Murder Begets Murder (13 page)

There was a slight bump, a change of engine note, and they were down and safe. He opened his eyes and looked out at the airport buildings, fronted by flowers. Home. Sunshine.

There was no one there to meet him, but he was neither surprised nor bothered, even though a Telex message had been sent through. Probably the Guardia detailed to come in and fetch him had forgotten . . . These things happened.

He went out of the main building and could feel the sunshine soaking through him, driving out the dismal damp which had accumulated over the past four days. He crossed to the waiting tourist buses and found one which was going to Puerto Llueso. The driver was asleep, sprawled out in one of the double seats and Alvarez sat on the other side of the gangway. He closed his eyes and gratefully let the world drift by.

When he walked into the house and Dolores saw him, she shouted= ‘You’re back!’ She rushed forward and hugged him. Then she stepped back. ‘But so pale and thin! They’ve been starving you. Thank God I’ve pre­pared a solid dinner. There’s beans and ham and after that chicken and rice with peppers and garlic . . .’

‘Say no more. By the time I go to bed I’ll have put on all the weight I’ve lost.’

Juan and Isabel entered the house and after their initial excitement waited with an expectation which was not disappointed. He gave Isabel a pair of gold ear-rings in the shape of horseshoes and Juan a working model kit of a tank. Jaime arrived half an hour later and after shaking hands and speaking a few warm words of greeting he hurried through to the dining-room and brought back two glasses filled with brandy.

‘You’re not going to drink all that before the meal,’ said Dolores belligerently.

‘When a man returns home,’ replied Jaime, ‘he needs a drink to clear his throat.’

‘But not one big enough to drown it.’ She was, however, smiling.

When Alvarez went up to his bedroom he opened the shutters which had been closed throughout the day to keep out the sun and he looked over the rooftops at Puig Antonia. The hermitage on the crown of the sugar loaf mountain, which housed the remains of Santa Antonia, was still just visible since dusk had not yet quite become night. Santa Antonia, he said silently, if I were not so old and short of breath I would climb up tomorrow to light a candle for you in thanks for bringing me safely back here to the people I love and who love me.

Alvarez dialled the Institute of Forensic Anatomy and then propped his feet up on the desk. A gecko looking round the outside corner of the window saw him and in one quick squiggle of movement disappeared.

When the connection was made, he asked to speak to Professor Fortunato.

‘What is it?’ asked a sharp, crackling voice which suggested a man of very small temper.

‘Señor, this is Inspector Alvarez from Llueso. I’m sorry to bother you, but because of something I’ve recently learned I’d very much like to ask you a question concerning the autopsy on Señorita Stevenage.’

‘Well — what’s the question?’

‘Señor, could the deceased have died from aconitine poisoning, not mytilotoxin poisoning? The reason for asking is that there’s now evidence to suggest this was possible.’

‘Wait, please, while I look at my file.’

He lit a cigarette. It would be ironic if he discovered that it was the Mallorquin post-mortem which had made the mistake.

‘Have you read the report?’

‘Of course, señor.’

‘I’ve nothing more to add to what I wrote then.’

‘Señor, I’ve just returned from England and over there I discovered that Señor Heron, the man with whom the señorita was living before he died from natural causes, had been married to a wealthy woman and she died last year from mytilotoxin poisoning. It seems to be too great a coincidence truly to be one. And while I was in England I learned that the symptoms of the two poisonings are similar.’

‘Did you there also learn that tests for aconitine poisoning are confined to biological assay dependant on the isolation of the aconite, which is destroyed by putrefaction?’

‘No, señor.’

‘Then before you again decide to question an expert’s findings, I suggest you make certain you have mastered your own brief.’

He replaced the receiver. Fool, he thought, meaning himself. According to the records, Señorita Stevenage had died a natural death. So why had he needlessly stirred up trouble? He let his head sink down on to his chest. What strange bubble of perversity could possess him? A belief in justice? But true justice was incapable of definition because it could only exist subjectively. A love of the truth? At times truth could hurt so much more than lies. So why . . . ?

Alvarez stepped into Francisca’s house and called out. She hurried into the entrance room. ‘I didn’t know you were back. Come on into the other room and pour yourself a drink and then tell me all about England. Is it like it is on the telly? Did you see the palace and the guards . . . ?’

He had one drink and then another and it was time for luncheon and by chance she had prepared a dish for Miguel which she knew was a favourite of his . . . He ate very well and after the meal she insisted he sat in the most comfortable chair in the sitting-room to digest.

It was after five when he awoke, to find Francisca sitting opposite him and embroidering a sheet. He hurried to his feet. ‘I must get moving fast.’

‘Why?’ she asked peacefully. ‘What will have turned up which can’t wait while you pause to clear your mind and drink a cup of coffee with a slice of sponge with angel’s hair jam to go with the coffee?’

‘Angel’s hair jam?’

‘That’s right.’ She looked artlessly at him. ‘Didn’t Dolores once tell me you’d something of a sweet tooth?’

Most things, he thought, as he sat down again and settled in the chair, sorted themselves out if only one left them alone to do so.

It was while he was eating his third slice of sponge cake that he said: ‘Francisca, you remember Señorita Stev­enage?’

‘What a peculiar question. But of course I remember her.’

‘Didn’t you once tell me that she’d had a dog?’

‘That’s right. It was really jolly, but had such long trailing hair it was always getting that awful grass stuck in it and what a job it was then to untangle its coat.’

‘Was she fond of it?’

‘It was absolutely ridiculous. When all’s said and done, a dog is only a dog, not a child. Yet she’d talk to it as if it were her only son and cuddle it in her arms . . . We can’t all be the same, which I suppose is just as well, but if I’d been her I’d have given more of my affection to the man I was living with and less to my dog.’

‘Have I got it right that the dog died very suddenly?’

‘I arrived at the finca one morning and there was the señorita, in floods of tears. I can remember thinking, so it’s happened at last. Well, the señor had finally found peace. Then I heard him calling from upstairs. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you: just like hearing a voice coming up from a grave. So when she came downstairs and the tears were still falling I said, “What is the matter, señorita? Has you dear father died?” And she told me it was the dog. All those tears were for that little dog!’

‘Did she know why it had died?’

‘She’d no idea. One moment it had seemed all right, the next it had been violently sick and unable to stand.’

‘Have you any idea what happened to the body?’

‘She told the gardener to bury it. I seem to remember there was even some form of tombstone.’

‘Who was their gardener?’

‘It was only old Rafael Yarza who came one morning a week. D’you know what he charged them? A hundred and ten pesetas an hour! And that was for leaning on his mattock and staring at the land. But they never seemed to worry that their money was just standing around, doing nothing.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘Somewhere along the Calle Mostet.’

‘Well, I really must be getting along now.’ He stood up.

‘Thanks for everything. I’ve eaten and drunk far too much.’

‘And had a bit of a sleep, which you needed more than anything else.’

He left and drove past shuttered houses to Calle Mostet, a narrow street without pavements which sloped quite steeply upwards. Some children were playing hop­ scotch and from one of the girls he learned which was Yarza’s house.

Yarza lived with his daughter and her family and from the way in which she spoke it was clear that at times his presence became resented. ‘Dad’s out at the back so if you want to talk to him you’d better go through. And tell him he left his stuff all over the front room again.’

He went through the kitchen and out to the courtyard. This was small, but the beds were filled with colour and in the centre were two orange trees, leaves dark green and the following winter’s crop thick on the branches.

For a Mallorquin, Yarza was a large man: he’d just begun to bow and shrink from age. He hadn’t shaved that day, but his clothes were clean, if darned, and his shoes were well polished. He studied Alvarez, but didn’t speak.

Alvarez examined the nearer orange tree. ‘What d’you do to the soil to get the trees to grow like this ?’

‘Plant ‘em over a dead cat and then give ‘em lots of dung, that’s what. None of them artificials.’ Yarza hawked and spat, showing his contempt for artificial fertilizers.

‘I’m from the Cuerpo General . . . ’

‘Bloody hell, d’you think I don’t know who you are?’

‘Then maybe you also know why I’m here?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’m interested in the dog which belonged to Señorita Stevenage.’

‘That? More like a ball of muddied wool than a dog; that thing never earned its grub.’

‘Francisca tells me it died very suddenly. I wondered if you knew why it died?’

‘It was ill, it died. Who ever knows any more than that?’

‘But it died so quickly and unexpectedly.’

‘Some animals die slow, some die quick. There ain’t nothing you can do about it.’

‘D’you think it could have been poisoned?’

He rubbed the lobe of his right ear with a thumb and forefinger which were horny with thick skin. ‘How would I know? If an animal’s dying d’you think I get down beside it and ask why?’

‘Where did you bury it?’

He hesitated, then said: ‘Out behind the house.’

‘Whereabouts outside?’

‘Back beyond the pig shed. I don’t remember exactly.’

‘You don’t remember?’ Alvarez said disbelievingly.

Yarza appeared to become wholly interested in one of the orange trees.

‘Let’s go to Ca’n Ibore and find out if you can do better than that. And bring a mattock.’

‘I can’t move on account of me bones are killing me.

The doe says I’m to rest.’

‘You can rest all you like as soon as we’ve found the grave.’

Yarza stared at Alvarez with dislike, then began to shuffle his way into the house.

They left the village by the eastern bridge, passing over the rocky, dry bed of the torrente, now partially overgrown with weeds although in January it had surged with deep flood water.

On the land behind Ca’n Ibore, where no one had ever cleared it, maquis scrub grew among boulders and outcrops of rock. As they came in sight of it, a goat, neck bell clanging unmusically, hurried away, movements ungainly because its legs were hobbled.

‘Where should we start looking?’ asked Alvarez.

‘I told you, I’ve forgotten.’

‘And I’m telling you that I’m not as simple as I look. If you’d planted half a dozen melon seeds in the middle of a wood you’d remember precisely where they were six months later. So come on, where did you bury the dog?’

‘I don’t remember.’

He was a peasant himself, but that didn’t stop him sometimes cursing a peasant’s stubbornness. He walked slowly along a narrow, winding path which had at some time been blasted through the scrub and rock. Yarza would have considered the job of burying the dog a ridiculous one and therefore he would have taken as little trouble over it as possible. He would have looked for an accessible pocket of earth, just deep enough . . . As he rounded an evergreen oak, Alvarez saw a small boulder in front of which was some earth in which was a small cross. On the cross, carefully carved, was the inscription: ‘Sandy’. He turned. ‘Was the dog called Sandy?’

‘What if it was?’

‘Then we’ve found the grave. So now you can dig up the body.’

Yarza used the mattock to scoop through the earth and it was soon clear that no dog had ever been buried there.

Alvarez took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it. When they were both smoking, he said: ‘All right, I now know why you didn’t want to tell me where the dog was supposed to be buried. So having got this far, you’d better tell me what you did do with the body.’

Yarza leaned on the handle of the mattock and smoked. After a while he cleared his throat and said: ‘She wanted me to bury him out here because that’s where he used to like to chase around. I tried to tell her, there ain’t enough earth to bury anything: it’s all rock. Wouldn’t listen. I wasn’t going to kill myself breaking up them rocks, so I told her I put it here. Knew she’d never check. She had the cross made in the village and I wedged it up in the earth. It made her happy.’

‘And what did you do with the body?’

‘Chucked it down a hole.’

‘Let’s see the hole.’

The mountains and foothills were limestone, honey-­combed by an unrecorded number of caves and holes: ten metres out from the shed through which they had earlier come was a fissure in the ground, shaped like a shield, three-quarters of a metre across at its greatest width.

‘They used to chuck their tins down there,’ said Yarza, for once volunteering information.

‘Look,’ said the younger Guard, as he stared resentfully down at the fissure in the ground, ‘I didn’t join the force to go and kill myself pot-holing.’

‘Don’t worry,’ replied Alvarez, tying a rope round the other’s waist, ‘I promise to see your mother gets your medal.’

‘Why don’t you bloody go down yourself if you want this stinking dog so badly?’

‘I’m too fat.’

‘Drink less booze.’

‘Come on, lad, you volunteered for the job.’

The second Guard laughed, making the first one swear.