Three and One Make Five (18 page)

‘No, by the size of its udders, and from the looks of hers . . .’

‘Be quiet!’

He drained the glass.

‘She’ll need help looking after her property now.’

‘If you’re thinking of Enrique, I’d say, forget it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s reached the age where he likes his women young.’

‘Men!’ she said with contempt.

On Saturday, the last day of July and the penultimate day before the fiesta of Llueso when for almost a week the bars would be open throughout the twenty-four hours and no work would be done by anyone, Dolores—enforcing a rule that was very seldom observed—insisted on having the television switched off at nine, for the sake of her children.

Once the set was off, she looked up from her crocheting and across at Alvarez, who was slumped in one of the armchairs and staring into space, his expression one of sad depression. ‘I ran into Maria-Magdalena this morning. You know, Maria-Magdalena Belmonte. She was looking a lot better.’

‘She needs to, doesn’t she?’ said Jaime, very resentful at not being allowed to watch the film.

Isabel giggled.

‘She’s getting over the death of her husband.’

‘And he’ll be doing his share of rejoicing as well.’

‘Will you be quiet,’ she said furiously.

Jaime had determined to support Alvarez, but in the face of her anger he decided it was much better to leave a man to fight his own battles.

‘I asked her along here. It’s nice for her to get out and about after such a sad time.’ Her crochet hook flashed backwards and forwards and the intricate floral pattern grew. ‘I suggested she came along and had a meal with us tonight since it would make such a nice change for her . . . I thought she might enjoy the frito mallorquin I made . . . but she couldn’t manage it. But she did say she’d like to come tomorrow if her cousin from Palma doesn’t turn up. She’ll know by now whether he is or isn’t coming. She had the phone put in just before her man died so we could phone her and find out and then I’d know for the cooking.’

‘Will she bring me a present?’ asked Juan.

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then let’s not phone.’

She allowed her annoyance to surface and immediately made a mistake with the crochet work. It cost her quite an effort to say quietly: ‘Enrique, would you like to go and phone for me?’ She began to undo her last few stitches.

‘What’s that?’ said Alvarez.

‘Would you go and phone her to save me having to do it/

‘Phone who?’

She pulled too hard on the crochet cotton and undid more stitches than she had intended.

Jaime said: ‘She wants you to phone Maria-Magdalena Belmonte, the woman with the large . . .’

‘I’ll do it, since no one else will,’ said Dolores in a thin voice.

Alvarez pulled himself to his feet. ‘It’s all right, I’ll do it. And I might as well turn in afterwards.’

‘Come back and have a coñac?’ suggested Jaime.

‘Not for me.’

Jaime sadly shook his head. When a man ceased to drown his sorrows in drink, he’d lost all zest for living.

Alvarez crossed to the doorway, then stopped. ‘Who d’you say I was to ring?’

‘Maria-Magdalena Belmonte,’ replied Dolores, exercising a degree of restraint which until now she hadn’t known she possessed.

‘What’s her number?’

‘Fourteen twenty.’

Alvarez took one step forward, stopped, turned back. ‘What d’you say?’

‘Fourteen twenty.’

‘No telephone on this island is just four numbers.’ Tor Heaven’s sake, Enrique, you really must pull yourself together . . .’ She nibbled at her lips, then said: ‘Of course it isn’t. But you know she lives in the village so the number has to start with five three.’

It was amazing, he thought, how one could so easily miss the obvious.

It had always seemed likely that Massier was living either in France or on the island. Alvarez placed the telephone directory on his desk and opened it. The entries began with Palma and then each village was listed separately. He went through each list and noted down the area code, or codes. There was no Raymond Massier living in any area, but such an absence did not carry the significance it might have done in another country. First, the cost of transferring the name in which a telephone was held was so high that many people didn’t bother to have the change made, secondly it was a standard complaint that one entry in four was wrong and the other three were suspect.

His twenty-seventh code was 99. As he dialled it, he fleetingly thought that this was not a number one could ever need deliberately to remember. The call was answered by a woman who spoke Mallorquin. ‘I want to speak to Sen or Raymond Massier,’ he said, as he had done twenty-six times already, which had so conditioned him to expect a curt denial that the speaker had ever heard of Massier that he automatically held a pencil ready to strike out 99. ‘He’s not here,’ she said.

He kept the pencil very still. ‘When will he be back?’

‘Maybe not until late. It’s best if you try again tomorrow.’

He thanked her and replaced the receiver. It was odd, but now that he knew he’d run the murderer to earth, he felt no sense of elation. Rather, he was wondering how on earth he was going to explain to Superior Chief Salas how it had taken him until now to locate Massier, even if Massier had obviously never bothered to apply for either a residencia or a permanencia?

The mountain backbone of the island tended, on its south side, to peter out into hills before these too gently subsided into the central plain. Among the hills, particularly in the centre, were a number of valleys, some large, some small. Massier lived in one of the smallest—once it had been known as the lost valley. There was only one access track to it and this led through steep cliffs which at one stage came within twelve metres of each other: a torrente, dry throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, occasionally a roaring, dangerous torrential river in the winter, ran alongside the track.

The floor of the valley was almost level, except for a topped sugar-loaf mound in the middle: on this mound was a two hundred year old rock-built farmhouse, with walls more than a metre thick, small windows, and a heavy wooden front door with a cat hole. Beyond the house were three large, rock-built barns, once used for storing all the food necessary to keep the farmer, his family, and his animals, until the next harvest. Both house and barns had been restored and modernized, but this had been done with such sympathetic care that the fact was not immediately apparent: only when close did one notice that the faces of some of the rocks in the walls were of a different shade from the rest and that the limestone blocks above the windows were unscarred by weather. What was immediately obvious, however, was the fact that no farmer now lived there. Instead of crops reaching up to the house, there was a garden right round.

The track into the valley had been metalled and Alvarez was able to drive up to a pair of gates from which stretched a heavy chain-link fence surrounding the garden, topped with three strands of barbed wire. There was a notice on the right-hand gate, in French and Spanish: it advised callers that the property was guarded by a dog and therefore to ring the bell. He rang the bell. Immediately a dog began to bark with deep, fierce intensity.

A woman, dressed in a cotton frock over which was an apron, stepped out of a doorway to the side of the house. ‘You can come in,’ she shouted. ‘The dog’s locked up.’

He opened the right-hand gate and went inside. The garden was filled with colour which ranged from the blues of hydrangeas to the delicate pink trumpets of a datura tree.

As his shoes crunched on the stone-chips surface of the drive, the dog’s barks redoubled in volume until the woman shouted at it to shut up and then it lapsed into silence. He came up to where the woman stood and saw, chained to a kennel, a huge black dog, as hairy as a yak, which was watching him with lips drawn back to disclose a lethal set of fangs.

He pointed at the dog, an act which immediately provoked a rising growl. Tm glad that’s tied up!’

‘You need to be,’ she replied. ‘He can be vicious to someone he doesn’t know . . . What d’you want?’

‘Inspector Alvarez, Cuerpo General de Policia.’

She shielded her eyes from the fierce sun with her right hand as she studied him. ‘Enrique Alvarez from Llueso? . . . Remember me? Josephina Zimmerman, though I was Herrera Vila when we last saw each other.’

‘Of course,’ he said, trying to equate this middle-aged, stocky woman with a heavily lined face with a girl as fresh and as beautiful as a rosebud who had lived in the village.

‘How have things been?’

‘There’ve been troubles. I married a foreigner and when I had my boy and was ill, he left me.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The foreigners plundered everything, he thought bitterly.

She shrugged her shoulders. She belonged, as did he, to the last generation of islanders which had been born into poverty and who, in consequence, had never believed that the world owed them, or would provide them with, a smooth passage through life. ‘I work here for the señor and he pays. And my son is doing very well at school in his first year. They say he’s clever.’

‘That’s wonderful to hear. And how’s your brother who also moved away?’

‘We don’t see each other. He could never accept me marrying a foreigner.’

Years of silence, he thought, just because of that. Yet now the youngsters had little bastards and no one seemed to think twice about it. ‘Is the señor in?’

She nodded. ‘He doesn’t go out unless he has to, like yesterday, since she left.’

‘She?’

‘Another foreigner and much younger than him, but she was nice.’ Her tone suggested the combination was unusual. ‘Always full of fun.’

‘When did she leave him?’

‘Maybe a week ago: maybe a little more.’

‘D’you know why?’

‘Why?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who can know why? One day she was as always, the next she wasn’t here and he told me she’d left him. Perhaps she suddenly understood that it was all too difficult. There’s only ever trouble when an old man knows a young woman.’

He winced.

A bell sounded inside the house.

‘That’s him calling. I must go and see what he wants.’

‘Tell him I want a word with him.’

‘All right. You’d best come on into the kitchen to wait.’

The kitchen was large and very well equipped, yet it still managed to be in keeping with the beamed ceiling and the roughly faced walls. If only more old farmhouses had been restored with such loving care, he thought, remembering Ca Na Rostra.

She was gone a couple of minutes and when she returned she said: ‘The señor’s not feeling well and can’t see you.’

‘He’s got to see me.’

She became uneasy.

‘He’s not in bed, is he?’

She shook her head.

‘Then take me through to wherever he is.’

She hesitated, then led the way out of the kitchen, through the hall, under an archway which supported stone stairs, and into the high-ceilinged sitting-room, which had a second floor, or primitive gallery, at the far end. ‘Señor, the detective says he must speak to you . . .’

‘I told you to tell him I’m too ill,’ Massier shouted, his Spanish fluent but his accent heavy.

Alvarez stepped forward to come into view. Massier looked considerably older than he had in the photograph. His face was lined, his hair had receded and become grey, and the suggestion of hard physical condition had given way to one of flabbiness.

‘Why d’you let him in . . .’ he began wildly.

‘I insisted,’ said Alvarez.

Massier slumped back into the high wing chair. Josephina looked from one man to the other, then said: ‘Do you wish for coffee, señor?’

He shook his head.

Alvarez said: ‘Bring him a coñac’

She hurried out of the room.

Alvarez moved to a second chair and sat. ‘Your name is Raymond Massier?’

‘What if it is?’ Massier’s voice was deep and husky, like that of a man who smoked too much.

‘You once worked as an instructor in scuba-diving at Playa del Xima?’

‘No.’

Alvarez brought a print of the photograph from the breast pocket of his shirt. He stood, crossed the carpeted floor, and held the photo out.

‘I tell you . . .’

‘And I tell you that I can drive you to Playa del Xima and find half a dozen people, including Garcia, who’ll identify you immediately.’

Massier shivered.

‘You see the other two men?’

‘Well?’

‘Do you remember their names?’

‘No.’

‘One was Roger Clarke and the other was Simon Allen.’

‘What . . . what d’you want?’

Josephina returned, carrying a tray on which were two glasses, a bottle, a soda syphon, and an insulated ice container. She put the tray down on a table, stared uneasily at them, then left, without having spoken.

Alvarez returned the photo to his shirt pocket and went over to the table. He poured out two brandies, handed one glass to Massier, returned to his chair. ‘There were five of you and Loco Llobera. Llobera told you where the Marques de Orlocas’s boat had sunk and you dived and found the wreck. And even though it was nearly fifty years before, the jewels and the gold plate were still in the wreck and you salvaged them.

‘Llobera wasn’t as completely stupid as people thought him, but neither was he even halfway to being normal. So once he’d led you to the fortune, he had to be eliminated in case he might start boasting about how he’d got his own back on the Marquesas family. You murdered him by getting him drunk and then pushing him over the cliffs at Setray.’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ he contradicted harshly. ‘And that’s when you made your first mistake. You gave him a bottle of cognac, from France, instead of a bottle of coñac, from Spain, to make certain he got drunk.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Sweat had gathered on Massier’s face and it was beginning to slide down his cheeks and nose.

‘Did the other four know that Llobera had died?’

‘I swear I didn’t know him or anything about him.’

‘Obviously they didn’t. Which is understandable. If they had learned that, they might have begun to realize what you intended to do when you reckoned it was safe to do it.’