Mistakenly in Mallorca (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 20

Miguel began to speak again, then shrugged his shoulders. They heard a laugh which came from their right. Only Lady Eastmore could laugh like that, Tatham decided. He crossed the hall, opened a door, stepped inside, and tripped. He saved himself by grabbing the comer of the unusually large Hepplewhite table. There was a clink of silver (George IV, Queen’s pattern, engraved with the Eastmores’ crest of a boar’s head) as the table shook.

  Four people sat round the table: the Eastmores and Brigadier and Mrs Cabbott. They were wearing light-weight suits and formal dresses and the women had on some of their better jewellery. They looked like, he decided, an advertisement for one of the old-fashioned savoury spreads.

  Miguel stood in the doorway and spoke with nervous haste.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Lady Eastmore. ‘No doubt you did not understand that Miguel was trying to tell you that we were engaged?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he answered thickly. He had discovered what he most disliked about her. It was her invincible self-control in the face of every and any situation.

  ‘However, now that you have seen for yourself that we are engaged, you will wish to leave.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘For the moment, I regret I cannot return the compliment. If it has somehow escaped your notice, we are in the middle of our luncheon.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  ‘Mr Tatham, you force me to be very blunt. Will you kindly leave?’

  ‘Not till I’ve said what I’ve come to say.’

  Brigadier Cabbott laughed loudly.

  ‘Freddie!’ snapped his wife.

  Lord Eastmore stood up and spoke with stem authority. ‘My wife has been very patient …’

  ‘I’ll bet she hasn’t got the passion not to be.’

  ‘This is utterly outrageous,’ gasped Mrs Cabbott. ‘I have never met such ill manners. Never. Ever.’

  ‘D’you know what the real trouble is?’ said Cabbott, with great glee. ‘The nig-nog’s as pissed as a coot!’ He began to laugh, then cried out. ‘Christ! You’ve broken my ankle.’

  Mrs Cabbott leaned forward to hiss a warning at him that if he didn’t shut up she’d break a lot more and her right breast knocked over her wine glass. Wine spilled out over the highly polished table and there was a cry of anguish from Lady Eastmore, who hurriedly stood up to mop up the wine with her table napkin. She cannoned into Miguel who was rushing to help. Tatham began to laugh and couldn’t stop for some time.

  He discovered that Lord Eastmore now stood by his side. ‘You’d better leave,’ said Lord Eastmore harshly.

  ‘And you’d better listen to me.’ Tatham tried to cast from his memory the elan with which Mrs Cabbott’s imprisoned right breast had knocked over the wine glass, but he giggled once more before he said: ‘I know you know a great deal about Elvina’s death. Much more than you’ve ever let on.’

  Lady Eastmore handed Miguel the stained napkin and returned to her chair. ‘Charles, the man must be mentally deranged.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Cabbott. ‘I told you. He’s just plain bloody pi — tight.’

  ‘How could he come here?’ cried Mrs Cabbott. ‘To this house of all houses. It’s … it’s lèse-majesté.’

  ‘You know when she really died, don’t you?’ demanded Tatham.

  They stared at him.

  ‘And you know how she really died. That’s why you kept calling at Ca’n Manin to discover what had happened to her body when her death wasn’t announced.’

  ‘We’d a bloke like this once.’ said Cabbott. ‘Out in Iraq … Or was it Syria? … Or maybe it was Suez?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, it doesn’t matter where it was,’ snapped Mrs Cabbott.

  ‘Yes, it does, old dear. Very hot. Everybody thirsty. Bloke snuffed it after boozing home-brewed ploop. Spent three days in sick-bay, screaming a load of balls like this nig-nog. Nice bloke, too.’

  Tatham let go of the table and almost fell. He grabbed it again. ‘How did she really die? Where?’

  ‘I think, Charles, we have no option but to call the police,’ said Lady Eastmore. ‘And no doubt they will be interested in what he’s saying.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right, dear,’ said Lord Eastmore.

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ said Tatham. ‘You daren’t call them along.’

  There was a telephone on the corner of the very elegant sideboard. Lord Eastmore walked over to it.

  They weren’t bluffing, decided Tatham. Any minute now, Lord Eastmore would call the police. Which meant that they weren’t scared of a further investigation which, in turn, must mean they had had nothing to do with, and knew nothing about Elvina’s death.

  ‘I think,’ said Lady Eastmore, ‘that Mr Tatham has decided to leave without any further unseemly behaviour.’

  He stared at her. ‘That’s right, I’m leaving.’

  ‘Kindly do so immediately. And please do not call here again,’ she said, with polite distaste. ‘The staff will …’

  ‘Stuff the staff.’

  ‘Keep off the cheap gin,’ called out Cabbott with undiminished cheerfulness. ‘Out here, they make it from petrol.’

  He walked into the hall and Miguel accompanied him, Miguel raised his right hand.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m going nice and quietly, and there’s no need to throw me out.’

  Miguel shook his hand with enthusiasm, opened the door, and bowed with great courtesy as he left.

  Strangely, the fresh air seemed to sober him sufficiently that by the time he reached the Fiat he was more in control of his limbs. He sat down behind the wheel and started the engine.

  The drive took him past Ca’n Xema and when he saw the drystone house, looking very beautiful in the sunlight, he suddenly decided to see Judy. He turned off the road and then saw, for the first time, that there was a car parked in the drive. As he came to a halt, Ingham and another man stepped out of the house.

  The second man looked slightly familiar. But why? Small, dumpy with a paunch, a Vandyke beard … Ingham shook hands with the man, who climbed into a bright orange Seat 600 and then lowered the window and talked, his beard moving rapidly. The waggling beard triggered off Tatham’s memory. Ca’n Manin, the night of Good Friday. He’d been waiting for Judy because they’d been going into Llueso for the procession and there’d been a knock on the front door. He’d gone into the hall expecting the caller to be Judy, but it had been this man with the waggling Vandyke beard. Elvina had said that something about the man reminded her of his father, but had never detailed what. But now he knew. The man was a painter.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  INGHAM BROUGHT the coffee into the sitting-room, where Tatham sat on the settee. ‘Strong and black and from the look of you, you need it.’

  Tatham drank half the coffee. He lit a cigarette. ‘That man who left when I arrived is a painter, isn’t he?’

  Ingham went across to the bar and poured himself out a brandy. When he returned, he settled in one of the armchairs.

  ‘Isn’t he?’ repeated Tatham.

  Ingham looked at Tatham with sharp speculation, then answered the question. ‘According to himself, he’s a genius. As yet unrecognized by a Philistine world.’

  ‘And he painted the Renoir for you?’

  The lines around Ingham’s mouth tightened and he looked cruel rather than dissipated. ‘Presumably Judy has been confiding in you?’

  ‘Only because she was so desperately worried on your account.’

  ‘She need not have been.’

  ‘She was scared you were trying to sell a fake Renoir to Naupert as genuine. I proved to her it couldn’t be the case.’ Ingham clipped the end of a cigar with great care. He lit it. ‘Do I owe you my thanks for testifying to my honesty?’ Tatham ignored the mocking question. ‘I said you were selling a fake as a fake, to a buyer who was secretly certain lie was buying the genuine article. I doubted that was a criminal offence.’

  Ingham lifted his glass of brandy and drank.

&nb
sp; ‘Isn’t that the way it went?’

  ‘Does it really matter?’

  ‘It matters a great deal. After all, that man, carrying a parcel the size and shape of the Renoir, called at Ca’n Manin on Good Friday, thinking he was here. Elvina instinctively identified him as a painter.’

  ‘She was always an acute woman.’

  ‘Acute enough to wonder why a wealthy, hard-headed German industrialist should think of buying a house for more than it was worth on the open market. Acute enough to remember the painter who had under his arm a parcel that looked like a painting. Acute enough to remember what paintings were hanging on the walls of this room when she and I came along for drinks.’

  ‘Is all this of any relevancy?’

  ‘It’s highly relevant when one knows that Elvina died on Wednesday, the sixteenth.’

  ‘You must have drunk a lot more than …’

  ‘I’m sober enough to know exactly what I’m saying. On the sixteenth, Judy and I went out on a picnic. When I returned to Ca’n Manin in the evening, I found Elvina had apparently fallen from the balcony on to the patio and was dead. Because of an inheritance she’d promised to give to me, due from her godfather, who although on the point of death had not yet died, I had to conceal her death.

  ‘Eventually, the cable announcing his death came and I arranged for her “death” on that night. I wasn’t nearly as clever as I thought I’d been and the police became suspicious, but in the end I was able to persuade them that her death had been in order. It all seemed over and done with. Then I suddenly realized Elvina would never have crossed the carpets in the solar in her filthy outdoor shoes. After discovering one inconsistency, I discovered others … Added together, they had to mean she’d died elsewhere and had been carried to the patio to fake an accident there.

  ‘It’s taken me until now to appreciate certain facts about the faking — but then I’m really only at home with the problems of cows. First off, was the timing. The person who took her body to Ca’n Manin must have known that Catalina worked there from three until five. He also knew I was out and wouldn’t return until fairly late in the evening. Most of the English probably knew the first fact, only you and Judy knew for certain the second.

  ‘The person who faked the accident had to be clever and cunning, so much so that he even introduced a length of bamboo on which she supposedly fell — there was a chance in a hundred a post-mortem would be held, a chance in a thousand the blow to the skull which had been made with a blunt instrument the size of the bamboo would have left a mark that despite the extensive injuries would be discovered and identified.

  ‘There had to be a motive and a strong one. Two lots of people seemed to have motives. I saw the Eastmores earlier on and was on my way to the Mayans when I stopped here and met for the second time the painter. Having identified him, I knew a third person had a motive — you. Elvina loved prying into other people’s affairs and it intrigued her to learn how you’d interested Naupert into offering twenty million for this house. But she was also an honest person — it was the essential dishonesty of the social pattern that she found so contemptible — and once she divined what your plan was, she was determined to stop it. But because she was so straightforward, she came to tell you face to face what she intended so that if you had enough sense you could pack in your plans. Twenty million pesetas were your motive.

  ‘Having set up a fake accident, you were on tenterhooks until you could be certain everything had gone according to plan. But there was no report of any accident and Elvina was supposedly still alive. Only one person, for reasons that couldn’t have been clear, could have been concealing her death and that person was me. So you were desperate to know what had happened, but far too cunning to quiz me directly in case I ever became in the slightest degree suspicious. You encouraged Judy to see me so that you could pump her to find out what was happening.’

  Ingham smoked for a while, then he said: ‘Is the inheritance a large one?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘And it’s now yours?’

  ‘Provided no one challenges the two wills.’

  ‘Then you daren’t do anything to upset the date of Elvina’s death.’ It was a flat statement.

  ‘The fact that I’m here must show that I dare.’

  ‘It shows only that you dare to try to discover the truth, not that you’ll publish that truth. You’re not going to throw a fortune away.’

  ‘Aren’t I?’

  ‘What is it? Do you think I murdered her?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘You think me capable of murdering a defenceless old woman, just to protect the sale of this house for twenty million …? I suppose there are times when murder would come easily: marriage certainly provides innumerable possible occasions. But I liked Elvina far too much ever to have harmed her. I may be unprincipled in some respects, but I still honour my friends.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘You’ve guessed most of what happened. Or would you prefer me to say, deduced …? Elvina came here and told me in her inimitable style that she wasn’t going to let me make a fool out of Naupert. I was surprised. What is a rich German industrialist good for, if not for making a fool out of? But I’d underrated Elvina. Beneath that Bohemian exterior, there lurked a Calvinistic soul — in so far as honesty was concerned. I told her she was being rather stupid because if a clever German liked to lose five million by trying to swindle me that was his funeral and she should just enjoy the laugh. But she got really ratty, as if I’d impugned her chastity, and …’ He stopped.

  ‘And what?’

  He stood up, placed the glass on the small table by the side of his chair, crossed to the large fireplace, turned, puffed at the cigar, and then said: ‘I was here, when I told her she was being stupid. She became wildly excited, grabbed my arm and said that, stupid or not, she was going to blow the gaff if I tried to go ahead.

  ‘Selling this place for twenty million represented the difference between losing everything — the law out here doesn’t exactly favour a foreigner — and continuing my pleasant life and making a sizeable fortune on my other properties. To tell the truth, I got annoyed at her threats and unrealistic attitude and when she grabbed me, I jerked my arm free with too much force.’

  He was silent for a few seconds. ‘I hate what happened. I keep remembering every second …’ He looked up at Tatham. ‘I’d unintentionally used so much force that she spun round, tripped, and fell. She hit her head on one of the fire-dogs and when I checked, she was dead. It was that sudden.’

  Tatham stared at the two fire-dogs and the firebasket, almost certainly English in origin. The long arms of the dogs were about two centimetres in diameter.

  ‘I was frightened sick, both by what had happened and by what it seemed must follow.’ Ingham returned to his chair, sat down, and picked up his glass. ‘I’m certainly not proud of the way I thought, but … Well, you must have gone through the same kind of mental hell … If I called in the police, they’d ask questions and what convincing reason for what had happened could I give except the truth? That would be the end of the twenty million for this house. Even if I somehow managed to lie successfully to the police, I’d no idea how much Elvina had discussed with you. So I reckoned my only way out was to repeat what had actually happened, an accident, but make it seem to have happened at your house. Then there’d be no suspicion I was involved.

  ‘So now we both know, for the first time, all of the truth. And there’s obviously no need for anyone else ever to know it. There was a terrible accident, but nothing we do can turn back the clock. If we forget all we know, I’ll sell this house for more than it’s worth to a man who can easily afford to lose a few millions and is trying to swindle me, you gain your inheritance which was meant to come through to you but won’t if the truth ever leaks out. You know something? Elvina was far too sharp a realist ever to want any other conclusion to all that’s happened.’

  Tatham felt guilty because he was so desper
ately relieved. The farm was finally and forever his … An accident was different from a murder. Ingham was right: Elvina would never have wanted the truth to come out about the tragic accident.

  Whilst they were still both silent, they heard the front door open. Judy’s voice called out: ‘Hi! Where are you?’

  ‘We’re here,’ replied Ingham.

  She came in. ‘Hallo, John. I was glad to find the car outside because I was going to call you. I’ve been given two tickets to a concert in Palma tonight — Brahms, Chopin, and Beethoven. I’m hoping you’ll use the second one?’

  He stared at her without answering.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ she asked.

  Ingham chuckled. ‘Nothing, Judy, that a brisk walk up the valley won’t cure. He’s just had a heavy session and is recovering from my blackest of black coffee.’

  ‘John! Surely you’re not going to join the soaks brigade? The best thing for you is what Larry’s just suggested-a really good, sharp walk. So on to your feet, sir, and no rest for the first twenty kilometres.’

  Obediently he stood up.

  ‘I must say, you look quite awful! Where have you been boozing?’

  ‘Mostly on my own,’ he replied, ‘but I ended up at the Eastmores’.’

  ‘You’re a glutton for punishment.’

  ‘I can’t remember very clearly, but I think I made a bit of a scene and was rather rude.’

  ‘To her very noble ladyship?’ She laughed. ‘Then you’ll be ostracized and recommended for deportation. I didn’t know you had it in you, but I’m delighted to discover you have. Come on, we’ll be off before you’re too rude to me. What shoes have you on …? They’ll be good enough because it’s not rough walking, but I’d better change into something a little stouter.’

  She left the room. Tatham followed her after a last look at Ingham, whose face held a sardonic smile. To the right of the hall was a built-in cupboard and from this she brought out a pair of brogues. ‘Gan you give me some support while I change my shoes, or is standing still an impossible feat right now?

  He gave her support and she changed her shoes. She then stepped into the cupboard and searched for something. After a time, she put her head outside and called: ‘Larry.’