The Butcher Beyond

by Sally Spencer

  ‘As I said, we won’t know until we’ve heard it.’

  ‘Peter comes – came – from a mining family. His father was a miner, and so was his grandfather. When they were old enough, both Peter and his two brothers followed the family tradition, and went down the pit.’

  ‘But he didn’t stay down the pit.’

  Jessica Medwin smiled again, this time with a kind of sad pride. ‘No, he didn’t. He started going to evening classes as soon as he could. He wanted to better himself, you see.’

  ‘So by the time you met him, he wasn’t actually a miner any more,’ Rutter said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Jessica Medwin asked, an abrasive note entering her voice.

  Rutter looked confused. ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Is it that you can’t imagine someone like me ever falling for a man who spent half his life covered with coal dust?’

  ‘No, I … I didn’t mean to suggest—’

  ‘Of course you did,’ Jessica interrupted. ‘That’s exactly what you meant to suggest.’ Her mouth suddenly lost some of its tightness. ‘But don’t feel too guilty about it,’ she continued, softening a little. ‘You’re not the first person to see things in that way – not by a long chalk. All my friends were horrified when I started walking out with Peter. “You’re a manager’s secretary,” they reminded me. “You’ve got a good job. You shouldn’t be associating with a grubby little miner.” I didn’t argue with them. Why should I have? If they couldn’t see what I saw in Peter, then there was really very little point in continuing our friendships any more.’

  ‘What did you see in him?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘People thought he was timid. But he wasn’t. He was gentle. And strong! God, he was strong. I came from a background in which compromise and hypocrisy were the norm. Getting on with people – being acceptable – was all that mattered to most of the people I knew. Peter wasn’t like that at all. If he believed in something, there was no power in the world that could have talked him out of doing what he thought was right.’

  ‘Why was he in Spain?’ Rutter asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t he give you an explanation before he left?’

  ‘No. He didn’t even say he was going to Spain.’

  ‘Then what did he say?’

  ‘He said there was something important he had to do, and he would only be away for a few days.’

  ‘And you accepted that?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have? If it was important to him, I knew he had to do it. And if he didn’t want to tell me what it was he was doing, or where he was going to do it, that was fine with me. I trusted him. I always have, and I always will. Whatever his reason for being there, it was a good reason.’

  ‘Had he been to Spain before?’ Rutter asked. ‘Perhaps you’d taken a holiday there together.’

  ‘I used to travel to the Continent quite a lot, with my family. But I haven’t been abroad since we got married. Neither of us have.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘Peter didn’t want to travel. He seemed to have an aversion to it.’ Jessica Medwin frowned. ‘Which was strange – in a way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He had no prejudices of any kind. He was the first Coal Board manager to employ coloured people in his mine. Some of his superiors really didn’t like that at all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s too much prejudice even now – God knows – but if you think back, you’ll remember there was even more in the fifties. Some people simply didn’t want to employ coloured folk. But my Peter was having none of that. He said a man shouldn’t be judged by the colour of his skin – especially since the mine turned everybody black anyway.’ Jessica Medwin paused. ‘That was just his little joke.’

  ‘We understand,’ Monika Paniatowski said.

  ‘He had to fight damned hard to get his own way on that particular issue. In the end, he even threatened to resign. And he meant it, you know! He really would have gone through with it, at whatever the cost to himself. And the coloured people weren’t the only ones he went out of his way to help. He was the same with the Eastern Europeans – the Poles and the Romanians. He said they’d had quite enough of a tough time already, and it was his duty to help them. Yet when it came to the question of holidays abroad, he was adamant. Said he didn’t trust foreigners. I could never quite understand that. But there you are, that’s how he felt, and I wasn’t going to argue with him.’

  ‘We’d like to talk to other people who knew him,’ Monika Paniatowski said. ‘You wouldn’t mind if we did that, would you?’

  ‘Why should I mind? You’re not going to find out anything unpleasant about him, because there’s nothing unpleasant for you to find. Peter’s life was an open book.’

  Except that nobody – not even you – has the slightest idea what he was doing on the Costa Blanca, Paniatowski thought.

  Twelve

  If this had been an English police station rather than a Guardia Civil barracks, Woodend thought, there would have been a two-way mirror through which to look at the men in the next room. As it was, he found himself peering – like a voyeur – through a grille in the party wall.

  There were five men in all, sitting side-by-side on an uncomfortably narrow bench. But though their shoulders were – of necessity – touching, they didn’t speak. In fact, they didn’t even look at each other.

  ‘Who are they?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘You do not recognize any of them?’ Captain López asked, a slight smile playing on his lips as if Woodend’s ignorance amused him.

  ‘I’ve seen the Yank before,’ the Chief Inspector admitted. ‘He was on the church square on the night of the murder. But the other four are complete strangers to me.’

  ‘Then allow me to enlighten you,’ López said, the supercilious smile still lingering. ‘The fat man next to the American is a German by the name of Schneider. The one with the small moustache is a Frenchman called Dupont. The last two are both English. The tall one with grey hair is Sutcliffe, the shorter one with the thin face is Roberts.’

  ‘An’ they’re here because they’re the ones who had the meetin’ on the night Medwin was murdered?’

  ‘Partly. But there is much more to it than that.’

  You’re really goin’ to make me work hard for whatever titbits of information you feed me, aren’t you, you cocky young bugger? Woodend thought.

  But aloud, all he said was, ‘Would you care to be a little more explicit?’

  ‘Of course,’ López agreed. ‘Despite the fact they are from different countries, they seem to have a great deal in common.’

  Woodend waited for López to say more, and when it became obvious the Spaniard was not about to, he sighed heavily and said, ‘For example?’

  ‘They are all roughly of the same age.’

  ‘I can see that for myself.’

  ‘They all arrived here within the last three days.’

  ‘A lot of people must have done that.’

  ‘They are all travelling alone.’

  ‘Yes, that is unusual.’

  ‘And though they were all at first staying in different hotels, last night Schneider, Sutcliffe, Roberts and Dupont all moved out of their own hotels and into the one at which Mitchell had been staying.’

  ‘So what does that prove?’

  ‘That they were all in it together.’

  ‘In what, together?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ López admitted. ‘But I have always found interrogation an excellent way of finding out what I do not already know.’

  Close to, Mitchell looked rough, Woodend decided. He must once have been a vigorous, healthy man – the sort who thought nothing of a thirty-mile hike – but now he seemed to be almost melting away as he sat there.

  ‘Tell us about Mr Medwin,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Who?’ the American asked. The tone was just about perfect, but the rapid blinking of his eyes gave him away.

  ‘Medw
in,’ Woodend repeated. ‘The man who was killed.’

  ‘I thought his name was Holloway.’

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘I didn’t know him at all, in any real sense of the word. I met him – briefly – on the night he died.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘In a bar somewhere.’

  ‘Was that before or after your meeting on the church square?’

  ‘We never met on the church square.’

  ‘Of course you did. You didn’t look at each other, but you slipped a note into his hand as you walked past him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I saw you with my own eyes, for God’s sake!’

  ‘You’re mistaken.’

  ‘Tell me about the meeting you’re willing to admit that you had with him.’

  ‘Like I said, we met in a bar.’

  ‘Just the two of you?’

  ‘No, there were some other guys there.’

  ‘The same “guys” who are in the room next door?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’

  Mitchell coughed. It was a heavy cough – one which, from the pained expression on his face, seemed to be tearing his insides up.

  ‘To … to tell you the truth, I can’t remember,’ he gasped. ‘I was pretty drunk at the time.’

  No, you weren’t, Woodend thought. The state your body’s in, it couldn’t tolerate being ‘pretty drunk’.

  ‘You can’t remember who any of the other men were, yet you remember Medwin was there,’ Woodend said. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘Who knows what tricks the brain plays on you when you’ve drowned it in booze? Maybe I remember him because he got himself killed shortly after we’d split up?’

  ‘What brought you all together in the first place?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘Pure chance. We were all strangers in a strange place. It seemed kinda natural for us to decide to have a drink together.’

  ‘Why did the others all move into the same hotel as you? Was it for mutual protection?’

  ‘Mutual protection? From what?’

  ‘From whoever killed Medwin.’

  ‘What has his murder got to do with any of us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘On the question of hotels, I remember now that we talked about them when we met in the bar that night. The other guys said they were not happy with their hotels, and I said that mine was pretty good. I didn’t know that they’d checked into mine, but I can certainly understand why they might have done.’

  ‘So you remember discussing hotels?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you don’t remember the names and faces of the people you were discussing hotels with?’

  ‘I plead the Fifth,’ Mitchell said. ‘The Fifth of bourbon.’ He laughed at his own joke, and the laugh quickly turned into another attack of coughing. ‘Or maybe it was the Fifth of Spanish brandy,’ he continued, when he could speak again. ‘I really don’t remember.’

  ‘When was the last time you were in Spain?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I’ve never been to Spain before.’

  ‘Yet the waiter from the bar where you were drinking is willing to swear that you were speaking to each other in Spanish.’

  ‘He’s mistaken.’

  ‘It seems that a lot of people are mistaken. I’m mistaken about the note I saw you pass to Medwin, the waiter from the bar’s mistaken about the language you spoke, and probably—’

  ‘People do make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect.’

  Mitchell was finding it all an effort, Woodend thought. And not just a mental effort. All his brain power should have been focused on the interrogation, but it couldn’t be – because he was using a large part of it to combat the physical pain he was experiencing.

  ‘Medwin was an old friend of yours, an’ now he’s dead,’ the Chief Inspector said. ‘Don’t you want to help us catch his murderer?’

  ‘I’ve said nothing at all to lead you to believe he was any kind of friend.’ Mitchell winced as he fought back a fresh onslaught of pain. ‘And as for his killer, we’ll …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You were just about to say that you’ll deal with the killer yourselves, weren’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You may think you know who the killer is,’ Woodend said. ‘And perhaps you do. But can you ever be sure? Say you did take justice into your own hands, an’ killed the wrong man. You’d never even know it, would you? An’ all the time, the real murderer would be laughin’ up his sleeve at you, Mr Mitchell. Laughin’ at you – and laughin’ at the memory of your friend. You don’t want that. Nobody would. So why don’t you help us? We’re the professionals. We’ll make certain the right man is brought to book.’

  He was getting somewhere! Woodend thought. True, he was groping in the dark. True, too, he was making big assumptions, and leaping across wide speculative gaps. But he was still getting somewhere. The look of indecision on Mitchell’s face was all the proof of that he needed.

  And then, just as it looked as if real progress was about to be made, Captain López chose to break the spell.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think, Mr Mitchell?’ the Guardia Civil Captain asked aggressively.

  Mitchell shrugged. And in that shrug there was clear evidence of relief; relief that something had happened to make him back away from a course of action he hadn’t wanted to take – but had suspected that he well might; relief that López had saved him from himself!

  ‘I couldn’t care less whether you tell me what you think or whether you don’t,’ he told the Captain.

  ‘I think that the six of you were all part of a gang, here to commit a serious crime,’ López said. ‘I do not know the exact nature of the crime – maybe you are smugglers or bank robbers, or perhaps gunrunners – but the exact details do not matter.’

  ‘Preposterous!’ Mitchell replied.

  He wasn’t putting on an act, Woodend thought. He had no need to. Because it was preposterous!

  Whatever Medwin had been planning to do in Spain, it wasn’t to rob a bank or run guns. Medwin had been a National Coal Board regional manager, a man with no need to turn to crime – and López knew that as well as he did.

  ‘So we’re international criminals now, are we?’ Mitchell asked, unconcernedly. ‘And I suppose Medwin was our leader?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ López agreed. ‘Or perhaps not. What is important is that two nights ago you had an argument with him. Maybe Medwin wanted a bigger share of the money. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. But whatever caused the quarrel, the other five decided he had to die.’

  ‘Pure fantasy!’ Mitchell said.

  ‘Who pushed him off that balcony, Mr Mitchell?’ López demanded. ‘Was it you? The German? The Frenchman?’

  ‘This is insane!’

  ‘My English colleague here may be fooled by your protests of innocence, but I am not,’ López warned him. ‘You should remember, Señor Mitchell, that you are not in the United States of America now. Here, we do not need one quarter of the evidence to convict that would be necessary in your own country. You will all be found guilty of the murder. Make no mistake about that. And there is no Supreme Court to slow matters up. Once the verdict is given, execution quickly follows.’ The Captain paused for a moment. ‘But not all of you have to die. If one of you were to give evidence against the others, he would be spared and would probably be released after only a few years in prison. And one of you will give evidence, I am certain of that. So why shouldn’t it be you? Why should you choose to be executed, when you have the power to save yourself?’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ Mitchell demanded.

  ‘We are the ones who ask the questions here,’ López snapped.

  ‘Am I?’ Mitchell asked, looking directly at Woodend.

  ‘No,’ Woodend said. ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘So I can leave any
time I wish to?’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ Woodend agreed. He turned to López. ‘That’s correct, isn’t it?’

  ‘If he were a Spaniard …’ the Captain said.

  ‘But I’m not a Spaniard,’ Mitchell countered. ‘I’m an American citizen, and I demand that my rights as such be respected. Am I to be allowed to leave, or am I to report to my consul later that I was held here against my will?’

  López looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘An innocent man would not wish to leave,’ he said. ‘An innocent man would have the strong desire to stay and help us all he could.’

  ‘But you don’t think I am innocent,’ Mitchell said. ‘That’s the whole point. You think I’m guilty, and nothing I say is going to change your mind. Under those circumstances, I can see nothing to be gained from remaining in these barracks any longer than I have to. Which means that I would like to leave now.’

  Throughout the whole interrogation two privates had been standing at the door, as still as statues. Now López turned to one of them and spat out a few words in very rapid Spanish.

  ‘What did you say?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘He said I was to be shown out through the back door, so the others wouldn’t see me go,’ Mitchell told him.

  And immediately the words were out of his mouth, he looked as if he would gladly have bitten off his own tongue.

  ‘You told me you didn’t speak Spanish,’ Woodend reminded him.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Mitchell replied, making what – under the circumstances – was a very quick recovery. ‘All I actually said was that we weren’t speaking Spanish at the table that night.’

  ‘You also said this was your first visit to Spain.’

  ‘And so it is.’

  ‘Then why is your Spanish so good?’

  ‘You may not know this, Chief Inspector, but there is a large country called Mexico which borders my own. They speak Spanish there, and that is where I learned mine.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘I don’t care what you believe,’ Mitchell replied.

  Woodend waited until the first constable had escorted Mitchell from the room before asking López if he would dismiss the second one as well.