Free Relatively Dangerous by Roderic Jeffries Page A

it?’
    ‘His son would have told me if it wasn’t.’
    ‘His son? Here, you’d better tell me what’s been going on.’
    ‘Nothing’s been going on. Why do you people always suspect everybody and everything?’
    ‘Because that’s what we’re paid for . . . But just for the moment, I’m not suspecting you of anything specific. All I want to know is, how come you’ve heard from the son?’
    ‘There was this phone call. The son had just learned of the tragic death of his father and he wanted to know what arrangements there were for the funeral. I told him there weren’t any. He said his father was to be decently and honourably buried.’
    ‘When did you receive this call?’
    ‘Saturday.’
    ‘Why didn’t you get on to me right away?’
    ‘The money hadn’t arrived then.’
    ‘What are you talking about now?’
    ‘Until I had the money, I couldn’t go ahead and arrange the funeral, could I?’
    ‘Depends what kind of a man you are . . . How much?’
    There was a slight pause. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand pesetas.’
    ‘Has the son ordered a gold coffin?’
    ‘He asked me to prepare an honourable funeral.’
    ‘How are you getting in touch with him to let him know the time of the honourable funeral?’
    ‘I’m not. He said it was quite impossible for him to come over from England because of family problems . . . May I go ahead and arrange everything?’
    ‘Yes. And then get back on to me with all the details.’
    Alvarez replaced the receiver. He stared through the open window. Thompson had been travelling on a stolen passport and so it was reasonable to assume that Thompson was not his real name. The report of his death had been in the local papers, but was unlikely to have appeared in the British national papers. Then how had the son learned that he had died in the car accident?
     

 
CHAPTER 9
    The present cemetery at Fogufol was three-quarters of a kilometre outside the village, reached by a narrow, twisting lane. From it, there was a view across the central plain of the island and, especially after rain, the sea to the south-east was clearly visible. The high surrounding stone walls had been erected in the eighteenth century, the chapel and room of remembrance in the late nineteenth. Originally, the graves had been marked merely by single headstones, but then the custom had arisen of spending on death more than had ever been spent on life and headstones had become large and elaborate, while those families with property had erected mausoleums. The land was stone, making excavation both difficult and costly, and therefore there were no single graves; always, there was a shaft and excavated out on either side of this were cubicles into which coffins could be fitted.
    The cemetery was, of course, for Catholics and the first non-Catholic to die within the parish—a German botanist —had presented the priest and the council with a problem. The law said that the dead had to be buried within consecrated ground, the Church said that only a Catholic could be buried within the cemetery. In the end it was decided that just before he died, and even though he’d been alone when he’d fallen fifteen metres on to his head, the German had expressed the wish to become a Roman Catholic and therefore it was in order to bury him within the cemetery. Since then, the number of foreigners, many of them non-Catholics, had risen very considerably and it had become clear that since deaths must be expected, an elegant solution for one must become an inelegant, not to say absurd, solution for many. Eventually, it was decided to provide an area of consecrated ground outside the actual cemetery where all non-Catholics could be buried. A deep shaft, which accommodated six cubicles on either side, was blasted out of the rock and above this was built a sandstone edifice which resembled an old-fashioned steamer trunk; on the sides of this were plaques on which, for a suitable fee, the names of the deceased could be