‘John, there’s something I want to talk about.’
He looked round, surprised by the tone of her voice.
She tapped the letter on her lap. ‘This is from an old friend back in England, mainly to say that my godfather, Geoffrey Maitland, who’s been ill for a long time, can’t last much longer. It’s to be hoped the doctors are right because he’s suffered long enough. He’s ninety-one, so he’s had a long innings.’
She looked tiredly old herself, he thought, as he wondered where the conversation was leading.
She drank, then carefully lit a cigar. ‘He’s a cantankerous old man and has rowed with practically everyone, including his few relations: funnily enough, though, he and I got on very well together and when my husband died he immediately asked if I needed financial help. Perhaps it was a case of Greek appreciating Greek.’ She smiled momentarily. ‘Or maybe it’s because we only saw each other at long intervals. Anyway, cutting a long story short, he said years ago that he was going to leave the bulk of his fortune to me, and his relations — all of whom are far too wealthy for their own good as it is — wouldn’t get anything much unless I dropped dead before he did. He’s not a man to change his mind without saying he has so that I imagine that’s how his estate is still willed. He’s very rich because he’s cantankerous — always delighted in doing what the experts advised against.’
‘That will be great for you.’ He was genuinely glad and sounded it.
She played with the letter and for a while was noticeably uncertain about what to say. Then she spoke abruptly. ‘I don’t need any more money, John. My husband left me a life interest in family money — which goes back to his family as we never had any children — and it’s more than enough for me because I’ve never gone in for jewellery or longed to sail around the world on a luxury cruise.’ She chuckled. ‘The only thing I really would like to do is buy a Rolls to park alongside and overwhelm the Eastmores’ Daimler. Nearly gives her fatal blood pressure when I remind her it’s only a Jaguar and what Jaguars were called before the war … So I’ve what money I need and on top of that I’ve a rooted objection to dying and leaving a load of money which the government pinches. I’m going to give Geoffrey’s money to you.’
He stared at her, utterly surprised.
She spoke quietly. ‘When you came here you were someone who’d been kicked around by life and knocked down. I knew just how you felt because I had a husband who died. But one day you talked farming to me and you changed and came alive. You told me all about your past battles and what the future could be if only you’d the capital. I saw you were a dreamer like your father, but unlike him you were a dreamer who could go out and translate those dreams into reality by sheer hard gutsy work. I saw something almost unknown on this island — a man with enough enthusiasm to have a vision.
‘Talk to any of the English out here about being a visionary and they’ll think you’re talking about LSD, or whatever the latest drug craze is. But I want you to grab that vision with both hands. Which is why I’m going to give you the money and why I’ve had my solicitors make a new will just in case anything happens to me before Geoffrey’s estate is finally settled.’
He said: ‘You’ve just about shattered me.’
She smiled broadly, with happiness, and suddenly her round, vein-laced, rough-complexioned face, set beneath straggly greying hair, held a softness that many people would not have believed possible. ‘How much would the dream farm of yours cost?’
‘Complete, equipped down to the last harrow, a quarter of a million pounds,’ he answered immediately. He’d worked out the figures often enough — playing the game, Suppose I won the pools. ‘But that’s perfection. Corners can be cut, or machines left out if one’s willing to work that much harder. The basic essentials are good land and good cows and if you don’t economize on them, you’ll make it. Modern specialized buildings are obviously the best, but if you have to make do with something built in the ’twenties …’
‘I doubt you’ll need to bother about cutting corners, John.’
‘You really think there’ll be as much as quarter of a million?’
‘Unless Geoffrey suddenly made some very bad investments, that and more. Even after the death-duty sharks have had their pounds of flesh.’
‘Good God!’ he said, and the words were almost a prayer. ‘A farm of really good loam, all drained, and cows able to be out a month earlier and a month later than on clay … His expression changed. ‘Elvina, you really mean it?’
‘You surely know me well enough now to be certain I do?’
‘But it’s something that just doesn’t happen. People don’t give fortunes away.’
‘Sometimes they do. If they’re old and content with what they’ve got and if they meet someone they like very much who has a wonderful enthusiasm and a dream which money can make reality. In any case, it’s not all altruism.’ Her voice roughened slightly as it regained some of its normal astringency, almost as if she were ashamed of her emotions. ‘Like all old people, I’m beginning to want to know I’ll leave some sort of monument behind when I die to prove my life wasn’t meaningless. Your farm will be my monument. When you’ve bought it, I’ll come over one day and stay with you and you can show me the fields, the hedges, the trees, the cowsheds, the cows, and you can tell me all your plans, and I’ll see a future in which I’ll be a pan even though my body’s a heap of ashes.’
‘You’re a fraud, Great-Aunt Elvina,’ he said softly. ‘You play a part out here, yet really you’re just a visionary and an idealist.’
‘Tell that to Mary Eastmore!’ she said abruptly.
*
It was night. Through the opened window of his back bedroom, Tatham looked out across the short stretch of matorral at the nearest mountain. In the moonlight, this had lost its hard profiles and was softened and more friendly. He could see the shadows of the few pine-trees which clung to the precipitous sides in odd places, making him wonder why seeds bothered to grow there and what sustenance these trees could possibly draw out of the bleak limestone. A Scops owl called several times, sounding like a pure-toned bell. There was, thrice repeated, a deep mewing note which he tentatively identified as a hoopoe’s.
Life could be staggeringly odd, he thought, recognizing this was not an original conclusion. He had suffered the death of his fiancee, had thrown over the farm as he finally recognized the hopeless proposition it was, had come out here simply because his mother had suggested it … And as a result he was being offered the chance to own a proper farm, something that could never have happened if he’d stayed at home.
He had no doubts that Elvina meant what she’d said. She and he had hit it off together as soon as they’d met. He had enjoyed her unusual ways because he had always disliked conformity, she had found some quality in him — enthusiasm, dedication, call it what one would — that she equally liked. When the money from her godfather came to her, she was going to pass it on.
He continued to stare at the mountain, but he no longer saw it. Instead, his mind visualized fields of rye grass, long and juicy and beginning to head, forage harvesters chopping the grass and blowing it into tipping trailers, trailers emptying their loads into tower silos, sleek Friesians with the stamp of breeding, milk spurting into the glass jars of a herringbone parlour …
CHAPTER VII
IT WAS the night of Good Friday and the bells of Llueso’s church had been ringing intermittently since dawn. In the floodlit monastery on the hill — looking ethereal since it seemed to float in the middle of black sky —the monks prayed with special devotion.
Tatham, wearing a polo-neck sweater because it was quite cold, had been ready to leave Ca’n Manin for the past half hour when there was a knock at the front door. He went through to the hall, expecting to find the caller was Judy, but instead he met a small, rather dumpy man with a Vandyke beard, a large, flat parcel under his left arm, who said: ‘Señor Ingham?’ He spoke rapidly in Spanish.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tatham i
n English, ‘but this isn’t Señor Ingham’s house. He lives up the road.’
The man shook his head.
Tatham turned and called out: ‘Elvina, can you come? There’s a chap wants Lawrence Ingham’s place but doesn’t speak English.’
She entered the hall from the sitting-room. The man half bowed, his eyes filled with open curiosity as he stared at her unkempt appearance. He spoke as he straightened up and she answered briefly. He bowed again, said goodbye, and returned to his car which he had parked on the patio.
‘Mallorquins can’t find their way around anywhere,’ she said. ‘Lawrence told him the first drive on the left after the S-bend-so he comes straight down the dirt-track on the right before the S-bend. Tends to prove Columbus was born on this island since he found America when he was looking for India.’
He laughed, as the car drove off. ‘It’s not peculiar to Mallorca. Father can lose his way on a dead straight road.’
‘I’ve a soft spot for your father, John, but he’s the most impractical man I know … It’s odd. That man somehow reminds me of him … Anyway, I’m sure I’ve never seen the man before.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t have done and he certainly didn’t regard me with recognition!’ She looked at her watch. ‘Judy ought to have picked you up by now. Every once in a while something odd happens and one of these processions starts on time.’
‘I’m sorry you won’t come with us.’
‘I’ve seen this procession often enough. Bring Judy in for a drink afterwards, won’t you? She’s refreshingly different and not the crook that stepfather of hers is.’
‘I thought you’d got on rather well with Lawrence the other evening when we went to his place for drinks?’
‘Only because he wasn’t trying to sell me anything. Normally he’s pleasant enough, but try and do business with him … He’s like all the other foreigners out here who are illegally in the property racket. They’d sell you a tumble-down casita as a manor house if you were blind. It makes me furious. I’ve seen a few nice people come out here, without much money, and I’ve seen them swindled by people like Lawrence. I’ve tried to warn them when I’ve known in time. D’you know what they’ve said? “But he’s English, so we can trust him.” And they think I’m just a crabby old woman who’s trying to stir up trouble.’
‘I wonder …’ he began, but at that moment they heard a car draw up to a stop. ‘It must be Judy this time,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
He left the house just as Judy climbed out of her white Seat 600. ‘I’m always late for everything,’ she said, ‘but as I’m not as late as I usually am, I’m early.’
‘That, no doubt, explains why I’ve only been waiting for three-quarters of an hour.’
‘Didn’t Elvina tell you that nothing ever starts on time out here?’
‘On the contrary, she said that occasionally a procession did.’
‘That’s just Elvina being difficult. I’ll eat my latest Patou hat if anything happens before an hour’s up. Still, get in and let’s move — we’ll have to park away back from the route because the place will be seething with people now the procession’s been declared to be of special interest by the Ministry of Information and Tourism. I do wish they wouldn’t do that sort of thing. In next to no time, the procession will be put on for the tourists and not for the people.’
‘And isn’t it now?’
‘No, it definitely isn’t, as you’ll see for yourself if I can ever persuade you to get into the car.’
He climbed into the passenger seat.
‘Do you mind being driven by a woman?’ she asked, as she settled behind the wheel.
‘That depends on the woman.’
‘Then sit back and relax. I’ve been driving out here for three years and not had a single accident, so I’m brilliant.’
They parked in Llueso in front of one of the many buildings in which cottage industries were carried out during the day, walked through the square and then past the church to Calle Mayor. Here, the crowds were thick.
‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Is anything happening yet?’
Being so much taller than the average Mallorquin, he could look over the heads of those in front of him. The centre of the road was clear of anyone but two members of the Municipal police. ‘No sign of anything.’
‘Then you can apologize for all your unnecessary worrying and start pushing: we want to get through to the steps which are a hundred yards along on the right. As this is Spain, use your elbows and tread on toes if people won’t move, but apologize profusely every time.’
They reached the foot of the stone steps which led up to the top of Puig Llueso, the small chapel, and the figure of Christ on the Cross.
The procession began soon after their arrival and almost immediately he realized that Judy had been right; this wasn’t a pageant merely carried out to entertain the watching crowds. This was a deeply felt religious experience for those who took part in the procession and for those of faith who watched.
The priest came first, followed immediately by the Virgin of Llueso beneath her golden canopy, carried by four men in white. Town dignitaries, ex-servicemen with medals clanging, the choir, Christ on the Cross carried by one man who staggered under the weight, and the town band playing a dirge, followed. Finally, there walked the penitents. Two abreast, dressed in white robes and with white or green hoods in which eyeholes were cut, many barefoot, they descended the stone stairs, hoods bobbing in unison to each step, some leaving behind smears of blood because the soles of their feet had been cut by the rough stone.
The Mallorquins in the watching crowd became silent and only the foreigners talked amongst themselves.
Judy tucked her arm round his. ‘It’s eerie,’ she whispered.
It was eerie. For him, the centuries rolled back, the Inquisition existed, sin had meaning, and only painful expiation could save a man from eternal damnation.
*
The Easter weekend was fine, yet on the following Friday the clouds rolled in before a northerly wind and settled on the mountains to blanket their tops, the light dimmed, lightning flashed, and the rain began.
Ingham stared through the window of the study of Ca’n Xema and cursed the rain, now lashing down with tropical intensity. Soon the mountains, already turned black by the wet, would begin to bear waterfalls, the torrentes would swirl into life with debris-laden floodwater, roads would flood and perhaps become impassable, dirt-tracks would turn into quagmires, and houses would begin to leak. When it rained like this the island became sad and bedraggled, the last place on earth where a man would spend a great deal of money to buy a holiday home. And today the Nauperts were coming to look at the house.
Why couldn’t the bloody rain have held off for another day? If even the gods had turned against him, what chance had he of escaping his present bad luck? He looked up, incredibly trying to find some sign of a break in the clouds, and saw only dirty greyness from which the rain bucketed down with even greater intensity.
The Mercedes turned into the drive, windscreen-wipers working with frenzied speed. He hurried into the hall and picked up the two umbrellas he had put ready. He opened the seven-foot-high thick wooden front doors, carved on both sides, and rain thrown up from the ground spattered his feet even in the shelter of the porch. He opened the umbrellas and went out to hand them to the Nauperts, becoming fairly wet in the process.
Back in the hall, he laughed lightly and said in German, one of four languages he spoke fluently: ‘The weather’s decided to get all of the year’s rain over and done with in one day. It’ll be blazing sunshine tomorrow.’ Anything to dispel a little of the gloom.
Naupert, with slow and careful movements, collapsed the umbrella, then looked for a stand. He frowned briefly when he failed to see one. He was a man of medium height, stocky in build, with a square face filled with sharp, harsh lines. His eyes were pale brown and they had a disconcerting habit of suddenly going blank, as if he’d lost interest in whatever was being said a
nd had retreated into his own thoughts. His wife, of the same height, was fashionably slim despite being well into middle age, was dressed with expensive taste, and her hair and skin were in a condition that spoke of constant care.
‘Such a shame to get a day like this,’ said Ingham. ‘I was looking forward to showing you round the garden — I’m very proud of it. A garden does so much for a house: provides the setting, like the gold of a diamond ring.’ The laboured simile produced no noticeable reaction. ‘But maybe you’ll have time to come some other day and see it?’
Naupert said nothing.
‘Suppose we start looking round upstairs?’ suggested Ingham. He took them round the bedrooms, pointed out the different hand-made tiles in the bathrooms, the different and traditional patterns carved on the doors. They went up into the square tower. From there, he told them gaily, one could normally see the bay so clearly it was as if one could stretch out and dangle one’s fingers in it. Right then, replied Naupert briefly, it was as if the bay were being emptied over them. No goddamn soul, thought Ingham.
He led the way downstairs to the sub-basement and the large area which he had equipped as a traditional English pub. ‘Every house needs a folly and this is mine.’
Naupert nodded. He agreed, it was indeed a folly. You stupid bastard, thought Ingham, you can change it into a Munich beer garden, can’t you, if that’s what turns you on, and import a couple of Brünhildes in size forty-five breastplates?
They left the English bar and went upstairs to inspect the maids’ quarters, the washroom, the storerooms, the deep-freeze and refrigerator room, and the kitchen. In the kitchen, Frau Naupert spoke for the first time since saying hallo. She pointed to the space between the two cookers (one electric with automatic timing and cleaning, one working on bottled gas for times of power cuts) and said with distaste: ‘There is a dead cockroach.’
Mistakenly in Mallorca (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 6