A Dead Man in Barcelona

by Michael Pearce

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Seymour.

  The midshipman laughed. ‘Well, we start level, then. Because I don’t think we’re going to solve them, either.’

  The seaman raised the bar which had been across the entrance.

  ‘Sorry about all this,’ said McPhail. ‘It’s not as if someone’s going to come in and pinch a ship.’

  ‘Where are the ships?’

  ‘Mostly out at sea. Wish I was, too. But there’s a corvette in over there, and, just around the corner, a Navy tanker. Nothing much just now. Are you familiar with ships, Mr Seymour?’

  ‘Not really. I occasionally have jobs in the docks, though.’

  ‘Ah, do you? You’ll know your way around this sort of place, then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  But then, deciding to add to the stir:

  ‘A bit about Purchasing, perhaps.’

  ‘Ah, Purchasing?’ He raised his voice: so that it would carry to the guardroom. ‘You know about Purchasing, do you?’

  Seymour thought he heard a faint groan.

  ‘And stores,’ he said.

  ‘Stores, too? Oh, that will be very helpful!’

  Seymour laughed. ‘I’m not sure everyone will think so.’

  McPhail laughed, too.

  ‘You won’t find anything too awful,’ he said. ‘But it won’t half do them good if they think that you might.’

  He pointed to a large building with long windows looking out to sea.

  ‘That’s the mess. The officers’ mess. The wardroom, we call it. I expect the Admiral will take you over for a drink. Are you putting up there, while you’re here?’

  ‘No, I’ve booked in at a pension. The Pension Francia.’

  McPhail looked doubtful. ‘The Francia? Well, a lot of our people do stay there. When they’re with a lady friend. Or wife, of course. Ladies can’t stay in the mess. But the Francia is very handy.’

  ‘It’s that sort of place, is it?’ said Seymour.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘So you’ve come over to Gibraltar, then?’ said the Admiral.

  ‘Yes. There are several things I want to do. But it might be helpful if I could pretend to be investigating something else. You remember we spoke of the stores.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll set it up.’

  ‘I’ve already dropped a few hints.’

  ‘That probably accounts for the worried look on one or two faces.’

  ‘If you can arrange things, I’ll make a start. But that, of course, is not the real reason why I am here. Nor, I imagine, for your interest in Lockhart.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is the real reason for your interest in Lockhart?’

  ‘I don’t know how far I can go . . .’

  ‘I’ve done a lot of Diplomatic work.’

  ‘The man from the FO said you had, and that’s good. But this isn’t quite Diplomatic work.’

  ‘I didn’t think for a moment that it was.’

  ‘No.’

  The Admiral rubbed his chin. The bristles made a slight scrapy noise. Probably been up for hours, thought Seymour. Shaved in the middle of the night.

  ‘No,’ the Admiral said again. ‘Defence is not the same as Diplomatic. Especially at the moment, when we might be in the run-up to another war.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘You always have to think so if you’re in the Services. Especially if you’re in the Navy. You’ve got to think that far ahead. Do you know how long it takes to get one of our capital ships on a new course? One of the big ones? Well, you won’t do it in much less than three-quarters of a mile. So it’s no good coming up at the last moment and saying, “Mind that boat!” Or rock, or whatever. So you’ve got to think ahead. Which, believe it or not, is just what the Government is doing.’

  Seymour didn’t believe it. In his experience, which was of the ministry responsible for the police, the Home Office, ministers didn’t think ahead. They just improvised on the spot, after the event, when it was already too late.

  ‘It’s this new bloke,’ said the Admiral. ‘Did you know we’ve got a new bloke at the Admiralty?’

  Seymour didn’t. In the East End Naval affairs did not loom large.

  ‘Yes. There’s been a switch around and we’ve got a new bloke. Churchill, his name is. Doesn’t know anything about the Navy, of course. Been a soldier. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t get you far when you’re managing ships. But this new bloke seems actually to have a few ideas, and some of them are not totally daft. For instance, he intends to switch the whole Navy from coal to oil. Fisher’s idea, of course, but a good one.’

  He looked expectantly at Seymour. Seymour could see this was significant but for the life of him he couldn’t see why. Something to do with fuel, obviously. What made ships go. Until now he had not, actually, ever thought about this. If anything, he was still living mentally in the world of sail. Of course, he knew, vaguely, that sail was being superseded by steam. That must be the coal. And now, apparently, coal was being superseded in its turn by oil.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, trying to sound impressed. ‘Important, I imagine.’

  ‘It is!’ said the Admiral enthusiastically. ‘You can see at once the implications it has for us!’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said Seymour. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Take refuelling times, for instance. With oil, all you’ve got to do is stick a pipe in and then pump. With coal, you’ve got to have dozens of people shovelling. Takes hours. The switch from coal to oil will cut refuelling times – and, therefore, turn-round times – by four-fifths!’

  ‘Amazing!’ said Seymour.

  ‘Oh, it’s going to be. And that’s not the end of it. It will revolutionize the way we do things. But we’ve got to get on with it. Otherwise, the Germans will do it first. In fact, they probably have done it first! But – and this is where I really do take my hat off to the Government – in one respect we’re ahead of them.’

  ‘We are? Oh, good!’

  The Admiral paused dramatically, then lowered his voice.

  ‘We’ve got the oil,’ he said.

  ‘Got the –?’

  ‘Yes. Stitched it up. Bought the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Guaranteed the Navy’s oil supplies for years.’

  ‘Well, that’s splendid!’

  ‘And I don’t need to tell you the difference that will make!’

  ‘No, indeed!’

  ‘And this is where Lockhart comes in.’

  ‘Lockhart?’ said Seymour with a start.

  ‘Yes. You see, until this Anglo-Persian deal, we hadn’t been sure where our oil was going to come from. We’d been thinking about it, of course. I’d been thinking about it. Thought about little else from the moment I knew the switch was in the offing. I’d been making forward contracts, building storage tanks, trying to find suppliers – and this, of course, is where Lockhart came in.’

  ‘Lockhart?’

  ‘Yes. With his contacts. All through the Middle East. Especially with the Arabs. Now, of course, he wasn’t dealing directly with the Persians. But he had plenty of ways of dealing with them indirectly, and I found him invaluable.

  ‘It had to be done quietly, you see. We were ahead of the game, and we didn’t want to let on to anyone else. And that was especially important to me, down in the Med, with the Turks at one end, and the Germans in cahoots with them, letting them have warships.

  ‘Of course, once the Anglo-Persian oil started coming through, we’d be all right. But until then we were scratching around for oil. And that was where Lockhart came in with his connections. As I said, he was invaluable.

  ‘So when I heard – and this was two years ago, remember, when things were still in the balance, and before the Anglo-Persian oil had really started flowing – that Lockhart had been murdered, I thought: hello, someone’s putting their finger in my pie! And I didn’t like it. By then I looked on Lockhart as one of my people. If someone was out to get him, I was out to get them.

/>   ‘So I went to the Foreign Office and said, “This is an Englishman. More than that, he’s one of my people, so you’ve got to do something.” Did they do anything? Did they hell! They just faffed around, pushing papers in all directions, referring it here, taking it up there. I think they hoped I would go away. But once I’ve get my teeth into something, I don’t let go and I’d got my teeth into this. And I still have. I want to know who killed Lockhart. And that, I hope, is what you’re eventually going to tell me.’

  Seymour, in fact, had come across the Admiral’s ‘new bloke’ previously. Before he had been switched to the Admiralty, Churchill had been Minister at the Home Office, in charge, among other things, of the police. And there he had put Scotland Yard’s back up in no small way.

  This had been over the famous – or notorious – ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, as the newspapers had called it. A small armed gang had tried to break into an East End jeweller’s. Surprised in the act, they had shot three policemen and then, hotly pursued, had taken refuge in a house in Sidney Street where they had been trapped. Shooting was rare in London’s underworld and the case had made big headlines in the press. And where there were big headlines, these were usually, in Seymour’s experience, shortly afterwards big politicians. Churchill had interested himself personally in the case and had turned up on the spot; to be photographed for the newspapers, some said unkindly.

  Worse, though, in the eyes of the police, he had called in the Army. He had even gone to the lengths of summoning up a field gun – this, for a relatively small incident, in the crowded streets of the East End, when the criminals were already trapped! Seymour was not alone in thinking that this tended towards overkill. However, it had gone down well in the newspapers.

  Sidney Street was in Seymour’s patch and what made it even more irritating was that he had had an inkling of what was planned and had been quietly taking steps to thwart it. In his view he could have wrapped the whole thing up without the need for heavy artillery.

  He had been especially anxious to do this because the area had a considerable immigrant population. Indeed, some of the gang had immigrant connections. Seymour had been eager to avoid wider repercussions in the local community. But, of course, the immigrant connection, and also a later discovery that some of them had been anarchists, was too much for the press to resist and it had had a field day. Which had not helped either with solving the crime or in relations with the community.

  So, yes, Seymour had heard of Churchill; and privately thought him a trigger-happy Boy Scout with an ego larger than one of the Admiral’s battleships, a man who, if there was not a war already going on, was just the person to start one.

  Seymour had arranged to meet Chantale at the Pension Francia, where, unknowingly, he had previously booked a room, and he went there now with a certain amount of apprehension. Chantale met him with a smile, however, and took him up to their room almost with pride. It was certainly very clean and respectable. But, then, so, it appeared, was the hotel as a whole; not at all what Seymour’s fears had projected after what the midshipman had said.

  It was clearly a place used by the Navy. There were sturdy, weather-beaten men standing around, often with sturdy weather-beaten ladies. These were not exactly houris, however, but motherly figures, homely rather than alluring, and talking practically about dhobi-men and dhobi-marks and when houses were going to come up. There were, it is true, a few ladies who might have been houris, slim, elegant but dressed just a little too nonchalantly, and with an over-easy familiarity of address. But it took all sorts to make a world, Seymour reflected, and, probably, especially the Naval world.

  One thing was definitely clear: there was no colour-bar in that world. The ladies came from all parts of the globe. There were Chinese, Indians, South Americans and Caribbeans. And they seemed to mix on terms on which, possibly, in the wardroom they might not mix.

  Their room had a little balcony and they went out on to it. There were some people standing below it, talking. One of the voices sounded familiar.

  ‘Yes, I can let you have some calico. There’s a new roll just come in. It’s slightly spoiled at one end where the sea water got to it but it’s nothing. You can cut if off, or I’ll cut it off for you, and the rest is as good as new. Or if you like, I’ll leave it on and adjust the price accordingly. It depends what you want it for. It’s only slightly spoiled so if you’re not too bothered, you can have that bit too and have it cheap. Only the thing is, see, I won’t be able to let you have it for a day or two. It’s got to be signed off, and that could take a bit of time just at the moment. The boss says things have got to be just so. Just at the moment.’

  And now Seymour knew whose the voice was. It was that of the man he had heard in the guardroom, the one whom the midshipman had been so mercilessly teasing, Ferry.

  ‘You interested? I’ll make a note of it if you are. In my mind. No, I’m not going to write it down. These things are best not written down. But I’ll remember it. You can count on it, right? Price? I’ll have to come back to you on that, but say five quid. No, not for the roll. For the yard. A lot? No, no, no, no! It’s dirt cheap. This is best quality calico. Straight from Pompey. You won’t find this sort of thing in the souk and you won’t find it at this sort of price anywhere. You need to think about it? Well, don’t think too long or you’ll lose the chance. There’s others after it. Best quality, this is, apart from the little bit that’s spoiled. And there’s plenty of people interested. I can keep it for a day or two, but only for a day or two. Say Friday. By then the bastard will have gone.’

  The people beneath moved away.

  ‘You don’t need some calico, do you?’ said Seymour.

  ‘Calico?’ Chantale stared at him. ‘What would I want that for?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Make a sail, perhaps? Is that the sort of thing they make sails from?’

  ‘Why would I want to make a sail?’

  ‘Maybe it had better be something else. Can you think of another material?’

  ‘Gingham?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re likely to have much of that in ships’ stores. Perhaps you’d better put it more generally? “Any chance of getting some material cheap?” That sort of thing.’

  ‘And who am I supposed to ask?’

  ‘Don’t go to him directly. Ask around. I have a feeling that the women here will know.’

  Señora Lockhart’s house was a large white one with little balconies in front of the upper windows, over which bright red geraniums trailed in abundance. When he rang the bell an Arab servant girl came to the door.

  She showed them into a dark entrance hall at the other end of which an open door led into a small inner courtyard, in the middle of which a fountain was playing. At one corner a broad flight of steps led up to a kind of half-verandah, on which were strewn some large leather cushions. They were shown up to these and the servant girl brought them glasses of lemonade.

  Chantale looked around her in surprise.

  ‘It’s just like an Arab house!’ she said.

  A moment later Señora Lockhart came on to the verandah and they saw why. She was an Arab herself; small, almost bird-like, with slender arms and feet, middle-aged, and with a sharp Arab face and bright intelligent eyes.

  She advanced on Seymour and held out her hand.

  ‘Mr Seymour?’ she said in English. ‘I am very pleased to see you. My friend, ’Attersley, told me that you might be coming.’

  ‘And this is Mademoiselle de Lissac,’ said Seymour.

  The sharp brown eyes took in Chantale. ‘From Morocco?’

  ‘Tangier.’

  ‘I know it well.’

  ‘You know my mother, perhaps? Madame de Lissac?’

  She thought. ‘I think I’ve heard of her in some connection. But, no, I don’t think I’ve actually met her. It’s been a while since I was last in Tangier. And your father: he is French, of course.’

  Seymour felt that the sharp eyes had grasped at once much of Chantale’s situ
ation: just possibly because she had known it for herself.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chantale. ‘But he is dead.’

  ‘Ah, pardon!’ She took Chantale’s hand in both of hers and pressed it sympathetically. ‘Un militaire?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘I am so sorry!’

  Back in English. Like many people who were familiar with several languages, like Seymour himself, she moved readily from one to another.

  ‘You are welcome,’ she said softly to Chantale.

  They sat down on the leather cushions.

  ‘I don’t know if Señor Hattersley explained,’ said Seymour, ‘but I am a policeman from England. And I have come to Spain – and to Gibraltar – to find out what I can about how your husband died.’

  ‘Yes, he did tell me that,’ said Señora Lockhart. ‘But what he did not tell me, was why anyone in England should be interested in how my husband died.’

  ‘Because he was English, Señora.’

  She laughed. ‘He always denied that. He said he was Scottish and that was quite different.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have said British.’

  ‘He would admit to that on occasions,’ she conceded. ‘Especially,’ she added drily, ‘when it suited him.’

  ‘So I have heard. And I think it is probably partly because of that that people in England are interested in what happened to him.’

  ‘David ’Attersley again?’

  ‘Admiral Comber, rather.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The Admiral.’

  ‘Does it surprise you that the Admiral should be interested?’

  ‘I knew about what Lockhart was doing for him, if that’s what you are asking.’

  ‘The Admiral thinks that could be something to do with his death.’

  Señora Lockhart did not respond.

  ‘There are so many things,’ she said, after a moment, ‘that could be to do with his death.’

  ‘Yes. Public as well as private.’

  ‘Public?’

  ‘What he was doing for the Admiral, for example. But also, perhaps, what he was doing for the Catalonians. Or, for that matter, the anarchists. But also private.’