Lady From Argentina

by James Pattinson

  There was still money in the safe. There appeared to be the same amount in dollars as there had been when he had told her that the sum was fifty thousand in that currency alone. Perhaps he always kept a reserve of that size where he could lay his hands on it at once if necessary.

  She put the money in her shoulder-bag. In new hundred-dollar bills the bundle was surprisingly small and did not take up much room. The Argentine money, the australes, was of lesser value, but she took it also. She had no qualms about taking the cash; she regarded it as due to her in compensation for all that Ricardo had forced her to undergo. If anything, it was scarcely enough to pay his debt to her.

  This thought came to her as she was turning away from the safe, and it halted her. The question formed in her mind: was it enough? And she knew that it was not. She knew also that there was something else which might compensate her more fully. She had felt a desire for it when he had shown it to her and allowed her to wear it for a few minutes. Now the desire possessed her again. She had to have it for her own. She could not leave without it.

  She pulled out the drawer and took it. It glittered in her hand, and her pulse quickened as she gazed at it. Oh yes, she had to have it. It would have been unthinkable to walk away and leave it there. The lost chance would have haunted her all her life.

  The other pieces, the rings and the bracelet, she left. The necklace was what she wanted, not the rest. She dropped it into her shoulder-bag and snapped the fastener.

  She looked down at Ricardo’s trussed form and saw that he had already regained consciousness. His eyes were open and he was staring at her. If he had not been gagged he would probably have been swearing, calling her all the filthy names that came into his head. Robbed of the use of his tongue, he had to say it all with his eyes. And she could read the message there very clearly indeed.

  She could not resist the temptation to crow a little. ‘Well, Ricardo, you lost this one. You should have treated me better. You brought this on yourself. And don’t imagine that you’ll ever get your revenge, because you’re never going to see me again. I’m going a long way away from here and I’m never coming back. But you’ll be all right. You’ll live to make a lot more money. Some people might have killed you, but I’m not as vindictive as that. So just thank your stars I’m not. Don’t look so angry. You’re lucky.’

  Before leaving the office she used the telephone to order a taxi.

  She locked the office on the outside and took the key. Then she went up to her room and packed her bags.

  She was ready when the taxi came.

  She told the driver to take her to the airport.

  Chapter Fourteen – Mystery Tour

  It was one of the maids who brought the news to Gomez and Villa that Señor Marquez could not be found and that Señorita Lacoste also appeared to be missing. Their beds had not been slept in and the señorita’s luggage had gone. Also, Señor Marquez’s office was locked. Repeated knocking on the door had produced no answer.

  Gomez and Villa took action at once. They suspected that something unforeseen had happened, something which might have important implications for them. And their first concern was to keep the maids and the housekeeper out of the way while they were investigating this mystery.

  So the household staff were ordered to remain in the kitchen while the two men set to work to force an entry into Marquez’s office. This task did not give them much difficulty; it was the kind of operation in which they had had some practice. They were inside the office very quickly indeed, and the first thing that met their eyes was the trussed-up form of Ricardo Marquez, still awake but still unable to move or utter a word.

  Gomez closed the door instantly, since it occurred to him that here was a situation which needed careful consideration and ought not to be dealt with in too much of a hurry.

  He said as much to Villa, who, though a trifle slower in his mental processes, was inclined to agree.

  They could see that the safe was open; this was the second thing to catch their attention. Gomez crossed to it and looked inside. He saw immediately that there was no money in it. Adelaide had left the jewel drawer open and he saw also that there were only the smaller pieces of jewellery remaining. He had been sufficiently in Marquez’s confidence to know about the necklace and the money reserve, both of which had vanished, and it took him no time at all to work out what had happened. He spoke to Villa.

  ‘The bitch took the cash and the necklace.’

  He had no doubt in his mind that it was Adelaide Lacoste who had done this. Mixed in with his other reactions there was a grudging admiration for her. She had brains as well as beauty, and she also had nerve. There were not many people who would have had the audacity to do this to Marquez.

  He saw that Villa had taken a clasp-knife from his pocket and was opening the blade.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing with that?’

  ‘Going to cut him loose. What else?’

  ‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Gomez said. ‘He’s not doing any harm where he is for the present.’

  He put an arm round Villa’s shoulders and drew him into a corner where they went into a huddle. He spoke close to Villa’s ear in a voice so low that Marquez could not hear the words.

  ‘It seems to me that we could play this game to our own advantage. You and me, we could stand to gain one hell of a lot if we do things right.’

  Villa was puzzled. ‘I don’t see –’

  ‘Look at it this way. She’s gone off with a wad of money and a necklace worth a fortune. So why don’t we go after her and take the loot away from her? Especially the sparklers.’

  ‘And then bring it back to him?’

  ‘Talk sense,’ Gomez said. ‘Why would we do that?’

  The light of understanding dawned on Villa’s craggy face. ‘Oh, I see. You mean keep it for ourselves?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  It took a bit of work to drive things into Villa’s thick skull. He was not the brightest of guys. But Gomez was used to that; and the man had useful qualities: he had no scruples about what he did when you told him what needed to be done.

  ‘But how about him?’ Villa gave a nod in Marquez’s direction. ‘He’ll be real mad. He’ll put the bloodhounds on our trail, sure as fate.’

  ‘He would if he could. The thing for us to do is make damned sure he can’t.’

  Villa got the slant of this one pretty quickly. He gave a grin. Gomez was really speaking his language now.

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘Thought you would.’

  ‘There’s something else though. If the girl’s gone on the run, how do we catch up with her?’

  ‘We make inquiries. We’ll find her, never fear.’

  ‘And then we’ll make her pay.’

  ‘Right in one. We’ll certainly do that.’

  Marquez looked up at them apprehensively when they came out of the huddle and stared down at him. He seemed to guess that they were about to do something that would not be at all good for his health. And when he saw Villa take a length of thin cord from his pocket he must have guessed the worst. He began to writhe in a last desperate attempt to free himself, but it was no use; the woman had done the job on him too well.

  Villa strangled him with the competence and complete lack of fuss of one who was used to that sort of thing. He exhibited no emotion while doing it and no particular satisfaction when it was done. It was just another task, all in the day’s work.

  They took the jewels that Adelaide had left. These would be useful in paying expenses, which might be heavy. They ransacked the safe and filing cabinets in a search for anything else that might have been of value to them, but they found only documents which would no doubt have been of use to Marquez but were worthless to them. As a precaution they put them all through the shredder.

  Gomez went to tell Señora Cepeda that her employer had gone away and would not be back for some time. He had left a note to this effect in his office. Gomez did not show her the note and she di
d not ask to see it. She wanted to know what she and the maids were to do.

  ‘Look after the house until Señor Marquez comes back.’

  He did not tell her when that would be. He did not tell her she would have a very long wait. He told her that Señorita Lacoste had also left and would not be returning. The housekeeper thought this was very sudden and maybe rather odd, but it was none of her business.

  Gomez gave her some money – for herself and the maids. He said it was an advance on wages. It would keep the women quiet for a while. By the time they became suspicious and maybe decided to go to the police he and Villa would have left Buenos Aires far behind, and they had no intention of coming back.

  *

  It was about mid-morning when they left the house and took the Jaguar from the garage. They drove to Bartolomeo Granada’s place, because he was the person Adelaide had last visited, and he might be able to make some suggestion as to where she had gone.

  It was apparent that the fact of her departure came as a complete surprise to him, and an unwelcome one at that. He looked shattered; there was no other word for it.

  ‘She has left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you do not know where she has gone?’

  ‘If we did we would not have come to you,’ Gomez said.

  ‘But Señor Marquez. Does he not know?’

  ‘Señor Marquez has gone away also.’

  ‘With her?’

  ‘We don’t think so. It could be that he has left for the good of his health. In a great hurry. You understand me?’ Gomez winked and laid a finger along the side of his nose.

  ‘Ah!’ Granada said. ‘I see.’

  People of Marquez’s sort sometimes left in great haste for the good of their health when they had sailed rather too close to the wind and were in danger of capsizing.

  ‘We were wondering,’ Gomez said, ‘whether you could make any suggestion as to where Señorita Lacoste might have gone. Can you?’

  ‘I? How would I know?’

  ‘She was here yesterday evening. Did she mention anything to you about leaving?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  The roly-poly man was looking far less happy than he had appeared to be in Adelaide’s company the previous day. This news of her departure had really depressed him. He might never see her again; that dismal fact kept hammering in his brain. And she had told him nothing, had not confided in him as she might have done. For had he not been her friend? Had he not done things for her? And had he not even offered her a home?

  He had imagined that she trusted him. Yet she had been with him all that evening in apparent good spirits and not once had she dropped the slightest hint that she intended leaving Buenos Aires. Why, good God, she must have departed in the night, soon after returning to Marquez’s house. It was odd. He could not understand it, and it distressed him greatly.

  Moreover, her perfidy, as he saw it, even roused in him a degree of bitterness. He had adored her, and this was how little she valued his adoration.

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I even forged a passport for her and charged her nothing.’

  Gomez pricked up his ears. ‘A passport?’

  ‘Yes. And curiously enough, a British one; though she was in fact French.’

  ‘British,’ Gomez said musingly. ‘Why that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And then he remembered something. ‘But she did once say that of all the cities of the world she thought she would most like to live in London. Though she had never been there, so it could only have been a romantic idea.’

  Gomez was thoughtful. ‘For someone proposing to live in London it might look like a good idea to have a British passport, mightn’t it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I imagine a French one would have done just as well. Both countries are in the European Union, aren’t they?’

  ‘All the same –’

  It was not much to go on, but what else was there? Somehow Gomez took to the idea of London as Adelaide Lacoste’s destination. He decided to make inquiries. Maybe he would find that someone of that name had recently bought an airline ticket to the English capital.

  *

  There remained a body to dispose of.

  They waited until the housekeeper and the maids had gone to bed before removing the dead Ricardo Marquez from his office. They had left it locked while they had been away, using the same picklock with which they had gained entrance in the first place. They had had no wish to let Señora Cepeda or her assistants go poking their noses in there and finding the body of the man who was supposed to have left the house. Now they carried this body to the garage and stowed it in the boot of the BMW. They had a long drive ahead of them, more than eighty kilometres westward. Gomez led the way in the Jaguar and Villa followed in the other car, now serving as a hearse.

  Gomez knew the place. Some years ago he had had another body to dispose of. Ironically, it had been a person whom Marquez had wanted to remove from circulation; the man had been treading on his toes and irritating him. Gomez and Villa did the dirty work and the man vanished, never to be heard of again.

  And now it was Marquez himself who was to vanish without trace. Perhaps there was a certain grim justice in that.

  The journey was uneventful. Eighty kilometres beyond the environs of Buenos Aires the two cars left the major road they had been following, and before long they were negotiating what was no better than a rough track in some pretty wild and hilly country. They were moving more slowly now, and Gomez, still in the lead, was keeping a keen eye on the way ahead. He was searching for landmarks which might indicate to him that they were nearing the place which he was seeking.

  He had no doubts when he had reached it. It had changed scarcely at all since his former visit. He stopped the Jaguar, and Villa brought the BMW to a halt a short distance behind it. They both got out and made an inspection with the aid of electric torches.

  ‘You reckon this is the place?’ Villa asked.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ Gomez said.

  It was a dark, still night and there was hardly any sound. The track up which they had come had once been roughly metalled with stone and gravel. That had been in the days when heavy lorries made regular journeys along it. Now it was grown over with coarse grass and weeds.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ Gomez said.

  They walked gingerly forward, shining the torches on the tangled growth in front of them, until they came to a place where the ground fell sharply away in a drop of ten metres or so. Here they halted and shone the torches downward to reveal a dark expanse of water with not a ripple stirring its surface.

  ‘You think Cantallo is still down there?’ Villa said.

  Gomez gave a laugh. ‘Where else would he be? What’s left of him. You can bet your life nobody came and fished him out.’

  ‘Maybe his ghost haunts the place.’

  ‘I don’t see any ghosts,’ Gomez said. ‘Do you?’

  The place had once been the scene of considerable activity. But that had been years ago when the pit had still been worth working. Since it had been abandoned it had filled with water, cold and stagnant. It was so far away from the nearest town or village that few people ever came near it now. There was nothing about it to attract anyone. Except maybe people who had a special use for it. People like Gomez and Villa.

  ‘Well,’ Gomez said, ‘let’s get on with it.’

  Villa drove the BMW as close up to the brink as he dared, put the gear in neutral, stopped the engine and got out. He and Gomez went to the back of the car and pushed. There was a slight downward slope, and once they had the vehicle moving it went forward fairly easily. They gave it a final heave and it went over the edge. They heard the splash as it hit the water, and when they shone the torches downward there was no sign of it. The ripples that had been caused by its plunge were already subsiding.

  Marquez had been very satisfactorily disposed of.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Gomez said.

  They rather enjoye
d the drive back to Buenos Aires in the Jaguar. They felt the satisfaction of knowing that a job had been well done.

  *

  Their inquiries regarding Adelaide Lacoste proved fruitful. She had indeed bought an airline ticket to London. It only remained now for them to do the same and follow her.

  There was, however, an unfortunate delay. In the first place their passports needed renewal, and when this formality had been gone through there remained the question of British visas. They applied for these at the British Consulate, but they were not immediately granted. Officialdom took its time, and they wondered whether it would not have been better to have gone to Bart Granada and bought a couple of Spanish passports made out in their names.

  Meanwhile, they made some jewellery sales to boost their capital. They now possessed quite a considerable sum in cash; more than enough to meet their needs, Gomez reckoned. But of course it was only seed corn that should in due time produce a bumper harvest.

  The visas came through eventually and they were ready to depart. They had been living in their quarters at Marquez’s place and fending off inquiries from various callers regarding the whereabouts of the dead man. Several people seemed to be anxious to contact him. The word had got round that he had gone to ground somewhere, and Gomez’s protestations that neither he nor Villa had any idea where this might be were treated with a considerable amount of disbelief.

  They were not at all sorry, therefore, to be getting away at last. For besides all the bother that they were having in one way and another, there was also the galling thought that they were getting no nearer their quarry.

  After some consideration they decided that it might be advisable to tell Señora Cepeda they were leaving.

  ‘We shall be taking a holiday. I don’t know quite when we’ll be back,’ Gomez said. ‘Carry on just as you are. All right?’

  She looked doubtful. It was all very strange. This sort of thing had never happened before.

  Gomez handed her some more money, and this seemed to allay the doubts to a certain extent. But she was still uneasy.