Two-Faced Death
Roderic Jeffries
© Roderic Jeffries 1976
Roderic Jefferies has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1976 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER I
The telephone rang, waking Alvarez. He shook his head, opened his eyes, and stared balefully at the telephone, willing it to be quiet. It went on ringing and eventually he sat up, reached out, and picked up the receiver.
‘This is the office of Superior Chief Salas,’ said a woman, very incisive of tone. ‘Señor Salas wishes to speak to you.’
One of the shutters, insecurely latched, was slowly swinging outwards and harsh sunshine spilled across the desk. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his eyes. What the hell was the time? He looked at his watch and saw it was four o’clock. Sweet Mary! he thought, with renewed irritation, hadn’t Salas ever heard of the siesta?
‘Alvarez?’ said a sharp voice.
‘Speaking, señor.’
‘Where is the report on smuggling I asked you to send me three weeks ago?’
Was it really three weeks ago? ‘Señor, the moment I received your orders, I began my investigations. But as you will readily understand, it is not a matter which can be quickly dealt with … ’
‘Why not?’
‘Well … señor, smuggling is like a second job to some people — kind of runs in the family. They did it when the Moors were here, probably even as far back as the Romans … ’
‘I am not concerned with what happened in prehistoric times. I wish to know who is smuggling American cigarettes into this island now. They’re being sold in bars all over the place and Chief Inspector Tamidir reports that the evidence quite definitely points to their entering at your end of the island … What have you done about the matter?’
‘Everything possible, señor. But as you’ll appreciate, when one is dealing with people who regard smuggling as a justifiable practice which their ancestors have carried on for generations …’
‘Why do you insist on harping on the past?’
‘Only to explain why all the usual channels of information dry up when it is a question of investigating smuggling, señor. No one is eager … ’
‘It is your job to make them eager. I want to know where these American cigarettes are being landed and who’s landing them. And I want the information on my desk within the next week. Is that clear?’ Superior Chief Salas cut the connection.
Alvarez replaced the receiver. Salas had, unfortunately, been born in Madrid — it explained a lot, without excusing it.
He yawned, looked at his watch again in near disbelief, then slowly stood up. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man and he experienced great difficulty in buying clothes which fitted him. His shirt, even when unbuttoned at the neck, was tight across his chest: had he worn a tie, as regulations demanded, he would, in the July heat, have been exceedingly uncomfortable.
He left his office and went downstairs. Outside the captain’s office was a guard who, as soon as he saw Alvarez, looked at his watch, simulated total astonishment, and said: ‘My God, it’s not five yet! Where’s the riot?’
Alvarez walked past him and out into the street. In the past, youngsters had shown respect towards their elders: now, they mocked them. Roll on the day when he retired and bought himself a small finca, sat out in the shade, and picked up handfuls of earth to let them slowly trickle through his fingers — and the nearest youngster was kilometres away.
He went up the road on the shady side and into the square. Since the land sloped, part was raised to provide a level surface and here chairs and tables were set out in front of two cafés. A number of people sat at the tables and he identified them from their reddened complexions as holidaymakers. The fools! he thought. They could be back at their hotels, sleeping.
He entered the Club Llueso, a square, attractive building to the south-east of the square and just beyond the steps down from the raised section. The bar was empty apart from the barman, who sat on a high stool and studied a football pool entry form.
Alvarez went over to the bar. ‘Let’s have a very large cognac.’
‘You’re early,’ said the barman.
‘Early for what?’
‘It’s like that, is it? It’s the heat. The moment the thermometer tops thirty, people get gritty. I see it every year.’ He poured out a large brandy and pushed the glass across the bar. ‘Get outside of that and you’ll find life’s a bit more rosy.’ He brought out a pack of Lucky Strike from under the bar, tore off one corner of the top paper, and tapped out a cigarette. ‘And have a coffin-stick to go with it.’
‘Thanks.’ Alvarez flicked alight a lighter and lit the barman’s cigarette, then his own. He inhaled a lungful of smoke and let it trickle slowly out of his nostrils, then drank. He replaced the glass on the bar and said: ‘I’ve had the big white chief from Palma shouting at me over the telephone.’
‘So that’s what’s got you even more mournful than usual!’
‘He’s giving himself blood pressure over smuggling.’
‘Smuggling?’ said the barman, very casually.
‘American cigarettes. Says they’re pouring ashore in their millions this end of the island … D’you think they could be?’
‘How would I know? Palma’s always on about this end of the island: blames it for everything. It’s jealousy, that’s what it is, because we’ve kept it beautiful and … ’
‘I wonder if there really is much smuggling these days?’
‘Haven’t I just told you, I don’t know a bloody thing about it? But what I do say is this — suppose there is some smuggling, so what? A few fags nipped ashore when no one’s looking — what harm’s that doing Palma?’
‘Well, smuggling’s illegal.’
‘So are most things. And anyway, people have been smuggling longer than the history books go back.’
‘That’s roughly what I told my superior chief.’
‘So what did he say to that?’
‘He hates history.’ Alvarez finished the brandy and pushed the glass across. The barman refilled it.
‘So you don’t know anything?’ asked Alvarez, as he picked up the refilled glass.
‘I do my job, keep my nose clean, and my ears and eyes tight shut.’
‘But possibly not your hands?’ Alvarez stared at his cigarette and turned it round so that he could read the brand name.
The barman spoke angrily. ‘The way the world is now, it doesn’t pay to be kind and generous.’
‘I know. It’s a bitch.’ Alvarez sighed. ‘Ever heard of an Englishman being mixed up in the smuggling?’
‘Didn’t you hear me say I don’t know nothing about anything?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the best way to keep out of trouble.’ He finished the brandy. ‘You know, you’re right. I feel more cheerful now.’
‘You’re dead lucky, then,’ replied the barman moros
ely.
*
Most of the time, Jim Meegan could regard himself with ironic detachment and his writing with the amused tolerance of someone who had learned to live with a slight disability: it was only when his jealousy over Helen grew out of hand, fed by too vivid an imagination, that he began to feel angrily sorry for himself.
He stared at the page in the typewriter and reread the nine lines of type. They weren’t going to gain him immortality. Yet those nine lines represented two hours of work, two hours during which he had had to drag each word out, screaming, from the depths of his mind … The lion opened his mouth to roar and a mouse squeaked … He began each book with visions of a masterpiece and ended up by producing only popular entertainment (if that wasn’t a gross misuse of the word ‘popular’). He pulled out the paper, scrumpled it up, and threw it at the wastepaper basket. It missed and fell on the floor. Someone had once said that the wastepaper basket was a writer’s best friend: he hadn’t added that it might end up as his only friend.
He worked a new sheet of paper around the roller and typed 72 at the head of the page. Roughly 178 pages to go. Or 278 if this was to be the masterpiece: masterpieces mustn’t be of a commercial length or the critics became doubtful and suspicious.
He was not wearing a shirt and the back of the chair was covered with a towel, but even so he sweated heavily. A drop of sweat trickled down from his neck. He watched it as soon as it came within his vision; apparently heading for the hairs on his chest, it suddenly and unaccountably swerved aside to slither down past his left nipple to his stomach. The sweat of Tolstoy and Dickens had probably run straight and true.
Page 72. Seventy-one pages completed, the hero and heroine about to go to bed together for the first time and he couldn’t damn well get them moving. Perhaps they needed help from Masters and Johnson.
He heard a car and thought it was coming down the spur road, but then it continued on along the middle road of the urbanizacion. He’d expected Helen to be back a long time ago, but if she were with John Calvin then there was reason enough for her continuing absence. He heard the front door bang and thought she had, after all, arrived, but immediately afterwards he realized that Antonia, their part-time maid, had just left.
Calvin. What a hell of an inappropriate name for a man who was reputed to have had an affair with at least half the English married women in the area. Helen had laughed a lot with Calvin at the McKelties’ cocktail party. True, at the McKelties one either had to laugh or drink like a fish, or both, if one were to survive, but there had been something about her laughter …
He trusted her. Implicitly. No set of circumstances, however compromising, could ever shatter his trust … Was she having an affair with John Calvin?
When she wasn’t with him, he had the most intelligent and logical ‘conversations’ with her concerning their present relationship. They discussed his jealous fears, reviewed the reasons for these, she admitted to part of the blame and promised there would never again be cause for his doubts and jealousy, and in an adult manner they coped with an adult situation … But when she was actually with him … Jealousy seemed to strip him of all logic and reason.
Would it do any good if they left Mallorca? There must be other places where her bronchitis and asthma would respond as dramatically to climate as they had on the island — ironically, since so many Mallorquins suffered from both. If they left, they’d be leaving Calvin behind. But wouldn’t there always be a Calvin wherever they went, until he and Helen had sorted themselves out?
He heard another car approach and this time it turned into the spur road which ended in a wide turning circle. A squeak, high in pitch and caused by the brakes, told him this was Helen. Play it cool, he told himself: cool and adult.
She entered the house by the front door, stepped past the kitchen into the sitting-room, and then came along the passage to the bedroom he used as an office. She was wearing a multi-coloured frock which suited her slightly angular shape and he remembered, with a sudden, painful shaft of memory, that the day he had first seen her she had been wearing a frock very similar in colour and design.
‘How’s it going, Jim? Is the inspiration flowing?’
She had spoken quickly, a shade nervously, he thought.
‘Bloody awfully.’ He pushed the low typing table away from himself.
She sat down on the unmade-up bed: she had an oval face filled with character and her mouth was curved as if forever about to break into a smile. She regarded him levelly. ‘What’s the matter that the work’s not going too well?’
It was strange how, when questions concerning their relationship were put to him directly, he could seldom answer them directly. ‘I keep thinking.’
She ran her tongue along her full lips, a frequent mannerism of hers when bothered, and reached up with her right hand to fidget with the top button of her dress. ‘Couldn’t you try thinking a little less?’
At their initial meeting, the first thing he had noticed about her had been her eyes. Deep blue, very direct, and obviously quick to suggest emotion. He answered her, trying to speak lightly. ‘I can’t cut back too far on thinking — apart from anything else, my job depends on it.’
‘Why do you always … You knew what I meant, Jim. Why don’t you try to think a little less intently about emotional matters?’
Why? Because … His emotions had always been too intense. (Weren’t all artists intense by nature? There must be some obvious point of difference between them and the nine-to-five man on the Clapham omnibus.) ‘I just can’t change. If I get twisted into knots … ’ His sense of humour belatedly came to his rescue. ‘God! I sound like some self-tortured Dostoyevsky character.’
‘Hardly.’ She smiled back at him. ‘You’re not nearly loquacious enough. You’ll need to learn to make a hundred words do the work of ten.’
‘I wish I could. It would make a plot go much further.’ She moved until she could rest her back against the wall. She began to fidget once more with the top button of her dress. ‘Jim, the car was hell to start after lunch. I thought I’d never get it to go.’
‘So what happened?’ he asked, aware that his voice had become sharp. Where had she had lunch?
‘I was just about to give up and call the garage when it finally spluttered into life. The poor old thing really is worn out. Don’t you think it would be sensible to buy a new one?’
It would have to be her money which bought it and he had laid it down, when they married, that he paid for the essentials and her money was spent by her on whatever luxuries she wanted. That had been before successive governments, right and left, had knocked the pound into the gutter and inflation had all but crippled publishing. Now, she had to help pay for the essentials. That fact was resented by him even as he knew his resentment was childish and illogical.
‘We could afford a Seat one two seven. Madge says hers is a jolly good car and she’s had hardly any trouble with it apart from all that nonsense with the firm who supplied it.’
‘There’s no need. The garage will patch the old jalopy up,’ he said, with a certainty he didn’t feel.
She sighed, but did not press the matter. She thought his attitude towards her money was stupid, but she was perceptive enough to know that he saw things in the light of emotional pride and not logic.
‘I’m packing in work for today.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘The masterpiece will have to wait.’ He looked out at the sun-drenched, boulder-strewn land which was their garden and wondered again where she had had lunch and with whom. If he asked her, she would tell him. But he was scared of her answer.
CHAPTER II
The Hotel Azul, in Playa Nueva, was readily distinguishable from all the other slab-sided hotels around it because it was painted from top to bottom in a piercing shade of blue. It was U-shaped, had three bars, two dining-rooms, a TV lounge, a children’s play area, and an outside swimming pool. Because the government had raised wages but the tour operators had fought any reasonable increase in prices, t
he management had cut the staff by a third: the remaining members were overworked and surly and the quality and quantity of the food had deteriorated sharply. Since ninety-eight per cent of the trade was with the package tour industry, any complaints were received with bored indifference.
Thomas Breeden stood in front of the reception desk in the foyer and impatiently watched the clerk trying to make out his bill, annoyed anyone could experience such difficulty in adding up a few figures. In the end the clerk passed the bill over and he checked it. He was not in the least surprised to discover an error of three pesetas. He pointed this out to the clerk, who was resentfully insolent that anyone should worry over so small a sum. However, when there had been farthings back in England, Breeden had worried over them. Watch the farthings and the halfpennies grew. Naturally, he was perfectly at home with the mechanics of decimal coinage, but had never really reconciled himself to it.
He took his wallet from his inside coat pocket. Even the clerks and waiters were no longer wearing coats because the heat was so great, but he believed in maintaining standards, especially in foreign countries where the natives were lax in such matters. He counted out three one thousand peseta notes and handed them over. The clerk gave him the wrong change and when this was pointed out, added an extra twenty-four pesetas with as much ill-will as possible. Breeden, carefully separating the twenty-five from the five and one peseta pieces, put the coins in his purse. He picked up his briefcase and suitcase, politely said goodbye to the clerk to show there was no lasting resentment, and walked towards the main doors.
A colleague at work had once been asked to describe Breeden. He’d thought for a while, scratched his head, and then confessed that he didn’t really know what to say because Breeden was the most forgettable character he’d ever met. It was a harsh, but not wholly inaccurate, description. Breeden was of slightly above average height, well built but not fat, and his round face was so regularly proportioned that no single feature predominated, although his lips did lie a little straight and were rather thin: his hair was an unremarkable brown and his brown eyes seldom registered any emotion greater than pained surprise. He was a precise, pedantic man, but he saw precision and pedantry as virtues in a world where standards had plummeted and chaos had become the new religion.
Two-Faced Death (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 1