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was only stringing them along. I’d never really borrow that half million from you.’
    ‘Not even when it’s the one chance you’ve always longed for?’
    His expression momentarily hardened.
     

 
CHAPTER VIII
    Alvarez awoke, remembered it was a Sunday, and relaxed.
    How to spend the day? If it was fine, a drive up into the mountains where there were no tourists and there remained space and solitude? . . . But, of course! He’d promised to take the two children along to one of the beaches so that they could fly the new kite. He smiled. Children completed a home. If Juana-Maria had lived they would have filled their house with children and then through them they would have lived after death. Perhaps a little of him would live on through his cousin’s two children, even if she wasn’t really a cousin and his relationship to them had become too remote to be readily explained.
    He remembered the cauliflower from Ca’n Ritat. He experienced the fierce longing to own land which so often gripped him. One day he would buy some and grow cauliflowers even larger and denser-headed than the one he had been given. Perhaps if he stopped drinking and buying so many presents for the children he could save enough money. But children ought to be given toys and when he drank brandy he could forget Juana-Maria for a little while.
    He climbed out of bed, crossed to the window, opened it, and pushed back the shutters. It was a sunny day, warmer than expected because the wind was coming in from the south. He stared over the roofs of the houses, their tiles forming a mosaic of soft pinky-browns, at the hermitage and church on Puig Antonia, now looked after by nuns, and he wondered whether Santa Antonia would listen to his plea to own a little land? He wasn’t certain how a saint saw worldly ambitions, yet felt that his ambition was surely one of which he need not really be ashamed.
    Downstairs, his nephew, Juan, was reading a comic. ‘Hullo, Uncle. You promised to take us to the beach today.’
    ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ said Alvarez, scrumpling Juan’s already untidy hair.
    ‘Mother said you would probably forget because you’d drunk so much coñac when you said you’d take us.’
    ‘I am very fond of your mother, but sometimes she does tend to exaggerate. Report back to her that you are quite definitely going to the beach this afternoon.’
    ‘Why not let’s go this morning? After lunch you’ll sleep and snore and it’s getting dark so early now.’
    He sighed. ‘All right. But you’d better understand that I’m making a very great sacrifice on your behalf.’
    ‘You mean you won’t be able to go boozing at the club?’
    ‘The young of today are far too smart for their own good.’
    Juan laughed and at that moment the telephone rang. ‘It’ll be for your mother,’ said Alvarez hopefully.
    He was wrong. ‘The Institute of Forensic Anatomy has rung through, Enrique,’ said the Guard. ‘The English señor died from eating a poisonous fungus called Amanita Mallorquinas?
    ‘I suppose that means it was a llargsomi?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know about that. Superior Chief Salas says that you’re to investigate very carefully how the Englishman came to eat a poisonous fungus and to take whatever steps are necessary to see it doesn’t happen again.’
    ‘Well, it won’t happen again to him, will it? . . . Why in the hell is Salas getting in on the act?’
    ‘The captain rang him to make a full report because it is a matter of public urgency.’
    ‘The captain’s a stupid bastard.’
    Juan laughed and Alvarez looked at him through the opened doorway and shook his fist, daring him to tell his mother what he had said.
    ‘I’m not arguing with you over that, Enrique . . . Have a happy working Sunday.’
    Alvarez replaced the receiver. If the captain had minded his own business, nothing need have been done until tomorrow. But thanks to that interfering idiot, he was now going to have to spend Sunday trying to discover