Murder Begets Murder (17 page)

‘Then why did he go over the edge?’

‘There was a phone call to go to Ca’n Asped double quick sharp because a woman had had a very serious accident and her husband said she was bleeding badly. Roldán drove to the house, which is right up the urbanizacion where the road aims pretty near straight for the sky. When he left he must have been going at a rate of knots and right now it looks like brake failure, because there aren’t any rubber marks on the road until almost at the bend where he obviously tried to turn in to the rock face and only succeeded in skidding over the edge.’

‘Was it an old car?’

‘Practically brand new Seat one-three-one.’

‘Hasn’t that got a dual braking system?’

‘I wouldn’t know off-hand.’

‘What about the people he called on –can they help at all?’

‘There wasn’t anyone in the house: been shut up for the past nine months. The owners live in England and only come out for the last part of July and whole of August and sometimes Christmas. Either Roldán’s wife got the address wrong or it was a hoax.’

‘A hoax?’

‘I know. That sounds pretty thin to me too.’

‘If Señora Roldán got the name wrong,,wouldn’t he have realized this from the name of the patient?’

‘As far as I know, no name was ever given, only the address, and since they would have been new patients Roldán hadn’t any way of checking. But the wife’s in such a state it’s difficult to get any sense out of her.’

‘Is the car being checked over?’

‘Of course. How come you’re this interested, Enrique ?’

‘I don’t know, really. Maybe it’s because I was speaking to the man only a week ago.’

‘Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s the way the world goes. So drink and wench while you still can.’

After the call was over, Alvarez stared at the far wall. Roldán had been Heron’s doctor, but so had he been the doctor of hundreds of other people. Heron’s wife had died from accidental poisoning. Betty Stevenage’s dog had been poisoned with aconite and probably it was aconite which had killed her. Surely it could be only one more coincidence that Roldán’s name was linked with theirs . . .
?

On Monday, a day promising to be even hotter than before, Alvarez walked through the town to the Seat garage. The wrecked car was on a low trolley in a corner bay. It was so shattered and twisted that without very close inspection it was impossible to judge that it had been a Seat 131.

He went over to where Largo, the owner of the garage, was working on the prop shaft of a six-metre speedboat in a cradle. ‘Have you checked out the crashed car yet?’

Largo, a short, stocky man with a humorous face, straightened up and pressed a clenched fist against the small of his back. ‘Not yet. They brought it in yesterday and I had to open up the garage specially to take it. This morning I’ve this boat to repair: the owner wanted it days ago.’

‘So when d’you think you’ll get round to the car?’

‘When I’ve the time.’

‘It’s important.’

‘So are the paying customers.’

Alvarez leaned against the hull of the speedboat. ‘You’ve looked over enough wrecked cars in your time, Alberto. D’you reckon you’ll be able to judge what caused the accident?’

‘With a car as bashed up as that? When they brought it in I told ‘em, you’re wasting your time and mine. But they insisted — check over the remains and tell us why the car went over the edge.’

‘Traffic seems to think the brakes must have failed.’

‘All right. You check the brake lines and tell me if they were damaged before or after the crash. You tell me if the reservoirs of brake fluid were empty before he went over.’

‘OK, OK. I take your point.’

‘Have a fag,’ said Largo, producing a pack from his oil-­stained overalls, ‘and forget it. Worry only gives you ulcers.’

‘I reckon I must be growing a champion crop,’ said Alvarez gloomily.

Alvarez stood by the entrance to the drive to Ca’n Asped and looked upwards. The road turned in a right-hand hairpin bend fifty metres on. He looked downwards. A three-hundred-metre run down a very steep road. If Roldán had been very annoyed by the abortive call he might well have driven off with reckless speed . . .

He walked downhill. There was no form of barrier on the outer edge of the road, but the very obviousness of the danger surely was a safety measure? At night time, any driver who wasn’t either drunk or mad would stick to the centre of the road. Where was the last point at which one would normally brake? He judged the point would be opposite a ledge of rock, left after the road had been blasted out, on which grew a solitary spurge bush. Reaction to brake failure might be quick, but it couldn’t be instantaneous and the car would travel quite a few metres before the driver’s brain realized the brakes had gone and he reacted to this knowledge. Then an attempt to drop down into a lower gear? And the last, desperate act, to try to ram the rock to bring the car to a stop? . . . The road was marked with black rubber strips where the Seat had skidded . . . He reached the edge of the road and looked down and immediately suffered the nausea which heights always produced in him. Exercising considerable will-power, and courage, he forced himself to stand still and study the scene. The mountainside sloped away unevenly, its surface a jumble of levels, with bushes and scrub grass growing in sparse pockets. The passage of the car could readily be traced out: gouged rock, smashed bushes whose leaves were already brown, shattered glass which glinted in the sunlight and jagged pieces of metal.

To him, the scene suggested only one thing, brake failure. Yet the car had a dual braking system and the odds against both systems failing together were surely very, very great?

He began to climb up the road and soon the sweat was rolling down his face, neck, and back, and he was having to breathe through opened mouth.

Alvarez had never been able dispassionately to observe another’s grief: he was far too emotional for that. So to an extent Denise Roldán’s tragedy became a tragedy for him.

‘Señora, I am desperately sorry to have to bother you at such a terrible time.’

She said nothing. She was dressed in black and by some terrible irony black so suited her that she looked more beautifully elegant than ever — only her eyes betrayed the depths of her misery.

‘I have to question you about the telephone call on Friday night.’

She had a lace-edged handkerchief in her lap and she plucked at this with the fingers of her right hand.

‘I believe that you answered the call?’ She nodded.

‘Can you remember exactly how it went?’

Staring straight in front of herself, she said tonelessly: ‘The man said his wife had had a terrible accident and was bleeding very badly. The doctor was to come immediately to Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion.’

‘What language did he speak?’

‘English.’

‘Do you think he was English?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you understand the language well?’

‘I’ve learned it to be able to help Ricky. He needs . . .’

She stopped as she realized that the present tense was no longer applicable.

‘Would you say you understood English well enough not to make a mistake in translating it either to yourself or someone else?’

A few tears had spilled out of her eyes and run down her cheeks. She brushed them away with her hand. ‘Yes.’

‘Did the man tell you his name?’

‘No. I asked him for it, but he rang off.’

‘Señora, please bear with my questions, but do you think you could possibly have been mistaken over the name of the house?’

She turned and stared straight at him, yet he was certain she was not really seeing him. ‘D’you think I haven’t been asking myself over and over again, did I make a mistake? If Ricky had gone to another house, he would be alive now. So if I heard wrongly, I killed him. But the man said Ca’n Asped. I swear it.’

‘Did you recognize his voice, señora?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know many of the English residents?’

She shook her head.

He stood up and thanked her. She gave no sign that she had heard him.

Alvarez entered the town hall, a large, rather church-like building, and walked along a narrow, badly-lit passage to a room which was largely filled with filing cabinets and dusty ledgers.

A small man, very dark complexioned, was searching amongst the ledgers and sneezing at irregular intervals.

‘I need some help,’ said Alvarez.

‘We’re terribly busy . . .’

‘It won’t take you long. Just draw up a list of all the houses called Ca’n Asped and any name which is pretty similar which are in any of the local urbanizacions.’

‘But that’ll take hours and hours,’ said the clerk plaintively. He was about to say something more when the beginning of a sneeze robbed him of the powers of speech.

Alvarez took off his spectacles, which he should have worn far more often than he did, and rubbed his nose. There was only the one house called Ca’n Asped and there was no house with a name so similar that it was reasonable to suppose Señora Roldán could have confused the one with the other. He recalled the gist of the telephone conversation. A woman gravely injured and bleeding badly. If the call had been genuine, then there had been a husband who must have become quite frantic when Roldán failed to turn up. Clearly, he would have telephoned another doctor . . . Alvarez telephoned all the doctors who lived in Llueso and Puerto Llueso and none of them had attended an Englishwoman who had been badly injured on Friday night.

Had the call been a very stupid practical joke? It didn’t seem reasonable to believe any of the English community would have played such a joke because the Roldáns apparently knew none of them well. A Mallorquin, filled with spite, might have been responsible, except that Denise Roldán was certain the caller had been English – and over the telephone any accent usually became magnified. Then the call had been made in order to get Roldán’s car up on a dangerous road where it could be sabotaged, so that when he left he was driving to his death. Why? Because he knew, or suspected, the identity of the murderer of Señorita Stevenage?

He stood up and wandered over to the window. If he did nothing and allowed the apparent accident to remain an accident, then a brutal murderer might escape, perhaps to murder yet again: but if he pursued what he now believed to be the truth, he must cause Denise Roldán even greater misery because he would be blackening the character of her husband. He sighed.

He left the office, went down to his car, and drove the short distance to Roldán’s house.

Roldán’s mother, a frail woman of eighty who opened the door, lamented and wept as Alvarez murmured words of condolence: for her, grief needed to be expressed openly. But for Denise grief was a very private matter, and at first when she spoke to Alvarez in the main sitting-room she was as coldly self-controlled as she had been before, when her emotions had to some extent been anaesthetized by the initial shock.

‘Señora, I’m very sorry, but I must ask you some more questions about your husband.’ He paused, then continued more quickly: ‘You see, now I am not certain it was an accident.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s possible the accident was deliberate.’

‘Mother of God!’ she whispered. ‘Someone murdered him?’

‘There’s no other house called Ca’n Asped, or any name which could be mistaken for that one. And I’ve checked and no other doctor in the area was called out to attend a badly injured woman. If there had been a badly bleeding wife, the husband must have tried to call help from another doctor when Doctor Roldán failed to turn up.’

‘Who would kill him?’ Her voice was little more than a whisper.

‘Señora, it is possible . . .‘After a brief pause, he doggedly continued. ‘It is possible that your husband knew the identity of the man who murdered Señorita Stevenage.

And because he knew, he had to be killed to prevent his saying who that man was.’

She murmured something he failed to catch.

‘I will have to examine what drugs he has been using and also speak to the receptionist. And perhaps look through his accounts.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is possible that he sold some poison to someone.’

It took her a little time to understand the full inference of his words, but when she did she shouted wildly at him and although she had been shouting in French he knew she was cursing him for his vile suspicions. Her mother-in­ law ran into the room and, without understanding the reason for the turmoil, began to wail as she drew Denise to her to comfort her.

He left, hating himself, his job, and a world in which one person could be so terribly hurt.

Carolina Belderrain — the Vestal Virgin about whom Denise had so often teased her husband — was a woman in her early forties whose face had the misfortune to appear to be out of proportion no matter from which direction it was observed. Even her beautiful eyes, deep, warm brown, were too large in relation to her high forehead so that they appeared constantly to be expressing astonishment.

Her manner was defensively abrupt, even antagonistic: Roldán’s unpopularity with many Mallorquins had, in fact, been partially due to her. ‘No,’ she snapped, ‘it’s quite impossible.’

Alvarez looked across the sitting-room of her house, a room filled to overflowing with furniture, a collection of china figurines, and four garishly coloured paintings.

‘Señorita, I think that nothing is completely impossible.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about: suggesting the doctor would ever have sold poison to someone. It’s completely disgusting.’

‘There’s reason for thinking . . .’

‘Don’t they teach you people anything? Doctors work to save lives, not take them.’

‘Unfortunately, it’s not every doctor who remembers that.’

‘Well, Doctor Roldán did. Oh, don’t think I don’t know what mean and spiteful things some people used to say about him!’ Her scorn increased. ‘Just because he dressed really smartly and his wife was beautiful and because he wouldn’t live in a slum like them. But he was a different kind of a person.’