Mistakenly in Mallorca (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1)

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘Then when exactly did you actually last see them?’

  ‘I suppose it was the middle of the previous week. With the kind of weather we’ve been having, wouldn’t you have been out on picnics?’

  ‘Of course,’ he answered. How the rich lived, he thought resentfully. But he had to acknowledge that as Tatham had driven round the countryside he must have studied the fields, assessed the state of the crops, sympathized with those who needed capital to break out of a primitive form of agriculture or horticulture, hated those who were responsible for the creeping housing developments, and he could no longer feel truly resentful.

  She looked straight at him. ‘Why are you asking these questions?’

  ‘We have to ask many questions after such an accident,’ he answered brusquely. ‘Has anything at all unusual recently taken place in the house? Has anything altered?’

  He noticed her expression of uncertainty. ‘Señora, please tell me what has been unusual.’ He allowed a slight note of command to slip into his voice.

  She fidgeted with her hands, running thumb and forefinger of one hand up and down the middle finger of the other. ‘But it’s all so stupid …’

  ‘I still wish to hear.’

  ‘The señora wore old dresses and sometimes looked like — like a gypsy — but that was her business, you understands But she was very fussy about her pyjamas and changed them twice a week, every week. She left me to make her bed, so I know. But just recently, she has worn the same pyjamas for days and days.’

  It seemed a matter of no importance, since it could have no bearing on whether or not she’d been murdered. But to give her confidence, he praised Catalina. ‘You are very observant, Señora, and are helping a great deal. Now, has there been anything else?’

  ‘Only the deep-freeze, which I’ve this moment recalled.’

  ‘Tell me about that.’

  ‘It was locked for several days, which it’s never been before.’

  He looked at her, without realizing it, in a speculative manner.

  ‘No,’ she said sharply, ‘I do not steal food from it. In the whole of my life I have never stolen a peseta’s worth of anything. But I was curious to see what the señora ate and what it cost her and I used often to look inside.’

  ‘I never thought otherwise,’ he lied.

  She relaxed, accepting his denial as genuine. ‘When it was once more unlocked, all the food had changed.’

  ‘Perhaps they had a big party?’ he suggested in an offhand manner.

  ‘The señora did not give parties. But if she had have done, she’d have asked me to help. And what kind of a party would use fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, cream, and ice-cream, all at the same time? There was another thing. When the new food was put in, there was quite a lot of squid. The señora did not like squid.’

  ‘But perhaps the señor did?’

  ‘He said not, when I asked him how he liked our food.’

  He had, he thought, learned something about their eating habits, but nothing towards proving Tatham had murdered his great-aunt.

  Catalina smoothed down her dress with her long, shapely lingers whose skin had not been roughened by all the housework she did. ‘The señora was a strange woman, but she was very kind and she loved our country.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘She was much nicer than other people I work for and who dress smartly and it was very sad it was her who fell.’

  ‘Very sad,’ he agreed. ‘Tell me something. Wasn’t it a bit odd, going out in the evening at that time to look for a plant instead of waiting for the next day?’

  ‘Odd for her? Never. When she heard about a plant she hadn’t seen, she was like a man with a sweetheart in the next village — time meant nothing. I remember …’

  He listened and was convinced that there was nothing basically illogical in Elvina Woods’s actions just prior to her death.

  Alvarez was becoming hungry, so he went into the small bar near the travel agents in Puerto Llueso and ordered a brandy. The barman asked for twenty pesetas. Alvarez identified himself and then said that a brandy in Llueso cost him five pesetas and he wasn’t paying tourist prices for anyone. The barman shrugged his shoulders and told Alvarez to have it on the house.

  Alvarez finished his drink and then went into the tourist agency. The man and the woman who worked in it were preparing to close for lunch, but they resignedly settled down to answering his questions.

  ‘Do you know Señor Tatham?’ he asked them both. ‘He is an Englishman who may have come in here to buy an air ticket for his aunt, Señora Woods? It would have been a ticket to England.’

  The woman moved her handbag to one side, opened a drawer, and brought out a form which was half filled in. She ran a pencil down the entries until she found the one she sought. ‘Yes,’ she said, without looking up, ‘he came here and bought a ticket to London.’

  ‘How much was it?’

  ‘Eight thousand three hundred pesetas.’

  ‘Can you remember how he paid? By cheque or by cash?’

  ‘With cash.’

  The man spoke nervously. ‘The money’s all right, isn’t it? It’s not counterfeit?’

  ‘No. There are no problems like that.’

  ‘That’s a mercy.’

  ‘D’you mind if I use a phone?’ Alvarez said. He leaned over and picked up the receiver that was in front of the woman. When he’d briefly looked through the handbag in the Fiat 128, he’d noticed that the cheque-book inside was for the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de las Baleares, Puerto Llueso branch. He asked the operator to give him the bank and as he waited he wondered whether the automatic exchange would ever open. The call was put through and he asked the man he spoke to to make certain there was someone in the bank in five minutes’ time. The man said the bank didn’t close until two.

  He drove from the travel agent along the front, past a swarm of noisy French tourists who had just disembarked from a bus, turned left, and parked in the square.

  The bank manager, a smiling man in his middle forties, came forward and he recognized Alvarez. They shook hands across the counter and exchanged brief courtesies, then Alvarez said: ‘I’d like some information on Señora Elvina Woods’s account.’

  ‘The lady who so unfortunately died? Is there some sort of trouble?’

  ‘Possibly, possibly not,’ said Alvarez vaguely. ‘The first question is, did, she withdraw more than eight thousand pesetas last Friday?’

  ‘I’ll check the two accounts — she has an ordinary one and still a sum of money in a convertible one.’ The manager chuckled. ‘Head Office keep telling me to try to get her to liquidate the convertible one and I reply each time that she is not a woman to be persuaded. Wasn’t, I should say.’ He went over to a filing cabinet and slid out a drawer, rifled through the filing cards and extracted two ‘Last Friday …? The twenty-fifth …? No, there were no withdrawals on either account.’

  ‘When was her last one?’

  The manager checked the first card. ‘Back on the fourteenth.’

  ‘That’s quite a time before she died.’

  ‘Eleven days.’

  ‘Is that odd?’

  The manager fingered his chin. ‘She never drew regularly on the same day each week. But she usually drew more often than this.’

  ‘What was her last withdrawal for?’

  He consulted the card again. ‘Five thousand. That was what she usually withdrew.’

  ‘What did her weekly withdrawal work out at?’

  ‘In cash? There was a cheque once a month for rent, though it was pretty small.’

  ‘Yes, in cash.’

  The manager picked up a pencil and worked out some figures. ‘About three thousand nine hundred.’

  Alvarez thought about that figure. ‘D’you know her nephew? Senor Tatham?’

  ‘She introduced him when he first came to the island and said we must give him a good rate of exchange. I told her, for travellers’ cheques, there is only the one rate, but I don’t think she believe
d me.’ The manager smiled. ‘A very definite woman.’

  ‘Did he cash any travellers’ cheques on Friday, the twenty-fifth?’

  The manager left the counter and spoke to the two other men who worked in the bank. The younger of the two crossed to another filing cabinet and checked through a bundle of forms. After half a minute, he pulled one free. ‘He cashed cheques for a hundred pounds on the Friday.’

  Alvarez made a note of the amount. ‘Thanks for all your help.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ replied the manager.

  Alvarez left the corner building and returned to his car, but did not immediately start the engine. He’d been given no absolute proof that Tatham had bought that ticket with his own money, but all the available evidence said that he had. Why, unless the señora was not alive to pay for it herself?

  *

  Tatham walked up the road to Ca’n Xema as the sun dipped below the mountain behind the Creyola/Llueso road.

  Judy was in, on her own, and she made no secret of the fact that she was delighted to see him. ‘I’ve been listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and getting more and more depressed, so you’ve got to cheer me up.’

  ‘Why depressed by music like that?’

  ‘Because it heightens whatever mood I’m in when I start to listen and I was thoroughly depressed to start with. I should have tried Wagner. He annoys me so much with his old superman mythology that I forget myself.’

  ‘So what depressed you in the first case?’

  She hesitated, but her need to talk was too great. ‘I’m scared of something that’s happening.’

  ‘Here, in this house? It is something that Lawrence is doing?’

  She nodded.

  He spoke quietly. ‘Is it financial? Elvina used to say that he was the kind of man who’d always sail a little too close to the wind, so that one day he’d get capsized.’

  ‘It’s kind of financial. And I’m terribly fond of him and can’t bear to think of him getting into real trouble.’ She nibbled her lower lip.

  ‘Do you have any idea exactly what’s up?’

  ‘Not really. Only that he’s been short of money for some time and recently the government’s been pressing him for taxes he owes so things really are getting tight. He was terribly worried — until he interested a German, Naupert, in buying this house.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘He’s persuaded Naupert to agree to pay five million more than the place is worth, yet the German is a very hard-headed businessman.’

  ‘The hardest head can sometimes do something stupid when he steps outside his own line of business. This Naupert could have liked the house so much he just never bothered to find out what its market value is.’

  ‘That isn’t possible — he even had two German surveyors flown over from Essen to check the place. He’ll have consulted the market and know to the last peseta what this place is worth. He’s willing to pay five million more because …’ She stopped.

  ‘Because?’ he prompted.

  ‘Because of the Renoir in the sitting-room,’ she said in a rush. ‘That painting suddenly appeared and it was obviously because Naupert was coming to the house — he’s a well-known art connoisseur and collector.’

  ‘But it can’t be genuine. If so, it would be worth much more than Lawrence is asking for the whole place.’

  ‘I know it can’t be genuine. But I think Naupert’s being led to believe it is. I think Larry is …’ Again she stopped.

  Was Ingham so hard pressed for money he was trying to sell a faked Renoir? But that failed to make sense, thought Tatham. If no more than five million was indirectly being asked for the painting, it couldn’t be being offered as genuine. But suppose it was the other way round? Sold as an acknowledged fake to a buyer who believed it genuine? The oldest gambit in the confidence trickster’s book: apparently giving the victim the chance to make a lot of money by appealing to the sense of larceny that was said to lie in every man’s soul. He explained this to Judy.

  Without speaking, she led the way out of the music-room into the sitting-room and stood in front of the Renoir. It was an attractive painting, he thought, vaguely familiar, though he was far too ignorant of art to be able to name it.

  ‘Suppose he is playing it like that?’ said Judy in a low voice. ‘Is he doing anything legally wrong?’

  ‘Under Spanish law? I haven’t the slightest idea what the answer really is, but I’d guess that if Lawrence called it a fake from the beginning and no one could prove that he’s overpricing the house because he expects the German to be misled into believing the painting is genuine, then no. After all, when you sell any house you always start by asking more than it’s worth.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God,’ she murmured, as if his opinion were good law. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of Larry’s doing it that way round: just got panicky, I suppose. It’s so like him. Making money as he makes a fool out of an expert. No wonder he’s been so cheerful!’ She turned and her voice sharpened. ‘John, you won’t breathe a word about this to anyone, will you?’

  ‘What d’you take me for?’ he protested.

  ‘Sorry, but gossiping is the busiest occupation after boozing out here … And talking about drink, will you have one?’

  ‘Of course. That was my sole reason for coming along.’

  She smiled for the first time. ‘Then I’ll pour out two very large drinks, turn on Brahms loud and clear, and in next to no time I’ll be feeling relaxed, comfortable, and human.’

  ‘Were you aware that cows give more milk to Brahms than to pop?’

  ‘You know something? Until right now, that’s one of the facts of life I’ve been able to live without.’

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE CORPORAL was in the captain’s office — the captain rarely arrived before eleven in the morning — sorting through the papers on the desk when through the open doorway he saw Alvarez go by. ‘Hey! Enrique, Where the hell have you been?’

  Alvarez returned to lean against the jamb. His shirt had a stain down it where he had spilled some soup the previous evening: his trousers were virtually without creases: he’d shaved badly and there was a noticeable triangle of stubble on the right-hand side of his chin.

  ‘I’ll swear,’ said the corporal, ‘you look like you died during the night.’

  ‘I did. So now I’m going to go and lie down.’

  ‘Like hell you are. You are going to be one very busy man. There’s been someone on the telephone, demanding to speak to you at once, pronto, appassionato.’

  ‘Did you tell him I was out in the field, working myself to a crop of ulcers?’

  ‘I said you were probably in bed, snoring, too pissed to do anything else.’

  ‘Great. Remind me to do you a favour some day.’ Alvarez took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. Three guards walked past and one loudly demanded to know why the previous day’s rubbish hadn’t been removed.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who’s called?’ asked the corporal.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re the laziest, sleepiest bastard I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Then you don’t know my brother. He hasn’t crawled out of bed in the past five years.’

  The corporal straightened up and moved away from the desk. ‘The bloke who wants you is a regular hidalgo, all orders and do-as-I-tell-you-chum-or-else. A professor of anatomy, he calls himself. God help those who get anatomized by him.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Alvarez drily. ‘Since they’re dead, they won’t get help from anyone else.’ He jerked himself upright and left, climbed the stairs past the peeling plaster, and reached his room. He sat down and yawned. Too much work. All his own bloody stupid fault. He lit a cigarette, decided he was feeling even lousier than before, opened the bottom drawer of the desk and poured himself out a brandy. On his desk were two letters which had arrived that morning. Forms on which certain statistics were to be entered. He
threw them into the waste-paper basket. The telephone rang. A woman with a twittering voice said he’d turned up at last, had he?, and Professor Goñi had been waiting for hours to speak to him. He hooked the receiver up on his shoulder, leaned back in the chair, and rested his feet on the desk as he waited for the great professor to come on the line. Through the window, he saw a young woman walking along the narrow pavement and the way she swung her hips made him feel randy for the first time in days.

  ‘This is Professor Goñi,’ said a voice with a Madrid lisp.

  Alvarez identified himself. He apologized for not having been at the station before, but said he’d been working since daybreak.

  ‘It has caused me considerable inconvenience to have repeatedly to try to contact you,’ said the professor.

  He apologized again.

  ‘I wish you to know that I have completed my initial post-mortem on the deceased, Señora Woods. There are several points of interest to observe, though you will please treat as provisional only any information I give you now. Is that clear?’

  Alvarez said it was quite clear. He pictured the professor in a knife-edged suit, newly laundered white shirt, tightly knotted tie, shining leather shoes. He removed his feet from the desk, let the chair fall down to a normal upright position, reached down, and refilled his glass.

  ‘The deceased was a woman whose general physical condition as far as this could be determined was consistent with her age. Her injuries were very extensive, with many fractured bones and ruptured internal organs. The nature of some of these injuries is at the moment a little … mystifying.’ He spoke the word with distaste.

  Alvarez put the glass down on the desk. ‘How so, Professor?’

  There was a long technical explanation. He understood few of the individual words, but gained the general meaning: the injuries were in part less extreme, in part more extreme, than might have been expected, and they were in nature unusual.

  ‘It was a very considerable drop,’ he said.