THE ENGLISH WITNESS (4 page)

“I’d use the railway viaduct,” announced
the junior man. “Hell, they’d be inaccessible from the road. With care they could
walk the tracks all the way up to the station. And there’s any number of places
they could cut away—the university campus, maybe, or over the fence to the new
riverside development.”

It was as well for the squad leader’s already
shaky standing in the eyes of his subordinate that his face was in shadow; Martí
could not see his complexion going grey. Serrano knew that time was running
out, that any time now he would be expected to order a withdrawal.

“Thank you, Martí,” he said at length,
opening the door as he spoke. “I need you to take the wheel and get me down to
the viaduct. As quietly as you can, but quickly.”

As Martí stabbed at the accelerator and
the big SUV lumbered forward, Serrano already had his phone out. It was not
totally secure, but it was less porous than short-wave radio. “Get two units across
to Mundaiz and take control of the road bridges from that end. And I want the
crews from another two units inside the station on foot. They need to park
discreetly, and keep a low profile pending further orders.”

As his partner brought the SUV smoothly to
a halt alongside the railway line and killed the engine, Serrano leapt out and
scrambled up onto the unfenced track bed. He saw in a moment that Martí had called
it right but that an opportunity had been missed. There was just enough daylight
left to make out movement on the viaduct, and resonating through the structure
came the sound of multiple footfalls on the narrow steel catwalk that ran
alongside the tracks. The river was not very wide at this point, but in the
near-darkness the fugitives had a significant head start.

“They’re on the bridge,” he called
back to Martí in a hoarse stage-whisper. “Get on the radio. One of the Mundaiz
units to cover the tracks below the station, one to patrol between the tracks
and the riverside development. Station units to deploy to the southern end of the
platforms.”

As soon as Jack heard the roar of Serrano’s approaching SUV and his agitated
voice carrying on the night air, he knew that they were not going to get away
as cleanly as he had expected. His field of vision suddenly filled with roiling
black smoke and flickering red light. For a moment the flashback eclipsed the
reality around him, and he teetered dangerously on the narrow catwalk before regaining
his balance.

He swore under his breath as his vision
cleared, one blackness giving way to another. He had been anticipating a brisk
march across the university campus and  up the Mundaiz peninsula to the
railway station. From there, he had intended a quick dash over the river, to vanish
into the evening crush of the Old Quarter.

A moment later, Jack saw that history had thwarted
his plan in advance. Where once there had been direct access to the campus across
a strip of waste ground, now the way was obstructed by a high fence. Alonso and
Julio would get over it in seconds, but for the ageing Englishman and the overweight
detective it would be all but impossible. There remained the possibility of
following the tracks all the way to the station, but in the darkness that could
be suicidal. He turned to look at his companions.

“If you’d said what you had in mind, I
could have told you about the fence,” muttered Miguel. “It’s been there for the
best part of thirty years. And before you try to find it in the dark, the road
bridge that used to run alongside the viaduct has been demolished. It’s what
they call progress… Shhh! Listen!” As the talk abruptly died away, they could hear
the shuffle of cautious footsteps transmitted through the metal of the catwalk.
“Quickly,” whispered Julio. “Round the side.”

They hastily picked their way
off to one side of the track-bed, putting the solid steel sidewall of the
viaduct between them and the approaching threat.

Serrano crept on across the river, his automatic pistol held out in
front of him, desperately peering into the darkness for a glimpse of his
fleeing quarry. He approached the end of the catwalk confident that the old man
and his mismatched police escort would flee up the tracks straight into the
arms of the men he had ordered to cover the route. Suddenly he winced with
pain, shock and disbelief as a heavy blow deadened the nerves in his extended
right forearm and sent the Beretta spinning from his grasp.

Still Serrano felt in control of the
situation. He retained enough use of his arm to slide a switchblade out of his right-hand
pocket and transfer the weapon to his equally dangerous left hand. Proud and
poised for combat, he looked back and forth for an adversary on whom to vent
his fury. But at that moment something hit him hard under the ribs. The breath
driven from his lungs, he staggered backwards with his arms flailing, vainly
attempting to recover his balance before launching a counter-attack. But his
hastily planted rear foot met no resistance whatsoever. He found time to swing
the knife wildly in his assailant’s direction, and felt an all-too-brief sense
of satisfaction as the blade struck and he heard a sharp intake of breath. Then
his forward knee buckled and he plummeted through the gap between two adjacent
railway sleepers. His head struck one of them as he vanished beneath the
tracks, not hard enough to render him unconscious but more than sufficient to
knock the fight out of him. He felt himself falling for what seemed an
impossible length of time, but was reassured by the expectation that he would
land in deep water and be able to swim to the bank.

Serrano lived just long enough
to experience a crushing blow as he landed on the reeking mudflats at the
river’s edge. There he lay supine, straddled across a mound of debris left over
from the demolition of the former road bridge, while his universe contracted to
a black, disembodied singularity.

Working largely by feel, and guided by Julio, Alonso took off his own shirt
and used it to pad a shallow diagonal slash across the driver’s torso. He
re-buttoned Julio’s own shirt over the top of the makeshift bandage and
instructed him to hold it firmly in place. Then they cautiously made their way
back across the viaduct, the unknown attacker’s presence telling them clearly
enough that Jack’s escape plan had been second-guessed.

All the same, thought Julio, it had been
smart tactical thinking on the Englishman’s part. And now that the manhunt
would be focused on the Mundaiz peninsula – an extensive park and academic
campus cut off from the city by a broad loop in the river – there was some hope
of safety back in the heavily populated grid-pattern streets of the
ensanche
.

They picked their way back across the
darkened viaduct, but as they neared the opposite bank the precariousness of
their situation hit them again. At the side of the road, in the wash of
artificial light from a nearby residential street, they could make out the
shape of a large SUV. There was a whispered conference among the two police
officers and the driver, following which Jack was instructed to stay out on the
viaduct while the three of them worked their way forward.

He remained in the rear as they came to the
last few yards of the catwalk, where they stopped and waited. Minutes crawled by
as they stood in silence, until at last Jack felt a faint but soothing
vibration through the soles of his tired feet. The tremor gathered strength,
and then he could make out the sound of a train on its way down from the
station. As the massive engine thundered onto the far end of the viaduct, the roar
and the juddering movement in the steel girders rose to a crescendo. Caught in its
headlight, Jack feared that he would be seen by anyone in the SUV, but a moment
later the front of the train had passed him by. He squeezed his eyes shut as a
seemingly endless stream of carriages swept past inches from his face.

By the time the train had gone he had lost
visual contact with his three companions, but he guessed that they were using
the speeding carriages as cover to dash past the car and come at it from behind.
He peered anxiously into the gloom in a vain attempt to see what was going on.
There was nothing for several minutes, but then his heart leapt into his mouth
as he heard a sharp impact followed by the sounds of a scuffle.

“You can join us now, Jack,” came Miguel’s
voice from out of the darkness, “but mind the drop.”

Jack would never forget that drop as long
as he lived. He had once shown off to friends by jumping from sleeper to
sleeper the whole width of the river, and the memory still figured in fever
dreams. He moved carefully until he had reached the end of the catwalk, then sent
stones skittering as he gingerly picked his way down off the track bed.

There was now a little knot of people
beside the SUV. Alonso had his sidearm levelled at a dazed but heavily muscled stranger
who was kneeling beside the vehicle, his face cut and bleeding. The policeman’s
body language suggested that he was itching for an excuse to start blasting,
but he acted on Miguel’s order to open the tailgate and stow the prisoner in
the load area.

Jack saw that one of the rearmost
side-windows was smashed. “What happened?” he asked.

“Textbook manoeuvre,” replied Julio, who
had fresh abrasions to his face and neck and considerably more blood spreading
across the front of his shirt. The driver had rarely spoken so far, and Jack
listened intently for more information. “We didn’t know how many were in the
car,” Julio continued. “So Alonso and I waited behind it with our guns out
while the Chief here threw a chunk of railway ballast at the window. Then the
door flies open, and out jumps this iron-pumping steroid junkie with the piece
of artillery you can see on the ground over there. But before he can line it up,
I step forward and tap him on the side of the head with a little persuader I
carry around. Just as effective as a gun at close quarters, and much less noisy.
Of course, anyone else would have gone straight down, but I guess it took a
while for the shock to get through all the muscle to his brain. So we had a
little set-to, and I hit him again, and after that he let us put the cuffs on
him.”

“Have you quite finished posturing,
Julio?” asked Miguel.

“Yes, Chief, sorry,” replied the driver.

“Then we need to get moving. Can one of you
spare a shirtsleeve to gag him with? With the window out, we don’t want him
attracting attention. And while you’re at it, a vehicle like this ought to have
rings in the floor for securing dangerous loads. I think our friend could be
quite a dangerous load when he wakes up properly, even in handcuffs. Why don’t
you run another pair through one of the rings – stop him moving those meaty
arms around too much.”

Handcuffs. Chains.
“Hey! Do the bracelets really tight!” Jack
blurted out in response to a sudden, unwanted recollection.

The uniformed officer unhooked a pair of
cuffs from his belt, went round to the rear of the SUV and opened the tailgate.
The muscle-bound prisoner was more alert than when Jack had first set eyes on
him, but still dazed enough that there was little difficulty in gagging him and
immobilising the impressive arms. Alonso then took the driving seat with Miguel
beside him in the front, while Jack sat behind him with Julio to his right. The
prison remained hunched up in the luggage area behind them, breathing shallowly
and reeking of ketosis.

Jack glanced across at Julio as Alonso pulled
away, and saw that their regular driver’s face was white; he had been bleeding
more heavily since his clash with the prisoner, and needed medical attention.

“Julio, you need to see a doctor and
possibly a surgeon,” announced Miguel as they cruised through well-lit
residential streets at the southern edge of the city. “Alonso, you need a shirt,
and so will Julio once he’s been patched up. We have to ditch our friend
somewhere he can’t make a nuisance of himself. And as for you, Jack, we need to
finish getting a statement.”

“I must say, I’ll feel safer once we’re
inside your HQ,” answered Jack. “All the running around makes it hard to
concentrate on getting the story straight.”

Miguel was silent for several seconds.
“It’s still too dangerous to bring you in,” he said at length, “and at the
moment I’ve no idea where to take you. But as soon as we’ve dropped Julio at the
hospital, we’ll look for somewhere out in the sticks where we can rest up for a
few hours. If I might borrow your phone, there’s a charger in the front here. I’ll
report in and see if they can come up with a safe location. What the hell have
you done, Jack? We haven’t seen a paramilitary mobilisation on this scale in a
decade or more.”

JAMES

The weather was changeable throughout the spring and early summer. It
was certainly better than my family were getting back in England, and there
were many glorious afternoons on the beach long before the tourists arrived. But
days that started off sunny could turn stormy later and a strong, chill wind could
get up without warning. Ominously, and symbolically as it turned out, you could
sometimes hear the rumble of thunder coming in from the Bay of Biscay even when
the sky overhead was blue.

However, our first full day in San
Sebastián was as warm and bright as we could have wished. And as the two dozen of
us kept a prearranged rendezvous in the college bar we experienced something quite
novel: a sense of shared excitement and mutual belonging that for a few days transcended
all the cliques and personal rivalries we’d brought with us from home.

We’d known that our teachers would be
priests, and we had a good idea of what to expect. Thus we were somewhat taken
aback when we met our course tutor. Tall, lean and muscular despite his age,
his clerical garb immaculate in its blackness and his iron-grey hair cropped
close to the scalp, Father Ignacio cut a scary figure. The clerical dog-collar
only seemed to emphasise the aura of quiet danger that surrounded him. It was
easier to imagine him as the Grand Inquisitor turning the screws on a screaming
heretic, or as a modern-day Van Helsing purging an infested crypt with a
glowing crucifix clenched in his fist, than presiding at the altar or the
confessional.

Officially we were enrolled on a Spanish
studies course, but the priest had an agenda of his own. He clearly intended that
none of us should go home without a grasp of what he called the particularity of
the Basque people. And while there’s no denying that the Basques are racially
and culturally distinct from the rest of Europe, to Ignacio it meant more than
that. He saw them as occupying a special moral high ground, owing to the
incredible age of their culture and the persecution they’ve suffered over the…

JACK

Jack hesitated in mid-sentence as Miguel put down the pencil with which
he had been scribbling occasional notes
in a spiral-bound pad. The Englishman had been in
some kind of comfort zone with this part of his story, and was clearly
irritated by the interruption. The little red light on the voice recorder continued
to blink.

“So, this priest,” began the detective. He
glanced down for a moment at his notes. “This Father Ignacio. Would you describe
him as an ardent Basque nationalist?”

Jack paused before answering, taking in the
drab, institutional décor of the modest compound to which he been brought. He
thought back to what he remembered of an immensely complex man, full of
contradictions. But the answer to detective’s question was sufficiently clear-cut.
“Yes, very much so,” he responded at length. “Being a priest, we were surprised
how reluctant he seemed to condemn the militants. He never openly supported
violence, but he tended to make excuses for it. As I said a moment ago, he was
one scary individual.”

“Well that doesn’t endear him to any of us
here,” remarked Miguel sourly. “Julio is the only one of us with so much as a
zurito
of Basque blood in his veins, and even he dismisses them as a bunch of raving fanatics.
Isn’t that right, Alonso?”

Alonso looked across at Jack with the hint
of a sneer on his lips. “Yes, for all his lanky build, Julio’s got a touch of Basque
in his genes. But he doesn’t speak their  abomination of a language, and it’s
not something he talks about. If people know about it, they’re going to assume he’s
got mixed loyalties, and you can’t survive in the police with that sort of
baggage.

“General Franco bribed thousands of people
from all over Spain to move up here. He gave them all the top jobs in industry
and the public services. The Basques themselves didn’t get a look-in. My
grandfather relocated here, so I’ve got deeper roots in the region than Miguel,
but the ethnic Basques don’t trust us and we don’t trust them.”

“They’re Europe’s Red Indians,” responded
Jack, rather defensively. “Direct descendants of Cro-Magnon stock. They speak the
world’s most ancient living language. And until Franco banned their government
and their language and their traditional music, they were an independent
people. Can you blame them for being angry?”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” cut in
Miguel. “It’s hardly surprising you feel sympathetic, Jack. But do you feel the
same about the IRA?”

“Different situation entirely,” responded Jack
curtly. “If Harold Wilson had declared total war on the Irish Republic and
persuaded the Russians to come and bomb the shit out of Dublin, then I’d have
had some sympathy. That’s the equivalent of what Franco did through his pact
with Hitler. And that’s what fuelled Ignacio’s anger.”

“I guess he was old enough to have been
involved,” admitted Alonso.

“I can remember his story as if I only
heard it last week,” confirmed Jack. “It was the day after his twenty-first
birthday. He’d spent the evening in a bar with friends and still had a hangover
on the Monday afternoon. He lived no more than ten kilometres from the centre
of Gernika, close enough to hear the bombs going off. He lost three members of his
family and two close friends.”

“That was the Germans though—a division of
the
Luftwaffe
,” retorted Alonso.

“Yes and no. There was an argument in one
of our lessons—part of a feud involving two of the girls. One of them had
German parentage, and during a debate in one of the lessons the other one threw
Gernika in her face. She’d grown up in Coventry which suffered some of the
worst bombing of the war, and she said that was typical German behaviour. When Ignacio
couldn’t stand any more, he leant forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Let
me tell you, young lady,’ he said, ‘something I don’t normally tell my
students, because if my comments got back…’ He looked around at the rest of us.
‘I had a close friend who saw the orders for the bombing of Gernika with his
own eyes. They were written on the official notepaper of General Mola, Franco’s
second in command.’”

“Worth a thousand textbooks, a teacher
like that,” muttered Alonso. “I don’t like his politics, but he had some guts
talking like that.”

Jack smiled faintly. “Yes, he had guts
alright. He kept himself tightly bottled up. He never smiled, never frowned,
and I never heard him raise his voice. But that conveyed more anger and grief
than any amount of ranting could have done. I began to develop a healthy respect
for him, even a kind of wary affection. And a few weeks later, when things got really
dark, it was to him that I turned for help.”

Miguel coughed and looked down at his notes.
“Interesting character, Jack. I assume from the time you’ve spent talking about
him that he becomes a major player later in the story. But can we get back to
the main narrative? What I still need to understand is how your criminal but
fairly innocent exploits with the young Santiago Ibarra dragged you into what I
gather to have been a nightmarish experience. Don’t leave out anything that
might be relevant – remember that we’re building up a witness statement from
you in relation to the death of your friend Antonio – but
please
try to
be brief.”

The detective’s attempt to move the
narrative on backfired, because Jack was badly shaken by this fresh reminder of
his friend’s death and needed to excuse himself for a while. Events and
conversations had begun to unlock deeply buried images and impressions. So
attractive were some of these that it was tempting to dwell on them, but even
the most enticing of them had negative associations from which his mind
recoiled.

The view from the upstairs window, out
over the hills towards the twinkling lights of Hernani, brought other unwanted sensory
impressions flooding back.
Carbolic soap. Petrol. Smoke.
But were they
altogether unwanted? Was there, this time, a ripe and meaty taste of
satisfaction in his mouth—the barest hint of something dark, inadmissible, but
distinctly appealing? Dear God, what could he have hoped to achieve by coming
back and puncturing this seething bubble of memory? Perhaps the very process of
planning this reunion with an old friend had summoned up a monster.

He turned from the window and made his way
back to the living room, if the Spartan communal area could be described as
such, where someone had brewed a jug of coffee.

JAMES

Foolish pride was the catalyst for what happened—initially Steve’s pride
but ultimately my own.

The Bar Alarra was something of an
institution back then, and I hear it’s still going strong today. Apart from a tiny
dance floor in the basement it was no different from most of the other drinking
haunts in the Old Quarter—little more than a large area of floor adorned with a
sprinkling of sawdust and a few stools. However, it boasted a tiny basement
dance floor and kept the longest hours of all the city’s drinking haunts. From
around 2 a.m. onwards it was the last port of call—the place people ended up
when everywhere else had closed and they weren’t ready to call it a night. On
show night after night was a cross-section of society that mixed innocence and
cynicism in equal parts:  local revellers, tourists, students, predators,
victims, in fact the universal assortment of urban night-creatures.

I was in the Alarra with my colleague Steve
and a small group of local teens, some time in early June, when the
conversation turned to their new folk-hero Txako and his miraculous escape.
Steve had been drinking more heavily since our friend’s departure, and in a careless
moment he gave away what had so far been a closely guarded secret: that we had
set up Txako’s exodus and escorted him across the border.

As I stood there next to Steve and heard
the words tumble out of his mouth, the room seemed to go dark and distant. I
could hear the blood pounding in my ears. My mind raced, trying to come up with
a way of changing the subject. But I needn’t have worried, because his
admission had been enough to kill the conversation and the evening stone dead.
Our little crowd had gone so quiet that I could hear a drunk singing in the
lane outside. The local lads looked at one another nervously. For several
seconds there was no movement. Then one of them, a long-standing friend named
Pablo, fished in his pocket and scooped some coins onto the bar before heading
towards the exit.

One by one the rest of the locals broke
eye contact with us. They each put money on the bar, and one of them put out a
hand to stop me when I moved to do the same. Then, suddenly it seemed, Steve
and I had one end of the bar to ourselves. “That went down well,” he said.

I smiled wryly in return. “I think at
least one of us might have said the wrong thing,” were my words as we left.

To my pleasant surprise, Pablo was waiting
for us in the doorway of a souvenir shop fifty metres along the cobbled lane,
but he looked agitated rather than pleased to see us again. “My friends,” he
began, then paused as if unsure whether to continue. He looked back the way we
had come towards the sound of footsteps, and suddenly took each of us by the
arm and urged us along a dark alley heading away from the bar and the lights.

For several minutes Pablo and I walked
briskly ahead, with Steve absorbed in misery a few feet behind us. We turned
this way and that, and nothing further was said until we reached the seafront.
Here we stopped a few metres away from another small group of men. A couple of them
looked in our direction, but once they realised we were neither friend nor foe they
ignored us. Pablo slouched for a moment with his elbows on the parapet and his
eyes fixed on the sand below, while my eyes were drawn up to the brilliant
stars visible over the bay now that the massive circle of floodlights had been
switched off.

“Just relax,” he urged us. “Try to act
like the
maricones
over there. And if any of them come over, just stay
relaxed and chat nicely. They won’t harm you, and the police mostly leave them
alone. Unlike political troublemakers.” He turned and looked at us then, and at
last there was a smile on his face. “It was amazing what you did, but you
mustn’t talk about it. It’s dangerous for you and for us.”