“Yes,” I said. I could also have told him there was a man, dressed in a safari suit, who had tried to run me off the road because I’d stepped on his toe. But what would be the point?
He looked at me for a long time, then sighed loudly.
“Another day of joy, adventure, and achievement in the service of the Maltese people,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t you have some expression for days which are not going well?”
“Sure. At the shop we say ‘just another day in paradise.” Is that what you mean?“
“Exactly,” he said. Amazingly, he smiled at me. Despite myself, I smiled back. It was the first friendly gesture that had come my way since I’d arrived at police headquarters in the town with the rather charming name of Floriana. Charm had been sadly lacking in its inhabitants, however, until I had met Detective Tabone. While the police may have been prepared to concede Martin Galea’s right as a native-born Maltese to come home to die, they were not pleased with the foreigner who had had the bad taste to find his body.
For the first time since I had arrived there, I relaxed a little, and was able to look closely at him, trying to take the measure of the man. He was slim, tall by Maltese standards, with greying hair, an arresting, shall we say, moustache, and an air of fatigue about him, not so much from the lateness of the hour, I thought, as the chronic weariness of seeing too much of the seamier side of life.
“We don’t get a lot of this kind of thing, you know. Oh, there’s no question people kill each other from time to time. Domestic situations, usually. Find the culprit right away. And people like to throw bombs in doorways every now and then. Blood feuds of some kind, politics at the heart of it most of the time. But people don’t normally get killed by the blast that often. We have more trouble with fireworks factories blowing up as a matter of fact. That seems to happen pretty regularly.”
He tossed his pen and notebook onto the desk. “I expect it’s the wife,” he said. “It usually is. Cherchez la femme, you know.”
“Marilyn Galea? I find that hard to believe. Too quiet, timid even.”
“Ah, but it’s often the quiet ones…” We both thought that one over for a minute or two, before he continued, “And you know what they say about women in Malta. That when St. Paul was shipwrecked here, he rid the island of poisonous snakes by transferring the venom to women’s tongues!”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said, in what I hoped were suitably acid tones. Perhaps, I thought, I should introduce this man to Anna Stanhope and watch her have a go at him.
Then, thinking how more than anything, I just wanted to go home, I said, “Is she coming over? To claim the body and make arrangements for… you know?”
“I expect she might, if we could find her to tell her. Gone missing, it seems. Hasn’t been seen since sometime yesterday.
Cherchez la femme, as I said. Anyway, why don’t we call it a day? It’s nearly midnight, and there isn’t much more we can do until we get the coroner’s report. If we get the coroner’s report, that is.“ He sighed loudly again.
I wondered what that meant. I didn’t want to ask.
“You wouldn’t be thinking of leaving Malta in the next day or two, would you? No? Then I’ll get someone to drive you back to the house. I think it’ll be good to have you staying there. Who knows, maybe the mystery guests will show up, one of them with a sign saying ‘I’m the murderer.” Or someone who confesses to killing Galea because he wasn’t considered important enough to be invited to the party. You never know!“ As he spoke, he watched my face, and evidently thought better of his attempts at humor. ”I’ll get someone to watch the house at night, if it would make you feel better,“ he offered. I told him it would.
After checking every door and window in the place, and peering intently into the backyard to see if the hooded creature was there, I sat in the dark in the living room of Martin Galea’s nearly perfect house, and thought about the day. Had it not been for the fact that this was all the result of a murder, it would have seemed rather funny, in a Monty Python kind of way.
After my initial screaming fit, my northern temperament reasserted itself, and I got a grip, admittedly tenuous, on myself. This could not be said for the others. I have never heard such a din. Everyone was screaming and yelling. Marissa took it all particularly badly, overcome by a really serious attack of hysteria, which ended only when she fainted dead away. The cousins, the truck driver, everyone was crying and waving their arms around.
I headed for the telephone. I had no idea how to reach the police, of course, so I tried to get an operator.
I got a recording of some sort, which in my shaken state I tried to engage in conversation. I assumed it was telling me in Maltese that all the lines were busy, that my call was important to them, and that I should stay on the line. Then there came extremely loud and raucous music, disco style, seemingly everyone’s favorite in Malta. On this occasion it was disconcerting, to say the least.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, an operator, a man, literally shouted something in Malti.
“There’s been a terrible accident,” I said, rather inanely.
The operator switched to English and yelled, “What do you want?”
“The police,” I yelled back.
“Where?” he shouted.
Where what? I thought. “How should I know?” I yelled.
“Malta or Gozo?” he yelled again.
“Malta.” Another round of rock music. I thought he had cut me off. Finally I was connected to the police and told them as best I could that there was a body in a piece of furniture. You can imagine how this was received. I was asked where I was, and couldn’t describe my location. “Wait a minute,” I yelled.
“You don’t have to shout,” the policeman said peevishly.
I went to fetch the calmest, or perhaps I should say least hysterical, of the cousins, and got him to talk to the police. Finally they arrived. A doctor was called for Marissa, and I was escorted to police headquarters in Floriana, where I was treated as a major nuisance, until at last I was taken to Vincent Tabone. All of this, including Tabone’s interrogation, had taken many hours and I was feeling more than a little sorry for myself when I got back to the house.
It was nearly one in the morning, so my first thought was that it was way too late to call anyone. But then I remembered the time difference and realized it was dinnertime back home. But there was the question of who to call. It is one of life’s revealing moments when one considers who, out of perhaps dozens of acquaintances and friends, one knows well enough to call when one has found a corpse, a murdered corpse, stuffed in a piece of furniture.
Calling Lucas was out of the question. As much as I might need him right now, he was out of reach, probably sitting in a tent eating astronaut food from a plastic bag, oblivious to my situation.
I considered calling Clive, my ex, on the theory that a heated argument, even over the telephone, would be therapeutic. Even talking to his new wife, the rather fatuous but extremely rich Celeste, might do the trick.
In the end, I called my neighbor, Alex. I first met Alex when I moved into the neighborhood after my rather acrimonious separation and divorce. He adopted me somewhat in the way he takes in various stray cats and dogs from time to time. I credit his avuncular concern and friendship with getting me through a bad patch in my life. In turn, I have fended off more than one foray by his other neighbors who feel his rather ramshackle house and jungle-like garden are not in keeping with the image they have of our part of town. They’re right, of course. His place is a bit of an eyesore, but who cares? Alex is a genuine eccentric, and I don’t know what I’d do without him now, nor how Sarah and I could manage the store without his help.