A Maze of Murders

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘I’ve told you, no one had.’

  ‘Can you be so very certain?’

  ‘When Cara’s had a skinful, she gets all giggly and mixes up her words. She wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘Señor Lewis poured a drink for each of you?’

  ‘Yeah, even though I said I didn’t want one.’

  ‘Señor Sheard began to yawn and complain of dizziness. Were Señorita Fenn and Señor Lewis also showing signs of tiredness and dizziness?’

  She leaned forward until her breasts were pressing against her raised legs, wrapped her arms around her legs and interlaced her fingers, rested her chin on one knee and watched a waterskier criss-cross the wake of a towing speedboat. ‘I don’t know. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about what they were doing.’

  ‘But perhaps you noticed them just briefly before you fell asleep?’

  ‘They was both flat out. Asleep, I mean. And I can remember thinking that the way Cara was lying, if she wasn’t careful she’d end up on the floor. Which is what she did.’

  The course of events suggested the full bottle of whisky had been drugged; the forensic evidence made it certain it had not been. ‘During the night, you seemed to hear someone moving about the cabin?’

  ‘It was a nightmare.’

  ‘The last time we spoke about it, you weren’t all that certain it was.’

  ‘Well, I am now.’

  She found it far preferable to believe her memory to be the product of a nightmare than to live with the possibility that she had heard Lewis’s moving aft so that, if she’d pulled herself together, she might have saved him after he’d fallen overboard. ‘Can you describe what kind of movements they were?’

  ‘Nothing’s normal in a nightmare.’

  He was not going to learn from her any facts that would confirm or deny the possibility that she had half heard – being less deeply drugged than the others – someone’s exchanging both whisky and glasses in order to hide evidence which would have shown Lewis had been murdered. He stood. ‘Thank you, señorita, for kindly recalling times you so wish to forget. I shall not be troubling you again.’

  She unwrapped her arms and lay back, propping herself up on her elbows.

  Her movement had, through no conscious volition on his part, caused him to shift his gaze. Her breasts were more silken and shapely than a ripe persimmon …

  As he walked across the sand towards the pine trees, he wondered who was the fool who had first dubbed women the weaker sex.

  CHAPTER 12

  Alvarez sat by a window in the Club Llueso and drank the last of the coffee and brandy. Today was Friday, tomorrow was Saturday. Only in very unusual circumstances did he have to work on Saturday afternoons. The day after was Sunday. Circumstances had to be quite exceptional for him to have to work on a Sunday. And to add to such a rosy future, Dolores’s mood remained so sunny that lunch must surely be another feast.

  He looked at his watch and was surprised to discover how long he’d been in the club. He paid the bill and walked across the square, then down the road to the post. He had been seated at his desk for less than a minute, contemplating the confusion of papers, files, unopened letters, memoranda, and notes to himself which didn’t make sense, when the phone rang. The plum-voiced secretary told him that the superior chief wished to speak to him. No day could be perfect, he thought philosophically.

  ‘Have you received the report in the Lewis case from the Laboratory of Forensic Sciences?’ Salas demanded.

  ‘The preliminary one, yes, señor.’

  ‘Then you’ll know that it makes clear that neither the whisky in the bottle, nor the dregs in the second bottle or the glasses contained any form of narcotic?’

  ‘That is so, señor.’

  ‘Thus there is now no logical reason to doubt that the missing man’s disappearance was the result of a drunken accident?’

  ‘When there are circumstances which seem to be ambiguous…’

  ‘It is you, Alvarez, who delights in adding ambiguity to every circumstance. If confusion is not already present, you rush to introduce it.’

  ‘Yet in this case…’

  ‘There can now be no confusion.’

  ‘I’m still perplexed by…’

  ‘By virtually everything. The head of the laboratory has informed me of the total bill he will be presenting to the department. Have you any idea how large it is?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, señor.’

  ‘Well over two hundred and fifty thousand pesetas.’

  ‘That seems rather a lot…’

  ‘When one remembers that the analyses were not authorized, it is a very large sum indeed.’

  ‘As I explained, it was my opinion that in the circumstances it was essential for the tests to be carried out to discover if the whisky had been drugged.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘The fact that they all fell asleep on the job.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘Sex, señor.’

  ‘My God! Are you under some perverse compulsion? Do you have to introduce the subject into every conversation?’

  Alvarez said hurriedly: ‘Then there was Señorita Glass’s nightmare…’

  ‘Are you now saying that the basis for your investigation has been a woman’s nightmare? Then, no doubt, you have also consulted a clairvoyant and a necromancer?’

  ‘The thing is, I thought that…’

  ‘I have neither the time nor the inclination to follow the course of your thoughts. In future, you will exactly observe each and every rule of procedure, with no exceptions. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, señor.’

  ‘There is no room for confusion?’

  ‘No, señor.’

  The line went dead.

  Alvarez replaced the receiver. The superior chief was, perhaps, confused about the nature of Kirsty’s nightmare.

  * * *

  Pascoe had made a fortune from the production of pornographic videos. But since the expatriate community tended to be small-minded, he always claimed he’d been in educational publishing.

  Naturally, a man of his position needed to own a boat even when he feared the sea and he had been on the point of buying a forty-foot motor cruiser when, just in time, he’d learned that an acquaintance had ordered a forty-two footer; he had immediately changed his purchase to a forty-five footer. He was a gregarious man and enjoyed entertaining lavishly, especially aboard his cruiser, especially those who had cause to envy him.

  When under way, he liked to be on the flying bridge, wearing a peak cap with scrambled egg, tilted at a nautical angle. He employed Milne full-time as pilot, deckhand, engineer, greaser, and steward.

  Milne, at the wheel, said: ‘Will this do you, Cap’n?’

  It had never occurred to him to wonder whether ’Cap’n’ was touched with sarcasm rather than respect. He visually searched the sea. The island was some five kilometres to the north, most of its details scrambled by the heat haze; between it and them were two yachts, ghosting along in the lightest of breezes. He considered yachtspeople the greatest of bores, preferring to talk of sheets, halyards, tacks and greybeards, rather than indexes, futures, scrip issues, and P/E rates. On the port beam was a ship, hull down. ‘Stop engines.’

  Milne reached forward to bring both engine control joysticks back to neutral, then switched off. The faint noise of the boat’s movements and the water gently slapping against her hull became audible.

  ‘Keep a good lookout,’ Pascoe ordered.

  ‘Aye, aye, Cap’n.’

  He adjusted the rake of his cap, made his way down the companionway and into the saloon, then aft to the open deck where a tarpaulin had been rigged to give shade. Several men and women were gathered, drinking with the enthusiasm of poor relations.

  ‘Must be eight bells,’ Kerr said.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘The end of the watch.’

  Pascoe was annoyed by his failure to understand. ‘I’ve decided we’ll lie idle for
a bit,’ he said pompously. He disliked Kerr, who was more or less permanently drunk and also one of them; however, his brother was a noted landowner in Scotland. He moved to the centre of the deck, braced his feet against a nonexistent swell, cupped his hands about his mouth to overcome a nonexistent gale, and called out: ‘Who’s for a swim before lunch?’

  Monica, over made-up, under-dressed, her décolletage only just giving imagination work to do, said in her husky voice: ‘I didn’t think we’d be swimming. I haven’t brought a costume.’

  Turner could be relied upon to make the obvious comment. ‘Then go in skinny.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘And have you ogling me?’

  ‘I promise not to look.’

  ‘My mother told me never to believe a man’s promise unless he’s got his legs crossed.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Hilda Pascoe. Plump, cheerful, content with whatever life offered, she regretted her husband’s thrusting social ambitions since it meant she had so often to mix with people she would rather not have done. ‘And there’s no call for anyone to get excited because we’ve several costumes in the cabins and I’m sure one of them will fit you nicely.’

  ‘That’s what I call optimism,’ Turner said.

  Hilda and Monica went into the saloon and for’d to the cabins, others followed. Within five minutes, most were in the water.

  It was Turner, a couple of hundred metres from the boat, who suddenly began to shout and to wave his arms. The other swimmers, unable to see him clearly, if at all, assumed he was fooling and someone called out to enquire whether he had been foul-hooked by Monica. Milne, however, up on the flying bridge and able to look down and judge the sense of panic in Turner’s movements, grabbed a pair of binoculars and looked through them. It was immediately clear that Turner had not been attacked by cramp because he had begun to swim back to the boat with a stylish crawl. Milne visually searched the surrounding sea, remembering the authenticated stories of great white sharks in the Mediterranean; he made ready to start the motors, accepting that should this be a shark attack, he’d never get the boat under way in time. He picked out something that floated so close to the surface that from time to time parts of it broke through to become clearly visible. For a while he could not identify what it was; when he did, he swore.

  * * *

  Few moments were filled with such blissful satisfaction as when, on a boiling Saturday afternoon, having dined and wined to perfection, and taken a little more brandy as a digestif, one retired to the bedroom, stripped off and lay down on the bed, knowing one did not have to return to the office, shut one’s eyes and allowed one’s mind to go walkabout. Image drifted into image, each becoming that little more abstract …

  Downstairs, the phone rang.

  Jerked awake, Alvarez cursed the caller with all the crude viciousness of which Mallorquin was capable. As the ringing continued, he wondered why Dolores was not hurrying downstairs. Should he stir himself to go along the corridor and hammer on her bedroom door to alert her … The ringing ceased.

  He reached across to adjust the fan slightly so that the draught of air struck higher up his side, snuggled his head down on the pillow. He was just about to fall asleep when the phone rang again. Clearly, after it had automatically disconnected because the call had not been answered, the fool at the other end had dialled again …

  Footsteps passed his door. Dolores had at last decided to go down. He hoped she would, despite her present sunny humour, tell the caller what she thought of someone who rang during the siesta …

  The bang on the door was so unexpected – he had not heard her return upstairs – that he started. ‘It’s for you,’ she called out.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  There was no answer.

  Reluctantly, he sat up, swivelled round, stood, put on his trousers – she insisted that no member of the house walked around in underclothes – and went downstairs.

  ‘It’s the post…’

  He interrupted the speaker. ‘What’s the idea of phoning at this time of the afternoon?’

  ‘Have to do my duty, you lazy bastard.’

  ‘It’s Agustin, isn’t it? I’ll see you get a conduct report that has you spending the next ten years in some godforsaken village in the centre of Andalucia.’

  ‘You reckon the teniente will listen to anything you have to say?… The port’s just been through. A motor cruiser’s come into harbour to say they’ve sighted a body floating five kilometres off the bay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So they marked it with a buoy and now you can go out and help recover it.’

  ‘My job can’t start until the body’s landed.’

  ‘If they made a mistake and dropped you off at the pearly gates, you’d wait for St Peter to open ’em.’

  ‘Each man to a job; each job to a man.’

  * * *

  The open fishing boat, built to traditional design, approached the curving shore midway between the port and the small, ugly holiday village – a point of the bay where there was the least likelihood of there being any tourists. The helmsman put the single-cylinder diesel into neutral, then reverse, to cut the boat’s way and prevent her running her bows on to the shingle. Two cabos, trousers rolled up, cursing everything and everybody, waded out, lifted up a body-bag and carried it ashore.

  If there were anything Alvarez disliked more than looking at death, he could not readily name it; to look at it was to see the image of one’s own precarious mortality, to be reminded that even that brief prick of pain as one had climbed out of bed could be the first call to join the victim. Mentally bracing himself, he pulled back the edge of the bag until he could gain a clear view of the face. Death was often described as merciful; its aftermath never was. He recognized Lewis from the passport photograph, but it required a considerable degree of imaginative reconstruction to do so.

  CHAPTER 13

  On the Tuesday, Alvarez returned to the post to be informed by the duty cabo that the Institute of Forensic Anatomy had telephoned and wanted him to call back. He went up the stairs, into his office, and sat. After he’d regained his breath, he dialled Palma.

  ‘The cause of death was drowning,’ said Professor Fortunato’s assistant. ‘There can be no doubt about that with all the classical signs present – ballooning of the lungs, marked congestion and cyanosis in the right side of the heart, microscopic diatomaceous matter in the air passages and stomach. That he drowned in salt water is evidenced by the fact that the chloride content in the left heart is higher than in the right. But we do have a query as to whether he suffered an assault before death.’

  Alvarez drew in his breath sharply. ‘How strong a query?’

  ‘There’s the rub. The temperature of the sea has meant decomposition has taken place quite quickly and there’s been considerable damage from fish. If you’d like the details…’

  ‘Thank you, just the conclusions,’ he replied quickly.

  ‘There are two lines of bruising on the back. Unfortunately, we cannot determine whether these were caused before or immediately after death. As you know, floating debris often batters bodies in the sea through wave or wind action and this is probably the most likely explanation. However, there is one interesting thing about the bruising – the lines are parallel, some thirty centimetres apart. It calls for quite a coincidence for two objects floating in the water to strike the body either at the same or different times at angles parallel to each other.

  ‘On the other hand, it’s difficult to envisage an offensive weapon that consists of two bars thirty centimetres apart – very clumsy. Of course, there remains the possibility that two separate blows were struck by an attacker, but that recalls the problem of the bruises being parallel. Could be a coincidence; they do happen.’

  With disconcerting frequency. ‘Assume these bruises were caused by a blow, would they have knocked Lewis to the ground?’

  ‘Hard to answer. The best I can offer is that he would at least have had a job to keep his bal
ance.’

  ‘Would they have incapacitated him?’

  ‘I doubt it. That is, unless in falling he suffered further damage.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of any?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘In a nutshell, you can’t say with any certainty what did happen?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Sorry about that, but the state of the body makes it impossible. After several days in the water at the height of summer…’

  ‘It’s anybody’s guess,’ Alvarez cut in, wondering again why pathologists seemed always so keen to pass on the grislier details of their work. He thanked the other, rang off. He scratched the side of his nose as he stared through the window at the blank wall of the building on the opposite side of the road. On its own, the evidence he had just been given was as ambiguous as previous evidence. But if he could show that even one part of it was unambiguous …

  He drove down to the port, parked, and went into the office of Gomila y Hijos. The young woman was again painting her nails and she again viewed him with disdain, plainly not remembering who he was. He reminded her.

  ‘What is it this time?’ she asked.

  ‘Is the Aventura still in port?’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Perhaps you could be very kind and stop work long enough to check,’ he said with sarcastic politeness.

  Sullenly, she tapped out instructions on the keyboard and the information came up on the VDU. ‘No one has chartered it, so it must be here.’

  ‘A boat is always feminine.’

  ‘Because it’s beautiful,’ she said, and giggled.

  Although the distance was so short, he drove to the eastern arm of the harbour and parked as near to the Aventura as he could go. In such heat, unnecessary exercise was dangerous.

  He had forgotten the gangplank. He swallowed repeatedly, called on St Christopher, and finally, eyes firmly fixed high above the yawning hell beneath him and despite the terrible, perverse temptation to look down, boarded.