Murder Begets Murder

The English community on Mallorca were sorry for William Heron. The reclusive, wealthy invalid had come to the island accompanied by his mistress, and now there were indications that while he lay dying, she was carrying on with another man. So no one mourned when it was discovered that instead of leaving the island, as she had planned to do, shortly after his funeral, she had died alone in the house from food poisoning.

Roderic Jeffries’s crime novels have established themselves steadily, and will do so yet more firmly with this book.

Murder Begets Murder

By the same author

TROUBLED DEATHS

TWO-FACED DEATH

MISTAKENLY IN MALLORCA

DEAD
MAN’S
BLUFF

A
TRAITOR’S
CRIME

A
DEADLY MARRIAGE

DEATH IN THE COVERTS

DEAD
AGAINST
THE LAWYERS

AN
EMBARRASSING
DEATH

THE BENEFITS
OF
DEATH

EXHIBIT NO.
THIRTEEN

EVIDENCE OF
THE ACCUSED

RODERIC
JEFFRIES

Murder
Begets

Murder

St. Martin’s Press

New York

Copyright © 1979 by Roderic Jeffries

All rights reserved. For information, write:

St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10010

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jeffries, Roderic.

Murder begets murder.

I. Title.

PZ4.J473Mu [PR6060.E43] 823’.9‘14 79-5108

ISBN 0-312-55288-2

Babs Browning braked to go from the tarmac road to the dirt track, then drove very carefully in first gear, avoiding most of the potholes but not all. She passed a man ploughing between two rows of orange trees with a mule and a single furrow plough and it pleased her to think that a traveller of centuries ago would have seen very much the same scene, even the design of the plough not having changed.

The dirt track turned sharp left past an outbuilding and here her nose informed her that part of the building was used to house pigs. Someone had once told her that the Mallorquins would only clean out their animals on certain Saints’ days because to do so at any other time was to risk having the evil eye cast on those animals: for her money, the smell was the greater danger.

The track turned sharp right at the large estanqui and leading from this was the drystone wall of the terracing down which grew trailing geraniums, one of which bore large variegated pink and white flowers. She stopped the car, climbed out, and carefully nipped off a cutting. Then she saw a bush of wild marjoram, a herb used extensively in local cooking, and she helped herself to some of that. She returned to the car and drove to the end of the dirt track and on to the concrete apron which bordered the lean-to garage and the roughly surfaced patio of Ca’n Ibore.

Along the front of the house was a stone ledge, three-­quarters of a metre high, half a metre deep, on which were several pots of geraniums. Their leaves, she noticed, were shot with yellow and their: growth was pinched.

There were two sets of front doors, one old and one new. The two old doors were made from solid wood which time and weather had pitted, ribbed, and greyed: the long, thick hinges of rusty iron, fastened by hand-made nails, could have hung doors three times the size and weight; there was a cat hole with swinging flap. The new door, recessed, was glass for half its height and utilitarianly ugly. She knocked briskly on one of the glass panels, turned the handle, pushed the door open and stepped into the hall.

‘Betty, it’s Babs.’

There was no reply.

‘Hullo, hullo, anyone at home?’ Betty must be in, surely, since the car was in the lean-to garage.

She heard a sound from behind the nearer of the closed doors on her left. ‘Are you in there, Betty? I’m out here, in the hall.’

There was another sound, which she first identified as a whisper but then dismissed this as a ridiculous idea. After a while, the nearer door opened and Betty Stevenage stepped out into the hall, carefully closing the door behind her. She was wearing a gaily patterned cotton dress which did up the front and the top two buttons were undone. Babs looked at the undone buttons, at Betty’s flushed face and tousled hair, and finally at her eyes. Babs was a woman of experience and had always prided herself on being able to accept the world as it was, but she was shocked by the certainty that Betty had just been with a man.

‘D’you want something?’ Betty asked thickly.

Babs liked to help other people, but this didn’t stop her usually saying exactly what she thought. But for once she controlled her tongue. ‘I came to see how Bill is and if there’s anything I can do for you?’

‘There’s nothing I want.’

‘You haven’t said how Bill is,’ she snapped.

‘The doctor says he can’t last much longer.’

‘I shouldn’t pay much attention to that. Doctors are always pessimistic to try to keep their reputations intact.’ Betty was plainly indifferent to that comforting suggestion.

‘Well, if there’s nothing I can do, I’ll go,’ Babs said. She crossed to the front door and opened it, then paused. She half turned. ‘All those pot plants outside need fertilizing. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it.’

As she returned into the sunshine, warm considering it was early in the year, she realized that she not only felt angry, she also felt degraded, as if she had just taken part in something nasty. But that was quite ridiculous.

She began to walk towards the car, head held high, when she noticed that one of the geraniums was the deep red colour for which she’d been searching for some time: she was surprised she had missed it on her arrival. She nipped off a cutting.

Driving back along the dirt track, she angrily wondered how any woman could become so lost to all standards of normal decency as to be unfaithful to a man who lay dying in an upstairs room?

After the sixth glass of wine at a wedding luncheon, Enrique Alvarez usually found himself sadly wondering how long the bride and bridegroom’s starry-eyed happiness could possibly last.

There was a loud cheer and he looked the length of the dining-room at the top table where the bride, groom, and their respective parents sat. The groom was holding up a white sheet. Proud the bride these days who had the right to smile demurely when that sheet was held up!

‘Cheer up, Enrique,’ said Francisca, who sat opposite him on the far side of the wooden trestle table.

His cousin, Dolores, laughed. ‘He always looks miserable until the coñac comes round.’ She turned to her left.

‘Juan, if you eat any more of that pudding you’ll be sick: that’s your third helping.’

‘It’s my fourth,’ replied her son boastfully. ‘Uncle didn’t want his so he gave it to me.’ He dug his spoon into the caramel custard.

‘Let him carry on,’ said Francisca. ‘After all, it’s a wedding. . .’

Alvarez refilled his glass and passed the bottle of red wine across to Jaime, who emptied it into his glass before Dolores could tell him he’d had enough. A waiter, sweating, dressed in open-necked white shirt, blue trousers, and a red cummerbund, began to clear away the dirty plates.

Alvarez lit a cigarette. There must, he thought, be three hundred people eating lunch. Yet the bride’s and groom’s parents, who’d had to pay for this, were ordinary people. How times had changed, thank God! When his parents had married, they had stopped work in the fields at midday, walked to their respective homes to change into the best clothes they possessed, driven into the town in a donkey cart, been married, and then, after changing back, returned to the fields to work until dusk.

Prosperity had eased people’s lives, but it had also destroyed some of their values. When there had been poverty, families had stayed together, neighbour had helped neighbour. Now, married children were no longer willing to have their elderly parents living with them and neighbour overcharged neighbour. Could there never be good without bad: must every coin have two faces?

There was more cheering. One of the groom’s friends was cutting his tie just below the knot. A professional photographer took a couple of flashlight photographs, then a third one of the two men cutting the two lengths of tie into dozens of small pieces.

A waiter, carrying four bottles, came to their table and Alvarez chose a brandy. The waiter, who knew him, filled his tumbler. A second waiter brought along a box of cigars and he took one and lit it. If, he thought, Juana­ Maria had lived there would have been no feast like this at their wedding because in those days, although the poverty had receded, people had still had to guard their pesetas: but the day would have been no less memorable.

Dolores put her hand on his arm. ‘Drink up, Enrique,’ she murmured, ‘and then have another one.’

He drank, grateful to her for her unspoken sympathy.

She was a woman of quick passion, but also of great emotional understanding. Jaime was a lucky man and obviously realized this because he endured his wife’s tantrums with, for a Mallorquin, great forbearance.

At the next table, young men were flirting with young women and making them giggle and blush. Years ago, men and women never tried to behave like that — and if they had, the women’s parents would soon have put a stop to such dangerous nonsense. An illegitimate child was a sin beyond understanding. But these days, even in the streets of Llueso, one saw slips of women wheeling prams in which lay their little bastards. They might act as if it were nothing, but surely in their secret minds they must wish times had not changed so that they had not been exposed to temptation.

Juan and Isabel repeatedly asked to be allowed to see their friends who were at a table half-way along the huge room and Dolores eventually said all right, but if they got their new clothes dirty there’d be an infinity of trouble. Isabel, already pert, with flashing dark brown eyes and her mother’s jet black hair and beautiful oval face, promised with a saucy grin that they’d be careful. They left.

Francisca leaned forward. ‘Now they’ve gone out of hearing, I can tell you.’ She had a small, round face, full of warm good humour but very lined so that there was no mistaking the fact she had known a hard life: her husband had suddenly died after they had been married only six years, leaving her to bring up their son on her own.

‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’ She was a gossip, but most Mallorquins were.

‘I know,’ claimed Dolores. ‘Pedro’s being a fool and is insisting on marrying that gipsy woman of his?’

‘No, nothing like that. It’s to do with the English señor I work for at Ca’n Ibore. He’s been ill ever since he came to the island with that English señorita who lives with him.’

‘Isn’t she blonde and beautiful? You pointed her out to me one day in the square.’

‘I suppose some people might describe her like that,’ said Francisca disapprovingly. ‘Well, the other day she asked me to buy some pills for the señor: the doctor had told her she must try new ones to see if they would be better. She asked me to buy them and bring them to the house next day. I bought them and went to work for the French señorita in the afternoon and then I began to worry more and more. If the doctor had said the señor must try new pills, why hadn’t the señorita driven into the village and brought them back immediately?’ Francisca’s voice became still more disapproving. ‘Well, I worried so much for the poor señor that after I’d got Miguel’s supper I bicycled up to the finca so he could have the pills: if she didn’t really care about the poor señor, I certainly did! When I got to the finca I propped my bike up against the side of the garage and walked across the patio. That’s when I heard them.’ She stopped, with histrionic timing.

‘Heard who?’ asked Dolores.