Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online

Alfa Romeo to collect Señora Stuart Pedrell was not wearing gaiters. But he appreciated the stylish grey uniform with velvet lapels and the hands dressed in a pair of fine, whitish-grey leather gloves that contrasted elegantly with the black steering wheel.
    Carvalho had asked if he might move freely around the house, and the butler ushered him in with a movement of the head that hinted at an invitation to dance. And Carvalho, taking his cue, glided his way through the house with the Emperor Waltz humming in his head. He mounted a garnet-marble staircase, with a wrought-iron handrail on one side and a banister on the other. The stairs were bathed in the refracted light of a stained-glass window depicting St George and the Dragon.
    ‘Is the gentleman looking for anything in particular?’
    ‘Señor Stuart Pedrell’s rooms.’
    ‘If the gentleman would be so kind as to follow me …’
    He followed the butler up the staircase onto a kind of open balcony. A perfect film setting. The heroine leans over and sees her favourite guest arriving; she calls out: ‘Richard!’; a flurry of long, blonde curls; she lifts her long skirts and hurries trippingly down the stairs into a long embrace. The butler, however, seemed oblivious to the cinematic potential of the scene. He asked Carvalho to follow him down a carpeted corridor, at the end of which he pushed open a high door of carved teak.
    ‘Some door!’
    ‘Señor Stuart Pedrell’s great uncle had it made. He had copra holdings in Indonesia,’ the butler explained, for all the world like a museum guide.
    Carvalho entered the library. The desk had the imperious presence of a royal throne. He imagined some sixteenth-century clericpoised over it, writing with a quill pen. The bedroom lay through a door on the right, but Carvalho took a long, slow look around the library, noting the dimensions of the room, the patterned stucco of the ceiling, the solid wooden wall-panelling which provided a backdrop for hefty bookcases full of leather-bound volumes, and several eighteenth- or nineteenth-century paintings by disciples of Bayeu or Goya, and a historical-romantic work by Martí Alsina. It was inconceivable that anybody could actually work there, except perhaps on the compiling of an Aramaic-Persian comparative dictionary.
    ‘Did Señor Stuart Pedrell use this study often?’
    ‘Almost never. In winter, he would sometimes light the fire and sit and read by firelight. The reason he kept the room like this was because of the value of what is in it. The library contains only books that are old and precious. The most recent is from 1912.’
    ‘You’re very well informed.’
    ‘Thank you. The gentleman is very kind.’
    ‘Do you have any other functions in the house, apart from being the butler?’
    ‘That’s the least of my responsibilities. In fact, I am responsible for the general upkeep of the house, and I also do the household accounts.’
    ‘Are you an accountant?’
    ‘No. By training, I am a teacher of commerce. In the evenings, I study philosophy and literature. Medieval history.’
    Carvalho caught the look of pride in the butler’s eyes, the obvious delight that he felt at having caused confusion in the detective’s brain.
    ‘I was already living in the house when the Stuart Pedrells arrived as a young married couple. My parents had been in the service of the Misses Stuart for forty years.’
    The bedroom had nothing of particular note in it, other than a first-rate reproduction of Gauguin’s painting
What Are We? Where Are We Going? Where Do We Come From?
    ‘This is a new painting.’
    ‘That is correct.’
    There was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm in the butler’s voice.
    ‘Señor Stuart Pedrell had it hung over the head of his bed when he decided to come and live alone in this wing of the house.’
    ‘When was that?’
    ‘Three years ago.’
    The butler turned a blind eye as Carvalho rifled through every drawer in the room, pushed back the bed so as to