In Search of Murder--An Inspector Alvarez Mallorcan Mystery (21 page)

‘One day when at Vista Bonita, Marta proudly showed Russell a brooch which Picare had given her. He'd heard that Picare gave jewellery to any woman he was after and that made him certain he was after Marta. Russell went up to Vista Bonita, found Picare in the pool, threatened what would happen if Picare continued to try to bribe Marta into willing submission.'

‘He threatened to kill Picare?'

‘He did not detail his threat.'

‘We will accept that is what it was.'

‘Señor, if you believe that here is the motive for which we've been searching and which would identify the man who dragged Picare under the water—'

‘You challenge the obvious?'

‘Initially, I viewed the information as you do. But then I learned he'd left Vista Bonita so mentally disturbed, he went to a bar where he drank himself silly. I made further enquiries and can confirm he was incapable of returning to drown Picare.'

‘He is the last named suspect. Presume his innocence and we have to accept Picare died accidentally, perhaps due to entering the water with his head at the wrong angle and with too great a force. My instinct is, that cannot be right.'

‘You have frequently told me, señor, that instinct is not to be trusted.'

‘Its value, or lack of same, depends on the person concerned. You have failed to identify any meaningful discrepancy or contradiction in a suspect's evidence and will, therefore, question each one again, searching for what you may have previously negligently overlooked.'

‘But—'

‘You have your orders.'

‘I've had a tempest of a day,' Jaime said, as Alvarez sat at the table.

‘A mere zephyr compared to mine.'

‘Do this, do that, why have you, why haven't you. Been on my feet the whole time.'

There was a call from the kitchen. ‘Your zephyrs and tempests are but breezes for someone who has to run a house and is on her feet all morning, afternoon and evening. But being a woman, of course, she does not complain.'

‘Just moans,' Jaime said, in a low voice.

Alvarez refilled his glass. ‘I was propositioned again.'

‘If I believed you, I'd want to know why in the hell you're complaining.'

‘You think I'm lying?'

‘Suffering from wishful imagination.'

‘She didn't sit hard alongside me on the settee and ask what I'd most like to enjoy; suggest we went into a bedroom to be more comfortable?'

‘You think I'm going to believe that?'

‘Don't give a damn whether you do or don't.'

Jaime betrayed his disbelief was false. ‘Why the hell does it always happen to you and never to me?'

‘I'm good looking.'

‘You'd make Dracula look friendly.' Jaime picked up his glass and emptied it. ‘Admit you make it up to annoy me.'

There was a rustle from the string beads as Dolores put her head through. ‘What's Enrique done to annoy you?'

Alvarez hurriedly responded to prevent Jaime's answering. ‘I was telling him about a man I know who's won over a million on the lottery. It's always annoying to be told about other people's good fortunes.'

‘For either of you to win a quarter of a million would be a catastrophe since you'd be dead within six months from a pickled liver.' She withdrew her head and, for a few seconds, the strings of beads knocked against each other.

Jaime drained his glass, checked Dolores had not reappeared, refilled it. ‘Why tell her I didn't like hearing about other people's good luck? She'll hold that's selfish thinking and likely now won't concentrate on the cooking as she should. You've put her in one of her moods. Next thing, she'll be telling me we all get what we deserve. If that were true, I'd get five times the salary I do.'

‘Is the table laid?' she called out.

‘Women should do women's jobs, not expect men to do them.' Jaime straightened the tablecloth.

Alvarez drove slowly. His thoughts were resentful. He was to ask the occupants of all the houses below Vista Bonita – never mind if he had already questioned the occupants of any of them – and ask if he or she remembered seeing a brown Ford Fiesta during a named interval of time on the twelfth of July. If Salas possessed the normal appreciation of what was reasonable and what was not, he would have accepted that the odds of gaining any worthwhile information were so low, the task was not viable.

He slowed as he approached the first bungalow, regretfully accepted that only a fool would take the risk, stopped outside the second property, an undistinguished looking house.

A Señor Cartwright answered the front door bell, listened to Alvarez's introduction of himself, suggested they went into the sitting room.

‘You want to know that?' he asked, surprise raising his tone.

‘Naturally, I realise the practical difficulties.'

‘Frankly, and no offence intended, I'd call them impossibilities. I mean, there aren't that many cars that go up or down which might seem to make it easier, but trying to remember a brown Fiesta some good time afterwards, when I normally don't take any notice of who goes by – there's no reason since I doubt we and the deceased have any friends in common – makes it, like I said, really impossible.'

Alvarez agreed. The problem was going to be how to explain to Salas why he did not bother to question those in the other homes.

A
lvarez drove to Ca'n Porta. As he climbed out of the car, Eva Amengual opened the front door, watched him approach. He wished her good morning.

‘How's Marta now?' he asked.

‘Learning to live again.'

He gave the traditional response to that traditional remark. ‘May she learn well and quickly. Is your husband here?'

‘You think him a tourist with nothing to do?'

‘He's in the fields? I'll find him and have a word.'

‘What about?'

‘I have to ask him more questions.'

‘You told him you were certain he had dragged that piece of shit under the water. You want to insult me as well by saying I once worked in a house with green shutters?'

‘I could never suggest anything so monstrously impossible. I accused him of nothing, just asked him if he had been in the pool with Picare.'

‘Only someone like you could think that possible.'

‘I am now certain he had no part in Picare's death.'

‘Anyone but you would have known that from the beginning.'

‘I need to find out if he knows something which he does not know he knows.'

‘If there's someone who understands what you say, it's not me.'

‘Whereabouts will I find him?'

‘We have so many tens of hectares, I need to direct you to save you the trouble of looking. He'll likely be with the peppers.'

He walked along the rough path to the field in which Amengual was using a mattock to weed between rows. Amengual looked up. ‘You again? Then you can do some work.' He indicated his mattock.

‘Twenty euros an hour.'

‘You ain't worth twenty cents.'

Alvarez brought a pack of Pall Mall from his pocket, tapped a couple of cigarettes free, offered them. ‘Care to try one? I ask, because the last time I was here, you preferred to smoke your own on your own.'

Amengual hawked and spat. He withdrew a cigarette, put it in his mouth, lit a match for them both.

‘I want another word,' Alvarez said.

‘Ain't nothing more to say.'

‘What you tell me may, as I mentioned to your wife earlier, give me the chance to find out that you know something useful you don't know you do.'

‘She says she can't understand half of what you say because you talk so daft.'

‘Shall we go to your place and get out of the sun?'

‘There ain't no more wine.'

‘Water will do.'

‘You've been told you can drink it?' He walked to the end of the irrigated row of peppers, propped the handle of the mattock against the estanque, made his way to the house without bothering to check if Alvarez was following.

‘He wants wine,' he shouted to his wife.

‘From the look of him, he'll be dead when he don't.'

In the sitting room, she filled three glasses from the earthenware jug.

‘Salud!' Alvarez drank, lowered his glass. ‘It's nectar.'

‘You saying it's the dregs?' she demanded pugnaciously.

‘That it's good enough to serve to the gods.'

‘As if you'd know what they like.'

Any hostility had disappeared by the time the jug had been refilled and partially emptied.

‘I've a superior chief who's so suspicious of everyone, he often doubts himself,' Alvarez said. ‘So when he heard you'd told Picare what you thought of him because of Marta, the superior chief got the crazy idea maybe you did the drowning. I'm here to learn something which will calm him down and make him accept that's nonsense.'

The Amenguals looked uncertainly at each other.

‘Picare died on the twelfth of July, in the afternoon.'

They said nothing.

He addressed Amengual. ‘Where would you have been then?'

‘Where d'you think? Working in the field.'

‘Did you see or speak to anyone who'd remember seeing you that afternoon? It was a Thursday.'

‘Don't make no difference what day it was.'

She said loudly, ‘You old fool!'

He looked at her, surprised and puzzled by her fierce intervention.

‘You think you were on the land when they changed market day before the summer. You'd of been collecting me in the van.'

He spoke slowly. ‘So I would. So I would.'

‘You sell in the market?' Alvarez asked her,

‘How else do we get a fair price?'

‘Your husband collects you and the unsold produce in the afternoon?'

‘There ain't nothing to bring back since there ain't no one else grows better fruit and vegetables.'

‘You collected him from the market that Thursday?'

‘Ain't I just said? Not missed a market in years.'

‘Then your husband may have had reason to hate Picare, but he did not kill him.'

‘Only the likes of you would believe he could.'

‘Not seen you for some time,' said the barman in Bar Fernadol, on the western edge of Llueso.

‘Been working too hard to have a moment's rest,' Alvarez replied.

‘How's the work going?'

‘Same as ever.'

The barman accepted his questions were not welcomed. ‘What'll you have?'

‘Orange juice.'

‘What?'

‘Comes from the fruit of an orange tree.'

The barman stared at him, said slowly, ‘Now I've seen it snow in July!'

It was, for him, an unusual request, Alvarez accepted; it was probably the first time he had made it since a boy. But after all he had drunk with the Amenguals, he needed something neutral.

He carried the glass over to a table and sat. The Amenguals would be able to prove they were at the market on the time and date in question so there was no need to question them further.

Salas' orders had been explicit. Each of the possible suspects was to be questioned again. Was that a practical demand? Most would say it was reasonable to assume that when one half of a marriage learned the other half had been guilty of an affair, he or she would regard the intruder with angry hatred. Yet experience in life showed that the old-fashioned values of loyalty and morality had been tattered. Lynette Arcton had committed adultery, but her husband was dead, Leila Macrone denied adultery with Picare and evidence suggested her husband had believed her and ignored the rumour-mongers, so had had no reason to murder. Other relationships seemed equally devoid of a possible reason for individual retribution.

He picked up the glass and walked to the bar.

‘Another orange juice?' the barman disbelievingly asked.

‘A large coñac with ice.'

Half an hour later, refreshed, he drove along a minor road to the Palma/Playa Neuva autoroute and on to Llueso.

He awoke, stared up the ceiling and wondered if the rich enjoyed limitless siestas every afternoon. It helped to believe that if they did, they probably lost the pleasure of them. It must have been the devil who decreed that to enjoy too much of what one enjoyed would destroy the enjoyment.

Had Dolores considered him and bought a chocolate éclair from a pastelería? Whom did he question when he left home after coffee? Marta? Her mental stability was still a question mark.

Cecily Picare? It was reasonable to assume she must have known at least a little about her husband's amorous lifestyle, but could, or would not, furnish all the realistic details he needed to know. Señora Metcalfe? Did she only go to Vista Bonita to learn tricks of cooking from Rosalía? Yes, if she was a good wife and considered her husband's pleasures; no if she put hers before his. Had Debra Crane seen Picare merely to remind him to pay his dues? Had Pierre Poperen discovered his wife's infidelities and avenged her dishonour? Russell claimed to have been concerned with Marta's welfare. He admitted pursuing one of Picare's women and might have infuriated Picare and caused him to refuse the money which would have enabled Russell to stay at the hotel, thereby denying him any chance of a reunion with his daughter. Giselle and George Dunkling enjoyed a ménage à trois which had been invaded by Picare; had his invasion caused one of the men to suffer murderous anger?

The possibilities had become too many, the task of gathering the evidence necessary to reject all but one, Herculean.

He would next question Madge Barrat, another of the neighbours living below Vista Bonita. With no apparent connection with Picare, aside from location, it need not be a prolonged and exhausting interview.

‘T
he superior chief wants to speak to you,' Ángela Torres said.