Relatively Dangerous (14 page)

‘Ah well, it was just an off-chance,’ he said philosophically. ‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll see if any of the banks have changed money for him.’

‘Here, fill your glass again. But leave mine as it is.’

He gave himself a generous drink, happy to make the most of the chance to enjoy the Carlos I brandy’.

‘What was that first name again?’

‘Steven. It’s possible it was usually shortened to Steve.’

‘Steve . . . Steve . . . I’ve heard that before. I wonder if. . . When did this man die?’

‘A fortnight ago last Wednesday.’

‘You know, that could be about the time.’

‘What could?’

‘When the woman lost her man.’ She continued with all the enthusiasm and irrelevancies of a born gossip. Charlotte Benbury was always called Charlie, which was confusing because an Englishman had told her that Charlie was a man’s name. Still, when one stopped to think about it, Spain wasn’t always that logical. A man was called Jose-Maria, but Maria was a woman’s name. And it was better to be called a woman’s name than Jesus. Agueda snorted. As a good communist—as she gesticulated to emphasize her standing, one of the diamonds on the largest ring caught the light and flashed out ice-cold sparks of colour—she had only contempt for people so conditioned by superstition . . . To get back to Charlie? Well, she was English. And men clearly found her very attractive. But then any man under the age of ninety was interested in only one thing, so none of them could see that she was a bitch . . .

‘Why d’you say that?’ he asked.

‘Because that’s what she is.’

She wasn’t a prude by any means, but there were limits. When Charlie’s man had been alive, they’d been like a honeymoon couple, even though he was a good bit older than she. Then he’d died and what had happened? Had she mourned her lost love? Had she hell! Within something like three days, she’d reappeared and started going about with Pierre, the Frenchman, who boasted that during the summer season he never bedded the same woman two nights running. When the two of them had walked into the supermarket, arms about each other’s waists, she’d wondered why God —not that she believed in such a superstition—had not struck her dead.

‘What happened to the first man?’

‘Someone said he’d been killed in a car crash.’

‘D’you know where?’

‘Can’t say. And if you want my opinion, it’s a great pity she wasn’t with him at the time.’

‘The young do things differently these days,’ he said pacifically.

‘The men don’t,’ she replied with crushing contempt.

‘Is she still living here?’

‘I saw her only yesterday. The bitch.’

There was possibly, he thought, more than a touch of jealousy in her outrage; perhaps her youth had been conventionally dull. ‘D’you know where she lives?’

‘Somewhere in Servas. I don’t know the number, but it’s the biggest house around, on the water, and there’s a huge yacht tied up. Masses of money. D’you think she’ll get all that?’

‘How would I know?’

‘It’d be just like a fool man to have left her everything so that now she can waste it on that Pierre.’

‘Lucky Pierre.’

She was not amused.

He found the house quite easily. It was a long U-shaped bungalow, built on two plots, and it fronted one of the main canals so that a yacht, fully rigged, could berth there. To the left was a hard tennis court and to the right a swimming pool, partially concealed from the road by a row of cupressus. The property was ringed by a high chain-link fence and both the small and the large gates were secured with heavy locks. At regular intervals there was a notice which said in Spanish, English, and German, that the house was protected by alarms and guard dogs.

He pressed the button of the speaker, to the side of the smaller gate. ‘Who is it?’ asked a woman in Catalan, her voice sounding harsh and tinny.

He identified himself and said he’d like a word with the señorita.

‘You can come on in; the dog’s shut up in the kennel.’ There was a sharp click from the lock of the gate.

As he walked through the gateway, a dog began to bark and he saw to the side of the house an enclosure in which, standing very stiff-legged, was a large, woolly, black dog whose teeth, even at a distance, struck him as exceedingly dangerous.

A middle-aged woman in an apron opened the front door and showed him into a very large sitting-room, tastefully furnished with good quality Spanish furniture; through one of the picture windows, he could look across the sloping garden to a schooner. Money might not buy happiness, but it helped one to enjoy one’s misery . . .

‘Good evening. You wish to speak?’ asked a woman in laboured Castilian.

He turned. Agueda had referred to Charlotte Benbury as being very attractive, but she had also named her bitch so that he had subconsciously been expecting her character to flavour her looks. Far from it. She was of such pure, stunning beauty that for a moment she shocked; tall, shapely, a round face topped by a cascade of honey-coloured hair, eyes more blue than the summer Mediterranean, a mouth shaped by Cupid, peaches-and-double-cream complexion . . . He saw both innocence and experience, cool purity and fervid passion . . . ‘I am sorry, I was admiring the yacht,’ he said in English, trying to explain away his gaucherie. ‘May I have a word with you?’

‘Thank goodness, you speak English!’ She smiled.

A man would run ten miles in the July heat for such a smile . . . ‘Señorita, as your maid probably told you, I have very recently arrived from Mallorca where I have been investigating the death of Señor Thompson, whose real name was Taylor.’

She bit her lower lip, hesitated, moved to her right to sit in an armchair.

‘You knew him?’

She nodded.

‘He lived here?’

She nodded again.

‘I am sorry to have to pursue a subject which must be painful—’ Perhaps!—‘but because of certain facts surrounding his death, I must. You will have been told that he was in a car which crashed; did you also know that his passenger was lucky enough to be thrown clear before the car reached the bottom of the cliff and so lived?’

‘All I care is that Steve was killed.’ Her tone was flat, her expression blank.

‘The passenger suffered some injuries and for a while lost his memory. When this returned, he told us certain facts which have subsequently raised very serious questions.’

She was staring into the far distance, almost as if bored.

He spoke more starkly than he would otherwise have done, determined to force her to understand that the past could not be as readily dismissed as she would have it. ‘What the passenger told us makes it seem certain that the crash occurred because Señor Taylor had been poisoned.’

‘What?’ She swung round to face him, her expression now strained. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘It is the truth.’

She began to pluck at a fold in her linen print frock.

‘Did the señor suffer from migraine attacks?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know when an attack was impending?’

‘Sometimes. Not always.’ She spoke in a nervous, staccato manner.

‘Have you any idea what triggered an attack?’

‘Chocolate, cheese.’

‘What about wine?’

‘He thought it did. But he liked it so much . . .’ She failed to finish the sentence.

‘What did he do if he believed an attack was starting?’

‘He’d take medicine.’

‘Would there be any of it in this house?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’ve been too busy with other matters to discover what he’s left?’ he said, which heavy sarcasm.

She looked at him with sudden alarm. So, he thought, she wasn’t completely indifferent to other people’s opinions. ‘Did you know that Señor Thompson’s real name was Taylor?

She made no reply.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know why he lived under a false name?’

‘What’s it matter now?’

‘Because it probably explains why he was poisoned. Did he ever tell you he’d faked his own death in England in order to escape being arrested for fraud?’

After a while, she nodded.

‘That fraud was in connection with share dealings. Since he lived here, did he deal in shares?’

‘I . . .’ She stopped.

‘Do you want to help, or don’t you? Does it matter at all to you that he was poisoned?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘Then had he been dealing in shares?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. I asked him once what it was he was doing and he refused to explain. He said it was much safer for me not to know.’

‘Didn’t you ever gain any hint?’

‘No.’

‘It’s almost impossible to run any kind of a business without records. Did he keep them?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Why are you uncertain?’

‘He often used to work in the study, but if I went in there I never looked at what he was doing.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t in the least bit curious?’

‘He was insistent that I never learned anything.’

‘Because if something went wrong, you wouldn’t be inculpated?’

‘Yes.’

And you repay his love by offering yourself to Pierre only days after his death, he wanted to say, but didn’t. ‘Are all his papers still in the study?’

‘I haven’t touched anything.’

‘Then I want your permission to look through them.’

For a while she made no comment, then she stood and it was obvious that this was the answer.

The large room was both library and study. Two of the walls were lined with shelves filled with books, there was a small desk, and an old-fashioned, free-standing safe.

The drawers of the desk contained nothing of interest. He asked her for the keys of the safe and she left, returned with them. On the top shelf of the safe there was a jewellery case and a considerable amount of money in pounds, dollars, and pesetas; on the bottom shelf were several files. He lifted out the files and put them on the desk.

It soon became obvious that Steven Taylor had been a systematic man. Each file covered a geographical region and one was for Mallorca. This contained papers listing the names and addresses of Archie Wheeldon/Muriel Taylor, Robert Reading-Smith, and Valerie Swinnerton. Against each name was a figure, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, forty thousand and a company’s name.

‘Do you know what Yabra Consolidated is?’

She shook her head.

‘Would you know if Señor Taylor left a will?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In one of the files.’

He looked through those he had not examined and found two wills, one in Spanish, one in English, that were essentially the same. Taylor had named only one beneficiary, his son.

‘Do you know the terms of his wills?’

She nodded.

‘You’re not mentioned. So his son now owns this house and all its contents.’

‘No. Steve bought it in my name. That’s why I put it up for sale, not him.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe a couple of months ago.’

‘Why are you trying to sell?’

‘Steve told me to.’

‘What was his reason for wanting to move?’

‘He was worried?’

‘About what?’

‘Someone had threatened him.’

‘Who?’

‘He wouldn’t say.’

‘Have you any idea how much his son stands to inherit?’

‘No.’

‘Where is his money held?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must.’

‘I don’t. I’ve an account with the Banque de Crédit Agricole in Berne and he paid money into that when it was needed. He never said where that money came from.’

‘Then how will his son learn the extent of his inheritance?’

‘I suppose he’s told Mike where he kept his capital.’

‘You’ve met Mike?’

‘No. But Steve often talked about him.’

He checked through all the files again, seeking a reference to bank accounts, but there was none. He replaced the files in the safe, locked it, handed her the keys. ‘Where will I find the medicine?’

She led the way into a bedroom that was nearly as large as the sitting-room and also faced the canal. The furniture was a strangely harmonious mixture of modern and antique so that the Spanish bed with barley-sugar headboard and footboard did not seem at all out of place in company with the superbly inlaid, serpentine dressing-table whose delicate elegance suggested it was French. To the side of a heart-shaped mirror on the dressing-table was a framed photograph. It was a poor photograph because flat lighting had stripped away all subtlety; nevertheless it was possible to discern in it all the features of the dead man he had seen in the coffin, even though many of those features had been attacked by decay. The frame was antique embossed silver. How, he wondered, could she leave that photograph there when she shared the bed with Pierre?

She opened the small top left-hand drawer of the dressing-table and brought out a medicine bottle and handed this to him. He unscrewed the lid. Inside were a number of capsules, half red and half white. ‘I’d like to take these.’

‘I don’t want them.’

He pocketed the bottle. He was glad that now he could leave.

As he sat behind the wheel of his car, he saw that she was still standing in the front doorway of the house. What were her real emotions? Worry and shame, not because of what she’d done, but because he might have learned of what she’d done? He knew a sudden, sharp anger that anyone so beautiful could at heart be so rotten . . . But that, surely, was to ignore completely the question of what kind of a man Taylor had been? Might he not have been swindling her out of love, as he had swindled others out of money? Might she not have discovered this and that was why she had been so ready to throw herself into the arms of another man? . . . Yet if that were so, could she really have been so hypocritical as to keep the photo on the dressing-table instead of ripping it out of the frame? He swore. He knew precisely what he was doing. Searching for what was not there because he was far too sentimental; inventing the most ridiculous excuses rather than admit that there could be evil in beauty.

Alvarez sat in his office and stared through the window. The day was already pulsatingly hot; there had been no rain for weeks and wells were beginning to empty and in another month only those which tapped underground streams or lakes would not be dry; on unirrigated land, all growth would shrivel to a uniform brown and it would seem as if the earth itself were dying . . .