Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (20 page)

‘Because he couldn't admit he was helped by one of the soldiers without revealing the reason
why
he was helped. And he doesn't want anybody – and I mean anybody – to know about the gold.'

‘Perhaps that is what happens,' Paco said, slightly dubiously. ‘But won't the other soldiers wonder how Martinez has managed to escape?'

‘Yes, they will, but they know the villagers couldn't have helped him, and it never crosses their minds that one of their own comrades – a man they've fought side by side with – would have killed the lieutenant and the other two soldiers. And so they come up with some other explanation. They decide – I don't know – that Martinez tricked the lieutenant into untying him, or that whoever had tied his hands behind his back hadn't made a very good job of it, and he'd managed to get free. None of their explanations will have entirely satisfied them, but then, in a war, so many things are left unexplained.'

Paco nodded. ‘That makes sense,' he said. ‘I can think of many unexplained occurrences in my war.'

‘Once Martinez has gone, José sets fire to the priest's house to create a distraction,' Woodend continued.

‘Why doesn't José keep the gold himself?' Paco asked.

‘He daren't run the risk. As things stand, there's nothing to tie him to the murders, but if the other soldiers find out he's got the gold, they'll put two and two together immediately. And can you imagine what they'll do to him then? It won't be a quick death, by any means. Besides, Martinez must be a clever talker to have got him to agree to the plan in the first place, and he's somehow managed to convince José that he'll keep to his half of the deal.'

‘But he doesn't.'

‘No.'

‘So why doesn't José track him down? After all, Javier was living in England under his own name.'

‘You and I know that he was living in England, but José doesn't. He probably thinks that since Javier is rich enough to live wherever he wants to, he will have settled in a country as much like Spain as possible – because that's just what José himself would have done in the same circumstances.'

‘Somewhere in South America?'

‘Exactly! And remember, José isn't much more sophisticated than the people of Val de Montaña – he comes from a town which has only four shops – and he has no idea how to set about searching the world for Martinez.'

‘But he does have one link with the gold – Elena!' Paco said.

‘Spot on! He is sure that Martinez will contact her eventually, and he keeps watch on her for nearly four decades.'

‘There is probably no other country in the world where that would happen,' Paco said reflectively. ‘But this is Spain, and, like all Spaniards, José has within him all those characteristics which could make him a great man or a fool – and sometimes both. For him, it is no longer about the gold. Martinez has made a dupe of him – has damaged his pride – and he will not rest until he has had his revenge.'

‘And finally, his patience is rewarded,' Woodend said. ‘Elena books a flight to England, and he follows her. And once she's led him to Whitebridge, she's no longer of any use to him. In fact, she may actually be a danger to his plans, because Martinez will realize that if Elena can find him, José might, too, and that will put him on his guard. So the first opportunity he gets, he kills her. Then he tortures Martinez to make him reveal where the gold is, and once he has it – or even if he doesn't – he garrottes the man who has betrayed him.'

‘It is an elaborate theory …' Paco began.

‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once had Sherlock Holmes say, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,”' Woodend interrupted him.

‘I had not finished what I was saying,' Paco replied, a little sharply.

‘Sorry, I'm acting like I'm the boss again, aren't I?' Woodend said.

‘Or an excited five-year-old,' Paco said wryly.

‘Yes, that's more like it,' Woodend admitted. ‘So what were you about to say?'

‘That it's an elaborate theory, and elaborate theories have a habit of being widely off the mark,' Paco told him, ‘but that in this case, Charlie, I am convinced you're right.'

‘So where does that leave us?' Woodend asked.

‘It leaves us making an excursion to Arco de Cañas,' Paco said.

Martin Cheavers, Her Britannic Majesty's Vice Consul to the Costa Blanca, was holding the telephone in one hand, and scratching vigorously under his left armpit with the other.

‘Yes, Charlie,' he said into the phone. ‘I see … Do you really think that's wise? … Well, you be careful. And that goes for Paco, too.'

He hung up and saw, with some annoyance, that his new assistant – who went by the improbable name of Gerwain Harrington Benson – was looking at him questioningly.

Cheavers had become Vice Consul in the 1950s, at which time he'd been running a largely dormant import–export company. It was a post he had more or less drifted into.

‘I suspect the only reason the government wanted a consulate at all was to show that Britain was still a world power – which, of course, it self-evidently wasn't,' he'd tell his dinner guests, ‘and that the reason it chose to bestow the singular honour on me was because I was the only person in the entire region who was even vaguely suitable.'

In the fifties, his duties had involved little more than signing the odd letter and showing the occasional British VIP around. But the tourist boom in the sixties had ended all that, and soon he seemed to be spending half his time persuading the Spanish police that the drunken Brits they had in their cells were good lads really, and had just got a bit overexcited.

As the tourist industry had grown even more, he had acquired a staff. It had been locally employed at first, but then the Foreign Office had begun sending out bright young men from London on a one-year attachment.

‘It'll be a good experience for them, Martin,' an official from Whitehall had explained to him over the phone. ‘You can train them up.'

But what he had really meant, Cheavers decided, was that they could keep an eye on him – the maverick whom the FO had employed when it didn't really seem to matter, and whom it now couldn't quite find the right excuse to get rid of.

‘So who was that you were just talking to on the phone?' asked his new deputy/handler.

‘That,' said Cheavers, ‘was Charlie Woodend.'

‘Who's Charlie Woodend?'

‘How long have you been here?' Cheavers asked.

‘A couple of weeks.'

‘And you still don't know who Charlie Woodend is? Haven't you read the files?'

‘No, I've been … er … too busy absorbing the culture,' Harrington Benson said.

‘Absorb too much culture, and you'll wreck your liver,' Cheavers told him sharply. ‘Well, then, for your information, young man, Charlie Woodend is one half of the best Anglo-Spanish old-age pensioner detective agency on the whole of the Costa Blanca.'

‘How many Anglo-Spanish old-age pensioner detective agencies are there on the Costa Blanca?' his new deputy asked.

‘Given that combination – Anglo-Spanish, old-age pensioner, and detective agency – how many do you think there are likely to be?' Cheavers asked.

‘I've absolutely no idea.'

And to think that one day, this idiot – Gerwain Fartington Bumhole, or whatever his bloody name was – would probably be one of Her Majesty's ambassadors, Cheavers thought with a sigh.

‘There's only one,' he said.

‘Then it's bound to be the best,' said his assistant, looking puzzled. ‘And the worst, too.'

‘Do you know, I'd never thought of it like that,' Cheavers said. ‘What a sharp, analytical brain you do have, my boy.'

‘Thank you,' his assistant said. ‘And what was it, exactly, that this Charlie Woodend wanted?'

‘Oh, he was just warning me that he could have a spot of trouble, and might need my help to sort it out,' Cheavers said vaguely.

‘Trouble?' his deputy repeated. ‘Difficulties with his residence permit? Something like that?'

‘Yes, something like that,' Cheavers agreed.

K
ate Meadows was in a bad mood, and it showed in the way she was driving, Jack Crane thought, as, for the third time since they'd set out, the sergeant only avoided a collision by wrenching violently on the steering wheel.

‘Steady on, Sarge,' he said.

‘Don't be such a baby, Jack,' Meadows replied, accelerating her way out of yet another potential accident.

‘What's your problem?' Crane asked.

‘My problem is that, as far as this case goes, good old Colin Beresford's been thrown a real chunk of meat to get his teeth into, and all we've been slipped is a nut cutlet.'

‘You think what we're doing is a waste of time?'

‘I know it's a waste of time.'

‘The boss has to pursue this line of inquiry, if only to cover her back in case anything goes wrong,' Crane pointed out. ‘And surely, as part of her team, we should be happy to help her to do that?'

‘You're probably right,' Meadows agreed, slowing down to a speed which was only slightly dangerous. ‘In fact, you're definitely right. We'll go through the motions because that's what we need to do for the boss – but there's no reason why we can't have a bit of fun along the way, is there?'

Have a bit of fun?

Oh dear, Crane thought. He didn't like the sound of that at all.

Sunshine Holidays' main depot was outside the Whitebridge boundary, just on the edge of the moors. It had been built in a slight dip, and was invisible from half a mile away, so it was only when Meadows' car reached the crest of a small hill that it was suddenly – and dramatically – spread out in front of them.

‘Behold – the Martinez Empire!' Crane said, with a flourish.

He had a point, thought Meadows. Covering an area larger than some of the nearby villages, it certainly did have an imperial feel about it.

The depot was surrounded by a large, electrified fence of reinforced wire netting, and the only entrance was the main double gate, next to the security officer's booth.

Meadows pulled up by the booth, and showed her warrant card to the guard, who was an oldish man with a grumpy expression.

‘I'm so sorry to disturb you, when you're all so obviously in mourning,' she said.

‘In what?' the guard asked.

‘In mourning!' Meadows repeated. ‘For your boss!'

The guard sniffed. ‘I suppose there's some that might mourn him,' he conceded.

Once through the gate, they could see the complex in all its commercial grandeur. Two large garages – almost as big as aircraft hangars – ran along the east and south sides of it. Next to the south wall garage, there was a car wash, and just beyond the east wall garage were a series of petrol pumps. The north side of the compound was used as a workers' car park, and along the west side there was a row of one-storey buildings where the offices, toilets and canteen were housed.

‘It's a big business,' Meadows said.

‘It's forty per cent larger than its nearest northern rival,' replied Crane, who had an annoying habit of always doing his homework.

For much of the first couple of hours of their journey northwards, they had the Mediterranean Sea to their right, and orange groves to their left, and given the almost agonizingly slow speed at which they were travelling, Woodend had ample opportunity to enjoy both these sights.

He should have insisted on hiring a bigger car – one that wasn't going to be overtaken by almost every other vehicle on the road – he thought.

But he knew, deep down, that that would have been a mistake. Paco was now too old to legally drive a hire car, and while the two of them might be equal partners in the business, this was still his country, and it would have hurt his pride to have been chauffeured around it.

Where he should have put his foot down, Woodend decided, was over their route. It was clear from the map that the quickest way to get to Arco de Cañas would have been to go through Madrid.

Yet Paco had been adamant on this point, too.

‘You can't just go by the maps,' he'd said. ‘You must take the road conditions into account, too.'

‘But going to Madrid, and from there to Burgos, we'd be travelling on much wider roads than the ones on the route you propose,' Woodend had argued.

‘It will be quicker to go north, and then cut across country,' Paco had said firmly.

And Woodend had been forced to accept it, even though he was sure that if they'd gone by the other route, they would have been much closer to their destination by now.

The orange groves began to peter out, and soon they were passing stretches of water which could have been taken for inland lakes, had it not been for the fact they were rectangular, and clearly man-made.

‘Those are rice fields,' Paco explained. ‘If you look at the military map of Spain in the early stages of the Civil War, you will see that most of the areas held by the Republic grew rice, and most of the areas held by the fascists grew wheat. And the reason for that is obvious, isn't it?'

‘Not to me.'

‘The wheat areas were controlled by the big, powerful landlords, whose interest was in keeping the common man down, and who forced the workers to join the fascist army. The rice fields were controlled by cooperatives – people working together in the interests of the community.'

‘That's interesting,' Woodend said.

And normally, he would have found it interesting. But there was only one thing occupying his mind at that moment, and that was the investigation.

It would be, he was sure, his last big case – and he was eager to get stuck into it.

‘When do you think we will reach Arco de Cañas?' he asked.