The Butcher Beyond (15 page)

‘And what are you here in Spain to bet on?'

‘Absolutely nothing. I had a bit of a win on a rank outsider, to tell you the truth, and I thought to myself: Rodney, that money's burning a hole in your pocket, and if you don't take yourself off to somewhere there's absolutely nothing to tempt you, you'll have wagered it away in no time. So here I am.'

‘Why don't you tell us about the last time you were in Spain?' Woodend suggested.

‘Haven't got a clue what you're talking about, old sport.'

‘The last time the old gang was together,' Woodend said patiently. ‘You know who I'm talking about. You, Ham-'n'-Eggs, Sutcliffe, the Frenchman, the German – and Peter Medwin.'

Roberts' mouth fell open in surprise, but only for a second. ‘Don't know any Peter … Peter … What was his other name again?'

‘Medwin,' Woodend repeated.

‘The name still doesn't mean anything to me, I'm afraid. Maybe Holloway knew him.'

‘He
was
Holloway!' Captain López exploded angrily. ‘I am tired of listening to this
mierda
. I will make the same offer to you that I made Mitchell. Confess to the murder, give evidence against the others, and I will do all I can to save your worthless neck.'

‘You don't think we killed Medwin, do you?' Roberts asked, sounding genuinely shocked this time.

‘You mean
Holloway
!' Woodend pointed out.

‘I thought you said his real name was Medwin.'

‘I will count down from five,' López said. ‘Once I have reached One, your chance is gone. Anything you say about your part in the murder after that will be of no interest to me.'

‘Now just a minute!' Roberts protested.

‘Five,' López began. ‘Four … three … two … one …'

Woodend listened with increasing rage and a growing feeling of impotence. If López had been one of his subordinates, he'd have chewed the man's balls off. As it was, he could only sit there as another promising line of interrogation disintegrated into dust.

T
he old man sitting at the table outside the bar wore a grey suit, and a grey felt-brimmed hat. His shirt was open at the neck, and thick white hairs sprouted out from over the top button, like weeds seeking the sun. When Paco Ruiz sat down on the chair opposite him, the old man looked up. The expression on his face said that he was more used to being ignored than to being sought out, and that though he suspected Ruiz had made a mistake and would quickly stand up again, he rather hoped the new arrival would stay.

A waiter arrived and placed two glasses of
vino blanco
on the table. Ruiz looked down at his watch, then flashed the fingers on his right hand three times. The message was clear to the old man – his new companion had just ordered fresh drinks every fifteen minutes. When the waiter nodded and walked away, the old man gave Ruiz an almost toothless grin, to show his appreciation.

‘You certainly must have seen a lot of changes in your time,' Ruiz said, as though the two of them were already deep in the middle of a conversation.

The old man nodded. ‘Many, many changes.'

‘First the war, now this,' Paco said, indicating a group of obviously foreign tourists who were just walking past the bar. ‘Tell me, what do
you
think of all these foreigners?'

‘The women have no modesty,' the old man said. ‘They flaunt their bare arms and bare legs in public. And on the beach, it is even worse. They prance about in their underwear – an underwear so revealing that no decent Spanish woman would ever think of wearing it even
under
her clothes.'

‘And the men?'

‘The men have no sense of pride. When I was younger, I would never have allowed my wife to dress in that manner. And if I had seen another man look at my wife – fully dressed – in the way these
extranjeros
allow other men to look at their women half-naked, I would have killed him.'

Paco nodded. ‘And no court in the land would ever have convicted you,' he said.

‘I wouldn't even have been
arrested
,' the old man said. ‘The Guardia Civil back in those days were just as much
hijos de putas
as they are now, but even they would not have dared to interfere in a matter of honour.'

‘What was life like in the old days?' Paco asked.

‘It was hard, but we were content,' the old man said. ‘We are not blessed with good land around this town, but at least it allowed us to grow a few olives. And then there was the fishing. When we had a good catch, it was a cause for celebration throughout the whole village.'

‘So you had nothing to complain about?'

‘We had
plenty
to complain about. And we did complain. If the bulls were the national sport, then complaining was the local one. But we never expected things to change and, in truth, being men, we did not really
mind
them as they were.' The old man paused. ‘Does what I am saying make sense? Or do you, like my children, think I have gone soft in the head?'

Paco laughed. ‘I can only hope that when I reach your age I can still see things as clearly as you can,' he said. ‘But tell me, what do you think of the young men you see around you nowadays?'

The old man spat reflectively on to the pavement. ‘They want to wear silk next to their bodies,' he said. ‘They sob themselves to sleep at night because they cannot afford to buy a motor car. They are men only because of what they have swinging between their legs – and even in that respect, they put on a pretty poor show.'

‘How was this allowed to happen?' Paco wondered aloud.

‘It is all the fault of the foreigners.'

‘The foreigners?'

‘Of course. Our people look upon them, and want to be like them. I hope I am wrong about this, but I do not think it will be too long before Spanish girls are exposing their flesh just as the foreigners do.'

‘When did all this start – this dilution of Spanish manhood, this erosion of the proper female modesty?' Paco asked.

‘About eight years ago now. When Don Antonio Durán was made the
Alcalde
of Benicelda. It was all
his
idea to encourage the invasion. I still don't know why he did it. It can't have been for the money they would bring, because he was rich even then.'

‘Was he?' Paco asked. ‘I didn't know that. How did he make his money? Did he inherit it?'

The old man gave a hoarse cackle.

‘Inherit it?' he repeated. ‘If you can think that, you must not have known his father. Roberto Durán was so poor he couldn't afford an arsehole to shit through. And as for
Don
Antonio himself …'

‘Yes?'

‘He was a good-for-nothing – an idle wastrel.'

‘Still, the money he has now must have come from somewhere,' Paco reflected.

The old man looked cautiously around him. ‘When the Civil War broke out, we were all on the side of the government in this town,' he said, almost in a whisper. ‘And why shouldn't we have been? We knew that the other side favoured the church and the rich landowners.' He paused, as if suddenly worried that he had said too much. ‘I mean …'

‘I piss on the rich landowners,' Paco said. ‘And I piss on Don Antonio Durán, as well.'

The old man looked reassured. ‘We raised a militia to fight at the front,' he continued. ‘I did not go myself – even then, I was too old for fighting – but many of our young men did. When Antonio Durán disappeared, we thought that was what he had done, too. We said to ourselves that war had finally made a man of him, and that if he ever returned alive, we would give him the hero's welcome that he deserved. How little we knew.'

‘He hadn't gone to join the Republican militia?'

‘Just the opposite. We did not see him again until March 1939, when he entered the town at the head of a
fascist
militia. He summoned us all to the town hall square. I can see him there even now, standing at the top of the steps, as proud as a peacock. Franco's army would reach the town soon, he told us. But until it did, he would be in control, and his decrees would have the force of law. I wanted to scream that he was a traitor to the Republic. I wanted to pull him off those steps and beat him within an inch of his life. And I was not alone in that. Yet I did nothing – and neither did anybody else.'

‘There was nothing you could do,' Paco said sympathetically.

‘True,' the old man agreed. ‘There was nothing we
could
do. He knew our struggle was over, and so did we. Those units of the Republican Army which had not already surrendered had fled. Franco had won. He is
still
winning.'

‘So you think that Durán made his money by plundering the town?' Paco asked.

The old man cackled again.

‘There was nothing
to
plunder,' he said. ‘We had been through nearly three years of war. Anything of value we had ever owned had been sold or melted down to support the war effort.'

‘Then where do you think he …?'

‘He must have marched through other towns before he got here – towns which, perhaps, had more that was worth looting. I think that he and his militiamen stole from them.'

A new group of visitors walked past the café. The women, as the old man had already pointed out, were exposing more flesh than even a Spanish prostitute would be willing to put on public display. The men accompanying them were wearing shorts that no one but a
maricón
– and then only in the safety of a secret, forbidden homosexual club – would ever dare to show himself in.

It was a strange and exotic world which was now being revealed to the Spanish people, Paco thought – and it must be even stranger for the old man than it was for him.

‘But for the tourists, you might have gone to your grave without even seeing a foreigner,' he said.

‘You are wrong there,' the old man told him. ‘Even without these new arrivals, I would still have seen the others.'

‘The others?' Paco repeated. ‘What others?'

‘The ones who came before.'

‘I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.'

The old man sighed, as if he had just realized that he was talking to an imbecile.

‘The men with guns,' he said, speaking so slowly and carefully that even his dull-witted drinking companion should be able to understand. ‘The ones who arrived in the town in March 1939, shortly after Antonio Durán had taken over.'

T
he Miners' Welfare and Social Club was located on the edge of the village, framed by a slag heap on one side and the pit winding gear on the other. When Rutter and Paniatowski arrived, it was already full of pit men swilling back pints of best bitter in a futile effort to wash the taste of thick black coal dust from their throats.

The bar steward saw the two police officers the moment they entered the door, and made a bee-line for them.

‘This is a members-only club,' he said in a voice which indicated that he felt under no obligation to be welcoming to strangers. ‘An' even if it wasn't, we still wouldn't serve ladies in the bar.'

Paniatowski smiled sweetly at him. ‘Lucky for me I'm not a lady then, isn't it?' she asked, producing her warrant card.

The steward instinctively glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘We're well within our rights to be servin' alcohol at this time of day,' he said, having satisfied himself that – on this occasion at least – they really were.

‘We're not here looking for trouble,' Rutter assured him. ‘We just want to talk to one of your members – a man called Jim Stoddard.'

The bar steward hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘He's over there – at the far end of the bar.'

Rutter and Paniatowski strode over to where the miner was standing. ‘Could we have a quick word, Mr Stoddard?' Rutter asked.

Stoddard turned slowly round towards them. His face was not old, Paniatowski thought, but it was certainly battered. His nose was slightly off kilter, as it had once been broken. A broad blue scar ran above his right eyebrow. And though his skin was pink from a recent vigorous scrubbing, there was still a hint of the all-pervasive dust in his wrinkles.

‘What can I do for you?' he asked.

‘We're police officers,' Rutter said.

‘Well, I know that,' Stoddard said. ‘It's stamped all over you. An' even if it wasn't, my hearing's not quite so gone that I couldn't hear you talkin' to the bar steward. So what do you want? To ask me about Pete Medwin?'

‘That's right.'

Stoddard nodded thoughtfully. ‘A great loss,' he said, and there was an intensity to his voice which gave new meaning to the old platitude.

‘You used to be his best friend, didn't you?' Rutter asked.

‘I still
am
his best friend – or, at least, I was until he got himself killed,' Stoddard said, with unexpected ferocity. ‘Whatever led you to think that I wouldn't be?'

‘Well, I suppose …' Rutter began.

‘Did you think that I'd have had to say goodbye to our friendship when he went up in the world? That once he'd started wearin' a suit an' tie to work, he'd forget all his old mates?'

‘No, not that
exactly
—' Rutter continued, digging himself further into the hole.

‘Of course that's what we thought,' Paniatowski interrupted. ‘Why wouldn't we? There's not one man in a hundred who can resist the temptation to turn his back on his roots once he's started to get on in life. If Pete Medwin was different, why don't you tell us about it?'

An admiring smile spread across Stoddard's lips. ‘You speak your mind, don't you, lass,' he said.

‘I've found it's the best way to get other people to speak theirs,' Paniatowski replied. ‘Why don't you tell me about the Pete Medwin
you
knew?'