He realized that Dolores understood perfectly well why he hadn’t enjoyed himself as much as he might have been expected to. ‘I’ll change and then go along to the post and telephone Palma.’
‘You’ll be back for lunch?’
‘I . . . I’m not certain. It depends what work’s waiting.’
She put her hands on her hips. ‘Since when has work ever interfered with your lunch?’
‘But if there’s a lot . . .’
‘What you mean is you’ll be back if she isn’t free. No matter. Don’t worry. It doesn’t upset me to be treated like a restaurant.’
‘Dolores, I . . .’ He stopped, accepting that it was useless to try to make her understand. ‘Just a moment. I’ve a present for you.’
She regally accepted a small, elaborately packaged bottle of perfume and kissed him on both cheeks yet again, then went through to the kitchen where she banged the pots and pans about because she loved him like a brother and couldn’t bear to see him make such a fool of himself.
He went upstairs and changed into fresh clothes, then left and drove to the guardia post. Once in his room, he telephoned Palma. Salas was there, working on a Sunday!
‘Señor, on my arrival in Nice I learned that Sen or Marsh died the night before. So we now know that Massier is the murderer.’
‘Was Marsh murdered?’
‘The circumstances of his death were similar to those in the other cases in that they point to accident. So far, there’s no definite proof it wasn’t accident, but of course if one considers the previous deaths . . .’
‘Can you prove he was the James Marsh who stayed at Playa del Xima?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Alvarez, either you can prove it or you cannot.’
‘In Marsh’s desk was a notebook he used to jot down notes when telephoning. In this were the initials RM and the numbers nought seven eight two. That has to be Raymond Massier’s telephone number. Which means he knew Massier so he is the same Marsh.’
‘You can prove that RM refers to the Raymond Massier who was the diving instructor at Playa del Xima?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Then nothing is certain. Where is the telephone number located?’
‘It’s very difficult because there are just the four numbers. That means an area code isn’t included and without that . . .’
‘Has it occurred to you that the figures might not be a telephone number?’
‘But I’m certain they are.’
‘That inclines me to think that in all probability they are nothing of the sort. Well, what have you done about them?’
‘I had a word with the Nice police.’
‘What did they say?’
‘That it can’t be a local number and so there’s no way of finding out. But I’ve asked them to do everything they can to trace Massier. Since he’s French, it’s likely he’s living in France, don’t you think?’
Salas didn’t bother to answer.
‘And also I’ll put out a fresh call throughout Spain. We’ve that photo of him and he can’t have changed much in the time. Given the slightest luck, we’ll run him to earth.’
‘Unfortunately, a very considerable degree of luck is obviously essential if ever you’re to bring this case to a successful conclusion,’ snapped Salas, before ringing off.
Alvarez left his office and drove down to the port. The bay was at its most beautiful, its colouring dramatic. He gave it hardly a second glance but left his parked car, crossed the road, and walked the short distance to Tracey’s flat. The woman downstairs was sitting out on a rocker and she nodded a good-morning and watched him climb the creaking wooden stairs.
He reached the patio and the tension was sharp in his stomach. It was like being twenty again, when the sap ran strong and a man would sell his soul for the joy of a woman’s loins . . .
The door was locked. He knew a quick disappointment because he’d been promising himself that, knowing how upset he’d been last time, she’d be there, waiting: he’d step inside to feel the sweetness of her lips against his . . .
Since she wasn’t in, she must be on the beach. He turned and walked to the head of the stairs and visually searched as much of the beach as was readily visible, looking for the long, slim figure, in a minimum bikini, that looked so cool and controlled until it was making love . . . He expected to see a waving arm to show she’d seen him, but there was none . . . He went down the stairs.
The woman in the rocker stared at him with beady eyes filled with interest. He was reluctant to say anything that would fuel her gossipy inquisitiveness, but he had to find Tracey as soon as possible. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed which way the señorita went along the beach this morning?’
The woman rocked. ‘She didn’t go on the beach this morning,’ she finally answered.
‘Are you certain of that?’
‘Wouldn’t say if I wasn’t.’
‘Have you any idea where she went, then?’
‘She didn’t go anywhere.’
He tried to remain calm. Nothing would delight her more than to make him lose his temper. ‘If she’s not in her flat, which she isn’t, she must have gone somewhere.’
‘Not this morning, she didn’t.’
A terrible fear began to freeze his mind. ‘What d’you mean?’ he asked hoarsely.
‘She went yesterday and took all her things with her. She’d paid the rent to the end of the month, so there wasn’t anything wrong with that.’
Nothing wrong with it? he thought wildly.
CHAPTER 19
‘Uncle,’ said Juan, ‘will you take me to the bullfight?’
Alvarez, seated on the other side of the dining-table, continued to stare into space.
‘Uncle, I want to go to the bullfight.’
‘Stop worrying him,’ said Dolores.
‘But there’s never been a bullfight in the village before and I want to see it.’
‘There was one here forty years ago,’ corrected Jaime.
‘Angel says this is the first one ever.’
‘Don’t contradict your father,’ said Dolores.
‘But Angel knows and he’s never wrong. He says the village was always too poor before.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!‘Jaime reached out for the bottle of wine and refilled his tumbler. ‘I went to one when I was about your age.’
‘But Angel says . . .’
‘Angel’s full of . . .’ Just in time, Jaime cut short what he’d been about to say. He turned. ‘Here, Enrique, you must remember it?’
Alvarez said listlessly: ‘Remember what?’
‘When there was last a bullfight in the village.’
‘How can he remember that?’ asked Dolores. ‘When he was young he lived along the coast.’
‘But he must have heard about it. A bullfight in the village!’
‘Uncle,’ said Juan, ‘was there a bullfight here years ago?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Alvarez.
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘Juan!’ snapped Dolores.
Juan, muttering mutinously, ate the last of his serving of chocolate layer cake. He stared at the piece left on the serving dish, caught his mother’s look, and gloomily came to the conclusion that he was not going to be allowed a second helping.
‘Fill your glass up, Enrique,’ said Jaime, holding up the bottle of wine.
‘Not for me.’
‘But you’ve hardly had any.’
‘I’ve had enough.’ Alvarez stood. ‘I think I’ll go on up.’ He left.
Jaime spoke in an undertone to Dolores. ‘Is he ill?’
‘Must you be quite so stupid?’
‘What in God’s name have I said now?’
Juan was becoming very bored. ‘Can I get up from the table?’
She nodded. ‘And you can go and tell Aunty Francisca-that it’s time Isabel came home.’
‘But I wanted to see Bernado and . . .’ His mother frowned and he hastily decide
d that his wants had better be left unstated.
After Juan had gone, Jaime finished the wine in his tumbler, then jerked his head at the ceiling. ‘So what d’you think’s got into him?’
‘You really don’t know?’
‘If you mean that woman? . . . That’s ages ago.’
‘And you can’t understand how any man’s heart can stay broken for longer than a few hours?’
‘But it must be . . . nearly a week now. I mean, lose one, find another. There are always better fish left in the sea than get hooked out.’
‘So if I drop down dead tonight, tomorrow you’ll find someone better than me?’
‘Hell, I wasn’t saying anything like that . . .’ He trailed off into silence. And as he refilled his glass, he morosely wondered how it was that she invariably manoeuvred him into the wrong?
‘All the same . . .’ she murmured.
‘All the same what?’
‘Perhaps for once you could be right.’
That she could say such a thing made him vaguely uneasy.
‘I wonder if the best way to help him forget about that woman . . .’ She spoke the words ‘that woman’ with bitter scorn. She’d never met the foreigner and didn’t even know her name, but she hated her with a sharp passion for having hurt Alvarez. ‘D’you know Maria-Magdalen a?’
‘Well, of course I know Maria-Magdalena Vidal,’ he said carefully.
‘Not her. He’s still alive,’
‘Who’s still alive? What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Maria-Magdalena Belmonte. Her man died last year.’
‘Well I know that. I was at the funeral.’
‘She’s a fine woman.’
‘Provided you don’t look at her face. He married her before electricity came to everyone.’
‘Always the same stupidity! . . . Do you judge whether a cow is a good beast by the look of its face?’
‘No, by the size of its udders, and from the looks of hers . . .’
‘Be quiet!’
He drained the glass.
‘She’ll need help looking after her property now.’
‘If you’re thinking of Enrique, I’d say, forget it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s reached the age where he likes his women young.’
‘Men!’ she said with contempt.
On Saturday, the last day of July and the penultimate day before the fiesta of Llueso when for almost a week the bars would be open throughout the twenty-four hours and no work would be done by anyone, Dolores—enforcing a rule that was very seldom observed—insisted on having the television switched off at nine, for the sake of her children.
Once the set was off, she looked up from her crocheting and across at Alvarez, who was slumped in one of the armchairs and staring into space, his expression one of sad depression. ‘I ran into Maria-Magdalena this morning. You know, Maria-Magdalena Belmonte. She was looking a lot better.’
‘She needs to, doesn’t she?’ said Jaime, very resentful at not being allowed to watch the film.
Isabel giggled.
‘She’s getting over the death of her husband.’
‘And he’ll be doing his share of rejoicing as well.’
‘Will you be quiet,’ she said furiously.
Jaime had determined to support Alvarez, but in the face of her anger he decided it was much better to leave a man to fight his own battles.
‘I asked her along here. It’s nice for her to get out and about after such a sad time.’ Her crochet hook flashed backwards and forwards and the intricate floral pattern grew. ‘I suggested she came along and had a meal with us tonight since it would make such a nice change for her . . . I thought she might enjoy the frito mallorquin I made . . . but she couldn’t manage it. But she did say she’d like to come tomorrow if her cousin from Palma doesn’t turn up. She’ll know by now whether he is or isn’t coming. She had the phone put in just before her man died so we could phone her and find out and then I’d know for the cooking.’
‘Will she bring me a present?’ asked Juan.
‘Certainly not.’
‘Then let’s not phone.’
She allowed her annoyance to surface and immediately made a mistake with the crochet work. It cost her quite an effort to say quietly: ‘Enrique, would you like to go and phone for me?’ She began to undo her last few stitches.
‘What’s that?’ said Alvarez.
‘Would you go and phone her to save me having to do it/
‘Phone who?’
She pulled too hard on the crochet cotton and undid more stitches than she had intended.
Jaime said: ‘She wants you to phone Maria-Magdalena Belmonte, the woman with the large . . .’
‘I’ll do it, since no one else will,’ said Dolores in a thin voice.
Alvarez pulled himself to his feet. ‘It’s all right, I’ll do it. And I might as well turn in afterwards.’
‘Come back and have a coñac?’ suggested Jaime.
‘Not for me.’
Jaime sadly shook his head. When a man ceased to drown his sorrows in drink, he’d lost all zest for living.
Alvarez crossed to the doorway, then stopped. ‘Who d’you say I was to ring?’
‘Maria-Magdalena Belmonte,’ replied Dolores, exercising a degree of restraint which until now she hadn’t known she possessed.
‘What’s her number?’
‘Fourteen twenty.’
Alvarez took one step forward, stopped, turned back. ‘What d’you say?’
‘Fourteen twenty.’
‘No telephone on this island is just four numbers.’ Tor Heaven’s sake, Enrique, you really must pull yourself together . . .’ She nibbled at her lips, then said: ‘Of course it isn’t. But you know she lives in the village so the number has to start with five three.’
It was amazing, he thought, how one could so easily miss the obvious.
It had always seemed likely that Massier was living either in France or on the island. Alvarez placed the telephone directory on his desk and opened it. The entries began with Palma and then each village was listed separately. He went through each list and noted down the area code, or codes. There was no Raymond Massier living in any area, but such an absence did not carry the significance it might have done in another country. First, the cost of transferring the name in which a telephone was held was so high that many people didn’t bother to have the change made, secondly it was a standard complaint that one entry in four was wrong and the other three were suspect.
His twenty-seventh code was 99. As he dialled it, he fleetingly thought that this was not a number one could ever need deliberately to remember. The call was answered by a woman who spoke Mallorquin. ‘I want to speak to Sen or Raymond Massier,’ he said, as he had done twenty-six times already, which had so conditioned him to expect a curt denial that the speaker had ever heard of Massier that he automatically held a pencil ready to strike out 99. ‘He’s not here,’ she said.
He kept the pencil very still. ‘When will he be back?’
‘Maybe not until late. It’s best if you try again tomorrow.’
He thanked her and replaced the receiver. It was odd, but now that he knew he’d run the murderer to earth, he felt no sense of elation. Rather, he was wondering how on earth he was going to explain to Superior Chief Salas how it had taken him until now to locate Massier, even if Massier had obviously never bothered to apply for either a residencia or a permanencia?
CHAPTER 20
The mountain backbone of the island tended, on its south side, to peter out into hills before these too gently subsided into the central plain. Among the hills, particularly in the centre, were a number of valleys, some large, some small. Massier lived in one of the smallest—once it had been known as the lost valley. There was only one access track to it and this led through steep cliffs which at one stage came within twelve metres of each other: a torrente, dry throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, occasionally a roaring, dangerous tor
rential river in the winter, ran alongside the track.
The floor of the valley was almost level, except for a topped sugar-loaf mound in the middle: on this mound was a two hundred year old rock-built farmhouse, with walls more than a metre thick, small windows, and a heavy wooden front door with a cat hole. Beyond the house were three large, rock-built barns, once used for storing all the food necessary to keep the farmer, his family, and his animals, until the next harvest. Both house and barns had been restored and modernized, but this had been done with such sympathetic care that the fact was not immediately apparent: only when close did one notice that the faces of some of the rocks in the walls were of a different shade from the rest and that the limestone blocks above the windows were unscarred by weather. What was immediately obvious, however, was the fact that no farmer now lived there. Instead of crops reaching up to the house, there was a garden right round.
The track into the valley had been metalled and Alvarez was able to drive up to a pair of gates from which stretched a heavy chain-link fence surrounding the garden, topped with three strands of barbed wire. There was a notice on the right-hand gate, in French and Spanish: it advised callers that the property was guarded by a dog and therefore to ring the bell. He rang the bell. Immediately a dog began to bark with deep, fierce intensity.
A woman, dressed in a cotton frock over which was an apron, stepped out of a doorway to the side of the house. ‘You can come in,’ she shouted. ‘The dog’s locked up.’
He opened the right-hand gate and went inside. The garden was filled with colour which ranged from the blues of hydrangeas to the delicate pink trumpets of a datura tree.
As his shoes crunched on the stone-chips surface of the drive, the dog’s barks redoubled in volume until the woman shouted at it to shut up and then it lapsed into silence. He came up to where the woman stood and saw, chained to a kennel, a huge black dog, as hairy as a yak, which was watching him with lips drawn back to disclose a lethal set of fangs.
He pointed at the dog, an act which immediately provoked a rising growl. Tm glad that’s tied up!’
‘You need to be,’ she replied. ‘He can be vicious to someone he doesn’t know . . . What d’you want?’
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