Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (19 page)

‘How would she have done that?'

‘It could have been a chance meeting. Such things happen.'

‘But they are rare,' said Doña Rosa, with a distinct quiver in her cracked old voice.

‘And then I began to wonder if this person, who the dead woman might have met, would have told the police about it – and I decided that she probably wouldn't have.'

‘The coffee is almost ready,' Doña Rosa said.

‘Because, you see, I know that Spaniards of a certain age – and I hope you are not insulted that I call you that, Doña Rosa, because you are a marvel – Spaniards of a certain age, with memories of the old country, do not trust the police. In fact, they do not trust any officials.'

‘That's true,' the old woman agreed.

‘I imagine that when you came here as a political refugee, there were any number of government officials who tried to make your life difficult for you,' Martinez said.

‘They wanted to send me back,' the old woman said, with a sudden anger in her voice. ‘I told them I would face the firing squad in Spain, but they didn't believe me. They laughed, and said that that could never happen. The fools! What they meant was, it could never happen in England. They had no idea what things were like in Spain.'

‘But you must eventually have found some official who was prepared to believe you.'

‘I did – or I would not be here now.'

‘So there are good officials?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘And there are good police officers, too. I have met one. Her name is Chief Inspector Paniatowski.'

‘No doubt she is nice to you – you are an important man,' Doña Rosa countered.

‘I truly believe she is nice to everyone – and that if you had something to say, she would be most interested in hearing it.'

‘But I do not have anything to say.'

‘There's something I haven't told you about the woman who was killed,' Martinez said. ‘She was my mother.'

‘Oh, you poor boy,' the old woman gasped.

‘We are talking about the honour of my family,' Martinez said. ‘I must do what I can to avenge her.'

‘Of course you must,' Doña Rosa said.

‘And that is why, if you know something, I am asking you – I am begging you – to inform the police.'

‘There was a time when I feared nothing,' Doña Rose said wistfully, ‘a time when I would have laughed in the face of death. But as you grow older, Don Roberto, it is not just your body that shrinks, it is your courage, too. I worry when my cat is away for more than an hour. I worry when I feel a draught under the door. Small matters – truly petty matters – grow to become of huge importance. It is a curse, but we must learn to live with it.'

‘Do you know something, Doña Rosa?' Martinez asked gently.

The old woman nodded. ‘Yes, Don Roberto, I do.'

‘And would you be willing – for my sake, and for the sake of my family's honour – to talk to Chief Inspector Paniatowski?'

The old woman hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and said, ‘I will do it as long as you are by my side.'

‘I will be by your side,' Robert Martinez promised.

W
ith a large man like Charlie Woodend as a passenger, Ruiz's little Seat 500 made even harder work of the mountain roads than it had the last time Paco had visited Val de Montaña, but finally it drew to an exhausted halt in the village square, close to Don Ramon's bar.

‘It will be harder for me to question the old men if you are there,' Paco said, as they crossed the square.

‘I understand that,' Woodend said, ‘but if I'm to be of any bloody use at all in this investigation, I need to soak up the atmosphere, and watch the men's faces as they talk.'

Paco grinned. Woodend had been famous for ‘soaking up the atmosphere' back in Lancashire, Monika Paniatowski had told him. He'd even had a nickname – Cloggin'-it Charlie – which acknowledged the fact that rather than stay in his office and coordinate the investigation – as many chief inspectors did – Woodend would walk endlessly around the environs of the crime until, as if by magic, he began to gain an understanding of exactly what had gone on.

‘Any information we can gather up will be useful,' Woodend said, ‘but the vital thing to find out is whether or not this lieutenant – or one of the other two soldiers killed by Javier Martinez – had a close enough friendship with another of the soldiers for
that
soldier to want to seek revenge, even after all this time.'

Paco's grin widened. ‘Is that right?' he asked. ‘I would not have known that. But then, I have never been a policeman.'

Woodend grinned too – though his grin was somewhat sheepish, rather than amused.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I've been the boss for so long that it's a little hard to get used to having an equal partner.'

The two old men – Don Ramon and Don Pedro – were at the same table they had been sitting at the last time Paco paid a visit.

Don Ramon smiled an almost-toothless greeting at Paco, then looked with suspicion at Woodend.

‘This is Carlito, an old friend of mine,' Paco said to Don Ramon, in Spanish. ‘If you trust me, then you can trust him.'

The old bar owner was silent for some time, then he said, ‘And does this Carlito of yours play dominoes?'

‘Yes,' Paco replied.

‘Does he take it seriously?'

‘He takes it very seriously indeed. In fact, you would almost think he was Spanish himself.'

Don Ramon gave a nod which looked only half-convinced. ‘Ask Carlito if he would like to play a few games,' he said.

Paco passed the information on to Woodend.

‘It is a kind of audition,' he said. ‘They want to see if you are the kind of man they can talk to.'

‘Would it put them in a more receptive mood if I lost the game?' Woodend asked.

‘It might,' Paco replied, ‘but it will depend on how you lose. These men are experts. If you lose badly, they will take you for a fool, and tell you nothing. If you try to throw the game, they will see you as dishonest, and also tell you nothing.'

‘So I should play as well as I can?'

‘You should play as if your life depended on it.'

Woodend nodded. ‘That seriously, hey? Then I'd better take my coat off,' he said, removing his hairy sports jacket and draping it over a chair.

Don Pedro won the first game, and Don Ramon won the next two, but by now Woodend was getting a measure of their playing styles, and won the fourth.

At the end of half an hour's fast and furious playing, when Woodend was one game ahead, Don Ramon pushed the dominoes to one side, and turned to Paco.

‘Carlito is an excellent player,' he said, ‘but on a good day, I still think I could beat him.'

‘I'm sure you could,' Paco said.

Don Ramon grinned. ‘That was the right answer,' he said. ‘We are ready to answer your questions about Elena now.'

‘We have no more questions about Elena,' Paco said. ‘Today, we are more interested in those soldiers who came to Val de Montaña just after the Civil War ended.'

‘What has this to do with Elena's legacy from her uncle in the United States?' Don Ramon asked.

‘Nothing at all,' Paco admitted. ‘We are now investigating something quite different, though it is still related to this village.'

‘So that is what you are – a shepherd who also keeps pigs,' Don Ramon said.

Paco laughed. ‘And you are a bar owner who sells sardines,' he said. ‘In both our lines of work, Don Ramon, it is sometimes necessary to have more than one string to your bow.'

‘That's true,' the other man agreed. ‘And what does this second string of yours involve?'

‘I am sorry to tell you that Javier Martinez, who has lived in England since the end of the Civil War, has been murdered.'

‘It is sad news,' said Don Ramon, nodding gravely, ‘though in a way, he was lucky – as we all are – to have lived so long.'

‘We think that his murderer was a Spaniard,' Paco said.

‘I do not understand why you should think that,' Don Ramon said. ‘Are there not many more Englishmen in England than there are Spaniards?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then wouldn't it perhaps be wiser to consider the possibility that it was one of them who killed Javier?'

‘Under most circumstances, what you have just said would undoubtedly be true,' Paco agreed, ‘but you see, Javier Martinez was garrotted.'

‘Then perhaps you are right, and it was a Spaniard who killed him,' Don Ramon said. ‘And do you think that this murderer might have been one of the soldiers who came to this village?'

‘It is a possibility – especially since, before he left the village, Javier killed three of their comrades,' Paco said.

‘Thirty-six years is a very long time for someone to hold a grudge,' Don Ramon said.

‘Are you saying that you yourself do not hold grudges against the enemy any more?' Paco asked. ‘Are you suggesting that if one of those soldiers walked into the village today, you would greet him as a brother, clap him on the shoulder and buy him a drink?'

‘I might buy him a drink – but only if I had poisoned that drink first,' Don Ramon said.

‘So perhaps one of those soldiers felt the same way about Javier.'

‘Perhaps he did.'

‘We would like to track them down, and if one of them is guilty, we would bring him to justice.'

‘Much chance there is of that in Francisco Franco's Spain,' Don Ramon said dismissively.

‘But this is not Franco's Spain any more,' Paco pointed out. ‘Perhaps things will change. And if they do not, did I say anything about bringing him to justice through the courts?'

‘You would kill him?' Don Ramon asked.

Paco laughed. ‘Not me. I'm too old for that. But I have two or three young friends who might be willing to oblige me.'

‘I cannot remember the fascists' names,' Don Ramon said. ‘Perhaps I never knew them – but I do know that most of them – including the lieutenant – came from a small town called Arco de Cañas in Burgos province.'

‘And how they boasted about it,' Don Pedro said. ‘“Arco de Cañas is a grand town,”' he continued in a voice that was not quite his own. ‘“Arco de Cañas has four shops.” “Peasants like you would be completely lost in a town like Arco de Cañas”.'

‘They treated us all like dogs,' Don Ramon said. ‘They locked us in a barn, you know.'

‘I thought you told me they didn't lock you and Don Pedro up, because you were too old to have taken part in the fighting,' Paco said.

‘We were there in spirit, if not in body,' Don Ramon said, his dignity clearly offended.

‘Of course you were,' Paco agreed hastily.

‘They gave us a slop bucket, but when it was full, and we asked if they could empty it, they laughed at us. They said we were almost animals ourselves, and we should be used to living in shit. And when they took one of us to the priest's house to be questioned, they tied his hands so tightly behind his back that they almost cut off the blood.'

All the time the old men had been speaking, Paco had been providing Woodend with a running translation, and Woodend himself had done no more than just listen, but now he said, ‘Their hands were tied behind their backs?'

‘Yes.'

‘Could you make sure that's what Don Ramon said?'

Paco did.

‘It's what he said,' he confirmed.

But that just didn't square with what Monika had told him, over the phone, about Javier Martinez's escape, Woodend thought. According to her, Javier had said that he had stunned the lieutenant with a large crucifix.

‘Ask him why they didn't tie Javier Martinez's hands behind his back,' he said to Paco.

‘They did tie his hands behind his back,' Don Ramon said, when Paco had translated. ‘I saw him myself, being marched down the street, and there is no question about where his hands were.'

‘Then if that's true,' Woodend said, when Paco had translated, ‘it's not Martinez's enemy we should be looking for – it's his thwarted business partner.'

‘We have to start with the assumption that the gold isn't just a legend, but that it actually existed,' Woodend said to Ruiz, as they drove back towards Calpe.

‘Do we?' Paco said. ‘And why is that?'

‘Because if the gold existed, then everything that I'm about to say makes sense,' Woodend told him. ‘But if it doesn't exist, then absolutely nothing that went on in that village one night in 1939 makes any sense at all.'

‘I'm listening,' Paco said.

‘With his hands tied behind his back, it would have been impossible for Javier Martinez to escape from the priest's house on his own, so he must have had help,' Woodend said, ‘and that help couldn't have come from any of his fellow villagers, because all the young, able-bodied ones were locked up in the barn.'

‘So it must have been one of the soldiers who helped him,' Paco said.

‘Exactly,' Woodend agreed. ‘We know that the lieutenant wanted the gold for himself, and maybe this soldier – let's call him José for the sake of convenience – had the same idea. So José strikes a deal with Martinez. He will help him to escape, in return for a share of the gold.'

‘But there are quite a lot of soldiers guarding the barn, so the only time such an escape will be possible is when Martinez is in the priest's house,' Paco said, following his reasoning.

‘Of course, the lieutenant and the other two soldiers will be witnesses to that escape, so they will have to die, but José's so hungry for the gold that that thought doesn't bother him. Anyway, the whole thing goes like clockwork – José shoots the three soldiers, and lets Martinez go, taking the gold with him.'

‘Why did Javier Martinez tell Monika such a different story about how he managed to get away?' Paco asked.