Troubled Deaths (22 page)

She nodded and blushed.

‘I’m interested in the next day. Can you think back to it? Did he tell you that Señorita Cannon was coming to lunch on the Friday and what kind of a meal he wanted?’

‘No, señor.’

‘Can you be quite sure of that?’

‘Indeed. You see, the señorita did not like any rich food, but the señor did. He would have asked for two different dishes and I would certainly remember.’

A simple answer to a simple question, but what a complicated difference it made! ‘I’m sure you remember exactly, señora, but in my job we have to check up on everything. Did the señor keep an appointments book?’

She filled a jug with milk so that the machine would warm it. ‘He used to write things down on the calendar by the telephone, but they were in English so I didn’t really understand them although some clearly were appointments.’ Her tone of voice had suddenly become sharply disapproving.

‘Where is the telephone?’

‘In the hall.’

He stood up and went through into the hall. The telephone was on a small corner cupboard and by its side was a calendar and when he saw this he understood why she’d been so disapproving - there was half a month to a page and a pin-up to each half-month. All the previous pages had been retained and in the interests of a thorough investigation he went back to January i and studied each page. The second half of October was adorned by a redhead, noticeable for consistency. There were luncheon or drink appointments for every day but the twenty-second and the twenty-third. At the beginning those blanks would have had no special meaning for him, now he knew they held the answer to the riddle of the two deaths.

He returned to the kitchen.

‘Did you find it?’ she asked.

‘I did, thanks. And checked right through it.’

She blushed as she smiled.

Blanco, dressed in overalls that were splattered with damp patches, came into the kitchen. ‘I’ve been cleaning the pool,’ he said after greeting Alvarez. ‘And before that I washed the big car down. She’s a beauty. If I had a million, I’d buy it.’

‘And have all the luxury taxes to pay?’

‘If I could afford a million for a car, why should luxury taxes bother me?’ He undid the buttons and began to strip off the overalls.

‘You’ve a point there. It must be strange to be rich and so not have to worry about where the next ten thousand pesetas are coming from.’

‘If rich means being like him, I’d rather stay poor,’ said Matilde.

‘You’ve an even better point there,’ agreed Alvarez.

The machine hissed as the coffee made. Matilde poured out three cupfuls, added milk to each and a liberal tot of brandy to two, then passed the cups round.

Blanco, who’d thrown his overalls on to the floor by the the side of the outside door, sat down at the table. He spooned sugar into his coffee. ‘So you’re still looking round the place?’

‘Still looking,’ agreed Alvarez.

‘Then it’s wrong what I was told - that you’d found out all what happened?’

‘I’m afraid it was wrong - until now.’

‘And now you know? So what did happen?’

Alvarez sipped the coffee. ‘Señorita Cannon was so shocked and upset by what she saw here when she found him with Veronica that she put a llargsomi in with the esclatasangs he was going to eat that night. There’s no proof of this, but I’m certain all she meant to do was to make him ill. She overdid things, though, and killed him.’

‘And then she committed suicide?’

‘No. She was murdered.’

‘Who killed her?’

‘Señor Freeman,’ replied Alvarez. He picked up the cup and finished the coffee.

He should, of course, have divined the truth almost from the beginning - but then although he had a certain peasant sharpness in some matters, he had never made the mistake of thinking of himself as intelligent.

He leaned over and opened the bottom drawer of his desk and brought out the bottle of brandy and poured himself a generous drink.

Looking at things back to front, and it was that sort of a case, it was easy to see that his greatest mistake had been to accept the logic of the sequence of events. Freeman had died before Mabel Cannon and therefore logically there were only three possibilities: Mabel Cannon had killed Freeman and then committed suicide; she had killed him and in turn been killed by a third person; or a third person had killed both of them. Yet seen back to front there was a fourth possibility. Mabel Cannon had poisoned him and he had poisoned her - after he was dead.

He should have studied the motives together, instead of separately. Wherever there were large sums of money, there was motive for murder, wherever there were strong emotions, there was motive for murder. The tontine had been set up by the three of them, Freeman, Mabel Cannon, and Charles Brent. (Surely this must have been at Freeman’s suggestion, ostensibly to avoid their having too much money available to spend which might have drawn attention to themselves, in fact because he had an eye firmly fixed on the main chance?) Each of them, after buying a house, had been drawing a very good income from the tontine, soon to be made even larger by the strength of the Swiss franc when compared with softer currencies. In April of this year, Freeman had passed fifteen million pesetas through his bank account in Palma which had not gone through his account in Puerto Llueso. Where had it gone and why had he had to draw it? Assume he had earlier been engaged in some sort of financial speculation which had gone sour, leaving him owing this large sum of money. Where was he going to get it from? There was more than enough left in his share in the tontine, but that capital could not be drawn without the written consent of the other two members and as the survivor took all it was not in their interests to allow him to withdraw so much. Mabel Cannon wouldn’t have bothered where her interests lay because she was in love with him, but Brent would have objected. Being the younger man, Brent would have hopefully believed he was going to be the survivor who inherited all, little realizing the unlikelihood of this if Freeman had his way. So unless Brent’s veto could be removed, there was no hope of Freeman withdrawing the money he needed. Brent had died in the middle of March and the cause of death had been recorded as accidental whilst drunk. But that must have been a carefully planned murder.

With Brent dead, Freeman could have had little difficulty in persuading Mabel Cannon to agree to his withdrawing fifteen million pesetas in Swiss francs from the tontine. And as everything had gone so smoothly with the first death, why not start thinking earlier than he would otherwise have done about the second one which would make the tontine wholly his? A thought which might well have been underlined if and when she began to talk about making restitution to their old firm. (She had sought spiritual guidance from Father Farras. The little priest, who never fought Satan with less than a full armament, would have insisted on that.)

Freeman could have killed her and made her death look like another accident, but he was a clever man, as proved by his successfully planned and executed swindle, and he realized that there was always the chance, however remote it might seem in times of optimism, that someone in authority would learn about the tontine and the ‘accidental’ deaths which had overtaken two of the members and would begin to investigate. So he decided she must appear to commit suicide.

She was very interested in the flora of the island and in her house was a book on poisons in plants. He read through the book and chose colchicine. The motive for her suicide was easily found. She loved him sufficiently to shut her eyes to all his affairs. There’s none so blind as they that won’t see. But what happens when you force a thirty-nine-year-old spinster into seeing the truth in all its naked passion?

He’d asked her to lunch at his house on the Thursday. (Here he made a mistake - he didn’t record the invitation on his appointments calendar with the consistent redhead.) On that day he met Veronica and took her back to Ca’n Ritat and there, with one eye on the time wherever the other eye was fixed, he began to make love to her in the sitting-room. Would any man, experienced in affairs, normally make love to a woman in the sitting-room, knowing the servant might enter whatever she’d been told to do? Veronica had protested, but he’d given her sufficient drink to make certain her protests weren’t as strong as they would otherwise have been. And sharp on time (people like Mabel Gannon were always good timekeepers, even in Mallorca) Mabel Cannon had come into the sitting-room and seen them. A sight to shock and torment a love-sick spinster.

His biggest mistake, of course, had been to underestimate Mabel Cannon’s passion for him, presumably because he had held her in contemptuous amusement. He had never bargained for the depths of her shock or the breadth of her torment. She planned a revenge that would punish him for his wicked betrayal of her and yet at the same time give her the chance to nurse him back to health and so prove that her devotion would survive anything. Her biggest mistake had been to fail to understand the potency of the poisonous llargsomi.

So he died, but he had reached out from his grave to murder her. Just prior to the carefully contrived love-scene with Veronica which was to provide the motive for suicide, he had emptied the contents of one of her antihistamine pills and substituted colchicine. It was a foolproof method of murder, suffering only the one disadvantage that the time of her death must be haphazard. Yet if she died very soon after finding him in flagrante delicto, people would say the awful shock had tragically affected her, if she died many days afterwards they would say that she had been brooding over what had happened until she could no longer face the world.

She took the fatal pill after Anson visited her on the Thursday after Freeman died. Her hay fever had obviously been triggered off both by causative agents and by such agents combined with heightened emotions. And Anson, with typically blunt words, had upset her so badly that she’d had a bad attack. She took one of the pills and it contained the colchicine. If Freeman had not previously died, her death would almost certainly have been recorded as suicide, exactly as planned.

Alvarez poured himself another drink.

On the following Monday afternoon the head booking clerk in the Palma office of Iberia rang Alvarez. ‘Regarding that call of yours. I’ve managed to trace out the flight you’re interested in.’

‘That’s great. When was it?’

‘Señor Freeman flew on the sixteenth of March.’

Brent had died on the eighteenth. ‘When did he come back?’

‘Three days later, on the nineteenth.’

It wasn’t proof in the legal sense - perhaps the death of Brent now never could be proved to have been murder – but it was proof enough for him. He thanked the other and rang off. He stood up and crossed to the window and looked down at the street, rather dismal under the steady rain which had been falling since early morning. Almost all the loose ends were now tied up, but it occurred to him that he should bring the appointments calendar away from Ca’n Ritat because it provided one link in the chain. There was, he thought with satisfaction, a measure of morality in all that had taken place. Three people had carried out a swindle: these three had died because they had taken with them their greed and their passions.

He left his office and went downstairs and out to his car. He drove to the Llueso,‘Palma road, turned left, and as he passed the new school he wondered whether Juan was now working at his studies harder than he had been. If Isabel could get excellent, why couldn’t he? The road rounded the outcrop of rock and he came in sight of the mountains. Because of the rain they were slate grey in colour and bleak in nature and they made him feel unhappy so that he was troubled by the thought of who would visit his grave when he was dead. Isabel and Juan? But the young today didn’t observe the customs as their parents had. How many of them now spent All Souls’ Day in the family cemetery? How many welcomed their aged parents (and uncles) into their homes when they were no longer capable of looking after themselves?

There was a car in the drive of Ca’n Ritat and when he parked behind it and looked into the courtyard he saw Caroline. Suddenly the day was no longer grey.

She was wearing a lightweight anorak with a hood that was pulled over her head, to make her look like a pixie. She was feeding the dog which looked round at Alvarez but did not bother to bark. When he entered the courtyard, she said: ‘Hi, there! I’m just feeding Cheetah.’

‘Lucky dog!’ He watched her empty out a piece of meat from a plastic bag. The dog caught it and began noisily to eat.

‘Mabel used to do this every Monday because it’s the Blancos’ day off. She was always so afraid that they wouldn’t bother to feed him because . . . Oh!‘Her expression became confused.

He smiled. ‘No doubt, señorita, she did not believe any Mallorquin could be trusted to bother about a mere dog on his day off?’

‘She was rather silly when it came to animals.’

‘But you also must have a little doubt or you surely wouldn’t bother to come here today?’

After a while she smiled ruefully at him. ‘All right, you’ve caught me out fair and square. I did wonder whether they’d remember Cheetah and I couldn’t bear to think of him going hungry so I bought a couple of lamb chops.’

‘Whole lamb chops, señorita?’

‘Yes.’

He would never begin to understand the English. Lamb chops cost so much that it made him incredulous just to look at the prices. But she had bought two for a dog which would have been better off with a lump of paunch.

She watched the dog swallow the last of the bone. ‘There you are, Cheetah. At least you ought to have pleasant dreams tonight.’ She pointed at the battered drum which was the kennel. ‘That can’t be watertight. Why don’t people look after their dogs better out here? I mean, you see them chained up in fields with much worse shelter than this drum and so thin they’re obviously half-starved and then there are all the strays with the most awful sores . . .’ She stopped. She reached up and pushed the hood a little further back from her forehead. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I shouldn’t have criticized like that. After all, you’re hot like us - you don’t need to have a society to prevent cruelty to children. But it so hurts to see animals suffering.’