Death Trick (17 page)

‘Ye gods!’ he said, as he sat upright.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘I’ve been asleep. I’m terribly sorry. I meant to talk over the case with you.’

‘Tomorrow’s soon enough,’ said Alvarez, surprised.

Farley might not have heard him. ‘It’s the heat and all that wine with the meal; I’m just not used to it.’

What was life when there was no sun and no wine?

The hotel was on the eastern end of the front in Puerto Llueso; from most of the bedrooms one looked across the bay to the mountains which ringed the far side, a view that was always changing its colours, always beautiful.

On the following morning Alvarez took the lift to the fifth and top floor and walked along the corridor to the end room. He knocked, entered. Farley, stripped to the waist, was sunbathing out on the small balcony. ‘I’m damned if I knew there was anywhere on the island half as lovely as this. I’d heard it was all concrete.’

Alvarez spoke sadly. ‘If some people have their way, it will be, even here in Puerto Llueso.’ The pace of development in the port was accelerating after years during which it had been carefully held in check. No one seemed to know quite why the change. There was talk of bribes given and fortunes made, but talk came easily. Certainly, the building provided work for many people, but if all the quiet charm was destroyed and in consequence the number of visitors dropped—those who sought brash entertainment would always look for it elsewhere—then long-term it could turn out to be a very expensive solution to the problem of unemployment. ‘Shall we go and speak to Oakley?’

‘I’ll be with you just as soon as I’ve put on a shirt.’

‘By the way, I would be careful; it is very easy to become badly sunburned.’

Farley stepped from the balcony into the bedroom, crossed to the nearer bed, and picked up his shirt. ‘Thanks for the warning, but in fact I don’t suppose I’ll get the chance to overdo things. I’ve a mountain of work waiting on my desk, so I have to get back just as soon as I possibly can.’ He noticed the expression on Alvarez’s face and chuckled. ‘You think that’s crazy?’

‘A very commendable attitude, but . . .’

‘But why kill myself rushing?’ He turned and looked through the window. ‘Another twenty-four hours of this sort of life and I reckon I won’t know the answer. Who the hell really cares if half the City is defrauding the other half, just so long as I can lie out in the sun, swim in a warm sea, and have a couple of bottles of wine with every meal!’

They drove to Ca’n Tardich.

Farley studied the house. ‘If this is where insider trading gets you, lead me inside.’

They crossed to the front door and Alvarez knocked. Beatriz opened it. He greeted her, then said with mild curiosity: ‘What are you doing here today? I thought your days were Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?’

‘The señor wanted me to give the house a really good clean through and asked if I could put in a bit of extra time.’

‘Is he in?’

She shook her head.

‘Have you any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘Only that it probably won’t be before lunch.’

Alvarez spoke to Farley in English, explaining what had happened, then turned back to Beatriz. ‘I suppose you’ve no idea where he’s gone?’

‘I haven’t, no.’

‘Then we’ll return this evening and see if he’s back . . . Will you leave a message and say we’ll be around at about six? And if he can’t make it then, would he please be certain to be here tomorrow morning at nine-thirty.’

They returned to the car. ‘Strewth, but it’s hot!’ said Farley, as he settled in the car and clipped up the safety-belt. ‘I feel as if I’m dissolving.’

‘Since now there is nothing you can do until this evening, why not cool down in the sea?’

‘Why not indeed!’

They returned to Ca’n Tardich at six-ten that evening. The air was filled with the shrilling of cicadas, the croaking call of frogs, intermittently sounding sheep bells, and the barking of dogs tied up at the entrance of fields to ‘guard’ them. Up in the sharp blue sky, two aircraft created crossing white plumes as they overflew the island in different directions.

Alvarez knocked on the front door. There was no reply.

‘Not back yet,’ said Farley.

‘Or he’s gone out again.’

‘Would he, if he’d got your message?’

‘Beatriz may not have left it; she likes him and thinks I shouldn’t keep bothering him. We islanders don’t take much notice of authority.’ Alvarez spoke with both pride and irritation. He walked over to the garage and looked through the crack between the two doors. ‘The car’s away.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Just to make sure tomorrow, I’ll ring first thing in the morning and say he’s not to leave here until we’ve spoken to him.’

‘I don’t see how he’ll be able to wriggle out of that.’

‘So now we have to make two decisions. Which bar do we go to for a drink, and to which restaurant for a meal?’

‘Tell me something, Enrique: living here, how in the hell do you ever get any work done?’

‘It is a question I occasionally ask myself.’

Alvarez crumbled a slice of coca into the hot chocolate which was well laced with brandy. Dolores dried one of the plates she had just washed. ‘It’s Maria’s First Communion next week.’

‘Which Maria’s that?’

‘Typical!’ she told the plate. ‘Only a man could ask, which Maria!’

‘But we know so many.’

‘Cecilia’s Maria, that’s which. Such a sweet little thing.’

It was not the description he would have given the young girl whose manners so often proved that she’d been spoiled from the day she’d been born.

‘I’ve said I’ll help with the cooking for the party which means being out all day, so you’ll have to get your own lunch.’

He showed his astonishment.

‘It won’t kill you for once.’

Maybe it wouldn’t, but what counted was the principle. In the old days, no woman would for one second have considered leaving her menfolk to provide their own lunch. He’d always been against joining the Common Market.

‘Cecilia told me that they’re getting the baker to cook four suckling pigs.’

‘Four?’

‘They want to have a good party.’

‘But however many people are they asking?’

‘Hundreds,’ she answered, careless of the real number.

He ate another spoonful of coca and chocolate. Parties on christenings, First Communions, weddings, and Saints’ Days, were becoming bigger and bigger as each giver vied to present the most Lucullan feast. A far cry from his First Communion: just a few pasties filled with angels’-hair jam and homemade wine . . .

She said: ‘Will you get your present separately or would you rather join in with us?’

‘It’ll be a lot easier if I join in with you.’

‘Then you’d better give me five thousand pesetas.’

‘How much?’

‘You don’t want us to appear mean, do you?’ She stared hard at him, then resumed washing up. ‘I’ve decided to buy her a frock; there are two I really like in that new shop next to the bank.’

‘It’s a very expensive place.’

‘The blue one is lovely, but it does cost a bit more than I’d reckoned on. I suppose the green one is almost as nice and it is a lot cheaper, but . . .’

‘I think she’s always looked most attractive in green.’

She said with good-tempered scorn: ‘As if you’ve ever noticed what colour she’s been wearing!’ She turned. ‘You’re bringing the Englishman to lunch, aren’t you?’

‘If that’s still all right with you?’

‘I don’t suppose he’ll like my cooking.’

‘On the contrary. I told him, you’re the finest cook on the island.’

She accepted that compliment without any sense of modesty.

‘I said that your hunters’ quail have flown straight down from heaven.’

This further compliment provoked a rare touch of self-criticism. ‘The last time there was something not quite right. Perhaps not quite enough sobrasada . . .’

He looked up at the electric clock on the wall and realized that time was getting on and if he was to be certain of speaking to Oakley, he’d better phone now. He left the kitchen and went through to the front room and the telephone. The call went unanswered. The agreement had been to pick up Farley on the way to Ca’n Tardich, but he decided to go straight there.

The front door of the house was locked and the garage was empty. If Beatriz had left the message, Oakley’s absence was deliberate and he was probably on the run; but if through carelessness, or pig-headedness, she had not passed on the message, then his absence was probably without any special significance . . .

He drove back to Llueso and parked outside No. 21, Calle General Riera. Beatriz, obviously about to leave for work and impatient to be on her way, said: ‘Of course I gave him your message.’

‘He returned before you left?’

‘He did not. I put the message where I always do when there’s something to tell him, but he’s out.’

‘What exactly did you write?’

She said, becoming uneasy instead of belligerent: ‘Just that you’d called with an Englishman and wanted him to be in the house either that evening or this morning.’

The reference to an Englishman would have alerted Oakley, but he had no passport . . .

‘Is there anything more you want?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘Then is it all right if I’m on my way?’

A moment later she wheeled a Mobylette out of the house, started it, and drove off. He watched her round the corner and go out of sight. The first thing to do was to telephone Emigration and warn them that a passportless Oakley might try to slip past (assuming he hadn’t already done so) and . . . Suddenly it occurred to him that on the plea of a lost passport, Oakley might have applied to the British Consulate for temporary papers; they had not been warned not to issue any . . .

He hurried back to his office and telephoned the consulate. In the past week only two people had applied for temporary papers, following the theft of their passports, and neither was Oakley. Imagining what Salas could have found to say if Oakley had successfully chosen that means of escape, Alvarez breathed a deep sigh of relief. He spoke to Emigration. There was no way Oakley could have left.

He returned downstairs and as he drew level with the duty desk, the cabo seated behind it said: ‘There was a message for you earlier on. The harbour master reports that one of the yachts has been taken.’

By the time Alvarez reached the hotel, Farley was out on the patio which jutted out over the sandy beach, drinking a mid-morning coffee.

‘I’m sorry to be so late,’ Alvarez said, ‘but things have started moving very fast.’ He sat at the table. ‘I telephoned Oakley’s house earlier on, but there wasn’t any reply so I went straight there, instead of coming here first. The house was locked and the car was out. Then I had a word with Beatriz and she assured me she’d left the message and he must have seen it. In it, she mentioned I’d been with an Englishman. That obviously alerted him. I was just leaving the station to come here when I received a message to the effect that a yacht’d disappeared from the harbour.’

‘Does anyone know at what time it went?’

‘At the moment, I’ve told you all I know.’

‘Then you’ll be in a hurry to start asking questions.’ Farley lifted his cup and drained it. ‘Lead on.’

They drove round to the eastern arm of the harbour and parked half way along this. ‘The harbour master’s office is just beyond the restaurant,’ said Alvarez, ‘but first it’ll be an idea to check the cars.’

Cars were parked wherever there was space. The white Seat 127 was the last one before the tables and chairs set outside the yacht club. The driving door was unlocked. On the front passenger seat was a plastic shopping-bag with the logo of Continente, from which had spilled a quarter kilo pack of butter; in the heat—the sun was beating through the side windows—the butter had begun to melt and a small yellow rivulet had spread across the cloth.

‘Been shopping,’ said Farley, ‘returned home, went indoors without unloading everything, read the note, and promptly took off.’

‘So now we must speak with the harbour master.’

The harbour master was not in the small air-conditioned office, but his young and engagingly helpful assistant was and he gave them what information he could. ‘Roughly an hour ago, Señor Cassell came in and wanted to know where his yacht was; very pugnacious about it.’

‘And then?’

‘I went with him to his berth, but that was certainly empty. So I had a quick look round the harbour to make certain some bloody fool joker hadn’t merely shifted her.’

‘Was it fit to go to sea?’

‘The señor’s a real yachtsman, unlike some of the owners of the floating gin palaces who hardly know which end of the boat is which; his yacht is always ready to sail.’

‘Would it be big enough to reach the mainland?’

The assistant spoke with cheerful contempt tor such ignorance. ‘It’s never merely a question of size, it’s how the yacht’s built and who’s sailing her. A couple of good seamen could sail the señor’s yacht right round the world.’

‘Then could one man handle it?’

‘She; a boat’s always feminine because you don’t know how she’s going to behave next . . . Yeah, someone who knows what he’s doing could easily sail her. All I was really saying was, on a long passage it’s safer and easier with two.’

Alvarez told Farley in English what had been said.

‘Where d’you reckon he’ll be making for?’ asked Farley.

‘Almost certainly not Menorca, Ibiza, or Formentera, since he must know they’ll be alerted. But as to how much further afield . . . ?’

‘How far is it to France?’

Alvarez put the question to the assistant, who went over to the chart table, opened a drawer and brought out a chart, then used dividers to measure the distance, which he set against the latitude scale. ‘Call it a hundred and eighty nautical miles from here to Port Vendres.’

‘What sort of speed would the yacht be making?’

‘In a light wind like this?’ He looked out through the window at the bay. ‘With plenty of sail hoisted, four knots at the very most. But that’s guesswork. You’ll have to speak to the señor to find out more precisely how she makes in these conditions.’