Murder Begets Murder

by Roderic Jeffries

‘Then maybe you also know why I’m here?’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’m interested in the dog which belonged to Señorita Stevenage.’

  ‘That? More like a ball of muddied wool than a dog; that thing never earned its grub.’

  ‘Francisca tells me it died very suddenly. I wondered if you knew why it died?’

  ‘It was ill, it died. Who ever knows any more than that?’

  ‘But it died so quickly and unexpectedly.’

  ‘Some animals die slow, some die quick. There ain’t nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘D’you think it could have been poisoned?’

  He rubbed the lobe of his right ear with a thumb and forefinger which were horny with thick skin. ‘How would I know? If an animal’s dying d’you think I get down beside it and ask why?’

  ‘Where did you bury it?’

  He hesitated, then said: ‘Out behind the house.’

  ‘Whereabouts outside?’

  ‘Back beyond the pig shed. I don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘You don’t remember?’ Alvarez said disbelievingly.

  Yarza appeared to become wholly interested in one of the orange trees.

  ‘Let’s go to Ca’n Ibore and find out if you can do better than that. And bring a mattock.’

  ‘I can’t move on account of me bones are killing me.

  The doe says I’m to rest.’

  ‘You can rest all you like as soon as we’ve found the grave.’

  Yarza stared at Alvarez with dislike, then began to shuffle his way into the house.

  They left the village by the eastern bridge, passing over the rocky, dry bed of the torrente, now partially overgrown with weeds although in January it had surged with deep flood water.

  On the land behind Ca’n Ibore, where no one had ever cleared it, maquis scrub grew among boulders and outcrops of rock. As they came in sight of it, a goat, neck bell clanging unmusically, hurried away, movements ungainly because its legs were hobbled.

  ‘Where should we start looking?’ asked Alvarez.

  ‘I told you, I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘And I’m telling you that I’m not as simple as I look. If you’d planted half a dozen melon seeds in the middle of a wood you’d remember precisely where they were six months later. So come on, where did you bury the dog?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  He was a peasant himself, but that didn’t stop him sometimes cursing a peasant’s stubbornness. He walked slowly along a narrow, winding path which had at some time been blasted through the scrub and rock. Yarza would have considered the job of burying the dog a ridiculous one and therefore he would have taken as little trouble over it as possible. He would have looked for an accessible pocket of earth, just deep enough . . . As he rounded an evergreen oak, Alvarez saw a small boulder in front of which was some earth in which was a small cross. On the cross, carefully carved, was the inscription: ‘Sandy’. He turned. ‘Was the dog called Sandy?’

  ‘What if it was?’

  ‘Then we’ve found the grave. So now you can dig up the body.’

  Yarza used the mattock to scoop through the earth and it was soon clear that no dog had ever been buried there.

  Alvarez took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it. When they were both smoking, he said: ‘All right, I now know why you didn’t want to tell me where the dog was supposed to be buried. So having got this far, you’d better tell me what you did do with the body.’

  Yarza leaned on the handle of the mattock and smoked. After a while he cleared his throat and said: ‘She wanted me to bury him out here because that’s where he used to like to chase around. I tried to tell her, there ain’t enough earth to bury anything: it’s all rock. Wouldn’t listen. I wasn’t going to kill myself breaking up them rocks, so I told her I put it here. Knew she’d never check. She had the cross made in the village and I wedged it up in the earth. It made her happy.’

  ‘And what did you do with the body?’

  ‘Chucked it down a hole.’

  ‘Let’s see the hole.’

  The mountains and foothills were limestone, honey-­combed by an unrecorded number of caves and holes: ten metres out from the shed through which they had earlier come was a fissure in the ground, shaped like a shield, three-quarters of a metre across at its greatest width.

  ‘They used to chuck their tins down there,’ said Yarza, for once volunteering information.

  ‘Look,’ said the younger Guard, as he stared resentfully down at the fissure in the ground, ‘I didn’t join the force to go and kill myself pot-holing.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ replied Alvarez, tying a rope round the other’s waist, ‘I promise to see your mother gets your medal.’

  ‘Why don’t you bloody go down yourself if you want this stinking dog so badly?’

  ‘I’m too fat.’

  ‘Drink less booze.’

  ‘Come on, lad, you volunteered for the job.’

  The second Guard laughed, making the first one swear.

  They lowered him down into the hole and he landed on a load of empty tins, amidst a clatter.

  Alvarez hunkered down on his heels. ‘Can you see the dog?’

  ‘D’you mind waiting until I can find somewhere safe to stand? It’s like a bloody roller-coaster down here.’ As if to prove his words correct, he slipped amidst a further clatter of tins. Eventually he found a secure foothold and he switched on the torch and shone the beam around the small cave. ‘There it is.’

  ‘Is there much of the body left?’

  ‘It looks like it’s all left. Hey, what kind of a dog was it — a mop dog?’

  ‘Stand clear. I’m dropping the shovel and basket down.

  And go carefully — I want that dog up here as undamaged as possible.’

  They hauled the rubber basket up. When Alvarez untied the rope and the sides of the basket sprang open he saw that the dog was not a mess of putrefaction, as he’d expected, but was in shape and form clearly a Yorkshire terrier.

  The forensic scientist rang Alvarez late Friday afternoon.

  ‘What happened is what we call mummification. Dry heat when there’s an accompanying current of air can prevent bacterial decomposition and therefore putrefaction. The dog must have been slap in a current of air which reached the bottom of the cave. There was only a little mould and no damage from insects.

  ‘Most of the interior organs were in reasonable condition and I was able to isolate and identify a small amount of aconite.’

  Alvarez whistled.

  ‘It’s impossible to say accurately what amount of poison was administered, but I’d guesstimate this at about one twentieth of a grain — roughly the fatal dose for an adult.’

  ‘Have you told Professor Fortunato all this?’

  ‘Yes, I have. And his comment is that it doesn’t change anything in respect of Señorita Stevenage. Her body was in far too advanced a stage of decomposition for there to be the slightest chance of tracing aconite in it, even though it now seems likely that that is what killed her.’

  Alvarez thanked the other and rang off.

  Someone — a man — had been dining with her. He had had to get rid of all traces of his presence to avoid coming under suspicion and so he had washed up all he’d used during the meal, but before washing up he’d automatically swept the mussel shells and lemon into the waste bucket, forgetting in the stress of the moment the need to take these away with him to conceal the fact that he’d been present.

  Medically, it could now never be proved that Señorita Stevenage had been poisoned and had not died from mytilotoxin, so the fact that the dog had been poisoned by aconite was irrelevant. Was this, then, the perfect murder?

  CHAPTER XXI

  Alvarez parked his car outside a shop which sold electrical goods and agricultural machinery. He crossed the road and went into the doctor’s house and called out. Señora Roldán came out of a room on his right. She was dressed with as much, perhaps more, chic t
han when he had last seen her, in a frock which was patterned with colours which drifted one into the other like a Turner sunset. Her hair was beautifully fashioned, her make-up light but effective. More than ever he was struck by the two certainties which clearly lay behind her beauty: that she gave passionately of love, but that she had to love to offer passion.

  ‘Señora, is the doctor in? If so, I’d be grateful for a quick word with him.’

  ‘I’ll find out. Do sit down while you’re waiting.’ Her foreign accent gave her words an attractive lilt.

  Roldán, as smartly if more conventionally dressed than she had been, came into the hall from a room to the left.

  ‘My wife tells me you want to see me?’ He pulled back the sleeve of his lightweight coat to look at his watch.

  ‘I’ll not keep you long, señor.’

  ‘All right,’ he said abruptly, making it still clearer that he was one man on the island to whom time did mean something.

  They went into the surgery and Roldán sat behind his large desk.

  ‘Señor, during all the time you were attending Señor Heron you must have spoken to Señorita Stevenage ?’

  ‘Of course. I thought I made this clear last time . . .’

  ‘Please bear with me. Did she talk to you about matters which had nothing to do with the señor? I’m thinking that when people are very upset they often talk about their affairs to try and calm themselves. Perhaps she spoke to you about the time when she lived in England?’

  ‘There wasn’t much social chit-chat because I tried to cut my visits as short as was reasonable. No, I can’t say that I remember her ever mentioning England.’

  ‘She never said that Señora Heron had most unfortunately died from mytilotoxin poisoning?’

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘Señora Heron died very suddenly and there was a post­ mortem which found the cause had been mytilotoxin poisoning. The señorita never told you this?’

  Roldán shook his head. He looked bewildered. ‘That . . . that’s quite a coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t think it was a coincidence. You see, tests have just shown that Señorita Stevenage’s dog, which died not long before the señorita herself, was poisoned with aconite.’

  ‘Mother of God!’

  ‘I have spoken to the people in Palma and they say that it doesn’t matter what the dog died from, they can’t go on from there to say that the señorita was also poisoned by aconite. The state in which her body was precludes any other finding than the original one. But I’ve no doubts. She had a second lover even while her first one was upstairs in the house, dying, and she had become jealous of this second lover. And because she was so jealous, he had to get rid of her, perhaps because he is married and could not risk trouble, perhaps because he had become fed up with her. So now you’ll understand why I need to know if she ever spoke to you.’

  Roldán shook his head.

  ‘She never mentioned a single name?’

  ‘I keep telling you, no. I was far too busy to spend my time gossiping.’ Roldán began to tap on the desk with his fingers. ‘If it’s impossible ever to prove she was poisoned with aconite instead of dying from mytilotoxin, there can never be any certainty.’

  ‘Doctor, there can be certainty without proof even if there can’t be proof without certainty.’

  As Alvarez drove along the rough track through the maquis scrub a crossbill flicked round the edge of a pine tree, banked, and disappeared behind another pine: a second later he heard the call of a nightjar. He parked and climbed out into the hot sunshine. From away on the right came the clatter of a number of bells — a flock of sheep or herd of goats and from all directions came the shrilling of cicadas. Peace on the island of calm. Yet a woman had died violently at the hands of a man and the image of peace was a mirage.

  Dunton, followed by his wife, came out of the bungalow on to the raised patio. ‘Herlock Sholmes in person,’ he boomed. He was wearing yachting-style clothes, but it was difficult to imagine him braving anything but a dead flat calm.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you again, señor.’

  ‘It’s no trouble at all,’ said his wife,· and it was obvious that her husband’s manner worried her. She had taken a great deal of trouble over her appearance, but she still looked as if she would have been more at home behind a bar.

  Alvarez climbed up on to the raised patio.

  ‘It’s happy time by my sun,’ said Dunton. ‘And as I’ve never met a Mallorquin who doesn’t drink like three fishes, what’ll it be?’

  ‘A coñac, please.’

  ‘Jo, pour his nibs a large brandy and you can give me the same. Don’t forget the ice this time, will you?’

  Alvarez was not in favour of women’s lib, but he would have welcomed her telling her husband that he could get his own drinks.

  ‘Well, what’s to do now? Been seeing suspicious things through your magnifying glass?’ Dunton laughed.

  ‘I have to ask you, señor, where you used to live in England?’

  ‘Where I what? . . . As I’ve always said, out here the only things which seem to matter are the ones which don’t matter a brass farthing. Apply for a residencia and they want to know the names of your great-grandparents. We were in Kent: Garden of England, they call it, but if you ask me it’s got very bloody weedy.’

  ‘Did you live near Menton Cross?’

  ‘That place? That’s so dead they pay out the old age pension at fifty-five. We were on the coast.’

  Mrs Dunton returned to the room with three tall, frosted glasses on a silver clover-leaf tray. She handed the glasses around.

  ‘You probably knew Señora Heron, who lived near to Menton Cross?’

  ‘Never clapped eyes on the lady: always assuming she was one. Look, old man, you musn’t judge the outside world by this little smudge of an island. Everything’s so tiny here that three cars make a traffic jam. There are fifty million people in the British Isles.’

  ‘But in Kent, señor, surely not so many?’

  ‘One and a half million, less us two. I tell you, you’re lucky if you know your next-door neighbours. Or bloody unlucky.’ He laughed loudly.

  Alvarez could easily understand how those grey houses under grey skies so gripped a man’s soul that he did not even try to speak to his neighbours. He said, while looking at Josephine Dunton: ‘Señor, last time I was here I asked you if you were friendly with Señorita Stevenage and you said you weren’t. But I have been told that in fact you were.’

  ‘Who told you that load of bloody nonsense?’ demanded Dunton with sudden anger.

  Mrs Dunton spoke very earnestly. ‘We really hardly knew her at all. She was so . . . well, so difficult to get or. with.’

  ‘Not one of your oo-le-là girls,’ said Dunton, and he laughed, his good humour restored.

  ‘Then this information is wrong?’

  ‘Like everything else you hear on this island, hopelessly wrong. You ought to be used to that by now, old man.’

  ‘Then perhaps you will tell me if you are friendly with Señora Carrington ?’

  ‘Her. She’s too noblesse obliged for me and you can quote me any time you want. What I say is, one person’s just as good as another and it’s plain bloody ridiculous to put on airs.’

  ‘It is very pleasant to hear an Englishman express such a view, señor.’

  Dunton stared suspiciously at Alvarez, but the latter’s bland expression reassured him. ‘I speak as I think and always have done.’

  Señora Dunton had shown no distress at the mention of Señora Carrington’s name, Alvarez noted.

  When Alvarez explained he wanted to question Elliott further, Avis Elliott made it quite plain that this time she was staying. She sat down in an armchair and said, in her commanding voice: ‘Gordon can’t help you, so there’s absolutely no point in your bothering him again.’

  Alvarez asked Elliott where they had lived in England.

  ‘We had a house near Oxford,’ she said.

>   ‘Did you ever travel to Kent, señor?’

  ‘We had a cousin in Kent whom we visited quite often,’ she answered.

  ‘Did you know Señora Heron?’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘Señor, you will remember you told me that you hardly knew Señorita Stevenage ?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ she snapped.

  ‘But I have been told that, in fact, you did know her quite well.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ Her voice rose.

  ‘But if you did not know her, why should the señorita have been so interested in who you were going out with, Señor?’

  ‘She wasn’t.’

  Alvarez sighed as he half turned. ‘Señora, I can assure you . . .

  ‘My good man, that woman can’t possibly have been interested. Gordon has never been out with her. He has never been out with anyone but me.’

  ‘Not even with Señora Carrington ?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  No wonder, thought Alvarez, that England hadn’t suffered a successful invasion in over nine hundred years.

  Waynton turned away from the window in the sitting-room of his flat. ‘The rumour was going around that the post-mortem proved she’d died naturally.’ His tone be­ came bitterly ironic. ‘I was expecting to be socially rehabilitated.’

  Alvarez, seated in one of the armchairs which looked as if a generation of holidaymakers had misused it, said=

  ‘The findings of the post-mortem, señor, were that there was no proof that the señorita had been deliberately poisoned.’

  ‘The difference seems rather subtle.’

  ‘But very important as now, when there is fresh evidence so that I have to ask more questions.’

  ‘Are you back to thinking she was murdered?’

  ‘I am afraid it becomes more and more likely.’

  Waynton sat down.

  ‘Señor, if she were murdered then the murderer was surely very friendly with her. So I ask again, who was she friendly with and again there is never any name but yours.’

  ‘I’ve explained God knows how many times that I was friendly with her because I was sorry for her. For her part, she seemed always to make a point of talking to me. But I wasn’t having an affair with her and I didn’t kill her.’