Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (11 page)

‘Identification card!' the sergeant demanded, when Paco had wound down his window.

Paco handed it to him.

‘So you are Francisco Ruiz?' the sergeant said.

‘Yes.'

‘And where are you going?'

Since the road he was about to take led to the village of Val de Montaña – and to nowhere else – there didn't seem to be much point in lying.

‘I'm going to Val de Montaña,' Paco said.

‘And why are you going there?'

‘May I ask why you want to know that?' Paco said.

‘Why would you want to know why I want to know?' the sergeant countered suspiciously.

‘Merely for professional curiosity,' Paco replied.

‘Professional curiosity?' the sergeant repeated, with a frown. ‘What do you mean by that?'

‘When I was a sergeant myself – in the Army of Africa – I, too, manned roadblocks with my lads,' Paco explained. ‘But I could never really see the point of them. Nobody I knew could see it either. So if there is a point – and you know what it is – I would be grateful if you could explain it to me.'

The sergeant frowned again. He was well aware that he didn't have to answer questions put to him by an aged civilian, but he was also aware that if he didn't answer this particular question, then his men – who were listening carefully to the conversation – might start to think that this roadblock was equally as pointless as the ones Paco had manned.

‘We are here, my men and I,' he said, his chest expanding as he spoke, ‘to defend Spain.'

‘And am I a threat to Spain?' Paco wondered.

‘You might be,' the sergeant said. ‘An old man – especially an old man who has served as a sergeant in Morocco – can plant a bomb quite as well as any young man.'

‘I am flattered that you think that at my age, I might still be dangerous,' Paco said.

The sergeant smiled indulgently. ‘Just tell me why you're going to Val de Montaña,
abuelo
,' he said.

‘I am going to see my mistress,' Paco replied.

The young conscripts, who were standing just behind the sergeant, began to giggle.

‘Your mistress?' the sergeant repeated, incredulously.

‘That's right.'

‘And how old is this mistress of yours?'

‘Sixty-six,' Paco said – and the young conscripts thought this was really hilarious.

‘That is very old for a mistress,' the sergeant said.

‘How old are you?' Paco asked.

‘Forty,' the sergeant said – and then looked surprised at himself for answering the question.

‘And if you had a mistress who was only thirty, wouldn't you be proud of yourself?' Paco asked.

‘Well, yes, I suppose I would,' the sergeant admitted.

‘And my mistress is ten years younger than me, so I, too, am proud,' Paco said.

The sergeant grinned. ‘All right, it wouldn't do to keep her waiting, so you'd best be on your way.'

As Paco slipped his little car into gear, the conscripts banged on the roof, and one of them shouted, ‘Good luck, old man – I hope you can find what you're looking for among all the wrinkles.'

Arrogant little shit
, Paco thought, as he pulled away.

The sergeant was laughing along with the rest of the soldiers, but that still did not stop him taking out his notebook and writing down the number of Paco's car.

As the sergeant had pointed out, an old man could plant a bomb as well as a young one, Paco thought, as he left the roadblock behind him, but the soldiers had not checked the boot of the Seat 500 to see if there were explosives in it. And the reason for that, he decided, was that their real purpose in being there had nothing to do with checking on anything.

The roadblock was, in fact, like one of those billboards that were placed at the side of trunk roads. It was an advertisement – and that advertisement said,
Don't forget that though the Generalissimo has gone, we are still here, and we are more than ready to crush you if you attempt to step out of line.

And no doubt there were similar roadblocks all over Spain, he told himself, because the army mistrusted the people quite as much as the people mistrusted the army.

As it started to climb, the Seat 500 found the twisty mountain road harder and harder going, but the little car seemed determined not to give up, and slowly but surely it drew closer to the village of Val de Montaña, where a woman called Elena Vargas Morales had once lived.

On one side of the road there was a sheer drop down into the valley. On the other side there were terraces, cut into the steep slope, on which cherry and almond trees were growing.

It must have been back-breaking work to carve out those terraces, Paco thought – and even maintaining them would be no picnic – but the people who lived in these mountains were as tough as the scrawny goats that they drove from thin pasture to thin pasture, and they took hard work in their stride.

It would not be easy to get the villagers to talk, he reflected. Mountain people had always been suspicious of strangers, and after thirty-six years of being continually punished by the Franco regime for being on the ‘wrong' side in the Civil War – as so many other towns and villages in Spain had been – they had closed in on themselves even further.

The little car reached the crest of the road, and Paco could see the village spread out in the small valley ahead.

‘Well done, Rocinante,' Paco said, and the engine snorted as if to say it was glad it had not let him down.

There were only two people in the Pig and Whistle Bar of Melly's Hotel and Restaurant. One was Ted Melly himself (who was serving the drinks), and the other was Charlie Woodend (who was sinking them).

‘I used to have a couple of barrows on the old Petticoat Lane market in London,' Melly was telling Woodend. ‘I'd sell anything. One week it would be crockery, the next one clothes, and the one after that, record players. It all depended what I could get my hands on cheap.'

‘It was a good business, was it?' Woodend asked.

‘It was a great business, especially if you knew how to cook the books – and I was bloody brilliant at that. In fact, I've been told that they only assigned the smartest tax inspectors to my case, and even then, at least three of them found it so frustrating that they ended up taking sick leave.'

‘You do know I'm an ex-bobby, don't you?' Woodend asked, just out of curiosity.

‘An ex-what?' Melly asked.

‘Copper,' Woodend said, translating from Northern English to London English. ‘I'm an ex-copper.'

‘Oh yes, I knew that,' Melly said easily. ‘I wouldn't be talking to you like this if I didn't.'

‘You've lost me,' Woodend confessed.

‘Well, when you tell some people you've got something a little bit dodgy in your past, they start looking all superior – like they've never done anything bent in their entire lives,' Melly said. ‘Coppers aren't like that. They know nobody's all that squeaky clean. In fact, some of the ones I knew in the East End were so bent themselves that they made your ordinary decent criminals look like Mary Poppins.' He held up his hands in front of him, palms outstretched. ‘No offence intended – I'm sure that when you were on the job, you were as straight as they come.'

‘I was,' Woodend said.

‘But you know what I mean, don't you?'

‘Yes,' Woodend agreed. ‘I know what you mean.' He looked down at his empty pot. ‘I think I'll have another one of those.'

‘Coming up,' Melly said, reaching for a fresh glass. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I was making good money on the market, but it was so easy that I was getting bored with the whole thing, so when I got the chance to open a hotel in sunny Spain, I jumped at it.'

‘When was this?'

‘Back in 1962,' Melly said, sliding a newly filled pint pot in front of Woodend. ‘I was what I suppose you might call a bit of a pioneer – and like all pioneers, I had my fair share of frustrations. The Spanish government wanted us to come here, of course. They needed the foreign currency that we were bringing in. But they were damned if – just because we were vital to the economy – they were going to make it easy for us. You just can't imagine the number of forms I had to fill in, and even when I'd done that …'

‘You used to have a woman called Elena Vargas Morales working for you, didn't you?' Woodend interrupted.

‘What makes you ask that?' Melly said, with a new note of suspicion entering his voice.

‘It seems that Elena's got into a spot of trouble in England,' Woodend told him.

‘Oh, so that's where she was go …' Melly began, before he realized his mistake and clamped his mouth shut.

‘What was that?' Woodend asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘Anyway, as I was saying, she's got into this spot of trouble, and as a favour to a mate of mine, who's still on the force, I'm doing a bit of background research on her.'

‘Well, you've certainly come to the wrong place if you're looking for somebody to grass Elena up,' Melly said, backing slightly away from the edge of the bar.

‘He's not trying to hurt her, this mate of mine – he wants to help her,' Woodend said. ‘And nothing you tell me can possibly do her any harm – you have my word on that.'

Melly hesitated for a moment, then, clearly not wishing to offend his customer by doubting his word, he said, ‘I've always liked employing women. They're good workers, and, unlike a lot of the men you hire, they don't spend half their time trying to show they're better at doing the job than you are yourself. But it's through that policy that I hit one of my first problems in this country.'

‘Go on,' Woodend said encouragingly.

‘Apparently, before the Civil War, women had all kinds of jobs. But after the war, Franco and the church soon put a stop to that. Women couldn't be judges – hell, they couldn't even appear as witnesses in court – they couldn't have high-ranking jobs in the civil service, they couldn't … well, you get the picture, don't you?'

‘Yes,' Woodend agreed. ‘I get the picture.'

‘But even at the lower levels, they had a very hard time. If a woman was unmarried, she couldn't take any job at all without first getting her father's permission in writing, and if she was married, that permission had to come from her husband. And there was me, a single man in his late thirties – a bloody foreigner – wanting them to give me the right to have their women in my power for eight hours a day. Well, given the macho Shithead attitude they all have here, they weren't going to stand for that, because even if the husband thought his wife would be safe enough with me, he knew his mates would imagine the worst – and nobody wants his mates laughing at him behind his back.'

‘But Elena didn't have a father or a husband – or any close relatives for that matter,' Woodend said.

‘Exactly,' Melly agreed, ‘so nobody kicked up any sort of fuss when I took her on.'

‘What kind of work did she do for you?'

‘She started in the kitchen, and, by God, that woman could graft. Once she'd learned the ropes, she was doing the work of two men. And not only that, but she had a thirst for learning. She could hardly speak a word of English when she started here, but after a couple of years, she was good enough to take out of the kitchen and put on Reception. And when I expanded, I made her assistant manager – and she was bloody good at that, as well.'

‘When did she leave your employment?'

‘About three years ago.'

‘And why did she leave?'

‘She left because I sacked her,' Melly said, slightly shamefaced. ‘I had no choice.'

‘But if she was such a good worker …'

‘A couple of plain-clothed policemen paid me a visit out of the blue one day. They had half a dozen free drinks off me, and when they'd finished, they said they thought they should tell me – as friends of the establishment – that it wasn't good to have a suspected enemy of the state working for me.'

‘Was she an enemy of the state?'

‘Depends how you look at it. She'd spent some time in prison for political crimes after the Civil War. Also, I think the policemen might have suspected she was a member of the local communist party – and since the party is illegal in Spain, that certainly makes her Franco's enemy.'

‘And was she a member?' Woodend asked.

Melly grinned. ‘Just between you, me and the gatepost, she wasn't just a member – she was the party secretary.'

‘So you sacked her.'

‘Like I said, I didn't have any choice in the matter. If I hadn't have sacked her, they'd have found some excuse or other to close me down. But I wouldn't want you to think I just cut her adrift.'

‘No?'

‘Certainly not! I could never have done that. I pay her a small pension. It's not as much as she'd earn if she was actually working for me – I couldn't afford that – but she gets by.'

‘Would this pension of hers be enough to get her to England?' Woodend wondered.

‘Er … no, I don't think it would,' Melly said evasively.

‘So how could she afford it?'

‘I don't know,' Melly said – and now the shutters had come down over his eyes.

‘I told you she'd had a spot of bother in England,' Woodend said, ‘but I'm afraid it's a bit more than that. She was murdered.'

‘Oh God, no!' Melly gasped, holding on to the bar for support. ‘She can't … she just can't …'

‘If you don't mind me saying so, you seem to be very affected by the news of her death,' Woodend said.

‘I … I wasn't her lover, or anything like that, you know,' Ted Melly said, as his eyes began to fill with tears. ‘I don't think – strictly speaking – we could even have been called friends. But I really admired her, and the truth is, I was very fond of her, as well.'