The Butcher Beyond (30 page)

‘Oh that,' Paco said offhandedly. ‘As I told you, the frustrations had been building up, and three or four days before I met you I had finally decided that, since nothing else seemed to work, I would have to kill Durán myself. I will always be grateful to Roberts for saving me the trouble.'

Pablo Vasquez felt uneasy – as he always did whenever Captain López paid him a visit.

‘A drink, Captain?' he asked.

‘Do you have a good brandy?'

‘The best. Lepanto. I have been saving it for you.'

Another man would say he was honoured. López merely grunted his assent. Vasquez went over to the cupboard and poured a generous ration of the precious brandy into a glass.

‘You're not drinking yourself?' López asked.

‘I have some delicate work to do today, my Captain. I will need a steady hand.'

‘I may soon have some more work for you myself,' López said.

He sounds as if he thinks he's doing me a favour, Vasquez thought. He treats me as if I were no more than a cobbler or a shirt-maker.

And suddenly, he felt a tiny flame of rebellion flaring up inside him.

He was always complimenting López – why didn't López, for once, return the compliment? Would it hurt if, occasionally, the Captain said something nice to him?

‘I see myself as an artist, and you as my patron,' Vasquez said. ‘You do think of me as an artist, do you not, my Captain?'

The words came out almost as a challenge. López said nothing, and for a moment Vasquez worried that he had gone too far.

Then the Captain chuckled. ‘You are indeed an artist,' he said, thinking of the stunningly convincing title deeds and stock certificates that Vasquez had produced for him in the past. ‘A great one, in your own grubby way. For while most other artists have to wait until they are dead before their work becomes valuable, yours is like money the moment the ink is dry.'

Vasquez let out a silent sigh of relief, and immediately fell back into his familiar role of stroking the Captain's ego. ‘This last scheme of yours was brilliant,' he said. ‘Perhaps the most brilliant of all your schemes.'

‘It was not bad,' López said. ‘I particularly liked my idea of using the word Gee-Gee on the document. That could almost be called a master stroke.'

‘Yes, indeed,' Vasquez said enthusiastically.

López smiled at him, in the way a snake might have smiled if it had had teeth. ‘I was not aware that you knew the word,' he said.

He's paying me back, Vasquez thought in a panic. I challenged him, and now he's paying me back by making me squirm.

‘I … I don't know what it means,' he said. ‘But you said it was brilliant, and your assurance is good enough for me.'

‘It is what the English gambler called horses,' López said. ‘Now do you understand?'

Vasquez nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes. It was very clever. But not as clever as you knowing who the killer was.'

López frowned again.

What have I done wrong
now
? Vasquez wondered.

‘Do you know what “irony” means?' the Captain asked.

Of course I know the meaning, Vasquez thought. What am I, an ignorant peasant?

‘No, my Captain, it is not a word that I have ever come across,' he said aloud.

The ‘admission' brought a return of López's good humour.

‘I did not know who had killed our beloved
Alcalde
, nor had I any particular interest in finding out,' he said. ‘Yet I understood well enough that for my career to prosper,
someone
had to be arrested. Under normal circumstances, I could have arrested anyone I chose to, because the policeman's skill comes not in making the arrest but in extracting the confession. But these were
not
normal circumstances. The English detective was involved, and so there would need to be at least
some
evidence. And who was likely to find that evidence, and get the credit for solving the case? Why, the English detective! Unless, of course, I did not have to
find
the evidence but merely
create
it. Which is exactly what I decided to do. My original intention was to frame the Frenchman for the murders, but because, as I told you, I am a far-sighted man, I arranged to have a back-up plan in case that didn't work. That's where you came in.'

‘I know, my Captain.'

But López, enchanted by the sound of his own voice, was not listening. ‘I told you to forge a document which would suggest that Durán had sent money to Roberts as a payment for Roberts's betrayal of his own comrades. You can imagine how much I laughed inwardly when that English policeman took my bait and concluded that Roberts was the murderer. What a fool I'd made of him, I thought to myself.'

‘But …'

‘But this is where the irony comes in, my dim friend. Because the story I invented turned out to be the
truth
! Durán
had
sent Roberts money, and Roberts
did
kill Durán. Without ever intending to, I framed the man who was actually guilty! So perhaps I am not such a bad detective after all.'