An Air of Murder Read online

  When Dora Coates’s nephew reported his aunt was missing after having gone for a swim in Llueso Bay and had later been heard to cry out in alarm, Inspector Alvarez’s reaction to this news was to tell the Policia Local that tourists stupid enough to get into trouble when swimming in the dark were their problem, not his. Then her body was recovered and the evidence suggested her drowning might not have been accidental.

  It was almost inevitable that Superior Chief Salas should criticize the course of Alvarez’s investigation; even more unfortunate for him that others were so vocally displeased by his dogged attempts to establish the truth.

  Roderic Jeffries was born in London and is the son of author Bruce Graeme. In 1949 he read for the Bar and also began to write. His first book was published in 1951 and his writing career rapidly overtook his legal one. He has since published many books, including the famous Inspector Alvarez series.

  Roderic Jeffries lived in Kent until 1972, after which he moved to Spain and now lives in Mallorca. He has a son and a daughter.

  Copyright © 2003 by Roderic Jeffries.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Jeffries, Roderic, 1926-

  An air of murder. - (An Inspector Alvarez novel)

  1. Alvarez, Enrique, Inspector (Fictitious character) - Fiction

  2. Police - Spain - Majorca - Fiction

  3. Majorca (Spain) - Fiction

  4. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14 [F]

  ISBN 0-7278-6050-X

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  One

  AS LAURA TURNED TO FACE HER HUSBAND, HER DARK GLASSES glinted in the sunlight passing through the overhead vine leaves. ‘When does Heloise’s plane arrive?’

  ‘Half five,’ Gerrard answered.

  ‘Since she was so rude, ordering you to meet her, why on earth didn’t you say you’d be too busy and she’d have to take a taxi from the airport?’

  ‘Now that I think about it, I’ve no idea why I didn’t.’

  ‘Liar!’

  He smiled.

  ‘You know damn well it’s because you can’t stop behaving like a gentleman.’

  ‘It’s because she’s my sister-in-law.’

  ‘A cross to bear which you should have lightened.’

  ‘My sweet, you are beginning to sound a trifle sour.’

  ‘Knowing she’s arriving makes me feel sourer than an unripe caqui.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘You must know.’

  ‘Would I ask if I did?’

  ‘Ralph said the other day that the average Englishman who lives here only ever learns four Spanish words – vino rojo, rosado, and bianco.’

  ‘We Brits concentrate on essentials.’

  ‘Have I ever told you, your sense of humour is becoming flaccid.’

  ‘Many times, and after I looked the word up in a dictionary, I understood what you were getting at.’

  ‘Give me patience! . . . I wonder if Heloise will arrive looking as if she’s about to start work in Soho?’

  ‘Is one allowed to hope?’

  ‘You are becoming irritating.’

  ‘Even after many years of marriage, a good husband tries to entertain his wife.’

  ‘Then could you do so less facetiously?’ She drew her colourful linen skirt further up her thighs. ‘God! It’s hot and we’re only in May. What’s it going to be in July and August?’

  ‘Baking.’

  ‘If Heloise doesn’t stay for long, we can spend the days in her pool.’

  ‘We can, whatever. She’s always told us to enjoy it as if it were our own.’

  ‘And if we take advantage of the offer, she’ll give us reason to regret we have.’

  ‘Meow!’

  She was silent for a moment, then said: ‘Small wonder Jerome wasn’t happy with her.’

  ‘What on earth draws you to that conclusion?’

  ‘Mainly female intuition.’

  ‘Notoriously capricious.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d begun to suspect that when being chairman of that agricultural trust took him abroad, she was entertained by someone else.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it? She wasn’t made for constancy, and she’s so self-centred, she’d have believed she could always fool him because of his trust in her.’

  ‘You’ve more reason than female intuition for talking like this, haven’t you?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘There was a whisper that at least once when Jerome went abroad, she wasn’t as lonely as she should have been.’

  ‘Who was doing the whispering? Miranda? Her tongue would destroy a saint’s reputation in seconds.’

  ‘It wasn’t she.’

  He picked up a glass and drained it. ‘If there’s any truth in the suggestion, one could say he was fortunate to die when he did.’

  ‘Very true. He’d have been emotionally shattered to learn she’d been cuckolding him; he never really understood how much the world had changed and that most of what he believed in had become derided. He was a refugee from the time when honour and patriotism weren’t guaranteed laughs for comedians. Stayforth House, its contents, the land, meant so much more to him than just possessions; the estate was a part of history for which he’d become a guardian, and if she’d betrayed him, she’d have destroyed his guardianship. I’m probably not talking sense, but you’ll understand what I mean. You see things as he did.’

  ‘I’m not certain of that.’

  ‘Only because you don’t like admitting to the emotional tie there is between you and Stayforth. Look how upset you were to hear she’d persuaded the trustees to sell one of the Van Dycks.’

  ‘Surprised is the word I’d have used.’

  ‘So surprised, you swore you’d take the trustees to court for agreeing to the sale.’

  ‘But better counsel very quickly prevailed when I accepted that they’d judged money had to be found for repairs and the sale of one of the paintings was the sensible way of finding it.’

  ‘Provided none of the money funds her luxury suite on the latest must-do cruise liner or a month in the Bahamas.’

  ‘The trustees will make certain it doesn’t.’

  ‘You underrate her wiles.’

  ‘You’re really damning her!’

  ‘She makes a better job of doing that than ever I can.’ She was silent for several seconds, {hen said, rather diffidently: ‘Aren’t there times when you feel really bitter that someone like she should live in Stayforth and it’s Fergus’s?’

  ‘Sad, not bitter. Don’t forget that from the moment I could appreciate such things, I learned that in order to maintain estates and prevent their being broken up, they always passed through to the eldest son. I knew Jerome and then his son would get everything.’

  ‘It’s so damned unfair.’

  ‘But effective, as witness the many historic estates which still survive and are one of the glories of our country.’

  ‘Dale was quite right.’

  ‘What exactly has our son been saying now?’

  ‘You are way behind the twenty-first century.’

  ‘It’s not often one receives so generous an encomium from one’s son.’

  ‘I don’t have to point out that that is not what was intended.’

  ‘What son worth his salt ever praises his father?’ He stood. ‘Basil told me his infallible way of identifying a newc
omer to the island – he sits in front of an empty glass. Pass me yours and I’ll refill it.’

  She handed it to him.

  He went indoors. Ca’n Dento was bereft of any suggestion of architectural grace, having been built a century and a half before, for staff who worked in the manor house. Although modernised to a basic level, it now offered a far better quality of life than any of the previous inhabitants had ever known or even envisaged. The front door led directly into the small sitting-room; one had to go through the kitchen to reach the bathroom or the patio; the two upstairs bedrooms could have been regularly shaped, but weren’t because part of one of them had been extended into the other in a narrow rectangle for an inexplicable reason. When Jerome had bought the big house – then called Ca’n Plomo – Ca’n Dento had been uninhabited for many years and become little more than a ruin.

  The kitchen was the largest room since it was there a family would have spent most of their free waking time. The ceiling was beamed and in the beams were the hooks from which strings of garlic, onions, tomatoes, botifarro, chorizo, and sobrasada had once hung; the open fireplace was very large and on either side were narrow recessed seats in which people had sought what warmth they could from the wood fire when the winter winds brought cold, wet and, once in thirty or forty years, snow.

  He opened one of the cupboards, brought out a bottle of gin, poured two drinks, filled the glasses with iced tonic from the refrigerator. He carried the glasses out onto the narrow patio which enjoyed the shade of the overhead vine from which hung bunches of grapes, still little more than berries.

  He put one glass down in front of her on the glass-topped bamboo table, sat. He stared out at the garden – this more in name than fact because the ground was poor, stony, and already too hard to work – at the backdrop of mountains, part of the chain which ran the length of the island, and finally at the many roofs of Heloise’s house visible above pine trees. Ca’n Plomo had been owned by a wealthy family of known politically left-wing sympathies. The Civil War had forced them to flee the island and cost the lives of father and eldest son, and all their wealth. After the war had ended, the house had remained uninhabited, even though there were many who would have welcomed its shelter, because of the political taint they irrationally feared would result in their occupying it. When the tourist invasion began, the property had been put up for sale and an Englishman, escaping from tax officials who found great difficulty in believing that a man living in great luxury was earning no more than a reasonably inefficient plumber, had bought it, had the old manor house knocked down and in its place a large, modern house built. Only remedial work had been carried out on Ca’n Dento since he believed that to provide staff with even a hint of comfort was to pander to their innate laziness. Jerome had purchased the property from him and Heloise had demanded the name be changed to Ca’n Jerome . . .

  ‘Where have you disappeared to?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I was remembering how Heloise decided their place had to be renamed because she’d learned houses were often called by nicknames and Plomo meant lead. Whoever told her failed to point out the fact that in this instance, Plomo ironically suggested the owner of the house was wealthy.’

  ‘Even if she’d learned that, I doubt she’d have understood.’

  ‘Probably not. Most females find difficulty in appreciating irony.’

  ‘Being far too straightforward . . . I suppose there’s room for surprise she didn’t want it called Ca’n Sir Jerome.’

  He chuckled.

  ‘I wish . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘Wish what?’

  ‘That you didn’t just laugh.’

  ‘Humour is said to be the best antidote to life’s problems.’

  ‘You’ll laugh when Fergus comes of age and people have one more reason for damning so-called privilege?’

  ‘It’s hardly fair to judge from his present form what he’ll be like when that happens.’

  ‘It may not be fair, but only because it’s backing a dead cert . . . What a fool Jerome was!’

  ‘That’s rough.’

  ‘Are you suggesting his marrying Heloise was the act of a wise man?’

  The act of a man, he thought, who had left himself totally vulnerable because he had dedicated himself to the saving of the estate. When their parents had died in a plane crash, Jerome, then twenty-one, and he, eighteen and about to enter university, had been shocked to discover how serious were the financial problems of the estate. Jerome, who possessed the faculty of being able to tackle a problem with exhaustive and exhausting tenacity, had worked with the trustees day after day, week after week, month after month to restore financial health. He had finally succeeded, in spite of governments who abhorred the trappings of privilege except for themselves and who refused to understand the benefits of maintaining the countryside, but success had come at the cost of never having had the time to learn that all work and no play not only made for dullness, it also left one unable to judge the quality of the pleasures of life. Ignorance, not stupidity, had been responsible for his marriage.

  Gerrard arrived back at Ca’n Dento as the setting sun neared the mountain ridges and the sky gained the mauve tint which marked the end of a hot day. As he drove into the garage – originally a pig-sty – Laura opened the front door and stepped outside. When he approached her, she said: ‘I was beginning to worry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but the plane was late, the baggage handlers were having their fourth or fortieth merienda of the day, and when I tried to use the mobile to warn you I’d be late back, the battery was flat.’

  ‘I did remind you to put it on charge.’

  ‘You did. But after the age of thirty, one’s memory cells vanish like snow flakes in the Sahara.’

  ‘Which was why you forgot you could use one of the public phones?’

  ‘Spanish efficiency kept me dashing from one end of the arrival hall to the other as they three times changed the gate at which the passengers would come through because a carousel broke down and I knew that if she didn’t find me waiting to carry her bags, she’d be bitching harder than ever. And when there was a pause in my frenzied perambulations and I tried to use a pay phone, it was always to find them all occupied by garrulous females or out of order.’

  ‘Over-detailed explanations never sound wholly convincing.’

  ‘You’re calling me a liar?’

  ‘Ten to one, because you had time to wait, your mind drifted to that other universe it seems to inhabit part of the time and it just never occurred to you I might start worrying if you weren’t back in a reasonable time and there’d been no word from you.’

  ‘Since confession is said to be good for the soul, I’ll admit, you’re right. It was only after I’d met her ladyship, listened to her criticisms concerning her fellow passengers, escorted her to our ancient car, suffered her complaints at the discomfort of the front passenger seat, meekly accepted her criticisms of my driving, and we were approaching the autoroute, I realised just how overdue I’d be and I should warn you. But as I said, the mobile battery is flat.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to you to ask to use her mobile?’

  ‘Would it have worked here?’

  ‘Of course it would, since she’ll have the most expensive money can buy.’

  ‘Mea culpa.’

  ‘I’ll forgive you, being a weak and feeble woman.’

  ‘With the heart and stomach of a king.’

  ‘Thank you very much, my stomach is not the size of a king’s.’

  ‘The heart and will of a king.’ He kissed her. The degree to which she had been worrying was obvious when she briefly gripped his right arm very firmly.

  She released him. ‘Let’s go in and you can tell me how Heloise is in addition to being bitchy.’

  They went through the sitting-room and kitchen out on to the patio, the overhead vine now offering little protection from the low sun. ‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked. ‘A G and T, very long, very cold.’

  He retu
rned to the kitchen, poured out two gin and tonics, added ice, carried out the glasses and sat.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Where shall I start?’

  ‘With what she was wearing.’

  ‘The Rokeburt pearls and that clasp supposedly made up from diamonds and rubies pinched from a maharaja’s palace by one of our ancestors.’

  ‘No clothes? She must have attracted enough attention to satisfy even her ego.’

  ‘She had on a green frock.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘Not much of it.’

  ‘But very chic?’

  ‘Where does chic end and lubricity begin?’

  ‘In a man’s mind . . . In other words, as tartish as ever?’

  ‘A catty description, but fair.’

  ‘Did she mention what’s happened to Fergus after she pulled him out of Barnsford Close because she doesn’t believe in sending a son to boarding school and depriving him of his mother’s love and affection?’

  ‘He’s now at a school I haven’t heard of in Middleton.’

  ‘But isn’t that Sussex?’

  ‘West Sussex.’

  ‘She’s on a school run of a couple of hours twice a day?’

  ‘He’s a boarder.’

  ‘But . . .?’

  ‘After Jerome died and she pulled Fergus out of Barnsford Close, she put him in that prep school less than ten miles from Stayforth. One term was long enough for her to discover the pleasures of enjoying her son’s company every day, ferrying him to parties, and the school run, were not for her.’

  ‘How typical! . . . That’s surely not the prep school which suffered a scandal which almost forced it to close down?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Doesn’t the woman ever consider anyone but herself?’

  ‘How would she find the time to do that?’

  She drank. When she next spoke, her tone was reflective. ‘Mind you, I can understand how she felt initially – if she was being genuine – when she tried to persuade Jerome not to send Fergus to Barnsford Close. I remember how I so hated the thought of sending Dale there. It feels almost as if one’s rejecting one’s child by having strangers look after him through his most formative years.’