Free Deadly Petard by Roderic Jeffries

by pulling a plastic bag over her head, probably after taking some sleeping pills. Everything appeared to be straightforward and therefore there seemed to be no point in asking for a PM. However, in case the superior chief decided that as a foreigner was involved a PM was justified, the body would be held at the mortuary for forty-eight hours before arrangements were put in hand for the funeral.
     

 
CHAPTER 11
    The intermittent noise broke through Alvarez’s sleep and scattered his dreams, but when it ceased he thankfully began once more to drift away . . .
    ‘It’s the station,’ Dolores shouted from downstairs.
    He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, very dimly seen in the light which filtered through both shutters and curtains.
    ‘Are you coming down, then?’
    He slowly manoeuvred himself into a sitting position.
    ‘Are you dead up there?’
    No such luck. He dressed in shirt and trousers and, bare-footed, made his way downstairs.
    Dolores, as coolly handsome as a flamenco queen, said: ‘You look terrible.’
    ‘If you knew how I felt! . . . What lunatic at the station is ringing up this early in the afternoon?’
    ‘It’s only early to someone who’s drunk a bottle of coñac and been snoring like a matanza pig.’
    Before all that nonsense about women’s lib, he thought sourly, a woman had known her place and stuck to it. He crossed to the telephone. ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Been on holiday, have you? . . . You’re handling the suicide case in Caraitx, aren’t you?’
    ‘What if I am?’
    ‘There’s an Englishman been ringing up and creating.
    Inspector Antignac says you’re to see him and find out what in the hell he’s on about.’
    ‘The case is closed.’
    ‘You argue that out with the inspector. And in case you’re interested, the Englishman lives at Ca’n Noyeta.’
    ‘Where’s that?’
    ‘Near Caraitx.’
    ‘How near?’
    ‘How would I know?’
    Alvarez replaced the receiver and walked into the kitchen where Dolores was beginning to prepare the supper. He slumped down into a handy chair. ‘I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.’
    She picked up the kettle, filled it from the cold tap, and placed it on the gas stove. The gas refused to light. ‘The bottle must need changing.’
    In the old days, he thought, no woman would have dreamed of asking a man to do a household chore. Reluctantly, he dragged himself to his feet and went through the small enclosed patio to the passageway in which they kept the gas bottles.
    Around Caraitx, the land was light grey in colour, very stony, and poor in heart. Almonds and algarrobas grew freely, but only where there was irrigation and there had been heavy fertilizing with dung or well-weathered seaweed was it possible to grow the kind of crops seen everywhere around Llueso. But there was one crop, which grew without the need of any irrigation, for which the district was justly famous: the Caraitx melon. How they grew, when they were never watered and no rain fell for weeks on end, was a miracle. And since any miracle needed to be celebrated and propitiated, on the first Saturday of every June a special service of thanksgiving was held in Caraitx church, when farmers gave thanks for miracles past and—although this was never actually stated aloud—pleaded for miracles to come. When the small, very dark green melons, white veined, were harvested, any man could join the gods and dine on ambrosia and nectar.
    When Alvarez came abreast of the first of the melon fields, he slowed the car and stared at the rows of plants, as yet bearing only small, rock-hard fruit, and as he conjured up the icy sweetness of the mature melon, he cursed the Englishman who was responsible for his having to be on the road when the heat was so stifling. He cursed the Englishman much harder when, twenty-three minutes later, a third set of direction to Ca’n Noyeta proved to be wrong.
    With considerable difficulty, he turned the car and bounced his way back along