Murder Begets Murder

by Roderic Jeffries

Alvarez sat on the rush-seated, wooden-framed chair, the only other piece of furniture in the room. He asked how Gomez was. If God willed it, Gomez answered, he would get better, if He didn’t, he would die.

  ‘Back in the year,’ said Alvarez, ‘I went to the wedding of Damian and Teresa.’ There was no change of expression on Gomez’s leathery, lined face. ‘Francisca was there. D’you know Francisca González: her husband died a long while back?’

  ‘Died a youngster,’ said Gomez, in a deep, croaky voice.

  ‘She told us about the English señor and señorita she worked for who lived at Ca’n Ibore. Sounded a proper foreigner’s mix-up — them not married, him upstairs, ill to the point of death, and her downstairs, messing around with another man.’

  There was an earthenware plate on the bed and from this Gomez picked a crust of bread, spread with unrefined, greenish olive oil, from which he took a bite.

  ‘The señor died in March. You’ll remember that because you were the undertaker.’

  Gomez took a second bite from the bread.

  ‘I was surprised. I thought you’d retired a long while back.’

  ‘Retired? Who bloody retired?’

  ‘Isn’t that what happened?’

  Gomez put the bread back down on the plate. He sucked his right forefinger, carefully licking off the suspicion of olive oil which had been on it. ‘I’d buried ever since my dad died and he’d buried for twenty-seven years. Clean and cheap, that’s how I did it, same as my dad. Then Pablo came to the village and offered fancy coffins, fit for a king, and flowers out of season which cost a fortune. “You’re nowt but a daft bugger,” I told him. “People don’t spend fortunes getting planted: if they’ve got any money they buy food for their bellies.” ‘ He coughed. ‘It’s me that was the daft bugger. The money was beginning and what’d been good enough for their parents wasn’t good enough for them any longer. Special coffins with enough brass to build a house: flowers grown in heated greenhouses. They wanted to go out boasting.’ He hawked, leaned over to spit on to the floor. ‘But wait till the money stops — then see how they get buried. It’ll be back to the cheapest wood and flowers what grow naturally.’ He coughed again, rasping coughs which shook his body and obviously hurt. ‘When they plant me I want the flowers from the mountains, like I used to see when I tended the sheep.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘Pablo’s lived in the village a long time.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘So you’ve not been burying regularly for years.’

  ‘There were a few of the old ones who knew how a man should go, but when they went . . . then it was all boasting.’

  ‘So how come you were asked to bury the English señor this spring, long after you’d given up? Why didn’t they have Pablo, like everyone else?’

  Without opening his eyes, Gomez picked up the bread and took a bite out of it.

  ‘Dr Roldán came to you and asked you to do the burying, didn’t he ?’

  ‘What if he did?’

  ‘How much did he offer you to return to work for just this once more?’

  ‘Five thousand.’

  ‘Come on, old man, stop lying. It was very much more than five thousand. How many hundreds of thousands was it?’

  Gomez fingered the remaining piece of bread but did not eat it.

  ‘What did you do with the money he paid you?’

  ‘I spent it.’

  Alvarez looked round the threadbare bedroom. ‘On what? . . . You wouldn’t put it in the bank, would you?’

  ‘In a bank?’ His voice rose. ‘In the war . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘In the war,’ said Alvarez quietly, ‘banks were looted and the pesetas, earned by years of sweated labour, vanished. A man learned the rough way that banks aren’t as safe as houses. So old an man who lived through the war would never use a bank today, even if the youngsters laugh at him and call him as daft as a March hare . . . Where have you kept that money, old man? Somewhere right close to you, where you can always feel it to make certain it hasn’t vanished? Under your mattress?’

  Gomez grabbed the rough blanket and the edge of the mattress underneath.

  ‘All I want to know is, how much? Listen, would I take the money, like the bank robbers, leaving you to starve?

  Didn’t my father know your father? Didn’t you help to bury my uncle, Guillermo, who died from a broken heart after Angela was killed when she went to the Peninsula to visit her brother?’

  Gomez stared wildly at Alvarez, two thin lines of spittle beginning to dribble down from the corners of his mouth.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Five hundred thousand,’ he whispered.

  Alvarez looked round the bedroom again. Five hundred thousand pesetas could have bought light and colour and comfort. It could have bought a new gas cooker and the food to cook on it so that Gomez’s wife did not have to spend day after day bent double, tending the soil . . . But the money would stay under the mattress while the couple would continue to lead lives of poverty until perhaps it would finally be used to bury, amid the pomp and circumstance the old man so hated and despised, whomsoever of them was the last to die.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Alvarez sat slumped in his office chair. He stared at the shaded light on the louvres of the closed shutters. Identity. Why had it needed the bitter hatred of a woman to show him that this case had always been about identity?

  What was identity?

  Individual identity arrived with birth, but what at first sight seemed automatic and unalterable was not so. A mother bore a son, but the hospital made a mistake and presented her with the wrong baby: immediately, a false identity had been established. Yet no one, if that initial mistake were not discovered and rectified, would ever suspect that the identity was false. And in time did it not really become genuine? Would the mother know her real son in twenty years’ time? Would she feel the same emotional love for him as she felt for the boy she had reared, believing him to be hers? So identity was not innate, but was dependant on external events.

  Identity was the past and the present, home, friends, work, habit . . . A boy went to school, got a job, started a bank account, married, bought a house, played golf on Sundays, and people knew who he was because they had seen him do some or all of these things over the years. There were papers to prove his identity. Birth and baptismal certificates, driving licence, passport, marriage certificate . . . He signed his name over and over again, continually reinforcing his claim to his identity.

  But what was identity when a man left his country and arrived in a new one? Then it was not the past, but solely the present – who he claimed to be and who his papers said he was. He could call himself Smith, Jones, or ffoulkes-ffoulkes, provided that his papers said that was who he was, there was money available for him in that name, and he met no one who had known who he was before. And thus a clever man, using the past, the present, and the future, could have two identities, each as good as the other, provided only that his skill at juggling did not fail him . . .

  Monica Heron had loved her husband far more deeply than ever he, in his philandering contempt of her, had realized. And when she had no longer been able to pretend not to know about his infidelities she had tried to compensate for this bitter knowledge by eating. With the bitter irony with which life has always been so generously endowed, she had become fatter and fatter and therefore still less desirable to him.

  Eventually she had accepted the fact that she had to bring an end to an intolerable situation. She had presented him with an ultimatum — either renounce all his women and especially the one with whom he was now openly having an affair, or clear out of her house, her life, and her bank accounts.

  He had no money and had been living at her expense for far too long easily to face losing his pampered way of life. But equally he was not prepared to lead a life in which his only female companion was his fat, unattractive wife. . . A classic recipe for murder.

  When a mussel’s thoughts turned to love, its flesh could become
poisonous, and for a reason not yet known to science mussels which grew in some areas were potentially more poisonous than others. In this fact Heron had seen his chance to cut the Gordian knot. He had persuaded Betty Stevenage to collect mussels from one of the dangerous parts of the British coast — perhaps South Darkpoint, the most notorious. Then he had cooked these mussels and fed them to his wife, in huge quantities because she had the appetite of a horse. Possibly Betty had had to return several times to the chosen beach and perhaps he had prepared dish after dish before he was successful in feeding her with a lethal number of mussels.

  Rich wife, philandering husband, sudden death of wife . . . An enquiry into the death of Monica was inevitable, but the post-mortem showed she had died from mytilotoxin. Very regrettable, but apparently not murder.

  He now had the money and everything in the garden should have been lovely, but he was not the first murderer to discover that murder didn’t necessarily deliver the freedom it had seemed to promise. Betty had demanded payment for her part in the murder — faithfulness — and she had turned out to be of a very much more demand­ingly jealous nature than Monica, especially when she began to understand what should have been apparent long before, that he was constitutionally incapable of being faithful.

  Murder begets murder. So Heron began to think that $ere would have to be a second murder, again to help him escape from a woman. But this time he would plan and execute it on his own so that he was finally free. Identity proved to be the solution to his problem of how safely to murder her.

  He explained to Betty how they could never be absolutely certain they were safe because there was no statute of limitations for murder: a case could be re-opened after twenty years if vital evidence suddenly came to light. So they must change their identities, he first, and then even if such evidence did one day turn up, they would be beyond its consequences.

  When they came to Mallorca they were Betty Stevenage and Bill Heron – they told everyone those were their identities and they had the papers to prove it. But he had grown a very full beard, his hair was long, his movements troubled, and everyone understood that he was seriously ill. Which was why so few people ever met him and those only immediately after his arrival. No matter, Betty was there to reinforce his identity.

  The money had previously taken a different route, probably ending up in Switzerland in the name of Hugh Compton. All he’d had to do to open an account was show a passport in the name of Compton (not difficult to obtain, thanks to all that money) and provide a specimen signature. From then on Hugh Compton could draw money in whatever part of the world he was in. Thanks to this arrangement, and the way in which the money Betty needed was given to her in cash, Heron when he ‘died’ had left nothing behind him on which the Spanish tax officials could claim their share. But he’d become a little too clever now. If he had had an account in his true name and had left in it just enough to make it seem that this was all that remained after what must have been several months of gambling, wenching and what-have-you, it would have avoided all the questions of where the inheritance had gone and where had all the sums of cash come from.

  Beard shaved off, hair cut short, shoulders squared, cheek pads out, lots of health, plenty of money, a passport in the name of Hugh Compton — a new identity. He’d rented a house and set about enjoying life while his other identity, Bill Heron, lay dying upstairs in Ca’n Ibore. Not for the first time, he’d unwisely enjoyed life too much: identity might change but character didn’t. Inevitably Betty had become more and more jealous and time after time she must have taxed him with being unfaithful while she stayed in Ca’n Ibore to lend verisimilitude to the deception, time after time he must have tried to reassure her that all he was doing was creating a character totally removed from the stricken Bill Heron, not actually living it.

  Alvarez bent down and opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk. He brought out a bottle of brandy and a glass, filled the glass, and drank.

  Betty, a woman of not very keen intelligence, had from the beginning fallen into the trap of believing that she could keep Compton’s love with her body, little realizing that he was a man who sharply differentiated between lust and love and that his lust could only be satiated by novelty. She had demanded that he frequently return to Ca’n Ibore so they could make physical love. He must have tried to refuse, realizing the dangers of such visits, but she had been able to blackmail him into going. He would have gone at night and sometimes stayed until the next night, taking the chance during the day to become Bill Heron so that Francisca could see or hear him and later be a witness as to his declining state of health. (The shutters in the bedroom had been drawn, the bedclothes up about him, so all she had really seen had been a false beard and a mop of hair.) The day she had turned up unexpectedly in the evening and had heard Betty speaking words of passion and love must have made him frightened and furious and determined to kill her as soon as possible.

  The aconite had been at least sixteen months old and he had needed to make certain it was still effective, not having the specialized knowledge to know whether or not its potency deteriorated with time. So, with the same degree of callousness as he had shown previously, he had poisoned the dog. Francisca had been horrified that Betty could weep frantic tears for the dog and not for the dying Heron. A clever man would have understood the real significance of the facts.

  Obviously, the major problem to be solved before Heron could carry out all his plans had been that when he ‘died’ a doctor would have to certify his death and the ‘body’ would have to be buried. Where to find a doctor who would agree to fake the death? Heron could clearly judge his fellows in the broadest sense, yet equally clearly would usually miss any finer shades of character. Dr Roldán loved money, to the extent that a career which had started as a mission soon became solely a means of personal gain, and therefore the offer of a million pesetas for issuing a false death certificate was bound to attract him. But beyond that point Heron had made a very serious mistake in not realizing that Roldán would lie in the course of his work,if paid enough, but he would never betray that work.

  Gomez, the undertaker, was a far simpler man who for years had been suffering under a personal grievance. Thus when he was offered half a million pesetas to carry out a faked burial, he saw his proposed reward as two-fold — the money and the secret satisfaction of knowing that the new undertaker who had usurped his job would never earn nearly so much for just one burial.

  Heron had ‘died’. Now each of them became deeply concerned with his or her own problem.

  His problem. How to cover up the coming murder of Betty? When a body suffered serious decomposition, the poison aconite could not be isolated and identified: so her body needed to be hidden for as long as possible. The landlord of Ca’n Ibore was a man who pursued every last peseta with fanatical perseverance and because of this had refused to carry out even the most essential repairs to the house. Thus what could appear more natural by way of retaliation than to leave the house locked up and denied to him until the last day of the lease? In the heat, decomposition would be very quick. What’s more, the mechanics of the plan would be carried out by Betty her­ self, further allaying suspicion.

  Her problem. To identify the woman he was currently chasing and to force him to leave her. Betty knew he was seeing Diana quite often and that there was another man in Diana’s life, Harry Waynton, but she couldn’t be certain of the degrees of relationship. So she went out of her way to become friendly with Waynton in the hope that she would learn the facts and also through him be able to keep some sort of tab on what Hugh Compton was doing. But because she dared not ask any questions directly, she had always had to put them in a very roundabout way. That was why, in the square, she had asked Waynton whether Diana were seeing Alex Dunton or Gordon Elliott. When one learned that Betty had had a lover, it had been natural to suppose that she had been jealously interested in who those two men were seeing, but in fact her interest had been in who Diana was seeing and she had only
introduced their names because she knew Diana would not have been seeing them and had hoped that because of this Waynton would have told her whom Diana was seeing. A clever man must surely have realized this, once he became satisfied that the two men never had been friends of Diana?

  Accidental death gradually assumed the sinister mantle of murder and when it did so Compton’s one really serious mistake came home to roost. Roldán, who had connived in falsifying a death because this harmed no one, discovered to his horror that he had been an accessory, no matter if unknowingly and indirectly, in what now appeared to have been a murder. He was a doctor, not a murderer. He had threatened Compton with exposure and because of that had had to be killed. Gomez knew only that Roldán had given him half a million pesetas to perform a false burial and so he had been allowed to go on living.

  Denise Roldán had known that her husband had had contact with a rich Englishman called Compton and that something about this relationship had suddenly worried her husband most terribly. So when she learned that her dead husband had had in his possession about a million pesetas which couldn’t be accounted for, that he had probably been murdered, that his murder was directly connected with the money . . .

  Her emotions had always been intense and she had loved Rodriguez Roldán to a degree not known, perhaps fortunately, to many. And so, because hate was the opposite face to love, she had hated his murderer with savage intensity. She could have denounced Compton, but then punishment would have been in the hands of the law and the law didn’t always extract the last ounce of retribution. She wanted revenge to be complete. So she hid her desperate sorrow and returned to the world, like any other widow who wasn’t really very sorry that her husband had died, and she had made certain that she met Compton. She was uniquely beautiful, he had never been able to resist a beautiful woman. So when she suggested they leave the island together . . .

  Somewhere, Denise was fooling Compton into believing she loved him passionately as she bided her time before she extracted her revenge for the murder of her husband . . . Alvarez shivered. Such a woman would recognize no limits.