‘The trouble is, she obviously thought …’
‘She’s a bitch.’ Lettie did not normally swear, but when she did she chose her words carefully. ‘You can’t tell me she doesn’t know we have to watch every peseta we spend. So for someone in her financial position to ask for twenty per cent interest on money borrowed in an emergency is completely immoral.’
‘I know it is. But that doesn’t change anything.’
‘It does for me.’
‘It doesn’t for me,’ he said miserably.
‘You are not going to pay her.’
‘I don’t see how I can get out of it. I promised …’
‘If she’s so besotted with money that she has to have some interest, you’ll pay her five per cent and not a fraction more.’
‘But if she thought that originally I was agreeing …’
‘Are you scared of her?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Because if you are, I don’t in the least mind telling her.’
‘It’s not that at all.’
‘I know,’ she said, suddenly sounding weary. ‘It’s because you always keep your word and if she thought you meant one thing and you failed to make it clear you didn’t, because you were so worried, you feel obliged to carry out your side of the bargain as she conceived it … I suppose I ought to be proud you can be so honourable: but all I can think is that it’s people like you who make life too easy for people like her.’
He had been winding and unwinding the grass about his thumb and forefinger and now it broke in the middle. After a brief, sideways, look at her, he stood.
‘If we gave her twenty per cent,’ she said, ‘we’d never, ever be able to pay off the capital.’
He nodded, then walked round the side of the house. She thought that she shouldn’t have pressed the matter so firmly because she’d only managed to add to his worries. But if that bitch of a woman thought she was going to get twenty per cent …
*
The staff at Ca Na Nadana, by gracious permission of Dolly, were allowed to use the swimming pool at certain times of the day. Erington sat out on the pool patio and watched Victoriana as she dog-paddled in the water.
‘Come on in,’ she called out, with the familiarity with which she — but never Ana — spoke to him when Dolly was not within earshot.
He stood, crossed to the diving-board, and executed a perfect running dive. When he came to the surface, she said: ‘When are you going to show me how to swim properly?’
‘Any time.’
‘Then now?’
‘First I have to teach you the movements.’
‘Where?’
‘On a bed is best.’ It was an old joke, not yet grown stale.
She laughed. Like most Mallorquins, she had an earthy sense of humour and it was some little while before the subject was exhausted.
‘What’s the time?’ she asked as she stood waist deep in the shallow end, conscious that her scantily covered breasts were standing proud.
‘Coming up to eleven.’
‘Then I’d better get out and do some work. The señora said she’d be back by twelve and I must make the bed and tidy up the bedroom before she gets here. I can’t think how her bed gets so disturbed.’ She tried to suggest wide-eyed innocence, but had to laugh coarsely. He made several suggestive movements. She scooped her right hand across the surface of the water to splash him.
‘I thought she was out for lunch?’ he said casually.
‘Is that what she told you?’ She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. ‘Maybe she thought she’d come back and surprise you?’
‘Surprise me doing what?’
‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’ She waded to the steps and climbed out.
‘I suppose she’s having her hair done.’
‘On a Wednesday: in the village?’
‘I was forgetting she’d only gone into Llueso.’
‘Ana said something about her making an appointment to see Old Foxy.’ She picked up a towel and began to dry her face and hair.
‘Who’s Old Foxy?’
‘You don’t know? Vives, the solicitor.’
He’d thought that Victoriana would have a very good idea of where Dolly had gone, but had had to be circumspect in finding out. Victoriana was an inveterate gossip. She began to tell him about Vives — how he had come to be the richest man in the village — but his mind was not on what she said. Dolly had been very coy that morning, refusing to explain where she was going or why and merely insisting that she had to be on her own. So why hadn’t she wanted him to know she intended to speak to one of the local solicitors and why a local man when normally she dealt with one in Palma?
‘I’m going inside to change,’ she said.
‘Need any help?’
She tossed her head with scorn and walked off. But her rate of walking appeared to slow as she approached the patio.
*
Many of the tiled floors in Ca Na Nadana were carpeted, as were the stairs, and bare feet made only the faintest of noises, nevertheless he waited until one o’clock the next morning before he left his bedroom. Dolly’s room was further away from the stairs so he did not have to pass her doorway — not that that would have mattered very much because she’d taken a sleeping pill. Victoriana and Ana slept on the other side of the house.
With the aid of a small pocket torch, he went down the main stairs to the hall and then into the study. He shut and locked the door, reached through the opened window and unlatched the closed shutters. In an emergency — although it was difficult to conceive an emergency — he could escape through the window. He used his skeleton key to pick the lock of the top drawer of the kneehole desk. On top of the untidy mass of papers was a large brown envelope. He opened this and inside found two documents, each of two pages, the first in Spanish and the second a translation in English: Dolly’s will. He read the translation. George Trent was to receive a pewter cigarette case, carefully identified. The whole of the rest of her estate, situated in Spain and elsewhere in the world, was to go to Mark Erington.
*
At three-ten that afternoon, Dolly burped with genteel decorum. ‘I’m so hot — I’m sure the air-conditioning isn’t working properly — that I think I’ll go and have a little lie-down.’
‘Very sensible,’ said Erington.
‘I’m almost certain to be down by five, but just in case I’m not, be a sweet boy and wake me up.’ She got up from the settee and walked with care to the doorway: she always drank a lot of wine with her meals.
Give them ten minutes, he thought, and both she and Lulu would be stretched out, snoring. He picked up his glass and went out to sit under the covered patio. He stared out at the colour-filled garden with its dramatic backdrop of harsh mountains under full sun. What was Dolly worth if one added together all her possessions? A million pounds? Two million? And except for a pewter cigarette case — and he was prepared to be charitable about that! — everything was left to him.
He sipped the last of the cognac. Lord and master of Ca Na Nadana: rich beyond the dreams of Croesus. He’d give parties and all those high-nosed women who now took such great pains to show their scorn for him would come and drink his drink and be as nice as their burned-out souls allowed because there was no denying money, not even if one had been the wife of a district commissioner …
He watched a hoopoe, a swirl of colour in undulating flight, cross the lawn and settle by the side of one of the rose-beds. It bobbed its head and raised its crest. Cocky little bastard: acting as proud as if it had just inherited a fortune …
He had to keep Dolly contented. No matter what she wanted, he must smilingly provide it. There had not been much room for pride before: there was none now. He must become totally indispensable because then she would not consider changing her will …
Carol? He lit a cigarette. His desire to be with her, to renew his soul by reference to hers, had become a luxury he couldn’t begin to afford … Yet even as he recogniz
ed that fact, he experienced a bitter, almost overwhelming longing to see her again and he sensed that it would be all too easy to formulate the ultimate blasphemy, to hell with money … If only Dolly were suddenly to die, how perfectly that would solve everything. But Dolly, despite her drinking habits, despite the fact that she would never have admitted this, was remarkably healthy and unlikely to die for years … Unless she were killed. Unless he murdered her … It was a wistful thought, admitting the impossibility even as the possibility was formulated. He knew himself too well: at heart, he was a coward.
CHAPTER 8
Matas, recalled to work as he’d known he must be, put the plastic bag filled with tomatoes in the basket of his Mobylette and carefully covered the bag with the piece of sacking. He wheeled the bike past the red Seat 124 Sport, which he admired so much, and into the harsh sunshine where he pulled it back up on to its stand. He didn’t immediately start the engine, but looked up at the large and ancient almond tree immediately facing the garage and studied the fruit. It was going to be a good year for almonds. In late August or early September, the crop of the fourteen almond trees on the land would be ripe and the señora would tell him to knock it down and to sell it, but would insist that the buyer must pay her direct.
Suspicious old bag. He’d sell to Reinaldo. Reinaldo would give her a thousand pesetas less than the true price and later would hand him five hundred. The rich foreigners thought they were smart, but in truth they were all simple.
He looked away from the almond tree and put his foot on the pedal, his finger round the compression lever, to start the engine and at that moment Dolly came out of the front door. ‘I want a word with you,’ she called out.
He took his foot off the pedal and stolidly waited. She came to a stop immediately in front of the bike. ‘Do you remember me telling you something when you first started working here?’ she asked in a bullying tone.
He shrugged his shoulders. What she needed was a man man enough to belt her until she learned to shut up.
‘I said that on no account whatsoever were you to take anything from here without my express consent.’
He hawked and spat.
‘What is in that basket?’ She pointed at the wire basket on the front of the Mobylette.
‘An old sack,’ he muttered.
‘What have you got underneath that?’
Events were moving too quickly for him.
Events moved even more quickly. She reached forward and pulled off the sack. She picked up the plastic bag and looked inside. ‘My tomatoes!’
‘No,’ he retorted angrily.
‘My tomatoes, bought with my money, grown on my land, watered with my water.’ She returned the bag to the carrier, dropping it as if it were suddenly contaminated.
‘Mine,’ he said hoarsely. It was he who each year insisted on growing vegetables in one half-hidden corner of the garden because it was a criminal waste to grow nothing but flowers and grass. It was he who had hoed and dunged the soil, planted the plants, irrigated them, harvested the crop …
‘You’ve been stealing my tomatoes day after day after day. And before that it was my beans. And before that my lettuces.’
‘My tomatoes, my beans, my lettuces.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I warned you and you’ve chosen to pay no heed to my warning. So when you leave here today, do not bother to come back again.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re fired.’
‘No,’ he cried, aghast.
She looked at him, then turned and went back into the house. The front door shut behind her. Mother of God! he thought, she had been smiling. Bemused, he stared at the front door.
‘What’s up with you, then?’ asked Victoriana pertly, as she came round the corner of the garage, a bucket in her hand. When he made no answer, she became worried. ‘Here, you’re not ill, are you?’
He finally turned and looked at her. ‘She … she’s been and sacked me!’
She put the bucket down. Her brown eyes were alive with delighted curiosity.
‘She can’t do it. Not when I didn’t want it.’
‘Makes a bit of a change, doesn’t it? So what happened?’
‘She says I’ve been pinching tomatoes. My tomatoes.’
‘Caught you at last, has she? Taken her long enough.’ He looked at her with jaundiced dislike.
‘It explains something, then. Ana and me was wondering why she had that bloke along last Saturday afternoon.’
‘What bloke?’
‘Came from Mestara, so he said: acted queer enough. I asked him what he was seeing the señora about and all he did was wink and tap his nose. He did say, though, that he’d been working for a French señora in the Port who’d sold her place and was returning to France.’
‘Working at what?’
‘Gardening. Says he’s grown the best tomatoes on the island.’
He leaned forward and picked the plastic bag out of the carrier. ‘Take ’em.’
‘We don’t need any more.’
He emptied the tomatoes on to the drive and stamped them into pulp. He started the Mobylette, pushed it off its stand, sat on the saddle, and accelerated away. ‘Sacked because of some bastard from Mestara,’ he said furiously to an apricot tree as he rode past it.
*
Erington had been born in sight of the sea, in south Cornwall, and some of his earliest memories were of boats. He could remember how he had watched yachts set sail from the nearby harbour and how he had envied the owners and all who sailed in them because they were so fantastically rich. It was then that he had first learned that the eighth sin, poverty, is the most deadly of all.
He walked slowly down the narrow jetty, one of two built within the past few years in the harbour of Puerto Llueso to increase the number of berths, studying the craft which ranged from 11-foot dories to 30-foot sailing boats. He reached the end of the jetty and looked across the water at the western harbour arm against which were moored larger boats: a Bonetti motor yacht that had cost well over half a million pounds, three trawler yachts, several schooners built to face the seven seas … This was the world of the rich. And this was the world which he could now enter if only …
He turned round and saw Carol coming along the jetty. He suddenly remembered how, when he was just thirteen, he had gone with Stella to the woods at the back of the village and how she had been quite careless of the fact that he was held in contempt by almost all the other children in the village because his mother was a slut and his father had disappeared with the very toothy daughter of a nearby landowner. He knew now the same sense of excitement, expectation, and apprehension, as he had known then.
‘Hullo, Mark, I didn’t expect to find you here.’ Carol was wearing a see-through blouse, under which was a bikini top, jeans, and flip-flops. The light wind flicked her hair into artfully sculptured shapes: the walk had brought warm colour to her cheeks. ‘Are you interested in boats?’
‘You sound surprised. Why shouldn’t I be?’ He smiled. ‘On quick second thoughts, don’t answer that.’
She liked the way in which he could mock himself. ‘I don’t see much danger in answering. I’m surprised simply and solely because you’ve never talked about them to me and my experience is that anyone who’s interested in them can’t keep off the subject for more than a few minutes.’
‘If I were lucky enough to own one, I’m sure I’d be in there, talking.’
‘What would you choose? That one?’ She pointed across the water to the Bonetti motor yacht.
He shook his head. ‘She’s for an owner who keeps a permanent crew to do all the work while he does all the drinking … I’ll take the ketch three berths along.’
‘Really?’
‘Why d’you say it like that?’
She shook her head, obviously embarrassed by her question, put on the spur of the moment.
Hadn’t she learned that appearances could be deceptive? he wondered, with a brief surge of resentment. He might be da
ncing attendance on a rich middle-aged woman, but that didn’t mean he could only live with luxury or that he would hesitate to fight a gale in a sound ketch.
She swept a strand of hair away from her forehead. ‘“If dreams were but the herald of reality.”’
He laughed. ‘Reality would be grossly overworked.’
‘You dream a lot?’
‘All the time, in glorious technicolour. But if you’re talking about real dreams, as opposed to day-dreams, I usually end up in some ridiculous situation which probably means that subconsciously I’ve a fear of banana skins.’
‘Mark, do you always make fun of everything?’
‘If I can …’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m afraid I’d better get moving.’
‘I’ll come with you as far as the road.’
As they walked back along the jetty, he found himself hoping that none of the people aboard the boats — washing down, varnishing, merely letting the world move on — would recognize them. Contemptuously, he cursed himself for such weakness, forgetting how only minutes before he had been assuring himself that he was not really weak.
They reached the end of the jetty and walked between two palm trees to enter the car park. The red Seat was near by. He opened the driving door. If he asked her now to go for a drive, he decided, she’d accept. Another chance to be with her. But among the crowds of people in the Port there must surely be more than one of the juiceless English residents who would ask for nothing better than the chance to rush to Dolly to say she’d seen Mark with a blonde. And there was no way that Dolly would accept another blonde who’d thumbed a lift … ‘Sorry I’ve got to rush,’ he said. He climbed into the car.
She looked at him with an expression he could not read, then smiled goodbye and walked away. He started the engine, backed, and drove out on to the front road, turning left on to the Llueso road opposite the eastern arm of the harbour.
There was not much traffic and soon he was free of the Port and driving along the straight, slowly rising road at 90. Rich men could always afford to follow their stars. If Dolly were to die now, he would be rich. Strangely, her murder didn’t seem quite so ridiculously impossible now as it had before.
Unseemly End (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 6) Page 6