Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  Coming from most people, these conspicuously self-effacing protestations would be evidence of false modesty, but from Rafe, with his odd mixture of diffidence and self-assurance, Gideon thought they were genuine.

  While Rafe was speaking, Julie had used her phone to get seats for herself, Gideon, and John on a 10:15 a.m. flight the following day that would have them at Jersey Airport at 3:35 p.m.

  “Why, that’s perfect,” Rafe said. “I’ll be free by then, and I’ll drive you to your hotel—oh, and naturally, the flight’s on me.” The first offer was gratefully accepted, the second politely declined.

  Rafe began to insist, but Gideon gently sidetracked him. “Why do you keep a suite for visitors to Jersey, though? Don’t you live in York?”

  “York? No. My laboratory is in York, at the university, but I’m only there a few days a month. I don’t run the place, I just endow it,” he said with a smile. “Well, and run a small project for them now and then, such as the one I’m doing here. No, no, I live in Jersey. Always have. I consider myself a farmer first and foremost, you see, a dairy farmer. That’s what got me interested in genetics in the first place, and raising dairy cows is still my primary occupation. It’s what I do for my living.”

  “Must be a heck of a living if you can afford to endow a DNA lab and keep a two-room suite at a hotel just for company,” said John, who wasn’t known for his subtlety but who had a wonderful knack for saying this sort of thing without giving offense.

  “Well, yes, I suppose you might say that,” Rafe said, and then made a clucking noise. “Oh, I don’t know why I should be coy about it. Silly how embarrassed people are about wealth these days. The fact is that Carlisle Dairies are the largest dairy enterprise in the islands by quite a lot. We have four different farms totaling fifteen hundred acres—two square miles, almost five percent of all the land there is in Jersey.”

  “Wow, how many cows is that?” Julie asked.

  “Three thousand, and every one of them prime Jersey stock. And then we have the dairy itself, the processing plant, in Grouville. I inherited the whole thing from my father, you see, and he from his, so it’s nothing in which I can take any personal pride. The Carlisles have been, shall we say, prominent in Jersey for a long time, and, if I do say it myself, our Jerseys are right up there with the finest milk producers in the world: 4.9 percent butterfat content. Even among Jerseys, the accepted standard is only 4.84.”

  “The skeletal material,” prompted Gideon, whose interest in dairy cows, Jerseys or otherwise, had been sated and then some. “What’s the story on it? You said—”

  In turn, he was interrupted by Rafe. “Gideon, could you hold your question for a bit? It’s ten past seven. I think we’d best make our way to a restaurant.”

  “Second that,” John said, raising a hand.

  “But won’t they be jammed?” Julie asked. “All those cruise passengers?”

  “Not at all. No more crowds. Look around.” Rafe gestured toward the amphitheater’s public overlook, behind and above them on Calle Alcazabilla. It was the street they’d taken to get there, and it had been as jammed as Julie had predicted; they’d practically had to fight their way through the hordes. Not anymore.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Where did everybody go?”

  “Most of the passengers have to be back on their ships in time for a five or six o’clock departure. And the ones that don’t have to leave until later have usually had enough—and spent enough—for one day and are more than ready to return to the ship, especially to their no-additional-cost dinners. As for the locals, however, they’re barely up from their siestas and aren’t nearly ready for dinner yet, as you know. So between now and, say, nine o’clock, finding a table couldn’t be easier.”

  “And I think I know a place everybody would like,” Julie offered, “right on the Plaza Mayor. It couldn’t be too far from here.”

  “The Plaza Mayor?” Rafe said. “Only a few streets over. Shall we go?”

  CHAPTER 8

  Every city in Spain has its Plaza Mayor, its “main square,” where the seminal events of its history are likely to have taken place: proclamations, celebrations, rebellions, and executions. Málaga is no exception. The handsome old square is still there, still the heart of the city, and still ringed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century governmental mansions and palaces. But it’s been a while since anybody got hanged there, and the upper floors of the buildings have been broken up into holiday apartments. At street level, there are restaurants, cafés, taperias, and boutiques, easy and pleasant to access because the square is now a pedestrian area paved with handsome slate blocks of an eye-soothing rose-gray color.

  In name, however, and unknown to Julie, it hadn’t been the “Plaza Mayor” for two centuries. Since 1812, it had been the “Plaza de la Constitución.” Ask for the Plaza Mayor in Málaga, and you will be directed to the gigantic shopping mall of that name out by the airport.

  The best-known restaurant on the square, mostly on account of the prime people-watching from its patio, is the hundred-year-old Café Central. Julie had had lunch here two days earlier, and it was here she brought them. And even in this long-established hub of city life, as Rafe had told them, they had no trouble finding a table for four on the awninged patio. Their waiter—a dark, aging Latin-lover type, with hair a little too black and improbably narrow hips that suggested the help of a corset—laid their menus on the table with a bullfighter’s flourish, threw a burning, lingering glance at Julie, and sidled away.

  “My goodness, I certainly hope that was meant for you and not for me, Julie,” Rafe said.

  “I was totally unaware of that of which you speak,” Julie said in a fluty voice that might have come from a portly Victorian duchess peering down her nose through a lorgnette. “Such things are beneath my notice.”

  “Probably wasn’t anything personal, anyway. Just part of the service,” John observed. “The tourists expect it.”

  Julie dropped the duchess manner and made a sour face. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.”

  Gideon smiled. He loved it when her nose wrinkled.

  John shrugged. “Just sayin’.”

  As they began to browse the menus, Rafe turned to Gideon. “You had a question you were about to ask.”

  “I did, yes. You described it as a murder case. You said there was good reason to suspect foul play.”

  “Indeed, I did.”

  “But why, if there’s no evidence on the bones?”

  “Well, when the two of them had disappeared a few years earlier, the circumstances had been somewhat suspicious, to say the least.”

  “Wait a minute, are you saying you know who these people were?”

  “Certainly, I know who they were. One of them was my father, after all—”

  “Your father!” Julie exclaimed.

  “Yes, of course, Roderick Carlisle,” Rafe said, as if surprised that they hadn’t figured it out for themselves. He frowned for a second and then looked blankly, pleasantly, at them. “Oh, dear, did I neglect to mention that?”

  “If you did, I sure missed it,” John said.

  “That is to say, I think they’re my father’s remains, but I’ve never been a hundred percent certain.” He glanced curiously from face to face. “Why in the world are you looking at me like that?”

  It was Julie who replied. “It’s just that you don’t seem very upset about it—about your father being murdered and the case never having been solved. It seems a little . . . cold, as if it’s just some kind of academic exercise for you.”

  “Oh, I see. But you have to understand, that’s what it is, in a real sense. Naturally, I’m very interested to know what happened, but it’s true that I don’t have a great deal of emotional investment in it. It’s been almost half a century, after all, and I feel very little personal connection to the man. I have only the vaguest memories of him, you understand, and I’m not certain that even those are real. When he disappeared I was barely three yea
rs old. And then, as I said, I’ve never been sure that those bones really are his. Not completely sure.”

  “But I thought you said you had access to them,” Gideon said. “You never ran a DNA analysis at your lab?”

  “I did try, but the material was unusable. They’d been in the pitch a long time, you see.”

  “Huh,” Gideon said. “I would have thought that, if anything, the tar would have acted as a DNA preservative.”

  “As would I, but as it turned out, that wasn’t the case. It was too degraded to yield any usable results. Ah,” he said, spotting their approaching waiter, “Don Juan slithers back.”

  He was there for their drink orders. Rafe asked for some more Rioja, but red this time. Gideon and John were both pleased to learn that Guinness was on tap and ordered it. As most Americans did, they enjoyed beer in Spain (but not necessarily Spanish beer) because it was typically served ice-cold, a rarity in Europe. Julie ordered a lemonade, which earned the waiter’s smoldering, dark-eyed approval, as if she’d given the sexiest, most brilliant order he’d heard all week.

  “Now. What else would you like to know?” Rafe asked amiably.

  “A lot,” Gideon said. “First, you said that when your father disappeared there were suspicious circumstances. Such as?”

  “And what about the other guy that was found with him?” John asked. “In the pitch pond. Who was he?”

  And from Julie: “What exactly did the police think happened? A double murder?”

  The questions threw Rafe off his stride. “My word. It’s a bit more complicated than I realized. Perhaps I’d best go back a little and set the stage for you. A few background details.” With his forefingers steepled at his chin, he took a few seconds to arrange his thoughts. “First, it occurs to me that I might also have failed to tell you that at the time my father disappeared, he himself was the subject of a murder investigation.”

  “That might have been worth mentioning, yes,” Gideon said.

  Julie stared at Rafe. “Your father was . . . ?”

  “A murder suspect, yes, I’m afraid so,” Rafe said calmly. “He still is, I suppose, if a nonliving individual can be a suspect.” He shook his head. “Oh, a wretched affair from start to finish. Now, the man he was suspected of killing—George Skinner was his name—was a cousin to my father, but not in the usual sense. That is to say, his father, George’s father, Willie, was the husband of Rose, who was the sister of Grace—”

  “Uh, Rafe?” John said quietly.

  “—who was the wife of my father’s father, Howard, my grandfather that would be, but he—not my grandfather but George’s father, Willie—married again after Rose died, so that—”

  “Rafe?” John said a little more loudly and succeeded in getting noticed. “You think maybe you’re giving us a few more background details than we need? At this point?”

  “Ah, right, yes, very true. Right, then. George Skinner and my father, Roderick Carlisle, known by one and all as ‘Roddy,’ were cousins—their mothers were sisters, don’t you see—and they’d been friends to some degree all their lives, and perhaps that’s as much as need be said on the matter.”

  John rapped his knuckles on the table. “Hear, hear.”

  “Now then,” Rafe went on, “the two of them, my father and George, also had business relationships, in that George had been an employee of my father’s. He’d served as sales manager of Carlisle Paving and Road Construction and—”

  “Paving and road construction?” Gideon echoed. “I thought you said your father was in the dairy business too, like you. Carlisle Dairies.”

  “Well, yes, he was, but he had the road-construction company as well. That had been in the family since the 1870s, when asphalt came into its own as a paving material, and the useless, smelly stuff that was bubbling up turned into a giant moneymaker, the only source of pitch for more than two hundred miles in any direction. My father inherited both businesses as a very young man and ran them quite successfully. For a while—until we lost access to the pitch—Carlisle Tar Pits proved more profitable than all the dairies combined.”

  “Lost access?” John asked. “How’d that happen?”

  “It was the trials, the suits—we were forced to sell the rights.”

  “Trials? Suits?” said Gideon. He was starting to wilt. This was a lot to take in, especially after a few glasses of wine.

  “Yes, I’ll come to that in a moment. In any event, we were able to hold on to the land, you see—in fact I continue to live on the property today—but Inter-Island Road Construction bought the rights to the pond and had them for some years, until the pitch ran out, and that was the end of that.”

  “So the pond isn’t really there anymore?” asked Gideon, who’d been thinking it would have been helpful to have a firsthand look at the site.

  “Correct. We—that is to say my mother; I was still a child at the time—had it cleaned up and turned into a lovely freshwater pond, with a charming little gazebo beside it. A good thing too, because it’s only thirty meters from the house. I still remember the stench when the wind blew the wrong way. Whew.”

  He wrinkled his nose to emphasize the point. Not as cute as Julie’s, but it was one hell of a wrinkle, more like a full-fledged twitch that a rabbit would have been proud of. The man didn’t have much going for him in the way of overall musculature, but his nasalis and dilatatores naris would have been something to see.

  When their waiter came back with their drinks and a pen and pad at the ready for their dinner orders, Julie asked for the seafood tapas platter, Rafe the plato de carne mixed grill, and Gideon the paella Valenciana—Café Central was one of the rare Spanish restaurants that didn’t require a two-person order for paella. John, breaking with his red-meat tradition, went for fish: boquerones fritos, a beautiful, heaped pile of whole, golden, deep-fried, fresh anchovies, which he’d seen on its way to a nearby table.

  They clinked glasses and took their first sips, and Rafe carried on.

  “It pains me to tell you that there was yet a third person involved, other than George and my father, whom you need to know about to understand it all. And that is a young man named Bertrand Peltier, who was married to George’s wife’s younger sister, which would have made him George’s brother-in-law, if I have it correctly, or would it have been—”

  A second gentle finger wag from John got him off that particular track.

  “Thank you, John, I needed that. Well, whatever else he was, young Bertrand was apparently a whiz kid when it came to maths; he was the assistant bookkeeper at the paving company, although quite youthful for such a position, but unfortunately—unfortunately for him—not overly endowed with moral fiber.”

  “I’m guessing this Peltier would be the other person who wound up in the pitch pond with your father?” Gideon said. “The younger one?”

  “You guess correctly. It was he who performed the hands-on work necessary to the embezzlement until . . . ah, you’re all looking rather confused.”

  “What embezzlement?” Julie asked, speaking for the three of them.

  “Jesus Christ,” John said. “Help, somebody.”

  “I’m coming to it, I’m coming to it. We do seem to have gotten a bit ahead of things, though. Don’t despair, all will become clear.”

  “Knock on wood,” John said. And did, following it with a lusty swig of beer and using his napkin to swipe away the mustache of foam that resulted.

  “Now, back to Carlisle Paving and Road Construction itself . . .”

  The company had grown ever more successful under Roddy’s adaptable and forward-looking management philosophy, to the extent that by the early 1960s, Carlisle Paving had a virtual monopoly on road construction throughout the Channel Islands and was making inroads in building construction as well, to say nothing of the business they did in England.

  Until it turned out that there was more at play than vision and adaptability. In January 1964 the government had begun an investigation into “a culture of corruption” at
Carlisle Paving.

  “My father, believing George to be at the bottom of any disreputable activities—and I have no doubt that he was—dismissed him from his employ, despite their relationship and their long friendship. By June it was an ill-kept secret that Roddy and George would both be charged as coconspirators in the crimes of intimidation (of competitors) and bribery (of government officials).”

  “And this Peltier guy, when does he come into it?” asked John.

  “Right now. One day my father and George both disappeared and, surprisingly, Peltier as well. Simply vanished, the three of them, leaving not a trace behind.”

  But nobody had needed traces. What had happened was obvious. With indictments imminent, Roddy Carlisle and George Skinner had fled the island, and Peltier with them. This suspicion became a virtual certainty when rapidly compiled company audits showed that £990,000 of Carlisle Paving’s money had disappeared with them.

  “Were there charges pending against Peltier too, then?” asked Gideon.

  “Not at the time. Only later was it shown that it was most assuredly Bertrand—and this is one of the few certainties in the entire affair—who had used his position as assistant bookkeeper to help them extricate that million pounds. Very likely, that was why he was put into the position in the first place. How he came to end up in the pitch pond with my father is one of the many mysteries that was never resolved. In fact, I have yet to hear a credible theory.”

  But by the next morning, the certainty was no longer a certainty, not even a virtual one. They hadn’t gone anywhere after all, or at least George hadn’t. His body was found twenty meters from his house, at the foot of a cluster of craggy outcroppings. He had been shot to death, and the police were able to establish that the bullet that killed him—killed him instantly—had been fired from atop the crags.

  Suspicion now fell on Bertrand Peltier and Rafe’s father, then quickly focused entirely on Roddy when it was discovered that the murder weapon was a gun that belonged to him. The motive for the killing, it was now thought, probably had more to do with their recent estrangement than the coming indictment, a squabble between thieves who had fallen out. It was believed at the time that Roddy and Peltier had probably made off to some distant corner of the Commonwealth—Canada, Australia, Singapore, God knows where—and then separated. And with nearly a million pounds to split between them, they weren’t expected back anytime soon.