Dead Clever

by Roderic Jeffries

  She shrugged her shoulders, turned and left.

  The following morning, Cristina and Juana by chance arrived together at the gateway; Juana used her remote control unit to open the gates and they drove up the hill and round the house to park their cars by the side of the garage. Despite their difference in ages, they were very friendly and they chatted volubly as they crossed to the door of the utility room. Cristina turned the handle and pushed, but the door remained firm. ‘It’s locked,’ she said with surprise.

  ‘The señor’s overslept; or maybe he’s been too busy to worry about unlocking.’

  They both giggled. Juana searched her purse for the key —they’d both been given one, but normally never had to use it because Bennett was a man of routine who rose early and unlocked the house.

  Once in the kitchen, Juana looked at the table. ‘He’s not eaten the salad you put out for him for supper.’

  ‘Nor has he! And come to that, there’s no dirty crockery to put in the machine. He must have gone out . . . Only he always says if he’s going to so that we don’t prepare something that’s wasted.’

  ‘A man with his fortune, worrying about a little lettuce wasted!’

  Cristina remembered something. ‘When I left last night, I thought he was looking ill. Maybe . . .’

  ‘You’d better go and find out.’

  ‘You’ll have to come with me.’

  They first went into the sitting-room. An opened newspaper had been left on one of the chairs, there was a dirty glass on a coffee table, and the TV and video sets had been switched off by remote control, but not at the sets. A small pool of vomit was by the chair in which Bennett normally sat.

  ‘Sweet Mary,’ whispered Juana.

  Apprehensively, they looked at each other.

  ‘He must have called a doctor . . .’ Cristina became silent.

  They went up the stairs and along the corridor to the door of the master bedroom. Juana knocked and when there was no answer, she knocked again. Eventually, she said: ‘We’d best find out if. . .’ She hesitated for several more seconds before she finally opened the door. To their horror, they saw that Bennett had collapsed and fallen to the floor beyond the foot of the bed and there could be little doubt that he was dead.

  CHAPTER 23

  Rossello had the bouncy aggressiveness of so many small men and he was unusually pompous, but he was also a very competent and dedicated doctor. He fingered his pencil moustache as he stared down at the body on the floor. ‘It would almost certainly seem to be something he ate or drank, but this naturally can only be confirmed after the post-mortem and all necessary forensic tests have been completed.’

  ‘Can you guess what that something might have been?’ asked Alvarez.

  ‘I am in the habit of diagnosing, not guessing.’

  ‘What I really meant was . . .’

  Rossello was clearly uninterested.

  Ten minutes later, after he’d phoned the Institute of Forensic Anatomy and the doctor had left, Alvarez returned to the bedroom. As he stood near the body, he shivered, not from the coolness of the air-conditioning, but because of the knowledge that Bennett had possessed so much that the world had to offer, yet his end had been lonely and frightening; not all his wealth had been unable to buy him a kind death. Perhaps this was the only consolation that the poor of the world were ever likely to receive.

  The assistant professor from the Institute of Forensic Anatomy was a large, jovial man with a macabre sense of humour that sometimes shocked Alvarez, whose sense of decorum was always sharply narrowed by death.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said the assistant professor, as he fitted the last of the plastic pots containing samples into a small leather case, ‘It’s OK to move him when you’re ready.’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me now?’

  ‘Not really. You’ll have to wait until all the tests have been completed for any hard information.’

  ‘But the cause of death was something he ate or drank?’

  ‘There’s no real doubt on that score.’

  ‘If it was food, could it have been tainted naturally?’

  ‘You’re thinking along the lines of acute salmonella? I’d say that things happened too quickly. The maid says he was perfectly all right at midday, but looked a bit rotten at six in the evening. He was sick downstairs, but presumably didn’t feel bad enough to call out a doctor or, alternately, was too muddled mentally to think of doing so. He came upstairs and then collapsed. The best estimate for time of death suggests two or three in the morning, so from being OK to death is about fourteen or fifteen hours. That calls for something fairly violent.’

  ‘Then you’re saying he was poisoned?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like right now, but I’m not saying that that is definitely the case; only the tests can do that. Do you know if anyone wanted him out of the way?’

  Alvarez answered slowly: ‘There is someone who could never feel safe all the time he was alive.’

  Salas’s secretary answered Alvarez’s call and in her plum-in-the-mouth voice informed him that the superior chief was not in the office, but if the matter was urgent—really urgent —he could be contacted at the hotel where a reception was being held for senior members of the forces of law and order.

  He telephoned the hotel. He spoke to three men in turn before it was agreed to call the superior chief to the phone.

  ‘Yes?’ said Salas.

  ‘Inspector Alvarez, señor.’

  ‘Now there’s a coincidence!’ The tone of voice had been jovial.

  At first bewildered, Alvarez suddenly realized that Salas had probably been enjoying the hospitality and that even he must mellow after several drinks. ‘señor, I have to report . . .’

  ‘The Governor-General is a man with a great sense of humour and when I told him about some of your cases he laughed more than I’ve seen anyone do for a long time. He particularly appreciated my description of you as a man who, if placed in the government, would reduce the whole country to a complete shambles even more quickly than the socialists are doing. Do you like that?’

  ‘Yes, señor . . . señor Bennett died early this morning. Although there can be no certainty until all the tests have been completed, it seems likely he was poisoned. This must mean that Green has not, after all, left the island.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you have changed your mind yet again?’

  ‘It is not really that I have changed it, señor; more, the facts . . .’

  ‘You inform me that this Englishman, Green, is dead, after which you inform me that he is alive; you say he is in Stivas; no, in France; no, here, on the island; then that you are mistaken, he is not here, he is somewhere else; again, he is not there, he is here; no, he is not here, he is there; but he is not there, he is here . . .’

  ‘I don’t think it’s really been quite that often . . .’

  ‘The Governor-General will be even more amused when I tell him about this!’ Salas was still chuckling as he cut the connection.

  By next morning, Alvarez thought miserably, Salas was not going to find the matter quite so amusing.

  In the sitting-room of Ca’n Feut, Cristina stared wide-eyed at Alvarez. ‘Mother of God!’

  ‘There can’t be any certainty yet, but there’s little room for doubt.’

  ‘But he had his lunch here . . .’ For the first time, she realized a possible implication in what had been said. ‘You think I poisoned him?’ Her fear became almost hysterical. ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t . . .’

  He said sharply: ‘I’m not suggesting anything of the sort.’

  ‘But I cooked his lunch. I gave it to him . . .’

  ‘And did you add poison to it?’

  ‘No,’ she shouted wildly.

  ‘Then you didn’t poison him. Just sit down, calm down, and tell me what happened here yesterday.’

  At first haltingly, then with greater fluency, she described the previous day.

  ‘Let’s see i
f I’ve got this correctly. He went out at ten o’clock, you don’t know where but expect it was to collect the post, and returned at roughly half eleven. He went swimming and was in the pool when you asked him what he wanted for lunch. He said he didn’t mind, or words to that effect. You cooked him pork chops in a mushroom sauce, boiled potatoes, and beans. Afterwards, he had ice-cream. And as far as you can judge, he felt perfectly all right at this stage?’

  ‘Well, he ate everything.’

  ‘How did you make the mushroom sauce?’

  ‘I didn’t actually do anything but put the dish in the microwave oven.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, like I said to you—and Mum went on about it when you were at home—I don’t go for cooking, so Juana does it all.’

  ‘Then since it was her day off, presumably she’d prepared the food beforehand and left it for you to heat up?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But then why did you ask the señor what he wanted to eat? There wasn’t really any choice for him, was there?’

  ‘No, it’s not quite like that. Juana makes half a dozen dishes at the same time and so he could have had pork chops in garlic sauce, kidneys in sherry, duck in orange, or chicken which she does with peppers, almonds, and herbs.’

  ‘If that lot was in the refrigerator for any length of time . . .’

  ‘Not the refrigerator, the deep freeze.’

  He silently called himself a fool. A deep freeze. Which had made things so easy for Green when he’d been staying at the house. All he’d had to do was to take out one dish and defrost it until he could add the poison, then return it; that dish had become a time-bomb, exploded by the innocent party who cooked it in the microwave and served it.

  And Salas would have to be told that although Green had murdered Bennett, he was not after all on the island when the murder was committed, but hundreds of miles away . . .

  The weather usually broke towards the end of August and this year was no exception. The sky clouded over during the early part of the night and by daylight the rain was steady. Tourists complained bitterly, farmers rejoiced and stared out at their crops which would not need irrigating for at least a couple of days.

  Alvarez sat behind his desk and tried to find a reason for not starting on the mountain of paperwork. After a while he sighed and reached for the top sheet of paper on the nearest pile. It proved to be a memorandum headed Urgent, from Salas’s office, dated two and a half weeks earlier . . . The telephone rang and he dropped the sheet on to the desk.

  ‘Inspector Alvarez? I have a call for you from Professor Ochivera.’

  There was a brief pause before Ochivera said: ‘The postmortem has been concluded and the cause of death is confirmed as poisoning. While you will have to await the findings of my colleague, Professor Fortunato, for the nature of the poison positively to be identified, you may accept that the active principles were amanitine and phalloidine; there was the typical inflammation around the eyes and of the mucous membranes of the gastric and intestinal tracts. Perhaps the commonest source of those two principles is amanita phalloides, better known as the Death Cap. Part of one will lead to serious illness, two mean certain death.’

  ‘You’re talking about the mushroom?’

  ‘The fungus,’ corrected Ochivera.

  ‘Wasn’t there a case on the island many years ago . . .’ Alvarez tried to pin down the memory.

  ‘You are probably thinking of the late eighteen-nineties when several people died in a village in the Sierra de Torrelles. The science of toxicology was not advanced then and it was some time before the Death Cap was suspected; especially since experts had previously held that the fungus did not grow on the island. Subsequently, it has been found in several locations, always near oak and at a height of between one and three hundred metres. The deadly peril of the Death Cap is that it is easily confused with edible fungi, especially the field mushroom, and it is neutral in taste or even slightly pleasant.’

  The pork chops had been in a mushroom sauce so it had been simple for Green to find a pack which perfectly suited his murderous plans . . .

  ‘There is one last point of interest, although it has not, in fact, any direct connection with the poisoning. The buttocks of the dead man bore several abrasions. It is impossible to speak with any certainty, since the marks were caused many days ago and are now faint, but it’s my opinion they were caused by a whip. An investigation into the dead man’s character would probably show that he was of a masochistic persuasion.

  ‘That’s all. You will, of course, receive a written report in due course; and my comments concerning the source of the poison must be treated as provisional until you hear from my colleague.’

  Alvarez mumbled a goodbye, replaced the receiver. Blankly, he stared out through the window, trying, but failing, to cut short his questioning mind. Green had been a masochist. Now it appeared that Bennett had also been one. Was that a coincidence, or the key to what had really happened? With a growing, sick despair, he knew that the answer was the latter . . .

  He would, of course, have understood the truth much earlier, and saved himself untold bitter sadness, if only he’d had the wit to realize that this case had been as much about characters as facts. During the course of their friendship, Serena had revealed to him her own and Green’s characters, but because he was not clever and his emotions had become involved and because he had already formed his judgements, and had not listened carefully enough to appreciate the significance of all she’d said . . . Or to understand that when someone had so clearly acted out of character—could she really have fallen in love with a weak, perverted man who’d betray her at the first opportunity?—there had to be a reason, which must be that the facts as presented were wrong . . .

  Green. A fast talker, a superb salesman, enjoying life to the full; married to a woman who was only comfortable in a suburban sitting-room and forever worrying about what the Joneses thought; seeking an emotional relationship, the depths of which were quite beyond his wife’s ability—or wish—to provide; possessed of a strict sense of morality which, however, owed nothing to conventional thought or the dictates of the law . . .

  Bennett. Sharp, clever, hard-headed, and so selfish that he was unable accurately to assess the qualities of others; ruthless where his own interests were concerned; indifferent to misfortune unless he suffered it; contemptuous of weakness, but only identifying this in others, never in himself; a pervert without the strength of will to try to conquer his perversion . . .

  Serena. Possessed of two gifts more precious than gold: inner warmth and limitless loyalty, which had first brought her happiness and then anguish, which had driven her to an act which seemed out of character unless and until one knew her well enough to understand that it was wholly in character because the stronger the loyalty, the higher the price it would demand . . .

  Green had been a brilliant salesman and this had made Bennett a very wealthy man; the morality of the job had never worried Green because it was only the rich who were being swindled—he would never have helped to swindle a poor man. Then the job had come to an end because Bennett had decided to retire, careless about how his decision affected anyone else. Green’s relations with his wife had never been good—he should have remembered the old Mallorquin adage, The woman you fall in love with stays behind at the altar—and when he could no longer give her enough money to satisfy her desires for suburban grandeur, they had become impossible. He’d met Serena. She was all that his wife wasn’t. Their love had been intense; too intense because the gods were jealous of men and women who were too happy.

  Since no individual would suffer and there was little chance at his age of his finding another really good job, he’d had no hesitation in working out a scheme to defraud the insurance company and she’d had none in agreeing to help him execute it. He was smart, so he accepted from the beginning that such a fraud had to be carried out carefully, never rushing any move, and that he must be content with a modes
t reward.

  His plan called for a second accomplice which seemed to offer a serious weakness until one added that such an accomplice would never betray him for the good reason that to do so would inevitably result in the betrayer being, in turn, betrayed . . .

  His one, fatal, mistake had been his inability fully to understand what kind of man Bennett was; just as Bennett’s had been the inability to understand what kind of a man Green was. Green had failed to see that Bennett was weak as well as strong and that this weakness could lead him to believe others to be as weak as he just as his strength could incite him to act. Bennett had failed to understand that Green, who had used gentle blackmail to persuade him to help in perpetrating the fraud, would never dream of continuing to blackmail him for ever-increasing sums of money because, according to his moral values, that would have been despicable behaviour . . .

  Bennett had decided that the only way to prevent his being blackmailed into poverty was to murder Green. And the proposed fraud might have been tailor-made for such a purpose. But simply to kill him after his descent by parachute would be dangerous because when questions were asked—which they certainly would be by Serena—the trail must lead straight back to him. So he had evolved a scheme which first would alert the insurance company to the fraud, secondly would confirm Green’s part in the fraud and repeatedly ‘prove’ that he had not died in the crash, and thirdly would persuade Serena that he had gone off with another woman. (Of course, had he been able truly to appreciate Serena’s character, he would have realized that she would refuse to believe this possible.)

  He had set his plan in motion just before Green made his first move. In Green’s name, he tried to double the capital sum assured, knowing that the insurance company would not agree immediately and that the report of Green’s death so soon afterwards must automatically alert them. (Alvarez remembered how he and Ware had wondered how Green could have been so stupid and greedy as to try to double the amount just before faking his own death; they should also have wondered why he, a man with a tongue of honey, should have verbally attacked the company when they refused, rather than use all his professional charm and guile to try to talk them into doing so—one more action out of character which could have alerted them to the truth early on.)