He climbed off the bed and crossed the room to stand behind her. He put his hands round her and cupped her flesh. ‘What’s dead?’
‘The sail.’
He looked out through the window. ‘I told you so — that is Alan’s yacht. Instead of a beautiful job like that, he ought to have a dinghy.’
She leaned her head back until she could nuzzle his cheek. ‘So why are you such a dog-in-the-manger? You can’t stand anyone having something you haven’t, can you?’
‘I hate seeing anything as beautiful as that yacht being completely wasted,’ he answered sharply.
‘You ought to be like me. I don’t care what anyone does or has.’
‘Sure. Just a simple little girl at heart.’ He stared moodily at the yacht, whose crew were just beginning to clear the spinnaker from the water. ‘That yacht should be owned by a proper yachtsman, not a fair-weather lollipop — she’s an ocean racer.’
‘You say that with a hell of a lot more feeling than you ever say anything to me.’
‘Ships are faithful.’
‘God, it’s hot!’ she said, breaking away from him. ‘And you feel like a furnace. Let’s go for a swim.’
He returned to the bed and sat down on it. ‘How did he take the news?’
‘How did Frederick take what news?’
He looked up and spoke in an exasperated tone. ‘Half an hour with you and my mind’s looping the loop. Where the hell did Frederick come from? … How did your husband react to knowing about you and me, apart from shouting about motes?’
She shrugged her shoulders and her well filled breasts bobbed up and down invitingly. ‘I never did know what he was thinking. He’s one of those awful men who never loses his temper and can smile all the time. The only thing which blows his cool is money: he’ll have a throm if he thinks he might lose a hundred pesetas.’
‘Then how did he react when you asked him for money?’
She laughed as she looked at him. ‘Worried I won’t get any?’
‘That’s a bloody thing to say.’
She walked over to the bed and cuddled him against her body. ‘Didn’t I ever tell you, I never know what my tongue’s going to say?’
He began to stroke her flanks. ‘Why on earth did you ever let him have your money in the first case?’
She looked faintly puzzled. ‘Why not? I’ve never understood the stuff and he said he knew all about it and would invest it so that it would make me a fortune.’
‘Make him a fortune, you mean. He’s swiped the lot and pays you out as little as he reckons he can get away with.’
‘He swears it’s all safely invested.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. Or else you’re even more naive than I thought.’
She stepped away from him and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit a cigarette with a small, slim gold lighter. ‘You don’t begin to understand John. You’re just like Dick.’
‘I’m nothing like Dick,’ he said, with sudden annoyance. ‘If I thought I were really anything like him, I’d cut my throat.’
‘It’s funny you can’t stand him. I think he’s a duck.’
‘He sure quacks a lot.’
She giggled. ‘As a matter of fact he doesn’t like you very much. Do you know what he calls you?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think I’d better tell you.’
‘Don’t.’
‘If you’re going to be like that! … Master World.’
‘I’ll smash his head in next time I see him.’
‘But where’s your sense of humour? He’s such fun. He knows all the best scandal and when I’m bored I go and have tea with him.’
‘You’re not to see him again.’
‘Don’t be so pugnacious.’
‘I’m telling you, cut him out.’
She spoke laughingly, yet there was a note in her voice which wasn’t usually there. ‘Steve, love, I’m nearly as old as my bust measurements, so I’ll decide who I see and who I don’t. Don’t start getting like him.’
‘Me get like Dick. I’ve just told you … ’
‘Francis.’
‘Who the hell’s talking about Francis?’
‘I am.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Come on, let’s put our costumes on and have a swim. Last one in the sea is a cissy.’
*
Whenever he was introduced to someone he had not previously met, Percival Goldstein said: ‘I am not a Jew. My father’s family three generations back was Dutch.’ He was a man of middle height, with a large head that was almost bald: in artificial light it shone as if he had covered it with oil. His eyes were very dark brown, almost black, and behind his thick-lensed glasses they were forever on the move, as if he could look at nothing for very long.
He and his wife, Amanda, lived in a large and well built house — it was one of the very few buildings which didn’t leak whenever it rained hard — on the side of a small hill on the road to Cala Roig. She was fifteen years younger than he and looked twenty years younger. She was almost the same height and so wore flat-soled shoes in order not to look taller. She had tight curly hair — her nickname to his sharp annoyance was Bubbles — azure blue eyes set slightly wide apart, an attractive face which was slightly spoiled by a suggestion of uncertainty, and a slim body which belied her age of forty.
Goldstein stood in front of the grey steel filing cabinet, at the far end of the very large sitting-room, and searched through the papers in the top drawer. He said, in his dry, flat-toned voice: ‘I can’t find the receipt for groceries bought in the second week in March.’
She looked up from the copy of Woman’s Own which she had bought earlier in the Port. ‘Can’t you, dear?’
‘Did you get one?’
‘I can’t really remember. It’s rather a long time ago.’
‘How can I work out the household figures if I haven’t the receipts?’
‘Why not just call it five hundred pesetas?’
He looked at her with annoyed surprise, then resumed his search.
After a while, she said: ‘There’s a simply lovely three-quarter-length coat advertised this week. D’you think we could ask Martha to get one in my size and bring it out next month?’
‘I thought you had a large number of coats already?’
‘Love, a woman needs a new coat from time to time, to cheer her up.’
‘Why are you feeling depressed?’
‘I don’t mean it exactly like that. Not literally. But you know how a woman is … ’
‘We can’t afford it,’ he said definitely. He slammed the cabinet drawer shut and there was the sharp and ugly noise of clashing metal.
‘But it only costs fifteen quid … ’
‘I’ve asked you before not to use that ugly word.’
‘Fifteen pounds, then.’
‘Amanda, until I am able to work out the figures for last year, I have no way of knowing how our finances stand.’
‘You must have. What is it? You want to get your own back on me because I forgot to get some stupid little receipt?’
He looked at her over the tops of his spectacles. ‘I am not small-minded.’
‘I’m sorry, love, I shouldn’t have said that … But you do get so upset just because I forget things. You know I’ve never had a very good memory. And anyway, most of the shops out here don’t really know what a receipt is.’
‘That is absurd. They are, by law, bound to issue one. What you mean is, they’re too lazy to give you one and you haven’t the business sense to demand one.’ He crossed over to the nearer armchair and sat down. He stared out through an opened window at the mountains, light grey in the sharp sunshine, with an occasional patch of green to show where a lone pine tree struggled to survive, and complacently thought that the view added at least a million pesetas to the value of the house.
She looked again at the coloured illustration of the coat. It wasn’t very stylish and at that price couldn’t be of very good material, b
ut it would have been colourful and gay and her life was short of colour and gaiety.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the Drays are coming to supper.’
‘Oh, my God!’
‘Now what’s the matter?’
‘First you’ve only just told me and I can’t think what I can give them to eat; second, they’re the most boring old couple on the island.’
‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that.’
‘Why can’t we have someone under sixty for a change? The Jacksons. They’re such fun … ’
‘She is not a very pleasant person.’
‘You only dislike her because she teased you at that party.’
He spoke with great dignity. ‘I consider that she was unpardonably rude.’
‘She’d had a drink or two, but she was good fun and was making everyone laugh. Isn’t it better to make people laugh than be like the Drays who tell you all about their colds before the meal, their tummy upsets during it, and their geriatric pains with the coffee?’
‘They are a couple of very intelligent persons who have the misfortune to suffer considerable ill health.’
‘What you mean is, they’re stinking rich.’
‘Sometimes, Amanda, I wonder if you ever have a serious, worthwhile thought in your head.’
‘That shouldn’t disturb you. You didn’t marry me for my brains.’
‘That was quite unnecessary.’ He looked at his wristwatch.
‘It’s time for tea, I think.’
She left the room. The kitchen was tiled in old Mallorquin tiles, rich of colour, which depicted various costumes traditionally associated with certain jobs — they had been expensive. The kitchen equipment was very extensive. Her husband never minded spending money when it was obvious that he had done so.
She switched on the electric kettle and put the tin of Lapsang Souchong tea near the teapot: from the very large refrigerator she brought out the plate on which were four pastries. From the day they had been married, he had had Lapsang tea and three different pastries at five o’clock every afternoon. She wondered whether his first wife had catered quite so thoroughly to his precise, finicky ways. Probably not. His first wife had been his own age and wealthy in her own right. Perhaps he had had to do everything for her to make certain of inheriting her money and now he was gaining his revenge.
The kettle boiled and she poured water into the teapot to warm it. Before their marriage, ten years ago, a villa in Mallorca had seemed to her the very height of luxurious happiness. Now, she knew that for her such a life was a slow form of death.
She emptied the teapot, put in three heaped spoonfuls of tea, and added water. She placed the teapot, silver milk jug, a single slice of lemon, pastries, silver sugar bowl, two silver teaspoons, two plates, and two cups and saucers, on the heavily engraved silver tray. Percival said that the crest in the centre of the tray was his family’s. She preferred to believe he’d bought the tray and appropriated the crest: instant aristocratic ancestors.
She returned to the sitting-room, which was looking very beautiful since the sun had moved until sunshine flooded through the windows to pick out the colours of the two large Chinese carpets.
She put the tray down on the walnut piecrust table and poured him out his first of two cups of tea and put in the slice of lemon. She was convinced he would rather have milk and sugar, as she did, but Lady Eastmore had once told him that Lapsang tea should only be drunk with a slice of lemon. She pulled out the bottom table of a nest of four, and put that by the side of his chair: she placed cup and saucer on it. She proffered him the tray and he studied the pastries for a long time before he made up his mind and chose one.
She sat down and poured herself out a cup of tea and, with a brief, futile sense of defiance, added sugar and milk. She ate the slice of Swiss roll with lemon filling because she knew he didn’t like it. She lit a cigarette.
‘Aren’t you smoking rather heavily these days?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’
‘How many have you had today?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘You should have. I can’t think why you continue to smoke when you know how dangerous the habit is.’
‘I can imagine worse deaths than cancer of the lungs.’
‘Such as?’
‘Living too long.’
He spoke coldly. ‘Just what is that supposed to mean?’
‘That I don’t want to live to be as old as the Drays.’
‘No doubt your attitude would change if I suffered an early demise?’
‘Don’t, please, start that up again, Perce.’
‘How many times have I asked you not to call me Perce?’
She forced herself to smile, to try to move away from an open row. ‘That makes two thousand four hundred and sixteen.’
He was not amused.
‘The trouble is, love, Percival is such a mouthful and Perce seems so much more friendly.’
‘I have always disliked diminutives.’ He put his cup and saucer down on the table. ‘I think I would like some more tea — and, perhaps, another of those pastries.’ He spoke as if there might have been some doubt.
She poured him out a second cup of tea and passed him a second pastry.
He ate slowly, chewing every mouthful very thoroughly. When he’d finished, she stood up and carried over the tray so that he could take the last pastry. Half-way through eating this, he paused and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He brushed his lips with it, then looked at her over the tops of his spectacles. ‘I went into Palma this morning.’ He resumed eating.
‘I know. I saw you off.’
‘I met the Phillpots on Jaime Three.’
She was upset, but did what she could to hide the fact. When she spoke, she fiddled with her cigarette, rolling it backwards and forwards between finger and thumb so that the smoke rose in wavy billows. ‘I thought they’d gone back home?’
‘They had to delay their flight … Stella told me you did not go to lunch there on Monday.’ He stared fixedly at her.
She smoked.
‘Well? Where did you go at lunch-time?’
‘Nowhere special. I just drove around.’ She looked quickly at him. ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand me if I told you just the truth.’
He took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief, then replaced them.
She struggled to sound totally unworried. ‘Every now and then I want to be on my own. But you can’t seem to understand and you get all fussed if I want to go out, so I just said Stella had invited me to lunch to make everything easier.’
‘You knew they were supposed to be going back to England. That’s why you used their name. So I wouldn’t be able to check up on what you told me.’
‘Maybe. But only because I knew you wouldn’t … ’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I just drove about the place, to be on my own and with nothing definite to do. In this house, everything has to be done by the clock. Breakfast at eight-thirty, lunch at one, tea at five, dinner at nine. And if I’m ten minutes late, you’re in the kitchen, demanding to know what’s wrong. It’s a wonderful treat to be somewhere that I don’t need to give a damn whether it’s one or three o’clock.’
‘Who were you with?’
She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I was on my own and just driving round the roads …’
‘You were with a man, weren’t you?’ His voice rose. ‘I’m not a fool, so don’t try and treat me as one. You were with a man. You arranged to meet him on Monday.’
‘For God’s sake, Perce … ’
‘Don’t call me Perce.’
She lit another cigarette.
CHAPTER IV
Alvarez parked on the wrong side of the no-parking sign. He climbed out on to the pavement and stared at a lithesome, long-legged girl who was walking along the pavement — she was dressed in a minimum bikini and a floppy sun hat. He was sufficiently old-fashioned to regret that any young lady should appe
ar on the roads in so scanty a dress, yet not so old that he failed to appreciate the sight if she did.
He followed the girl to the T-junction, where the Llueso, sea front, and Playa Nueva roads met, and there he carried on, across the road to the eastern arm of the harbour while she turned right.
Like most islanders, the sea and boats held a special meaning for him and he liked nothing better than to wander around a harbour, however small, staring at the boats and smelling the salt/fish/tar/paint smell which accompanied them. He was not a man who could clearly identify his own emotions, yet he knew that Puerto Llueso, ringed by mountains, the bay deep blue in the sun and occasionally so still that he almost hesitated to breathe out too deeply in case it destroyed the peace, offered him a sense of inner contentment that was beyond value. At such times he had consciously to take note of the kiosks selling hot dogs and ice creams to the tourists, and of the tourist buses and the large yachts owned by tourists, to retain a valid sense of grievance.
He walked up the cobbled eastern arm and came abreast of the fish restaurant. It was reputedly a very good restaurant, with prices to back up that reputation, and once it had been almost exclusively patronized by the English: now most of the patrons were French or German. When he thought of how the once mighty pound sterling had fallen down on its face, he was prepared to believe there was some natural justice in the world.
He walked on, past the ferries which took trippers to Parelona beach, past the Club Nautico where yachtsmen and would-be yachtsmen sat and drank, and reached the end of the arm. To his left was the harbour entrance and straight ahead was the curving western arm. Almost opposite there was tied up a two-masted schooner, surely seaworthy enough to cross any ocean? How much money did she cost just to keep tied up there? he wondered. Enough to make most Mallorquin families whistle with envy — not that there were now many poor Mallorquins: tourism might have ruined parts of the island, but it had enriched most of the islanders.
With a throbbing roar of noise, an old flying-boat, rolling back the years, began to taxi across the water before taking off. Higher in key, and far more irritating in quality, was the noise from an approaching speedboat which was towing two water-skiers: as he watched, the skiers criss-crossed each other’s wakes, the man ducking under the woman’s line. For a short time, the intensely blue water was slashed by the white wakes of boat and skiers.
Two-Faced Death (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 3
