The Butcher Beyond

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Unless one of his old comrades was rich,’ Paco said.

  ‘A rich man, you see, could hire the best private investigators that money could buy – a whole team of them, if needs be. They’d keep lookin’ and lookin’, and eventually they would find the traitor. An’ once they’d done that, of course, he was a dead man.’

  ‘So burying the truth was not just one option,’ Paco said. ‘It was the only option.’

  ‘From what you’ve said, I take it you think that I was the traitor,’ Roberts said.

  ‘We know you were the traitor,’ Woodend said. ‘The photographs prove that.’

  ‘What photographs?’

  ‘I can pick out everybody else on them,’ Woodend said, ignoring Roberts’s claim to ignorance. ‘Medwin, Sutcliffe, Mitchell, Dupont, Schneider – they’re all there. There’s a lot of other lads, too.’

  ‘And we have a second set of pictures – taken of the dead on the beach,’ Paco said. ‘Several of the faces from the first set are missing from this one, because some of the brigadistas survived.’

  ‘But there’s only face that’s missin’ from the first set,’ Woodend said. ‘An’ whose do you think that might be, Mr Roberts?’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Yours,’ Woodend agreed. ‘An’ the reason your face is missin’ is because you were the one takin’ the photographs.’

  ‘Why would I take photographs?’ Roberts asked.

  ‘Because Durán insisted on it. He should have handed the treasure over to the advancin’ Nationalist army, but he had no intention of doin’ that. So anybody who knew what was in the boxes had to die. He calculated he’d kill most of them in the ambush, but it was possible that a few of the brigadistas might escape. If that did happen, he’d have to hunt them down – an’ he’d need photographs for that.’

  ‘Anybody could have taken the pictures,’ Roberts said. ‘It could have been one of the villagers who brought us food.’

  ‘None of them would have stayed long enough to photograph everybody in the camp,’ Woodend said. ‘It had to be an inside job.’

  Roberts smiled again. ‘True,’ he said. ‘“You’ve got me bang to rights.” Isn’t that the phrase?’

  ‘This isn’t a game!’ Woodend said angrily.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Roberts replied. ‘Life is a game. Or if it isn’t, I’ve unwittingly been playing by the wrong set of rules.’

  ‘So you admit you betrayed your comrades?’

  ‘Why not? You seem to have put together a pretty good case, and when I know the deck’s stacked against me, the only thing to do is fold.’

  ‘Since you knew all about the ambush, why were you on the beach yourself?’ Woodend wondered. ‘Surely it would have been easy enough to slip away in the darkness?’

  ‘The others might have smelled a rat if I’d suddenly disappeared. Anyway, that would have been cheating.’

  ‘Cheatin’!’

  ‘It would have been like slipping a card from the bottom of the pack. If you’re a true gambler, there’s no pleasure in winning unless you’ve taken a risk. And what a risk that was! If I died, I’d get nothing. If I survived, I’d be a rich man. It was the ultimate challenge. I’ve never felt so alive in my life.’

  Woodend shook his head. ‘I simply don’t understand you,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Roberts agreed easily. ‘I’m a front-line gambler, and you’re a mere civilian.’

  ‘Why did you help the others to escape? Wasn’t your deal with Durán that they should all be killed?’

  ‘My deal with Durán was that I should make it possible for him to kill them. It’s scarcely my fault that he bungled it.’

  ‘You could have got a message through to him somehow. You could have set your comrades up again.’

  ‘I was wounded by then. If Durán had seen me in that state, he might well have decided to renege on our deal, and finish me off as well. Besides …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chance had decreed that the others should survive, so who was I to say that they shouldn’t?’

  ‘We’ve seen the record of the money transfer Durán made to London,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It was paid into an account owned by Gee-Gee Trading Ltd.’

  Roberts laughed. ‘Someone’s been playing silly buggers with you, you know,’ he said.

  ‘A lot of people seem to have been doin’ that recently,’ Woodend admitted. ‘But how, especially, have I been taken in this time?’

  ‘With the name! Gee-Gee Trading! It’s as good as a confession! Why would I have been that obvious?’

  ‘Perhaps because it gave the whole thing that edge of danger that you seem to live for.’

  Roberts nodded. ‘You’re quite right, of course. I probably would have called myself Gee-Gee Trading if I’d come up with the idea. But I didn’t.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘Does it matter now? After all, I’m perfectly willing to admit that Durán did send me money.’

  ‘An’ a lot of money it was,’ Woodend said. ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Gone. Long gone. Placed on horses which didn’t run as well as they should have done. Lost at poker games in which I underestimated my opponents. To tell you the truth, I was glad when I’d spent it all.’

  ‘Because it was blood money?’

  ‘Because it made my life too easy. Because there were no challenges any more. It didn’t matter whether I won or lost when I knew I still had plenty of money in the bank. But once I was one step away from poverty again, then I could really begin to enjoy what I was doing.’

  Woodend shook his head again. ‘Can we talk about the night you killed Durán?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly. It’s very courteous of you to ask for my permission, if I may say so.’

  ‘You gave us the impression that, even though you wouldn’t admit it to yourself, Sutcliffe had doped you. That was very clever, because, in fact, it was the other way around. You had doped Sutcliffe.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Why did you think that was necessary? He was all for revenge. Couldn’t you have risked telling him what you were doing?’

  ‘Spoken like a true amateur,’ Roberts said. ‘There are some risks it is necessary to take. There are some risks you take because you enjoy taking them. Telling Sutcliffe even a half-truth didn’t fall into either of those categories. It was so much easier to drug him.’

  ‘An’ once he was out for the count, you ran up to the Mayor’s villa as fast as you could.’

  ‘I cycled up. I’d already arranged for one of the local lads to provide me with a bicycle.’

  ‘When I talked about the man I’d bayoneted, you went quite green,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ Roberts agreed. ‘It’s a very useful trick. I’ve used it countless times at the poker table.’

  ‘An’ you’ve never had the slightest scruple about killin’ people at close quarters?’

  ‘None at all. Do you know why I left the first unit I served with in Spain?’

  ‘Is that relevant?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Very. Strictly speaking, of course, I didn’t really leave it. It left me. All my comrades were killed, but with my gambler’s luck—’

  ‘Get to the point!’ Woodend said.

  ‘In that first unit, I used to do the same kind of work as Sant did later on. In fact – and in all modesty – I think I’m better with a knife now than Sant was even in his heyday.’

  ‘Yet you never told Medwin and the others how good you were. Why?’

  ‘Children show off their skills and accomplishments. Gamblers keep them hidden until they need them. It gives them the edge.’

  ‘Why did you mutilate Durán once you’d killed him?’ Woodend asked.

  Roberts began to look a little uncomfortable – and this time, Woodend thought, he was not faking it.

  ‘I did it to make it look as if whoever killed him really hated him,’ Roberts said.


  ‘Which you didn’t?’

  ‘Of course not. We were business partners, and I was merely dissolving our agreement.’

  ‘You could have mutilated him less, an’ still made your point.’

  ‘True. So perhaps I also did it, in some small part, for my comrades who died on that beach.’

  ‘Why did you kill Medwin?’

  ‘How do you know that I did?’

  ‘He was here on a mission to kill Durán. He knew there was a danger of Durán finding out, an’ strikin’ first. He’d never have run the risk of takin’ somebody who might have been one of Durán’s henchmen up to his room. It had to be somebody he trusted – or somebody he desperately wanted to regain his trust in.’

  ‘I don’t know how he first became suspicious of me,’ Roberts said. ‘Perhaps it was something I inadvertently let slip. Or perhaps he knew me better than I thought I did. But you’re right. He did want to regain his trust in me. He desperately wanted me to prove to him that I wasn’t the traitor. But, of course, I couldn’t – so poor old Pete simply had to die.’ Roberts paused. ‘Could I ask you a question now?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’d rather like to know if either of you is armed.’

  ‘Would that make any difference, one way or the other?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Just as I thought. You’re not. British policemen don’t carry weapons around, and Spanish ex-policemen aren’t allowed to. But you see, I don’t fall into either of those categories, and I’ve got a gun in my jacket pocket which is pointing straight at you.’

  ‘You’re bluffin’,’ Woodend said.

  ‘It’s an essential tool of my trade to be able to do so,’ Roberts agreed. ‘But part of the skill of bluffing well is that sometimes you don’t bluff at all. And maybe this is one of those times.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Woodend asked.

  Roberts raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Aren’t you supposed to say, “You’ll never get away with this”?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d only be wastin’ my breath. You know you’ll never get away with it. So what do you want?’

  ‘I want the two of you to get up from the table, ever so slowly and ever so carefully.’

  ‘An’ then?’

  ‘And then, I would like the three of us to walk together to the edge of the square.’

  ‘To the top of the cliff, you mean,’ Woodend said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Roberts agreed. ‘To the top of the cliff.’

  The bulge in the gambler’s pocket might well be a gun, Woodend thought when they had all stood up and he could take a closer look at it. On the other hand, it didn’t have to be a weapon at all. But as Roberts had said, bluffing was what he was good at.

  They reached the wall at the edge of the cliff. It was no more than three feet high, and beyond it lay a sickening drop.

  ‘You can see Pete Medwin’s balcony from here,’ Roberts said conversationally.

  ‘I know,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Do you think he knew he was going to die as he fell from it, and plunged down to the beach?’

  ‘He was certainly screamin’ as if he did.’

  ‘Yet there must have been one small part of him, don’t you think, which believed that he could beat the odds and survive the fall? There’s always a small part of everybody that believes that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Woodend said.

  Roberts glanced quickly over the wall. ‘It’s not quite as long a drop from here as it is from the balcony. What odds would it take to make you bet that somebody could survive the fall from here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t make the bet at all.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Roberts said, disappointedly. ‘Anybody will bet on anything if the odds are long enough. The bigger the gamble, the bigger the rewards. What if I gave you odds of a thousand to one? That way you’d only be minus a pound if you lost, but you’d have earned yourself a thousand if you won. Certainly worth the risk, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t want to play this game,’ Woodend said.

  ‘But I do,’ Roberts told him. ‘And I’m the one holding the gun. So what odds would be acceptable to you? A hundred thousand to one? A million to one?’

  ‘A million to one,’ Woodend said reluctantly.

  ‘I’d have gone up higher to get you to bet, you know,’ Roberts told him. ‘Looking at that drop, I might have even given you ten million to one.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But it does. Have you got a pound on you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then find out – or my finger just might tighten a little too hard on this trigger.’

  Woodend reached into his pocket. ‘I’ve got a five peseta note,’ he said, when he’d withdrawn it again. ‘I don’t know exactly what it’s worth, but it’s much less than a pound.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Roberts said. He held out his left hand. ‘I want you to hand it to me very carefully.’

  ‘This is sick,’ Woodend said.

  But he did as he’d been instructed.

  Roberts pocketed the note. ‘A million to one,’ he said reflectively. ‘That could make you five million pesetas. And I always honour my debts – when it’s at all possible.’ He brought his right hand smoothly out of his pocket. It was empty. ‘I was bluffing about the gun,’ he said, as if the admission surprised even him. ‘Remember now, if I live, I owe you five million pesetas.’

  He vaulted over the wall. There was no scream as he fell, just a sickening thud when he hit the rocks below.

  Epilogue

  It was ten days since Roberts had plunged to his death, and the holiday was finally over. It would have been much more comfortable for the Woodends to have travelled back to the airport in the bus the hotel provided, but Paco Ruiz seemed eager to drive them there in his little car, and they felt it would have been rude to refuse. Now the Chief Inspector, his wife, and the Spanish private investigator stood together in front of the departure lounge.

  ‘I hope that you enjoyed your short stay in my country, Joan,’ Paco Ruiz said.

  ‘Oh, I did, Paco,’ Joan Woodend agreed. ‘I will admit that the first few days were a bit rough – what with the foreign food, an’ sittin’ around on my own while my Charlie was out playin’ his usual game of “Catch the Killer”. An’ then, of course – though I hardly like to mention it – there was my heart attack. But after that, it was grand.’

  Ruiz looked doubtful.

  ‘You’ll not get higher praise than that out of a Northern woman,’ Woodend told him, grinning.

  ‘I think I’ll just go an’ look for an English paper,’ Joan said.

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ Woodend told her.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Joan countered. ‘I might have one foot in the grave, but I can still use the other one to hop over to the newspaper kiosk. Besides, I know you of old, Charlie Woodend. You’ll need at least five minutes alone with Paco, so you can talk about how clever you’ve both been.’

  There was no point in arguing. Woodend watched as his wife walked towards the kiosk, and fretted as he wondered whether her step was quite as firm as it used to be.

  ‘Do you think that you’ll ever come back to Spain, Charlie?’ Paco Ruiz asked.

  ‘Aye, we might well,’ Woodend said. ‘In fact, I’ve been eyein’ up some of those little villas on the edge of town, an’ thinkin’ this might be a nice place to retire to – providin’, of course, that the next mayor’s a little better than Durán.’

  ‘I think I can guarantee that,’ Paco said.

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Yes. Madrid selects all the new mayors, so we would be foolish to expect a saint. But what he will be is one of the younger men from the Movement – a man brought up after the Civil War; a politician who wormed his way into power, rather than a thug who butchered his way into it. And unlike the veterans who run the country now, he will understand that a time will come when it will take more than simple loyalty to Franco to hold on to his privileges – that h
e had better do a good job, or else he will be out.’

  Woodend nodded. ‘My, but he was a nasty piece of work, that Durán, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was an hijo de puta,’ Paco agreed. ‘He almost turned me to a life of crime.’

  ‘He almost did what?’

  ‘A man cannot right all the wrongs in the world, but at least he can try to improve his own little corner of it. For the last few years, that has been my ambition. I have been like the tall, handsome stranger of the Western films, who rides into town and sorts out all its problems.’ Paco grinned. ‘Not that I am handsome, tall, American or own a horse. But you get the idea?’

  ‘I get the idea,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘More times than I care to remember, Durán has blocked me in what I tried to achieve. What did it matter that I could prove something was wrong, when he said it was not – and his word was law? Such a situation can be very frustrating for a man like me.’

  ‘I still don’t quite see where your comment about him almost turnin’ you to a life of crime comes into this,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘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.