Three and One Make Five (13 page)

‘Have to. The bloody firm makes me keep a log on what progress everyone makes and what standards they reach so that if they come out again I know all about ‘em. PR exercise, they call it: a bloody waste of time, I call it.’

‘How far do the records go back?’

‘The year dot, judging by the dust.’

‘I want to see them.’

There were many restaurants along the front at Playa del Xima and without exception they catered for the tourists: three roads back was a small dingy-fronted restaurant which catered for the locals—and those few tourists who had the wit to eat there—where the food was excellent and it cost only half as much.

Alvarez regretfully put the last forkful of suckling pig in his mouth. It was a dish which varied enormously in quality, even at the same restaurant, and this had been one to dream about. He swallowed, looked down at his now empty plate, and sighed. He emptied the last of the wine from the earthenware carafe into his glass.

The waiter came and cleared his plate and asked him if he wanted a sweet. He chose banana with almonds. When these came, he peeled the banana and ate it and the toasted almonds alternately, but for once his mind was far removed from the food.

The records had been in a rusty filing cabinet in one corner of the lock-up garage that was used to store the diving gear and an air-compressor. Forty minutes after starting, he’d found what he wanted. July 5th to 18th:

Simon Allen, Peter Short, James Marsh, and Roger Clarke. Clarke and Allen had been in the photo. Short had not. But he was assuming that there was some connection between them so this surely meant that it was logical to include Marsh and, probably Massier . . .

Assume he’d identified the five men in the conspiracy, three of whom had been murdered. Murdered for what? Their share of the loot? What loot? No unsolved crime on the island three years ago had yielded the kind of money that was involved here. And in any case, hadn’t he decided that, as amateurs, they couldn’t have carried out a successful crime in the normal sense of the word . . . ?

The waiter returned to the table. ‘D’you want anything more? A coñac?’

‘Make it a large one.’ Perhaps he could drown his sense of frustration. How many times now had he made some progress in the case, only to come up against the question: where had the money come from?

It was time to make an inspired guess, he thought as the waiter brought him a brandy. The four Englishmen had been from different backgrounds (at least, it seemed likely they had: nothing at all was yet known about Marsh), but one thing they’d obviously had in common had been a restricted budget—otherwise they’d have been on a more luxurious package. Massier had thrown up his job at the height of the season, when he’d have been making the money which would normally have kept him through the winter, so something suddenly and unexpectedly had happened to enrich him. The two events had to be connected. In other words, the source of Massier’s good fortune and theirs was the same. Taking that one stage further, since Massier had been an expert diver and they had come out on a diving holiday, what more likely than that they had discovered their fortune through diving?

Drugs, as he’d originally considered? Consignments of drugs were often dropped into the sea off the shore of the country into which they were to be smuggled, to be picked up later. Perhaps the five, when out diving, had found a considerable quantity of heroin or cocaine, had taken it ashore, and had subsequently sold it for large sums of money. Now, the men to whom it had been consigned but who had lost it, were extracting their revenge . . . But amateurs couldn’t peddle drugs and hope to escape attention and there’d been no reports of unusual drug activity . . .

The waiter came near the table. Alvarez ordered another coñac.

He drank slowly, irritated because some memory, important in the present context, was knocking at his mind but refusing to enter. Something he’d heard very recently . . . Of course! Garcia had said that the last time he’d seen Massier, Massier had been drinking with a man called Loco Llobera, a stinking old bag of rags. Yet Massier had been a very fastidious man, over-conscious of his appearance, and normally not the kind of person to consort with a tramp . . .

He called the waiter across.

‘Another coñac?’ asked the waiter, with the tired disinterest of someone who’d spent much of his life serving food and drink to people who ate and drank too much.

‘D’you know a man called Llobera: Loco Llobera?’

‘No, I don’t know him. On account of the fact that he died three years back.’

The guardia post had been built within the past couple of years so there were as yet few visible signs of structural decay and only one outer wall was cracked. Administrative quarters were to the front, living quarters to the rear. The office open to the public was to the left of the main entrance and here a guard sat and watched television, resenting any interruption.

‘Inspector Alvarez, Cuerpo General de Policia, from Llueso.’

The guard scratched his right ear.

Alvarez sat down on one of the chairs. ‘I want a rundown on a man called Llobera who died three years ago.’

‘I wasn’t posted here then,’ said the guard quickly.

‘But I expect you can find someone who was?’

The guard muttered something, waited until the commercials began on the television, then came to his feet and left. When he returned, he said: ‘The sergeant’ll be along,’ after which he slumped down in his chair and watched the television once more.

The sergeant was equally unfriendly, but there was nothing significant in this. Guards were never posted to the part of the country in which they’d been born and brought up, so none of them was an islander: like everyone from the Peninsula, they regarded the islanders as foreigners and disreputable ones at that.

‘I’m interested in a man who died three year ago—used to be known as Loco Llobera,’ said Alvarez.

‘I remember him,’ said the sergeant, slurring and swallowing his words in true Andalusian style.

‘What can you tell me about his death?’

‘What’s there to tell? He was as pissed as a newt and fell over the cliffs at Setray.’

‘The PM said he’d been tight?’

‘PM? Who needed a PM? There was an empty bottle to show what had been going on before he fell over and broke his neck. And done himself proud, too: a bottle of French cognac’

‘Had anyone seen him there, drinking?’

‘It sounds like you don’t know the cliffs at Setray?’

‘I don’t.’

‘They’re a couple of kilometres from anywhere.’

‘Then why was he there?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Didn’t anyone ask that question?’

‘If a drunk falls and kills himself, you don’t spend days investigating his death. There’s no call for that.’

‘What time of the year was this?’

‘End of August, beginning of September.’

‘There was never any suggestion it mightn’t have been an accident?’

‘No.’

‘How old was he?’

‘The family said he was sixty-four. To look at him, he was a hundred and sixty-four. Filthy old sod! I had to help carry the body round and up and I didn’t get the stink out of my nostrils for weeks.’

‘Why was he known as Loco Llobera?’

‘Why d’you think? He was crazy.’

‘In what way?’

‘How many ways are there? You’re either crazy or you aren’t . . . I did hear it was because he got a bullet in the head during the war.’

‘Was he dangerous?’

The sergeant laughed contemptuously. ‘Him! He was just soft: always giggling at nothing.’

‘D’you know if he did any scuba-diving?’

‘I know he hadn’t been near water in thirty years.’

‘What kind of family is left?’

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders.

‘But there was one three years ago. Could you get me their address?’

The sergeant said belligerently: ‘He died because he was so pissed he walked over the edge of the cliff. That’s all. So why keep asking so many questions?’

‘There’s a chance he didn’t fall, he was pushed.’

The sergeant walked past Alvarez, his expression angry. When a man’s death had officially been held to be accidental only a fool Mallorquin would ever start asking questions about it.

The finca lay two kilometres back from the beach. At the end of a short dirt-track, among small fields which were bounded by dry stone walls, was the house, squat, of the most elementary design, and in need of repair. Yet because it had been built with stones taken from the fields as these were cleared, with wood grown locally, and with roof tiles made of clay dug half a kilometre away, it was part of the countryside, something which a modern and superficially more attractive house could never be.

Alvarez parked alongside a pigsty in which several pigs were snorting and squealing. Come the winter, he thought as he climbed out of the car, and there would be a matanza with a pig slaughtered and the family and their friends preparing hams, sobrasada, butifarra, negro . . .

To the right of the house, a couple were working in the nearest field. He was dressed in beret, shirt, torn trousers and plimsolls, and was weeding with a small hand hoe. She was dressed in a wide brimmed straw hat, a faded and shapeless cotton frock, and shoes made from canvas and strips of worn tyre, and was irrigating, using a mattock to open and close channels running between bush tomatoes.

The man straightened up and stared at Alvarez, his leathery, lined, stubbled face showing no expression. The woman continued irrigating.

‘Señor Amengual?’

‘Well?’

‘I’d like a word.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Enrique Alvarez, from Llueso.’

Amengual hawked and spat. I’ve a cousin out there.’ He spoke as if Llueso were hundreds of kilometres away. ‘Name of Juan Sanchez.’

‘Does he run a butcher’s shop?’

‘That’s him.’

‘He sells some good meat . . . I’ve come to talk about your wife’s brother who died three years back.’

Amengual’s expression became sullen and he bent down and resumed work, chopping the heads off the weeds with a rhythm that he could maintain all day.

‘Cuerpo General de Policia.’

The woman suddenly stopped work and stared at Alvarez and the water, rushing into the side channel from the main one which led back to an estanque, filled it and overflowed. Hastily she bent down once more and opened the entrance to the next channel, using the plug of earth to dam the previous one.

Amengual stopped his weeding and walked between the rows of sweet peppers to a rough pathway. When close to Alvarez, he jerked his head in the direction of the house.

Outside the house was a rough patio—a hard-packed dirt floor and concrete pillars, chipped and cracked, which supported wires on which were trained three grape vines whose dozens of bunches of grapes, now no larger than peas, hung down. Three wooden chairs and a table, all badly worm-eaten, were set out under the vines. Without a word, Amengual sat and stared out at the land.

Tm sorry to have to bring up a sad subject,’ said Alvarez, ‘but I need to know certain facts about your wife’s brother, Augustin Llobera, who died three years ago . . . Why had he gone out to the cliffs at Setray? What was he doing there, so far from anywhere?’

Amengual shrugged his shoulders.

‘You must have some idea why he was there?’

Amengual spoke angrily. ‘He fell and died. Does it matter why he was there to fall?’

‘I need to know.’

A small cur dog, with curled tail came round the corner of the house and approached them. He shouted and it hurriedly retreated.

‘He lived here with you, didn’t he?’

‘When he was here.’

‘Was he often away, then?’

‘He was daft,’ said Amengual with the detachment of a man who had always accepted life as it was and not yearned for what was not. ‘Sometimes he were here, sometimes he weren’t.’

‘Would he be away a long time?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Have you any idea where he used to go when he was away?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe he stayed with a friend?’

‘He didn’t have no friends.’

‘Had he been with you immediately before he died?’

‘Hadn’t seen him for more’n a couple of weeks.’

‘How did he manage to live when he wasn’t with you?’

‘Some folks’d give him scraps to eat. When he got too hungry, he’d come back.’

‘Did he ever talk about meeting foreigners?’

‘Why’d he want to talk about foreigners?’

‘During the war he got shot in the head—was that soon after it started?’

‘What’s it to you? He’s dead. Let the poor bastard rest in peace, seeing as he never had any when he was alive.’

‘Did he often talk about what happened to him during the war?’

Amengual stood and went into the house. When he returned it was with an earthenware pitcher and two mugs. He filled the mugs with wine and passed one across. It was a strange gesture of companionship coming, as it did, immediately after his angry outburst.

Alvarez drank. The wine was like it had been when he was young and it had all been locally made: harsh and leaving behind a taste of hot, dusty bitterness.

‘Which army was he in?’

‘He weren’t in the army.’

‘Then how’d he get shot?’

Amengual’s expression tightened. He drained his mug, refilled it.

Over forty years ago, Alvarez thought, and still the fear and the guilt remained for some of those who had lived through the civil war, even though there was now a socialist government, the communist party was official, and La Pasionaria had appeared on television. ‘Old man,’ he said softly, ‘no matter what happened then, it can’t threaten you now.’

Amengual drank deeply, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Did he betray someone?’

‘No,’ he replied violently.

‘Then how did he get shot?’

Amengual’s wife, having finished irrigating the tomatoes, came across to the patio. She sat next to her husband.

‘He’s asking about Augustin,’ Amengual said. ‘About him being shot.’

She looked at Alvarez, but remained silent.

Alvarez waited, with the infinite patience of a peasant.