Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

“So he took the offer, boozed his way around Europe, finally settling here, where there was plenty of sun and unlimited quantities of the cheapest booze. As a joke, drunk and being taken advantage of, he awakened one day file owner of this haunted house. Price was cheap, but the place is unlivable and unsellable. Everybody seems terrified of it. Maids and delivery people refuse to get near it. He thought he wasn’t afraid of ghosts but the d.t.s or something scared him enough to build a new house, a small house out where the gate house had once been. Later, even that scared him and he bought land and built your present house out at, how do you pronounce it, Puerto de Andraitx.

“He drank as fast as he could put it away but instead of killing him it pickled him. He got so rubbery he could stagger into cars and bounce off. So he boozed and aged and cashed his generous check every month.

“You, Mrs. Crop, were on a two-week holiday, a cheap charter. You’d never done anything in Stockholm, called yourself a model, were a spoiled brat who knew the one thing you had going for you were your looks. You traded on them and would have, but then you took that vacation and you ran into drunken, old enough to be your father, Stanley.

“On a small island like this, everybody knows everything about everybody. You heard Stanley’s story, made an estimate of his net worth, decided that it was your big chance. You canceled your flight back to Stockholm, checked into a cheap pension and went after Stanley. One drunken night you befriended him, got him on a plane to Lisbon and another to Gibraltar where you stood him up for the marriage ceremony. When or if he ever sobered up he was probably amused by it all. So back you came and played the good wife. How does that get played in your league? Always have a bottle at hand for the little husband? Put a bottle at his bedside and always see that it’s filled? Funny. There you were feeding him buckets of what — Fundador or some similar rotgut? But Crop’s guts were beyond the rotting stage. Fast as you could pour it into him, he could absorb it and reach for more.”

“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.”