Murder Begets Murder (6 page)

‘Tell him to wait. There’s plenty of time.’

They went into the bar of the Club Llueso and Alvarez ·ordered two coffees and two brandies.

Once they were seated, the driver said: ‘What in God’s name happened to the señorita?’

‘I don’t know much more than you do . . . Now, let’s hear what happened with you.’

‘It was like this. I was in the square and she comes and says she wants to go to the airport on Wednesday morning.

I tell her, two thousand pesetas, she starts to beef, and we settle for eighteen hundred.

‘I drive up to the house on Wednesday. ‘Strewth, what a track! Like a tank obstacle course. I turn the car, open the boot, go to the front door and knock. Nothing. I knock again. Still nothing. I shout, “Señorita, we must go now or you’ll miss your plane.” I knock on the shutters, I do everything and it’s always nothing.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

The barman brought them the coffee and brandies.

Alvarez poured half the brandy into his coffee, then added two spoonfuls of sugar. As he stirred, he said: ‘And then?’

‘What could I do but go away?’

‘Naturally.’

The driver looked quickly at Alvarez, then said: ‘There’s one thing more. The señorita paid when she booked the taxi — said she didn’t want to have many pesetas on her when she left. I tried to persuade her not to pay until the journey was made, but she insisted. Since she never went to the airport . . . What do I do with the money?’

‘Forget it. A dead foreigner can’t worry about eighteen hundred pesetas.’

‘In that case, drink up, it’s on me. And we’ll have the other half as well.’

Dr Rodriguez Roldán was a short man in his middle thirties, compactly built, with a round, rather chubby face topped by wiry black hair. His eyes were a very light blue, a strange colour for an islander. He dressed with great care, in well-cut suits, hand-made shirts, and expensive shoes. He should have looked distinguished. But for some reason, perhaps because he worked so hard at being smart, he looked slick rather than distinguished: the local kid made good and without the taste to conceal that fact.

He looked at Alvarez and said: ‘From your description, she died from some kind of food poisoning.’

‘That’s what I’d guessed. Only it would have had to be very virulent, wouldn’t it, to have prevented her calling for help?’

‘She was on her own, the house hasn’t a telephone, and it’s a good way up the track from the next house. Perhaps she tried to ignore the symptoms at first and by the time she realized they were serious, she was in too bad a condition to leave the house to seek help.’

‘A sad way to die.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, the post-mortem will tell us for certain.’ He was surprised that although Roldán had obviously initially been shocked by the news, he had shown little sympathy: a doctor should surely know sympathy for all his patients? ‘I need to find out what kind of a man Señor Heron was — you can tell me that, can’t you?’

Roldán adjusted the tooled leather blotter which was immediately in front of him on his large, ornately inlaid desk. ‘Why should I be able to answer you? I was his doctor, not his personal friend.’

‘You’ll have gained some sort of impression.’

‘Only as to his medical state. And as to his ridiculous stubbornness.’ He examined his nails, then opened the left-hand top drawer of his desk and took out a small pad and briefly polished the nails of his right hand with quick, precise movements. ‘He was a. very sick man who should never have come out to the island.’

‘What exactly was wrong with him?’

‘Put as simply as possible, mitral stenosis subsequent to a bad attack of rheumatic fever when young. This was quite serious, and then on top of that he contracted a bacterial endocarditis, which is the condition in which he was when I first treated him. Surgery would probably have relieved the primary complaint, but he said he had a horror of operations and had always refused to undergo one. Then the bacterial endocarditis made it impossible for an operation to be performed, even had he been willing. My immediate advice, put very strongly, was that he should consult a specialist in Palma, but he refused. I treated him with antibiotics, but although I kept changing them he raped to respond. I again said it was essential he went into a clinic for treatment, again he refused.’ Roldán replaced the nail pad in the drawer and shut this. ‘There are some patients, Inspector, for whom one can do very little, thanks to their characters.’

‘Did you speak to the señorita about persuading him to go into a clinic?’

‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with the death of the señorita?’

‘Please bear with me a bit longer.’

‘Very well. I told the señorita that the señor was a seriously ill man and it was more than ever essential he went into a clinic for treatment. She said she’d do what she could to persuade him, but she was no more successful than I had been.’

‘How did you find her — eager to help?’

‘Of course. Why shouldn’t she have been?’

‘There seems to have been a possibility that she was rather too friendly with another man. Did you ever get any suggestion of that?’

‘No. Furthermore, I am not in the habit of listening to poisonous gossip.’

‘Then there has been such gossip?’

‘I was not inferring that.’

‘Do you think that she looked after the señor as well as she could?’

‘I think your questions are becoming not only unnecessary, but offensive.’

‘I’m sorry, doctor. What finally finished off the señor?’

‘It is inaccurate to suggest that anything “finally” was responsible for his death, unless he developed a sudden allergy to the latest antibiotic I tried. The course of his illness, without there being surgery, had inevitably to lead to his death. It is possible, too, that his state of emotional excitability not long before his death played some part: I have always been of the opinion that a patient’s mental condition plays a far greater part in his physical condition than many fellow doctors will admit.’

‘What did he get emotionally excited about?’

‘The señorita told me he’d had a very heated argument over the telephone with the firm they hired their car from.’

‘Which firm was it?’

‘I’ve no idea . . . Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a number of patients I must visit.’

The surgery was in the doctor’s house and as Alvarez stepped out into the hall a woman entered from the road. In her early twenties, she had an oval face of unusual, striking beauty, framed by curly hair the colour of newly ripened corn, which suggested at one and the same time the contradictory characteristics of virginity and wantonness. Her eyes were cobalt blue and warmly emotional, yet there was also a hint of recklessness in them: her full lips were curved for smiling passion. Ye gods! he thought, if ever there’d been a woman to make any man feel that here was a citadel to be stormed for the rich rewards concealed within . . .

She studied him, accepted his obvious admiration with amusement, and walked past. He tried to persuade him­ self that he was far too mature to lust after a woman of her age, however exciting she might be, but he could not stop himself watching her walking towards a door and visualizing the honey-smooth, melon-sweet limbs momentarily and intriguingly outlined beneath the frock. She went through the doorway and shut the door. No wonder Francisca had been critical of her: she’d incur the resentful jealousy of every woman who saw her. Feeling suddenly old, he turned and crossed to the front door.

The manager of the car hire firm sat inside the very small office. He spread out his hands and on his wide, Mon­golian face, there was an expression of surprise. ‘Sure Señor Heron phoned me. So what?’

‘So how was he?’ asked Alvarez. ‘Calm and collected?’

‘You’ve got to be joking. He was mad: quite mad.’ There was a clanging row as a mechanic who was working on a very battered Seat 600 knocked over something. Alvarez waited until there was relative quiet before he asked: ‘What had got into him?’

‘He was being unreasonable, like all the foreigners. Look, I hired the señorita a car. For months it runs OK, then it breaks down. Any car can break down: yours can, mine can. I get a fresh one to her and because I strain myself to try to do too much for the customers, that also breaks down.’ He gestured with his large, powerful hands.

‘Any car can break down . . .’

‘I got the message the first time. He bawled you out for lousy cars, eh ?’

The manager used a tooth-pick to work on his teeth. After a while he turned his head and spat on to the floor.

‘It was the petrol.’

‘What about the petrol?’

The manager sighed. ‘When I hire a car out, the tank is full. When the client brings the car back, I charge for the petrol used if the tank hasn’t been refilled. The señorita had told the señor the tank of the car was over three quarters full when it broke down.’

‘And you said it was only half full and charged accordingly.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘I’ve been around a long time.’

‘Too bloody long.’

‘I take it he called you a liar?’

‘Foreigners have no manners. Why get excited over a few pesetas?’

‘Did you know that the señor died soon after having that row with you?’

‘No.’

‘The doctor thinks the row might have affected him.’

‘It wasn’t anything to do with me: he had the row, not me.’

Alvarez jerked himself upright. ‘Know something — if I were you, I’d buy some new petrol gauges. Then maybe you wouldn’t meet these embarrassing situations which can so upset people.’

‘I don’t get embarrassed.’

Alvarez left and drove down to the harbour. He parked along the western arm and walked slowly along, studying the yachts and motor cruisers. For him, as surely for most people, a yacht epitomized wealth. A yacht gave a man command, independence, the ability to escape from it all. He sighed. Snow would drift in the Sahara before he ever owned so much as a dinghy. In any case, a man should understand the priorities. Any one of the large yachts tied up must represent something over seventy thousand square metres of prime farming land. That or a yacht? Only a fool could hesitate.

He drove back to Llueso, turning off on to the Festona Valley road, which twisted its way through small, intensely cultivated fields and past fincas, so often now in the hands of foreigners. Nearer to the mouth of the valley the road was bordered by a water channel which brought water down from a spring in the mountains to the estanquis on the farms below. The Romans had reputedly first built this aqueduct, to take the water right across to Playa Neuva, where they had maintained a garrison.

He turned left on to a very rough dirt track which made his ancient Seat creak alarmingly. The track sloped down to a ford, now dry, then climbed up through typical maquis scrub to end at wrought-iron gates. He climbed out of the car. The air was heady with the scent drawn out by the hot sun from the wild herb bushes which grew around here in such confusion.

A wide path curved round to his right, hugging the contours of the hill. The sloping land was thick with outcrops of rock and considerable imagination and labour had been used to turn the whole area into a very large rock garden, growing not only cacti and flowering bushes, but also mimosa, orange, and lemon trees. The path made a final sharp turn and then debauched on to a fiat, concreted area on which was built a large bungalow. Twenty feet below the patio of the bungalow was a wide terrace in which was a swimming pool and beyond that the land, again terraced, sloped downwards, leaving a view over a belt of scrubland to the bay. He stood and stared at the scene, marvelling that despite all the years he had lived in Llueso he’d had no idea that this place existed.

‘I spend a lot of my time sitting out here,’ said a woman.

‘It’s the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen.’

He swung round, surprised because he had not heard her approach.

‘My husband bought the land twenty years ago this month. We had nearly ten wonderful years together here before he died. He wanted to be buried up on the hillside, overlooking the garden, but although I tried very hard I couldn’t get permission. But I like to think that his shade sits up there on lovely days and looks out with me.’

He knew an immediate sympathy with this slim, elderly woman who clearly cared more for practicalities than fashion and who was dressed in a faded blouse and a pair of darned, puce jeans which were much too large for her.

‘If I were he, señora, I’d spend every day up there. Even when it does rain it can be so beautiful, but in a different way.’

‘How right you are! Yet so many of the people out here moan that when it rains this island becomes impossibly dreary. I tell ‘em, it’s their minds that are dreary, not the country . . . Well, now we know we think alike on at least one subject, tell me who you are and what you want. And we might as well sit while you’re doing it.’

They sat near the edge of the patio. A small boy in a swimming costume suddenly ran into view and dived into the pool, raising a fountain of spray. He swam to the far end with more enthusiasm than technique.

‘That’s the gardener’s son,’ she said, as if asked the question. ‘A limb of Satan, thank God. can’t stand little boys who behave themselves: it’s far too unnatural.’ She turned and studied Alvarez for a while, then said: ‘I’ve seen you about the town more than once.’

He introduced himself.

‘A detective! I suppose you’re here because of Betty Stevenage’s death?’

‘Yes, señora.’

‘So a rumour’s true, for once — she didn’t die a natural death?’

‘At the moment, nobody knows. So now I just try to find out how a woman could come to so sad an end on her own. I am told that you knew the señorita well. Is that so?’

‘It’s a typical exaggeration.’ She began to massage her cheeks, using the tips of her fingers and rubbing in a clockwise direction. ‘I’m a busybody: interested in every­body else’s business. And if I can help someone, I try to do so. I kept thinking I could help Betty.’

‘Why did you think that?’