Dead Clever (17 page)

‘Where you’re going wrong is that I’m not looking for a hand-out.’

‘Then what the bleeding hell are you after?’

‘Information.’

One of the two telephones rang. The owner answered the call in Mallorquin, switched to French and accepted a booking. He replaced the receiver, swivelled round in his chair until he could note the booking on a systems chart pinned to a wooden frame.

‘You own the white Fiesta with this number.’ Alvarez passed a slip of paper across. ‘Who’s the present hirer?’

‘Why the interest?’

‘I’ve seen the car around and want to know who’s driving it.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve secrets in your business and I’ve got ‘em in mine.’

The owner looked at Alvarez with dislike. ‘You know something? You sound like you come from the north.’

‘I do.’

‘I had a cousin from Mestara who couldn’t get a job up there and so came here begging me for one. Had to sack him.’

‘For honesty? Who hired that Ford.’

The owner searched through a pile of slips, swore, opened a drawer and brought out another pile, secured by a rubber band, and looked through them. ‘An Englishman, name of Terence Galloway.’

T.G. again, thought Alvarez with satisfaction. Strange how even intelligent criminals so seldom learned the danger of sticking with the same initials. ‘What address did he give you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not? You’re required to put it on the hiring form.’

‘So?’

‘So find the right book and tell me his address.’

The owner still hesitated.

‘Start becoming any more difficult,’ said Alvarez pleasantly, ‘and I’ll begin to think it my duty to find out if you’re keeping two sets of hiring and insurance forms so that when a car is returned undamaged and there’s no need to claim on the insurance, you can decide whether to make the hiring official or keep the good news to yourself and pocket all the money.’

‘They may do that sort of thing up north, but we don’t bloody do it down here.’

‘There’s some who say that you lot always have been slow.’

His expression bitter—the owner prided himself on being far too smart for anyone in authority—he unlocked a drawer and brought out a book of forms in triplicate.

‘I’ll do the checking.’

‘You’re saying you can read?’

The book covered the dates from July 21st to August 12th; originally there had been a hundred and fifty top and two copy pages for each hiring; now, only a hundred and fifty copy pages remained. It was, thought Alvarez, impossible to judge whether or not this was the official book, but it was a safe bet that whichever it was, a hundred and fifty hiring and insurance fees had gone straight into the owner’s pocket during the period. He looked through the copy pages. On August 3rd Terence Galloway had given his address as Hotel Llureza. ‘What do you remember about him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on, think.’

‘I can think from now until tomorrow and it’ll still be nothing.’

Alvarez took the passport photograph of Green from his pocket. ‘Now d’you recognize him?’

The owner shrugged his shoulders. ‘You don’t seem to understand; I’m too busy to remember.’

‘Especially the demands of the tax inspector . . . Where’s the Hotel Llureza?’

‘Along the front.’

‘Thanks. You’ve been a great help.’

The owner plainly found that the most unkindest cut of all.

The hotel was already showing signs of poor construction; rising damp had stained the walls up to two metres above the ground, old cracks had been filled in but new ones were appearing, and there were rust streaks running down from the wrought-iron railings on many of the balconies. Most builders on the island were cheerful men, as well they might be since they had a job for life—every building erected in the past twenty years was going to need very extensive repairs before the next twenty years were up.

The receptionist was young, smart, and pleasant. He checked through the entries in the register, using the unsharpened end of a pencil as a marker. He looked up. ‘You can’t say what day he booked in here?’

‘Not for certain, but it was probably on or just before the third of this month.’

The receptionist checked again. He shook his head. ‘Sorry. There’s no one of that name stayed here recently.’

‘Then would you go back to July 16th.’ Perhaps Green had come here very soon after leaving Stivas.

A few minutes later the receptionist said: ‘Still no booking.’

Alvarez thanked him, returned to the car. The fact that Galloway had given a false address to the car-hire firm was proof that he had not been a straightforward tourist; that his initials were T.G. and his car had been at Bennett’s house was as near proof as he was going to get for the moment that Galloway was Green . . .

Alvarez arrived home late for supper, but Dolores’s annoyance only surfaced when he had finished his brandy, stood, and said he had to go out.

‘At this time of night?’ she asked sharply.

‘I won’t be long.’

‘I thought you specially wanted to watch that programme on the telly?’

‘Work has to come before pleasure.’

‘Since when? Where are you going?’

‘Only to try and find out something.’

‘From whom?’

‘The work’s very confidential . . .’

‘Naturally!’

Jaime looked at them. ‘What are you two on about this time?’ he asked plaintively.

‘That’s none of your business.’ She began to clear the table; her actions suggested anger, but her expression was worried. In matters of the heart, men were like children, unable to see the dangers towards which they were racing; but unlike children, once those dangers had been identified to them they blindly refused to heed them but insisted on continuing into disaster . . .

Alvarez left the house, totally unworried about whether he was approaching disaster. He would, he told himself, present all the facts calmly and unemotionally; Serena would, of course, initially try to reject the conclusion to which these facts irresistibly led, but she was too intelligent a woman not to accept them finally.

She was in the dining-room, one of only eight guests still there. She smiled as she pointed at the chair on the opposite side of the table. ‘Enrique, how wonderful to see you! Especially as I’ve been feeling rather blue and need someone to jolly me up. So welcome, knight in shining armour.’

Was it so very stupid for a nearly middle-aged man to feel his heart beat a little faster? Did age always make ridiculous what had once been romantic?

‘You’re off on one of your brown studies again. What are you thinking about this time?’

‘That if my horse could gallop instead of just trot, I’d have been here much sooner.’

She laughed, finished her last spoonful of ice-cream. ‘Let’s conform to tradition and have coffee and brandy outside. There’s something you should realize. You’re leading me into very bad habits. Until I met you, I only drank brandy very occasionally; now it’s every day.’

They had coffee and brandy outside the hotel, then left the table, crossed the road and walked on to the beach. She took off her shoes. ‘Come on, this time you do the same.’

‘I’d really rather . . .’

‘Now! Cast aside all those inhibitions and advance to a second childhood.’

‘Serena, there’s something I have to say before we do anything more.’

‘And from your tone of voice, I’m not going to like listening to you. Then forget whatever it is until tomorrow. This is the land of mariana—do as the Romans do.’

‘I have to speak now for your sake.’

‘Dammit, why do people always become so eager about other people’s sakes?’

‘Because they’re worried about them. I can’t bear to see you get hurt any more.’

‘When I learned about Tim’s death I promised myself that I’d never take anything more seriously so that life could never hurt me again. But it’s not all that easy to banish the past. You’ve discovered that, haven’t you? I can see it in you . . .’

‘You virtually admitted last time that you know he’s alive.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t start that again.’

He longed to stay silent, but knew that the longer he did so, the greater must be the hurt she eventually suffered. ‘Let’s sit down.’

She sat on the sand and he settled by her side. Still without speaking, she reached out and gripped his hand, asking for, and receiving, comfort.

‘I now know almost everything,’ he said sadly. ‘Señor Green decided to defraud the insurance company by staging an air crash from which it must seem he could, not possibly have escaped; in fact, he’d made certain Señor Bennett would pick him up at sea after he’d jumped from the plane. In the past, Señor Bennett had found a way of defrauding rich men that was safe so long as no one could prove that his intention was to defraud them; Señor Green, who’d worked for him, could provide that proof and his price for silence was Señor Bennett’s help.

‘As soon as the boat docked in Stivas, Señor Green went ashore; because it was too late to travel that night, he booked in at a hotel, under the name of Thomas Grieves, and the next morning he took a woman back to the hotel—’

‘No!’

‘I’m very, very sorry but that is what happened.’

‘But he couldn’t have done such a thing . . .’

And then she leant against him and he felt her shaking and he knew that she was at last accepting the bitter truth. He put his arms around her and stared out at the bay.

‘I didn’t know . . . I never thought . . .’ Her voice died away.

He held her tighter as the words raced through his mind. She hadn’t known that Green was a masochist . . . Although he’d assured himself again and again that this must have been so, one small and nasty part of his mind had repeatedly reminded him that there were women who were ready to condone, or even liked, perversions . . .

After a while, he continued speaking. ‘Señor Green returned to this island either because he thought there might be trouble—and here could be one of the safest places to hide—or because by then he knew there was trouble. Señor Bennett was threatened with blackmail at the hands of a fisherman who, with his brother, had been at sea on the Saturday night. The señor refused to be blackmailed, saying he’d taped the threats, and the fisherman became too frightened to pursue the blackmail. Then, a couple of days later, señor Bennett offered him money to stay silent. The only possible explanation for this unnecessary change of attitude is that señor Green had told him to pay because the fisherman’s evidence would, in a civil court, be fatal to the plan to defraud the insurance company.

‘Blackmail is a crime that only finally ends when the victim has nothing left. señor Green knew this and that now there was only one way of making certain he was not financially bled white. He decided to kill the brothers. He planted a bomb aboard their boat that was detonated by a trembler and timing device; the trembler was activated by the movement of the boat, which made certain they’d put to sea, and it started the timing device, which made certain they were well out from shore when the bomb exploded. But the elder brother was very lucky and was up for’d and he survived the explosion to be picked up by another boat.

‘I know señor Green is on the island because he hired a car in Cala Blanca on the 3rd and has been at señor Bennett’s in it at least once. He is a murderer, a fraudster, and a . . .’ He stopped. The word ‘pervert’ seemed to echo. ‘Serena, he’s rotten through and through. I’m going to have to find and arrest him and if you’re with him you’ll be inculpated in the fraud and possibly even in the murder, although you had nothing to do with that. So please, please leave him.’

After a while, she said, in a low voice: ‘You shouldn’t have told me a lot of that, should you?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘You’re a policeman, yet you’re warning me even though you’re quite certain I helped him with the fraud. You’re betraying your duty.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Surely to God that’s obvious?’

Her answer was to brush his cheek with her lips. He began to turn his head, but she put a finger on his cheek. Conscious that her emotions must be in a state of such turmoil that, the last thing she’d want would be further emotional stress, he forced himself to relax.

She spoke in a distant voice. ‘I tried to tell you the other day what kind of a man he is, but I don’t suppose I succeeded. He’s so full of the fun of living that with him the world becomes painted in glowing colours; even walking down a road you’ve walked a hundred times before becomes wonderfully exciting . . . I suppose you’re asking yourself how, after all my proud boasting about being descended from the women of La Verry, I failed to see what kind of a man he really is. The answer’s very simple. As I once hinted, when my own emotions are involved I can be as blind as the next person—I see what my emotions want me to see and not what’s actually there. But just occasionally when I was with him something would happen momentarily to lift the blindfold and I’d gain sight of something that scared me. He always knew when that had happened. He’d whirl me back into a state of blindness.’

‘But surely you couldn’t hide from yourself the nature of the intended fraud?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Didn’t that tell you what he’s really like?’

‘There’s no connection. And you know there isn’t.’

‘A man who’s so ready to commit one crime—’

She broke in. ‘Can be the nicest and kindest person you’ll ever meet. You’re a policeman and so have to condemn crime, but you’re far too humane really to believe what you’ve just tried to say—that every criminal is morally rotten. Steal to feed your starving children and the law says you’re a criminal; do you morally condemn the thief? Buy a company, strip it of its assets and throw out of work its previous employees, and legally you’ve just been clever; morally, I say you’ve committed a crime.’

‘If everyone thought like you, there would be chaos.’

‘Not chaos, because morality would reign and morality looks at all the circumstances which the law never does . . . And for me, when a man has worked for years and his work has made his employer very rich and then he is thrown aside, he is owed. So why shouldn’t he claim his debt, if to do so will hurt no one?’