“You really are quite offensive,” Ewa Crop told him.
“There were even letters, anonymous ones, to the Barcelona Consulate saying that you were trying to get him to drink himself to death. Apparently a British couple.”
“I don’t like you, Mister Scape.”
“Hardly anyone does. Then what happened? This is it up ahead?”
“That is the gate house, yes.”
“Okay. Then you had a fight. What was the fight about?”
“It was a private matter.”
“Was it? Let’s see. A pickled old drunk like that. You know what my bet would be. I’ve run into this game before. The old drunks wake up one day and see the light and totally addle brained they fall in love with their lethal child brides. It’s the old genes suddenly emerging, all the indoctrination of the innate superiority of the family and the necessity to preserve it. So he came to you and said: ‘My dear, I adore you. I’ve seen the light. I’m going on the wagon. Let’s have a son and heir’. And you looked at that svelte body you carry around with you and considered all your well laid plans for widowhood and you threw him out.”
“That’s sheer fantasy, Mister Scape.”
“Yeah. But it’s a good story and it would make sense. Everyone always thinks they’re unique when they’re very young, but I’ve found that you amateur con artists pretty much play the same games, go through the same dialogue, live out the same theater.”
“I’m going to write a very nasty letter about you to your company,” Ewa Crop said.
“It’s not my company. I’m just doing a favor.”
“And I will write a letter, too,” Randolf-Wilson said. “I suggest that you, sir, remember yourself.”
“That’s one of my problems. I can’t forget.”
“Actually, Mister Scape, the problem was my husband’s sexual ineptness because of his drinking. We fought about that. It was very unpleasant and I said certain things that were unnecessarily cruel. I was frustrated. I regretted what I’d said almost immediately, but Stanley had been badly hurt. I did not throw him out. Minutes after he left I knew that I’d been wrong and wanted to apologize.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I hoped he’d come back.”
Scape slapped on the little car’s brakes and stopped nose to a thick, heavy black chain hung between two massive gate posts.
“And when he didn’t? Why didn’t you go to him?”
“Well, after the fight I felt terrible and I drank. Unfortunately it is a truism that Scandinavians shouldn’t. I awakened with a terrible headache and then I was angry again. I thought to go to him and then decided that he should come to me and then maybe that I needed time to think everything out.”
“Go on.”
“I knew Stephanie and Mike were going on Lord Vandelaff’s yacht for a two-week cruise. We had been invited. On the spur of the moment I decided to go with them. I left a note for Stanley in case he did come home and, of course, everyone in town knew that I went on the cruise.”
Scape held out his hand. “The key?”
“I didn’t kill my husband and I really would rather not go in, Mister Scape. Whatever you think of me, you should have the decency—”
“I don’t even know what the word means,” he told her, his hand still patiently waiting.
Ewa Crop went into her pocketbook and dug it out. Scape got out of the car and went to the gigantic ancient iron padlock and with the foot long key unlocked it and then lowered the chain. In the heat, the chain was heavy enough so that it made him sweat. It was that hot. Almost dusk. November. And it was that hot “It’s okay to drive over it?”
“Yes.”
Scape went back to his side of the car and folded himself into the little wheeled box. He was a tall, thin, cold looking man. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a confidence that was impressive if not likeable. He carried himself well.
“Okay. So Stanley came out here after the fight. The place was just sitting empty—”
“It always is empty. No one will go into it.”
“That’s not what you told the Spanish police.”
“Well, sometimes we’ve put foreign guests up there.”
“The ghosts get them?”
“You may be surprised, Mister Scape. There are strange things in the Monasteria.”
“Ghosts,” Scape said, unimpressed. “You all believed in them and you wouldn’t spend a night in the place. Not even happy there, the closest you’d get was the gate house. Stanley settled in there and boozed it up. Right?”
“Apparently, yes,” the widow conceded.
“In the meantime you all cruised the Med with Lord Vandelaff, who once had something to do with British Intelligence, was a pal of the British Prime Minister and whose veracity was unimpeachable. Two weeks at sea and short visits ashore and then back here to Mallorca. You got back in the evening of December first. You made no attempt to contact Stanley.”
“I asked about him. People told me he was out here and that he was all right — drinking, but he always drank.”
“And you made no attempt to contact him on the second?”
“I had a terrible migraine headache. I took four nembutals. That next day didn’t exist for me. But the following day, the third, as soon as I awakened I knew that despite our problems I wanted to have a reconciliation with my husband. Perhaps for his money, if you wish to believe that.”
“Go ahead.”
“I didn’t go myself. Call it pride. I asked Stephanie and Mike to come out and tell Stanley that I was sorry and I wanted him home.”
“And that’s all the story you want to tell?”
“That’s the truth, whether you or the company you’re doing this favor for like it or not,” Ewa Crop said.
“Okay. Now you two. You came out here and what? Chain on?”
“No,” Randolf-Wilson said. “It was not.”
“What time was it?”
“Approximately four-thirty in the afternoon of December third. Ewa had asked us in the morning but we’d both not gathered our courage, we were suffering the after effects of a little party we’d held on the second and we were delayed by our having to wait for a repairman. That was a cold year, last year. While we were away they even had flurries of snow. It was quite bitter. The heating units weren’t functioning.”
“But finally you did get here. You went to the gate house, knocked and got no answer.”
“That’s correct. The assumption was that he was sleeping off a bout with the bottle and not wanting to have to come back or having any real expectation that there was any hour with a greater probability of finding him sober, we pushed in. The door was unlocked. We looked through the house, calling Stanley, and we got no answer and found that though clearly he was using the house, he wasn’t in it.”
“The what?”
“Then we came back out to the cold and called. His new 124 Sport was parked right there. Stanley was rarely in any condition to drive a car, but he was never sober enough to walk anywhere. We assumed that he had to be near. Much as we disliked it, Scape, when our calling him found no response, we approached the Monasteria. It was bitter cold, dark, very grey and overcast. Night was near. We approached the Monasteria, still calling for him, hoping he would hear us.