Slowly, meditatively, Don Jaime sipped, the pale-amber liquid moistening his full red lips. He took his time; and when the glass was empty he lit a cigar and rang for the butler. When the man reappeared Don Jaime said, “Send Señor Martin to me.”
“Si, señor.”
The butler bowed, slid away silently. A minute later a dumpy, anxious little man scuttled urgently on to the veranda. Don Jaime grinned inwardly, rumbling away into his vast expanse of shirt-front. Martin, third of his four secretaries, was a fuss-pot. Gravely Don Jaime indicated a chair and Martin sat practically on the edge of it, his mouth pursed up as though trying to keep back the torrent of words of which it wished to be delivered. His stomach seemed to vibrate. The butler filled two glasses. Don Jaime knew with amusement that Martin wouldn’t dare to intrude with his business until the polite formalities were over. Meanwhile, let him sweat!
“Salud, Don Jaime.”
“Salud.”
The two men drank. For some minutes Don Jaime held his third secretary in conversation on the merits of the Amontillado, seeking his opinion on the blend of the years. And then, when he saw that the moment was approaching, the little man sighed and gave a delicate cough, his plump body quivering, his posterior edging right to the limit of the chair’s seat. Don Jaime lifted an eyebrow. He said solemnly, “You may proceed.”
“Señor!” Martin sat bolt upright, mopped at his face with a red silk handkerchief. “The matter is very urgent. There was a telephone call — two telephone calls.” He paused, then added importantly, “From the Policia Municipal at La Linea.”
“The police — at La Linea?” Don Jaime’s brown eyes scanned the secretary’s face. “And what was their business, pray?”
“Don Jaime, they have taken into custody in la casilla last night a man who was drunk.” The secretary swallowed, gabbled on. “If you will permit the use of the word, señor, the man was found not far from a — a brothel. The man asks for you, Don Jaime.” He looked away, drawing in his breath sharply.
“For me?” Don Jaime’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but there was a new alertness in his manner. “What have I to do with a drunken man found outside a brothel?”
Martin raised his hands almost in supplication. “Señor, I do not know! That is what I asked the sargento, but he was insistent. The man had threatened terrible things if they did not telephone to you at once.”
“And the name of this man?” The eyes were slits now.
“It was Pedro Gomez, a worker in the dockyard at Gibraltar—”
“Pedro Gomez — Gibraltar!” Don Jaime’s body heaved; the table at his side fell, the sherry decanter and the glasses flew, smashed to splinters. Martin went pale, his mouth opening in alarm. Don Jaime didn’t notice; he stood up. “Get me the La Linea casilla at once… and then my car, the limousine. And do not speak of this to a soul, you understand? Thousand-fold fool!” he roared, his face a dark, suffused red. “Dolt — not to tell me at once of this!”
He stormed off the veranda, the terrified secretary scuttling after him on rapid, twinkling feet, rolling his eyes despairingly to Heaven. Working for the rich Don Jaime could be so wearing, so upsetting. How was he to know? There were hundreds of men named Pedro Gomez in Andalusia, and probably very many of them were in prison. Yes, Don Jaime was very difficult; the only consolation was that his sudden and unreasonable rages never lasted for very long, and afterwards they were quickly forgotten.
Two nights before, the Studebaker, its headlights dipping and rising again, had wound upward towards Ronda.
It had made good progress until it had come to a better stretch of road below Vercín, where the way switched right for Ronda, and then over-confidence had taken charge. As soon as he felt the wheels take the good, hard surface the driver slammed his foot down hard, and the Studebaker, tyres whirring on the road, shot ahead at something like ninety miles an hour, the old walled town of Vercm high above them on its mountain crest like an ancient castle-fortress guarding a valley, tall stone tower reaching into the night sky and seeming almost to touch the low-slung lanterns of the stars.
Then the blow-out came. The Studebaker had eased for a turn and she wasn’t travelling all that fast; but she seemed half to leave the road, the rear swaying and twisting upward like a bucking horse; then the whole car appeared to hurtle through the air like a flung stone. It lurched sickeningly to the verge, quite out of control, ploughed through earth and stone and sand when it touched, and then, fair and square, it hit the bole of a big cork-oak; its radiator burst into a cloud of steam and spurts of boiling water, and the bonnet crumpled until the shattered windscreen went dark and blank behind the mass of upturned metal. The steering-wheel drove full onto the driver’s chest, the column piercing him like a bayonet as the wheel itself splintered into a hundred fragments, the spokes disintegrating. A bloody foam appeared on the driver’s lips and he gave no sound beyond a sighing exhalation of breath. The big man in the rear seat went head first through the roof, face and hands smashed and lacerated, his neck broken, to be hurled like an unwanted kitten against the tree. Mr Ackroyd shot forward and his head was caught cruelly against the back of the front seat. Head down, his legs circled upward like a maddened pendulum, caught in the jagged, splintery hole in the roof. He hung there for a moment, and then his feet slipped free and slowly he slid downward on to his head and lay crumpled up in the space between front and back seats, a pathetic little scrap of scarcely living human wreckage, whimpering and muttering through a haze of unconsciousness.
For a long time he lay there. And then, as he began to come back to life, something stirred in his crazy, unhinged mind, and he moved a little. He gave a yelp of pain as his left arm scraped against the front seat. He didn’t quite realize it then, but that arm was one big bruise, though it had not broken. After a while, still whimpering, Mr Ackroyd dragged his protesting body on to the back seat, which was canted up at a sharp angle.
He lay back, panting, spent.
After a long, long time he felt a little strength seeping back into his tortured body, and he began humming to himself, grotesquely: on a sombre note, constantly repeated, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da…
It was a gruesome, horrifying sound, that humming in the wreckage of the car; but — as yet — there was no one there to hear it. Mr Ackroyd realized, in a dim kind of way, that his refrain had some significance, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was, except that it was desperately important that he should get out of that car and get back to — back to where? Mr Ackroyd thought for a bit, got nowhere, and gave it up. He started humming again; later, when he grew tired of that, he remembered, in some curious way, that there was something he had to do, something he just had to do before he could go back to wherever-it-was he had to get back to. It was something that had been on his mind a lot just recently, and it was to do with that woman — the perfumed woman, and the awful beatings he’d had, the dreadful, wicked beatings that always came when he smelt that scent, the beatings that had left his whole body red and raw and bleeding and still most terribly painful however he sat or lay. There was something yet to do, something imprinted in the little man’s hazy memory because it was so wrapped in those beatings.