Relatively Dangerous (20 page)

‘So what were your feelings towards Señor Taylor?’

‘I . . . Well, I . . .’

‘You must have hated him?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Sufficiently to wish him dead?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why not? He’d deprived you of what you’d most wanted.’

‘My God, you can’t think like that! I couldn’t ever get so worked-up as a Mallorquin would . . .’ He stopped.

‘That is very true. An islander has a violent argument and before he thinks what he’s doing, he pulls out a knife and uses it. But poisoning is not a hot-blooded act, it is a cold-blooded one.’

‘That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’d never think of murder just because I’d been swindled.’

‘Not even the third time?’

‘What d’you mean, the third time?’

‘Señor Taylor sold you more shares.’

‘Yes, but they . . . they may rise in value just as Yabra Consolidated did.’

‘Have you checked that they are worth at least as much as you paid for them?’

Wheeldon shook his head.

‘Why not?’

‘I . . . Well, the truth is, if they turn out to be worth a lot less, it’ll make me look such a fool.’

‘I’d prefer to say, too trusting.’

‘You must believe me.’

Alvarez stood. ‘I do,’ he said sadly.

Alvarez walked into the chemist shop and spoke to the husband, who had just finished serving a customer. The husband led the way into the stock room.

‘I want to find out something. I gather colchicine is a pretty potent poison?’

That’s right.’

‘But even so, it’s used therapeutically?’

‘Lots of poisons are; maybe they all could be if we knew enough about ‘em—natural, not manmade poisons, that is. I’ve heard it claimed that that’s one more proof that the universe is totally symmetrical; there’s always a plus to balance a minus. Frankly, that sort of stuff leaves me cold, but it is a hard fact that a poison like colchicine can cure as well as kill.’

‘What’s it used for medically?’

‘As far as I know, just the treatment of arthritis. I read not so long ago that its use is being extended and there have been promising results in cases of rheumatoid arthritis.’

‘Extended from what?’

‘From its traditional field, which is gout.’

Friday morning brought the first clouds for days, but as the sun rose higher these were slowly burned away and by eleven the sky was once again clear and the sun shone with burning brilliance. Alvarez parked in front of the stone stairs which led up to Ca Na Mufia, turned off the engine, stepped out. One by one, the cicadas, which had been disturbed by his arrival, resumed their shrilling; overhead, but not immediately locatable, came the sharp cry, twice repeated, of a raptor; a branch of a tree, moving in the very light breeze, scraped against something with a soft, rhythmic sound; the air was heady with the scent of wild thyme.

Valerie came out of the house, her movements slightly easier than when he had last seen her, and she met him at the head of the steps. ‘Hullo again. I hope you’ve come for a long chat?’

‘Señora, I fear that I have to ask you more questions.’

‘Why be sorry? I told you last time, I’m delighted to have someone to talk to. Now, come on in and we’ll have a glass of wine.’

‘Perhaps we should have the questions first.’

‘Good heavens, no! You’ll be able to ask much nicer ones and I’ll be able to answer them much more wisely if we have a drink beforehand.’

He followed her into the coolness of the house. A newspaper was on the floor by the side of one of the chairs and she bent down and picked this up. ‘I went into the village yesterday and met some friends and they gave me this copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. I rather wish they hadn’t. Britain’s become a dreadful place because of all the crime.’

‘There’s crime on this island. Señor Taylor was poisoned.’

‘Was he? Oh dear! What a horrid way to die.’

‘He didn’t die from poisoning, but because of it; that’s what caused him to crash.’

‘I suppose there is a difference?’

‘Yes, although it remains a murder.’

‘I know it’s wanting to bury my head in the sand, but can’t we talk about something nicer?’

‘I’m afraid not. That’s what I have come to discuss.’

‘Oh dear! . . . Anyway, let me get the drinks first. Would you still prefer red wine?’

She went out into the kitchen, returned with two tumblers of wine, one of which she handed to him. ‘This is a different wine which I bought yesterday in the village; the woman in the shop told me it was much nicer than the one I usually have.’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps she couldn’t sell it to anyone else, so decided to unload it on a fool foreigner.’

‘Señora, I have just been to the town hall in Estruig. I asked them for the date on which Señor Swinnerton died. They could find no record of the señor’s death. I then asked them to check burials. There was no record of the señor’s burial. Yet I distinctly remember your telling me that he died in this house. In such a case, it was necessary to notify the town hall in Estruig and for the burial to take place in Estruig cemetery.’

There was a silence.

‘Why did you not notify the authorities of the señor’s death?’

‘What does it matter now?’

‘Where is he buried?’

She gave no answer.

‘Last time I was here, you walked down from the terraces above and you were moving with difficulty because of pain from gout. Crippled to such an extent, you would surely only have climbed up if there were some very important reason to do so.’ He waited, but she remained silent. ‘Señora, is your husband buried up on one of the terraces?’

She seemed to shiver; seen in profile, her heavy face held an expression of sad resignation. She said in a low, distant voice, ‘He knew he was dying, but thought I didn’t. For as long as he could he pretended that he was feeling better and I pretended that I believed him . . .

‘Then he became too weak to move. He lay on the settee in the other room because the window’s so low and he could look out at the mountains he loved so much. Towards the end, he wasn’t fully conscious and quite often he asked why it was so hot. I tried to explain that we weren’t in Wales, but he couldn’t understand. Once or twice, he thought I was his mother . . .

‘On the last day his mind suddenly cleared and he knew that I knew. He told me that our marriage had always been so happy that he’d dreaded the bill—he was so certain that happiness always had to be paid for. He talked about the garden and how he hoped there really was a life after death so that he could keep the picture of the garden together with the picture of me. He told me how he wished he could be buried amid the garden and not in a cemetery, hemmed in by walls and frowned on by tombs which had been built to impress. He was talking about the beauty all around here only seconds before he died . . .

‘I knew that I had to give him what he had most wanted.’ Tears were trickling down her furrowed cheeks, but her voice held steady. ‘I buried him on one of the terraces, near the twisted olive tree he called the Laocoon, I don’t care how wrong that was.’

‘Señora, nothing that so strong a love does can be truly wrong.’

‘Do you . . . Do you really believe that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God . . . It’s all become so difficult since David died. You see, he never understood how to manage the money we had and so there wasn’t much left and no matter how hard I tried, because everything had become so expensive I had to keep using a little of the capital. One day I discovered that very soon I wouldn’t be able to afford to live here any longer. That would mean leaving David and I couldn’t bear to think of doing that . . .

‘I went to the cocktail-party where I met Mr Thompson and he talked about how easy it was to make money if you knew what you were doing . . . I thought that if I could make some money, perhaps I could stay here until I died and then I would have kept faith with David. So I asked Mr Thompson to sell me some shares. And the next time I saw him, he said that they had gone up until they were worth twice as much and he strongly advised me to sell and take the profit before they went down again, as he expected them to do. The extra money meant that I could stay here a little longer and look after David. I told Mr Thompson how grateful I was and he said that it was helping people like me which made his life so worthwhile.

‘I was in Estruig one day and in a newspaper I read about the shares. They were worth fifty times what he’d paid me. If he’d given me the proper price, I would have had enough money not only to be certain I could go on living here until I died, but also to employ a gardener again so that David was surrounded by his favourite flowers . . .

‘Mr Thompson came to the house. I begged him to give me the extra money and explained why I needed it. He said . . .’

‘What did he say, señora?’

‘That a promise to someone who was dead was meaningless.’

‘A man like him could never understand.’

‘He gave me another thousand pounds . . . He made it seem he was doing me a favour instead of having cheated me. I couldn’t bear it . . . I kept thinking of David . . .’

‘So you poisoned him?’

She opened her mouth to speak, said nothing.

He thought he understood her sequence of emotions. She was a woman of peace and love and was shocked and horrified by what she’d done. She believed in forgiveness and redemption, but only after expiation. So having poisoned Taylor, she wanted to expiate her sin, which meant she should now confess and suffer the penalties the law decreed. But imprisonment would mean deserting David . . .

He had to be certain of the details. ‘You suffer from gout and one treatment is to take therapeutic doses of colchicine. You knew that this was a poison and it was dangerous to take more than the prescribed dose. You had learned that Steven Taylor suffered from migraine and had seen the capsules he always carried around with him, so you got hold of the bottle, extracted some of the capsules, emptied these and refilled them with as much of your ground-up pills as you could get into them. Sooner or later, he would swallow one of these poisoned pills and, you hoped, would die.’

‘No,’ she said fiercely.

He looked at her with pity. ‘Where are the pills you take to alleviate your gout?’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘If necessary, I will search this house.’

‘All right, I do take some. But I didn’t do as you’ve just said.’

‘Will you get them for me, please.’

She stood, left. He heard her slowly climbing the stairs, which led out of the next room, then crossing overhead, her footsteps loud because the floor was bare concrete. When she returned, she handed him a bottle half-full of small round green pills.

‘Do you have any more of these?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll only take a few.’

‘Aren’t . . . aren’t you arresting me?’

‘Since you deny having substituted some of these pills for the contents of the capsules, I have to prove that that is what you did—at the moment, I have no such proof. Indeed, it’s not even certain that these pills contain colchicine.’

‘But you’ll find the proof?’

‘I’m afraid I probably will, señora.’

‘And then you’ll arrest me?’

Being a coward, he was glad that now it would be the superior chief and not he who would initiate the actual arrest.

On Tuesday, a south wind brought the heat and the sand of the Sahara; everything in the open became covered in fine sand and the temperature rose above a hundred so that even the foreigners left their homes shuttered throughout the day. Villages appeared to be deserted.

At breakfast, Dolores had asked Alvarez to drive on from the port—when he’d finished his work there—to Playa Nueva to buy some cold smoked pork from the German shop and he remembered this as he passed the petrol station on his way back to Llueso. He swore, stopped the car on the hard shoulder, and looked at his watch. Nearly half twelve. If he now drove over to Playa Nueva he would not be home much before a quarter past one and for the past hour he’d been looking forward with ever increasing impatience to the first iced brandy. On the other hand, if he didn’t get the pork, Dolores would not be best pleased . . .

He waited for two cars to pass, made a U-turn. Once more in the port, he cut through the back streets to the front, where he turned right. The bay was at its most beautiful, perhaps because the hard sun and burning air were exaggerating contrasts. David Swinnerton had wanted to remain among the beauty of the mountains, he would choose the bay . . .

The blast of a horn jerked his thoughts back to the present and he realized that the car had wandered out into the centre of the road. He pulled in to the side and a builder’s van swept by; as it passed, he read the name on the side: Javier Ribas. Builders and property developers were the modern plutocrats, making so much money that they didn’t know how to hide it all from the tax people . . . The van’s right-hand blinker flashed and it turned off the road. Gone to Las Cinco Palmeras, he thought. Then did that mean the young couple had found the money? He hoped they had. Helen was someone who deserved to succeed.

He didn’t consciously make the decision, yet he braked and also turned right. The yard behind the restaurant was, despite the heat, filled with energetic movement. Near the kitchen door, a concrete mixer was turning and a man was shovelling the last of a pile of sand into it; beyond, a second man was working at a plumber’s bench which had been placed up against the building, to take advantage of the shade. The lorry had turned and was now backing. It came to a stop, the driver shouted to the man by the concrete mixer who undipped the tail-board, the hydraulic ram slowly raised the loading bay and sand began to spill.

Alvarez left his car and walked round to the door of the kitchen. It looked as if every fixture inside had been ripped out or was being ripped out . . .

‘It’s a horrible mess, but it’s wonderful!’

He turned to face a smiling Helen.

‘The builder’s promised by all the saints in every calendar that the work will be finished in time for the inspector to pass it by the end of the month. So we’ll be able to open on time after all . . . You must have a drink to celebrate.’