Alvarez awoke, but did not open his eyes. When sleep had departed, but reality not fully intervened, a man could float on a cloud above the world and all its troubles … A shout from below brought him crashing down to earth.
‘Enrique, are you ever going to get up?’
Women seemed constitutionally incapable of relaxing and so, because of their selfish natures, made certain men never had the chance to do so.
‘It’s after five o’clock.’
Time should not be worshipped; a slave, not a master.
‘If you don’t come down right away, there’ll be no hot chocolate because I have to go out.’
He climbed off the bed, put on shirt and trousers, went along to the bathroom to wash his face in cold water.
Dolores was standing by the kitchen table, reading a book. ‘If you spend any more time in your bed, you’ll grow roots,’ she said, without looking up.
‘I had a very stressful morning.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have drunk so much at lunch. Alcohol is the worst possible thing for stress.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘You are an expert in medical matters; the doctor on television knows nothing?’
‘Doctors, especially on the telly, get bees in their bonnets…’
‘Better than worms in their brains. The chocolate’s on the stove. It may have become lumpy because you’ve taken so long to come down.’ She looked up. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be back at the post by four-thirty?’
‘The hours are not fixed exactly.’
‘Not by you, that’s for certain.’ She looked back at the book. ‘There’s some coca in the cupboard if you left any yesterday.’
‘But that’ll be stale…’
She jerked her head up. ‘So! I am expected to go out every day, no matter how exhausted, to buy fresh coca for my cousin so that when he can find the energy to come downstairs, it is waiting for him?’
‘I thought you made it…’
‘In the heat of the summer, when men find it impossible to do anything but eat, drink, and sleep, I should not only slave all day preparing two full meals, I should also exhaust myself beyond recovery to make you coca because you have too delicate a palate for any that is not fresh?’
He crossed to a cupboard and brought out the triangle of coca on a plate. When in her present mood, it was no good pointing out how illogical and selfish she was being. He put a mug on the table, lifted the saucepan off the stove and filled the mug with hot chocolate. Of course, basically Jaime was at fault. A husband should at the beginning of a marriage make it clear who was boss in the house.
He ate and drank.
‘We have not had Pilotes amb safrà for a long time.’ she said suddenly. She shut the book with a snap.
He cheered up. ‘You’re going to cook that?’
‘Why should I bother when it would be eaten with careless indifference?’
‘Each mouthful will be sweeter than a maiden’s kiss because you are the finest cook on the island.’
‘Because I am fool enough to spend my life in slavery.’ But her tone had changed. What he had said was true. ‘I am going shopping. So be certain to lock up.’ She picked up her purse and left.
He began to eat the coca. Meatballs could be just an apology for food, yet when Dolores wove her magic over the ground pork, beef, ham, bacon, eggs, onions, garlic, breadcrumbs, lard, lemon juice, parsley, nutmeg, saffron, pepper and salt, they became a Lucullan feast … She was at times irrational, illogical, and very unreasonable, but in all fairness one had to make allowances for the fact that she was a woman. And truly a wonderful cook.
* * *
Alvarez had never fully understood the expression ‘blue-rinse lady’ until he faced Dolly Selby.
‘It is an impertinence,’ she said.
She undoubtedly regarded almost everything as an impertinence, he thought gloomily. Judging by the attempts to camouflage her age, she was probably well past her allotted span and into extra time; her hair was not blue-rinsed, but neither was it naturally coloured and, since she’d left him to stand, he could make out where it was thinning; her nose was beaky, her lips full and moist, but the only passion they suggested was greed; she wore a finca and many good hectares of rich land on her fingers and a manorial house on her over-generous bosom.
A young woman, dressed in a neat, striped maid’s frock, came across the lawn of gama grass to where Dolly sat in the shade of an ancient evergreen oak. ‘Señora, a telephone,’ she said in fractured English.
‘What’s that?’
‘Someone speaks…’
‘I think there is a telephone call for you, señora,’ Alvarez said.
‘Thank you, but I am quite capable of understanding … Where’s the cordless phone, you stupid girl? Why didn’t you bring it with you?’
The maid looked confused.
‘The cordless phone,’ she said loudly and held her clenched fist up to her ear.
The maid hurried into the house.
‘The brains of a rabbit,’ Dolly said.
Better than the manners of a bitch. ‘Señora, I need to ask you…’
‘Wait.’
He sat on the second chair, an action which clearly annoyed her. The maid returned, handed Dolly a cordless phone, left. Dolly languidly and at length discussed the incompetence of the local workmen and the stupidity of all staff.
She finally said goodbye, switched off the phone, put it down on the table to her right.
‘Señora, I should like to ask you about the party you gave a week ago, yesterday.’
‘It is an impertinence to concern yourself in my affairs.’
‘Señor Zavala drowned in his swimming pool…’
‘Do you wish to suggest I am in any way concerned with that fact?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then there is nothing more to be said.’
‘I wish to ask you questions concerning Señor Zavala.’
‘Why?’
‘I understand you were a friend of his.’
‘Even in these dreadful socialist times when we are not supposed to say what we think, we are still left at liberty to choose our friends. He was an acquaintance.’
‘You did not like him?’
‘He was not a gentleman. Of course, that’s not surprising since he was an Argentinian.’
‘Actually, señora, he was a Bolivian.’
‘There’s no difference.’
‘There is to a Bolivian or an Argentinian.’
‘You seem intent on being insolent.’
‘Señora, would you like to be thought Italian?’
‘No one could seriously make such a suggestion.’
‘That is true.’
She stared angrily at him, but his battered face held such a woebegone expression that she decided it was absurd to believe he had the intelligence to have been inferring anything.
‘Señora, is it correct that during the course of your party, you introduced Señor Zavala to Señor and Señora Bailey?’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘You cannot be certain?’
‘I see no reason to be.’
‘It could be important.’
She sighed heavily and her bosom surged. ‘Yes, I introduced them.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘What an extraordinary question! Do you people have no idea of social manners?’
‘Indeed, señora, but in many cases they are different from yours.’
‘Unfortunately! It is the duty of a hostess to make certain that all her guests meet.’
‘And the Baileys did not know Señor Zavala before you introduced them?’
‘Do try to use a little common sense. Would I have needed to introduce them if they knew each other?’
‘Do you think Señor Zavala had any idea who they were before you introduced them?’
‘Really, this is like trying to explain something to a five-year-old. If they had never met, how could Guido know who they were?’
‘It is possible to know who someone is before one meets that person.’
‘Really?’
‘Did the Baileys later speak to you about Señor Zavala?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did they ask you where he lived, how long he’d been on the island – that sort of thing?’
‘You can’t be expected to realize this, but it is bad manners to ask personal questions and the Baileys do have manners. Only…’
‘Yes, señora?’
‘It has to be admitted that they did behave rather strangely.’
‘You are now saying that they did ask many questions about Señor Zavala?’
‘You seem incapable of understanding anything. I was not referring to that, but to the fact that very soon after I’d introduced them to Guido, they left, before the party was half over and without thanking me for inviting them. Hardly the behaviour expected if they really are the right kind of people, as they try to make out.’
‘Perhaps one of them suddenly felt ill?’
‘Hardly an adequate excuse.’
‘Did they later explain to you why they had left so suddenly?’
‘They did not.’
‘Did Señor Zavala later make any comment about them to you?’
‘No. Though he had the manners to thank me for having invited him. A bit too flowery with his thanks, of course, but one can’t expect too much when one invites him into one’s circle.’
He stood, said goodbye, and was amused when her only response was a curt nod of the head.
As Alvarez drove up the main road from the port to the village, he wondered whether the explanation for the Baileys’ behaviour was, in fact, that one of them had become ill? But then wouldn’t the other have mentioned the fact, however briefly? Had it been their meeting with Zavala which had so disturbed them? Yet how could a brief meeting between strangers have such consequences?
There was something here that might be important, but he was damned if he could begin to work out what it might be.
* * *
The Laboratory of Forensic Sciences phoned at twenty past seven.
‘We’ve been working in conjunction with the Institute and can now say that the fingerprints on the glass and bottle are all Zavala’s; likewise, the hairs are from his head. While some hairs have been broken off, many have been pulled out by their roots. The blood on the patio chair was his.’
‘Would it require much force to have pulled the hairs out?’
‘Singly, no; all together, a reasonable amount.’
‘Is there any way of judging which happened?’
‘No.’
‘Suppose he’d fallen into the pool and someone was holding his head under with a scoop until he drowned, would you expect a mixture of broken hairs and hairs torn out by the roots?’
‘If he was fully conscious and struggling, almost certainly; if unconscious, or even badly dazed, it would be a question of how much force had to be used to keep his head under.’
‘If he was conscious and someone was using the scoop not to force his head under, but to keep it raised, or he was unconscious and that someone was trying to keep his nose above the water, but eventually failed, one would expect the would-be rescuer to try to have called for help.’
‘Logical.’
‘Can you suggest any other way those hairs could have reached the skimming net, apart from the obvious one that they fell out naturally?’
‘With their roots? And nine times out of ten, when a person has finished scooping the surface of a pool, he shakes out the net.’
‘Would that dislodge them all?’
‘I’ve no idea. Find out by testing with your own hairs. But remember, you’ll need to carry out a large number of tests in order to gain a statistical probability. Are you prepared to go bald in the pursuit of justice?’
People who worked in the laboratory had almost as poor a sense of humour as those in the Institute. Not conscious of what he was doing, Alvarez fingered the hairs on the crown of his head to convince himself that he was not, as Juan had so rudely suggested a few days before, becoming bald.