Deadly Petard

by Roderic Jeffries

  Alvarez’s tone was deeply sympathetic. ‘One always wishes to be loyal to people one loves, but unfortunately sometimes that can be wrong. señora, did señor West ever discuss with you what happened in England before he came to live on this island?’

  ‘I’ve told you already. He said his wife died very suddenly and that because of the way the police behaved, her death was made doubly tragic for him.’

  ‘Did he explain further?’

  ‘No. He was far too distressed about it all to say anything more.’

  Cullon, who was unable to keep silent any longer, said: ‘He was distressed, all right, but not for the reason you think.’

  She tried to retain her composure, but now her apprehension had become fear.

  ‘When Mrs West’s death was first reported it was treated as suicide. But very soon, we discovered she’d been murdered. The only serious suspect was West, but Gertrude Dean swore that he’d been in her house at the time of his wife’s death. We were never able to persuade her to tell us the truth. If we’d succeeded, we’d have arrested him and charged him with the murder of his wife.’

  She moved her hands as if trying to push away the terrible facts that were crowding around her.

  ‘Gertrude Dean came and lived on this island and later on—after we’d asked the Spanish police to question her on a point on which we’re certain she again lied—West moved out here. Presumably, to make certain she never recanted. Murder is an extraditable offence in Spain and had we gained the evidence we were after, we’d have brought West back to England to stand trial.

  ‘Of course, it was pretty obvious that should Miss Dean die, we almost certainly never would be able to find sufficient evidence . . . She died. And in exactly the same circumstances as West’s wife. And once again, we’ve discovered it wasn’t suicide, as at first appeared, it was murder.’

  ‘You’re . . . you’re lying,’ she whispered.

  ‘I wish we were,’ said Alvarez sadly.

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Señora, perhaps now you can understand why I said earlier that sometimes loyalty to someone one loves can be wrong . . . Please tell us the truth. Did you see señor West that Monday night?’

  She shut her eyes.

  ‘Señora, you must tell us.’

  She spoke with violence. ‘I didn’t see him.’ She opened her eyes and stared with hatred at Alvarez. ‘He wouldn’t come because he had to go out. I didn’t see him at all.’ She began to sob.

  Alvarez stood, said with deep compassion: ‘Señora, you need a friend to be with you. Tell me who we can ask to come here?’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘Señora . . .’

  ‘Get out. Get out.’

  They left.

  They were silent from the moment they drove away until they were passing the football field, then Cullon said bitterly: ‘I’ll make the bastard confess, even if I have to beat it out of him, inch by bloody inch.’

  ‘Only one man. Yet because he is evil, many people are so badly hurt.’

  ‘But for our goddamn stupid laws of evidence, we’d have nailed him for killing his wife. Then she wouldn’t be back there, in that bungalow, breaking her heart.’

  ‘That is why I do not always understand what justice means.’

  They turned off the major road in the direction of the mountains, so that now they were travelling parallel to the road from the urbanizacion. They passed irrigated fields, in each of which grew five or six different crops, an estanque that was being emptied to feed irrigation water channels, and four women picking French beans, who bent double at their work. They reached the dirt track which took them up to Ca’n Absel.

  West was sunbathing by the pool and they judged from his initial casual reaction to seeing them approach that Rosalie had not telephoned him about their visit. When they climbed out of the car, West stood and said: ‘You’ve at last got your timing wrong. This bar doesn’t open before a quarter to twelve at the earliest.’

  ‘Señor, will you please come up here so we may talk.’

  ‘Why don’t you come down here?’

  No one moved. West laughed scornfully, bent down, picked up a towel and looped this round the back of his neck. He left the poolside and climbed the steps. ‘If Mohammed wasn’t too proud to move, why should I be? Well, what’s brought you here this time?’

  ‘A few more questions.’

  ‘You’ve more questions than my tax inspector back home, may he suffer a nasty fate.’ He indicated the chairs set around the glass-topped table under the vines. ‘If we’ve got to waste time, why not waste time in comfort?’

  They sat.

  ‘Well, what are the questions?’

  ‘Will you tell us, please, where you were on the evening of Monday, the nineteenth?’

  West spoke with weary contempt. ‘Don’t you blokes ever listen? I’ve told you, God knows how many times, I spent the night with my fiancee. Maybe not according to Emily Post, but times have changed since she was about.’

  ‘We have just come from speaking with señora Rassaud.’

  Like a wild animal first scenting danger, but as yet unable to determine its extent or the direction from which it threatened, West’s sardonic manner changed to being sharply watchful.

  ‘We asked her to corroborate your alibi.’

  ‘So now you’re finally satisfied that I was with her.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ snapped Cullon, his manner in sharp contrast to Alvarez’s. ‘Now we’re satisfied you weren’t.’

  ‘Are you trying to call her a liar?’

  ‘Not now. She finally admitted that she didn’t see you at all that evening.’

  ‘Like hell she did. If you think you can come here and trick me . . .’

  ‘Save your breath. We also spoke to the French people who’ve rented the next-door place. She was with them for part of the evening and she was on her own . . .

  Understand? No alibi. Not this time.’

  ‘They’ve got their days mixed up.’

  Cullon smiled.

  West stared out at the distant bay, careful to keep his face as far as possible turned away from them. ‘All right,’ he finally admitted, ‘I wasn’t at her place when I said I was.’

  ‘So where were you?’

  Twice he started to speak, twice he checked the words. Then he said curtly: ‘Here.’

  ‘Are you now trying to make out you were here all evening?’

  ‘I swear I was.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody sure.’

  ‘Then how come you told Mrs Rassaud you couldn’t be with her because you had to go out?’

  ‘Never mind what I told her. I was here, in the house, all evening.’

  ‘No. You were driving to Caraitx to murder Gertrude Dean because she threatened to recant on your alibi and that would have exposed you as the murderer you are. You had to silence her before she carried out her threat. And because you’re not as smart as you imagine, you murdered her in precisely the same way as you murdered your wife.’

  ‘Christ, why won’t you ever understand? I didn’t kill Babs. I loved her.’

  ‘You loved her money very much more and you were in danger of losing all that because she was changing her will.’

  Alvarez said: ‘Why did you tell the señora that you would be out all evening and then not go out at all?’

  ‘I . . . I changed my mind.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you join her at the party the French people were giving?’

  ‘By then it was too late.’

  ‘Too late to be any use as an alibi?’ asked Cullon.

  ‘How could I know I’d ever need an alibi? I didn’t go because it was late and I was tired.’

  ‘It wasn’t a case of how late it was, was it? What really happened is that you’d just killed Gertrude Dean and discovered your nerves weren’t half as strong as you’d thought them.’

  ‘I never went near Gertie’s place.’

  ‘Prove i
t.’

  ‘How can I? I was here, on my own. I didn’t see anyone else. But I was here all evening.’

  Alvarez spoke. ‘Señor, I would like to have your permission to search this house?’

  West shook his head, realized from their expressions the futility of this denial, shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ll not find a bloody thing,’ he said aggressively.

  They started in the far, or guest, wing of the house. In the third bathroom, Francisca was washing down the tiled walls. Her curiosity was obvious, but it largely went unsatisfied.

  They moved into the central living quarters. Watched by West, who had regained sufficient confidence to jeer at them for wasting time and effort on one of the hottest days of the summer, they quickly but expertly searched for any trace that might prove to be a link between this house and No. 15, Calle Padre Vives.

  There were three more bedrooms and bathrooms in the owner’s wing, the master bedroom being considerably larger than any of the other five. One wall of this was taken up with a built-in cupboard, which was filled with clothes.

  ‘Quite the Beau Brummell,’ said Cullon, fingering a lightweight grey check suit.

  ‘So who’s your fat friend?’ sneered West.

  ‘Meaning precisely who?’ demanded Cullon, his voice suddenly violent.

  ‘No one,’ muttered West.

  The next bedroom was being used as a study and beyond a partners’ desk was a small square table on castors on which stood a portable typewriter. Cullon went straight over to this and opened the lid. ‘Now there’s an interesting coincidence!’ He did not try to hide his satisfaction.

  ‘What is?’ asked West.

  ‘This is an Olympia.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Has it been well used?’

  ‘How the hell would I know? I bought it from a bloke who was returning to the UK. What’s it matter if it’s typed out the London telephone directory?’

  ‘Gertrude Dean had a typewriter and typed out her suicide note. There didn’t seem any significance in that until the experts checked and discovered the note hadn’t been typed on her machine. I wonder, I do just wonder, if we’ll find that the note was typed on this machine?’

  ‘Of course it goddamn well wasn’t.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind finding me a sheet of typing paper?’

  West went over to the desk and pulled open one of the drawers. He brought out several sheets of paper. ‘Here. Start a second bloody War and Peace.’

  Cullon inserted a sheet of paper and wound it down, typed briefly and with some fluency despite only using two fingers, pulled the paper free and studied the typing. He passed the paper across to Alvarez. ‘Ten to one in fivers the experts will match it.’

  ‘D’you think if I’d killed her I could be such a fool as to use my own typewriter?’ West demanded wildly.

  ‘Yeah. And why? Because, as always happens, you became too cocky. You’d got away with murder, so in your eyes that made you twice as smart as the police. You could even afford to cut a few corners the second time. And you particularly wanted to cut one of the corners because you knew you wouldn’t fancy hanging around Miss Dean’s house after you’d murdered her: didn’t want her dead eyes watching you.’

  ‘You’re bloody crazy.’

  They looked through all the papers in the desk and the contents of half a dozen files, but found nothing of interest.

  Ten minutes later, when they were back in the air-conditioned sitting-room, Cullon said: ‘One final thing—we’ll give your cars the once over.’ Then, belatedly, he remembered that he was not in charge of the investigations and his manner could easily have given considerable offence. But Alvarez’s expression was not one of annoyance, but of perplexity. Privately, Cullon was not surprised. It must be a hell of a struggle for the poor old boy to keep up with events.

  They searched the Seat 127 and afterwards the Mercedes. In the bottom of the glove compartment of the Mercedes, beneath the instruction manual, Cullon found a single, scrumpled-up plastic bag.

  He smoothed out the bag and held it so that the sunlight caught it at an angle, then passed it across to Alvarez. ‘It’s the same size as the one over Miss Dean’s head. And what was so interesting about that was, wasn’t it, that there weren’t any other bags of the same size in her house although there were others which she could, and surely would, have used had she really committed suicide.’

  ‘There are millions of plastic bags . . .’ began West.

  ‘Not like this one. This has a fault running across one bottom corner. And so did the one used to murder Gertrude Dean. In other words, they came from the same manufacturer’s batch. No one’s getting to call that just a coincidence.’

  West was very frightened.

  CHAPTER 20

  They drove back along the dirt track, bouncing from pothole to pot-hole, and finally reached the metalled road. Cullon said: ‘It’s a dead cert the lab will match the typed suicide note to his typewriter: and match the two plastic bags. We’ve finally wrapped up the case.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ agreed Alvarez doubtfully.

  ‘What more are you asking for? A signed confession?’

  ‘He was very disturbed by what we found.’

  ‘Is that surprising? He gets away with one murder which turns him into a millionaire and everything in the garden’s lovely. But then suddenly he’s in danger of being exposed and has to kill again. By now, he reckons nothing’s easier. Only it isn’t quite so simple.’

  ‘Why was he in such danger that he had to murder a second time?’

  Cullon briefly turned to look with tolerant amusement at Alvarez. ‘Because Gertrude Dean had threatened to recant on his alibi, of course.’

  ‘But why should she have done that, after standing by him all the time they were in England and even when she first came to live out here?’

  ‘We’ve been through this before. It all boils down to jealousy: jealousy and a determination not to let Rosalie Rassaud marry a man who she knew was a complete rotter, even if she never had the wit to see him for what he really was, a murdering bastard.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I know so . . . And now, I guess, much as I’d rather not, I’d better think about returning home.’

  ‘Surely you will wait to do that until you have heard if England can tell you anything about Señorita Dean’s early life?’

  ‘That evidence can’t alter any of the essential facts. Doesn’t matter now if it turns out that she was eight-tenths dotty from the word go. Her mental state was only relevant when West had a chance of claiming that she committed suicide because she was mentally unstable.’

  ‘I suppose that is true.’

  ‘But you still sound doubtful?’

  ‘I was wondering . . . about that painting.’

  ‘Painting? What painting?’

  ‘The one on the easel in her studio that was not finished. The tree looked so . . . tortured that surely something very dramatic had happened to her?’

  ‘She’ll have seen the engagement in dramatic terms.’

  ‘And the broken cazuela in her bedroom. That had not been used for anything so why was it there?’

  ‘Because she dropped it, carrying it from somewhere to somewhere else.’

  ‘It was a large one, of the kind that is normally used only for cooking. Why should she have carried a cooking cazuela in her bedroom?’

  ‘God knows! But don’t forget, she was certainly mentally odd, even if she wasn’t outright dotty. I don’t reckon you can question her actions quite as you would the ordinary person’s.’

  ‘Then you don’t see the broken cazuela as being of any importance?’

  Alvarez had spoken so seriously that Cullon subdued his instinct to answer facetiously. ‘I’m positive it isn’t.’

  Seated behind the desk in his office, Alvarez put a hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. He said to Cullon: ‘There is a seat on a flight late this afternoon or else one tomorrow morning.’
r />   ‘I’d like to hang on, but I really ought to get back as quickly as possible.’

  Alvarez uncovered the mouthpiece, spoke in Spanish, and finally replaced the receiver. ‘I remembered that I have not yet taken you to Parelona Beach, so I have booked you on tomorrow’s plane. It is quite impossible to come to the island and not see the most beautiful beach in the world. Even your detective-inspector would understand that.’

  ‘Old Banger? You’ve got the wrong impression of how his mind works.’ Cullon laughed. ‘But I’ll tell him today’s planes were all booked out and I don’t suppose, suspicious bastard as he is, he’ll bother to check.’

  ‘Good. Then we will drive to Parelona after a short siesta. And in the meantime . . .’ He looked at his watch. ‘It is time for lunch,’ he said, with evident satisfaction.

  Rifle rang the guardia post at five-thirty that afternoon, when Alvarez and Cullon were lying on the sun-drenched sands of Parelona. He tried to leave a message, but no one then at the post spoke any English.

  Later, after they’d returned, sun-burned and salty, Alvarez and Cullon went to the post where they heard about the abortive telephone call. Cullon telephoned Petercross divisional HQ.

  ‘Damned if I could get anyone to understand honest-to-God plain English,’ complained Rifle. ‘What the hell’s the matter with ‘em? . . . And where the hell were you?’

  ‘Out tying up the last few threads of the case,’ replied Cullon easily.

  ‘Oh! Does that mean you’ve landed West?’

  ‘He’s sewn up tighter than a Victorian daughter’s drawers.’

  ‘It’s about time . . . In that case, what I have to say won’t be of much account, but you’d better listen all the same. We managed to turn up an old gossip who knew the Dean family from way back: she also remembers West and describes him as a nasty boy who couldn’t be trusted. Mrs Dean died very soon after Gertrude was born and her father was left to bring her up and they wandered all over the place until they settled in Wealdsham. He was arty, unsuccessful, and lived from hand to mouth. When Gertrude was still young, he boasted that he’d invented something that was going to make his fortune. Our informant has no idea what that something was, but is certain it involved using acids. Gertrude’s father had warned her never to go into his workroom which he kept locked, but one day when he was out of the house she got hold of the key and took West in there and accidentally spilled a bowl of acid over his face. That’s what scarred his cheek. Gertrude became quite hysterical at what she’d done and it seemed to affect her for years afterwards.