by Simon Brett
“I mean,” Truffler continued, “obviously I haven’t had a chance yet to get proper investigations going in Uruguay, and maybe I’ll be able to unearth something through my contacts out there. But it does seem from all accounts that Chris Dover kept very quiet about his origins. In fact he seems to have worked hard on presenting himself as the perfect English gentleman. Uruguay was hardly ever mentioned.”
“Perhaps that was just because nobody was interested,” suggested Mrs. Pargeter.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know how insular the English are. So far as most of them are concerned, a foreigner’s a foreigner—doesn’t matter where he comes from. They just about recognize the difference between a Frenchman and a German, but when it comes to less well-known countries, so far as your average Englishman is concerned, they’re pretty much interchangeable. I bet most people you stopped in the streets of England couldn’t even tell you where Uruguay is.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that possibly at first Chris Dover talked about his former life, but when it became clear no one was interested, he gave up and decided if you can’t beat them, join them. Perhaps presenting himself as English made things easier for business.”
“You could be right.”
“Oh, by the way, you didn’t find out what his real name was, did you, Truffler?”
“No records of him ever being called anything other than Chris Dover.”
“Hm, doesn’t sound very Uruguayan, does it? Not very Hispanic. Must’ve been made up. Probably,” Mrs. Pargeter went on, suddenly remembering how Larry Lambeth had arrived at his surname, “based on his port of entry into England.”
“Could be. Anyway, he seems to have arrived in London in the late fifties. Difficult to find out much about the early years, but he must’ve got involved in the export business at some level. First time there’s much about him is when he started up his own company in 1964.”
“And was his business always legitimate?”
“Well . . .” Truffler paused ponderously. “Certainly in recent years no problems. Pure as the driven snow. Reading between the lines, though, I’d have said his early dealings was a bit more dubious. Haven’t got anything definite yet, but hints I’ve heard from people in the business suggest Chris Dover may have started out as a bit of a villain.”
“What, not violence? Not gang stuff?”
“No, no. More your sort of white-collar crime. Export business but it was what he was exporting that was interesting.”
“What was he exporting?”
“Arms, it seems.”
“Oh?”
“To Africa, mostly. Always some nice little war going on in Africa to keep up the demand, isn’t there? Anyway, from what I can gather, that’s what he was into in the early sixties—exporting stuff whose paperwork might not bear too close an investigation.”
“Gun-running.”
“Always one to call a spade a spade, wasn’t you, Mrs. Pargeter? So, anyway, presumably he made a pile from that, which provided the capital when he started his company in 1964. From then on, though, as I say, all very respectable.”
“Yes, certainly Joyce always seemed the soul of respectability. One would never have imagined that her husband was involved in anything he shouldn’t be.”
Mind you, thought Mrs. Pargeter with a little inward smile, of course the same could be said of me.
“But, Truffler,” she went on, “you didn’t manage to find any connection between Chris Dover and Greece?”
“Absolutely none. Certainly had no business dealings with Greece. Didn’t go there on holiday. So far as I can tell, he’d never been near the place.”
“Hm.” Mrs. Pargeter mused for a moment. “Incidentally, did you get in touch with the daughter?”
“Conchita? No. I tried, but I think you’ll find it easier to contact her than I will.”
“What?”
“She’s on her way out to Corfu. The grisly business of taking back her mother’s body.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Pargeter wondered whether that meant the suicide verdict had already been achieved and the cover-up completed. “Right. Well, I’ll look out for her. Do you think you’re likely to find out much more about Chris Dover?”
“Well, Mrs. Pargeter, I got a lot of enquiries out. Something unexpected might come in from one of them. Though, in my experience, when you get a case like this where someone’s deliberately covered their tracks, if you don’t get a lead early on, you ain’t going to get one.”
“Right.”
“I’ve found out the name of a solicitor Chris Dover dealt with a lot. Mr. Fisher-Metcalf. I’m going to try and get to see him. Maybe find out something there. But I’m not overoptimistic,” he concluded in the voice which had never been heard to sound even mildly optimistic, let alone overoptimistic.
“And what about his death? Anything odd there?”
“I’ve checked with the hospital. And his family doctor. Nothing. It was a brain tumour. Difficult thing to engineer, a brain tumour. Not like a heart attack—that’s easy.”
“Yes. Did he look ill . . . you know, in photographs?” Mrs. Pargeter knew Truffler’s modus operandi. His first action in investigation of anyone—alive or dead—was to get hold of photographs of the subject, and his skill in obtaining these was legendary.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a strange thing, Mrs. Pargeter. I’ve done a lot of investigation on this and, do you know, as far as I can tell, not a single photograph of Chris Dover exists.”
“Really? But surely there must have been something round the house?”
Mrs. Pargeter felt slightly guilty for having said that. Just slipped out. She was never one to pry into any of her helpers’ methods of investigation, but she knew that Truffler would already have entered and searched the Dovers’ home. Shouldn’t have mentioned it, though, she reprimanded herself. Keeping in blissful ignorance of any dubious deeds that might be going on was a talent Mrs. Pargeter had refined over the years, and she wondered for a moment whether perhaps she was losing her knack. Still, it had been quite a time since the late Mr. Pargeter died. Maybe she was just out of practice.
Truffler seemed unaware of her lapse, anyway, so it didn’t matter. “No, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not in the office, neither. Company photographs, company reports, lots of that stuff, but not one of them shows a photograph of Chris Dover. Almost like he had a phobia about being photographed. Odd, that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pargeter thoughtfully. “Very odd.”
chapter
TWENTY
* * *
As she put the phone down, Mrs. Pargeter saw Maria lingering in the doorway that led to the hotel kitchen. How long the girl had been there, or how much of the telephone conversation she had overheard was impossible to guess.
But she gave Mrs. Pargeter a large, totally unsinister smile and said, “There was a message for you about an hour ago. From someone who wondered if you could meet her at Spiro’s at ten o’clock this evening.”
“Did she give a name?”
“Yes. Strange name. It sounded like . . . Conchita Dover . . . ?”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Pargeter.
At first she didn’t think the girl was there. Though Mrs. Pargeter hadn’t seen Conchita since she was a child and so didn’t know exactly what to expect, there was no one under Spiro’s striped awning who looked as if she had just arrived on the island, summoned by news of a dreadful tragedy. There were the usual loud groups of English, louder groups of Germans and a few Greeks, the last no doubt holidaying relatives of the management. They had all had a few rounds of drinks, their food orders were starting to arrive and everyone was very relaxed.
Mrs. Pargeter looked round again and realized there was only one person it could be. A dark-haired girl, whom at first glance she had taken for a local, was sitting alone at a table, chatting to Yianni. Of course,
there are certain very distinctive types right through the Mediterranean, Mrs. Pargeter reminded herself. It was the Spanish blood of her father’s relatives, filtered through Uruguay, that made Conchita Dover look so at home in Agios Nikitas.
On closer examination, the girl did look a bit too soignée to be a local. The way her thick black hair had been cut indicated an urban sophistication, which was echoed in the expensively casual flow of her designer pajama suit.
Mrs. Pargeter approached her. “It is Conchita, isn’t it?”
Yianni fired off one of his devastating smiles and left them to get on with the business of introduction.
“I’m terribly sorry about what happened to Joyce, Conchita. ‘Sorry’ sounds a wretchedly inadequate word in the circumstances, but you really do have my sympathy.”
“Thank you.” There was a hardness in the girl’s black eyes. “I wonder if she got what she really wanted.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Mother had been threatening suicide for years.”
“What, since your father died, you mean?”
“No, long before that. Practically since I can remember. She always was a dreadful emotional manipulator. Suicide threats used to be her ultimate weapon.”
“Oh?” This was a new insight into Joyce Dover. Once again Mrs. Pargeter was reminded how little she had really known her friend.
“Mind you, she’d cried wolf so often, I’d long ago ceased to listen. Overdid it this time, though, didn’t she? Called her own bluff good and proper.”
“Well . . .”
“Anyway,” said Conchita, picking up her ouzo glass and taking a savage sip, “I’m not going to let it get to me. Mummy tried to control me all the time she was alive and, if she thinks she can continue the process from beyond the grave, she can forget the idea!”
Only the rigidity of her jaw betrayed the effort with which Conchita was holding in her emotions.
“I think using suicide as an emotional lever is utterly pathetic,” she went on. “I very much doubt whether Mummy really meant it to succeed. Probably just intended another ‘cry for help,’ but cocked it up. Presumably the idea, as ever, was just to make me feel guilty. Well, if that was the intention, it isn’t going to succeed!”
Mrs. Pargeter hadn’t been prepared for this outburst of recrimination and adjusted the way she had proposed to talk to Conchita. She would hold back her suspicions about Joyce’s death for a while. Spiro’s taverna wasn’t the place for revelation of the kind she had to make.
On the other hand, if Joyce did have a history of threatening to kill herself, that could only help what Mrs. Pargeter was now convinced was an intention on Sergeant Karaskakis’s part to cover up the murder as suicide.
“Whatever your mother’s reasons for doing it,” she announced uncontroversially, “it’s still very sad. Any premature death, however it’s caused, is sad.”
“Huh,” said Conchita.
Yianni pirouetted back towards their table. “Please, can I get you something, please?” he asked Mrs. Pargeter.
She ordered retsina. Conchita asked for another ouzo. The girl watched the waiter’s retreating hips, very much in the way that her mother had done only a few days before. Her thoughts on the subject seemed quite similar, too. “He’s very dishy,” she murmured.
Mrs. Pargeter agreed.
“Be quite nice,” Conchita mused, “to indulge in a purely physical relationship with someone like that. Someone who’s just beautiful, someone who doesn’t speak the language, who can only communicate with his body. I’m sick to death of men who can talk!”
“Ah?”
“The only reason men are able to talk, it seems to me, is so that they can bore you to tears with lies and recrimination and self-justification. God, men are so pathetic—don’t you find that?”
Though this description certainly did not conform with Mrs. Pargeter’s experience of the male sex, she didn’t want to stop Conchita’s flow, so she contented herself with a noncommittal, “Certainly a point of view.”
“There are supposed to be these men around who are caring and concerned and altruistic and thoughtful and don’t spend all their time trying to screw you up, and all I can say is—I’ve never come across any of them. All the ones I meet are complete shits.”
“What about your father?” asked Mrs. Pargeter diffidently. “Did he fit into that category?”
Conchita Dover softened instantly. “Ah, my father was something special. He was a very caring man.”
Mrs. Pargeter had heard similar views over the years from many only daughters, girls who were more than a little in love with their fathers, and whose fathers, without raising the dramatic specter of incest, did nothing to discourage such flattering attentions. It seemed more than likely that Conchita Dover’s dissatisfaction with men as a sex arose from the inability of those she had met to measure up to the idolized Chris.
The strong element of sexual jealousy in her next words confirmed this impression. “He was wasted on Mummy, of course. Kowtowed to her, put up with her moods, did everything she wanted, worshipped her. And she just took him for granted. When he died, I really couldn’t believe how God had got it so wrong. She was the one who should have died, not him.”
“If that’s what you feel,” Mrs. Pargeter interposed gently, “you could say that God’s adjusted the balance now. Your mother’s dead, too.”
This statement of fact seemed to shock Conchita out of her cynicism. “Yes,” she said, “yes,” and lapsed into silence.
“I was never lucky enough to meet your father . . .”
“No.”
“I don’t even know what he looked like . . .” This didn’t produce any reaction, so Mrs. Pargeter added another prompt. “Do you have a photograph of him by any chance?”
“No. No, Daddy would never have his photograph taken.” So Truffler’s surmise had been correct. “Because of the scarring on his face.”
“Oh? I didn’t know about that.”
“His face was quite badly scarred. He’d lost a good few layers of skin. It made his features look all sort of smoothed out . . .”
“Do you know how it happened?”
“He never said, but I think it was when he was in Uruguay. Apparently he had political disagreements with the government out there, which was why he left. I think the scarring was probably the result of torture.”
“But he never actually said that?”
“No. He never talked about Uruguay at all. Whenever anyone asked him about his early life, he’d just change the subject, or say some things were better forgotten.”
“I see.” Mrs. Pargeter took a sip of retsina. “Have you had any contact with the authorities out here . . . you know, about when they’re likely to release your mother’s body . . . ?”
“The initial contact came through the British Consulate . . . that’s how I first heard about . . . her death. They said certain formalities would have to be gone through . . . I suppose the local equivalent of an inquest . . . but they didn’t seem to think it would take more than a few days . . .”
“Presumably they were only passing on what the Greek authorities had told them?”
“Presumably. They seemed a bit . . . sort of embarrassed about it. But then my mother liked embarrassing people,” Conchita added vindictively.
“Death’s always embarrassing.”
“Yes. ‘Suicide In Holiday Paradise’—not the kind of headline that the tour operators are really going to welcome, is it?”
“No.” Still Mrs. Pargeter held back her knowledge of the true circumstances of Joyce Dover’s death.
“Anyway, it was suggested that I should get out here as soon as possible. There’ll be papers to sign and that kind of thing before the body can be flown back.”
“Of course. So, what . . . you wait till someone contacts you . . . ?”
“Mm. Some local police representative, I think. There was a message to say he would meet me here this evening.” Conchita scrabbled in her h
andbag. “I’ve got the name somewhere here. It was . . .”
“Sergeant Karaskakis?” Mrs. Pargeter supplied.
“Yes,” said Conchita. “That’s right.”
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
* * *
“Talk of the devil,” murmured Mrs. Pargeter.
Sergeant Karaskakis looked more geometric than ever as he approached them. The horizontal line of his cap paralleled the right angles of his uniformed shoulders, and the triangle of its peak was an inverse reflection of his perfectly symmetrical mustache.
His mouth was set in a professional smile to greet Conchita. This paled a little when he saw Mrs. Pargeter. The music blaring from the taverna’s speakers changed. Bouzouki gave way to Beatles.
He gave Mrs. Pargeter a curt nod and turned to Conchita. “Miss Dover?”
“Yes.”
“I am Sergeant Karaskakis.”
“How do you do?”
“I am very sorry about the unfortunate circumstances which have brought you here, and I trust that your journey was not difficult.” This had the air of a sentence that he had practiced.
“No. It was a scheduled flight. There were no delays.”
“Good.” The Sergeant seemed to have taken a decision to conduct the conversation as if Mrs. Pargeter was not there. “Everything is proceeding as quickly as possible with the formalities, Miss Dover. I am optimistic that it will all be concluded in two or three days.”
“Fine.”
“And then you will be free to make your melancholy way back to England with the body.” He seemed rather pleased with this sentence, as if it was another one he had worked at and polished with the help of a dictionary.
“Thank you. So . . . what happens? Do I just wait to hear from you?”
“I will keep you informed, of course. You are staying, I believe in Costa’s Apartments?”