, if He didn’t, he would die.

‘Back in the year,’ said Alvarez, ‘I went to the wedding of Damian and Teresa.’ There was no change of expression on Gomez’s leathery, lined face. ‘Francisca was there. D’you know Francisca González: her husband died a long while back?’

‘Died a youngster,’ said Gomez, in a deep, croaky voice.

‘She told us about the English señor and señorita she worked for who lived at Ca’n Ibore. Sounded a proper foreigner’s mix-up — them not married, him upstairs, ill to the point of death, and her downstairs, messing around with another man.’

There was an earthenware plate on the bed and from this Gomez picked a crust of bread, spread with unrefined, greenish olive oil, from which he took a bite.

‘The señor died in March. You’ll remember that because you were the undertaker.’

Gomez took a second bite from the bread.

‘I was surprised. I thought you’d retired a long while back.’

‘Retired? Who bloody retired?’

‘Isn’t that what happened?’

Gomez put the bread back down on the plate. He sucked his right forefinger, carefully licking off the suspicion of olive oil which had been on it. ‘I’d buried ever since my dad died and he’d buried for twenty-seven years. Clean and cheap, that’s how I did it, same as my dad. Then Pablo came to the village and offered fancy coffins, fit for a king, and flowers out of season which cost a fortune. “You’re nowt but a daft bugger,” I told him. “People don’t spend fortunes getting planted: if they’ve got any money they buy food for their bellies.” ‘ He coughed. ‘It’s me that was the daft bugger. The money was beginning and what’d been good enough for their parents wasn’t good enough for them any longer. Special coffins with enough brass to build a house: flowers grown in heated greenhouses. They wanted to go out boasting.’ He hawked, leaned over to spit on to the floor. ‘But wait till the money stops — then see how they get buried. It’ll be back to the cheapest wood and flowers what grow naturally.’ He coughed again, rasping coughs which shook his body and obviously hurt. ‘When they plant me I want the flowers from the mountains, like I used to see when I tended the sheep.’ He closed his eyes.