Too Clever By Half, page 9
‘Both wiped clean.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
It was, surely, the clinching proof since it ruled out the possibility—however remote—that before his death Burnett had drunk whisky, perhaps as a gesture of contempt aimed at himself. It was impossible to believe he would have bothered to wipe down glass and bottle before committing suicide.
Obviously, Alvarez decided—trying to find an excuse for not doing so, and failing—he must ring Salas. But before he did, it might be as well to fortify himself. He opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk and brought out a bottle of brandy and a glass and poured himself a generous, and hopefully sustaining, drink.
The plum-voiced secretary said that Salas was in his office. It was not, Alvarez decided, his lucky day. ‘Señor, Señor Burnett did not commit suicide, he was murdered.’
‘Of course.’
‘But why do you say that? I mean, I’ve only just been given the final proof. . .’
‘The moment you assured me that beyond any shadow of a doubt he had committed suicide, I could be certain he had been murdered.’
CHAPTER 12
Alvarez looked at his watch and noted with pleasure that half the morning had passed. He settled back in the chair and stared without curiosity at the morning’s mail which he had not yet bothered to open. Dolores was cooking Sopa Mallorquina for lunch. In the hands of a tyro, the vegetable and bread soup could resemble prison gruel, but in the hands of an expert it became a dish fit to be served on Mount Olympus. His sense of contentment blossomed. It was Saturday. Superior Chief Salas was so superior that he seldom worked on a Saturday afternoon and there fore there would be no need to cut short the afternoon’s siesta . . .
Reluctantly he brought his thoughts back to the more immediate problem of Burnett’s murder. There was really no case against Heal, although he was the only possible suspect at the moment; nothing to prove that the red Mercedes parked in the sitjola had been his, that he had returned late that night, or to suggest a possible motive. Phillipa Burnett had said that she had not recognized the voice of the man who had been arguing so angrily with her brother, but that was before a name could be given to the unseen person. Identification was an odd process and quite often it needed a trigger to set it off; a person’s mind would be blank until prompted and then suddenly it became filled with details. Of course, to prompt could be to risk a false identification, but only if a person were easily misled and that did not describe the señorita.
Forty minutes later, he parked outside Ca’n Pario. Phillipa was out on the patio, reading, a glass on the wooden table by her side.
‘You must have heard the bar open.’
‘Señorita, I assure you I had no idea . . .’
‘Of course not. How could you know that an old woman like me frequently risks perdition by drinking on her own? I was only pulling your leg. Sit down and tell me whether you’ll change to red wine or stick to coñac?’
She stood, appearing ungraceful because her frock was voluminous and made her look very much larger than she was. She went indoors, returned with a tumbler which she handed him. She sat, suddenly slapped her left wrist with her right hand. ‘The mosquitoes are voracious. I told that old fool, Tomas, that he’d lost all the fish in the estanque, but he wouldn’t listen and now the mosquitoes are breeding like flies, if that’s not rather Irish.’
‘They are bad everywhere this year, señorita; even in the village we are plagued by them.’
‘Well, you won’t have come here to talk about mosquitoes. Has . . . Have you learned anything?’
‘Perhaps, but I cannot be certain yet, which is why I’m here now to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Are you friendly with Señor Heal?’
‘I’ve met him at parties, but I’d never say I was friendly with him. Frankly, he’s the kind of person one has as an acquaintance, an amusing acquaintance, but not as a friend. My father used to say that a gentleman remained a gentleman even though he wore a cloth cap, a cad remained a cad even though he wore a topper.’
‘You are saying that the Señor is a cad?’
That is what my father would have dubbed him; amusing, witty, but indisputably a cad. However, many of the other foreigners who live here find him a very nice man. It’s all a question of standards.’
‘Are yours the same as your father’s?’
‘I hope so. I believe that a man is who he is, not what he owns.’
‘Did your brother know him?’
‘Not to my knowledge. Justin, even when at his most gregarious, never liked cocktail parties.’
‘He might, of course, have met him somewhere other than at a cocktail party?’
‘Possible, but unlikely. Heal is welcomed by people who respect wealth, my brother was welcomed by those who respect honest intelligence. Why is this of any importance?’
‘I have learned something which makes it likely that it was Señor Heal whom you heard at your brother’s house on Monday morning.’
‘Impossible.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘Heal’s painfully cultured tones are unmistakable.’
‘When a person is excited, he can sound different from normal.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that voice. It’s possible the speaker was a foreigner.’
‘But Señor Heal is a foreigner.’
She started, looked disturbed. ‘Yes, of course. I’m very sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. I do apologize.’
‘Señorita, there is no need. All I was trying to do was to make certain what you meant.’
She ignored him. ‘There is every need to apologize. As I say to anyone whom I hear complaining about the way something is done on this island, this is the Mallorquins’ land and they can do things however they want and if a foreigner finds that objectionable, it’s up to him to leave . . .
What I was trying to explain, very clumsily, was that the man spoke English with an accent; he was probably not a native Briton.’
‘Could you suggest what nationality he might have been?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve definitely never heard him before?’
‘Never.’
‘Was there a second voice which might have been Señor Heal’s?’
‘No. Why do you keep mentioning him?’
‘There was a red Mercedes parked in the sitjola.’
‘So you mentioned before.’
‘It was probably his.’
‘All I can tell you for certain is that the man I heard was not Gerald Heal.’
He was too polite to point out that her quality of hearing might have deteriorated because of her age and he lacked the courage to suggest that, having once given her opinion, perhaps she was determined not to be seen to change it. And there was, of course, the faint possibility that another man had borrowed Heal’s car or had been driven to the house by Heal . . .
Satisfied that there was nothing to be gained from further questioning, he settled back and enjoyed the brandy.
He returned to the office fifteen minutes before he could, in all honesty, leave to go home and enjoy the Sopa Mallorquina Dolores had promised. He decided to use up the time by telephoning Heal and demanding the other come to his office on Monday morning. On the face of things, any interview was not going to be easy because Heal was plainly a clever man. But clever men could make mistakes if they were over-conscious of their own cleverness.
He dialled Heal’s number and the call was answered by Carmen. ‘If the señor’s in, tell him I’d like a word with him,’ he said.
She gasped. ‘But haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard what?’ He hadn’t an inkling of what could have happened, but instinct suggested his weekend was about to be ruined.
‘The señor’s been killed in a car crash.’
The mountains provided a different world from the coastal areas. Here, nature remained the ruler, powerful and antagonistic. Once, in some areas, there had been cultivation carried out along terraced slopes, but very few were now willing to labour so hard for so miserable a reward or to live in such isolation. One could drive for kilometres along tortuously zigzagging roads and not see a single inhabited building.
Fervently wishing he did not suffer from altophobia, Alvarez stood at the edge of the unfenced road and stared down at the crushed Mercedes which lay fifty metres down the very steep rock slope, hard up against a massive boulder. ‘Was he dead when they reached him?’
‘Too dead to say hullo.’ The traffic policeman was young and determined to prove himself tough and unimpressionable. ‘No one knew he’d gone over the edge until a couple of cyclists noticed that tree.’ He pointed at a small pine whose trunk had been shattered when the car hit it immediately after leaving the road.
‘Fancy cycling up here!’
‘Preparing for the round-the-island race.’
They were welcome. ‘What was the time?’
‘They saw the car just before half past three in the afternoon. The dead man had a gold watch—they say that that must have cost a few hundred thousand pesetas!— which was broken and that had stopped at twenty-five past twelve.’
‘Was he wearing a seat-belt?’
‘No. Not that it would have done him much good if he had been, at the speed he must have been travelling.’
Alvarez turned to stare up at the very sharp left-hand bend roughly a hundred metres from where they stood. A reasonable judgement was that a prudent driver would not take that corner at more than thirty k.p.h. Obviously, Heal had come round it at a very much greater speed. Because he was the kind of man he was and in a powerful car? Or because quite suddenly he could not slow down? The car must have begun to slide. A skilful driver would normally have corrected the slide by using the wheel and maybe a mere dab of the brakes, an unskilled one would have panicked and slammed on the brakes as hard as he could. There were no marks on the road, proving the brakes had not been slammed on. Either the driver had overrated his skill or by then the car had been travelling so fast—at a speed not even a Finnish rally driver would contemplate—that no degree of skill could hold it on the road.
‘You’re going to have to get the car into Palma.’
‘Are you loco? Get that wreck back up here, on to the road? How?’
‘You’re a bright bunch; someone will work out a way.’
‘Look, a foreigner with plenty of booze inside him comes round a corner too fast, loses control, goes over the edge, and kills himself. That’s his misfortune. And if the insurance company wants to look at things, that’s up to them, but they can work out what to do.’
‘I want the car taken to Traffic . . .’
‘Then the order will have to come from someone a lot higher up the ladder than you are. We’re not rupturing ourselves dragging that back up on to the road just on your say-so.’
Mustering what dignity he could, Alvarez returned to his car. He switched on the fan to clear the oppressive heat which had built up even though both front windows had been wide open, lit a cigarette, and stared across the wooded valley at the range of bleak mountains on the far side.
Heal had become a possible suspect in a murder case. Now, he had died in a crash. Coincidence? Instinct and experience suggested a connecting thread . . . The señorita was convinced that the man she had heard in her brother’s house had not been Heal. But despite her refusal to accept the fact, when a man was gripped by a violent emotion, his voice could change in character and tone and become difficult to recognize; the ‘foreign’ accent could well be no more than evidence of such a change. The odds must be that the car outside Burnett’s home had been Heal’s. A strong-willed, highly successful man, certain of his own superiority, he could have turned to murder more easily than most. The very wealthy were often overtaken by the I-am-God syndrome which led them to believe they had a right to take any action that was necessary to ensure that their will was done. It was realistic to envisage Heal as the murderer of Burnett.
If Heal had murdered Burnett, he must have realized that it was essential for his own safety that, since the police had identified his car, he appeared to give them his full and unstinted cooperation. Yet, knowing he had an eleven o’clock appointment with the detective in charge of the case, he had left the house beforehand and an hour and a half afterwards had still been forty minutes’ drive away. What could have been so vitally important to him, if he was the murderer, to make him prepared to take the risk of antagonizing the detective?
Thirty minutes later he rounded one last hairpin bend to reach the floor of a valley which led out to the central plain. With no more precipitous drops to worry about, and only light traffic, his mind returned to the case. If it was confirmed that the Mercedes’s crash had been engineered, Heal had been murdered. The two murders would surely have to be connected, at the very least through their motives. Yet he’d uncovered no motive for Burnett’s death because it seemed the only person who could benefit from that was his sister; and not only had it been in her interests for the case to be named the suicide it had first appeared to be, it was almost impossible to believe her capable of fratricide. Even if one stretched one’s imagination to breaking-point, how could her financial motive for her brother’s death have any connection with a motive for Heal’s death? What could have entwined the two men’s lives when they were so totally different in every respect and, it seemed, might never have met?
Another twenty minutes’ driving brought him to Llueso and he crossed the torrente near the Roman bridge. He parked outside the lottery shop, went in, and invested in six entries in the primitive lottery. On the brief drive from there to the office, he pondered the problem of how to spend the hundreds of millions of pesetas one of his entries would bring him.
He telephoned Salas. ‘Señor Heal has been killed in a car crash in the mountains and since he is the only possible suspect in the murder of Señor Burnett—’
‘Goddamn it, you do this deliberately!’
‘But . . .’ Alvarez became silent, accepting that his superior chief was incapable of appreciating the fact that he had little or no say in the course events so often took. ‘Señor, in the circumstances it is essential that his car is examined by Traffic to see if it was sabotaged.’
‘I’m surprised you think it necessary to point that out.’
‘But it is fifty metres down below the road and will be very difficult to recover. Traffic are refusing to act without an order from someone superior to myself.’
There was a long pause. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but is it not a fact that at the moment there is no hard evidence to suggest whether the crash was the result of accident, suicide, or murder?’
‘That is so, señor. But the fact that Señor Heal had become a suspect in Señor Burnett’s murder suggests—’
‘Suggests to someone of a rational mind, given to preferring simplicity to complexity, that if he were the murderer, then on this drive he was either so mentally preoccupied with the consequences of his crime that he did not exercise the care so essential in the mountains or that he was overwhelmed by guilt and decided to commit suicide.’
‘From what I’ve learned, he was a man so certain that whatever he did was justified that he’d never have become dangerously preoccupied or suffer that strong a sense of guilt.’
‘What motive is there for his murder?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea at this stage beyond the fact that it must be connected with Señor Burnett’s murder. But I’m certain it will come to light in the course of future investigations.’
‘That, surely, will depend on who is doing the investigating? Very well, I’ll give the order for the car to be retrieved.’ He rang off without another word.
Juan and Isabel were in the living-room, watching television. Alvarez settled in one of the free chairs and stared at the screen, but soon lost interest in the heroic deeds of the cartoon characters. Accept that the señorita was wrong and that the man who had had a row with Burnett had been Heal. What had the row been about? How could a retiring, insignificant, weak-willed man so infuriate a brash, self-important millionaire, whom he might never have met before, that the latter became violently angry?
Something caught his attention and caused him to look round. Dolores was standing in the doorway of the kitchen and staring at him with an expression of deep concern. Why was she worrying about him now? . . . And then he realized why. Ever since it had been clear that he was dealing with a case of murder, not suicide, he had been overwhelmed by perplexing problems. But she, with a woman’s instinct for foolishly mistaking a man’s emotions, believed that he’d become so abstracted because he was yearning after Alma. Why would she never grant him emotional maturity?
As he pictured Alma, he experienced a resentful sadness; why did a man have to grow old?
CHAPTER 13
Traffic rang on Tuesday morning.
‘We’ve examined the car from end to end. It suffered major damage in the fall, especially to the underside when this struck a very large boulder. As a result, while we can report that both brake lines ruptured, we cannot say for certain whether they had done so prior to the crash.’
‘Does that mean you can’t be certain whether someone sabotaged the car?’
‘Officially, we can’t; there’s no conclusive evidence on that point. Unofficially, I will go so far as to say that we have found marks on the brake lines which do not seem to be consistent with impact forces. But understand this: I’m not saying that we’re reasonably certain the car was sabotaged even if we can’t supply the legal proof, I’m merely pointing out that it could have been.’
Alvarez thanked the other, rang off. So it was still impossible to be certain Heal had been murdered, but instinct and logic said that he must have been. How to confirm instinct and logic? Uncover a motive for his murder and show that this motive was inextricably entwined with the motive for the murder of Burnett . . .
