An Artistic Way to Go (18 page)

‘It is early days…'

‘I am tempted to point out that whenever you are concerned, it is perpetual night.'

‘I know it looks rather confused at the moment, but I do have the feeling that –' The line went dead.

He poured himself a third brandy. He should have remembered that the superior chief had an irrational dislike of ‘feelings'. What he had been going to say was that he had the feeling there was one central pivot to this case and once that was identified, all the questions would be answered. He would not have added that at the moment he had not the slightest idea, not even a ‘feeling', as to what the pivot could be.

CHAPTER 19

Something obviously was wrong. Having called him once, Dolores had forgotten to do so a second and third time and so now he was going to be late for work. And although she had remembered to go out and buy a couple of ensaimadas for his breakfast, she had not made him hot chocolate until he'd reminded her. He surreptitiously studied her, wondering how seriously life would be disrupted if by some malignant chance she were ill …

‘You'll have to say something to him,' she said suddenly and violently.

He'd been about to eat a piece of ensaimada. He held it in front of his mouth as he waited.

‘How can I have married such a man. At his age!'

The anger, the bewilderment, the hint of helplessness, led him to the obvious conclusion. Curiosity made him consider the possibilities. Bárbara? Leonor?

‘He'll have a heart attack.'

That, surely, was the happiest of ways to die.

‘He'll be beaten black and blue.'

Sado-masochism?

‘He'll drink himself incapable.'

He tried to offer her some slight consolation. ‘That might not be such a bad thing.'

‘How can you speak such stupidity?'

He was taken aback by her fierce response. ‘Well, it's like this – if he drinks too much, he won't be able to … you know.'

‘I do not know.'

‘At his age, drinking too much makes it impossible. And that'll bring the affair to a sudden end.'

‘Mother of God, you are telling me that Jaime has become mixed up with another woman?'

‘It's you who's said he is.'

‘Puta!' she shouted. ‘I'll name her dishonour in every street. Who is she?'

Jaime stepped into the kitchen and, as always failing to discern in time what was the prevailing atmosphere, said belligerently: ‘What the hell's all the noise about?'

‘Do you, then, expect me to whisper?' she demanded.

‘No, but there's no need to shout.'

‘You think there is no fire in my belly?' She dropped her voice and spoke with all the hissing venom of a striking mamba. ‘There is fire enough for me to rip off your cojones so that a woman has only to look at you to laugh!'

Jaime said wildly to Alvarez: ‘What the hell have you been telling her?'

‘Only trying to point out that if you are mixed up with another woman and drink too much…'

‘Me with another woman?'

‘Who is she?' she demanded.

‘I don't know why you're going on like this.'

‘If I find out you're lying…'

‘For God's sake, you've said what you'd do. I swear I've not so much as looked at anyone else.'

She stared at Alvarez through lowered lids. ‘You told me he had a woman.'

‘I thought that was what you were telling me.'

‘I said he is to be a Moor.'

Language could complicate far more easily than it could explain. ‘Look, I'm sorry, but I misunderstood what you were talking about. That's why I said…'

‘Bloody fools like you should learn to keep your mouths shut,' Jaime said bitterly.

She placed her hands on her hips. ‘You are pleased to call Enrique a bloody fool? You are twice the bloody fool he could ever be. It is not he who agrees to be a Moor; who will visit every bar in the village because the drinks will be free; who will end up a sodden, incapable wreck.' She paused. ‘Men!' she shouted, making them start. ‘When God made Adam, He made a terrible mistake.' She lowered her hands, marched out of the kitchen.

‘And you've made my day,' Jaime muttered.

‘How was I to know she was on about you being a Moor for the fiesta? From the way she was worrying, I thought you'd found yourself a nymphomaniac.'

‘In Llueso? You're even dafter than I thought.' His tone was angry, resentful, and a shade regretful.

*   *   *

A résumé of the postmortem report was telephoned through soon after ten.

The victim had died from a series of blows to the head which had fractured the skull, due to its inherent weakness (bearing out Dr Pons's judgement), and caused serious intracranial haemorrhage. It was possible that the victim had suffered a period of unconsciousness before death intervened; it was even conceivable that he had briefly regained consciousness (there were well-documented cases where this had happened).

The many blows had been delivered by an assailant facing the victim; the blows had been continued as the victim fell and at least a couple had been delivered once he was on the ground, suggesting either a grim determination or a measure of loss of self-control. It was probable that the weapon had not been of a very substantial nature and had in part or whole been made of wood (a sliver of varnished wood had been embedded in one of the wounds; this had been sent to the laboratory for further investigation, but it was doubtful that anything of importance would be determined from it).

The assailant would have been stained with the victim's blood and, probably, body tissue.

After the call was over, Alvarez considered what he had just learned. Not all that much. But at least he could now be certain that the murderer had taken the weapon away with him.

*   *   *

The phone rang as he was wondering whether Dolores would have pulled herself together sufficiently to prepare a decent lunch.

‘My name's Gore,' a man said in English.

‘Yes, señor?'

‘I've been wondering whether to phone. I mean, I may be drawing a long bow, if you know what I mean?'

‘If you will give me the details, señor, I shall be able to judge.'

‘Yes, of course. Only … To be perfectly frank, I'd prefer it if people didn't learn what I'm going to tell you. They'd start to think, especially as we've had to stop employing our daily because she demanded a thousand two hundred an hour. That's a lot of money; more than they'd pay at home. When we first came here, it was forty an hour and that was being generous. Everything's changed so. I can remember…'

‘What have you to tell me?'

‘The fact is, I borrowed money. If they learned that, some of the people we know would start to think we've run into serious financial problems and would begin to cold-shoulder us.'

‘You borrowed money from whom?'

‘Mark this, it was only to help over a rough patch. Our son was made redundant and what with the new baby, things became very difficult for him so we gave him all our reserve cash. Then one of the firms in which I'd a lot of shares went bust and that capital's been lost. It was weighing on my mind so much that I found myself telling him about it. Usually keep such things to myself, of course; not done to bother others with these matters. Had a few and that didn't help. Anyway, he offered to lend me some money.'

‘Who are you talking about?'

‘Oliver Cooper. Didn't I say?'

‘No, señor, you didn't,' Alvarez replied, suddenly interested in what was being said.

‘I refused. Neither a lender nor a borrower be, if your friend you wish to see. But Oliver said it wouldn't be an interest-free loan, it would be a commercial one. I still didn't want to touch it, but the good lady wife said I was being stupid because it would be no different from borrowing from a bank. And we did have to find some extra money to tide us over if we were to maintain our social position.'

‘How much did you borrow?'

‘Two thousand pounds.'

‘And why exactly are you telling me this?'

‘Because of what happened when he gave me the cheque. He looked at me as if … As if he were sneering at me because having to borrow made me so much less of a man than he. So what I've been wondering since I heard about the terrible murder is if he lent someone else money and they realized he was jeering at them and this made them so angry they killed him … I just thought I ought to tell you.'

Amateur psychologists so often blossomed in murder cases. Trying to sound grateful, Alvarez said: ‘Thank you, señor.'

‘Just wanted to help. He wasn't the friendliest of men, but murder's murder … By the way, to whom will I have to repay the money?'

‘Whoever inherits the estate.'

‘That'll be Rachael. But as I told him when he phoned and wanted the money then and there, it's going to take time to repay it all because it's got to come out of future income. But repay it all I will, no one need think twice on that score.'

‘When did he phone you to ask for repayment?'

‘Wednesday. When he said who he was, I told him he could quote Mark Twain. Didn't understand what I meant, but then he sounded in one hell of a rush and in a very emotional state. Not surprising, really. I tried to ask him what had happened, of course, but all he'd say was that there'd been a terrible mistake.'

‘Can you say what the time was when he phoned you?'

‘A couple of minutes before eleven. Which made it really rather ridiculous to think I could find two thousand, plus interest, at that time of night.'

‘Eleven at night?'

‘That's right.'

‘Impossible!'

‘But I can be quite certain. We always go to bed reasonably early and there was a film starting at eleven so I was waiting to start recording it – I've never mastered how to work time-record. They say that people of my age seldom do because we haven't a gismo intelligence. So when the phone rang and there were only a couple of minutes to go, and the lady wife was already upstairs, I started the recording. It turned out to be rather a stupid film.'

‘You are quite certain the caller was Señor Cooper?'

‘Not a shadow of doubt. Recognized the voice immediately. Added to which, who else could know I'd borrowed the two thousand from him?'

Cooper had been alive at least one and a half hours later than the time at which he had, until now, been presumed to have died …

‘I thought I had to tell you about the way he'd behaved, despite
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
and all that. One owes a greater duty to justice than to one's friends. Wouldn't you agree?'

Gore's conscience needed reassurance. ‘Señor, that is absolutely correct. It was very right of you to tell me this.'

‘I'm so glad of that. It's difficult, but there are times when one has to forget the injunction against sneaking.'

Only the English could, in the course of a murder investigation, concern themselves with the ethics of sneaking. The Spanish, along with most continentals, were brought up on the art of denouncing. Alvarez made a note of Gore's address, thanked him for his help, rang off.

It was ironic that Gore believed his evidence about Cooper's attitude was material, while that concerning the timing of the phone call was totally irrelevant …

Get but one figure in a complicated mathematical calculation wrong and the result had to be incorrect. Work to the wrong time of death and the investigation had at best to be flawed, at worst, useless. When Salas heard about this, he would talk about crass, arrant, gross incompetence. But it wasn't really. He'd always worked to the best information available. Dr Pons had estimated the time of death at between nine and twelve. Because the smashed watch had shown 9.23, it had been logical to accept the further judgement that this marked the actual time when the injuries had been inflicted. Now he knew that death had not taken place then, he had to accept that all the alibis for 9.23 were immaterial … Or were they? The assistant at the Institute of Forensic Anatomy had mentioned the possibility that death had followed unconsciousness. Could the blows have been struck at 9.23 and the assailant, not intending death – as the medical evidence surely could suggest? – have left, believing Cooper would recover? Then he indeed had recovered consciousness, only to die some time after 11.00? Yet unless dazed beyond all reason, he would have called for help. And if that dazed, he must have sounded confused when he'd telephoned Gore which clearly he had not; indeed, was it really conceivable that in such circumstances his overriding concern would be to have demanded that his loan be repaid?

He was completely missing something. Something, he was certain, that had raised half a question in his mind at the time, but had then been forgotten because it had been only half … The watch glass! What was the make of watch? One of the luxury ones … Rolex? Audemars-Piguet?… Cotti.

He rang Inquiries, who automatically refused to search out the telephone number of Cotti's headquarters in Switzerland until he said it was police work.

The PRO at Cotti spoke near-perfect English. He said, with smooth, irritating Swiss superiority, that the glass used in the company's watches was of the most superior quality and would never shatter if a person fell.

‘But it might have been a defective glass?' he unwisely suggested.

He had to listen to a long lecture on quality control.

After the call was over, he assembled his thoughts. The watch had not marked the time when Cooper had been struck down. The glass had been smashed in order to suggest the wrong time of death, thereby enabling the murderer to create an alibi. Field had had no alibi, to fake so elaborate a one was surely beyond Serra's wit (and how could he have known Cooper was alive and in the house?). So only Rachael and Burns, and White, remained as suspects.