Dead Clever (15 page)

‘There’s been a telephone call for you,’ said Dolores, as she set the bowl of sopas Mallorquinas on the table. Her tone had been disapproving. ‘I said you were out.’

‘Who was it?’ Alvarez asked carelessly, more interested in savouring the smell of the sopas.

She began to serve, filling each plate with the soup that was almost a meal because of all the vegetables and bread in it. ‘She was a foreigner and I couldn’t understand her.’

‘Did she tell you her name?’

She passed a plate to Isabel. ‘She wouldn’t speak clearly.’

‘But she did tell you it?’

‘It sounded like Sierra Collans.’

‘Serena Collins . . . What on earth did she want?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘But you must have understood something of what she said.’

‘I do not have to understand anything when a person speaks so impossibly.’ She passed a plate to Juan.

Alvarez filled his glass with wine. ‘I didn’t expect to hear from her again, that’s for sure!’

‘Is she the woman who . . .’ Dolores looked meaningly at Alvarez.

He presumed she was remembering the flagellation. ‘That’s right.’

‘Then why . . .?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Is it because . . .?’

‘Why don’t you ever finish a sentence?’ demanded Jaime.

‘Because it is not a fit subject for you to listen to,’ she answered.

‘What? Am I an infant?’

‘In matters like this, you’d better be.’

That thoroughly bewildered Jaime.

The telephone rang. ‘It might be her,’ said Alvarez. He stood and went through to the next room.

‘Thank goodness it’s you so I can communicate!’ said Serena.

‘I’m sorry I was out earlier on, señorita.’

‘If you señorita me once more, I’ll throw something at you down the telephone line. My name is Serena as you well know . . . This was going to be an apologetic call and here I am, already shouting off my head like a fishwife.’ Her tone changed. ‘But I still haven’t reconciled myself to . It makes me so . . . Can you understand?’

‘Only with some difficulty.’

‘That’s a sweet way of saying that I’m being incoherent . . . I asked the concierge to find out your private phone number since you weren’t at the police station. I’m phoning to apologize for what I said last night and for walking out on you after inviting you to coffee. Will you put my behaviour down to my being a feeble and hysterical woman?’

‘But I doubt very much that you are either.’

‘I think that that’s a compliment. So will you have the coffee with me tonight that you should have had last night?’

‘I’m afraid I’m rather busy . . .’

‘A truly busy man was once defined as someone who could always find time to spare when he wanted to. How about nine o’clock at the hotel?’

‘Don’t you think . . .’

‘Recently,’ she said, her tone once more uncertain and bitter, ‘I’ve discovered how much easier life can become if one doesn’t think.’ She rang off.

He returned to the dining-room, sat, and began to eat. After a while Dolores’s impatience became too great to be restrained. ‘Was it her?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she want?’

‘Only something to do with the case,’ replied Alvarez vaguely.

‘Are you seeing her again?’

‘I have to, this evening.’

‘Even when you know . . .’

Jaime looked from one to the other of them, trying to work out what this was all about.

Serena was sitting at the same table outside the hotel and she waved to him as he approached. She was, he decided, a woman whose attraction had a delayed quality, because it was not entirely physical.

‘Thank you for coming.’ She smiled. ‘To tell the truth, when you called me “señorita” over the phone, I was certain you meant to refuse the invitation. I’m so glad I was wrong . . . Let’s get hold of a waiter. You’ll have a brandy as well as a coffee, but I won’t.’

‘I will get them . . .’

‘You may order, but it’s understood that I pay. I need the solace of being allowed to show my remorse. But please don’t assume from that that I’m saying my remorse can be expressed in pesetas. It’s much too genuine.’

‘I’d never think such a thing . . .’

‘Of course you wouldn’t and I was only pulling your leg. Don’t forget, I’m descended from the martyrs of La Verry. Let me prove part of that claim. You often have trouble in relationships because you are too generous in assessing good qualities in other people. Which must make life as a detective very difficult at times. And I’m embarrassing you because you’re a very modest man, so I’ll shut up on the subject . . . If I remember correctly, you smoke?’ She produced the silver case from her handbag and offered it.

He flicked open his gas lighter and they lit their cigarettes. As he replaced the lighter in his pocket, a waiter came across and he ordered two coffees and one brandy.

‘May I change my mind and have a brandy as well?’ she asked.

He changed the order and the waiter left.

She drew on the cigarette, then fidgeted with it, rolling it gently between thumb and forefinger. ‘The brandy’s to give me Dutch courage.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Something to stiffen my backbone. Why it’s called Dutch courage, I don’t know, since the Dutch are just as brave as anyone else . . . I must begin by apologizing once more.’

‘There’s really no need.’

‘Yes, there is. And then I’ve got to explain why you’re so wrong.’

He was struck afresh by the warmth in her dark brown eyes. Impossible to imagine her dressed in a whore’s costume, whipping a man; could she really learn that Green had found a woman to whip him without experiencing the immediate and deep repugnance that Dolores had felt? Did she not believe, or had she forced herself to believe and yet somehow to understand and through understanding to offer forgiveness . . .?

‘What are you thinking?’

Hastily, he said: ‘Nothing important.’

‘Is that the truth? Are you sure you weren’t silently condemning me?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because I was so fond of Tim and according to you he was crooked; you don’t believe I should be fond of a crook. Yet I can be certain that you know as well as I that when you love someone, you love them for what they are, not for what others think they should be.’

‘Are there not some faults which cannot be forgiven?’

‘Can there be a fault that great? Isn’t love the one force that is greater than evil? . . . You think Tim was some kind of a crook. That wouldn’t have mattered to me even if it had been true. It isn’t. He never intended to swindle the insurance company and the only reason that he tried to increase the amount of his policy was because of me. He wanted to make certain that if anything terrible happened to him, I’d be all right financially. I told him, he was being morbid and he said that he’d no intention of dying, but fate sometimes turned up a joker. And fate . . . and fate did turn up a joker.’ She looked away and out at the bay.

He longed to believe her, but sadly she had been a shade too emotional, too eager to convince him; and had she truly believed Green dead, would she not have been far more concerned with her own grief than worrying about what he thought of the dead man?

The waiter brought the coffee and brandies.

She warmed a balloon glass in the palm of her left hand. ‘You do believe me now, don’t you?’

He hesitated.

‘But why won’t you?’

‘Because of the facts.’ He was aware that he had sounded harsh because of his reluctance to answer.

‘The facts are that Tim crashed in the plane.’ She was becoming angry.

‘I have spoken to a fisherman who was out in his boat and he and his brother saw a parachute descend and the parachutist was picked up by a boat which arrived the next night at Stivas, on the Peninsula. That night, Thomas Grieves booked in at a hotel there. People often keep the same initials when they change their names. His passport was a false one. He left behind an English paperback and in this was the receipt for fuel loaded in the Fleche which Timothy Green flew from Palma airport.’

‘Whose boat was it?’

‘A man for whom señor Green once worked.’

‘Does he admit that he picked up Tim?’

‘He denies it.’

‘Then why believe the fishermen and not him? Why go on and on like this? Can’t you understand what it’s like for me, having you say he’s alive when I know he’s dead? If he were alive, he’d have been in touch with me.’

‘Why have you come here?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? The island was the last place where he was alive. I wanted to be where he’d been, to gain a few more memories for the future. Now I realize it was a mistake; God, what a mistake!’

‘Why did you go to see señor Bennett?’

‘Because . . . because he and Tim had known each other. I wanted to hear all he could tell me about Tim. I only knew him for what seems now to have been so short a time . . .’ She drank the brandy quickly and it caught in her throat and she coughed.

‘I’ve just told you that two men saw him parachute down . . .’

‘And you haven’t gone on to explain why you’re prepared to believe such a ridiculous story.’

‘I believe it because one of them has since been murdered.’

She stared at him, her expression shocked.

‘A bomb was planted on their boat which was meant to kill them both, but the elder brother survived. Their murder was planned to make certain that they could never testify about what they’d seen on the night the plane crashed.’

‘You’re not . . . Surely to God, you’re not now trying to say that Tim had anything to do with that.’

‘I do not yet know who was responsible,’ he replied, hoping he sounded truthful. He paused, then said: ‘Where is he now?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s much more serious than it was. Now there’s been a murder and I have to find the murderer.’

‘But I tell you he couldn’t have done anything like that . . . I know he couldn’t.’

The first doubt; the first premonition that she had not inherited all the skills of the women of La Verry and that there was a ruthless side to Green’s character which she had never identified; the first bitter acceptance of the possibility that there might be truth in the story of the flagellation?

She suddenly stood and left, walking quickly.

He added sugar to his coffee, stirred, drank. He stared out at the bay. Why could there be so much beauty out there when there was so much ugliness here?

He finished his coffee and brandy, drank her brandy, called the waiter across and paid the bill. The waiter brought him the change and then showed, by his expression, what he thought of the five-peseta tip. Did foreigners never tip less than fifty pesetas? They’d ruined everything. Alvarez was glad of the chance to find something on which he could unload a little of the anger and self-hatred he felt because he had deliberately sown the seeds of doubt in Serena’s mind.

As he walked along the pavement, he heard the sounds of someone running behind him, but he thought nothing of this until his left arm was gripped to bring him to a stop.

‘I’m beginning to feel like the ageing diva who can’t stop giving a final farewell concert,’ Serena said in a small voice.

He turned. ‘I’m very sorry . . .’

‘I know you don’t like doing what you are, any more than I like hearing what you have to say . . . Please, Enrique, just for a little while, can we pretend that there’s no past and no future, only a present?’

Several British tourists, very well wined, pushed past them, loudly complaining about the local peasants who wouldn’t get out of the way.

She let go of his arm and took hold of his hand. ‘Agreed?’

He nodded.

‘Then let’s go for a walk by the sea. When I was young —which immediately brings in the past!—I used to think that the most blissful experience was to walk barefoot on sand.’

He understood that when she’d said she wanted to banish the past, she had meant that part of it which included Green, not an earlier time when life had been so much kinder and more forgiving.

When he returned home, only Dolores was downstairs; she was crocheting. ‘Has everyone but you decided on a very early night?’ he asked cheerfully.

‘They went to bed at the usual time. It’s almost midnight.’

Her tone had been so frosty that he decided there must have been a family row. He walked over to the sideboard.

‘What have you got on your shoes? . . . Do look out, you’re putting whatever it is all over the floor.’

He brought out a bottle of brandy and a glass before he looked down. ‘It’s only sand. I went for a walk on the beach. You know, it’s very lovely down in the port at night—all the lights on the water.’ He poured himself out a brandy, began to walk towards the kitchen to get some ice.

‘Is it? I’m always far too busy ever to have the chance to find out.’

He added ice to his drink in the kitchen, returned to the other room. She had put her crochet work into a bag and was standing. ‘I’m too tired now to clear up the mess you’ve made; it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘When a man has to do my housework, I’ll be ready for my coffin.’

He tried to nudge her into a better humour. ‘Is that another bedspread you’re making?’

‘Isabel will need two when she marries. If she ever does.’

‘Why in the world shouldn’t she? She’s as bright as a button already and if she has half your looks when she’s grown up, the men will be running after her.’

‘Perhaps. But perhaps by then she will have learned what fools men are and so will have the sense not to marry.’ She left the room.

It must have been some row, he thought as he switched off the lights; Jaime was in for a chilly night. It was only when he was half way up the stairs that it occurred to him that maybe there had been no row and Dolores had been waiting up for his return—like a mother clucking over her son—and his unusually cheerful behaviour had reinforced her ridiculous and utterly wrong impression.

Alvarez rang Guardia Civil headquarters on Monday morning and spoke to a very harassed man. ‘Yes, yes, of course we’re doing it, but we need time. Have you the slightest idea of the size of the task?’ His accent suggested he was a Galician.