And then the sun of that terrible day came up over the Bidasoa which I had stopped us reaching. We thought we should be safe if we booked on a round tour to Biarritz. But even that dingy little tourist agency must have been warned to look out for us. While we were waiting in a café for our coach, Gonzalez arrested us without charging us with anything at all and took me back here and drove away with Philip without even letting us say good-bye.
I was forbidden to leave the village, and told that if I tried I would instantly be escorted back. To be confined to a little inn, always under the eyes of fellow guests who glance and look away—can you imagine it? I lived like a ghost, flitting from my room at set times. I saw human beings on holiday and pretended I was alive. They saw me and talked to me and found me harmless. They thought that after a fearful row I had been deserted by my lover. Elena probably started that rumour as being less embarrassing to all of us than the truth. She had already found out for me that Philip had been taken to Madrid.
After two days of this agony Lieutenant Gonzalez called on me. I had him shown up to my room. I loathed him, but anyone who could tell me about Philip was a friend. So I controlled myself and tried to treat him as if he had come with an unwanted bunch of flowers. I asked him to explain my position to me. Was I under arrest or wasn’t I?
‘At present, Mademoiselle, you are not being detained as a suspect, but as a key witness,’ he replied.
‘To what?’
‘To the attempted assassination of Mr Leopold Mgwana.’
I simply stared at him and said that it was nonsense, that I knew of no attempt to assassinate Leopold.
‘Then will you tell me why M. Ardower killed Livetti?’
The sincerity of my cry that Philip did not kill him must have impressed Gonzalez. He gave me a thin smile from that nasty, mobile slit of a mouth of his, and said that it was curious how each of us told him in unmistakable good faith that the other did not kill Livetti. Both of us, therefore, knew who did.
‘But we don’t!’ I exclaimed.
‘Could it be,’ he asked, still smiling, ‘that it was Mr Mgwana? Before you answer, let me tell you that he has confessed.’
That kind of cheap police trickery made me really angry. I told Gonzalez that I realised that I had to submit to being questioned, but that I was not going to have straight lies thrown at me.
‘Then of you three, the only suspect left is you, Mademoiselle,’ he said, still with his offensive smile.
I asked him if he would do me the honour to provide me with a motive.
‘Certainly!’ he replied. ‘It is typical of the uniformed branch and somewhat crude; but I invite your comments. You are reported to have been on intimate terms with Alberto Livetti in Rome. When he appeared here, perhaps wishing to revive an old friendship which now repelled you, there was a quarrel and—shall we say?—an accident. And then, owing to the exaggerated chivalry which Mademoiselle is able to inspire, you were assisted by your two devoted friends to dispose of the body.’
I could feel myself flushing all over. I could have killed myself. I don’t know whether he took it as proof of guilt or not. I suppose a man as accustomed as Gonzalez to torturing suspects with words or worse would be a good enough psychologist to know that he had poked his fingers into shame, not necessarily guilt.
‘And the car which followed us?’ I asked.
‘They could have known.’
‘If they did and said nothing to the police, wouldn’t it be a crime?’
‘It would indeed, Mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘and when my superiors have been able to settle the first question of how Livetti died, we can all proceed to the second of who else knew and why.’
I asked him what had happened to Philip, for I had no more fight left in me. He had been waiting for the question, and complacently drove the knife of his answer straight into me.
‘M. Ardower is in gaol on suspicion of murder. He has already undergone preliminary interrogation.’
I forgot everything but Philip. I forgot what Philip and Leopold knew very well: that we had no proof at all that we hadn’t killed Livetti, and that if ever we confessed to getting rid of his body there was bound to be a strong presumption that we did kill him. I told the lieutenant the whole story exactly as it happened, every detail of it. He took a few notes, and let me talk. I could tell from his face that some of it he did not believe. He merely said that he would ask his colleagues of the criminal investigation department to see how much of my story they could confirm.
Then he very formally pronounced that if I wished to communicate with our Embassy or with the Consul at Bilbao, I might do so immediately. I did not want to. First Secretaries and Consuls—what would they understand? I should be considered, as always, a nuisance to government servants. I could not bear to think of the smooth, wearied politeness with which they would treat me, and what they would say about my gift for getting into trouble as soon as I was out of the room.
So I answered Gonzalez with just the remnants of pride which remained to me that it was the duty of the Spanish Police to prove my story true, not of diplomatists; and that all I asked was permission for a member of my family to stay with me.
‘I am not some girl you have run in from a cabaret, Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘I am without reproach, alone, and at the mercy of the police. I have a right to demand that my honour be protected.’
It worked; and if I had been capable of being amused by anything, I should have smiled at the utter ridiculousness of convention. There was I, suspected of being Livetti’s mistress and possibly Mgwana’s too and proud to be known quite certainly as Philip’s, but still able to make a fuss about My Honour as if I never went down the street without a duenna. I suppose it is just a matter of words. Society—at any rate Latin society—grants women a right to Our Taste and agrees that we may call it Our Honour.
Gonzalez felt sure that his superiors would agree. Oh, those superiors! I imagine them sitting round a table on high leather chairs dressed like the councillors of Philip II and each with a typist on his knee. He allowed me to write out that urgent telegram to you. Even so it was altered, but it brought you.
Two more days went by without a word, and then Gonzalez came again. No magistrate. No detectives. Now do you see why I said they treated me as something very precious and very guilty? As always he was polite and deadly. He said that I was not to think he was trying to trap me, that he would share with me the evidence exactly as a prosecuting judge would do and encourage me to explain it.
He thanked me for informing the authorities that the murder took place in the Hostal de las Olas. I protested at once that I had said nothing of the kind, and I did not know where it took place. He waved that aside, and told me that my story had to some extent been confirmed. The screws on my bathroom window and Philip’s had indeed been taken out and replaced; there were prints of gloved fingers on both sills; the rough wood of the ladder had caught a few threads of Livetti’s jacket; at the iron ore chute the tracks of the barrow had been found.
‘Our only difficulty, Mademoiselle, is that you expect us to believe that Alberto Livetti climbed up the ladder when he was dead,’ he said.
I repeated that he had been put through my window dead, and explained the motive.
‘It is incredible,’ he insisted. ‘Nobody would risk murder simply to create a scandal.’
That was an echo. I remember Leopold saying the same thing. We were worse off than ever. Why did I dash into trying to save Philip by telling the truth?
‘You also ask me to believe, Mademoiselle, that it is mere coincidence that Livetti happened to know you.’
I tried to explain that it was not a coincidence at all, that Livetti was a natural choice for anyone trying to create a damaging news story. He couldn’t be kept out of anywhere. He had been lowered on a rope to take photographs of newly-married celebrities through their bedroom window.
Gonzalez was shocked and incredulous. He knew of the beastliness of Italian press photographers
from hearsay, but thought it exaggerated. In Spain, he said, there was police control on the behaviour of photographers and censorship control on what they could publish. For the first time in my life I wondered if Freedom of the Press was so essential a part of democracy as I believed.
He returned to his crazy theory of assassination, question after question leading nowhere. Why had the Prebendary and I not given notice to the police of Leopold’s arrival? Why was it known to other interested parties? What were my politics? Hadn’t I been disillusioned after Mr Mgwana came to power?
When I had denied and denied that Cyril Flanders knew Livetti and that I had employed him, Gonzalez dropped his obsession with politics and went back to the facts.
‘This telephone call to Mr Mgwana by some person who knew you were concealing Livetti’s body—did you actually hear the conversation?’
I replied that from Leopold’s appearance and anxiety I had no doubt at all that it took place, and surely the call alone should be sufficient proof of Philip’s innocence.
‘The degree of homicide of which he is guilty will eventually be decided by the Law,’ he replied very coldly.
Then there was nothing else left for me to do. I confessed that I had hit Livetti hard with a bottle when I found him climbing in through my bathroom window.
I thought that must be the end of it, that they would take me away and let Philip go. But Gonzalez was simply vague and melancholy.
‘You did not believe me, Mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘when I told you that Mr Mgwana had admitted he killed Livetti in self defence. But it was true. And now you also confess. It is a pleasure for us all to observe nobility, but I fear we cannot allow it to distract us from our duty.’
That is all. A day later you arrived, and I bless you for your love and trust.
MY COMMENTS
That was the story as I first read it, what I ought to read into it was beyond conjecture. I was certain of only two facts: that Olura, though she might omit and exaggerate, was not a liar, and that Mr Mgwana was to blame.
The discovery of Livetti’s corpse plainly threw him off balance; he was always well aware of his cherished Olura’s indiscretions, and his first reaction might indeed have been one of wild alarm. To some extent it was justifiable. The Spanish censorship could not have acted in time to prevent Miss Deighton-Flagg and her like from telephoning such highly profitable news. I am sure, however, that any responsible editor would have demanded the fullest confirmation before publishing the story, and thus given the Government time to suppress it.
When Mgwana should have gone straight to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Generalissimo and had the whole scandal stamped into oblivion, he did not; and when he should have been flexible and invited someone like this Gonzalez to fly out immediately to Africa, he was off-hand, on his dignity and expecting his say-so to be accepted without investigation.
In effect he prohibited further enquiry; for an ambassador, while perfectly capable of suggesting to a Prime Minister, where affairs of state are concerned, that he is a liar and a bad one at that, cannot do so when the statement is private, personal, voluntary and manifestly chivalrous.
My poor Olura was, as she writes, helpless as a ghost. I managed to comfort her by my certainty that the Government, out of respect for Mgwana, would never push the enquiry as far as a trial; but in fact I felt no absolute certainty. Such a trial might be convenient for some over-riding reasons of state. Apparently there really was a political angle, though I could not imagine how the devil it was possible. It seemed highly unlikely that Prebendary Flanders was as symbolic of evil to General Franco as General Franco was to Prebendary Flanders.
I was of course interviewed by Lieutenant Pedro Gonzalez, whom I found to be hurt by Olura’s treatment of him. I could appreciate his point of view, though I do not know what else he could have expected. I had to explain to him that Olura and the secret policemen of a dictatorship were irreconcilable. I also endeavoured tactfully to point out the blazing idiocy of suggesting that she and her Group would be privy to an attempt on Mgwana.
Yes, he said, he thought so too. But it was difficult to convince his superiors. I dare say it was. Communists and trigger-happy Africans had tried in vain to assassinate Mgwana, and it was believable enough that anarchists—whom any Spanish Government finds far from merely comic—would not wish to be omitted from the list.
I remember myself telling Mgwana that I could raise a hundred million for his country if the City thought it odds-on that he would live for ten years. He replied very simply that he trusted in God and his Chief of Police. I refrained from remarking that it was a pity neither of them were in a position to underwrite the issue.
Gonzalez was eager to impress it on me that interrogation of suspects was not his normal duty. The last thing the Government wanted at this stage was to commit Olura to gaol or even to allow her to appear formally before a police magistrate; it did not wish to provoke headlines on the subject of imprisoning prominent British citizens; it was well aware of our excitable and superstitious respect for Habeas Corpus.
So Gonzalez was left holding the baby, as I believe the expression is. He sometimes felt, he admitted after his sixth sherry-and-bitters—a custom of my Edwardian youth to which I had introduced him—as if he were torturing a Christian saint. I fear he was not proof against my goddaughter’s physical attractions and her devastating ability to act out, unconsciously and to perfection, whatever high-minded part she had conceived for herself. I was relieved to notice in her narrative that she was also capable of self-dramatisation in less moral but possibly healthier causes. The affinity to tall white heather was more marked at sixteen than twenty-four, but is still undeniable.
I emphasised for Gonzalez the ambiguity of the two men in the black car, one of whom seemed to be a Frenchman called Vigny. He was not so sure of their importance. Vigny had a perfect alibi and could be the reddest of red herrings. Sauche and his Alliance des Blancs, he said, might welcome an accident to Mgwana—the first indication I had that they were involved, for I had not then heard Ardower’s story—but it was inconceivable that the former general would plot assassination on Spanish soil, well knowing that he would be returned to France and his sentence on the slightest suspicion of anything of the sort. I was not impressed by this argument. Organisations which use plastic bombs to blow up children are unlikely to shrink from blowing up adults by means of a corpse.
I tried to lead him on into further disclosures, but he realised that he had already said too much. His candour was not, I think, due so much to my finesse as to his admiration for Olura. In face of her guardian he permitted himself indiscretions. To be allowed to worship at a distance is one of the rights of man; but, like so many of them, is incompatible with security.
When I asked him where Ardower was, he was thoroughly evasive. Doubtless Madrid would know, he said. It was out of his province, he said. I detected a love–hate relationship with Ardower which was not wholly due to jealousy. He both resented and admired a quality in that then unknown character which came through to me as a sort of impenetrable cheerfulness.
I shall now append the second half of Ardower’s narrative, having, as I say, somewhat arbitrarily divided it into two in order to clarify facts and motives should this case ever be reopened, and my actions as well as those of other interested parties be submitted to political scrutiny which, I am satisfied, will be as peevish as it must be futile.
CONTINUATION OF DR ARDOWER’S NARRATIVE
I was taken down to Madrid by Gonzalez’s companion, a sulky and self-important fellow who gave me little information except that his name was Captain Feria. Everybody in this affair seemed to have officer status. The cell in which I was duly and perhaps deservedly incarcerated was clean, and the food more to my taste than in, let us say, an English boardinghouse. A diet of beans and chick-peas was evidently considered to be punitive, but they were extremely well cooked.
In the usual Spanish way I was at first left to meditate upon
my crimes without any person in authority adding insult to injury by saying exactly what they were. I comforted myself between meal-times by remembering that the Clerk in Holy Orders who had occupied my college rooms some five centuries ago would have been amply content with such simplicity as his successor now enjoyed.
Until they gave me something to read—a matter which Spanish criminals are not expected to consider urgent—I tried to channel my longing for Olura into fantasies more constructive than those which are inevitable in solitary confinement. What future could there ever be for us and how?
Her voice, which I succeeded in analysing, vowel sound by vowel sound and intonation by intonation, until I had recreated its soft impetuosity, became so vivid that I heard it. Easier still to summon up was a mental tape-recording of the Master of my College, harsh and intensely friendly, like the cawing of the rooks behind his lodgings, as he broke to me my lack of any future.
‘I do not mind your involvement in a political scandal, dear boy,’ he would say. ‘I am prepared to overlook murder on the assumption that a Fellow of this College would not permit the ephemeral to interfere with his research. Fornication I should never describe as a deadly sin, though I personally have not felt it a frequent necessity. But you must realise, as I am sure you do, that in these days when we can no longer afford openly to ridicule so-called public opinion, the College cannot be expected to condone scandal, murder and fornication simultaneously.’
To this I could only reply (I am sorry to give you these dreams of a criminal, but they did have a definite bearing on my problem of whether I should hope for a future or renounce it) that I was guiltless of murder, that a gentleman must deny fornication in the particular while he may confess to it in general and that scandal, like debt, was unavoidable in our witless flight across the hall from dark to dark.
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