A Maze of Murders (11 page)

‘Are you sure?'

There was no answer.

Reluctantly, he sat up, swivelled round, stood, put on his trousers – she insisted that no member of the house walked around in underclothes – and went downstairs.

‘It's the post…'

He interrupted the speaker. ‘What's the idea of phoning at this time of the afternoon?'

‘Have to do my duty, you lazy bastard.'

‘It's Agustin, isn't it? I'll see you get a conduct report that has you spending the next ten years in some godforsaken village in the centre of Andalucia.'

‘You reckon the teniente will listen to anything you have to say?… The port's just been through. A motor cruiser's come into harbour to say they've sighted a body floating five kilometres off the bay.'

‘So?'

‘So they marked it with a buoy and now you can go out and help recover it.'

‘My job can't start until the body's landed.'

‘If they made a mistake and dropped you off at the pearly gates, you'd wait for St Peter to open 'em.'

‘Each man to a job; each job to a man.'

*   *   *

The open fishing boat, built to traditional design, approached the curving shore midway between the port and the small, ugly holiday village – a point of the bay where there was the least likelihood of there being any tourists. The helmsman put the single-cylinder diesel into neutral, then reverse, to cut the boat's way and prevent her running her bows on to the shingle. Two cabos, trousers rolled up, cursing everything and everybody, waded out, lifted up a body-bag and carried it ashore.

If there were anything Alvarez disliked more than looking at death, he could not readily name it; to look at it was to see the image of one's own precarious mortality, to be reminded that even that brief prick of pain as one had climbed out of bed could be the first call to join the victim. Mentally bracing himself, he pulled back the edge of the bag until he could gain a clear view of the face. Death was often described as merciful; its aftermath never was. He recognized Lewis from the passport photograph, but it required a considerable degree of imaginative reconstruction to do so.

CHAPTER 13

On the Tuesday, Alvarez returned to the post to be informed by the duty cabo that the Institute of Forensic Anatomy had telephoned and wanted him to call back. He went up the stairs, into his office, and sat. After he'd regained his breath, he dialled Palma.

‘The cause of death was drowning,' said Professor Fortunato's assistant. ‘There can be no doubt about that with all the classical signs present – ballooning of the lungs, marked congestion and cyanosis in the right side of the heart, microscopic diatomaceous matter in the air passages and stomach. That he drowned in salt water is evidenced by the fact that the chloride content in the left heart is higher than in the right. But we do have a query as to whether he suffered an assault before death.'

Alvarez drew in his breath sharply. ‘How strong a query?'

‘There's the rub. The temperature of the sea has meant decomposition has taken place quite quickly and there's been considerable damage from fish. If you'd like the details…'

‘Thank you, just the conclusions,' he replied quickly.

‘There are two lines of bruising on the back. Unfortunately, we cannot determine whether these were caused before or immediately after death. As you know, floating debris often batters bodies in the sea through wave or wind action and this is probably the most likely explanation. However, there is one interesting thing about the bruising – the lines are parallel, some thirty centimetres apart. It calls for quite a coincidence for two objects floating in the water to strike the body either at the same or different times at angles parallel to each other.

‘On the other hand, it's difficult to envisage an offensive weapon that consists of two bars thirty centimetres apart – very clumsy. Of course, there remains the possibility that two separate blows were struck by an attacker, but that recalls the problem of the bruises being parallel. Could be a coincidence; they do happen.'

With disconcerting frequency. ‘Assume these bruises were caused by a blow, would they have knocked Lewis to the ground?'

‘Hard to answer. The best I can offer is that he would at least have had a job to keep his balance.'

‘Would they have incapacitated him?'

‘I doubt it. That is, unless in falling he suffered further damage.'

‘There's no evidence of any?'

‘None.'

‘In a nutshell, you can't say with any certainty what did happen?'

‘I'm afraid not. Sorry about that, but the state of the body makes it impossible. After several days in the water at the height of summer…'

‘It's anybody's guess,' Alvarez cut in, wondering again why pathologists seemed always so keen to pass on the grislier details of their work. He thanked the other, rang off. He scratched the side of his nose as he stared through the window at the blank wall of the building on the opposite side of the road. On its own, the evidence he had just been given was as ambiguous as previous evidence. But if he could show that even one part of it was unambiguous …

He drove down to the port, parked, and went into the office of Gomila y Hijos. The young woman was again painting her nails and she again viewed him with disdain, plainly not remembering who he was. He reminded her.

‘What is it this time?' she asked.

‘Is the
Aventura
still in port?'

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Perhaps you could be very kind and stop work long enough to check,' he said with sarcastic politeness.

Sullenly, she tapped out instructions on the keyboard and the information came up on the VDU. ‘No one has chartered it, so it must be here.'

‘A boat is always feminine.'

‘Because it's beautiful,' she said, and giggled.

Although the distance was so short, he drove to the eastern arm of the harbour and parked as near to the
Aventura
as he could go. In such heat, unnecessary exercise was dangerous.

He had forgotten the gangplank. He swallowed repeatedly, called on St Christopher, and finally, eyes firmly fixed high above the yawning hell beneath him and despite the terrible, perverse temptation to look down, boarded.

He used a metal tape measure to determine the gap between rails at the stern. Thirty-one centimetres. So here was the coincidence too many. He pictured the murderer climbing aboard as the
Aventura
lay at anchor, entering the cabin where the four lay drugged, grabbing Lewis and dragging him out of the saloon – half-heard by Kirsty – and struggling to bundle him over the stern. An uncoordinated body was one of the most difficult things to handle, with arms and legs flopping this way and that and unexpectedly altering the centre of balance. As he'd tried to heave the unconscious Lewis over the rails, he had lost control and Lewis's back had slammed into them. In the water, the murderer had held the body underneath …

Alvarez replaced the tape measure in his pocket. For once, Salas was going to have to admit his work had been inspired and faultless.

*   *   *

He phoned Palma at a quarter to six that evening and spoke to Salas's secretary. ‘May I speak to the superior chief?'

‘No,' she replied.

‘It is important.'

‘It doesn't matter. He's had to fly to Salamanca.'

‘When will he be back?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘Can you get in touch with him?'

‘If you want something, you'll have to speak to Comisario Borne.'

He thanked her, rang off.

Comisario Borne was a man who took life so seriously that he believed his superiors' edicts were engraved on tablets of stone; who lacked the imagination to see how a fact might suggest one thing taken on its own, but could point to something entirely different when slotted in with another fact. It would be useless to ask Comisario Borne to override an order of the superior chief. Yet to conduct any further investigation into the deaths of Lewis and Sheard before he had express permission to do so would be asking for trouble …

He left the building and returned to his car, drove out of Llueso, through the Laraix valley and up the twisting, tortuous road to the mountains. He parked in a natural lay-by, left the car and crossed to the shade of an evergreen oak where he sat on a rounded boulder. To his left was a valley, on the far side of which the mountain slopes were bare except for odd patches of scrub grass; to his right, the uneven land, pitted with outcrops of rock striated by age and patched with clumps of bowed trees, rose to become the flanks of more mountains which were higher, starker, and touched with menace even in the harsh sunshine. There was not a building in sight.

He came here when he was troubled. The solitude, the land that had not altered in aeons and was therefore both past and present, the acceptance of the fact that amidst such natural grandeur he was an alien, produced in his mind a feeling of total insignificance; experience had taught him that only when one knew that one was totally insignificant did one begin to think with true honesty.

When he was convinced that he was right and everyone else was wrong, was his conviction fuelled by perverse pride? Salas thought him incompetent, so did he contradict merely because this was a weak man's way of trying to assert himself? Born a peasant, had he remained a stubborn, bloody-minded peasant?

He believed justice to be only slightly less essential to a man than the food he ate, the water he drank, and the air he breathed. Without justice, there could only be chaos in which the few strong prospered and the many weak perished. Justice demanded the truth, so surely if a man sought it he must be in the right, even if his motive for doing so might be suspect?

He drove back to the village, went up to his office, phoned the Institute of Forensic Anatomy and asked for a full analysis of Lewis's blood to be made.

He replaced the receiver. It was mortifying to realize how long it had taken him to work out that if someone had doped the whisky, had waited until it had taken effect, then swum to the boat and dragged Lewis over the side and drowned him, that someone was a man of imagination and fore-thought; such a man would replace the doped bottle of whisky and the glasses so that if any suspicion was raised and an analysis of their contents carried out, the result would be negative, leading to the conclusion that Lewis's death had been an accident.

*   *   *

The two calls came in quick succession on Thursday morning.

‘We've completed our analysis in the Lewis case,' said the assistant at the Forensic Institute of Anatomy.

‘Have you found anything?'

‘We have.'

Alvarez enjoyed the narcissistic satisfaction of having proved the world wrong.

‘Are you familiar with chloral hydrate?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘It's a hypnotic, occasionally used medicinally to induce a condition resembling natural sleep. In the past, it was a favourite with criminals who encouraged potential victims to drink something into which it had been introduced; then the victims could be robbed at no risk to themselves.'

‘You're talking about a Mickey Finn! I didn't recognize it by its proper name. So that's how Lewis was drugged!'

‘To be precise, no. Chloral hydrate is usually described as having a disagreeable taste – you or I would call it filthy. So it was difficult to obscure this in a drink and if the intended victim wasn't more than half seas over, he'd probably take one mouthful and spit it out. But a renegade chemist in the States who'd been working on the problem managed to eliminate most of the foul taste with a slight modification in the hydrolysis of the trichloroethanal. As a result, the narcotic could be introduced into a dry martini or a bloody Mary and, even if sober, the victim would cheerfully drink it. According to reports, this modified narcotic has only one drawback in so far as the criminal is concerned. It promotes a temporary hysterical violence in a few people before they pass out. One would-be thief was beaten to a bloody pulp before his victim collapsed. A rare case of the biter being bit!'

‘And it was this modified chloral hydrate that Lewis drank?'

‘It was.'

As soon as the call was finished, Alvarez reached down to open the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk and bring out a bottle of brandy and a glass. He was about to pour himself a congratulatory drink when the phone rang again.

‘Are you really as stupid as your actions inevitably suggest?' demanded Salas.

‘I understood you were in Salamanca, señor…'

‘Did I, or did I not, order you to close inquiries into the death of the Englishman, Lewis?'

‘Yes, but…'

‘One more “but” and you join the ranks of the unemployed. Did you, or did you not, agree that my order was incapable of misinterpretation?'

‘Yes, señor, only…'

‘Only instead of misinterpreting it, you flatly disobeyed it by asking the Institute to carry out further analyses of specimens from the dead man.'

‘Because of the facts…'

‘Which informed you – or would have done, were you capable of accepting information – that there was no evidence to suggest the cause of death had been anything but accidental drowning.'

‘Actually, there were two bruises on the dead man's back…'

‘Which you were told could well have been caused after death.'

‘The thing is, they were parallel and thirty centimetres apart.'

‘Had they been twenty or forty, you would have accepted the obvious conclusion without argument?'

‘That made me think.'

‘Please do not exaggerate.'

‘I went aboard the
Aventura
and measured the distance between the rails at the stern. They are thirty-one centimetres middle to middle. This makes it almost certain that the bruises were caused when Lewis fell against them.'