An Enigmatic Disappearance

by Roderic Jeffries

  Some facts were very uncertain. Keane was at an age when a man might seek the favours of a younger woman not simply for the physical pleasure, but also for the psychological reassurance to be gained from proving he could still attract. Initially, he had appeared to be reluctant to repeat the rumour concerning the liaison between Sabrina and Ruffolo, yet after very little persuasion he had done so. Had he initiated the rumour – and in truth was happy to spread it – because he had tried to have an affair with Sabrina, but had been rejected? His wife’s behaviour could suggest she thought this possible, even while she struggled to deny the possibility. Yet such behaviour could simply signify no more than the attempt, which any loyal wife would make, to defend her husband from a baseless charge. Was he using his warped and hurtful humour to conceal the corroding bitterness which came from learning that he could no longer attract? Could such bitterness, however corroding, ever lead to murder? That seemed doubtful, even if there were times when motive bore little relation to the crime it spawned.

  Some facts were mere conjectures. Sabrina had betrayed her husband once, so she had done so many times. When she and Ruffolo had ended their affair, she had sought another man to provide the passion that her husband could not. And because this new lover had had to conceal their affair as carefully as she, they had chosen to meet in the mountains behind Son Brau because there the odds of being discovered were virtually nil. Their passion, perversely heightened and sharpened because of its illicitness, had left them with little regard to the world beyond themselves. She had fallen over the rock face. Terrified by the consequences should he report the death, he had stripped her of all means of identification and made it appear she had left the island … Yet in a community where malicious gossip was a staple, it seemed there had been no whisper of yet another man in her life …

  There surely was a logical conclusion to be drawn? Alvarez settled more comfortably in the chair, rested his feet on the desk and closed his eyes. Since there was no sustainable motive for murder, whatever the actual circumstances surrounding Sabrina’s death, it had been an accident …

  CHAPTER 23

  On Wednesday, life was peaceful until Isabel returned home for lunch. She entered the dining-room in a rush that brought her hard up against one of the armchairs. ‘Guess what?’ She began to giggle.

  Jaime refilled his glass. ‘What are you going on about?’

  ‘You’ve got to guess.’

  ‘You’ve found the winning lottery ticket in the gutter?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Inés has invited you to a party?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go if she did. You’re not trying. Uncle, you guess.’

  Alvarez said: ‘Juan’s in trouble.’

  Her disappointment was immediate. ‘Someone told you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They must have done.’

  ‘Hand on heart, fingers straight, no one’s said anything.’

  ‘Then how do you know?’

  Before he could explain that her satisfaction had been too obvious, Dolores came through the bead curtain. She looked beyond Isabel. ‘Where’s Juan?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘I’m too busy for ridiculosities. Nothing’s happened to him, has it?’ Her imagination began to move into overdrive.

  ‘Something has.’

  ‘Oh, my God! He’s been hit by a car because he will run across the road even though I had told him time and again to walk. Is he badly hurt?’ She swung round to face Jaime. ‘Stop drinking yourself stupid and get ready to drive into Palma.’

  ‘Hang on…’

  ‘Can you not hurry yourself even for your own son who may be bleeding to death?’

  ‘She hasn’t said he’s even been hurt.’

  Dolores turned back. ‘Has he?’

  Frightened by the emotional furore she had raised, Isabel looked down at her shoes.

  ‘Will you tell me,’ cried Dolores, accepting her daughter’s response as evidence that in some way or another, her worst fears were about to be justified. ‘How seriously is he injured?’

  ‘He isn’t,’ she mumbled.

  Dolores’s voice rose. ‘You frighten me until my heart stops and then tell me he is unhurt? You are going to learn…’ She stopped as they heard the front door slam shut.

  Juan entered the dining-room to come to an abrupt stop as he found himself the centre of sharp interest. He nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘Well?’ said Dolores, in her most magisterial tones.

  Juan looked quickly at his sister, but she kept her gaze fixed firmly on her shoes.

  ‘Have you had an accident?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Either you are or you aren’t.’

  ‘It’s beastly Old Long Nose. He never listens to me and just blows me up when it’s not my fault…’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. If your teacher has been criticizing you then it is because you have misbehaved in rapaso.’

  ‘It was…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Her copying me.’

  ‘You have again been guilty of copying?’

  ‘I keep telling you, I didn’t,’ he cried, equal measures of fear and outrage at life’s iniquities raising the pitch of his voice. ‘It was Spanish grammar and I knew Blanca would copy from me so I deliberately made some mistakes. When Old Long Nose checked our books and saw the same mistakes, he said I’d copied her. But it wasn’t me, it was her.’

  ‘You admit that you intended deliberately to get Blanca into trouble?’

  ‘That’s what she did to me with arithmetic.’

  ‘Two wrongs do not make a right.’

  ‘But they make one feel a sight better,’ murmured Jaime.

  Dolores had very keen hearing. She whirled round. ‘Small wonder our son behaves as he does when his father believes it right to seek satisfaction from another’s misfortune!’

  ‘Who’s doing that? All I was saying was…’

  ‘What you have to say is of very small account except when it encourages others into trouble.’ She turned back. ‘Juan, your lunch will be bread, oil, and tomato and you will eat it in your room so that you can think about your wickedness.’

  ‘But I keep telling you, it wasn’t me…’

  ‘Go upstairs.’

  He hesitated, then ran across to the stairs and up them.

  She spoke to Isabel. ‘And you also will eat lunch in your room.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘So that you can think how cruel you were to frighten your mother into an early grave.’

  ‘I didn’t. It was you who went on about him being hurt…’

  ‘Go upstairs.’

  She crossed to the stairs, eyes glinting with tears, and climbed them very slowly.

  Dolores reached across the table to pick up the bottle of brandy. ‘For once we will have a meal when you two have not drunk yourselves stupid.’ She marched back into the kitchen.

  ‘How did all that happen from nothing?’ Jaime asked plaintively as he stared at his empty glass.

  * * *

  Alvarez adjusted the angle of the fan, wriggled his head into a more comfortable position on the pillow and sighed with pleasure. The gods had been generous when they had given man the siesta.

  Infuriatingly, for once sleep eluded him. He heard the distant church clock strike the half hour. Age was said to make sleep increasingly difficult, but surely he was not yet that old? Perhaps he was ill? Panicking, he mentally examined himself from head to toe, but he could find no stabbing pain, no dull agony, that was the harbinger of impending death.

  The church clock struck the hour. He swore, with all the crudity that the Mallorquin language so generously offered. Was he from now on to be denied all rest, like some landlocked Flying Dutchman?

  Sleep had finally almost cl
aimed him when into his mind slid the memory of Juan’s expression of outrage at the injustice of being punished because his planned revenge on Blanca had backfired. In later years, perhaps he would have cause to be grateful that he had been young when he’d learned that the female was indeed more deadly than the male …

  Suddenly, he was once more wide awake. In truth, any plan could backfire, more especially when it was fuelled by greed and conceived by a female.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Alvarez entered the kitchen, Dolores, her face expressing sharp surprise, looked up at the electric clock on the wall. ‘It’s not yet five. I’ve not made the coffee.’

  ‘That’s all right. I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Just in a hurry.’

  Concern gave way to suspicion. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to question someone.’

  ‘A woman, no doubt?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘And so much younger than you that it shreds a respectable woman’s heart even to think about it. Aiyee! When a man is born a fool, even the Good Lord cannot restrain his stupidities.’

  ‘She’s very considerably older than me and long since gone to seed. She’s also very, very rich.’

  Dolores fidgeted with a plastic bowl that was on the table; eventually, she said, her tone now reflective: ‘When the woman is older, she has had more experience of the ridiculous ways of men. And there comes a time when a man, if he has any intelligence at all, realizes that comfortable security is far more important than a beautiful face.’

  ‘You think she’d make me a good wife?’

  ‘There must be some foreign women who lead decent lives.’

  ‘Sadly, she hardly qualifies on that count. Her present indulgence is an Italian lad a third her age.’

  She said, with sudden fury: ‘So it amuses you to make fun of me?’

  ‘It rankles to have you assuming I have only to speak to a foreign woman to start lusting after her.’

  ‘What else, when experience tells me that that is so?’

  He did not pursue the point since she had a good memory.

  As he drove to Parelona, he caught the first glimpse of the hotel, the small bay, and the mountains which backed it. There, was great beauty; there, was great ugliness. Did the one always have to shadow the other because life needed both?

  He parked behind a green Alfa Romeo in front of Ca Na Ada and climbed out of his car to hear the sounds of splashing water. Beauty came in many guises. He walked towards the front door, came to a stop as he changed his mind, turned to go round the side of the house to the pool. If in luck, he would find Ruffolo on his own. He proved to be in luck.

  As Ruffolo looked up from the patio mattress, the sun glinted on his reflective sunglasses; he turned over on to his back and propped himself up on his elbows. ‘The British say a bad penny keeps turning up,’ he said sneeringly.

  ‘And we say, a dead sheep attracts many flies.’ Alvarez came to a halt a metre from the mattress. ‘There are some more questions I need to ask you.’

  ‘I’ve told you everything I can.’

  ‘It is what you have not said that now interests me.’

  Even though the glasses masked Ruffolo’s eyes, it was obvious that the Delphic quality of the comment worried him.

  ‘It is too hot in the sun, so shall we move into the shade?’

  ‘I’m staying here.’

  ‘Then I will have to shout my questions and you will have to shout your answers. I think that will be tiring for both of us.’ Alvarez crossed to the shade of the pool complex and sat.

  After a while, Ruffolo, assuming an attitude of amused resignation, joined Alvarez. ‘Let’s get it over quickly,’ he said, as he sat.

  ‘When Señora Sabrina Ogden saw you with Señorita Carol Murdoch, she was very upset, was she not?’

  ‘I’ve been though all that before.’

  ‘And now we’ll go through it again.’

  ‘Like hell. I know nothing about Sabrina’s death. Ada’s told you enough times for even you to understand, she and me were together all that Sunday and Monday.’

  ‘Surely the señorita usually enjoys a siesta?’

  ‘She’s explained she didn’t have one either afternoon.’

  ‘Perhaps she said that because you managed to persuade her you had nothing to do with Señora Ogden’s disappearance and therefore it would save a lot of annoyance if she told me the little lie?’

  ‘You can’t give one reason for me killing Sabrina.’

  ‘On the contrary, I can suggest two. First, to prevent her telling Señorita Heron about her affair with you.’

  ‘Sabrina and me had finished. Hans confirmed I hadn’t taken her to his pad in months.’

  ‘There are many other places for an assignation.’

  ‘Can you prove we were still together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you can’t, since we weren’t. So forget it.’

  ‘Secondly,’ said Alvarez equably, ‘to prevent anyone realizing that you were an accomplice to the intended murder of her husband.’

  ‘Are you completely crazy?’ Ruffolo shouted.

  ‘You hold a fatal attraction for women – why, is a complete mystery – and when Señora Ogden discovered you were having an affair with another woman, she was desperate to find a way of regaining your sole affection. That you were content to live with Señorita Heron in the circumstances in which you did, showed you would do anything to enjoy a life of idle luxury. This convinced her – although to an onlooker it would seem that your affair with her would suggest otherwise – that if she had enough money, you would be hers and hers alone.

  ‘When she married, her husband had been a wealthy man. But then he suffered financial problems so severe that he decided to carry out, with her help, an insurance fraud. It was cleverly planned and executed and the company concerned had to accept the claim as genuine and they paid him half a million pounds. This enabled him to recover financially and even, after a short while, to become wealthier than before.

  ‘When someone experiences a disaster but recovers, if he has any sense he takes great care to try not to suffer a similar disaster again. That was why Señor Ogden, determined they should lead a less profligate life, took every opportunity to persuade her that they had to be much more careful with money – probably even to the extent of saying they were having to spend capital. This convinced her that if things went on as they were – and in her mind, luxurious presents did not logically contradict what he’d told her, they merely confirmed that he was totally besotted with her and would suffer ruin again rather than lose her – it would not be long before all his money was gone and then she’d have lost you for all time. It was this conviction which led her to decide her husband must die.

  ‘She could be certain you’d never worry how she came into money, so she told you why she’d soon be a wealthy widow. You persuaded her that if it ever became known you and she had had an affair, it must appear that it had long since come to an end in order to prevent any suspicion that she could have a motive for her husband’s death.

  ‘She believed she had found the perfect way of killing her husband. He was much older than she and inevitably not as virile as he would wish: she made him very aware of his inadequacies. It then became easy to persuade him to seek relief in a supposed aphrodisiac – which also happened to be a poison. He was very careful about the amount of cantharides he took, but she found the opportunity to feed him what she hoped was a fatal dose, believing that if the cause of death was established, it would be accepted with many a snigger that he had tried to become too much of a man.

  ‘He nearly died, but not quite. Suffering the fears that failure raised, she turned to you for the reassurance she so desperately needed. She demanded you leave the señorita and she’d leave her husband and together you’d find happiness. It was not a future to attrac
t you. Give up the luxury and embrace poverty in the name of love? You told her to stay with her husband, hoping the truth would remain hidden, and to call you when he died from natural causes. Shocked by your cynical coldness and made ever more desperate by it, she replied that if you didn’t do as she demanded, she’d tell Señorita Heron the truth about your relationships with her and Señorita Murdoch, which must result in your being thrown out of this house.

  ‘It seemed you were doomed to a future of hardship whichever alternative you accepted. But you were as determined to continue to enjoy life here as she was to hold on to you. How to silence her? No doubt you promised her your undying love if only she’d wait, but she had gained a more realistic idea of what your promises were worth and so demanded results, not words. It became clear that your only way of escape would be to kill her.

  ‘She had told you all about the insurance swindle and so you could employ many of the details in your plans for her murder. You knew she and her husband had been several times to Son Brau and that much of the estate was wooded mountainside of no commercial value and rarely, if ever, visited. You went there often, while Señorita Heron had an alcoholic siesta, and eventually found the exact site you wanted. This meant that there was every chance the body would remain undiscovered until it couldn’t be identified since you would strip off every means of identification and lay a trail which would make it seem Señora Ogden had returned to England within a day of disappearing. But you were smart enough to recognize that things don’t always go according to plan, so you would make certain it would be virtually impossible to tell whether the fall had been an accident or murder. And by choosing a method of murder that exactly matched the faked accident Señora Belinda was supposed to have suffered, if murder were ever suspected, Señor Ogden must be the prime suspect.’