Troubled Deaths (13 page)

Caroline Durrel was going to be very wealthy . . .

He checked through the rest of her papers and discovered that there was among them not a single reference to her life before she had come to the island.

Alvarez sent a Telex message to England. He gave details of Mabel’s passport, a detailed physical description of her, the date of her arrival on the island and English address as supplied in her application for a residencia, explained that evidence suggested she was in some way connected with ‘Geoffrey Freeman’ who had died six days previously, and added that the señorita had the sum of over 919,000 Swiss francs on deposit in Switzerland. Could the police give him any information about her?

In contrast to Friday, Saturday was a day of warmth and sunshine and the land once more became beautiful and the mountains attractive, not lowering presences.

The Telex message arrived at eleven-fifteen in the morning. England reported that the address given did not exist, nor could they trace a Mabel Cannon. Further enquiries were being made.

Alvarez looked at the telephone on his desk. But there surely were times when things shouldn’t be rushed and therefore to report to Superior Chief Salas now must be unwise?

All urbanizacions on the island were, before a single plot of land was sold, legally obliged to lay down piped water, metalled roads, street lighting, electricity, and telephones. One or two promoters were said actually to have honoured their obligations, but most were long on promises and short on performance. Since it was usually foreigners who bought such land no one - apart from the foreigners, of course - was in any way inconvenienced. However, the urbanizacion in which Casa Elba stood had been developed by a promoter with a social conscience and there were not only metalled roads which hadn’t yet started to break up too badly, street lights, electricity points, no real reason why telephones should not be connected, and piped water which flowed except in bad droughts, there was also a man who was employed to tend the unsold plots, the verges, the rock garden, and the tennis courts.

Hevia was a tall, thin, balding man with a long, sad-looking face. He pushed to the back of his head the beret he wore in winter or summer and scratched his head with earth-stained fingers. ‘It’s like this, Inspector, most of the time I’m so busy I don’t notice no one.’

Alvarez stared at the rock garden, set to the side of the steps, which was crowded with weeds. ‘I can imagine. But maybe when you weren’t quite so busy you noticed someone going into Casa Elba?’

‘Casa Elba?’ Hevia hawked and spat. ‘That’s the place where that miserable old beanstick of a woman lives.’

‘That’s right. She died suddenly.’

‘So I heard tell.’

Two black vultures were riding the thermals high above the mountains. They really ought to settle over Casa Elba, thought Alvarez. ‘It’s beginning to look as if she was poisoned.’

Hevia showed no astonishment.

‘So I want to know who was visiting her on Wednesday and Thursday. I thought you might have seen someone?’

Hevia dug his mattock into the lowest pocket of soil and then leaned on the handle. ‘Wednesday or Thursday?’ He stared at the ground.

Alvarez waited with endless patience. Because he was from the same background as Hevia, he could appreciate the other’s need to consider the subject exhaustively before giving an answer: when one worked with the soil, one learned to rush nothing.

‘I’ve seen someone,’ said Hevia finally. He looked up.

‘On which day?’

‘It were the Wednesday.’

‘D’you know who it was?’

‘I reckon.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’

A superior chief from Madrid would have sworn loudly at such sly, stupid insolence, but Alvarez merely laughed. Hevia looked disappointed.

‘Anyone else?’ asked Alvarez.

‘There were someone there on the Thursday.’

‘Yeah. Me.’

‘Didn’t see you,’ said Hevia, and he laughed.

‘So who did you see?’

‘There were a man on a bicycle who went down the slip road.’

‘Did he go to her house?’

‘There ain’t no other house down that slip road, is there?’

‘What I’m asking is if you saw him go into her house?’

‘I just saw him bike down. I ain’t got all day to do nothing but just stand around and watch.’

‘About what time was this?’

‘Just as it were getting dark.’

‘Have you ever seen him around before?’

‘No.’

‘Can you describe him?’

There was another long pause. ‘He was young, I reckon. Can’t say more’n that.’

‘What kind of hair?’

‘Couldn’ve been any kind. It were getting dark and I was a ways away.’

‘What was he wearing?’

‘Clothes.’

Even Alvarez’s patience was tried by that. ‘What kind of clothes?’ he demanded sharply.

When Hevia spoke, his voice showed his satisfaction at having annoyed the other. ‘I wouldn’t know. Like I told you . . .’

‘It was getting dark,’ interrupted Alvarez.

As Alvarez approached Ca’n Ritat he thought how little he liked the place. Set against the mountain backdrop, the house looked attractive, the garden was lovely and even at a poor time of the year was filled with colour, but the old farmhouse had been so drastically altered and rebuilt that little of the original was left and the flower garden was wasting good, rich soil which could have grown vegetables.

Orozco was in the kitchen garden directing water through irrigation channels drawn out of the soil with a mattock. Alvarez stood and watched the water lap round the onion plants as the channel was closed, then quickly drain away. ‘I met an Englishman who reckoned that if we’d use good, modern seed on this island, we’d double our crops.’

‘There’s silly buggers everywhere.’

‘I don’t know so much. There’ve been tremendous strides in other countries in breeding hybrids which give better yields or are more resistant to disease. And we do tend to use the same strain of seed year after year. The experts’ll tell you it’s wrong to use seed from the same strain in the same ground twice or more.’

Orozco closed the last side channel. He trudged back to the main channel and altered the flow, with two mattockfuls of earth, so that now the water ran to beans. He straightened up and flexed his powerful shoulders.

‘D’you ever meet an expert who got his hands dirty, doing the work? The señor gave me seed to plant. It won’t do no good, I told him. Plant it, he orders, this is proper, expert seed from England. So I let him see me plant it and then when he’d gone I slung it. I wasn’t going to waste my time. Our seed’s used to sun and his seed’s used to rain. Stands to reason his wouldn’t have been no good out here.’

Alvarez had never before heard him speak so freely, but talk to any true peasant about land or animals and he becomes loquacious. ‘But some of the newly developed seeds will stand up to a lot of sun even if they come from a climate like England’s . . .’

‘And when it grows up it comes with curl or rots or gets eaten by bugs,’ said Orozco with contemptuous certainty.

There was both weakness and strength in a peasant’s stubbornness, thought Alvarez, happy to associate himself with such stubbornness. It clung to tradition and refused to accept novelty: in a world which seemed to believe all tradition was nonsense and all novelty desirable, that was a valuable trait. ‘How’s the señora?’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the house.

‘All right.’ Orozco once more became taciturn. He went over to the beans and changed the flow of water to another long channel.

Alvarez, who’d followed, said: ‘Is she over the shock of the señor’s death?’

‘Could be.’

‘Has she heard how her brother-in-law is?’

‘Couldn’t say.’

‘Is her husband back yet?’

‘No.’

He sounded uninterested, yet this would not be so, Alvarez knew. It was just that in such matters he would be a complete fatalist because life had taught him that to worry changed nothing. Alvarez’s mind changed tracks and he began to fidget with the button of his coat. ‘Luis is a lot older than she is, isn’t he? D’you reckon it matters very much?’

‘I reckon it ain’t none of my business.’

‘They say that when a husband’s a lot older than his wife, she gets restless. That sort of thing could cause trouble.’

Orozco said nothing.

‘But I’d have thought an older husband meant he was steadier and didn’t spend his time looking at other skirts. That could count for a lot.’ Caroline would never become restless because she would give total loyalty . . . Had God robbed him of his few wits? Since when had rich, beautiful women ever looked at penniless peasants with anything but pity or scorn? He sighed. It seemed a man had no shield against his own foolish dreams.‘There’s something I want to know. Did you see a stranger come to this place a day or two before the señor died? Someone you’ve never clapped eyes on before, or maybe only once. A chunky kind of a bloke with curly brown hair, in his early twenties, shoulders as solid as yours? Could’ve been dressed in kind of seaman’s clothes.’

‘Ain’t see no one like that.’

‘It’s probable he was not in a car, but was riding a bicycle.’

‘Ain’t I just said no? If words were pesetas, you’d be bloody rich.’

‘I’ve got to keep on asking. I’ve a job to do.’

‘Then why not clear off and do it?’

Alvarez laughed.

The Mallorquin woman who lived in the flat next to Caroline said that she had gone to stay with an English friend. She didn’t know who that friend was. Alvarez drove to the nearby supermarket where many of the English shopped and he asked the staff if any of them could tell him with whom Señorita Durrel was staying. One of the assistants said she thought the señorita was with Senora Jarmine who lived in a house in the urbani-zacion which lay half-way between the Port and Llueso.

He drove to the urbanizacion. Here, the houses, perched on the mountainside, were large and luxurious, almost all with swimming pools despite the difficulty and great expense of building them because of the slope of the rock.

He disliked Senora Jarmine on sight. She was coarse and vulgar and she possessed to a fine degree that insulting, off-hand superiority which seemed to come so naturally to many English. He spoke with great politeness. ‘May I speak with Senora Durrel, please? My name is Inspector Alvarez of the Cuerpo General de Policia.’

‘Why d’you want to worry her now?’ demanded Bertha.

They still stood in the hall. Anyone with any manners at all, he thought, would at least have taken him into the sitting-room. ‘Senora, I must ask her certain things.’

‘She’s not up to being pestered by the police.’

‘Senora, I am sure she will be able to answer for me the few questions I need to ask.’

‘You’d better come back some other time.’ She moved towards the front door.

‘I regret very much, Senora, but I must speak to her now if she is here, in your house.’ His tone remained polite, but there was the snap of authority to his words.

She looked at him with obvious annoyance. ‘Wait.’ She left, passing through an open archway.

He studied the hall. There were two Persian carpets, three paintings which could well have been old masters, to judge from their elaborate frames and sombre subjects, four very ornate antique pistols, a beautifully inlaid table with a patina that could have come only from constant care, and a striking group of two men and a dog in silver. How many cuarteradas of rich land did they represent?

Bertha returned. ‘Go on in,’ she said bad-temperedly, indicating the open archway. He went through. The sitting-room was very large and from the picture windows there was a view of the plain and Llueso Bay and to the west of that a small corner of Playa Nueva Bay and Puerto Playa Nueva which stood on the isthmus which separated the two mountain-ringed bays.

Caroline sat on the richly upholstered settee. In sharp contrast to Bertha, she wore a simple cotton frock, no jewellery other than a small locket which had been her mother’s, and no make-up. She looked tired and strained and her voice was tense. ‘It isn’t true, is it? She wasn’t poisoned? It’s just another beastly rumour?’

He vainly longed to be able to shelter her from the beastlinesses of the world. ‘Señorita, I am very sorry, but I cannot say. Until the tests are finished, I do not know.’

‘Then you think it is possible she was poisoned?’

He nodded.

She shivered.

‘Señorita, I will be as brief as possible, but there are some questions which I have to ask.’ He sat down in one of the armchairs. ‘I need to know something of Señorita Cannon’s financial affairs. Will you be able to help me? Perhaps she has spoken to you about them?’

‘Mabel never talked to me about anything like that.’

‘Then you do not know if she was very wealthy?’

‘She obviously had enough money to live on, but she didn’t lead an expensive life. I’m sure she wasn’t what I’d call very wealthy.’

‘Do you know if she had relations on the island or in England?’

‘I don’t think so, because she never spoke of anyone. And there was something sad about her which always made me think she must be completely on her own.’

‘I suppose, then, you cannot tell me who is likely to be her heir?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Señorita, there is one other matter on which I have to ask you. When I last met you, I was leaving the señorita’s house and you had driven up to it. I told you the señorita was disturbed and so I think you did not visit her. Did you see her before she died?’

‘No. You see I thought it was best not to go to her place for a little. Mabel was rather . . . Well, she could get very excited over some things and then she wouldn’t be quite reasonable.’

4 Who was your friend who was with you in that car on Wednesday?’

She tried to answer casually, but was far too inept at dissembling her feelings to prevent her voice tightening. ‘Edward Anson. He’s a wonderful boatbuilder and is going into partnership with Ramon Mena.’

‘Then he will be very successful. Ramon is a great craftsman, señorita . . . Were you perhaps wishing to speak to Señorita Cannon about something of importance?’