To him, the scene suggested only one thing, brake failure. Yet the car had a dual braking system and the odds against both systems failing together were surely very, very great?
He began to climb up the road and soon the sweat was rolling down his face, neck, and back, and he was having to breathe through opened mouth.
Alvarez had never been able dispassionately to observe another’s grief: he was far too emotional for that. So to an extent Denise Roldán’s tragedy became a tragedy for him.
‘Señora, I am desperately sorry to have to bother you at such a terrible time.’
She said nothing. She was dressed in black and by some terrible irony black so suited her that she looked more beautifully elegant than ever — only her eyes betrayed the depths of her misery.
‘I have to question you about the telephone call on Friday night.’
She had a lace-edged handkerchief in her lap and she plucked at this with the fingers of her right hand.
‘I believe that you answered the call?’ She nodded.
‘Can you remember exactly how it went?’
Staring straight in front of herself, she said tonelessly: ‘The man said his wife had had a terrible accident and was bleeding very badly. The doctor was to come immediately to Ca’n Asped in the Llueso urbanizacion.’
‘What language did he speak?’
‘English.’
‘Do you think he was English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you understand the language well?’
‘I’ve learned it to be able to help Ricky. He needs . . .’
She stopped as she realized that the present tense was no longer applicable.
‘Would you say you understood English well enough not to make a mistake in translating it either to yourself or someone else?’
A few tears had spilled out of her eyes and run down her cheeks. She brushed them away with her hand. ‘Yes.’
‘Did the man tell you his name?’
‘No. I asked him for it, but he rang off.’
‘Señora, please bear with my questions, but do you think you could possibly have been mistaken over the name of the house?’
She turned and stared straight at him, yet he was certain she was not really seeing him. ‘D’you think I haven’t been asking myself over and over again, did I make a mistake? If Ricky had gone to another house, he would be alive now. So if I heard wrongly, I killed him. But the man said Ca’n Asped. I swear it.’
‘Did you recognize his voice, señora?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know many of the English residents?’
She shook her head.
He stood up and thanked her. She gave no sign that she had heard him.
Alvarez entered the town hall, a large, rather church-like building, and walked along a narrow, badly-lit passage to a room which was largely filled with filing cabinets and dusty ledgers.
A small man, very dark complexioned, was searching amongst the ledgers and sneezing at irregular intervals.
‘I need some help,’ said Alvarez.
‘We’re terribly busy . . .’
‘It won’t take you long. Just draw up a list of all the houses called Ca’n Asped and any name which is pretty similar which are in any of the local urbanizacions.’
‘But that’ll take hours and hours,’ said the clerk plaintively. He was about to say something more when the beginning of a sneeze robbed him of the powers of speech.
Alvarez took off his spectacles, which he should have worn far more often than he did, and rubbed his nose. There was only the one house called Ca’n Asped and there was no house with a name so similar that it was reasonable to suppose Señora Roldán could have confused the one with the other. He recalled the gist of the telephone conversation. A woman gravely injured and bleeding badly. If the call had been genuine, then there had been a husband who must have become quite frantic when Roldán failed to turn up. Clearly, he would have telephoned another doctor . . . Alvarez telephoned all the doctors who lived in Llueso and Puerto Llueso and none of them had attended an Englishwoman who had been badly injured on Friday night.
Had the call been a very stupid practical joke? It didn’t seem reasonable to believe any of the English community would have played such a joke because the Roldáns apparently knew none of them well. A Mallorquin, filled with spite, might have been responsible, except that Denise Roldán was certain the caller had been English – and over the telephone any accent usually became magnified. Then the call had been made in order to get Roldán’s car up on a dangerous road where it could be sabotaged, so that when he left he was driving to his death. Why? Because he knew, or suspected, the identity of the murderer of Señorita Stevenage?
He stood up and wandered over to the window. If he did nothing and allowed the apparent accident to remain an accident, then a brutal murderer might escape, perhaps to murder yet again: but if he pursued what he now believed to be the truth, he must cause Denise Roldán even greater misery because he would be blackening the character of her husband. He sighed.
He left the office, went down to his car, and drove the short distance to Roldán’s house.
Roldán’s mother, a frail woman of eighty who opened the door, lamented and wept as Alvarez murmured words of condolence: for her, grief needed to be expressed openly. But for Denise grief was a very private matter, and at first when she spoke to Alvarez in the main sitting-room she was as coldly self-controlled as she had been before, when her emotions had to some extent been anaesthetized by the initial shock.
‘Señora, I’m very sorry, but I must ask you some more questions about your husband.’ He paused, then continued more quickly: ‘You see, now I am not certain it was an accident.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s possible the accident was deliberate.’
‘Mother of God!’ she whispered. ‘Someone murdered him?’
‘There’s no other house called Ca’n Asped, or any name which could be mistaken for that one. And I’ve checked and no other doctor in the area was called out to attend a badly injured woman. If there had been a badly bleeding wife, the husband must have tried to call help from another doctor when Doctor Roldán failed to turn up.’
‘Who would kill him?’ Her voice was little more than a whisper.
‘Señora, it is possible . . .‘After a brief pause, he doggedly continued. ‘It is possible that your husband knew the identity of the man who murdered Señorita Stevenage.
And because he knew, he had to be killed to prevent his saying who that man was.’
She murmured something he failed to catch.
‘I will have to examine what drugs he has been using and also speak to the receptionist. And perhaps look through his accounts.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is possible that he sold some poison to someone.’
It took her a little time to understand the full inference of his words, but when she did she shouted wildly at him and although she had been shouting in French he knew she was cursing him for his vile suspicions. Her mother-in law ran into the room and, without understanding the reason for the turmoil, began to wail as she drew Denise to her to comfort her.
He left, hating himself, his job, and a world in which one person could be so terribly hurt.
CHAPTER XXVI
Carolina Belderrain — the Vestal Virgin about whom Denise had so often teased her husband — was a woman in her early forties whose face had the misfortune to appear to be out of proportion no matter from which direction it was observed. Even her beautiful eyes, deep, warm brown, were too large in relation to her high forehead so that they appeared constantly to be expressing astonishment.
Her manner was defensively abrupt, even antagonistic: Roldán’s unpopularity with many Mallorquins had, in fact, been partially due to her. ‘No,’ she snapped, ‘it’s quite impossible.’
Alvarez looked across the sitting-room of her house, a room filled to overflowing with furniture, a col
lection of china figurines, and four garishly coloured paintings.
‘Señorita, I think that nothing is completely impossible.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about: suggesting the doctor would ever have sold poison to someone. It’s completely disgusting.’
‘There’s reason for thinking . . .’
‘Don’t they teach you people anything? Doctors work to save lives, not take them.’
‘Unfortunately, it’s not every doctor who remembers that.’
‘Well, Doctor Roldán did. Oh, don’t think I don’t know what mean and spiteful things some people used to say about him!’ Her scorn increased. ‘Just because he dressed really smartly and his wife was beautiful and because he wouldn’t live in a slum like them. But he was a different kind of a person.’
He wondered whether she saw herself as a different kind of a person.
‘They resented his success. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t hoard his money under a loose floorboard, but spent it all on enjoying himself: they couldn’t under stand why he was always ready to accept new ideas, instead of rejecting them out of hand. He once said to me . . .’ She stopped.
‘Yes, señorita?’
She shook her head, as if marvelling over something.
‘He once said to me, “When I started practising medicine, I saw myself setting out on a crusade. But now I know I’ve just been engaged in muddy trench warfare.” ’
‘Did you understand what he meant by that?’
‘Of course. He became a doctor in order to help his own people live better and happier lives. But they were too traditional and stupid to let him. If he wanted to make more than one visit or prescribe more than a couple of aspirins, they said he was just trying to make money out of them.’
‘He was once an idealist?’
‘He was always an idealist — which is why it’s disgustingly absurd to suggest he would have sold anyone poison.’
‘If he was an idealist, he was one who liked the good things in life ?’
‘Who says an idealist has to starve in a garret?’
‘I gather that if the poor peasants were suspicious of him, Which foreigners weren’t?’
Her manner became less certain, as if this was a point which in the past had troubled her. ‘If the locals were so stupid and suspicious, why shouldn’t he tend the foreigners? And why shouldn’t they pay for his being a really good doctor? But don’t you forget the rest of the story. If someone not very well off wanted him, but their insurance didn’t have him on their list, he charged them nothing. And if the medicines were very expensive, he’d pay for them out of his own pocket. That’s the kind of man he really was.’
Hadn’t someone once said that no man was a hero to his valet? Perhaps no doctor was a villain to his receptionist. And yet although it would be absurd to accept as gospel everything she said — wasn’t there too stark a contradiction between the idealist and the doctor who preferred to attend the wealthy foreigner? — he felt that there was some truth in her words. Yet if that were so, surely Roldán would not have given or sold poison to another person, knowing it could be used for only one purpose? And if he had not, why had he been murdered? Yet if he had not been murdered, what had happened to the badly injured Englishwoman . . . ?
‘Is there any aconite among the medical supplies at the doctor’s house?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied immediately.
‘How can you be quite so certain?’
‘The doctor would never keep any poison in the house.’
‘Used in very small doses it has therapeutic qualities: I believe it’s good for gout.’
‘He refused to keep any poison at all because he was scared of there being a dreadful accident. He said it was a chemist’s job to keep that sort of thing.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, but we’d better go along and check his stocks.’
‘I am not a liar,’ she said with haughty anger.
They drove in his car to Roldán’s house. The door was opened by the daily woman who tried to make conversation, but she was brusquely cut short by Carolina: it was obvious that the two women disliked each other.
Carolina led the way into her office and pointed to a large cupboard. ‘All the medicines in the house are in there, except for anything which has to be kept refrigerated.’ She opened her handbag and brought out a key.
‘There you are.’ She all but flung it at him.
The search did not take long because the cupboard was only half-full. There was no aconite, either in extract or in liniment form.
‘Do you keep a book listing all medicines in and out?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she snapped. She made no move to get this book until he specifically asked her for it.
With her help when this was necessary, very grudgingly given, he checked through all the entries over the past year. No aconite in any form had been purchased during that time.
Alvarez went into the chemist in the Calle Aragon and spoke to the young woman behind the counter and said he’d like a word with the señora. She walked between two of the stock shelves to the rear of the shop, where there were stairs, and shouted: ‘Rosalía.’
A woman carrying a small baby in her arms came down the stairs. When she saw Alvarez, she smiled a welcome. He asked how the baby was and it was almost five minutes later before he was able to say: ‘D’you remember being questioned about the sale of aconite?’
‘Yes, indeed. Not very long ago, was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t. Well we’ve been on to every wholesale and retail chemist on the island and everyone’s given us the same answer — no aconite. But now something’s turned up which suggests there must have been. Now, tell me right off the record. Suppose a doctor you knew personally came in and asked for some poison, only a very little, would you always bother to make a record of that sale? After all, he’s entitled to buy whatever he needs and lots of poisons are used in medicine.’
‘We’d bother, whoever it was, for our own sake just as much as for the rules. If there’s any trouble over a poison, every single milligram has to be accounted for or we can be in big trouble.’
He rubbed his heavy chin. ‘If Doctor Roldán had come in and bought a very small amount of aconite from you, then that purchase would have been entered in the book?’
‘It most certainly would.’
‘D’you remember his ever coming in and asking about buying some aconite?’
She looked curiously at him. ‘No. He’s never done that.’
He thanked her and left the shop. Once seated in his car, he lit a cigarette. Almost certainly all the other local chemists would give the same answers as Rosalía had just given him — and as for chemists further afield, Roldán would probably not have been personally known to them so that the regulations would have been strictly complied with and the purchase recorded. So as he had not left the island in the past year, what other source for the poison could he have drawn on? Extracting it from the roots of monkshood? But this was a fairly complicated process apparently, and could he manage to do the work in total secrecy, in a town where everybody’s business was every body else’s? Perhaps. But he could not forget Carolina’s contemptuous dismissal of the possibility that Roldán could ever have had a hand in poisoning someone.
CHAPTER XXVII
Alvarez looked through the window of the showroom at the white Seat 132.
‘You can have it for a third down and three years’ HP,’ said a voice from his left.
He turned to face Largo, dressed for once not in grease stained overalls but in an open-necked shirt and well pressed trousers. ‘Would anybody be fool enough to give credit to a mere inspector in the Cuerpo General de Policia?’
Largo chuckled. ‘Probably not. Maybe we’d both better forget the deal after all.’
‘Have you checked over that crashed car yet?’
‘We’ve done the best we can, Enrique, but it’s mostly like I said it would be. When a car get
s really crumpled up, you can’t tell much.’
‘You sound as if you might have found something, though?’
‘There was what seems to have been a loose union on one of the brake lines. If it was loose, that couldn’t have happened in the crash.’
‘So was at least one of the systems definitely inoperative?’
‘Can’t say. It all depends how bad the leak had been-if there was a leak.’
‘That’s nothing but ifs.’
Largo shrugged his shoulders.
‘If that had been a developing fault and all the fluid had drained away, there’d still be braking power left on the other circuit?’
‘That’s right.’
‘On opposite wheels, front and back. So if he’d panic-braked there would have been rubber on the road?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘If you knew what you were doing, how long would it take you to immobilize both brake lines?’
‘Say half a minute, unless you were going to do it crudely. Then ten seconds would be enough.’
Alvarez visualized the scene on the night of the crash.
He ‘saw’ the doctor climb out of his car and walk down the sloping path to the front door swearing because the chain had prevented his driving all the way down. A shadowy figure came round the bend immediately above the house. As the doctor hammered on the door, wonder ing why the frantic husband didn’t let him in, the man immobilized both brake lines, then returned to the cover of the bend. The doctor, furious and frustrated, drove off at a rate of knots . . . ‘Thanks for all your help,’ he said.
‘Not much we could do for you, I’m afraid. But there it is.’
There was sick, bitter anger etched in Denise Roldán’s face. As she sat in the red velvet chair in the sitting-room, which so dramatically set off her black dress, Alvarez could guess what thoughts poured through her mind. Why him? What had he ever done to be singled out by a malign fate? Alvarez remembered the days after the death of Juana-Maria, when his grief had seemed a physical pain and he had resented, instead of welcomed, comforting words. ‘Señora, I am very, very sorry to have to return to bother you. But I need to look through the doctor’s papers and his bank statements. If this weren’t absolutely necessary . . . ’
Murder Begets Murder Page 14