Free Troubled Deaths by Roderic Jeffries Page B

them tokens which they exchanged at the baker for loaves. They grew three crops each year and after the tomato harvest there were always long strings of air-dried tomatoes everywhere. They harvested the olives, with six-metre bamboos and had them pressed and the oil came green and pungent. They trod their own grapes and made a red wine that was filled with lees. They netted small migratory birds, or caught them with worm-baited snap-traps or on branches covered with bird-lime, and they ate these with a simple pleasure untroubled by any ecological thoughts.
    The house was small and hunched-looking. Most windows had no glass, only solid wooden shutters. In heavy rain the roof leaked in several places. There was no bathroom, only a cold tap in the kitchen. The privy was outside the back door. But as if to prove that time must always gain at least a foothold, there was electricity and in the sitting-room a large, much chromed television set.
    The couple looked old, but he guessed their ages at not much more than his own - life had been hard, though not without its compensations. On the battered desk in the sitting-room were photographs of two daughters, as babies, as girls at their first communion, and as brides.
    ‘A coñac, señor?’ said the man, obviously nervous about having a policeman in his home.
    ‘I could really do with one,‘he said.
    They bustled about, getting in each other’s way as they searched for the bottle of brandy and a clean, unchipped glass. Finally, the man poured out nearly a tumblerful of brandy for Alvarez.
    ‘Your health,’ said Alvarez. ‘And may your crops strain tight the granary doors.’
    They began to relax as they appreciated that he was of their kind. He talked to them about mules, the problems of maintaining the fertility of the soil when this was constantly being leached out, and the damage mole-crickets could do to a crop when the moon was in the first quarter. Finally, he led the conversation round to Ga’n Ritat.
    ‘He never used to talk to the likes of us,‘said the man and his wife nodded agreement. He did not say this deferentially or complainingly, merely as a statement of fact. He had a natural pride in himself, his family, and his work, and it would never have occurred to him that he might have considered himself socially inferior.
    ‘I’ve been told he was fond of entertaining the ladies?’
    The man laughed with Rabelaisian gusto. ‘If I’d a ram as active as him, I’d have a flock a hundred strong. Where’d he get ‘em all from, that’s what I want to know. They weren’t around like that when I was a young ‘un.’
    ‘Not that you could have done anything about it,’ said the woman.
    The man winked at Alvarez. ‘Here, is that right he ate a llargsomi? Couldn’t the silly bastard tell the difference from an esclatasang?’
    ‘It seems he couldn’t.’
    ‘Matilde says they was all esclatasangs,’ said the woman. ‘There weren’t no llargsomis among ‘em.’
    They stared at Alvarez with sharp interest. He shrugged his shoulders as if it were a matter of no consequence. ‘He must have picked up one from somewhere . . . D’you see him at all on Thursday?’
    They thought back. After a while, the man said: ‘Seems like it could be Thursday he turned up at the house after merienda with a woman. Skirt was so short there’s no knowing why she bothered to wear one.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have looked,’ said his wife.
    He laughed shrilly. ‘If wild asparagus grows in the lane, d’you think I’m going to walk past it?’ He rubbed his unshaven chin. ‘What d’you say that big car of his cost?’
    Alvarez had not seen Freeman’s car, but he guessed it was an expensive one because Freeman had obviously been a man who believed in show. ‘Maybe as much as a million.’
    They thought about that, but it was really beyond their comprehension that anyone could be so wealthy that he could waste a million pesetas on a car.
    ‘Did you see him in the afternoon