He felt terrible. Yet not many minutes before he had woken up and momentarily revelled in life. He tottered over to the phone. ‘Yes?’ he croaked.
‘Took you long enough,’ said the guard who was telephoning from the guardia post.
‘D’you expect me to break my neck rushing?’
‘You’ll never break your neck, mate: just drown it.’
‘All right, cut out the smart cracks. What’s the panic that’s got you interrupting my day off?’
‘Some rich foreign woman’s popped it up in the Huerta.’
‘So?’
‘So the doc who’s been called said to tell you.’
‘Why?’
‘How would I know that?’
‘Where’s she live?’
‘Ca Na Nadana. It’s off the road leading up to Festona Valley.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘I did hear it, but all these foreign names sound like you’re clearing your throat … Have fun!’ He laughed, rang off.’
Alvarez walked slowly into the kitchen.
Dolores studied him once more. ‘I told you not to keep on drinking. I said you’d regret it this morning. Have you looked in a mirror?’
‘No more, please. If you’ve an ounce of pity, make me a cup of coffee.’
‘Ha! Last night I was a damn fool woman who kept trying to spoil a man’s fun. This morning, however, it’s please be kind to me … Why should we women be kind to you men who are all such selfish fools? Did I give you the headache? Did I say, have another drink and then another? Did I insist on trying to tell the whole world that the mayor of Llueso, the Governor of the Baleares, and the Prime Minister of Spain, all should be sacked because none of them know about running the country?’
He sighed, turned, went back upstairs. It wasn’t the women who needed liberating, it was the men.
*
Alverez slowed the car as he reached a T-junction and in front of him, nailed to a convenient telegraph pole, were half a dozen name boards shaped to show in which direction the houses lay. Ca Na Nadana was to the left, along the dirt track.
He drove slowly because the surface was poor and his car was old, but even so the suspension thumped badly. Already the heat was sufficient to turn the interior of the car into a Turkish bath and as he bounced up and down, to the accompaniment of stabbing pains in his head, the sweat broke out on his face, neck, back, and chest. Sunday, bloody Sunday!
The dirt track divided at a T-junction, but the way ahead was overgrown with weeds. He turned right. The first house on the left was large and set behind elaborate entrance gates, but as he slowed he saw a nameplate: Ca Na Yelta. He drove on and the next house became visible over a belt of cypress. The entrance to this house proved to be far more elaborate than the previous one and a carved namestone, looking to his jaundiced eyes very like a gravestone, told him that this indeed was Ca Na Nadana.
He entered the drive and as he braked to a halt he stared with some amazement at the lawn which on the south side curled right round to the drive: how ever many thousands of litres of water a day did it take to keep the grass that green? Easy to judge that the owner of this place had no conception of the value of money.
He parked to the side of the front door, left the car, crossed the drive, and rang the bell. He heard a dog begin to yap. Then the door was opened by Victoriana and he introduced himself before stepping inside. A remarkably ill-proportioned small dog stared at him with bulging eyes and continued to yap until Victoriana shouted at it to shut up. ‘There’s no other car here — has the doc gone?’ he asked.
‘He left some time ago because he said he couldn’t wait any longer. Said he’d come back as soon as he could.’ She tried to be her usual boisterously confident self, but could not hide the effect of the shock she had received. ‘He said to give you the key.’
‘What key?’
‘Of the bedroom, of course.’ She studied him more closely. ‘You look kind of a bit worn out.’
‘I feel completely worn out, señorita. I was working very late last night.’
‘Then first of all d’you feel like something to wake you up? Coffee and a coñac?’
He hesitated.
‘Let’s go through to the kitchen and I’ll get it for you.’ The kitchen was the most luxuriously appointed one he had ever seen. Tiled from floor to ceiling, with matching cupboards and working surfaces, on which were stacked a large number of glasses and plates, there was a split-level electric cooker, with ceramic hob, a gas cooker, a very large refrigerator and a walk-in deepfreeze, washing-up machine, and enough further equipment to start a shop. In one corner there was an eating area and she told him to sit there while she prepared things. He watched her fill an electric coffee-maker and switch it on.
‘I’ll get the coñac. Carlos One do you?’
‘There’s no need for anything like that,’ he said, without conviction.
‘We never drink anything else.’
He settled back against the padded wooden shoulder rest. Victoriana went over to one of the cupboards and brought out a bottle with a Soberano label. ‘Don’t go by what it says.’ She winked as she handed him the bottle. ‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve about.’ The fact that she was no longer alone had cheered her up and much of her pert manner had returned. She went to another cupboard for a glass.
As he poured out a large brandy, he said: ‘So who works here apart from you?’
‘There’s Ana — she’s at home because it’s her day off. And old Angel. No. I keep forgetting, he’s gone and that new bloke’s with us.’
‘New bloke?’
‘Galmes: Miguel Galmes: comes from Mestara. Only you don’t need to be told that, not with him so rude and surly.’ The people from Mestara, only six kilometres away, had always been disliked by the people from Llueso: no one really knew why.
‘What’s he do?’
‘Works in the garden. Says he’s twice the gardener old Angel was, but if you ask me that’s all talk.’
‘And who’s Angel?’
‘Angel Matas.’
‘He died?’
‘Not him: got careless.’
‘How d’you mean, señorita?’
‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ She looked uneasily at him. ‘My mum always says I speak much more’n I think.’ She shook her head. ‘But going upstairs with the señora’s tea and finding her dead …’ She shivered. She got a glass for herself and poured out a brandy.
‘Why did Angel give up gardening here?’ he asked patiently.
She sat on the opposite side of the table. ‘It wasn’t really fair, was it? I mean, he had grown the tomatoes.’
‘Señorita, you will have to explain.’
She drank. ‘He can be an awkward squad, no question. As cunning as a cartload of monkeys. Know how he used to get her to give him a rise in wages?’ She explained how Matas had deliberately done something that would annoy the señora so that she’d sack him and how, before he left the job, he’d fix the automatic watering system so that it wouldn’t work. She and Ana had always known what he’d done, of course, but they weren’t going to split on him and the señor never put himself out to discover how to overcome the trouble …
‘The señor?’
‘Señor Erington.’
‘He lives here?’
The coffee-machine began to hiss. She finished her brandy, crossed to the machine and switched it off. ‘How d’you like it — black or white?’
‘Black,’ he answered immediately.
She poured the coffee into two mugs, set these on the table, brought a silver sugar bowl from a cupboard and a silver cream jug from the refrigerator. Absentmindedly, he helped himself to a second brandy. ‘Who is this señor?’
Señor Erington, she answered, had lived in the house for quite a long time now. He was, of course, very much younger than the señora … She looked at Alvarez out of the corner of her eyes.
The English were strange people, he thought.
Where was their pride? A woman with all the money that the señora so obviously had, buying herself a man perhaps half her age: and a man who was content to prostitute himself to a middle-aged widow when the world was filled with beautiful young women eager to be stormed and conquered … ‘When did he go to England?’
‘It was two days before the party, so it must’ve been Thursday. You ought to have heard the señora! Telling him he musn’t go until after the party and that his mother would have to wait to see him even if she was dying.’ This really shocked Alvarez.
‘She started shouting that if he went she wouldn’t have him back in the house. I thought that’d stop him: he likes the rich life too much. But it didn’t. He told her straight, it didn’t matter what she did, he was going to England to see his mother.’
He nodded approvingly. A gigolo, but a gigolo with some backbone left.
She finished her brandy and stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. ‘When she couldn’t get him to stay with threats, she tried crying. What a sight that was! … Holy mother!’ she said suddenly. ‘The señora is dead and here am I talking like this.’
Alvarez made no comment, correctly if cynically believing Victoriana’s sudden expression of conscience owed more to effect than to conviction. ‘What was the party all about?’
Victoriana said slyly: ‘I think she gave her parties just to show how rich she was. You ought to see the dress she bought specially — it’s hanging up in one of the cupboards. Know what it cost? Over a hundred thousand pesetas.’
‘Impossible,’ he said immediately.
‘She told me so herself: over a hundred thousand pesetas.’
Even today, that money would buy somewhere between five hundred and a thousand square metres of good land. How could anyone begin to spend so much land on a frock?
‘And the jewels! She once told me they were insured for over twenty million!’
She was clearly capable of any stupidity. ‘I’d better have a look at her.’ He stood and immediately his head began to pound once more.
‘D’you want me … Like, to come with you?’
‘Just to show me which is the room, that’s all.’
She was very relieved to learn she would not have to go into the bedroom. She led the way into the hall, where Lulu met them, and up the stairs to the first floor.
‘Does the señora have a family?’ he asked.
‘She’s a daughter back in England. Very rich with a husband who makes millions of pesetas a year.’
Wealth, he thought, bred wealth: just as poverty bred poverty.
They went along a wide corridor to a door panelled in a dark, finely grained wood. ‘That’s her bedroom … When I went in first of all, I thought she was just still asleep. But I opened the shutters and saw her face …’ She became silent.
‘Señorita, it will have been a terrible shock for you. Go back downstairs now and try to forget what you saw in there.’ He waited until she had returned to the head of the stairs, then put the key in the lock and opened the door.
The shutters of one of the three windows had been clipped back and the curtain drawn, and sharp sunlight was streaming in. The room was over furnished with pieces which even to his unknowing eyes were obviously of exceptional quality. He noticed a small pile of underclothes, carefully folded on the needleworked seat of one of a set of two walnut armchairs, a framed photograph of a woman in her early twenties on the bow-fronted dressing-table, and to the right of this a large, finely grained leather jewel case.
He approached the bed. He had seen death too often to be afraid of it, yet had never lost his awe of its presence, or his reverence for the dead. He believed that after death each man and woman faced judgement and therefore was to be pitied, because who could avoid doing wrong? But he also believed that when such wrongs had not been designed deliberately to hurt others then such judgement was always merciful.
She lay on her back, face pointing directly up to the ceiling. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly twisted to the right with lips parted. Her flesh had sagged and, although he was not to know this, in death she at last looked her age. At some time before her death she had vomited.
There was a satin quilted headboard which at each end had a bedside table with drawers: on the right-hand one was a medicine bottle, together with a small empty cardboard container and a printed pamphlet, still folded. He tried to read the label on the bottle, but the small print defeated his eyesight and he had forgotten to bring his glasses — glasses were an acknowledgement of advancing age which he was not yet prepared to make.
He straightened up, crossed to the two shuttered windows, and opened the shutters. Both windows faced west and he could see the mountains which marked the head of the Laraix valley. Gaunt, grey rock, pock-marked with the greens and browns of weed grasses, wild bushes, and occasional pine trees, speared upwards into the bitingly brilliant blue sky. He looked down at the garden. Here and there he could see bits of paper lying about on the lawn and he guessed that a bright point of light marked a glass, either broken or merely discarded. But as he continued to stare down he noticed that near the drystone wall on the north side of the garden the grass had begun to lose colour in a pattern. It was quite some time before he realized that if the pattern were continued in places where it faltered, the word ‘Putta’ — whore — was spelled out.
CHAPTER 11
Dr Rosselló was small, even by Mallorquin standards, with a body just beginning to put on weight. Seen full on his face was round, seen in profile it was triangular with the end of his nose a very sharp apex: he had a small, pepper-and-salt coloured moustache over a straight mouth. His expression made it fairly obvious that he was a man who seldom had found cause to doubt his own infallibility.
He spoke to Alvarez in the sitting-room. ‘I waited here as long as I could, but I then had to leave with a couple of patients to visit.’ His tone was critical.
Alvarez forbade to point out that he, in his turn, had had to wait quite a long time for the doctor.
‘You’ll have been up and had a look at her — did you notice anything?’
‘Nothing unusual.’
‘Ha!’ He was a good doctor, but a pompous man. He cupped his hands behind his back and paced the length of the sitting-room: Lulu on the settee, bewildered by the absence of people she knew, watched him with bulging eyes and at infrequent intervals gave a short yap which patently annoyed him. ‘You are no doubt aware that there was a party here last night? Clearly the señora drank a great deal. In fact, she was constantly doing so and then calling for me the next day on the pretext that she was suffering from some complaint.’ He sniffed his disapproval.
Over the past few minutes, Alvarez’s headache had increased in strength. Initially he had thought he might consult the doctor on what would bring the quickest relief: now, he decided against asking.
‘She had another regrettable habit. She was constantly taking sleeping pills. Quite unnecessary if one lives a healthy life. The two habits if indulged in together can have a fatal effect. I warned her several times against taking sleeping pills after drinking alcohol on the grounds that alcohol has a recognized adjuvant effect. Do you understand what that means?’
‘It increases the effect of the pills?’
Rosselló looked irritated, disliking, as an expert, a layman’s simplification. ‘Alcohol substantially reduces the minimum lethal dose. In respect of the drug the señora took, the fatal dose would normally be somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five tablets: after a large intake of alcohol the lethal dose would be as low as five.’ He stopped pacing the floor by the French windows, turned, and stared at Alvarez. When there was no comment, he continued speaking. ‘Almost all proprietary pills these days contain very carefully calculated amounts of antagonists to combat the accidental taking of a fatal dose: the situation where someone takes his or her regular dose; falls asleep, half wakes up and thereupon thinks he or she has failed to take it and swallows another full dose. The pills
the señora took contain the antagonistic ITC, which is a purgative. Other proprietary pills contain substances such as ipecacuanha, an emetic as well as a purgative: since vomiting can be highly dangerous when a person is not fully conscious, the use of emetics is becoming much less.’
‘She had vomited,’ said Alvarez.
‘Quite so!’ replied Rosselló with satisfaction. ‘Which is one of the reasons why you are here.’
‘But assuming she drank too much, surely that could explain …’
He held up a hand. ‘Please allow me to finish. There was by the bedside — you may have noticed it …’ There was a doubtful note in his voice. ‘A bottle which contained sleeping pills, the small cardboard container in which the bottle is sold, and the instructions pamphlet which accompanies it. Would you agree that the presence of the last two items suggests that the bottle was a new one, opened during the night?’
Alvarez nodded.
‘I counted the number of pills remaining and there were thirty-one. The bottle originally held fifty. Nineteen pills if taken together with a large amount of alcohol form without question a lethal dose. Yet nineteen pills contain sufficient ITC to ensure a somewhat violent reaction.’ He paused, then said crisply: ‘There was no such reaction.’
Alvarez, unable to remain standing any longer, sat on the settee. Lulu moved across and nuzzled his hand and he fondled her ears. Rosselló was looking intently at him, obviously expecting some comment, so he said: ‘The rest of the pills must have fallen to the floor and rolled under the bed. I mean, if she was really tight when she took them …’
‘Quite. But that lies within your province, not mine.’
‘Of course, she might have opened the bottle a couple of days before and the cardboard case and instructions were just left lying around …’
‘That also is within your province,’ Rosselló ran the palm of his right hand over his sleek hair. ‘Because of the questions raised by the missing pills, I examined the body of the señora with even more than my normal extreme care. During this examination I observed, on brow and face, what may be Tardieu spots, or petechiae. Do you understand their significance?’
Unseemly End (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 6) Page 8
