The Butcher Beyond

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I wanted,’ Mitchell said impatiently. ‘But that’s not important now.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  ‘The way the others divided up.’

  ‘The two Englishmen shared one room, an’ the Frenchman an’ the German shared the other. An’ that’s about it, isn’t it?’

  ‘The two Englishmen shared one room,’ Mitchell said, speaking in a croak, ‘and the two former lovers shared the other!’

  ‘Funny you should come up with that,’ Woodend said, ‘because, as it happens, I did ask them if they had a thing for each other.’

  ‘Then you could see for yourself that they were very special to each other!’

  ‘No. I couldn’t see anythin’ of the sort. The only reason I asked the question was to throw them off balance. I didn’t believe it myself, an’ I wasn’t the least surprised when they denied it.’

  ‘If they denied it, they were lying.’

  Woodend shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that simply won’t wash,’ he said.

  But he was starting to think that maybe it would. They made an odd couple – there was no doubt about that – but he’d seen odder couples in his time.

  And there was more! Schneider had denied they were homosexuals, but had cast aspersions on Sant’s heterosexual virility. And Sant had done the same thing with regard to Schneider’s.

  There was a symmetry about it which he should have noticed before – but hadn’t. It was almost as if they’d rehearsed it – almost as if they’d discussed, beforehand, what would be the best kind of smokescreen to throw up.

  ‘You’re convinced now, aren’t you?’ Mitchell said.

  ‘Not entirely. If it was true, why didn’t they come clean about it when I asked them?’

  ‘Because most people in the societies they come from consider it unclean. Schneider is married, and does have children. Sant says he has mistresses, and I believe him. They’ve both changed over the years – but whatever happens, first love is the hardest of all loves to destroy.’

  ‘Can I get confirmation from the others on this?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘No. They don’t know. If I hadn’t caught them together one night – out on the sierra, during the Ebro Campaign – I wouldn’t have known about it myself.’

  ‘An’ you never told anybody else about it?’

  ‘Not a soul. It was a beautiful thing they had together, you see, but most people wouldn’t have understood. Do you understand?’

  ‘Well, I’m certainly not goin’ to condemn it,’ Woodend said, and the moment the words were out of his mouth he realized that he believed everything Mitchell had told him.

  ‘I’d have taken their secret with me to the grave,’ the American said. ‘But I can’t – not if I’m to save Sant.’

  ‘You’re sure they still felt the same way about each other that they used to?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I’m convinced of it,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’ve been watching them over the last few days. They were aching to touch one another, but they didn’t dare while the others were there. Then they were given a heaven-sent opportunity. They had the chance, on grounds of security, to spend the night together. Do you understand what that meant to them?’

  ‘I’ve a pretty good idea, but I’d still rather hear it from you.’

  ‘Even their hatred of Durán would not have got them out of their room that night,’ Mitchell said. ‘They had this one chance to relive their old passion. They wouldn’t have sacrificed that for anything.’

  As Woodend stepped out of the main hospital door, he saw Paco Ruiz’s little car parked on the other side of the road. It shouldn’t have surprised him, he thought. Nothing Paco did should ever surprise him.

  He walked across the road and came to a halt beside the Seat.

  ‘How is Joan?’ Paco Ruiz asked, through the open window.

  ‘She’s goin’ to have to be careful, but it looks like she’ll be all right,’ Woodend said.

  Paco nodded his head, slowly and seriously. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘Excellent!’ Then he took a deep breath. ‘Sant didn’t do it,’ he continued, the words gushing from his mouth like water from a burst dam.

  ‘I know he didn’t do it,’ Woodend replied.

  Thirty-Six

  It was dark by the time they reached the Guardia Civil barracks, and as the double doors closed behind Paco’s small car, sealing it into the courtyard, Woodend couldn’t help wondering if he’d done the right thing.

  The lieutenant who spoke English – and had pretended to be a private – approached them as they climbed out of the Seat.

  ‘Captain López will see you,’ he said, addressing the remark to Woodend, ‘but you –’ turning to Paco – ‘must remain here.’

  ‘Open the gates again, will you, lad,’ Woodend said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If your Captain doesn’t want to see both of us, then he gets to see neither of us.’

  The lieutenant flushed. ‘I think you forget where you are.’

  ‘An’ I think you forget who I am,’ Woodend countered. ‘You might push your own countrymen around – you shouldn’t, but you might – but don’t try the same thing with me, laddie. Because Her Britannic Majesty requests an’ requires that her subjects be allowed to pass without hinder. She doesn’t like it when her subjects are bossed about by foreigners, you see – especially when the subject in question happens to be a senior police officer.’

  The lieutenant hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Wait here,’ and disappeared into the building.

  ‘That was a very pretty little speech you just made,’ Paco Ruiz said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Was it rehearsed?’

  ‘It was spoken straight from the heart of a true Englishman born and bred, you cheeky Dago bastard,’ Woodend said.

  ‘In other words, it was rehearsed.’

  Woodend chuckled. ‘It was more like an improvisation on a theme,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be useful to have a few well-chosen words to hand, so I was composin’ them on the way over here.’

  The lieutenant returned. ‘My Captain will see you both,’ he said, looking at Woodend with loathing.

  Captain López was sitting at his desk. His feet – clad in highly polished jackboots – were resting on an open drawer of his filing cabinet, and he made no move to get up when Woodend and Ruiz were shown into the room. Woodend was unimpressed. His boss back in England played tricks like that and – if anything – did them slightly better.

  ‘So what do we have here?’ Captain López asked. ‘Who has come to see me in the dead of night? Why, it is none other than the Laurel and Hardy of criminal investigation.’

  ‘Now that is what you call a carefully rehearsed line,’ Woodend said, in an aside to Ruiz.

  ‘What are you saying?’ López demanded.

  ‘Only that you’re not even half as relaxed as you’re tryin’ to look an’ sound. Because if you were, you’d never have agreed to see us.’

  ‘Why should I not be relaxed?’ López asked, almost lazily. ‘I have my murderer under lock and key.’

  ‘You certainly have somebody under lock an’ key,’ Woodend admitted. ‘Unfortunately, it’s the wrong somebody. You couldn’t wait for me to find the real murderer, could you, Captain? However hard you tried, you couldn’t resist tamperin’ with the evidence.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ López said. ‘Sant is an expert knife thrower—’

  ‘Was an expert knife thrower,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘By the time he comes to trial, he’ll have sworn statements from half a dozen French Foreign Legion doctors. An’ they’ll all be prepared to stake their professional reputations on their opinion that he couldn’t have raised the knife high enough to throw it.’

  López frowned. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘If that is true, then I clearly have the wrong man.’

  ‘An’ the wrong knife,’ Woodend said.

  ‘How can it be the wrong knife?’
<
br />   ‘Because it’s Sant’s knife.’

  ‘I don’t understand. If Sant is not the killer, then the knife cannot belong to him.’

  ‘But it does,’ Woodend insisted. ‘He’s had it for nearly thirty years, an’ though he hasn’t been able to throw it since the ambush on the beach, he always carries it around with him as a good luck charm.’

  ‘Then the real killer stole the knife, and used it for the murder,’ López suggested.

  ‘Wrong again,’ Woodend told him. ‘The knife could only have been used in the murder if it had been dropped into the rose garden at the time of the murder. After all, it’s not likely that the killer would have risked comin’ back to the scene of the crime the next day, now is it?’

  ‘The knife was dropped in the rose garden at the time of the murder,’ López said.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It was still in Sant’s room the next mornin’. The maid saw it when she was cleanin’. But later, after you’d been to the room yourself, it was gone. An’ later still, it appeared in the rose garden. It’s like I first thought – it was planted there. An’ you’re the one who planted it.’

  ‘What do you want?’ López asked.

  ‘Want?’ Woodend repeated innocently.

  ‘If your only aim had been to get Sant released, you would never have brought up the problem with the knife. But you did bring it up – and that can only have been to gain leverage over me. So I ask you again, Señor Woodend, what is it that you want?’

  ‘Well, what Señor Ruiz here would like is for you to prove, to his satisfaction, that you didn’t kill the Alcalde yourself,’ Woodend said.

  ‘What!’ López exploded.

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘You believe that I killed the Alcalde?’

  No, Woodend thought. No, I don’t. I was never really convinced by Paco’s argument, an’ now I’ve seen the look on your face I’m sure I’m right – because nobody’s that good an actor.

  ‘I did not kill Durán,’ López continued. ‘I may have arrested the wrong man, but I am still convinced that one of the brigadistas is the murderer.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Whichever one of them it was who betrayed the others.’

  ‘What are you talkin’ about?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘You must know the story as well as I do, by now. Two hours before the brigadistas arrived, Durán’s militia moved the fishermen out of their shacks and began to dig pits for their machine guns in the sand. And why did they do that? Because they knew for a fact that the brigadistas were coming. Because somebody had betrayed them.’

  ‘But the traitor could have been anybody,’ Woodend said. ‘One of the fishermen might have sold them out. Or one of the villagers who was providin’ them with food. That seems a lot more likely an explanation to me than that one of the brigadistas did it.’

  ‘That is what I would have thought, too, until I found a very interesting document among Durán’s personal papers.’

  ‘A document!’ Woodend sneered. ‘How convenient for you that a document should turn up – just at the right moment to implicate one of the brigadistas in even more dirty dealin’s. An’ exactly what is this document of yours? A scrap of paper in a handwritin’ which could be Durán’s – if you looked at it in the right light? A scribbled note in which he confesses that he had an English spy workin’ for him?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ López said, with a confidence which almost convinced Woodend that he really did have something of value.

  ‘I don’t suppose we could see this document of yours, could we?’ the Chief Inspector asked sceptically.

  ‘But, of course,’ López replied. ‘As long as you promise that in return for my showing it to you, you will abandon this crazy idea of yours that I was the one who planted the knife in the rose garden.’

  ‘You don’t really expect me to buy a pig in a poke like that, do you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I don’t understand the expression.’

  ‘You don’t really expect me to agree to pay your price before I see if what you have is worth it?’

  ‘Perhaps not. But once you have seen it, I will have lost all bargaining power.’

  It seemed as if they had reached an impasse. Woodend chewed the problem over in his mind for a second.

  ‘If what you’ve got is real proof that there was a spy in the brigadistas’ camp, I’ll forget all about how the knife found its way into the rose garden,’ he said. ‘You have my word on that.’

  López nodded.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. He swung his feet off the filing cabinet, reached into the drawer, produced a yellowed piece of stiff paper, and held it across the desk for Woodend to take. ‘Here is all the proof you need.’

  Woodend looked at the document. It was a printed form, with some of the spaces on it filled in with typewriting. ‘Tell me what this means,’ he said, passing it to Paco Ruiz.

  As Ruiz examined the document, the frown on his forehead grew deeper and deeper. ‘It is a bank transfer form,’ he said finally.

  ‘Is it genuine?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I am not an expert on forgery, but it looks real enough to me.’

  Then it probably was, Woodend thought. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘It is dated late 1939. It talks about a lot of other attached documents, because, at the time, it was very difficult to transfer money out of the country without a great many formalities being gone through.’

  ‘So the money left the country,’ Woodend said impatiently. ‘An’ where was it sent to?’

  ‘To London. To a company called Gee-Gee Trading Ltd.’

  ‘Was it a lot of money?’

  ‘A very large amount. Almost a fortune.’

  And there was no doubt how the money had been raised, was there? Woodend thought. It had come from the sale of what had been in those boxes that Durán had killed upwards of forty men to get his hands on. It was blood money!

  He was beginning to see things clearly for the first time. Medwin hadn’t been killed by Durán’s men at all. He had been killed by the same person who had killed Durán himself. And the key to both those murders lay in a deal which had been struck up early in 1939.

  Bits of previous conversations, which he had stored away in his mind, now began to fit together. He was almost sure that he knew who the murderer was. He just needed one more thing to confirm it.

  ‘I want the photographs,’ he told López.

  ‘Which photographs?’

  ‘Which photographs do you bloody well think? The ones of the brigadista camp! The ones the murderer took!’

  Thirty-Seven

  Roberts was sitting alone at the table in the square which Woodend and Ruiz had been using since the investigation began. He did not look surprised when the other two men sat down beside him. In fact, he might almost have been expecting it.

  ‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ he asked.

  ‘We think so,’ Woodend replied. ‘You see, we’re looking for what my friend Paco here calls “the butcher beyond”.’

  ‘Very cryptic,’ Roberts said. ‘And what does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means that we’re not lookin’ for the man who killed your comrades – that was Durán, an’ he’s dead himself now – but we are lookin’ for the man who made it possible for the killings to take place, an’ he’s—’

  ‘The butcher beyond,’ Roberts said. ‘I see. Very clever. But what I still don’t understand is why you’d want to talk to me about it.’

  ‘The first time I interviewed you, you referred to Mitchell as “Ham-’n’-Eggs”,’ Woodend said. ‘Back then, I thought it was a slip of the tongue – a very helpful slip of the tongue from our point of view. But it was no such thing, was it?’

  Roberts smiled. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, an’ if I’d known you better then, I’d have realized it immediately. You never raise the stakes at the poker table without havin’ at least some idea of how your opponent’s goin’ to react to it. You neve
r bet on a horse unless you think you know somethin’ that’s goin’ to give you the edge. A man like you doesn’t say anythin’ – doesn’t do anythin’ – before he’s thought out all the consequences first.’

  ‘I’m flattered you have such a high opinion of me,’ Roberts said. ‘But what, pray tell, was the point in revealing Mitchell’s nickname to you?’

  ‘It was the most indirect way you could come up with to let me know that you’d all been mates for a long time. An’ there was a bonus in doin’ it that way, because, since it involved a cravin’ for some pretty ordinary food, you were also tellin’ me that you’d been together through some pretty hard times. It was a signpost, if you like, pointin’ me towards the fact that you’d all been brigadistas.’

  ‘And why would I have wanted to do that?’

  ‘Because brigadistas are still not welcome in Spain. Once the authorities had found out what you were, you’d have been out of here on the next plane out. That would have meant that nobody would have got the chance to talk to Durán.’

  ‘What you meant to say was “Nobody would have got the chance to kill Durán”.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. You didn’t mind whether he lived or died. But if your mates were determined to kill him, you were very concerned that he shouldn’t say anythin’ before he died.’

  ‘We think that one of the brigadistas who isn’t here – one who was too ill or too old to come back with you – is a very rich man,’ Paco said.

  ‘Interesting,’ Roberts replied. ‘And what led you to that conclusion?’

  ‘It’s the only supposition which fits the facts,’ Woodend told him. ‘The traitor was faced with two choices, you see. He could come back to Spain and try to bury the truth. Or he could disappear before the truth came out.’

  ‘Disappearing would have been the easier option,’ Paco Ruiz said.

  ‘It would indeed,’ Woodend agreed. ‘The traitor didn’t have to stay in England. There’s lots of places in Europe for a feller to hide, if he knows his way around. And if he didn’t fancy Europe, he could go the States – or even South America. An’ what would be the chances his old comrades could track him down? Virtually nil!’