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

Monasteria by David Magil

Inside that gloomy old castle of torture, a helpless man had been done to death. I knew who had done it. But the proof?...

The widow was beside him. She was Swedish and better than anything he’d seen five hours before in the snow in Stockholm.

“The next right, at the cemetery,” Ewa Crop said. “But I don’t want to go there.”

Scape smiled. He was having a good time. He’d arrived in Palma two hours before and he’d picked up the circus vehicle, the SEAT 600, had found and gathered up the widow and the witnesses.

“Mrs. Crop. If you want your husband’s insurance money, I suggest you cooperate. It shouldn’t take long.”

“And then you’ll delay paying because of some other reason. My husband died November 28th, almost one year ago. I’m very tempted to employ an American attorney to make you pay your debts.”

“Not my debts. I’m a business analyst. It was a big policy. I happen to be a friend of the chief of investigations of the company. I was on business in Stockholm and knowing I was coming over, he asked me to drop in and make a quick decision.”

“About what, Mister Scape?”

“Essentially about you. Bluntly, is there any chance you murdered your husband and any hope we might prove it? The law says you can’t profit from a murder. If I think you did it and there’s a chance to get you, then the company has its excuse to go to war.”

They wound around the one and a half lane road, by fields of olive trees that were twisted and gnarled and grotesque, like walking deformed madmen quietly stalking over the earth; and there were the frail little almond trees and everywhere there were rocks.

“Is that the cemetery?” Scape asked, suddenly rounding one more turn and seeing the walled crowded little village of the dead. There were tiny little houses and as they got nearer Scape could see the walls were made of sealed drawers of the dead. No one answered.

“Must be old, huh?” Scape asked. He liked Europe. He liked the age, the history, the time span.

“No. It’s not very old. It’s about late 18th Century,” Ewa Crop replied.

Scape pulled over to the side, making the right turn and then stopping. It was hot, deliciously, uncomfortably hot after the snow and ice of Sweden.

“They have an older cemetery?”

“No, not that I know. I don’t think they do.”

“But they’ve been inhabited for at least a couple thousand years.”

“Yes, but I believe they don’t stay buried. They bury you and then after decomposition, if you don’t pay annual fees, you are reburied or maybe just discarded.”

“No, Ewa,” the young man in the back seat said. His name was Michael Randolf-Wilson, an Englishman. “They have their religion. They can’t be dug up or thrown away. They have to be in sacred or consecrated soil, don’t they?”

“They don’t,” his sister Stephanie said. The brother and sister were the ones who’d found Stanley Crop’s body. “Because none of them or almost none of them are really in the ground. They’re above it.”

“Interesting question. Living here all this time and we don’t know the answer,” Randolf-Wilson said. “We’ll have to ask about it, Scape.”

“Do that. Just along this road,” Scape asked, fiddling with the mushy gear box to probe for first.

“Yes, all the way to the very end,” Ewa Crop said. “Mister Scape, what you were saying before. My husband’s death was investigated by the local authorities. I don’t know what sort of image you may have of them, but they are fully professional. They are as modem as Scotland Yard or your F.B.I. I, obviously, was a suspect and you see that I was not arrested.”

Scape shrugged. “I don’t question their competence. I know they’re good, but nobody’s perfect. I’ve been asked to clear payment or not. Terms of policy state that beneficiary must cooperate in any investigation. Agreed that the company would like to get out of paying you, you might as well go through this with me and get it over with.”

“But why do we have to go out to the house?” the girl in the back seat, Stephanie Randolf-Wilson, asked.

“I understand it’s a ghost story. Haunted house. Everybody scared to death of the place. Police sort of threw the case up and said maybe the ghosts killed him.”

“No they didn’t. Maybe the locals said that,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The police are convinced that somehow a prowler must have done it or maybe some drinking buddy.”

“It’s a lousy road. Always this hot?” Scape asked. The little car was spinning up a cloud of dust. The unpaved road was bone dry.

“No. We have seasons.”

“It’s a nice island. Long way to go?”

“Another five minutes, Mister Scape.”

“Okay Let’s review this. What I know is from a telephone call and the company’s file. Correct me if I’m very wrong. And my apologies if I get offensive’ Crop was poor little rich boy, ne’er-do-well from a family that was degenerating. He lived in the crumbling family mansion and had enough money to keep him in cheap booze. He was pugnacious, a sloppy little drunk. His family, fallen but still living on earlier generations’ money, didn’t like one of their own in the drunk tank every other night and his not upholding their fancies of family name and honor. They got together and made the standard deal. Crop would get a monthly stipend, hopefully to drink himself to death, if he’d get out of the States and stay out. If they didn’t have his agreement they threatened to throw him out.

“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.”

“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.

“The door was locked. We hammered on it, shouted for him. Nothing. Stephanie then had the idea of trying to look into the Windows. She went around to the side of the house, the side facing west. I continued pounding on the door. I wanted to find him and be done with it. I’m not a superstitious man but I frankly do not like the Monasteria and I had no wish to return, even as a favor to Ewa.

“At that point, Scape, as I hammered on the door and called Stanley’s name repeatedly, hoping to arouse him from his stupor, Stephanie let out her shriek.

“Frankly, sir, in that situation, at the house, the weather cold and the dark descending, it sent shivers up my spine. In a moment I controlled those and I hurried around the house to her. She was standing, frozen, at the window. The drapes were open. The view was of the old bed, Stanley in it, his head broken and staining the linen with its blood.

“For some reason it wasn’t acceptable to me that he was dead. My first thought was that drunk he’d somehow fallen and then crawled to the bed. I took off my shoe and smashed the window. There are bars there, but I was able to call through to him. I called and called and only then did I realize his eyes were opened and frozen.”

“Lights on?”

“No, the electricity wasn’t on in the house. But there was enough natural light to just see. I backed away, taking Stephanie with me, and then we hurried to the village where I called the police.

“When they arrived we returned. The door was still well locked. The windows were all locked and barred, the bars so close that not even a midget could pass. No one could have gone in but when we went in with the police Stanley had been moved. He was on the floor in the living room. He was dead, he had been dead since the twenty eighth or twenty ninth.”

“So the ghosts moved him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Scape said. He looked over at the modem, California-like gate house and frowned at it and then he searched for the muddy first gear and drove in and on to the massive, handsome old house, the Monasteria. He stopped right at the entrance and cut the little sewing machine engine. “Let’s take a look.”

“Must we?” Ewa Crop asked.

“If you feel that strongly about it, just you, Mike, though I’d be happier if you’d all come.”

The house was massive. It was formidable, very rectangular, solid looking. The architecture was a combination of medieval castle and religious fortress. They walked to the door, two great slabs of iron studded wood, a golden fist probing out of the door as a knocker.

“Authentic?”

“No need to restore these old places, Scape,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The better people lived in homes built to last. We have unlearned the art.”

“Yeah, but our poor don’t live in caves, hovels or chains.”

“A republican, are you?”

“What is the history of the place?”

They’d all gotten out of the car, it was too hot to stay in it.

“There has been a house on this land for at least two thousand years,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The Roman maps, even the copies they sell in Palma have it listed. But this building is 13th or 14th Century, they think. The Moors were thrown out of Spain in the 15th Century, but they were thrown out of here much earlier. Anyway, it’s not clear what the Monasteria was first built for or as. But, most people think that about 1390 it was given to one of the religious orders and opened as a convent.”

“Convent is Monasteria.”

“No. Monasteria is just a joke, it’s not a Spanish word, as far as I know.”

“It may be Mallorquin,” Randolf-Wilson said.

“No. It’s just a joke,” Ewa Crop told them.

“The story goes on that during the Inquisition,” Michael had moved forward and was opening the big doors, “the house was used by the defenders of the faith. Whether that’s true or not, they say in the village that hundreds of men, women and even children were tortured to death here. They were carried up the road we’ve just come, bundled in horse drawn carts or they were marched up it with men on horseback prodding them on. They walked through the gate through which we came. It was a gate then. And then across the yards, up these steps and inside.”

“And they’re the ghosts?”

“Oh, no. Not according to the locals. The victims are in heaven. The ones who did the torturing are condemned to everlasting purgatory. They’re being beaten and tortured through all eternity.”

“Sounds like fun,” Scape said.

“You just wait. If you’re at all honest, you’ll at least feel something inside. There’s a presence there.”

“I’ll hear their screams?”

“They do scream, horribly; and things fall and there are noises. If you’re so very brave, Mister Scape, you really must be my guest alone here for a night. At the first thumping sounds, you tell the hairs rising at the back of your neck that there’s just some rational explanation.”

“And you should hear,” Stephanie said, “sometimes on real bad nights when they start shrieking. You can hear them crying and screaming even at the gate house.”

Scape smiled and then turned from the women and walked through the opened doors where Mike Randolf-Wilson had already gone. Scape looked at the large room, noticed that the walls were stone and that the doors were almost four feet thick. The room itself was normal, ordinary, reasonably modem. “Where was Stanley?”

“When the police came? Here,” Mike said. “Right here.”

Scape opened the folder he had with him and took out a police photograph. It showed the murdered man on the floor. The rest of the room had been undisturbed and looked unlived in. The photograph and the room, except for the missing body, looked identical, everything in place.

“Want to show me the bedroom where you first saw him?”

“Right this way,” Randolf-Wilson said, walking to the left and then into a corridor.

Scape followed, impressed with the incredibly thick walls, the marble floors, the ornate ceilings.

“This was the room, Scape. Steph broke in that window. The bed was as it is now, stained of course and occupied.”

Scape looked into the very small room, it was tiny. The door was a masterpiece, a magnificent chunk of wood; and he noticed that old time Spaniards had mastered the art of getting a door to fit its frame. His hotel room door didn’t even come close. “Head was turned toward the window. What about the injury?”

“Quite unmistakeable. Not only the blood but the entire top of his head had been caved in.”

“Signs of violence?”

“None. Though a 14th Century crucifix that had always been imbedded in the stone had fallen out of the stone and broken. It was right there, you can see where it was.”

“The murder weapon?”

“Yes, according to the police.”

“And no evidence of anyone or thing?”

“Not according to the police. There was no way It’s not a house that can be broken into. The door was locked, windows are barred.”

Scape took out the police photograph and walked around the little room. In the photograph the blood-stained bed had three empty bottles on the floor beside it. Otherwise, it was the same.

“A man named Delgado headed the investigation,” Scape said. “I’ve read his report. What was he like? He seem competent?”

“Officious. Authorities are in every country.”

“You saw him here. When you came back he was in that front room.”

“He was.”

“Marks of dragging, any blood?”

“Not that I saw. But he had been dead for days. We figured we probably were in Tunis when he was killed.”

“With Lord Vandelaff keeping second to second tabs on you, so there was no chance you could have flown back for the kill.”

“You suspect me or murder, Scape,” Ewa Crop said. “What motive?”

“How about the grieving widow and her money? You’re not exactly well to do, are you?”

“No. I’m not.”

Scape looked around the room again. A very small circular Spanish carpet was beside the bed, the floors were marble, the ceiling was decorated. There wasn’t anything in the room that said anything. Reluctantly, he moved away from the cold air coming from the sleeve-mounted air-conditioner, and he walked from the room, the way the body had allegedly walked or been transported by the ghosts.

“Where was the torturing done?”

“In the old days? A dungeon. It’s been sealed for a few hundred years, absolutely sealed.”

“Maybe the weird noises are things down there.”

“Perhaps. Anything else you’d like to see?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Ewa going to get your approval, Scape?”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?” Scape said and led the way outside where the two women were standing under a tall old shade tree. Scape moved to the car, Mike following and the women coming over. Then Scape looked back at the great old house. “Oh, what’s up on the second floor?”

“There isn’t any,” Randolf-Wilson said. “Oh, no. That’s just the air space. It’s nothing.”

“An attic?”

“No. There’s no way into it. It’s sealed. The old time architecture. I think it’s a Moorish touch or maybe even Roman.”

Inspector Delgado smiled at Scope “Superb dinner, I’m grateful to you, Mister Scape.”

“It’s my treat, Inspector. May I ask those few questions?”

“Entirely improper, official business, impossible to discuss it without authorization from Madrid. Okay. Go ahead, ask,” Delgado smiled.

“No criticism. I’m hardly in a position to criticize, but why have you dropped it?”

“Of course it’s criticism. Certainly the three of them or at least the two of them engineered the murder, but without the murderer—” he shrugged his shoulders. He was a tall, handsome man who’d been an Embassy brat, had grown up and been educated all over the world, including the States. “It’s hardly a locked room murder. Presumably someone was paid, given the key. The dead man was drunk in bed. The hired killer smashed his head in and then the body was carried into the living room. The killer left and he’s now in England or Sweden more probably.

“It’s difficult, Mister Scape. We have an immense tourist industry. Most probably one of them came and did it and left the island even before the body was discovered. For your purposes that may not be agreeable, but for me it’s a matter of near indifference. Europe stops at the Pyrenees. We’re medieval, a remnant from the Middle Ages. That’s your view. The truth is that our bias is even greater than yours. We generally refrain from killing each other, but have the inclination to believe that it’s one of your normal societal behavior patterns. This killing was investigated, we made a genuine attempt to find evidence to bring the widow and her friends to court. We were unable to do that and very frankly I’m considerably more concerned with the incidence of motor vehicle fatalities on our roads.”

“I understand. But I wonder whether your bias hasn’t hurt you on this. We may murder each other all the time, but with it we have a certain sophistication. I don’t think we usually hire a murderer if it’s a c old-blooded murder for money. Basic reasoning. If money is the goal, money is all important; and if that’s so, we do our damndest not to put ourselves into positions where we could be blackmailed.”

The Inspector smiled.

“That’s neatly rational, but are murderers?”

“Are you absolutely certain they didn’t kill him?”

“There’s no way they could have done it. The medical examiner placed the time of death.”

“Could he have been wrong?”

“Of course, but his credentials are excellent and the extreme time span still makes it impossible. They were at least a hundred miles away when it was done. Lord Vandelaff was with them.

“Look, my friend, I accept that you may have an inclination to distrust us, but we’re both a product of your system. The medical examiner is a Harvard Med product. I studied with the F.B.I., N.Y.P.D. Maybe Spanish police work could have pinned it on them, but I used American police work and I didn’t come up with a case.”

“This was your first murder on the island?”

“My first investigation. I’d just been assigned here. But in the States and England, Germany I’ve been an observer in plenty of them.”

“They did it,” Scape said. “I don’t know how. Vandelaff wasn’t drunk or drugged?”

“Sorry. Everything was checked and this is Spain, we have the means to check things. I’m afraid your company is going to have to pay. Certainly I believe they killed him, but I don’t know any way to prove that.”

Scape got progressively more sour. He checked at the offices of the Majorca Daily Bulletin and in their back issues checked the extremely brief account of the murder. He also talked to an effeminate columnist who knew all the gossip but nothing useful. And, just curious, he noticed the weather. He couldn’t avoid noticing it. They had photographs and stories about how miserable it had been. It had gotten rainy and cold in late October, it had been quite cold.

He walked out of the Bulletin office and headed for Iberia to change his flight. He’d give it twenty-four more hours. If he still couldn’t think of anything by then he’d give it up. They wouldn’t be the first people who’d gotten away with murder.

But he was disgusted about it. Somehow the two or three of them had killed old Stanley and for some reason there didn’t seem to be any way to prove it. How had they done it?

He walked, looking into the spectacular old court yards, admiring the mansions and visualizing how they must have been when horses and carriages and even Imperial Spain had commanded the world. And he looked into store windows. There were a lot of American products, very expensive compared to their competition. Zenith, Westinghouse, General Electric, Fedders, Kelvinator. Fedders!

The Crop House at Puerto de Andraitx had a stairway blasted out of the rock. Scape went down the stairs. He’d stopped off at his hotel to get the form out of his attache case and to get his bags. He was very pleased with himself.

There was a tiny beach blasted out of the rock, too. Sand had been brought in to cover it. It was really just a ledge and the sea, beautiful blue water lapped at it.

The three of them were there. They were wearing the tiniest bathing suits Scape had ever seen. They looked as close to a nudist colony as Scape had ever been. They were bronzed and glittering in the sparkling suntan oil that covered them as almost their only covering.

Scape stood on the lowest step and waiting. He admired them.

Mike Randolf-Wilson was the one who looked up first. No shock, no surprise. Just: “Well, well, if it isn’t the great investigator.”

The two women lifted their heads from their sun worshipping and looked at Scape.

“Come to say good-by, Scape? I assure you it wasn’t necessary. You needn’t have inconvenienced yourself.”

“No inconvenience. I just came for Mrs. Crop’s autograph.”

She smiled. “For what?”

“You’re a gambler. Want to sign?”

“Sign what?”

“A quitclaim. Your agreement that without prejudice and not as an admission of anything you agree to the company paying you one dollar as full payment of your late husband’s policy.”

“That’s a stupid bluff, Scape,” Randolf-Wilson said.

“The policy, Mister Scape, was for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars,” Mrs. Crop said. “The terms state that as my husband was murdered you or your friends have to pay me twice that.”

“They use the garrote here,” Scape told her. “It’s an iron collar. But, if you’re lucky you might avoid that. I don’t think they’re all that big on capital punishment. But Spanish prisons are a little rough. The idea is punishment and they’re punishing.”

“Don’t be a fool, Scape,” Randolf-Wilson said. “You’re wasting your time and ours with this puerile bluff.”

“I’m not interested in your opinion, Mike. You’re beneath contempt. I don’t even know the dirty word for you,” Scape said. “Mrs. Crop, this is your last chance. Understand, we have no interest in justice, just money. You sign this and I walk away.”

“And if I don’t, Mister Scape?”

“You make a bad mistake. I have no idea which of you bashed his head in, but you did it and I can prove it.”

“You suspect all of us,” Stephanie asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Even if Mrs. Crop was ignorant of the murder she had motive and wants the money and she had the key. She gave the key to you and lied about it. We have her. And you two are lying about the body. It’s circumstantial but plenty.”

“What motive?” Randolf-Wilson asked.

“You? Money and Mrs. Crop.”

“He’s talking nonsense, Ewa. Go away, Scape.”

“Your very last chance, Mrs. Crop. Are you sure I can’t prove it?”

“What will you do, if you really do have a theory?”

“I’m in a hurry. I have a plane to the States to catch. It’s about forty-five minutes to the airport. I’ll phone Delgado from there. He’ll send the local police for you or come out himself to make the arrest. If I’m bluffing you’re in fine shape, if I’m not you’ll have time to run; but Interpol is effective. They’ll get you. So, absolutely last chance. Going once,” he said, “going twice,” he paused, “lost.” He tore up the form and dropped it and then turned and started up the steps.

Ewa Crop called to him just as he reached his car. He turned. She had followed him.

“I don’t understand you, Mister Scape. You’re a handsome man, an exciting one. Why do you feel so much antagonism toward me.”

“Murderers scare me. I’m not afraid of being done in, it’s just that stupid people are dangerous. You could have kept feeding him booze, he would have died sooner or later.”

“I didn’t kill my husband.”

“You’re a liar.”

She smiled. “I say I didn’t and there’s no way you could prove I did. Why don’t you just give up and come in for a drink. If you want money we could discuss that, or perhaps you want me.”

He looked at her, up her and down her. “I have another form, of course. You sure you don’t want to sign it?”

“You’re a fool,” she snapped, furious at him.

“Scape,” Randolf-Wilson said, just topping the stairs from the beach.

“Mike. What are you doing here?” Ewa Crop said. “Go back to the beach. I’ll take care of this.”

“No. Scape is trying to be agreeable, Ewa. Why shouldn’t we be? Of course we murdered the old drunk, Mister Scape.”

“Michael. That’s not so. You’re lying.”

“Don’t be stupid, Ewa. There’s no question we murdered him. At issue is only whether they can prove the three of us did it. Can you prove it, Scape? Can you prove it in a Spanish court?”

Scape nodded.

“And we understand you? You say your only interest is in the money? If Ewa would sign your paper this would no longer involve you, you’d have no reason to go to Delgado?”

“From the minute the paper’s signed, I’m out of it.”

“All right. Convince us. How did we kill him?”

“You caved his skull in with the crucifix.”

“How? We were at sea when he was killed.”

“No you weren’t. I kept trying to figure how you killed him before you left. I couldn’t because you didn’t kill him until the night you came back, the first of December. It was dumb luck that let you get away with it. I grew up in a badly built California bungalow. Delgado always lived in luxurious badly built apartments. The medical examiner is a city boy, from Madrid, and he never saw the Monasteria. Our problem was we couldn’t believe it.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“I was in downtown Palma, where they have air-conditioners for sale, and I remembered that on the day you took me out to the house you’d gone to the trouble of getting the airconditioners put on out there. Servants don’t go into the Monasteria so it had to be one of you and that was strange. You didn’t want me to go out there. The house is never occupied. Why was it on, and why was it there?”

“Go ahead,” Randolf-Wilson said.

“The police photographs don’t show that piece of wall. I asked. The air-conditioning you have is new; it wasn’t there when Stanley was killed. At the same time I remembered how insistently you kept telling me how cold it was the day you claim you found Stanley. It kept pointing to before the cruise, but a body after seventeen days is a lot different than a body after a week.

“Anyway, that’s the primary confusion. The next point is the Monasteria itself. It’s magnificently built. The walls are thick, the doors and fittings are to almost perfect tolerance. As you said, they don’t build them that way anymore. It’s so unlike the shoddiness of any contemporary building that it’s hard to accept. And that brings us to my question about the second floor and your telling me there wasn’t one. Why? The space was there. There must have been some reason for it, some utility to it.

“I asked around and people told me that design is classic. The sealed air in that second floor that isn’t a second floor is supposed to act as insulation. In summer the sun bakes the roof, heating the air in that closed space. The heated air loses its heat very slowly so it warms the house in winter. The winter cold then cools the air and that cool air works to make the house more livable through a good part of the summer.”

“Your point?” Randolf-Wilson asked.

“The weather was cold the day Stanley was killed, but it had been a damned hot summer. The house had been sealed. The heat in the air of that air space must have been fierce — if we accept the house functions according to design and is as perfectly made as we think — and since the entire house had been closed up all summer the air in the living sections also must have been hot as hell. You put the air-conditioning in because you didn’t want anyone to be aware of how intensely hot that place must be at the end of summer, the beginning of winter.

“You killed Stanley in bed. You were clever enough to figure the heat factor and that’s why you moved him to the hottest point in the house. You needed that heat to bake Stanley, to dry him out.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, Mister Scape. If his temperature was warmer wouldn’t that place the time of his death later?”

“It’s confusing until you think about it. When the medical examiner came over from Madrid he saw a body that had been dead for days and a body that had been refrigerated waiting for his examination. Temperature was no factor at all. In a person just dead it may be, but Stanley hadn’t just died. So the time of death was determined by dehydration. Stanley rarely ate, he drank his meals, so the contents of his stomach were nothing. The dehydration of the tissue and organs of the body was how it was determined and you and the Monasteria, we now see, were the ones who’d cooked the juices out of poor pickled old Stanley.”

“It’s interesting as a theory. Can you prove it?”

“That’s easy. It’s hot now. According to the tourist office it’ll cool down soon. Delgado can use a whole battery of instruments or even a dead animal to test it. I think it’ll be enough to take it to court. It was vicious murder for very obvious gain,” Scape said, admiring the almost nude Ewa Crop again, “and I don’t see a Spanish court giving you the benefit of the doubt — if there would be any.”

Michael Randolf-Wilson and Ewa Crop looked at each other.

“If I sign your paper— If I give up the money, you won’t go to Delgado?”

“I’m not a policeman. He’s responsible for doing his own job.”

“It wasn’t premeditated, Mister Scape. Stanley caught me with Michael. He yelled and screamed and threatened. We sent Stephanie in but he didn’t want her. Then it happened. And afterwards we realized how hot it was.”

Scape took out his pen and the paper and put them on the hood of the car. “He was going to throw you all out, huh?”

Ewa Crop nodded. She walked forward, read the paper, picked up the pen.

“Two hundred and forty thousand dollars,” she said, sadly. “You swear you won’t tell the police?”

“I’m going right to the airport. Mike, you want to witness this.”

They both signed.

Scape looked at the paper, folded it, carefully put it away.

“Well, it was nice doing business with you,” he said. Then he turned to the wall. “Gentlemen.”

Delgado and two armed Guardia Civil came from behind the wall.

“You are under arrest for the murder of Stanley Crop.”

Both Randolf-Wilson and Ewa Crop looked at Scape. He shrugged, smiled. “I didn’t say a word to Delgado. All I did was call his office. Inspector,” he said, getting into the car.

“I am going to see the three of you prosecuted to the limit of our law. You foreigners are more than welcome here,” Delgado told them. Stephanie had been brought up from the beach by two more Guardia. “But perhaps the severity of your convictions will be a meaningful deterrent. If you want to murder people, do it at home, in your own countries.” He gestured to the Guardia and they came forward to make the arrests.

“Good-by, Mr. Scape,” Delgado said. “You have plenty of time to catch your plane.”