Relatively Dangerous (11 page)

The undertaker and an assistant unscrewed the lid. The undertaker said: ‘We’re ready when you are.’

Alvarez nodded.

They raised the lid. He looked down and swallowed heavily. ‘OK. Put it back on for the moment.’

He turned and walked back along the dirt track, round the corner of the cemetery, to his parked Seat. Taylor was standing by the passenger door. ‘Are you ready?’

Taylor’s face was heavy with strain; he was sweating heavily and kept brushing the sweat away with the back of his hand.

‘Señor, it will be brief ‘But not bloody brief enough.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Let’s get it over with, then.’

They walked down the dirt track to reach the coffin. Alvarez motioned with his hand and the coffin lid was lifted once again. Taylor stared down at the dead man for several seconds, his face working, then he made a choking sound, turned away, and hurried over to the low drystone wall which marked the limit of the cemetery land.

Alvarez nodded and the coffin lid was replaced; the undertaker and the assistant prepared to screw it down, but he checked them. ‘Hang on until I’ve had a word with him.’

He walked over to where Taylor stood, staring out over the land, and brought a small flask from his trouser pocket. ‘This is brandy. Drink.’

Taylor took the flask, unscrewed the cap, raised the flask to his lips and drank. He passed it back.

‘Was he your father?’

Taylor nodded.

‘Thank you . . . I have to give one more order and then I’ll drive you back.’

Taylor once more stared out, his gaze unfocused. Alvarez went back to the group of men and gave orders for the coffin to be returned to its tomb.

As Alvarez entered the guardia post on Monday morning, the duty cabo, seated behind the desk, looked up. ‘There’s someone waiting for you in your room; getting downright impatient. He’s rung down twice to ask where the hell you’ve got to.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Borne.’

‘Borne . . . Borne.’ Alvarez thought for a moment, his brow furrowed. ‘The name seems vaguely familiar, but I’m damned if I can think why . . .’ Then a disturbing thought suddenly occurred to him. ‘He’s not the new comisario, is he?’

‘Damned if I know, or care. But if he is your new boss, I reckon you’d better pull your finger right out.’ The cabo looked at his watch. ‘What time are you supposed to start work?’

‘I was held up,’ replied Alvarez defensively.

‘Yeah. By oversleeping.’

He went up the stairs and along the corridor to his room. Inside, standing by the window, was a tall, thin man, with a long, narrow face whose sharp features expressed a strong measure of moral dyspepsia. He studied Alvarez, then said, in a voice which chilled: ‘Are you the inspector?’

‘Yes, señor.’

‘I have been waiting here for the past twenty-two minutes. Are you not supposed to report for work by eight?’

‘Indeed. And I left home well before then, but I didn’t come straight here because I’ve an inquiry to pursue and since I couldn’t find the man yesterday evening, I was hoping to do so first thing this morning.’

‘You succeeded?’

‘Regretfully, no. Once again, he was not at home.’

‘I see.’ The two words expressed disbelief, but also an acceptance of the fact that it would be almost impossible to prove Alvarez was lying. ‘Hearing I had reason to come to this end of the island this morning, the superior chief suggested I spoke to you personally in the hopes that by so doing the investigation into the death of Señor Taylor might be dealt with with a little more efficiency than has hitherto been the case. When I expressed my surprise at the necessity for such a comment, he further remarked that whenever he knew you were handling a case of the slightest importance, he could never make up his mind whether he would prefer you to observe your usual level of incompetence, in which case nothing would get done, or to try to show some initiative, in which case there might well be total chaos. At the time, his words surprised me. Now they do not. Look at your desk.’

Alvarez perplexedly looked at it.

‘I have never before seen such slovenly untidiness. Have you forgotten the maxim,
ex nihilo nihil fit?’

‘Er . . .’

‘In future your desk will be tidy at all times and your papers up-to-date and correctly filed. One more point; when you have occasion to pursue an investigation before reporting here in the morning, you will tell the duty guard so that he can inform anyone who inquires where you are. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, señor.’

‘I do not expect to have to refer to the matter again. Now, you fly to England tomorrow morning . . .’

‘I what?’

‘Kindly do not interrupt me. It is necessary for you to go because they stubbornly refuse to accept that it was Steven Taylor who died on this island last Wednesday week. Quite clearly, they are both unwilling and unable to accept that their own investigations of three years ago were incompetently handled. In consequence, you will now prepare a report on Taylor’s death, detailing the facts in such a manner that they, despite their ludicrous pride, can no longer claim that they are right and we are wrong.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Thanks to your initial lateness, I am now going to have great difficulty in arriving on time for my appointment.’ He walked over to the door, put his hand on the handle, stopped. ‘It occurs to me that it would be best if I read through your report before you leave so that the necessary corrections can be made. Your plane takes off at eleven, which calls for you to check-in by ten . . . Be at my office at eight-thirty.’

‘But. . .’

‘Well?’

Alvarez realized that it would not be politic to point out that that would mean his leaving home at some quite ungodly hour. ‘Nothing, señor.’

‘It would clearly help you more closely to emulate
justum et tenacem propositi virum.’

‘Yes, señor.’

The comisario opened the door and left.

The main CID room at Brackleigh Divisional HQ was very large and it contained a dozen desks; at the far end, a space was partitioned off to form the detective-sergeant’s room. Detective-Sergeant Wallace, a round, cheerful man, with the beginning of a double chin, finished reading the report which Alvarez had translated into English. He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve got to admit that that seems definite. The son identified the father. So that presents us with the interesting question: Who did we bury?’ He reached over for a folder and read one of the loose pages inside. ‘How much do you know about our end of things?’

‘Very little, señor.’

‘Let’s cut out this señor talk. I’m Ian and you’re . . .?’

‘Enrique.’

‘Right . . . I’ll fill you in. When your initial request about tracing the next-of-kin of Steven Thompson came in, we shunted it to the passport people. As you know, they came back with the news that the passport had been pinched some four years back. That rang the alarm bells and we asked you for further details. You then identified Steven Thompson as Steven Arthur Taylor, late of Keene House, Middle Cross. Because he’d been travelling on a stolen passport, we put his name through the computer and that came up with the information that he’d one conviction for fraud and was dead.’

He turned over a page, read for a while. ‘His style of fraud wasn’t original, but he was extraordinarily successful at it. I gather that basically it’s a simple scheme and if the operator is very careful, not even illegal. He buys a load of shares which are quoted very low and sets out to sell them for considerably more than he paid for them. Obviously, this calls for a seller with the gift of the gab and a buyer who’s either a natural sucker or else has a streak of larceny in his make-up and who, when presented with a share he’s told he can buy cheaply only because someone else is being tricked into selling before discovering it’s worth many times its quoted price, rushes to buy . . . Taylor only ran into trouble when he let his tongue run too far ahead of the facts —drunk on his own verbosity. The judge at the trial— which was quite some time ago now—was an old fool who was gullible enough to believe Taylor’s fervent promises to reform and so handed out a suspended sentence instead of sending him to jail . . .

‘This brings us to a little over three years ago. Word reached us that he was back to his old tricks and had overstepped the line again. We started making inquiries and eventually discovered it was true and the papers were sent to the DPP for his decision on whether to prosecute; the point at issue was, were Taylor’s actions just legal or had they slipped into being illegal? It was a very abstruse point, the kind that makes a lawyer break open a celebratory bottle of champagne. Things were at that stage when he was involved in a car crash which killed him.

‘Obviously, when someone under investigation has a car crash and his body is so badly burned that it is not immediately recognizable, we need to be convinced that it is his body . . . What did we have here? The car was his. It had skidded off a wet road, gone through a stone parapet and crashed below, bursting into flames. The road wasn’t a busy one and it was several minutes before another car came along. The driver of this raced off to the nearest house to raise the alarm and while he was away the burning car exploded.

‘When it was possible, the wreck was examined. The body had fallen on to its left-hand side and because part was pressed against solid metal, we had a section of clothing and flesh which escaped burning. This gave us points to check with the wife. When he’d left the house, he’d been wearing a sports coat which she described in some detail and a blue shirt; the section of unburned coat matched her description and the shirt was blue. She told us he’d a crescent-shaped scar on his left leg, a few inches above the knee; the corpse showed signs of a crescent-shaped scar above the left knee. He’d worn dentures; we contacted his dentist who identified the dentures from the corpse as his. There was an autopsy. The deceased had not been murdered, he had died from a massive coronary thrombosis. Finally, there was not one person recently reported missing who could possibly have been the dead man.’

‘That would normally seem conclusive,’ said Alvarez.

‘You can say that again. But now you tell us that he died in Majorca almost a fortnight ago, identified by his son, so that the corpse in the car was not his. Which raises the sixty-four thousand dollar question, how and where did he find a dead man, near enough his own age and build to be passed off as him (the evidence about the scar shows his wife was an accomplice—which in turn suggests why she sold up and left the country soon afterwards), who died a natural death and whose disappearance created no disturbance?’

‘An undertaker?’

‘I’d say that that’s it in one. What’s more, it would need to be a busy undertaker in order to provide the wide choice there would have to be for him to find a suitable candidate. And even then, it would still take time for the exact combination to turn up, which explains why he didn’t fake his death when he first realized we were on to him, but waited until the last moment. He couldn’t do anything else.’

They were silent for a moment, thinking about what had just been said. Wallace was the first to speak. ‘I seem to remember that your report mentioned he might have been on the island on business. Was he working the same old game with the expats there?’

‘I haven’t been able to find out exactly what he was doing. Even his own son did not . . . That is, I believed the son when he said he did not know what his father was doing on the island, but now I begin to wonder.’

‘He may have known, or guessed, but been too ashamed to speak?’

‘That must be very possible. The son’s relationship with his father was obviously a very stormy one, but there was still natural love. A son would always want to defend his father’s reputation.’

Brackleigh was a market town set among well-wooded countryside, some eight miles back from the coast. Not on any direct road route to London, its railway a branch line with a poor service, it had never become a commuters’ town and had thereby escaped much of the sad development which had scarred so many other towns in the county.

The undertaker’s premises were to the west of, and on the edge of, the town, a very convenient location since both churches were also to the west, while the crematorium was three miles further out. Wallace led the way into the reception area. A middle-aged woman asked them in a hushed voice how she could help them and Wallace said he’d like a word with Mr Gates, if free. A moment or two later, she escorted them through the Hall of Loving Care, where half a dozen coffins in different styles were tastefully on view, and into a large office.

Gates was tall, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted. He had a wide, rubbery face, an air of solicitude, and a voice with treacly undertones. He was dressed in black coat, stiff collar and black tie, and striped trousers. He shook hands with a firm, but moist grip. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am delighted to make your acquaintances. Miss Carol, would you be kind enough to provide two chairs?’

She had already set one chair in front of the desk and now she put a second one alongside it. She left, without a word.

‘Miss Carol,’ said Gates, as he returned round the desk and sat, ‘informed me that you wished to ask me certain questions. I shall be delighted to assist in any way I can.’

Tine,’ said Wallace, who’d taken an instinctive and immediate dislike to the undertaker, but was trying not to show this. ‘I think I’m right in saying that your firm conducted the funeral of Steven Arthur Taylor, of Keene House, Middle Cross, three years ago last March?’

‘Who did you say?’ asked Gates, inclining his head as if to hear more clearly, although previously he had shown no signs of deafness.

‘Steven Arthur Taylor.’

‘I do not immediately recognize the name as one of our passed-ons, but you will, I know, understand that we conduct so many laying-to-rests that it is not possible for me to remember all the names.’

‘But you’ll keep records?’

‘Since the day this firm was founded the name of every passed-on has been recorded in the Book of Loving Remembrance.’