Relatively Dangerous (22 page)

‘You’re inquiring about Señor Higham’s account—what exactly is it that you want to know?’

‘Whether he made any phone calls while he was here. You’d have a record of them, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, of course. They go on the bill.’

‘Would anyone here know where he was calling?’

‘Our only record is the number of pulses.’

‘They should be enough. Can you find out the details?’

It took less than two minutes to turn up the details of the account.

‘Señor Higham made three calls and they added up to seventy-one pulses.’

‘You don’t have the number for each call?’

‘No, only the total.’

‘What rates were they at?’

‘One at full, one at normal, one at cheap.’

‘If they were all local calls, they must have been long ones?’

The man smiled. ‘Interminable, I’d say.’

‘Thanks very much . . . There’s one last thing. D’you mind if I telephone the British consulate?’

He spoke to the assistant consul and asked if Señor Higham had requested anyone in the consulate to help expedite the repayment of his stolen travellers’ cheques? There had been no such request. To the best of anyone’s memory, there had been no communication of any sort from Señor Higham.

Alvarez left the hospital and walked back to his car. He sat behind the wheel, lowered the windows, and switched on the fan to try and clear the heat. He knew exactly what Superior Chief Salas was going to say. An intelligent detective would have realized the truth long ago . . .

For several days after the crash, it had been impossible to know who the two victims were—their papers had been stolen, one of them was dead, the other was suffering from loss of memory. The doctors had been puzzled by that loss of memory because there had been no obvious head injuries serious enough to account for it; but what doctor could ever speak too dogmatically about the human brain?

Some days after the car accident, Higham’s passport and wallet had been thrown into a street refuse container. This was a normal way of getting rid of incriminating evidence. But why had not the thief, or thieves, taken the opportunity to dispose of Thompson’s things at the same time?

Back in the UK, Higham’s wife had left him and he’d no relatives to whom he’d be able to turn for comfort or help. It was his first visit to the island. So whom had he been phoning from the Clinica Bahia? How had he paid his account in cash when all his money had been stolen and he’d not called on the consulate to help him gain a refund on the travellers’ cheques?

There could be little doubt that Charlotte Benbury had been very much in love with Taylor. Yet within days of his death, she had thrown herself at Pierre Lifar. Only a bitch could act like that. Yet when he, Alvarez, had met her, he’d been sufficiently surprised and shocked that she should have acted as she had to begin constructing excuses for her; one might be shocked by the actions of a bitch, but surely seldom surprised, so somewhere within him there must have been doubt. A bitch would not have kept the photograph of the dead man on the dressing-table in her bedroom. Yet a woman who had loved deeply would surely have had a much better photograph than the one he had seen?

How had Charlotte known that Mike Taylor was so desperate for money? Why should she send him seven hundred thousand pesetas when she had never met him and might, such was human nature, easily be jealously resentful of him? And why had he tried to hide the fact that it was she who had given it to him when on the face of things there was no reason to do so?

Steven Taylor had been a man of charm and a golden tongue, with an inability to understand normal moral values. He’d made money by swindling people, been caught and convicted, yet by luck had escaped a prison sentence.

Even his conviction had not taught him discretion and later, after an impossible second marriage, he’d resumed his swindling ways. Disaster had threatened. The police were gathering the evidence to arrest him again and now he could be quite certain that he would be imprisoned. So he’d planned his ‘death’, successfully blackmailing his wife into financing it because his arrest and conviction would have shrivelled her snobbish soul.

Reborn in the name of Thompson, he’d resumed his old ways. He’d met Charlotte and had fallen wildly in love with her and, despite the difference in their ages, she had fallen equally in love with him.

He’d travelled to the island, possibly when temporarily short of funds and hoping against all the probabilities to get some more money out of his wife, and had met, in addition to her, his son and three potential victims. He’d set up a swindle and had sold shares in Yabra Consolidated to Wheeldon, Reading-Smith, and Valerie. Only this time, irony had played a hand. Instead of the shares being valueless, they’d suddenly become valuable. Inevitably, he’d set out to retrieve them and because of his golden tongue and a self-confidence that nothing seemed capable of denting, he’d succeeded. But for once his choice of victims had in part been bad. Reading-Smith was a self-made millionaire, contemptuous of any standards but those he set himself, ruthlessly convinced that his wealth set him apart from ordinary mankind. A man of his nature could never suffer being swindled without becoming determined to get his own back. Instinct had told him something about Thompson, a private detective had filled in the details. So when Thompson had returned, driven on by an inflated ego to sell him more shares, he’d bought them. And then made it clear that Thompson had just landed himself in trouble.

Thompson had considered the situation and very rapidly come to the conclusion that the only practical thing was for Charlotte and him to sell up and move out of Spain. Once they were in another country, living under different names, they should be safe.

Just as he’d misjudged the kind of man Reading-Smith was, so he’d misjudged the intensity of Valerie’s emotions which, at times, had a trace of madness about them. And when she’d pleaded with him to give her the rest of the money that her shares had made, he’d not understood that it was love which drove her, not cupidity. Had he done so, he might have been warned. Then again, perhaps he would just have laughed.

On the Wednesday, he’d given Higham a lift. He was not only a good talker, but also a good listener (in his ‘job’, it was often just as important to listen as to talk) and by the time they’d stopped for lunch, he’d learned a lot about Higham’s life. An attack of migraine had been threatening all day and he’d taken a second capsule, but it was the first one which had contained the poison. He’d drunk very little, leaving Higham to finish a bottle of wine on top of the pre-lunch drinks. By the end of the meal, Higham wasn’t drunk, but neither was he sober.

They’d driven away from the restaurant. Almost immediately, Thompson had suffered the initial symptoms of colchicine poisoning. One attack had been followed by another and this second one had left him too ill to continue driving. So he’d changed places with Higham. By chance, he’d not fastened his seat-belt; feeling too ill to bother, probably.

Higham had never before driven on roads such as that one, with its acute bends, sharp, winding ascents and descents, and unguarded edges, and at a time when he’d needed all his wits they’d been befuddled by alcohol. He’d been going far too fast for the corner, had not braked in time, but had braked too violently when he did; he had failed to correct the ensuing skid. The car had gone over the edge. Thompson, unbelted, had been thrown clear; Higham, belted, had stayed with the car for the whole of the fall and had been killed.

Shock can do strange things to the system. It can even, to some extent, counter the effects of poisoning for a brief while. Thompson, injured though not seriously, overcame the poisoning which in any case could never have been fatal because Valerie had been unable to pack a sufficient amount of crushed pills into any one capsule, and began to think clearly enough to realize that if he was delayed on the island for any length of time, Reading-Smith would probably succeed in amassing sufficient evidence to ensure he was arrested. He also realized that now fate, and not design, had given him the chance to ‘die’ a second time and so escape that possibility. And he had a fortune waiting so that never again would he have to put himself at risk (always supposing he could forgo the pleasure of proving to himself just once more how brilliant he was).

Higham’s wife had left him, he’d no immediate family alive, and no one in the UK expected, or particularly wanted, to hear from him, so he offered a perfect false identity. But somehow, the passports had to be switched . . .

Previously it had not been difficult for an expert to lift a photograph from one passport and paste it on to another, but the impressed strip of clear plastic had been expressly designed to prevent that and because of this there was no way in which, in his present circumstances, he could make the alteration. Yet if only there were time, there’d be no difficulty. In every major city there were men skilled enough to unbind a passport, swap pages, and then rebind it so that only the most detailed examination—and certainly not the normally casual one of an immigration official—would disclose what had happened. But even if not badly injured, he needed hospital treatment and the moment he entered into official hands, he’d have to declare his identity . . . Then he thought up a plan by which he could gain time.

He had gathered up the two passports, the wallets, and all the papers, and had hidden them near the scene of the crash. Then he had waited to be found and taken to hospital.

In hospital he’d simulated loss of memory. The doctors had been slightly surprised, but not suspicious; why should they be, when it was in his own interests, apparently, to remember who he was? He’d telephoned Charlotte, told her where everything was hidden and who to contact in Palma. She’d flown over from Barcelona, collected the passports, etc., paid to have the page switched, destroyed the remains of Thompson’s passport. She’d dumped the passport of Higham, now bearing Thompson’s photo, in a litter-bin, together with the emptied wallet. She’d returned to Corleon.

As Higham, he’d regained his memory. His passport confirmed his identity. He’d repeated all that Higham had told him in the car, giving it as the story of his own life. His one fear, of course, was that by ill chance someone on the island who knew him as Thompson would find him in the hospital under the name of Higham, but he was a gambler and correctly reckoned the odds were all in his favour. And the deception only had to remain good until he was fit enough to be discharged from hospital, whereupon he would vanish . . .

In the event, his gamble would have failed but for one factor—ironically, a factor which he had never taken into consideration; that was, the complex relationship which existed between his son and himself. If called upon to describe this, he probably would present it in much simpler terms from those Mike had employed; but then he saw the world as a much simpler place. Mike had both loved and hated him and because of the hate he had known guilt and remorse. It was the remorse which had made Mike lie when called upon to identify the exhumed body—realizing that his father was not dead but had made yet another switch with a dead man. Correctly assuming that this must be because he had again been swindling people and was in trouble in consequence, he had made the false identification in the hope of expiating at least a part of his guilt . . .

Perhaps the truth would never have surfaced had Charlotte not been so in love. Because, knowing how close to death he’d come, so luminous with relief that he’d escaped, she’d recognized that she could never convincingly simulate enough grief and thus the only alternative, if the fiction of his death was to be supported, was to act the part of a bitch . . .

Alvarez used a handkerchief to mop the sweat from his forehead. Did Steven Taylor even now appreciate why Charlotte made him the luckiest dead man alive?

Alvarez came to a halt in front of Ca Na Muña. He switched off the engine, pulled the handbrake hard on, and put the car into reverse gear as an added precaution. He climbed out.

Valerie stepped into the doorway of the house and stood there as he climbed the stone steps. She was looking old and rather feeble. ‘I suppose you’ve come to arrest me? If I can have a few minutes to pack . . .’

‘Señora, I am not here to do that,’ he answered, as he crossed the narrow level.

‘Why not?’

‘Because Steven Taylor is still alive. The man who died was Señor Higham, a hitch-hiker who was actually driving at the time of the crash. Afterwards, Steven Taylor changed identities in order to disappear. While you can clearly still be charged with administering the poison with intent to murder, it would be necessary for a successful prosecution for him to come back and give evidence against you. I am quite certain he will never do that.’

She turned and looked up at the olive tree she called the Laocoon. ‘He’s still alive?’ she said in a low, toneless voice.

What was her overriding emotion? Thankfulness that after all she had not murdered, or bitterness that the man who had robbed her of her chance of honouring her promise to her husband was still alive? Alvarez found he could not answer the question.

THE
END