A Dead Man in Barcelona (5 page)

‘Yes. But it had nothing to do with Lockhart.’

‘Nothing to do with Lockhart?’ said Seymour, astonished.

‘No. It was a terrible thing. But it was quite separate.’

‘But did not Lockhart go out on to the streets so that he could bear witness?’

‘Well, yes, and that was the act of a good man. But that was not why he died.’

‘Why
did
he die, then?’

The Arab was silent for a while. Then he said: ‘Señor, this is really no concern of yours. Nor of people in England. It is a private matter.’

‘Private!’

‘Yes. To him, to us.’

‘As friends you may think that. But if the Government –’

The Arab shook his head. ‘This was nothing to do with the Government, either Spanish or British. It was, as I have told you, a private matter. That it happened during Tragic Week was, well, incidental. The confusion of Tragic Week provided them with an opportunity. But even then they couldn’t take it. They had to wait until he was in prison. Then it became easier.’

‘Easier?’ said Seymour incredulously. ‘To kill a man when he is in prison?’

‘Yes. Because then he didn’t have his bodyguard with him.’

‘What is this about a bodyguard?’

‘You don’t know about his bodyguard? No? Well, he had one. And they were very good, too. My people. People from the Rif. Good fighters, no nonsense. They would have protected him. But, of course, when he was in prison –’

‘Why did he need a bodyguard? Who was it against?’

‘Señor, you ask too many questions, when, really, this is no concern of yours. Go home to England. Leave it to us. We shall see that justice is done.’

He rose to his feet, took Seymour by the arm, and then escorted him firmly to the door. As they stepped up on to the street he caught sight of Chantale, waiting patiently outside, and stopped suddenly.

‘Is she with you?’ he said, surprised.

‘Yes.’

The Arab looked uneasy.

‘Are you from Leila?’ he asked her.

‘Leila? Lockhart’s wife? No.’

The Arab looked again at Chantale, as if he did not believe her.

‘I was thinking of going to see her, though,’ said Seymour.

The Arab shook his head.

‘I do not think that would be wise,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

The Arab disregarded his question. He kept studying Chantale, as if fascinated. ‘Why have you come here, Señora?’ he said abruptly.

Chantale, not unnaturally, was caught for a reply.

‘Because she must,’ said Seymour.

‘I have come to find out,’ said Chantale, cleverly.

‘Leave it to us, Señora. This is not for women. Go back to your own people.’

‘Who are her people?’ said Seymour.

The Arab looked at him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? For all of us.’

Seymour and Chantale went for a walk along Las Ramblas. There was a slight breeze, which was very welcome because it was getting towards noon and the heat was already becoming overwhelming. The sunlight seemed to bounce back off the white boulevard. The flowers around the foot of the trees wilted. The onions on their strings seemed to hang more heavily. The piles of melons which had earlier shone green and gold seemed to whiten and lose their glow. The boulevard began to empty.

They found a little restaurant in a back street just off Las Ramblas. It was a humble place, consisting just of bare tables crammed together cheek by jowl, with the legs of the chairs often so interlocking that you could not get up or sit down without disturbing everyone else. But that did not seem to matter. It soon became apparent that most of the people there knew each other. Often they had children with them, who would crawl under the tables to escape or return. No one seemed to mind. In fact, the children appeared to be generally owned. Sometimes when they were very small and creating a hullabaloo an apparent stranger would reach over from one of the adjacent tables with a piece of bread dipped in sauce and give it to the child. Usually it worked and the child would calm down.

Once they had got used to the hubbub, Seymour and Chantale rather enjoyed it. There was so much of human interest going on. And somehow the family atmosphere was just what they needed at the moment.

A man in yellow oilskins came up carrying a bucket of freshly caught fish and the proprietor came out to study them.

‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘that’s fine. But, look, people are asking for sea bass tonight. We’ve got some coming up from the market but we’ll need more. Can you get us some?’

‘I’ll ask Juan, and Silvia will bring them up if he’s got any. I want to go out.’

‘The fishing will be good tonight, will it?’

‘Yes, God willing.’

‘Or maybe you’ve got something else in mind,’ said the proprietor, laughing.

‘There is that,’ said the oilskinned man.

‘Well, just be careful, that’s all.’

The proprietor took the bucket inside and the man in oilskins waited for his return.

‘Got time for a quick one?’ asked someone at one of the tables, holding up a glass.

‘Not just now, Vincente,’ said the man in oilskins respectfully.

‘Oh, it’s like that, is it? Well, good luck!’

The proprietor came out again with the empty bucket and the man in oilskins took it and went off.

There was a noisy group just beside them and Seymour and Chantale couldn’t quite make out what it was. In the end they decided that there had been a family christening and these were the family elders gathered to wet the baby’s head. Someone had produced a huge camera and set it up nearby and began to take a photograph of the group. It was taking some time. The photographer’s head disappeared under the cloth and he held up a hand. At the last moment a woman gave a cry, and the proceedings stopped while she took the bottles of olive oil and whatever off the table. She put them under the table so they would be out of the line of vision. Then the group recomposed itself. The photograph was taken and normal business resumed.

Then, suddenly, there was a dismayed cry. The woman, forgetting about the condiments, had kicked them over with her foot and now there was a great pool under the table and everyone was lifting their feet and inspecting their trousers and dresses.

The woman squeezed herself out and ran to one of the waitresses to get a cloth. The waitress stood with arms akimbo and said with mock severity, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just stay on for a few hours and clean it up!’

The offender began apologizing profusely. Suddenly the waitress collapsed into laughter and put her arms around her. Everyone in the restaurant roared. A couple of waiters darted over with cloths and a bucket and began wiping the people down. The owner of the café appeared, chuckling, and suggested that the women go out into the kitchen and take their dresses off. ‘What, again?’ said someone, and everyone burst into laughter. ‘She can save that till later,’ someone said, and again the place erupted.

It seemed a very jolly place, not at all like the café Seymour had previously been to. But this was Spanish, he could tell by the voices. That had been Catalan. The only Catalan voice that he had heard here had been that of the fisherman.

At the back of the restaurant was a large metal fish tank. He got up and went over to it. At this time of the day there were only a few fish in it, but a huge pair of lobsters, armour-plated dinosaurs with whiskers like aerials, probing out in front of them.

‘There’ll be more this evening,’ said a passing waiter. ‘Last night’s catch hasn’t come in from the fish market yet. They’ll be bringing it up right now.’

‘Fresh from the sea, is it?’

‘Straight from the boats. You can go down and see them if you want.’

‘Boats?’

‘Just through there. You wouldn’t think it, with the docks so close, but there’s a little harbour there for the fishing boats. It’s a nice little place. You want to take a look.’

‘Perhaps we will.’

‘Down that street and keep going. Eventually you’ll get there.’

Eventually they did, having almost lost their way in what became a maze of tiny side streets, where all the businesses were to do with the docks and the sea. In the doorways thigh-length rubber boots were hanging, with coils of rope and great drifts of netting. There was a carpenter’s, where they were working on a boat, and a place where they were mending netting. And everywhere there was the smell of fish and tar and the sea.

The harbour was very small, just round a headland from the main docks for the cargo vessels, not an adjunct but a kind of afterthought, although it had probably been there longer than the docks. It was full of little fishing boats. They would be ones which fished locally and would be out at night. Just now it was deserted, apart from a solitary man pulling a long net up from a boat and running it through his fingers before folding it neatly on the quay. When they got closer they saw it was the man in yellow oilskins they had seen earlier.

They stopped for a moment and watched him.

The net must have been about fifty yards long and it was about a yard wide. As the man ran it through his fingers he pulled out seaweed and tar and little dead fishes and squid.

‘Getting it ready for this evening?’ said Seymour.

The man grunted.

‘You’ve got to have it just right,’ said Seymour.

‘Sometimes it gets torn,’ said the man. ‘It fouls on something. And then in no time you’ve got a hole as long as my arm and anything can get through.’

‘What do you do? Tie it between buoys?’

‘Sink it. I use buoys but this net needs to go deeper. I leave it for a couple of hours and then pull it in.’

‘How far out do you go?’

‘About two miles.’

‘Don’t you have to look out for the big boats coming in?’

The fisherman laughed.

‘They don’t come in until the morning,’ he said. ‘And do you know why?’

‘Safety?’

The man laughed again. ‘It’s the Customs people. They don’t like it. They like to have a good sleep during the night and save their work for the morning. So everyone has to wait.’

He spat contemptuously into the sea. ‘The big boats lie offshore. So when I’m out there I just keep a bit further in. But sometimes they’re so close I can hear them talking.’

‘Or talk to them?’

The man gave him a long look.

‘Or talk to them,’ he agreed.

He bundled the net, neatly coiled now, up in his arms, took it across the quay, and dropped it into a boat. Then he walked off up the hill into the houses.

Seymour watched him go.

‘Lockhart liked fish,’ he said.

Chapter Five

‘Inspector –?’

From inside the guardroom at the entrance to the Navy docks came a stifled gasp.

‘Seymour from Scotland Yard.’

‘Jesus!’ Again from inside.

The seaman checking Seymour’s papers suddenly looked rattled.

‘Excuse me, sir.’

He dashed into the guardroom.

Through the open window Seymour could hear concerned discussion. Then:

‘Well, you go out, sonny, and ask him who he wants to see.’

The seaman reappeared. ‘Sorry, sir, just a minor point. I have to check. Who was it you wanted to see?’

‘Admiral Comber.’

An unmistakable ‘Christ!’ came through the open window.

‘Yes, sir. I’ll get someone to take you over.’

He disappeared back into the guardroom. Seymour, left standing there alone, moved over to be nearer the window.

‘You’re for it, now, Ferry!’ said a jaunty young voice.

‘Christ, they’ve brought the narks in!’ said another, older, coarser voice.

‘I wonder why that could be?’ said the young voice innocently. ‘Something to do with the stores, do you think? You’re looking a bit green, Ferry. Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Sir.’

‘Ground moving in the stores, is it? Rough swell? Don’t worry, Ferry, he’ll just want to look at your records. And see how they match up to the stores on the shelves. That should be no problem, should it? Ferry, you really
are
looking rather green. Were you thinking of reporting sick, by any chance?’

‘As a matter of fact, sir –’

‘I’d hang on a bit if I were you,’ continued the voice mercilessly. ‘You don’t want to draw attention to yourself, do you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘He won’t be bothered by a few discrepancies, anyway.’

‘That’s right, mate,’ the coarser voice chipped in encouragingly. ‘Small things are not going to bother him.’

‘It’s the big things he’d be looking for,’ said the jaunty one. ‘Just big things. Ferry, you
are
looking a bit off-colour. I’ll see if I can get something done about the heat in the stores. That
is
the problem, isn’t it?’

‘A bit hot, sir, yes. Just at the moment.’

‘Don’t worry, mate. He won’t know if things are shipshape or if they’re not!’

‘And they will be shipshape, won’t they?’ continued the merciless one, who seemed to be some sort of superior. ‘By the time he gets there? I think if I were you, Ferry, I’d get along to the stores pretty smartish.’

‘Yes, sir, I will, sir. If you don’t mind –’

‘Sir, he’s still waiting outside,’ said the seaman who had been checking Seymour’s papers.

‘Thank you, Parsons. We’d better get someone to take him over. In fact, I’ll take him over myself.’

The seaman came out, accompanied by a midshipman who looked about fifteen years old. He put out a hand.

‘Hello, Mr Seymour. I’m McPhail. The Duty Officer just at the moment. I’ll take you over to see the comber eel right away.’

‘Comber eel?’

‘That’s what we call him. The Admiral. But that’s unofficially. Nice to meet you, Inspector. Are you going to help us solve our problems?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Seymour.

The midshipman laughed. ‘Well, we start level, then. Because I don’t think we’re going to solve them, either.’

The seaman raised the bar which had been across the entrance.

‘Sorry about all this,’ said McPhail. ‘It’s not as if someone’s going to come in and pinch a ship.’

‘Where are the ships?’

‘Mostly out at sea. Wish I was, too. But there’s a corvette in over there, and, just around the corner, a Navy tanker. Nothing much just now. Are you familiar with ships, Mr Seymour?’

‘Not really. I occasionally have jobs in the docks, though.’

‘Ah, do you? You’ll know your way around this sort of place, then?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

But then, deciding to add to the stir:

‘A bit about Purchasing, perhaps.’

‘Ah, Purchasing?’ He raised his voice: so that it would carry to the guardroom. ‘You know about Purchasing, do you?’

Seymour thought he heard a faint groan.

‘And stores,’ he said.

‘Stores, too? Oh, that will be very helpful!’

Seymour laughed. ‘I’m not sure everyone will think so.’

McPhail laughed, too.

‘You won’t find anything too awful,’ he said. ‘But it won’t half do them good if they think that you might.’

He pointed to a large building with long windows looking out to sea.

‘That’s the mess. The officers’ mess. The wardroom, we call it. I expect the Admiral will take you over for a drink. Are you putting up there, while you’re here?’

‘No, I’ve booked in at a
pension
. The Pension Francia.’

McPhail looked doubtful. ‘The Francia? Well, a lot of our people do stay there. When they’re with a lady friend. Or wife, of course. Ladies can’t stay in the mess. But the Francia is very handy.’

‘It’s that sort of place, is it?’ said Seymour.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘So you’ve come over to Gibraltar, then?’ said the Admiral.

‘Yes. There are several things I want to do. But it might be helpful if I could pretend to be investigating something else. You remember we spoke of the stores.’

‘Fine. I’ll set it up.’

‘I’ve already dropped a few hints.’

‘That probably accounts for the worried look on one or two faces.’

‘If you can arrange things, I’ll make a start. But that, of course, is not the real reason why I am here. Nor, I imagine, for your interest in Lockhart.’

‘No.’

‘What
is
the real reason for your interest in Lockhart?’

‘I don’t know how far I can go . . .’

‘I’ve done a lot of Diplomatic work.’

‘The man from the FO said you had, and that’s good. But this isn’t quite Diplomatic work.’

‘I didn’t think for a moment that it was.’

‘No.’

The Admiral rubbed his chin. The bristles made a slight scrapy noise. Probably been up for hours, thought Seymour. Shaved in the middle of the night.

‘No,’ the Admiral said again. ‘Defence is not the same as Diplomatic. Especially at the moment, when we might be in the run-up to another war.’

‘You think so?’

‘You always have to think so if you’re in the Services. Especially if you’re in the Navy. You’ve got to think that far ahead. Do you know how long it takes to get one of our capital ships on a new course? One of the big ones? Well, you won’t do it in much less than three-quarters of a mile. So it’s no good coming up at the last moment and saying, “Mind that boat!” Or rock, or whatever. So you’ve got to think ahead. Which, believe it or not, is just what the Government is doing.’

Seymour didn’t believe it. In his experience, which was of the ministry responsible for the police, the Home Office, ministers didn’t think ahead. They just improvised on the spot, after the event, when it was already too late.

‘It’s this new bloke,’ said the Admiral. ‘Did you know we’ve got a new bloke at the Admiralty?’

Seymour didn’t. In the East End Naval affairs did not loom large.

‘Yes. There’s been a switch around and we’ve got a new bloke. Churchill, his name is. Doesn’t know anything about the Navy, of course. Been a soldier. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t get you far when you’re managing ships. But this new bloke seems actually to have a few ideas, and some of them are not totally daft. For instance, he intends to switch the whole Navy from coal to oil. Fisher’s idea, of course, but a good one.’

He looked expectantly at Seymour. Seymour could see this was significant but for the life of him he couldn’t see why. Something to do with fuel, obviously. What made ships go. Until now he had not, actually, ever thought about this. If anything, he was still living mentally in the world of sail. Of course, he knew, vaguely, that sail was being superseded by steam. That must be the coal. And now, apparently, coal was being superseded in its turn by oil.

‘Hmm,’ he said, trying to sound impressed. ‘Important, I imagine.’

‘It is!’ said the Admiral enthusiastically. ‘You can see at once the implications it has for us!’

‘Oh, yes!’ said Seymour. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Take refuelling times, for instance. With oil, all you’ve got to do is stick a pipe in and then pump. With coal, you’ve got to have dozens of people shovelling. Takes hours. The switch from coal to oil will cut refuelling times – and, therefore, turn-round times – by four-fifths!’

‘Amazing!’ said Seymour.

‘Oh, it’s going to be. And that’s not the end of it. It will revolutionize the way we do things. But we’ve got to get on with it. Otherwise, the Germans will do it first. In fact, they probably
have
done it first! But – and this is where I really do take my hat off to the Government – in one respect we’re ahead of them.’

‘We are? Oh, good!’

The Admiral paused dramatically, then lowered his voice.

‘We’ve got the oil,’ he said.

‘Got the –?’

‘Yes. Stitched it up. Bought the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Guaranteed the Navy’s oil supplies for years.’

‘Well, that’s splendid!’

‘And I don’t need to tell you the difference that will make!’

‘No, indeed!’

‘And this is where Lockhart comes in.’

‘Lockhart?’ said Seymour with a start.

‘Yes. You see, until this Anglo-Persian deal, we hadn’t been sure where our oil was going to come from. We’d been thinking about it, of course.
I’d
been thinking about it. Thought about little else from the moment I knew the switch was in the offing. I’d been making forward contracts, building storage tanks, trying to find suppliers – and this, of course, is where Lockhart came in.’

‘Lockhart?’

‘Yes. With his contacts. All through the Middle East. Especially with the Arabs. Now, of course, he wasn’t dealing directly with the Persians. But he had plenty of ways of dealing with them indirectly, and I found him invaluable.

‘It had to be done quietly, you see. We were ahead of the game, and we didn’t want to let on to anyone else. And that was especially important to me, down in the Med, with the Turks at one end, and the Germans in cahoots with them, letting them have warships.

‘Of course, once the Anglo-Persian oil started coming through, we’d be all right. But until then we were scratching around for oil. And that was where Lockhart came in with his connections. As I said, he was invaluable.

‘So when I heard – and this was two years ago, remember, when things were still in the balance, and before the Anglo-Persian oil had really started flowing – that Lockhart had been murdered, I thought: hello, someone’s putting their finger in my pie! And I didn’t like it. By then I looked on Lockhart as one of my people. If someone was out to get him, I was out to get them.

‘So I went to the Foreign Office and said, “This is an Englishman. More than that, he’s one of my people, so you’ve got to do something.” Did they do anything? Did they hell! They just faffed around, pushing papers in all directions, referring it here, taking it up there. I think they hoped I would go away. But once I’ve get my teeth into something, I don’t let go and I’d got my teeth into this. And I still have. I want to know who killed Lockhart. And that, I hope, is what you’re eventually going to tell me.’

Seymour, in fact, had come across the Admiral’s ‘new bloke’ previously. Before he had been switched to the Admiralty, Churchill had been Minister at the Home Office, in charge, among other things, of the police. And there he had put Scotland Yard’s back up in no small way.

This had been over the famous – or notorious – ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, as the newspapers had called it. A small armed gang had tried to break into an East End jeweller’s. Surprised in the act, they had shot three policemen and then, hotly pursued, had taken refuge in a house in Sidney Street where they had been trapped. Shooting was rare in London’s underworld and the case had made big headlines in the press. And where there were big headlines, these were usually, in Seymour’s experience, shortly afterwards big politicians. Churchill had interested himself personally in the case and had turned up on the spot; to be photographed for the newspapers, some said unkindly.

Worse, though, in the eyes of the police, he had called in the Army. He had even gone to the lengths of summoning up a field gun – this, for a relatively small incident, in the crowded streets of the East End, when the criminals were already trapped! Seymour was not alone in thinking that this tended towards overkill. However, it had gone down well in the newspapers.

Sidney Street was in Seymour’s patch and what made it even more irritating was that he had had an inkling of what was planned and had been quietly taking steps to thwart it. In his view he could have wrapped the whole thing up without the need for heavy artillery.

He had been especially anxious to do this because the area had a considerable immigrant population. Indeed, some of the gang had immigrant connections. Seymour had been eager to avoid wider repercussions in the local community. But, of course, the immigrant connection, and also a later discovery that some of them had been anarchists, was too much for the press to resist and it had had a field day. Which had not helped either with solving the crime or in relations with the community.

So, yes, Seymour had heard of Churchill; and privately thought him a trigger-happy Boy Scout with an ego larger than one of the Admiral’s battleships, a man who, if there was not a war already going on, was just the person to start one.

Seymour had arranged to meet Chantale at the Pension Francia, where, unknowingly, he had previously booked a room, and he went there now with a certain amount of apprehension. Chantale met him with a smile, however, and took him up to their room almost with pride. It was certainly very clean and respectable. But, then, so, it appeared, was the hotel as a whole; not at all what Seymour’s fears had projected after what the midshipman had said.

It was clearly a place used by the Navy. There were sturdy, weather-beaten men standing around, often with sturdy weather-beaten ladies. These were not exactly houris, however, but motherly figures, homely rather than alluring, and talking practically about dhobi-men and dhobi-marks and when houses were going to come up. There were, it is true, a few ladies who might have been houris, slim, elegant but dressed just a little too nonchalantly, and with an over-easy familiarity of address. But it took all sorts to make a world, Seymour reflected, and, probably, especially the Naval world.