‘If we don’t discover we’re meant to be somewhere you’ve forgotten all about.’
‘Stop acting so superior. You’d get everything totally confused if it weren’t for your precious Vestal Virgin. D’you think she really is so belligerently pure as she looks?’
‘You’ve asked me that over and over again and every time I give you the same answer: I don’t know.’
The phone rang.
‘Blast!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look at the time. If that’s a patient, I’ll tell ‘em to wait until tomorrow morning before becoming sick.’
‘It’s all right, I’ll go and get the call.’ He dropped the magazine on to the floor.
‘Stay right where you are. I know you. You’ll agree to rush out if it’s just some old biddy with a bit of a headache. If I answer the call I can find out if anything’s really wrong.’
He watched her leave the room. Since he had married her, he had not bedded another woman. That was the measure of his love for her.
The nearest telephone was in the room which the receptionist — the Vestal Virgin — used as an office. Denise entered and crossed to the small desk. She lifted the receiver. ‘Doctor Roldán’s house.’
A man, his voice strained, said hoarsely in English: ‘There’s been an awful accident. My wife’s bleeding terribly. The doctor’s got to come immediately. Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion.’
Denise, to help her husband, had learned English.
‘Please, what kind of accident — ‘ But as she spoke the connection was cut.
She returned to the sitting-room. ‘It was for you, darling, and not a headache this time. A man who lives in Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion says his wife’s had a bad accident and is bleeding seriously.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘He never gave it. I tried to get some details, but he was in such a state he just rang off.’
He hurried into the hall, where he always kept his black pigskin case. As he picked this up, he called out: ‘If the woman needs an injection, Sister Teresa’s on duty tonight.’ As a doctor, he did not give injections. ‘If it’s emergency surgery, I’ll ring you to get the room ready.’ He left the house, backed his car out of the garage, and drove through the narrow streets to the main Palma Puerto road. At the traffic islands he went straight across and then up the road past the football pitch.
At the first cross-roads within the urbanizacion there were a number of signboards, bearing the names of houses and arrows to indicate in which direction those houses lay. He slowed right down and in the light of the headlights saw that Ca’n Asped was to the left.
The road rose steeply and at the T junction, where he had to turn right, he dropped down to first gear. He accelerated fiercely after the turn, up the road which zig-zagged its way up the side of the mountain. The views from here were dramatic and the costs of building very high — only the rich lived in this area, he thought, with quiet satisfaction.
The road made a hairpin left-hand turn, so sharp that he only just managed to get round in one lock, then rose still more precipitously. Holidaymakers’ homes, he thought: access was too difficult for a resident. The woman might well bleed to death because either she or her husband had wanted to live with a view.
There was a large house, set below the level of the road on the left-hand side, and even at night it was possible to judge the amount of work which had been involved merely to. blast out level space for the foundations. There was enough moonlight for him to be able to make out a swimming pool, which must have had to be built up at least a couple of metres. Money had obviously been no object.
The drive led off the road, but when he turned into this he found a raised chain drawn across the track to prevent access. He swore. Why in the hell hadn’t the husband had the sense to come out and take the chain down? And why weren’t there any outside lights on to help him? He picked up a torch as well as his bag, left the car, and walked down the drive, steep enough to make him careful of his balance.
He hammered on the panelled front door. The seconds passed and nothing happened. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. Could this be the wrong house? But no sooner had he asked himself this than he saw, in the torchlight, a glazed stone set in the wall to the right of the door on which was the name Ca’n Asped. Then, tragically, were there two Ca’n Aspeds in the urbanizacion? He hammered again, much more violently.
The house remained silent and blacked out. He hurried to his left, passing the garage, and came to the edge of the levelled area, guarded by a low wall. From here he could see that there were no lights on in any of the rooms on that side of the house.
If a mistake had been made — either by the man who had phoned or by Denise — then a woman might be dying. But in truth was there no emergency and had someone been playing a practical joke? Some of the locals were stupid enough, and envious enough . . . But wouldn’t Denise have noticed the accented English . . . ?
It was now virtually impossible to believe this house was occupied and there had been a serious accident in it. Nevertheless he hammered on the front door for a third time in case the husband had panicked into stupidity. When there was still no movement, he returned to his car. How to discover whether there was another Ca’n Asped in the urbanizacion? Or how to identify the bloody fool of a practical joker?
He started the engine, backed on to the road, and went down, accelerating hard, venting some of his anger and frustration by driving even faster than he usually did. He remembered on the way up passing a house which had been ablaze with lights and in front of which had been parked half a dozen cars — he could ask there if anyone knew of a second Ca’n Asped.
He braked for the very sharp hairpin bend and the pedal went straight down to the floor. For a part of a second he disbelieved his own senses, as the engine note rose on the over-run, then he pumped the pedal up and down. The brakes still failed to work. He tried to change down to first to use the lower gear as a brake, but when he went to slam the gear lever home he discovered that now the car was going too fast. He wrenched the wheel over to ram the rock face, but he had left it too late. The tail came round in a vicious skid and he tried to correct the skid with opposite lock, but this lurched him over to the out side of the bend.
As the car went over the unguarded edge and began the first of a series of sickening roll-overs, he thought of Denise. He hadn’t fixed his safety-belt and was thrown sideways, to feel pain begin to spear his side. Then the car upended and he was thrown against the windscreen and steering-wheel, losing consciousness immediately.
CHAPTER XXIV
In his office, Alvarez read the Telex message which had just been brought to him: ‘Originator, Detective Inspector Fletcher. Eighth July, eleven hundred hours. Probate Monica Heron granted sixteenth October, confirm two hundred and fifty-three thousand four hundred and sixteen pounds fifty-three pence. All accounts belonging Heron emptied October twentieth. Nothing more known.’
Two hundred and fifty-three thousand pounds (unlike Fletcher, he found it much easier to round off the figure) which had virtually disappeared.
He heaved himself to his feet and crossed to the very old and battered filing cabinet. In one of the drawers there should be a parcel with all the papers which had been found in Ca’n Ibore after the death of Señorita Stevenage. He checked through the muddle, eventually found what he wanted, and returned to the desk.
Bills, receipts, a cash book, a cheque book and several books of cheque stubs, bank statements . . . But no letters, address book, diary, or any papers of a purely personal nature.
He read through the bank statements and the cheque stubs. The picture was exactly as the bank manager had presented it. Thirty thousand pesetas paid into, and about thirty thousand withdrawn from, the account each month.
So where was the two hundred and fifty-three thousand and all the interest this must be making? In an account in another country? Surely some reference to that account would have been left behind by heron, b
ut there was no reference among these papers. Yet after the death of Heron, Betty Stevenage had paid into her own account (the one she had opened after emptying the joint account) one sum of thirty thousand pesetas, so she must have known of a source of money which she. could tap. And where did the thirty thousand regularly turn up from, when it had been shown that it had never come through any of the normal sources of cash? Neither Heron nor the señorita had left the island from the day they arrived . . . He sighed, looked at his watch, and was slightly comforted to discover that it was almost time for lunch. When he arrived home, Dolores was laying the table.
‘You’re better than an alarm clock, Enrique.’ She put a kilo loaf of bread on a board down on the table.
‘My uncle always told me, eat regularly and you’ll live to be old.’
‘Was that your Uncle Miguel? From all accounts he knew more about drinking regularly than eating regularly.’
‘Maybe. But he did live to be ninety-one. Though God knows if in the end he thought it worth the bother.’
She turned and stared at him, her dark eyes suddenly filled with concern. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’
‘I’m sick: sick of having a mind which goes round and round in circles and ends up by tripping over its own tail.
There are times when I wish I’d refused to go to Damian’s and Teresa’s wedding.’
She put her hands on her hips.’ What the hell are you on about? Have you been boozing?’
‘Not a drop all morning. Cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘Don’t take the risk!
He slumped down in a chair. ‘If I hadn’t gone to the wedding I wouldn’t have listened to Francisca and then life would have been so much simpler. Francisca talks far too much.’
‘Just because you’re out of sorts . . . She’s a wonderful cook and keeps that house of hers as clean as a new pin . . .’ He ceased to listen to a long list of Francisca’s virtues: when a woman talked too much nothing could compensate for that fact.
Jaime, Juan and Isabel came into the house together and the two children were having a shouted argument. Alvarez loved his family because it gave him an identity.
They had started the first course — a thick fish soup — when Dolores said: ‘I suppose you’ve heard about that dreadful accident last night?’
‘What accident?’ asked Alvarez.
‘I’d have thought someone would have told you! Dr Roldán was killed in a car smash last night.’
‘Sweet Mary!’ said Jaime automatically.
‘Rodriguez Roldán ?’ asked Alvarez.
‘The doctor who’s always dressed up like a tailor’s dummy and is married to that Frenchwoman who puts on such airs and graces.’
‘He’s always driven around like a maniac,’ said Jaime, ‘so it’s no wonder he’s had a smash. What happened?’
‘Margarita said he was up in the urbanizacion visiting a patient and drove right over the edge of the road. The car rolled over and over and he was crushed to death.’
How long ago was it, thought Alvarez, that he had called at Roldán’s house and had so envied him? Now he was dead and his wife was a widow . . . A man left his house a thousand times and returned a thousand times, then left it once more and did not return . . .
Alvarez could not sleep: every time he was about to drop off his mind suddenly became so active it jerked him awake once more. Finally he gave up the struggle, sat upright, rubbed his eyes, and then stood up and went round the desk to the window to open the shutters. The nearby church clock struck four. Moodily he stared down at the empty street which shimmered in the heat.
He could not forget the way Roldán’s wife had looked at Roldán that evening, only a week ago. Then, they had been two of the luckiest people in the world. Yet now . . . Feeling old and sad, he returned to the desk and used the internal phone to speak to the traffic section.
‘Yeah, the doe bought it last night, all right,’ said the man at the other end of the line. ‘He went straight off the road and by the time he reached the bottom he was flatter than a pancake.’
‘Was he tight?’
‘His wife says he’d had no more than one drink before the meal and a glass of wine with the meal. And from all accounts he wasn’t a real drinking man. The tests’ll tell us for sure, but at the moment it’s ten to one he was sober.’
‘Then why did he go over the edge?’
‘There was a phone call to go to Ca’n Asped double quick sharp because a woman had had a very serious accident and her husband said she was bleeding badly. Roldán drove to the house, which is right up the urbanizacion where the road aims pretty near straight for the sky. When he left he must have been going at a rate of knots and right now it looks like brake failure, because there aren’t any rubber marks on the road until almost at the bend where he obviously tried to turn in to the rock face and only succeeded in skidding over the edge.’
‘Was it an old car?’
‘Practically brand new Seat one-three-one.’
‘Hasn’t that got a dual braking system?’
‘I wouldn’t know off-hand.’
‘What about the people he called on –can they help at all?’
‘There wasn’t anyone in the house: been shut up for the past nine months. The owners live in England and only come out for the last part of July and whole of August and sometimes Christmas. Either Roldán’s wife got the address wrong or it was a hoax.’
‘A hoax?’
‘I know. That sounds pretty thin to me too.’
‘If Señora Roldán got the name wrong,,wouldn’t he have realized this from the name of the patient?’
‘As far as I know, no name was ever given, only the address, and since they would have been new patients Roldán hadn’t any way of checking. But the wife’s in such a state it’s difficult to get any sense out of her.’
‘Is the car being checked over?’
‘Of course. How come you’re this interested, Enrique ?’
‘I don’t know, really. Maybe it’s because I was speaking to the man only a week ago.’
‘Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s the way the world goes. So drink and wench while you still can.’
After the call was over, Alvarez stared at the far wall. Roldán had been Heron’s doctor, but so had he been the doctor of hundreds of other people. Heron’s wife had died from accidental poisoning. Betty Stevenage’s dog had been poisoned with aconite and probably it was aconite which had killed her. Surely it could be only one more coincidence that Roldán’s name was linked with theirs . . .?
CHAPTER XXV
On Monday, a day promising to be even hotter than before, Alvarez walked through the town to the Seat garage. The wrecked car was on a low trolley in a corner bay. It was so shattered and twisted that without very close inspection it was impossible to judge that it had been a Seat 131.
He went over to where Largo, the owner of the garage, was working on the prop shaft of a six-metre speedboat in a cradle. ‘Have you checked out the crashed car yet?’
Largo, a short, stocky man with a humorous face, straightened up and pressed a clenched fist against the small of his back. ‘Not yet. They brought it in yesterday and I had to open up the garage specially to take it. This morning I’ve this boat to repair: the owner wanted it days ago.’
‘So when d’you think you’ll get round to the car?’
‘When I’ve the time.’
‘It’s important.’
‘So are the paying customers.’
Alvarez leaned against the hull of the speedboat. ‘You’ve looked over enough wrecked cars in your time, Alberto. D’you reckon you’ll be able to judge what caused the accident?’
‘With a car as bashed up as that? When they brought it in I told ‘em, you’re wasting your time and mine. But they insisted — check over the remains and tell us why the car went over the edge.’
‘Traffic seems to think the brakes must have failed.’
‘All right. You check t
he brake lines and tell me if they were damaged before or after the crash. You tell me if the reservoirs of brake fluid were empty before he went over.’
‘OK, OK. I take your point.’
‘Have a fag,’ said Largo, producing a pack from his oil-stained overalls, ‘and forget it. Worry only gives you ulcers.’
‘I reckon I must be growing a champion crop,’ said Alvarez gloomily.
Alvarez stood by the entrance to the drive to Ca’n Asped and looked upwards. The road turned in a right-hand hairpin bend fifty metres on. He looked downwards. A three-hundred-metre run down a very steep road. If Roldán had been very annoyed by the abortive call he might well have driven off with reckless speed . . .
He walked downhill. There was no form of barrier on the outer edge of the road, but the very obviousness of the danger surely was a safety measure? At night time, any driver who wasn’t either drunk or mad would stick to the centre of the road. Where was the last point at which one would normally brake? He judged the point would be opposite a ledge of rock, left after the road had been blasted out, on which grew a solitary spurge bush. Reaction to brake failure might be quick, but it couldn’t be instantaneous and the car would travel quite a few metres before the driver’s brain realized the brakes had gone and he reacted to this knowledge. Then an attempt to drop down into a lower gear? And the last, desperate act, to try to ram the rock to bring the car to a stop? . . . The road was marked with black rubber strips where the Seat had skidded . . . He reached the edge of the road and looked down and immediately suffered the nausea which heights always produced in him. Exercising considerable will-power, and courage, he forced himself to stand still and study the scene. The mountainside sloped away unevenly, its surface a jumble of levels, with bushes and scrub grass growing in sparse pockets. The passage of the car could readily be traced out: gouged rock, smashed bushes whose leaves were already brown, shattered glass which glinted in the sunlight and jagged pieces of metal.
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