Mistakenly in Mallorca (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1)

by Roderic Jeffries

  He strolled back to the square and sat down on one of the wooden seats, not far from the ice-cream stall which had recently started trading.

  But for a detective who was at heart a farmer, he’d have written back to ask her to make inquiries as quickly as possible. He thought he could place Knotts Farm. A sober assessment (no rose-tinted spectacles) would go: run down, small fields with overgrown hedges, in a heavily wooded area so that drainage was even more difficult than usual, potential low, virtually guaranteed to kill ambition and strangle success.

  What fantastic luck that the investigating detective should have been Enrique Alvarez.

  His thoughts returned to the solicitors’ letter. He’d write back and say he was returning very soon. Would they be able to assure him that the legal position regarding the inheritance was clear enough for him to start looking for a farm? Inevitably it would take a long time for the money actually to reach him, but equally inevitably it would take him a long time to find the farm he wanted. His mind jumped time. He tramped fields thick with grass, grew crops, bred sleek-hided animals … If only he could start immediately. He’d nothing to hold him on the island. Except … Judy.

  The future suddenly seemed far less certain. He’d come to like her a lot. She was warm-natured when she wasn’t being bitchy, great fun, and they had found a lot in common. She’d never lived on a farm or had anything to do with farming, yet it was quite reasonable to imagine her in working clothes, sitting on a tractor or helping out in the milking parlour: her smartness was not an end in itself. She preferred to be busy to idleness, admitted to being terrified of poverty and too fond of luxury, but what she really sought was security. But if he proposed to her, would such a proposal denigrate Jennifer’s memory? Basically, it was the same question he had asked himself when he had first gone out with Judy on a picnic. He was sure the answer was no, and yet …

  He drove back to Ca’n Manin, to find Mayans’s battered Citroen 2CV parked alongside the garage and Mayans and his brother-in-law waiting for his return, with the patience of timelessness.

  ‘My brother-in-law,’ said the brother-in-law, with a flash of his golden teeth, ‘would be happy to know what you will be doing.’

  ‘And so would I.’

  The brother-in-law looked bewildered by the answer and so did Mayans when it was translated for him.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll get some drinks,’ said Tatham. He unlocked the front door and went through to the larder for a bottle of Soberano and three glasses which he put on a tray.

  Back on the patio, he poured out three brandies and handed round the glasses. Mayans picked up his glass and drank.

  The brother-in-law beamed at Tatham through his spectacles. ‘Do you wish for a new lease? It can be a lease for eleven months, but not for a whole year. As it is now the season, if you wish just one month and not eleven, it will be twenty thousand. If you wish two months it will be thirty thousand the second month because then everybodys are after houses.’

  Tatham, irritated by such profiteering, suddenly made up his mind. ‘I’ll be returning home before the tenth, so there’s no question of a lease.’

  The brother-in-law translated and Mayans broke into a flood of passionate Mallorquin. The brother-in-law removed his spectacles and carefully polished the lenses. He flashed his teeth. ‘My brother-in-law says that because he liked the señora so much, he will lease you the house for sixteen thousand for one month, or twenty thousand for the second month.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  The rent drifted downwards. Mayans became more and more excited and finally, with waving hands, he addressed Tatham directly.

  ‘My brother-in-law,’ the brother-in-law translated, ‘says you are a very fierce businessman and like the señora. May she be peaceful. He says he loved the señora. So he will charge you twelve thousand a month for eleven months, but please tell other peoples fifteen thousand, or twenty if they are important peoples.’

  ‘But I keep telling you, I’m not staying here. I’m going home.’

  Mayans stood up. He stared at Tatham, scratched his curly black hair, and suddenly beamed. He spoke rapidly, but briefly.

  ‘My brother-in-law thinks perhaps you like buy this house. For you, but for no other peoples, it will cost five million.’

  Tatham smiled. ‘Thanks, but I’m going home to buy a farm — I still have to work for a living.’

  ‘A big farm, you will be buying?’

  ‘No, it’ll only be a small one. Maybe seventy to a hundred hectares.’

  He’d forgotten that on this island a farm of five hectares was large. They left, obviously convinced he was a liar and respecting him for doing everything possible to beat down the proposed rent.

  He carried the brandy and three glasses into the kitchen. He lit a cigarette. He’d told them he was returning home at once and so be it. The future as it lay between himself and Judy must be left to the future.

  One of the things he must do before leaving was to sort out the furniture and effects and have anything of value-stored until it was certain what was to be done with it. He went upstairs and into Elvina’s bedroom.

  There were a few pieces of jewellery in a battered leather case: he was no judge of jewellery, so it must be expertly examined. In one drawer of the chest-of-drawers was a pile of letters, perhaps twenty in all, written many years before, with envelopes browned with age: he put them on the floor for burning. Most of the clothes were also only fit for burning, but there was one fur coat that looked of fairly good quality and was hung in a large plastic bag: unless it were mink, which even to his eyes seemed unlikely, it could be offered to Catalina who would appreciate the memento even if this was not a country where a fur coat was often worn. In a drawer were several children’s books, all dated in pen on the fly leaves, which had been hers when young. With pages torn and drawn on in coloured pencils, these could be of no value to anyone else. He put them on the burning pile.

  In the solar, he first went over to the desk. It contained surprisingly little. Three folders of receipts and official documents, some recent letters from friends in England awaiting answering, a pocket Spanish/English dictionary, and several ancient guarantee cards which dated from when she’d first come. Apart from the desk, there were two empty suitcases stored above the staircase and, of course, the carpets. He could remember clearly her saying to him: ‘Those two are Ispahan, quite old, and I suppose rather valuable. That one is a Gum and Paul gave it to me on our first wedding anniversary. That other is supposed to be a Mir, but a friend of Paul’s came and was certain it was an Abadah. I never bothered to sort out their identifications. I just like them all, although I really like the Gum most of all for sentimental reasons.’ Unless she had willed them to someone else, he would lay them in the farmhouse. They would be something personal of hers.

  Then, as he stared at them, he abruptly realized that she would never have walked over them in muddy shoes.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  ALVAREZ EXAMINED his nails and noticed without surprise that they were unusually dirty. Then he looked across his desk at Tatham and his expression was one of irritation. ‘You tell me she would never have walked over those carpets on the Friday?’

  ‘She’d not have walked over any carpets in such muddy shoes,’ replied Tatham, ‘because she had a thing about keeping the house clean and tidy. But those carpets held tremendous sentimental value for her, over and above their high intrinsic value, so she would never have dreamed of going on them with shoes caked with sticky mud.’

  ‘Yet carpets are for walking on.’

  ‘Not these: not for her.’

  Alvarez didn’t understand, and yet he did. He remembered he’d been attracted by the beauty of the four carpets when he’d briefly seen them.

  Tatham spoke more urgently. ‘You can’t get out on to the balcony without walking on them. If it was fine and one’s shoes were clean, that was all right — a little walking on them may have done them some good. But Elvina was wearing thick
walking shoes, caked with mud from the dirt-track, and on top of that going out on to the wet balcony would have made them worse. She’d never have returned from a walk, gone upstairs, crossed the carpets, and gone out on to the balcony in those shoes.’

  Alvarez spoke with the tired fatalism of someone trying to avoid the unavoidable. ‘Could she not have worn the shoes when clean and have walked out on to the balcony and made them dirty there?’

  Tatham shook his head. ‘I’ve just told you — and you must have seen for yourself, unless the sea washed it all off — the dirt on the shoes came from the track round to the road.’

  Alvarez sighed. ‘So?’

  Tatham hesitated, then spoke very quickly. ‘There’s been something wrong from the beginning. You told me her last meal was very light, mainly bread, and she’d had no alcohol for at least nine hours. But it’s impossible to think of her having lunch without a drink or two and plenty of wine … She cannot have eaten lunch.’

  ‘Are you suggesting, then, she died before lunch, in the middle of the day? That is impossible. Catalina, the maid, was at the house between three and five and there was certainly no body on the patio then.’

  Tatham, voice slightly hoarse, asked: ‘How soon does rigor mortis start?’

  Alvarez shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Can you find out?’

  Alvarez, looking more tired than ever, his clothes sagging round him, stood up and crossed to the small bookcase from which he brought the text-book on forensic medicine. He returned to his chair, checked the index, turned the pages, and read a couple of paragraphs. He looked up. ‘Describe as exactly as you can remember the state of your aunt’s body when you lifted it.’

  ‘I’d parked the car so the lights were on her. Her head was pointing towards the car. Her arms were outstretched and when I first tried to tuck them in to her sides they refused to move. Her legs were stiff also, though not so stiff as her arms, and it was a job to fold up her body.’

  ‘Then rigor had spread down her body to her legs and that normally takes between seven to nine hours.’

  ‘Which puts her death at between one and three in the afternoon.’

  ‘Or conditions were abnormal.’ Alvarez jabbed his finger down on the book. ‘It says that rigor is a very unreliable guide to the time of death.’

  ‘Then don’t forget something else. The meal was eaten two hours before her death. She had a very late breakfast. That fits in with the rigor times. She ate bread and butter only, and drank coffee. That fits.’

  Alvarez scratched his right ear. ‘Didn’t you say there was a great deal of blood on the patio?’

  ‘I said there was relatively little. But there should have been a great deal, shouldn’t there? That alone could have suggested the truth.’

  ‘What is the truth?’

  ‘She died somewhere else and was brought to the house after Catalina had left and was pushed through the wooden rails of the balcony to make it seem she had met her death there, at home.’

  ‘If that were true, the person who brought her body back would have expected its discovery soon to become news. When it didn’t, he or she would have become desperate to know why. Did anyone come the next day, asking for the señora, trying to find out where she was?’

  Tatham thought back. ‘No. No one came here.’

  Alvarez shut the book with a snap. ‘My father was a very realistic man. One day, when I was young, I asked him why there were stars in the sky? He told me, “Why bother about the answer? It can do us no good. Instead, bother about why all the melons are this year splitting. The answer to that will do us good.”’

  Tatham fidgeted with a coin in the right-hand pocket of the light-weight trousers he was wearing. ‘But you are saying …’

  ‘I am saying that you went to a great deal of trouble to conceal the time of the señora’s death. Yet you come with questions which can only be answered by destroying all you have worked for. Convince me the señora was killed in some manner other than an accidental fall from the balcony and I must investigate because it may be a case of murder. Immediately, everyone must know the señora died not on the twenty-fifth of April, but on the sixteenth. Did you not tell me that then the farm of your dreams can never be?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘But what, Señor?’

  ‘If she was murdered — as she must have been …’

  ‘Must have been? Let us suppose she died somewhere else, in a different manner. Could it not have been an accident which someone had to conceal, just as you thought there had been an accident which you had to conceal?’

  ‘But you’ve got to make certain whether it was an accident or whether it was murder.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If there’s been a murder, the murderer’s got to be caught.’

  ‘Again I ask you, why?’

  ‘But …’ Tatham stared at him, shocked by the question.

  ‘Is it revenge you seek? But that will not restore your aunt to life. So the only result will be to destroy your own future life.’

  ‘It’s not revenge. It’s that justice be done.’

  ‘What is the real difference? And who are you to call for justice, when you tried so hard to defeat it? And did you not tell me all that justice did not do for you in England?’

  ‘If it was a murder and the murderer gets away with it …’

  ‘He will spend the rest of his life worried that the truth will one day arrive and he will be caught. Punishment enough.’

  ‘But in God’s name, what would happen if every crime committed were ignored like that?’

  ‘You are forgetting, this is not an ordinary crime — if it is a real crime. If the señora was murdered, the murderer is a man or woman of high intelligence and cunning or he or she would not have thought of faking an accident. Or think of placing the bamboo to explain away the particular injury to her head, should anyone ever doubt the accident and demand a post-mortem. A person of intelligence murders only when it is absolutely necessary. Therefore this is an isolated case and will lead to no other crimes. The course of justice for others will not be altered if the murderer goes unidentified.

  ‘Señor,’ continued Alvarez earnestly, ‘remember the melons my father spoke about. Go back to England and buy that farm. Give the señora the memorial she longed for.’

  Tatham slowly stood up. Only on this island could a detective argue someone out of presenting evidence which tended to prove that a murder had been committed.

  *

  Tatham poured himself out another gin and tonic, conscious even as he did so that he had already drunk enough to blur his thinking. He returned to the sitting-room and slumped down in one of the chairs. What did he do? On the one hand a fortune, but bury the truth: on the other, discover the truth, but bury the fortune. Should he, as Alvarez said, forget the stars and concentrate on the melons?

  He drank. Might not Elvina for once have gone upstairs in filthy shoes? Surely no one ever acted consistently all the time? Might she not earlier have suddenly felt ill so that she had no lunch? Might she not have bled profusely, but he remembered incorrectly? Might the rigor mortis, notoriously unreliable, not have taken an unusual course?

  He looked at his glass and was surprised to discover it was empty. He went through to the pantry and refilled it.

  Murder postulated a motive. Who had a motive to murder Elvina? Mayans, clearly. At her death, the lease of the house had expired and now he was able to ask a very much higher rent. The Mallorquins were crazy for money. The Eastmores? On the face of it, an unlikely possibility yet Catalina — source of so much information on the other English — had told Elvina that they were very worried because some bank official had come from England and was making financial inquiries. Local gossip had named Elvina the informer. If the Eastmores had been worried, it suggested they’d something to hide and perhaps they’d believed Elvina was an informer and had killed her to prevent her informing on them. They were the leaders of the English Community. As such, the
y must be seen to be beyond reproach.

  Alvarez had made the point that if Elvina had been murdered, or had suffered an accident elsewhere, the murderer, or the witness to her accident, must have been desperate to know what had happened to her body. Both Mayans and Lady Eastmore had come to the house to speak to Elvina, but not until the Friday, nine days after she’d actually died. (Of course, one or other of them might have called when he was out on his ‘picnics with Elvina’.) Alvarez had also said that this third person would have to be of high intelligence and cunning. Mayans was cunning but not highly intelligent; the Eastmores were highly intelligent but not cunning.

  He couldn’t explain even to himself what it was he wanted — revenge, justice, an easy conscience? — yet even if it was right against his own interests, he had to try to find out the truth. And, his gin-scrambled brain said, he had to know now. He left the house and climbed into the Fiat. He must drive very carefully. He was quite certain he was in sufficient control of himself to drive, even if the Spanish police were murder on drunken drivers. The thing was, he wasn’t anywhere near tight …

  He decided he must have been very deep in thought because he found himself entering the drive of Ca’n Lluxa without any clear recollection of the short journey. That worried him for a little, but he very soon forgot it. He climbed out.

  He rang the front-door bell, hammered on the brass knocker, rang the bell again in case no one had heard him the first twice. Miguel, looking flustered, opened the door and spoke a flood of Spanish.

  ‘Sure, I’ll come in,’ said Tatham. He stepped inside. He tripped over something and almost fell.

  Miguel spoke again, gesturing with his hands. ‘Sure, I’ll come along,’ said Tatham. ‘I want a word with them, but I rather doubt they’ll want a word with me. Where are they?’