Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (3 page)

‘I'm pleased to hear that,' Joan said, ‘because it sounded to me like an argument.'

‘It wasn't!' Woodend and Paniatowski replied simultaneously.

Joan nodded. ‘Good. Anyway, what I came to tell you was that that was Paco on the phone, and he says that the van's arrived, and the driver's just ordered his lunch at the Playa y Mar.'

Woodend stood up. ‘I'd better get down there, then,' he said, his relief at escaping from the earlier conversation evident in his voice. ‘Would you like to come along for the ride, Monika?'

‘I'd love to,' Paniatowski replied – and she sounded relieved, too.

Everyone back home would be walking around in overcoats, and wearing mittens and scarves, Louisa thought, but here it was so warm that just a cardigan would do – and when you were in the sun, you didn't even need that!

She looked around her – at the old stone farmhouse, at the groves of lemon and orange trees, and the women standing over the open wood fire on which the paella was being slowly brought to perfection – and, with her earlier trepidation now quite vanquished, she sighed with contentment.

She had been introduced to so many aunts and great-aunts, uncles and great-uncles, cousins and second-cousins – all of whom had given her such an enthusiastic welcome that her head was swimming.

‘What are you thinking about, little Louisa?' asked a voice to her left.

The speaker was Tiá Pilar, and though no one had actually said she was the matriarch of the family, it was obvious from the deference paid to her that that was exactly what she was.

‘I was thinking how nice it is here – and how very nice all of you are,' Louisa said. ‘And I was also wondering,' she added tentatively, ‘why all the older women here are dressed in black.'

‘It shows we are in mourning for a loved one,' Doña Pilar said. ‘I first put on my mourning clothes when my father died, and before my period of mourning for him was over, my mother died. Then an uncle passed away, then a cousin, and eventually, my dear husband, Curro. That is the way life goes. There is always someone to mourn. But you must not think we are unhappy with our lives, child – it is simply that we are brought up to show respect.'

‘I see,' Louisa said dubiously.

‘They tell me you were not brought up speaking Spanish,' Doña Pilar said in a puzzled voice, as if it were inconceivable to her that anyone in the whole world could have been raised in such strange circumstances.

‘No, I wasn't,' Louisa agreed. ‘But my mother – my adoptive mother – has always believed that I should learn to speak the language, and I've been having lessons since I was quite small.'

‘Why isn't she here with you now?' Doña Pilar asked.

‘She thought it would be easier for me if she stayed away the first time I met the family,' Louisa said, ‘but I will bring her with me next time.'

There was the sound of a cowbell being struck from somewhere close to the paella pan.

‘Lunch is ready,' Doña Pilar said.

The Playa y Mar was a very popular place at lunchtime, and since all the tables were already taken, Woodend and Paniatowski sat at the bar.

‘That's the driver who'll be delivering Sr Garcia's latest order of music centres in an hour or so,' said Woodend, gesturing discreetly at a man in a boiler suit who was sitting alone, and had already started on the dish of meatballs in tomato sauce, which was his second course.

‘And why are we watching him?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘Because this is where we think Luis Ibañez, Sr Garcia's manager, will pay him off.'

‘You're sure Ibañez is the man you want?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Yes, because he's the only one in the whole shop, apart from the owner, who has a key.'

‘But I thought you told me that he has to hand his key in to the boss at closing time.'

‘He does. But it's during the day he needs it – because he has to lock himself inside.'

‘You're being deliberately mysterious,' Paniatowski said.

‘That's one way of looking at it,' Woodend said. ‘Another way is to see it as me testing you, to see if you're as good a detective as you used to be.'

‘All right, I'll play along with it,' Paniatowski said, with a theatrical sigh. ‘Why will the driver be getting his pay-off now? Shouldn't he have to wait until after the robbery?'

‘Of course – but, you see, the robbery's already taken place.'

‘Before the goods have even been delivered?'

‘Yes,' Woodend said. ‘Maybe things will become clearer to you when I tell you that I found flakes of polystyrene in the alley.'

Paniatowski thought about it.

‘Ah!' she said.

‘Got it now?'

‘I think so.'

‘And just in time – because here comes Ibañez.'

The manager entered the restaurant and took a quick look around him, then walked up to the bar and ordered a black coffee.

‘Since the van driver is sitting midway between the bar and the toilets, my guess is that Ibañez will suddenly feel the need to take a pee,' Woodend whispered to Paniatowski.

The manager drained his coffee and headed towards the gents. As he passed the delivery man's table, he dropped an envelope on it, and the delivery man swept it up and put it in his boiler suit pocket. The whole exchange had taken only a couple of seconds, and anyone who had not been looking specifically at the table would have missed it completely.

‘Right,' Woodend said, ‘now we move into phase two.'

There were thirty to lunch, and they ate it at a long table on the terrace in front of the farmhouse. The youngest guests were three or four, and could only reach the table by sitting on a small mountain of cushions. The oldest were Doña Pilar and her surviving sisters – all of them widows, and all dressed in black.

The meal began with bread, garlic butter and olives, followed by several kinds of cold meat and cheese. And then the paella – a magnificent concoction of rice, rabbit, chicken and seafood – was served.

Doña Pilar sat at the head of the table, with Louisa to her left and Uncle Jaime – her son – to her right. As they ate, Aunt Pilar treated Louisa to a potted history of everyone present.

That middle-aged man was Cousin Antonio, who had worked in the Continental Tyre Factory in Germany for a number of years, and been so successful at making tyres that he had saved up enough money to buy his own small bar.

The man next to him had been a bullfighter in his youth. He should have risen to the top of his profession, but he was so good that the more famous matadors – envious of his talent – had conspired to keep him from making an appearance in any of the more important rings, like the ones in Madrid or Seville, and he had been forced to make a living performing at village fiestas.

The women with a large mole on her cheek, Cousin Teresa, had once been courted by a count, but had turned her back on a life of luxury and chosen to marry a poor wine press mechanic instead.

Uncle Jaime listened to his mother's stories with a smile on his face which said that while there was certainly an element of truth in all of them, the old lady was – at the very least – guilty of a little light embroidery.

‘And you see the woman at the end of the table?' Aunt Pilar asked.

Louisa saw she was pointing to a woman in her early sixties, who must once have been very handsome, but whose face now wore the marks of intense suffering.

‘Yes, I see her,' she said.

‘That is Doña Elena,' Aunt Pilar said. ‘She is not a part of this family – she is not even from our village – but when I heard her story, I clasped her to my bosom, and she has remained there ever since.'

‘Tell me about her,' Louisa said.

‘She was still a young woman when the Civil War ended, but when the fascists marched into her village …'

‘Be careful what you say, Mother,' Uncle Jaime cautioned her, with a hint of panic in his voice.

Doña Pilar gave him a look which could have frozen blood.

‘I am an old woman, in the midst of my own family, and I will not pretend to have anything but contempt for that butcher who lives in Madrid and calls himself our Caudillo,' she said.

‘But Mother …' Jaime said.

‘You will say no more,' his mother told him. ‘Is that clear?'

Don Jaime bowed his head like a guilty five-year-old, and mumbled, ‘Yes, Mother.'

‘Now where was I?' Doña Pilar asked, turning back to Louisa.

‘You were saying that Doña Elena was a young woman when the Civil War ended,' Louisa prompted.

‘Ah yes. When the fascists marched into her village, she did not pretend – as many of us, to our eternal shame, did – that she thought of them as conquering heroes. And when their officer offered her extra rations if she would …'

‘Mother, please!' Don Jaime said.

‘This time, you are right to stop me,' his mother said. She thought for a moment, before continuing, ‘This officer made a suggestion to her that no decent man should ever make to a respectable woman – and she spat in his face.'

‘And … and what happened to her?' Louisa gasped.

‘They had already locked up her husband, and now they took her baby son from her,' Doña Pilar said. ‘Then the officer took from her what she would not give freely, and when he had had his way, he locked her up, too. They said she had insulted an officer – it didn't matter to them why she had done it – and they kept her in prison for ten years. She was lucky she was not shot,' tears began to form in Doña Pilar's eyes, ‘although perhaps she does not think she was lucky at all, and would have seen a bullet as a merciful release.'

‘What happened to her husband and baby?' Louisa asked.

‘She never saw either of them again,' Doña Pilar said, wiping away a tear with her handkerchief. ‘But enough of that – let me tell you about cousin Mauricio, who once shook hands with a big American film star.'

The first customer who came into the shop after Luis Ibañez returned from his coffee was an old man who was looking around in amazement, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in an alien world.

But as out of his depth as he might be, he probably had a fat wallet – Luis could smell money at a hundred metres – and when Antonio, one of the junior salesmen, started to approach this new customer, the manager quickly cut in ahead of him.

‘How can I help you, sir?' he asked.

‘I want to buy a gramophone for my granddaughter,' the old man said uncertainly. ‘It's for her birthday, and I want the best you have.'

Oh, he'd certainly get the best they had, Luis promised, already calculating how much extra commission he could make from the little ‘add-ons'.

And then, much to his disgust, he saw that the delivery man had finished his lunch earlier than expected, and had entered the shop with a trolley packed high with music centres.

‘Excuse me,' he said to the customer, turning and intercepting the ever-helpful Antonio before he had time to reach the delivery man.

‘I will assist with unloading the new stock,' the manager said to the young salesman.

‘But you've got a customer,' Antonio pointed out.

‘You deal with the customer,' Luis said, ‘and …' he swallowed hard, ‘you can have the commission.'

‘All of it?' the assistant asked, open-mouthed.

‘All of it,' Luis snapped. ‘Well, get on with it, then.'

The assistant went over to the customer, and launched straight into his sales patter. A Dolby unit was a must, he said. He had one himself, and the sound filled the room.

The customer was not really listening. Instead, he was watching as the delivery man and the manager pushed a cart containing the new equipment across the shop floor to the cash desk, where Sr Garcia carefully counted the boxes before signing the invoice.

‘So what do you think, sir?' the young salesman asked eagerly.

‘Do you know, I think I've rather lost interest in the whole idea,' Paco Ruiz replied.

The last of the paella had been eaten, and the plates cleared away. Now, everyone was sipping coffee, and most of the men had a brandy as well.

‘Louisa has brought us some pictures of her life in England, Mother,' Don Jaime said. ‘Do you think that this would be a good time to look at them?'

‘It would be an excellent time,' Doña Pilar said.

Louisa reached under the table for her satchel.

She had thought long and hard about which postcards and photographs to include in what her mother had, slightly sarcastically, called her ‘Welcome to Sunny Whitebridge Package'. The problem was that she did not want to paint a rosily dishonest picture of a town which was in industrial decline, but nor did she want to besmirch the place which was her home, so in the end she had chosen a selection of pictures, and left it to those viewing them to reach their own conclusions.

She opened the satchel and took her carefully selected exhibits out.

Aunt Pilar liked the pictures of the moors which surrounded Whitebridge.

‘Good for sheep,' she said approvingly.

But she was not at all impressed by the factory chimneys.

‘We Valencianos have too much respect for good clean air to allow such monstrosities in our region,' she commented, with some disdain. ‘We leave that sort of thing entirely to the money-grabbing Catalans and the Basques.'

‘We mostly leave it to them,' Don Jaime said in fairness – and almost under his breath, ‘but there are factories in the Valencia region.'

‘But not in Calpe,' his mother countered.

‘No,' Don Jaime agreed, ‘not in Calpe.'

‘Well, there you are, then,' his mother said, as if she had just demolished his argument.

Doña Pilar showed great interest in Louisa's personal photographs.

‘Now that is a fine figure of a man,' she said, looking at a picture of DI Beresford. ‘Do you like him, little Louisa?'