Murder Begets Murder (3 page)

She crossed the square, aware of the men’s interest but contemptuously careless about it. She was wearing a light cotton see-through shirt and tight jeans. She dressed as; she felt she wanted to, ignoring the dictates of convention. This was another cause of some people’s resentment.

She said, as she sat: ‘Am I late?’ Her tone of voice suggested she didn’t care whether she was or wasn’t.

‘Far from it. It’s not quite half past one yet.’

She looked at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody accommodating. You know I’m almost an hour late. I got tied up.’

‘With Alex ?’

‘With that PP? Do you mind?’

‘PP?’

‘Provincial Percy, with emphasis on the euphemism.’

He laughed. ‘Then was it Gordon ?’

‘If you’re going to be insulting, at least try to be subtle.’

‘They’re not my idea. Betty saddled herself on me before you got here and she seemed very interested in who you were with. It’s she who suggested either Alex or Gordon.’

‘It’s a great pity she didn’t stay in Southgate, or whatever Godforsaken desert she came from. The men there must just about have been her mark.’

‘Don’t be too cutting. She was in a bit of a state.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t you ever feel any sympathy for anyone else? You’re in a right royal bitchy mood today.’

She seemed about to reply angrily, then suddenly relaxed. ‘You know something, Harry? I think there are times when you’re good for me. I always have the feeling that if you get too fed up with me you’ll revert to cave­ man style to vent your annoyance and that keeps me from becoming too obnoxious.’ She leaned back in the chair, tilted her head to the sun and closed her eyes. ‘I’m late because I ran into Hugh and he wanted to buy me a drink. I was feeling bloody depressed so I accepted. Then I lost count of time. I’m sorry.’

‘You realize you’ve just apologized?’

‘I do have my moments of weakness.’

He said, in a neutral tone: ‘Hugh seems to be a nice bloke.’

‘He is when he stops concentrating on bed.’

‘Like that, is he?’

She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Aren’t all men?’

‘I can only speak subjectively.’

‘And?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed.

Francisca pedalled harder, because now the road was slightly uphill. She passed a field, set lower than the road, in which a friend, bent double, was weeding beans. She shouted a greeting. To see someone working in the fields was to be reminded of her husband. He, with her help, had farmed just over ten thousand square metres on a share­ cropping basis. The owner of the land had been a real bitch. She’d demanded 50 per cent of all the produce and the first choice: the biggest strawberries, the fattest peaches, the juiciest oranges, the densest lettuces, the tastiest artichokes. If she had been content with just a third her husband would not have had to work so hard and then he might have been alive today. But perhaps not. It was impossible for a poor peasant to understand the will of God.

She turned off the tarmac road on to the bouncy dirt track. Miguel, her son, had asked the parents of his girl if he might have permission to call at their house without being invited. Then in four or five years, when they had a home and had furnished it, they would be marrying. How was she going to find the money to provide her share of the wedding feast, like the one Damian and Teresa had been given?

When she rounded the pigsty, she saw that there was a car by the side of the lean-to garage of Ca’n Ibore and a few metres further on she identified this car as Dr Roldán’s.

Poor Señor Heron. Life could be so unmerciful.

She entered the house, called out, ‘Good morning, señorita,’ and carried on through the sitting-room to the kitchen.

The kitchen was in a terrible mess, with dirty crockery and cutlery heaped everywhere. Ah well, she was paid to clear up, but couldn’t the señorita at least have stacked things? She seemed to be a woman without pride in her house.

After a while the doctor came into the kitchen. ‘Good morning, señora.’

‘Good morning, señor,’ she answered, with the respect due to a man of great education.

‘I’m afraid the señor has just died.’

‘Merciful Mother of God protect his soul,’ she said, and crossed herself.

‘Get on your bike and go and tell Arturo Gomez to come up here immediately.’

‘Old Gomez? But surely Señor Vazquez is now the undertaker?’

Roldán ignored her.

She took off her apron and carefully folded it up and placed it on one of the chairs.

‘Hurry it up,’ he said testily.

She had known Dr Roldán’s parents well. They had been ordinary villagers, just like anyone else. But their son had been clever and had become a doctor and he’d seemed to think that this made him a different man. Then he’d married a Frenchwoman, beautiful, true, but so expensive. And he’d needed a great deal of money and so had turned more and more to doctoring the foreigners because they paid so much more than the villagers. Now it was as if he had not been born in Llueso, but had come from afar. Ah well, that was the way the world turned.

She bicycled back along the bumpity dirt track. She was surprised she was to call in Arturo Gomez, who had had precious little work over the past few years because people now went to Vazquez who had expensive coffins and the biggest car in the village to carry the coffin in . . . Señor Heron could not have been nearly as rich as she’d always imagined. Would there, then, ‘be any money for the señorita? She wasn’t the kind of woman who would know how to live on little. Or perhaps she was thinking only of the money and that was why she was denying her lover the kind of funeral that would have honoured his memory.

Over one hundred people attended the funeral of William Miles Heron. The English vicar, from Palma, read the burial service and the very plain coffin was lifted by four men into the sepulchre where it would stay for seven years before being opened so that the bones could be removed and buried in the corner plot of land reserved for heretics. Betty Stevenage asked all the mourners back to a funeral tea at Ca’n Ibore. None of the wealthy or the socially elite accepted the invitation because they had shown the necessary respect towards the dead and they did not wish there to be any confusion about their feelings towards the living.

June was a month of constant sunshine and each day the thermometer reached a little higher until all previous temperature records had been broken. During the day the holidaymakers in their hundreds lay and sunbathed and during the evening they suffered from sunburn. It was ideal weather for doctors, chemists, soft drinks and ice-cream manufacturers.

Jose Sanchez’s only response to the unusual heat was to drink more. His wife frequently called him a drunken lay-about, good at nothing but swilling and gambling in the bars, but as he invariably replied, perhaps after a blow or two to quieten her down, it was his money so no one was going to stop him doing what he wanted with it.

He’d always been a lucky man. Almost from the day he’d been born, his father had recognized him as being a lazy good-for-nothing. His father had known when death was coming, so he’d taken great care to see that each of his three sons obtained his just deserts. To his wife he left his house in the village, to Adolfo and Bernado his land because land was more valuable than gold and they were wonderful sons, to Jose he left the half-ruined house on one of the fields because the law said he must leave something to each of his children and that was the most worthless thing he possessed. He hadn’t been dead a year when foreigners began to arrive on the island, all searching for somewhere to buy or rent. One day a ruin was worth just a few pesetas, the next (or so it seemed) hundreds of thousands, even millions. Before long Jose Sanchez’s house was worth so much more than his brothers’ fields that he laughed every time he watched them laboriously tilling the soil.

Instead of succumbing to the lure of a million pesetas, which was the sum a German offered him for the broken-down Ca’n Ibore, he’d persuaded a builder to reform the house, using the cheapest available materials. Naturally, he never paid many of the builder’s bills. When the house was finished, he’d offered it at a rent which all his acquaintances delightedly told him was much too high — and a simple foreigner paid it. At the end of that first let he’d raised the rent and all his acquaintances had rushed to tell him that now he was just being completely crazy – and another simple foreigner paid it, again without even trying to haggle. And these inflated rents were all profit because he’d discovered how to avoid all maintenance costs. When the tenants complained because the plaster peeled off the walls, shutters fell, the water-pump burned out, the water-heater failed, the water supply became clogged up with muck from the estanqui which he was too lazy to clean, and the worm-eaten furniture collapsed, he merely failed to understand what they were shouting about and in the end, in desperation, they usually themselves paid to have the repairs effected.

He drove up to Ca’n Ibore in his battered, ailing car, not quite as happy as he usually was when he approached the house that was his. Annoyingly, in a way one of the foreigners had managed to get the better of him; or, to be strictly honest, he had failed to take the foreigner for quite as much as he ought to have been able to. The man had died and the woman had said she was leaving the island, so everything had been set for his regaining possession of the house inside the period of the lease (paid in advance). But then the woman, with deplorable stupidity, had handed the keys of the house to her solicitor and said that the landlord. was not to be let into the place until the term of the lease was up. A mean, spiteful action.

He unlocked the front door and stepped into the hall.

Mother of God, what a stink! Was this how the English left a beautiful house which they’d rented? It would take days to get rid of the smell and this was when the high season was almost on them and a Frenchman or a German might be persuaded to pay as much as eighty thousand a month.

He went into the sitting-room. The dining-table, down by the window, still had on it the remains of a meal. Couldn’t even be bothered to clear up! Still, he’d demanded a deposit of five thousand pesetas against breakages and one could put up with a lot of stink and disorder for five thousand.

He pushed open the swing door of the kitchen and almost recoiled, because here the smell was nearly overpowering. When he looked to his left, past the antique dresser, he saw what was causing the smell.

Alvarez, sitting behind his desk, stared at the shaft of sunshine coming through the window in which was a multitude of dancing flecks of dust. It was tiring to watch such ceaseless activity.

The internal phone buzzed. He ignored it and continued to stare at the dancing dust. Eventually, each single speck would end up on the floor, lifeless. Most of what a man did during his lifetime ended up forgotten. So relax . . . Eyelids closed and his mind slipped into a delightful peace The internal phone buzzed again, jerking him wide awake. Resentfully, he lifted the receiver.

‘It’s taken you long enough to answer.’

The captain of the post had never learned to relax, undoubtedly because he came from Madrid. ‘I was tied up with some work, señor.’

‘There’s a report in of an Englishwoman who’s been found dead in a finca. The address is Ca’n Ibore. That’s in La Huerta. Get out there and find out if it’s a matter for investigation.’

He replaced the receiver, then slowly stood up, yawned, and looked down at his stomach which was straining his trousers. He kept telling Dolores he shouldn’t eat so much, but like all good cooks she became annoyed if he seemed not to appreciate her food. Also, when a man grew older there were few pleasures left to him and so these became doubly precious.

He left the room and went downstairs. His car was two roads from the post and by the time he reached it he was sweating and a bit short of breath. Perhaps he should take up some form of exercise? Tomorrow, he assured himself.

He loved Ca’n Ibore from the moment he turned the corner by the pigsty and saw it above the orange trees. It was the kind of house he would buy if ever fate made a mistake and showered him with favours. Built with rocks gleaned from the fields, it was as much a part of the land as the trees which grew around it.

He parked by the side of the lean-to garage and as he climbed out of the car Sanchez came hurrying up the stone steps which led down to the terrace below the patio.

His face was strained and when he spoke his voice was hoarse. ‘She’s in the kitchen. She . . .She . . .’ He shook his head.

‘Are you sure she’s dead?’

‘God Almighty, am I sure! I’ve never seen anything so terrible.’

‘Have you called for a doctor?’

‘I haven’t done anything but tell the Guardia. Why’s it happened to me? Why did she—’

‘How long d’you reckon she’s been dead?’

‘I don’t know. How can I know?’

‘You must have some idea,’ said Alvarez, trying to make Sanchez calm down.

Sanchez looked resentfully at him, but when he next spoke he was more coherent. ‘The señor rented the house for six months. Then he died and the señorita said she wasn’t going to stay, but she wouldn’t give me the keys, she gave them to the solicitor and said I wasn’t to have ‘em until the six months were up and the lease was over.

He gave them to me today. When I went inside, I found her.’

‘How long ago did the señorita hand over the keys to the solicitor?’

‘Roughly a month.’

Alvarez fingered his thick, square chin for a moment, then said: ‘If she gave the keys to the solicitor, how come she was inside with the door locked?’

‘I don’t know, do I ? Why keep asking me?’

‘Was there a spare front door key?’

‘I didn’t give ‘em one.’

”hat about the back door?’

‘Locked and shuttered. And all the windows are shuttered.’

‘You’ve checked on ‘em all, then?’

‘It’s my house. It was empty. Why shouldn’t I check?’