Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire Page 10

  ‘Very much,’ Paniatowski told her.

  ‘Elena married her childhood sweetheart, but then there is nothing unusual in that, because in a village like this, most people marry their childhood sweethearts,’ Don Ramon said.

  ‘That was the way in my village, too,’ Paco said.

  Don Ramon nodded, and then gave a laugh which sounded like a paper bag being crinkled.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘You might wear fine clothes now,’ he pointed a gnarled finger at Paco’s cheap off-the-peg suit, ‘but I had you marked down as a country boy the moment that you walked through the door.’

  ‘Tell me more about Elena,’ Paco said.

  ‘Her husband had a very good job. He had learned how to repair tractors, and though there were still not many tractors around, there were not many men who knew how to repair them, either. People would come from miles around to ask him to fix their machines. Even the big landowners would treat him with respect, because of his magic hands.’

  ‘He was a genius with engines,’ said Don Pedro. ‘He could raise them from the dead.’

  ‘When the war broke out in ’thirty-six, he joined the militia immediately,’ Don Ramon continued. ‘It was a hard war for him, as it was for everyone. He was wounded twice – once in the chest – but as soon as he had recovered from his injuries, he rejoined his unit.’

  ‘They made him a captain,’ Don Pedro said.

  ‘Who is telling this story?’ Don Ramon demanded.

  ‘I don’t see why it should be you, rather than me, who gets to tell it,’ Don Pedro said.

  ‘Then let me ask you another question,’ Don Ramon countered. ‘Who owns this bar?’

  Don Pedro sighed theatrically. ‘Tell the story, Ramon,’ he said.

  ‘The militias fought bravely and hard, but Franco had German pilots and Italian soldiers and Moroccan cavalry, and he was bound to win in the end. And when it was over, Elena’s husband – and all the other men who had survived – came back to the village.’ He paused for a moment, and looked Paco straight in the eye. ‘And do you know why they did that?’ he asked, challengingly.

  Paco shrugged. ‘Where else were they supposed to go?’ he said.

  ‘Exactly, country boy,’ Don Ramon agreed. ‘Where else were they supposed to go?’

  ‘And why would they even want to go anywhere else?’ Don Pedro asked. ‘This village has everything a man could possibly need.’

  ‘There are times when you almost seem to be talking sense – and this is one of them,’ Don Ramon told his old friend. He turned to Paco. ‘The village is not perfect, and only a fool would say it was – but it is better than everywhere else.’

  ‘Tell me the rest of the story,’ Paco prompted.

  ‘I have forgotten where I was,’ Don Ramon admitted.

  ‘The men came back to the village after the war …’

  ‘Ah, yes, and eventually, Franco’s soldiers came to the village, too. They were led by a lieutenant, and he was the biggest hijo de puta within a hundred kilometres of here. The soldiers immediately rounded up all the younger men, and locked them in one of the bigger barns.’

  ‘Did they arrest you, too?’ Paco asked.

  ‘They did not,’ Don Pedro said, perhaps a little sadly. ‘We were too old for war, even then.’

  ‘The lieutenant said each of those arrested would be questioned in turn,’ Don Ramon said. ‘The ones who could convince him they had not fought for the Republic would be released. Those who had fought for it would either be shot or sent to Alicante to stand trial.’

  Paco nodded. ‘That didn’t just happen here,’ he said. ‘It was going on all over Spain. It was called Pacification.’

  ‘But that wasn’t the main reason that the lieutenant was here,’ Don Pedro said. ‘He had come for the gold.’

  ‘There was no gold,’ Don Ramon said dismissively. ‘That was nothing but a fable.’

  ‘Fable or not, the lieutenant believed in it,’ Don Pedro said, sticking to his guns.

  ‘Yes,’ Don Ramon agreed. ‘He did.’

  ‘Where was this gold supposed to have come from?’ Paco asked.

  ‘At the start of the war, the government sold a quarter of its gold reserves in France, and sent the rest to Moscow for safe-keeping,’ Don Ramon said.

  ‘I know that,’ Paco said.

  ‘But what you probably don’t know is that – according to the rumours – a few dozen bars of gold were held back, and were given to trusted militiamen, so that they would be able to raise money to carry on fighting even after the Republic was forced to surrender. And Elena’s husband was said to be one of those militiamen. As I told you, it is no more than a fable, but Pedro is right when he says that the lieutenant believed it.’

  ‘So they locked all the men in a barn,’ Paco said, steering them back on to the story.

  ‘They did, and the lieutenant set up his headquarters in what had once been the priest’s house, and so was, of course, the best house in the village. And once he had done that, he began to look around the village for some entertainment, and his eyes rested on Elena.’

  ‘She was a pretty young thing,’ Don Pedro said wistfully.

  ‘He said if she would sleep with him, he would see that she was given extra rations – and she spat in his face,’ Don Ramon said.

  ‘It’s true! I saw it with my own eyes,’ Don Pedro said, and chuckled.

  ‘It was a foolish thing to do,’ Don Ramon said harshly.

  Don Pedro bent his head. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘it was.’

  ‘And what was worse than the spitting – much worse for Javier – was what she said to him,’ Don Ramon continued.

  ‘What did she say?’ Paco asked.

  ‘She said that her husband had been a captain in the people’s militia, and that the lieutenant was not fit to lick his boots. It was a foolish thing to do, but she was very angry, and so perhaps it would be wrong to blame her.’

  ‘But before she said it, the lieutenant had not known that her husband had been a captain!’ Paco exclaimed.

  ‘Just so. The lieutenant had Elena arrested and taken to the priest’s house, where he raped her. And when he had finished raping her, he told her that she would be sent to prison for a long time, and that her son – little Roberto – would become a ward of the state until more suitable parents could be found for him.’

  ‘That happened a lot, too,’ Paco said. ‘Many Republicans had their children taken from them and given to childless Nationalists.’

  ‘He had the child taken to the priest’s house, and Elena locked up in one of the barns,’ Dom Ramon said. ‘And then he sent his men to fetch Javier, Elena’s husband.’

  ‘He probably intended to use the child to put pressure on the father,’ Paco said.

  ‘Yes, that is the sort of thing they did,’ Don Ramon agreed. ‘The lieutenant only had two of his soldiers with him in the priest’s house. I suspect that was because he did not want too many witnesses around when he discovered where the gold was hidden. But three men are more than enough to control one prisoner – or so they thought.’

  ‘Or so they thought?’ Paco repeated.

  ‘Bastards like that lieutenant like to do their torturing in the dead of night, and it was just after dark that Javier was taken to the priest’s house,’ Don Ramon said.

  ‘And it was just after midnight that the fire started,’ Don Pedro added.

  ‘We do not know when the fire was started – only when it was noticed,’ Don Ramon said witheringly. ‘We became aware of the fire just after midnight,’ he continued, as if Don Pedro had not already provided this information. ‘We tried to get inside – we knew little Roberto was there – but the fire had taken a real hold by then and we were forced back. Fortunately, there was no danger of any of the other houses catching alight – the priest did not want to have to rub shoulders with the likes of us, and so his house stood some distance away from the rest – but it broke our hearts that we could not save the child. When morning came, we
raked through the hot ashes, and found the bodies of the lieutenant and his two bodyguards.’

  ‘But you did not find Roberto’s body?’ Paco asked.

  ‘We did not. Nor did we find Javier’s. And so, of course, we knew what must have happened – Javier had found a way to overpower his enemies, and had escaped with his son.’

  ‘The soldiers went mad – they acted as if it was all Elena’s fault,’ Don Pedro said.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ Don Ramon agreed. ‘They beat her very badly – she almost died – and then they sent her on the back of an open wagon to the prison in Alicante. It was ten years before we saw her again, and though she was only thirty-two, she looked like an old woman.’

  ‘She came back to the village, did she?’

  ‘Yes, but only because she wanted to know how many of us had survived. She was still a big-hearted woman, you see, even after everything she’d had to endure. We begged her to stay. We told her that she never needed to work again – that, as little as we had, we would support her for as long as she lived.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t stay?’

  ‘No. Perhaps she was too proud to accept our charity, or too ashamed that she had been raped. Whichever it was, she was wrong. It was not charity we were offering, and all the shame belonged to the lieutenant. But she would not stay. She moved to Calpe, where, we have heard, she works in a hotel. We have not seen her ourselves for twenty-five years.’

  ‘But one day – and that day may soon be here, now that Franco is dead – this village will put up a monument to Elena and her husband,’ Don Pedro said.

  ‘It will,’ Don Ramon agreed. ‘We have been planning it for years, and we know exactly what it will be like.’

  ‘And what will it be like?’ asked Paco, because he knew that was what was expected of him.

  ‘It will be a simple stone tablet,’ Don Ramon told him, ‘and it will say, “This tablet stands as a monument to the two heroes of Val de Montaña – Elena Vargas Morales and Javier Martinez Blanco”.’

  The short article on Whitebridge Hispanic Circle was dominated by a large photograph, and the caption underneath it read: The picture shows Mr Robert Martinez, the president of the Hispanic Circle, Mr Javier Martinez, his father, and Miss Louisa Paniatowski, the junior secretary.

  ‘Don’t all Spaniards have two surnames?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ Louisa agreed.

  ‘So what’s Mr Javier Martinez’s second surname?’ Paniatowski said, opening her notebook, and skimming through the information that Woodend had given her over the phone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Louisa admitted.

  ‘But after all the time you’ve spent with Mr Robert Martinez, you surely know his second surname, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, silly, his father will have the same name, won’t he?’

  ‘No,’ Louisa said. ‘He won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Spaniards take one of their surnames from their mother, and the other one from their father, so Mr Robert is called Martinez after his dad, and Vargas after his mother – which is why he’s Robert Martinez Vargas.’

  Paniatowski glanced down at her notes again.

  ‘Well, I’ll be buggered!’ she said.

  ‘You shouldn’t be swearing, Mum!’ Louisa said, with mild disapproval. ‘You should be setting a proper example for your impressionable daughter.’

  ‘Who would have bloody thought it?’ Paniatowski asked, reading the notes for a second time.

  ‘It cannot be my wife,’ Javier Martinez muttered, as Paniatowski led him into the mortuary. ‘The fascists will have killed her as soon as they realized I had escaped.’ He turned to his son, who was walking beside him. ‘Tell them, Roberto. Tell them it cannot be her.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see, Father,’ Robert Martinez said softly.

  ‘And even if – by some miracle – she had survived, why would she come to England now, after all this time?’ Javier Martinez moaned.

  Dr Shastri was waiting for them in the viewing room. ‘When the curtain is drawn back, you will see the body of a woman in the next room,’ she said to Javier Martinez. ‘Once you have seen enough, tell me, and the curtain will be closed again. Are you ready?’

  Javier Martinez took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders.

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘You will have to look at her sooner or later, Father,’ Robert told him. ‘It’s your duty.’

  ‘Do not try to lecture me on what is or is not my duty,’ Javier Martinez said. ‘I did not say that I would not look at her – I only meant that I will not look at her through a window.’

  ‘People often find it more of a strain to be close to the body than they ever imagined it would be, Mr Martinez,’ Dr Shastri said, in a soothing tone. ‘Perhaps the best idea might be for you to look through the window first, and then if you decide that you want to …’

  ‘I am no stranger to death,’ Javier Martinez said. ‘I was a militia man, fighting an enemy which had no heart – an enemy which had no pity. I have seen dead women before. I have seen dead children, too – many, tiny, dead children.’

  ‘That was a long time ago, when you were a much younger man,’ Robert Martinez said.

  ‘A long time ago?’ Javier Martinez repeated incredulously. ‘Do you think all that is behind me now? Do you think I don’t still see them?’

  ‘Of course I don’t think that,’ Robert replied. ‘And that is why you should just look through the window.’

  ‘I know it will not be her,’ Javier Martinez said. ‘But if I look through a pane of glass and say that, the police will not believe me. I need to be close enough to touch her, and then perhaps they will accept that I know my own wife, and that this woman is not her.’

  ‘We won’t let you do it, Father,’ Robert Martinez said, turning to Shastri for support.

  ‘It must be your father’s decision,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Then let us get this pantomime over with, so we can all go home,’ Javier Martinez said.

  The cadaver was lying on a trolley, covered with a white sheet, and when Shastri gave the signal, her young assistant folded back the sheet just far enough to reveal the dead woman’s face.

  ‘It’s not her,’ Javier Martinez said. ‘I told you right from the start that it wasn’t her.’

  ‘If you could just take a second look, just to make absolutely sure,’ Shastri suggested.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Javier Martinez said angrily. ‘I have already told you that it is not her.’

  There was no point in pressing him any further, Dr Shastri decided. She gave the briefest of nods to her assistant, and the assistant folded the sheet back over the face.

  They were almost at the door when Javier Martinez stopped and turned around.

  ‘I … I will take one more look,’ he said, with a catch in his throat.

  He reached into his inside pocket, and took out his wallet. With trembling hands, he opened the wallet and took out a sepia photograph, and when the sheet was folded back again, he held the photograph next to the dead woman’s head.

  ‘It’s her,’ he sobbed. ‘It’s my Elena.’

  TEN

  It was incredible the change that had come over Javier Martinez in the hour since he had identified the body, Paniatowski thought.

  He had entered the mortuary a worried man – though still a vigorous one – but the sight of his wife lying there seemed to have drained all energy from him. Now, back in his own home – and sitting in an armchair which looked as if it had been bought to accommodate someone much bigger – there was an almost ghostlike quality about him.

  ‘My comrades and I fought long and hard against the fascists, but in the end, we lost,’ he said in a thin voice, ‘I went back to my village – which was called Val de Montaña. I had given up all my hopes of seeing a fairer society in which the poor no longer went to bed hungry. All I wanted …’ He began to cough violently,
and for well over a minute he could not speak. ‘All I wanted,’ he continued with some effort, ‘was to survive long enough to see my son grow up.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave this until the morning, Father,’ Robert Martinez said.

  ‘I may be dead in the morning, and then my story will never be told,’ Javier Martinez said. He looked across at Paniatowski. ‘You want to hear it, don’t you, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But if you start finding it too much of a strain …’

  ‘When the fascists came to the village, I denied I had ever been a militiaman,’ Javier Martinez interrupted her. ‘I was not alone in that. Every man there denied he had been in the militia. We knew, even as we were telling those lies, that they would shoot some of us as a matter of course, but we also knew that they could not shoot us all, because now that the war was over, they would need people to work the land – and each of us prayed that we would be one of the lucky ones who was spared. It was a cowardly thing to do, to pray for the death of someone else, so that you might live yourself, but …’

  ‘It wasn’t cowardly at all, Father,’ Robert Martinez said sympathetically. ‘In your situation, any man would have thought the same.’

  ‘You were not a man in the village at that time, so you cannot possibly know,’ Javier said harshly.

  ‘The soldiers locked you all up in one of the village barns, didn’t they?’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘How did you know that?’ Javier Martinez asked, suspiciously.

  ‘I asked a Spanish friend of mine to talk to some of the old men who still live in the village.’

  ‘Is he a fascist, this friend of yours who went to the village?’ Javier Martinez demanded.

  ‘No,’ Paniatowski assured him. ‘He fought on the Republican side for the whole of the war.’

  Javier Martinez gave a slight nod. ‘Then he is a man of honour, and the villagers will have told him the truth,’ he said. ‘You are right, they locked us in the barn, but just after dark, two soldiers came and took me to the priest’s house. That was where I met the lieutenant. He was in the priest’s library, and he had a pistol held in his hand. I thought he might shoot me, then and there, but he merely pointed the pistol at me and told the two soldiers to go downstairs.’