Murder Begets Murder (16 page)

The carriage clock, made in France but bought in Palma, struck eleven o’clock. Denise yawned. ‘I’m for bed. How about you?’

Roldán, now wearing a silk shirt and grey flannels, just went on reading a medical journal.

She stood up. ‘Did I remember to tell you that Emilio and Rosa have asked us to dinner on Saturday?’

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked shortly.

‘Is tomorrow Saturday? No, it can’t be for then so it must be Saturday week.’

‘Can’t you ever get anything right the first time?’

She looked at him, wondering again what was worrying him so much. For some days now he’d obviously been under considerable strain, yet when she’d tried to talk to him about it he had refused to discuss the matter.

She spoke gaily, as if she’d noticed nothing. ‘Ricky, when I was in Palma this afternoon I saw a shop in he Borne with a most beautiful ivory fan. It was hand painted and the outside plates were chased silver.’ He finally looked up. ‘How much was it?’

‘ Only thirty thousand and I bet they’d come down five thousand if one bargained.’

He was about to say they couldn’t afford it because they’d been spending so much recently, but then he saw the expression on her face. He nodded. She rushed across and kissed him.

‘You are wonderful! I’ll put it in my case of nick-nacks, on the second shelf. When it’s spread out, it’ll look absolutely lovely . . . Or maybe I’ll change things round a bit first.’

‘Again?’

She laughed. ‘Half the fun of having a collection is to keep moving everything around. It makes all the pieces so much more alive. Come on through to the other room and let’s try altering things a bit now. Maybe you’ll have one of your brainwaves.’

‘I thought you were tired and were off to bed?’

‘I’ve woken up.’

He shook his head. ‘I must finish this article.’

‘You’re getting far. too serious, Ricky. It’s time you took me dancing, so let’s go out tomorrow evening?’

‘If we don’t discover we’re meant to be somewhere you’ve forgotten all about.’

‘Stop acting so superior. You’d get everything totally confused if it weren’t for your precious Vestal Virgin. D’you think she really is so belligerently pure as she looks?’

‘You’ve asked me that over and over again and every time I give you the same answer: I don’t know.’

The phone rang.

‘Blast!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look at the time. If that’s a patient, I’ll tell ‘em to wait until tomorrow morning before becoming sick.’

‘It’s all right, I’ll go and get the call.’ He dropped the magazine on to the floor.

‘Stay right where you are. I know you. You’ll agree to rush out if it’s just some old biddy with a bit of a headache. If I answer the call I can find out if anything’s really wrong.’

He watched her leave the room. Since he had married her, he had not bedded another woman. That was the measure of his love for her.

The nearest telephone was in the room which the receptionist — the Vestal Virgin — used as an office. Denise entered and crossed to the small desk. She lifted the receiver. ‘Doctor Roldán’s house.’

A man, his voice strained, said hoarsely in English: ‘There’s been an awful accident. My wife’s bleeding terribly. The doctor’s got to come immediately. Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion.’

Denise, to help her husband, had learned English.

‘Please, what kind of accident — ‘ But as she spoke the connection was cut.

She returned to the sitting-room. ‘It was for you, darling, and not a headache this time. A man who lives in Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion says his wife’s had a bad accident and is bleeding seriously.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘He never gave it. I tried to get some details, but he was in such a state he just rang off.’

He hurried into the hall, where he always kept his black pigskin case. As he picked this up, he called out: ‘If the woman needs an injection, Sister Teresa’s on duty tonight.’ As a doctor, he did not give injections. ‘If it’s emergency surgery, I’ll ring you to get the room ready.’ He left the house, backed his car out of the garage, and drove through the narrow streets to the main Palma­ Puerto road. At the traffic islands he went straight across and then up the road past the football pitch.

At the first cross-roads within the urbanizacion there were a number of signboards, bearing the names of houses and arrows to indicate in which direction those houses lay. He slowed right down and in the light of the headlights saw that Ca’n Asped was to the left.

The road rose steeply and at the T junction, where he had to turn right, he dropped down to first gear. He accelerated fiercely after the turn, up the road which zig­-zagged its way up the side of the mountain. The views from here were dramatic and the costs of building very high — only the rich lived in this area, he thought, with quiet satisfaction.

The road made a hairpin left-hand turn, so sharp that he only just managed to get round in one lock, then rose still more precipitously. Holidaymakers’ homes, he thought: access was too difficult for a resident. The woman might well bleed to death because either she or her husband had wanted to live with a view.

There was a large house, set below the level of the road on the left-hand side, and even at night it was possible to judge the amount of work which had been involved merely to. blast out level space for the foundations. There was enough moonlight for him to be able to make out a swimming pool, which must have had to be built up at least a couple of metres. Money had obviously been no object.

The drive led off the road, but when he turned into this he found a raised chain drawn across the track to prevent access. He swore. Why in the hell hadn’t the husband had the sense to come out and take the chain down? And why weren’t there any outside lights on to help him? He picked up a torch as well as his bag, left the car, and walked down the drive, steep enough to make him careful of his balance.

He hammered on the panelled front door. The seconds passed and nothing happened. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. Could this be the wrong house? But no sooner had he asked himself this than he saw, in the torchlight, a glazed stone set in the wall to the right of the door on which was the name Ca’n Asped. Then, tragically, were there two Ca’n Aspeds in the urbanizacion? He hammered again, much more violently.

The house remained silent and blacked out. He hurried to his left, passing the garage, and came to the edge of the levelled area, guarded by a low wall. From here he could see that there were no lights on in any of the rooms on that side of the house.

If a mistake had been made — either by the man who had phoned or by Denise — then a woman might be dying. But in truth was there no emergency and had someone been playing a practical joke? Some of the locals were stupid enough, and envious enough . . . But wouldn’t Denise have noticed the accented English . . . ?

It was now virtually impossible to believe this house was occupied and there had been a serious accident in it. Nevertheless he hammered on the front door for a third time in case the husband had panicked into stupidity. When there was still no movement, he returned to his car. How to discover whether there was another Ca’n Asped in the urbanizacion? Or how to identify the bloody fool of a practical joker?

He started the engine, backed on to the road, and went down, accelerating hard, venting some of his anger and frustration by driving even faster than he usually did. He remembered on the way up passing a house which had been ablaze with lights and in front of which had been parked half a dozen cars — he could ask there if anyone knew of a second Ca’n Asped.

He braked for the very sharp hairpin bend and the pedal went straight down to the floor. For a part of a second he disbelieved his own senses, as the engine note rose on the over-run, then he pumped the pedal up and down. The brakes still failed to work. He tried to change down to first to use the lower gear as a brake, but when he went to slam the gear lever home he discovered that now the car was going too fast. He wrenched the wheel over to ram the rock face, but he had left it too late. The tail came round in a vicious skid and he tried to correct the skid with opposite lock, but this lurched him over to the out­ side of the bend.

As the car went over the unguarded edge and began the first of a series of sickening roll-overs, he thought of Denise. He hadn’t fixed his safety-belt and was thrown sideways, to feel pain begin to spear his side. Then the car upended and he was thrown against the windscreen and steering-wheel, losing consciousness immediately.

In his office, Alvarez read the Telex message which had just been brought to him: ‘Originator, Detective Inspector Fletcher. Eighth July, eleven hundred hours. Probate Monica Heron granted sixteenth October, confirm two hundred and fifty-three thousand four hundred and sixteen pounds fifty-three pence. All accounts belonging Heron emptied October twentieth. Nothing more known.’

Two hundred and fifty-three thousand pounds (unlike Fletcher, he found it much easier to round off the figure) which had virtually disappeared.

He heaved himself to his feet and crossed to the very old and battered filing cabinet. In one of the drawers there should be a parcel with all the papers which had been found in Ca’n Ibore after the death of Señorita Stevenage. He checked through the muddle, eventually found what he wanted, and returned to the desk.

Bills, receipts, a cash book, a cheque book and several books of cheque stubs, bank statements . . . But no letters, address book, diary, or any papers of a purely personal nature.

He read through the bank statements and the cheque stubs. The picture was exactly as the bank manager had presented it. Thirty thousand pesetas paid into, and about thirty thousand withdrawn from, the account each month.

So where was the two hundred and fifty-three thousand and all the interest this must be making? In an account in another country? Surely some reference to that account would have been left behind by heron, but there was no reference among these papers. Yet after the death of Heron, Betty Stevenage had paid into her own account (the one she had opened after emptying the joint account) one sum of thirty thousand pesetas, so she must have known of a source of money which she. could tap. And where did the thirty thousand regularly turn up from, when it had been shown that it had never come through any of the normal sources of cash? Neither Heron nor the señorita had left the island from the day they arrived . . . He sighed, looked at his watch, and was slightly comforted to discover that it was almost time for lunch. When he arrived home, Dolores was laying the table.

‘You’re better than an alarm clock, Enrique.’ She put a kilo loaf of bread on a board down on the table.

‘My uncle always told me, eat regularly and you’ll live to be old.’

‘Was that your Uncle Miguel? From all accounts he knew more about drinking regularly than eating regularly.’

‘Maybe. But he did live to be ninety-one. Though God knows if in the end he thought it worth the bother.’

She turned and stared at him, her dark eyes suddenly filled with concern. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’

‘I’m sick: sick of having a mind which goes round and round in circles and ends up by tripping over its own tail.

There are times when I wish I’d refused to go to Damian’s and Teresa’s wedding.’

She put her hands on her hips.’ What the hell are you on about? Have you been boozing?’

‘Not a drop all morning. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘Don’t take the risk!

He slumped down in a chair. ‘If I hadn’t gone to the wedding I wouldn’t have listened to Francisca and then life would have been so much simpler. Francisca talks far too much.’

‘Just because you’re out of sorts . . . She’s a wonderful cook and keeps that house of hers as clean as a new pin . . .’ He ceased to listen to a long list of Francisca’s virtues: when a woman talked too much nothing could compensate for that fact.

Jaime, Juan and Isabel came into the house together and the two children were having a shouted argument. Alvarez loved his family because it gave him an identity.

They had started the first course — a thick fish soup — when Dolores said: ‘I suppose you’ve heard about that dreadful accident last night?’

‘What accident?’ asked Alvarez.

‘I’d have thought someone would have told you! Dr Roldán was killed in a car smash last night.’

‘Sweet Mary!’ said Jaime automatically.

‘Rodriguez Roldán ?’ asked Alvarez.

‘The doctor who’s always dressed up like a tailor’s dummy and is married to that Frenchwoman who puts on such airs and graces.’

‘He’s always driven around like a maniac,’ said Jaime, ‘so it’s no wonder he’s had a smash. What happened?’

‘Margarita said he was up in the urbanizacion visiting a patient and drove right over the edge of the road. The car rolled over and over and he was crushed to death.’

How long ago was it, thought Alvarez, that he had called at Roldán’s house and had so envied him? Now he was dead and his wife was a widow . . . A man left his house a thousand times and returned a thousand times, then left it once more and did not return . . .

Alvarez could not sleep: every time he was about to drop off his mind suddenly became so active it jerked him awake once more. Finally he gave up the struggle, sat upright, rubbed his eyes, and then stood up and went round the desk to the window to open the shutters. The nearby church clock struck four. Moodily he stared down at the empty street which shimmered in the heat.

He could not forget the way Roldán’s wife had looked at Roldán that evening, only a week ago. Then, they had been two of the luckiest people in the world. Yet now . . . Feeling old and sad, he returned to the desk and used the internal phone to speak to the traffic section.

‘Yeah, the doe bought it last night, all right,’ said the man at the other end of the line. ‘He went straight off the road and by the time he reached the bottom he was flatter than a pancake.’

‘Was he tight?’

‘His wife says he’d had no more than one drink before the meal and a glass of wine with the meal. And from all accounts he wasn’t a real drinking man. The tests’ll tell us for sure, but at the moment it’s ten to one he was sober.’