Murder Begets Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Why keep asking me?’
    ‘Was there a spare front door key?’
    ‘I didn’t give ‘em one.’
    ”hat about the back door?’
    ‘Locked and shuttered. And all the windows are shuttered.’
    ‘You’ve checked on ‘em all, then?’
    ‘It’s my house. It was empty. Why shouldn’t I check?’
    ‘All right, I’m only asking. Let’s go on inside.’
    ‘Not me. As God is my witness, I can’t go back in there . . . She’s in the kitchen, beyond the sitting-room. She’s on the floor and . . .’ He gulped.
    Alvarez looked at him, shrugged his broad shoulders, then opened the door. The smell was quite appalling.
    Once inside he turned and looked at the door and he saw what Sanchez had missed — a key with a length of string threaded through the small hole in its end, carefully hung where no one could smash one of the panes of glass and reach it. That explained the door, then: they’d wisely had a spare key made and it had been kept there.
    At the far side of the hall were stairs, which turned a half circle, and under them an archway into the sitting-room. He went through. To his left now was a swinging door and he pushed this open to enter the kitchen. She lay on the floor between a table and the antique dresser, arms outstretched, right leg curled up under her.
    When he returned to the patio he stood in the sun and drew great draughts of sweet, fresh air down into his lungs.
    Sanchez came up to where he stood. ‘What are we going to do?’
    ‘You are going into the village to the Guardia post and you’ll ask someone to telephone Palma and call the police doctor to come out here as quickly as he can make it.’
    Sanchez turned and hurried across the patio to his car.
    Alvarez lit a cigarette. He looked up at the grape vine which covered most of the patio, then out at the orange grove, the almond trees beyond, at Puig Antonia on the top of which, as near to Heaven as the builders could get, was the hermitage, at the mountains which ringed Llueso, and at the bay, part of which was just visible as a thin streak of blue seen through a gap in the trees. So much beauty, but behind him so much ugly corruption. Always there seemed to be two faces to life.
    Ever since he had arrived the name of the house had been worrying him because it had seemed as if he should recognize it. Now, as he turned away from the beauty of the view, he remembered why Ca’n Ibore was familiar. Francisca had been talking about it at the wedding of Damian and Teresa. Then it was the señorita who had loved a man even while the señor who loved her was dying in his bed upstairs who now lay dead in the kitchen.
    Back in the house, he examined the two bedrooms and bathroom to the right of the hall. None of the beds was made up. In the bathroom there was soap by the bath and handbasin, a single towel on the rack by the basin, and a face flannel on the rack between bidet and bath. In the bathroom cupboard three of the four shelves were empty, on the fourth were a tin of powder, a bottle of aspirins, a deodorant applicator, an electric toothbrush, and toothpaste.
    He climbed the semi-circular staircase which brought him to a large solar, empty except for two wooden chests, both badly worm-eaten. One chest was filled with bed linen, all carefully folded, the other was empty. Beyond were two bedrooms, separated by an impractically small bathroom. The back bedroom had an unmade-up double bed and a small built-in cupboard which was empty. The front bedroom had a single bed, made up, under the pillow of which was a flowery nightdress, a bedside table on which was an alarm clock, a paperback, and an adjustable light. There were only a few clothes in the cupboard, but on the floor was a packed suitcase and another half-packed.
    He returned downstairs to the sitting-room. Beyond the main part of this was a well, used as the dining area. The table had been set for one person and on it now was a plate filled with empty mussel shells and a quarter of lemon,