Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (27 page)

‘But I will get more customers by showing my loyalty to the Generalissimo,' Pablo had protested.

The secret policeman had seen his point, and had nodded.

‘Perhaps we can compensate for that by increasing your monthly payments a little,' he suggested.

And Pablo, who much preferred informing on others to actually working for a living, had readily agreed.

He had already phoned through one piece of information that day – the number plate of the Seat 500 driven by the man with an English friend – but he'd thought he was done with them, and was surprised to see them walk into the bar for a second time.

‘Two more glasses of wine?' he asked.

‘No, all we want this time is information,' Paco said, laying a five-peseta note on the table.

‘What kind of information?' Pablo asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing much. I just want to know if the man who carved the war memorial on the church is still around.'

‘He retired long ago.'

‘But he is still around?'

‘Yes, he lives at number twenty-seven Calle de Jesús.'

‘Thank you very much,' Paco said, turning from the counter, but leaving the five-peseta note still on it.

Pablo waited until the two men had gone, then swept up the note and reached for the phone.

The old man was bald, and almost blind. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from the corner of his thin lips, and his hands twitched convulsively as they rested on his bony knees.

‘I have lived here with my daughter since my dear wife died,' he said, in a cracked voice. ‘Most of my old friends are dead, too, and I get very few visitors these days.'

‘The reason we have come is that we wanted to ask you about the war memorial on the church,' Paco said.

‘The war memorial,' the old man said, with some disdain. ‘That is the sort of work you do to pay the bills – to put food on the table. But there is nothing wrong with it,' he added quickly, as if Paco might get the wrong impression. ‘No one else could have made a better job of it than I did.'

‘I'm sure they couldn't,' Paco agreed.

‘But that kind of work gave me no opportunity to show my real skill,' the old man continued. ‘Now there is an angel in the church which took me months to carve. I would like you to go and see it before you leave the town.'

‘We will,' Paco promised.

‘You will not regret it,' the old carver told him. ‘You will see with your own eyes what a real artist I once was.'

‘To get back to the war memorial,' Paco said, ‘once you had completed it, you chipped out one of the names and filled it with plaster, didn't you?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘Why did you do that?'

‘I had just finished the tablet when I was visited by a young army officer. He said that I should remove the name of Lieutenant Luis Suarez. I did not want to – it would unbalance the whole memorial – so I asked him why. Was Lieutenant Suarez alive, after all? I said. No, the officer told me, there was no question that he was dead – he had been killed by a communist in Alicante. Then there seems to be no sense in removing his name, I said. Here is the sense, he replied – and his voice was suddenly very cold – it is to be removed because Colonel Hierro wants it removed.'

That was the second time that Colonel Hierro's name had come up in an hour, Paco thought.

‘Hierro has been in his grave for many years, now,' the old carver said, ‘but back then, he was a very important man in this town – a man you did not argue with – so I chipped out the name and filled it with plaster.'

‘And that was all that the officer said?' Paco asked. ‘It should be removed because Colonel Hierro wanted it removed?'

‘That was all he said.'

There was the sound of screeching tyres outside, and looking through the window, Woodend saw that two army jeeps, containing armed soldiers, had pulled up outside.

‘We're in trouble,' he said to Paco.

And in a way, he'd always known they would be.

The morning had slowly drifted into the afternoon, the afternoon became the evening, and still Jonathan Sowerby sat at the desk, his calculator in one hand, studying the ledgers which purported to tell Sunshine Holidays' financial history.

Finally, at seven-thirty, he slammed the last ledger closed and smiled triumphantly.

‘There are perhaps only six people in the whole world capable of doing what I've just done,' he told Meadows. ‘And even then, they'd have needed a large back-up staff, a full office, and direct access to a computer, whereas I've achieved it all alone, working in a drab little hotel room.'

Meadows looked around her. The room contained a huge television set, a luxury three-piece suite, and the big desk at which Sowerby had been working. And beyond it lay the bedroom – with a king-sized bed – and the bathroom.

She smiled to herself, and thought that only Jonathan Sowerby could describe the best suite that the Hilton had to offer as a ‘drab little hotel room'.

‘What have you uncovered?' she asked.

Sowerby glanced longingly at the Zelda bag, which was sitting on the sofa.

‘Couldn't we talk about that later?' he asked.

‘Now,' Meadows said firmly.

Sowerby sighed. ‘All right then – if you insist. Sunshine Holidays has grown in a number of steps. The first step was in 1951, when it bought three second-hand – but comparatively new – coaches. Two years later, it took the next step, which was to buy three absolutely new coaches. Move on another two years …'

‘I could have worked all that out for myself,' Meadows snapped. ‘Cut to the chase.'

‘There are only two ways that a company can finance its expansion – either by using the profits it has generated itself, or by getting a loan from some financial institution. And that is what – from a superficial study of the ledgers – Sunshine Holidays seems to have done.'

‘But when you go deeper …?'

‘When you go deeper, you find that it's been counting things as assets when it's useful to do so, and writing those same things off as a loss when there's some advantage to that. And that creates a void right in the middle of the accounts, into which it has been possible to pump money from another source – an unexplained source.'

‘Wouldn't it have been easy for anyone who knew what he was doing to spot that?'

‘If it had been done as crudely as I've explained it, yes, it would. But as you go deeper, you find yourself in a positive labyrinth. You follow a trail down what seems to be the obvious tunnel and find yourself at a dead end. So you try to retrace your steps, and find you can't. After that's happened a few times, you get frustrated, and tell yourself that you must be having a bad day. And because you can't face going through it all again, you convince yourself that the books are probably all right.' Sowerby paused. ‘When I say you, of course, I'm not talking about me, I'm referring to one of those pathetic little HM Inspectors of Taxes whom I wouldn't even employ as an office boy.'

‘So whoever cooked the books was good at it?'

‘Whoever cooked the books was almost as clever as I am. In fact – and this is in the nature of a confession here – maybe even I wouldn't have spotted it, had it not been for the Middle Eastern crisis.'

‘Could you explain that?' Meadows asked.

‘I'd be delighted to. In 1967, Syria, Egypt and Jordan attack Israel, and because the West is seen as being too much on the side of the Israelis, the Arabs, in a fit of pique, raise the price of oil massively. Everybody in the West feels the effect, but for a company like Sunshine Holidays, which (on paper) is so heavily indebted that there's no room for manoeuvre, it should have been disastrous. That's when this accountant – this Leonardo da Vinci amongst bookkeepers – is forced to start taking risks. That's when his handiwork really becomes apparent, and when he leaves a marker which can be traced backwards to the start of the company and forwards to the present day.'

‘Was unexplained cash coming into the business right from the beginning?' Meadows asked.

‘No. At the start, it was far too simple a business for there to be any really creative accounting.'

The gold was real, Meadows thought. It had to be real. Javier Martinez had brought it with him from Spain, and converted some of it – or perhaps even all of it – into cash.

But his problem was that he couldn't use the money without explaining where it came from.

And what would have happened if he'd done that?

Britain had recognized General Franco's government as the legitimate government in Spain back in 1939, and that government might, with some justification, have claimed the gold was its property, and that Martinez had stolen it.

But that was by no means the worst thing that might have happened.

He could have lost his political asylum status. And since the war had been officially over when the priest's house was burned down, he could have been sent back to Spain and put on trial for the murder of the lieutenant and the two other soldiers.

The risk was too great, so he had simply sat on his wealth – because he had no choice in the matter.

That was why he had offered Fred Sidebotham the deal in 1946 – he had the money, but he didn't dare use it. But in 1951, when the business was becoming more complex, he could launder a little of it – just enough to buy Fred Sidebotham out. Then, as Sunshine Holidays continued to grow and grow, he found himself able to launder more and more.

‘I've done all you asked me to, haven't I?' Jonathan Sowerby asked, with a hint of anxiety in his voice.

‘Yes, you have,' Meadows agreed.

‘So I was wondering if we could now get down to what we both know we're really here for.'

‘Absolutely,' Meadows said, walking across to the sofa and unzipping her Zelda bag.

The cell was located in the centre of the punishment block of an army camp, a few miles from Burgos. It was four metres square, and had whitewashed walls into which messages of hope and desperation had been scratched by its previous residents. Its only furniture was a narrow bed, on which, at that moment, Paco Ruiz was sitting with his head in his hands.

‘I'm sorry, Charlie,' he said.

‘There's nothing to apologize for,' Woodend told him.

‘If we had only left Arco de Cañas straight after we came out of the Bar del Pueblo, we would have got away.'

‘I wouldn't be so sure about that,' Woodend said. ‘It's my belief that the army were probably alerted the moment we arrived in the bloody town, and even if we'd left, they'd have caught up with us before we'd gone more than a few miles.'

‘It was still a stupid thing to do,' Paco insisted. ‘What did it matter that Lieutenant Suarez's name had been chipped off the war memorial? I should never have pursued it any further.'

‘Then why did you?'

‘Because I had a policeman's gut feeling that it was somehow connected with the case.'

‘Well, there you are, then,' Woodend said. ‘If I learned one thing as a bobby, it was that you should always follow your gut instincts. Half the time, they take you up a blind alley. But doesn't it feel grand when they work out?'

‘It feels wonderful,' Paco agreed. ‘It is one of the finest feelings in the whole world.'

‘Anyway, the information that the stone cutter gave us might not be much help with the murder case, but we can certainly use it in our present situation,' Woodend said.

‘Use it?' Paco repeated, mystified. ‘Use it to do what?'

‘To create confusion,' Woodend told him.

M
ajor Ernesto Trujillo had started his career in the Spanish army with several distinct disadvantages. He did not have the dashing looks that many of his contemporaries at the Military Academy in Zaragoza had been blessed with, for example. He did not have a particularly good seat when on a horse, either, and was – at best – a fairly average shot.

All these failings could have been compensated for if he had had one of those personalities which automatically drew the other officers in the mess around him like moths around a candle, but unfortunately, he was deficient in that area, too, and so his time in the academy had been far from happy.

His fortunes had changed for the better once he had decided to join the military police. He liked the uniform, he liked the pay, and he liked the fear he inspired in others. But most of all, he liked the fact that he could use what he considered to be his obviously superior intellect to play games with the minds of lesser mortals – games which, he was convinced, the handsome, athletic arseholes who'd laughed at him at the academy would have no idea how to play.

It was because of his love of games that he never used violence to get the answers he wanted, leading some of his colleagues in the military police to think – quite wrongly – that he was too soft.

Anyone can beat a confession out of a prisoner, he always told himself, but it took real skill – the kind of skill that few people had – to get the suspect to confess voluntarily. And these two suspects who had just been brought in – the Englishman and the communist – would make a real change from the dull conscript soldiers he was usually given to play with.

He had, at first, considered interrogating them separately, but they were both old men – and no doubt both terrified – and he decided that it might be more fun to let each one hear the other betray him.

When he entered the interrogation room, he could see that, unlike in his imaginings, neither of them looked the least bit terrified, but then, he told himself, the process had not yet begun.

Trujillo sat down at the opposite side of the table from the two suspects and lit up an American cigarette.

‘My name is Major Ernesto Trujillo, and you are Charles Woodend and Francisco Ruiz,' he said, practising his English.