Authors: Roderic Jeffries
Dr Méndez lived on the outskirts of the village, at a point where the hill had begun to level out so that the land dropped only gently. The house was faced with rock, not limestone blocks, and it stood in its own grounds, one of only a few to do so.
Méndez’s face was thin and his expression harassed. His wife, who let Alvarez into the house, was considerably younger than he, was dressed very smartly, and wore a considerable amount of jewellery. The doctor’s harassment, decided Alvarez, was emotional rather than professional.
The sitting-room faced south and, despite the fact the house was near the foot of the hill, offered much the same dramatic view across the central plain to mountains and sea as was visible from higher up. Méndez, once Alvarez was seated, began to pace the floor, deftly rounding a small table on which were three pieces of Lladro ware. ‘I was called to the house at roughly nine-thirty. By then, she’d been dead for quite some time.’ He rushed the words and clipped the sentences short, as if very pressed for time.
‘Roughly, when did she die?’
His tone became impatient. ‘Not much point, surely, when it’s so obviously suicide? But if you must have a figure, call it twelve hours.’
‘And she died from asphyxiation?’
He came to a sudden stop. ‘Yes. Will you be calling for a PM?’
‘I doubt it. I take it you read the suicide note?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Alvarez said slowly: ‘It’s sad to think of someone committing suicide without ever finding out if her fears were justified.’
‘It happens,’ said the doctor grimly.
Back in his over-hot, stuffy office, Alvarez telephoned Palma. He was very grateful to hear that Superior Chief Salas was out and he made his report to the woman with a plum in her mouth. The English señorita had committed suicide by pulling a plastic bag over her head, probably after taking some sleeping pills. Everything appeared to be straightforward and therefore there seemed to be no point in asking for a PM. However, in case the superior chief decided that as a foreigner was involved a PM was justified, the body would be held at the mortuary for forty-eight hours before arrangements were put in hand for the funeral.
The intermittent noise broke through Alvarez’s sleep and scattered his dreams, but when it ceased he thankfully began once more to drift away . . .
‘It’s the station,’ Dolores shouted from downstairs.
He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, very dimly seen in the light which filtered through both shutters and curtains.
‘Are you coming down, then?’
He slowly manoeuvred himself into a sitting position.
‘Are you dead up there?’
No such luck. He dressed in shirt and trousers and, bare-footed, made his way downstairs.
Dolores, as coolly handsome as a flamenco queen, said: ‘You look terrible.’
‘If you knew how I felt! . . . What lunatic at the station is ringing up this early in the afternoon?’
‘It’s only early to someone who’s drunk a bottle of coñac and been snoring like a matanza pig.’
Before all that nonsense about women’s lib, he thought sourly, a woman had known her place and stuck to it. He crossed to the telephone. ‘Yeah?’
‘Been on holiday, have you? . . . You’re handling the suicide case in Caraitx, aren’t you?’
‘What if I am?’
‘There’s an Englishman been ringing up and creating.
Inspector Antignac says you’re to see him and find out what in the hell he’s on about.’
‘The case is closed.’
‘You argue that out with the inspector. And in case you’re interested, the Englishman lives at Ca’n Noyeta.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Caraitx.’
‘How near?’
‘How would I know?’
Alvarez replaced the receiver and walked into the kitchen where Dolores was beginning to prepare the supper. He slumped down into a handy chair. ‘I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.’
She picked up the kettle, filled it from the cold tap, and placed it on the gas stove. The gas refused to light. ‘The bottle must need changing.’
In the old days, he thought, no woman would have dreamed of asking a man to do a household chore. Reluctantly, he dragged himself to his feet and went through the small enclosed patio to the passageway in which they kept the gas bottles.
Around Caraitx, the land was light grey in colour, very stony, and poor in heart. Almonds and algarrobas grew freely, but only where there was irrigation and there had been heavy fertilizing with dung or well-weathered seaweed was it possible to grow the kind of crops seen everywhere around Llueso. But there was one crop, which grew without the need of any irrigation, for which the district was justly famous: the Caraitx melon. How they grew, when they were never watered and no rain fell for weeks on end, was a miracle. And since any miracle needed to be celebrated and propitiated, on the first Saturday of every June a special service of thanksgiving was held in Caraitx church, when farmers gave thanks for miracles past and—although this was never actually stated aloud—pleaded for miracles to come. When the small, very dark green melons, white veined, were harvested, any man could join the gods and dine on ambrosia and nectar.
When Alvarez came abreast of the first of the melon fields, he slowed the car and stared at the rows of plants, as yet bearing only small, rock-hard fruit, and as he conjured up the icy sweetness of the mature melon, he cursed the Englishman who was responsible for his having to be on the road when the heat was so stifling. He cursed the Englishman much harder when, twenty-three minutes later, a third set of direction to Ca’n Noyeta proved to be wrong.
With considerable difficulty, he turned the car and bounced his way back along the dirt track to the metalled road. A mule cart, with squealing axle, driven by a man who was slumped in half sleep, came along. He shouted through the opened car window: ‘D’you know where Ca’n Noyeta is?’
The cart stopped. The driver remained slumped, his face hidden by a wide-brimmed raffia hat.
‘Where’s Ca’n Noyeta?’ Alvarez shouted still louder.
The man slowly lifted his head until his heavily stubbled chin and toothless mouth became visible. He considered the question for a long time before saying: ‘Is that the house of the Englishman who . . .’
‘Who what?’
The man hawked and spat. ‘Up the road, first track on the left and keep going until you see the house of the Englishman who . . .’
‘In the name of the devil, who what?’
The man grinned: it was the grin of a satyr. Then he shouted at the mule to continue and lowered his head.
The dirt track wandered through the countryside: a hundred years previously, a traveller would have seen exactly the same scene as now. That Caraitx bastard, thought Alvarez, sending him into the blue for a laugh . . .
Finally, after a sharp left-hand bend, a house came in sight. Initially, he was certain that this couldn’t be Ca’n Noyeta: in a bad state of repair, without electricity, telephone, garden, or swimming pool, it was inconceivable that an Englishman could be living in it. Yet as he drew nearer, he saw a nameboard which, in very artistic lettering, identified it as the house he sought.
He parked behind a Renault 6 which looked as if it had escaped from a breaker’s yard. He crossed to the front door, knocked, and after a while heard a woman’s footsteps approaching. He pictured a dispirited, middle-aged wife who with her husband had come to the island when the cost of living was so much less and it had been possible to enjoy life on a small income . . .
Liza opened the door. She was wearing a bikini, but only just. He realized he was gawking at her, but it was not often one actually met the centrefold from Playboy.
‘What do you want?’ she asked in thickly accented Spanish.
He pulled himself together. ‘I am from the Cuerpo General de Policia, señora,’ he replied, in English. ‘Is your husband inside?’
She giggled. ‘I sure hope not! The last time I heard anything about him, he was in Manchester . . . You mean Bruno. Sure, he’s in. Come on through.’
As he followed her through the house, he tried not to concentrate on the delightful way in which her largely visible buttocks moved as she walked.
Bruno and Norah were sunbathing on rugs set out on the ground at the back of the house. He was wearing very brief trunks, she the bottom half of a bikini that somehow managed to be even briefer. They sat up. Norah flashed Alvarez a dazzling smile, said ‘Hi!’, picked up a glass and drained it. Only then, as an afterthought, did she bother to find the top half of the bikini and slip this on.
Alvarez said, with great formality. ‘Good afternoon, señora Meade.’
Norah giggled. ‘Grab that, Bruno! señora Meade!’
It was obvious that she was not señora Meade. Alvarez began to feel as if he were caught up in an erotic dream. ‘Señor, I understand you’ve been speaking to the police in Caraitx about the death of señorita Dean?’
Bruno came to his feet with athletic ease. He scratched his bronzed, hairy chest. ‘I don’t give a bugger what anyone says, the old girl didn’t commit suicide.’
‘Señor, I was in the house of the unfortunate señorita this morning and all the evidence suggests that she did tragically kill herself.’
‘Stuff the evidence . . . Here, let’s go on inside and find something to drink.’
In the sitting-room, Alvarez sat on one of the decrepit armchairs, apprehensive that it might collapse under him. He stared at the paintings on the walls and wondered what, if anything, they were meant to represent.
Liza came into the room with a battered papier-mache tray on which were glass tumblers, a bowl of ice cubes, and a bottle half full of brandy: she put the tray down on the wooden box that did duty as a table. Meade emptied the bottle into the tumblers and Liza added as many ice cubes as each glass would then hold.
‘Why are you so damned knuckle-headed as to think Gertie killed herself?’ Meade demanded, as he handed Alvarez one of the tumblers.
‘Apart from any other reason, señor, because she left a note in which she said she was going to commit suicide.’
He looked surprised. ‘So did it say anything else: like why?’
‘She feared she had cancer and had just heard that a friend of hers in England had died from that disease after many months of pain. She could not face the future.’
‘I just don’t believe all that.’
‘I myself read the note . . .’
‘I’m saying I don’t believe she thought she had cancer. We used to talk about everything and if she’d thought that, she’d have told us.’
‘It is a subject people often do not like to discuss.’
‘If she’d been worried, she’d have told us.’ He turned to face Norah. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘I think so,’ she replied. ‘After all, we were her friends.’ ‘Yeah.’ Meade looked back at Alvarez. ‘D’you know something? Before she came out here, she hardly knew anyone: to talk to as friends, I mean. So with us she talked all the time about anything. She’d have shared her fears if she had any.’
‘She’d have known we’d have done everything we could to help,’ agreed Liza.
‘Señor, I am sure that from your point of view what you say is correct, but how correct is your point of view?’ Alvarez thought for a few seconds. ‘Even from friends of many years, people keep secrets. If the señorita had told you her fears, would you not have insisted she see a doctor? And that might have been to confirm her very worst fears . . . Do you understand what I am trying to say?’
‘Of course. But it’s all a load of cod’s. One thing. Who is this friend who’s just died? Gertie told us often enough she hadn’t a single real friend back home.’
‘I know only that her name was Pat.’
‘She’s never mentioned anyone called Pat . . . And if she was all that frightened about herself, how come she was here on Sunday night, laughing her head off and planning an exhibition?’
‘This last Sunday?’
‘That’s what I just said.’
‘Did she perhaps not seem to be just a little upset over something?’
‘She was upset over nothing. She even had a few more drinks than usual and we bloody near had her doing “Knees Up, Mother Brown”.’
‘You mentioned an exhibition—was this to be of her paintings?’
‘Only a small one. And it was to be in Llueso because there’s a whole raft of painters live there: leastwise, that’s what the bloody ignoramuses call themselves. She only painted commercially, of course.’
‘Bruno paints,’ said Norah, with tremendous pride.
‘Artistically,’ said Liza, to make the point quite clear.
Alvarez looked up at a couple of the paintings opposite where he sat and tried to seem intelligently appreciative.
‘Funny thing is, I reckon that if she’d learned to spit on the money, she could’ve become a proper painter.’ Meade sounded as if this were not an admission which came easily. ‘When I saw that last picture of hers, I told her straight, for me that’s not chocolate box, that’s art . . . D’you see it?’
‘There was an unfinished painting on the easel.’
‘What was the composition?’
‘An olive tree, an almond orchard, a finca, and mountains.’
‘Original,’ sneered Meade. Then his tone altered. ‘But the way she’d nailed that olive tree! You just knew it was a thousand years old, that it had stared, caring but impotent, at all the stupidities and tragedies of life . . .’
Alvarez remembered how, after first seeing it, he had briefly sensed something chilling, even macabre about that painting. ‘Perhaps, señor, it was expressing the fears of a woman who believed she had a fatal cancer?’
Meade was clearly surprised by a possibility which had not occurred to him. He drained his glass, fiddled with it to spin the half-melted cubes around the edge, then said:
‘Get another bottle, Liza.’
‘There’s nothing more of anything, not even vino,’ she answered.
‘Jeeze! Who goddamn well keeps drinking all the booze?’
‘Do you know when the señorita came to live on this island?’ Alvarez asked.
Meade shrugged his shoulders, his mind troubled by the lack of alcohol.
‘Must be quite a long time now,’ said Norah vaguely.
‘And has she made many friends?’