Miguel watched him closely, and waited patiently for the Englishman to make eye-contact before answering. “Without wanting to alarm you, I think we have to assume that,” he admitted. “On the positive side, it wasn’t a specially well executed manoeuvre. But it was certainly designed to frighten, and it was carried out without the slightest regard for your safety, or ours, or that of the general public. And if you fail to get the message, I’m in no doubt that things will escalate.”
“But why? What have I done? What interest could they possibly have in me?”
“Señor Burlton, you do have a… shall we call it a history? One that involved your deceased friend. We don’t know the details, but we have to infer a connection between your visit to San Sebastián and his abduction.”
There was a long silence, during which Jack stared fixedly at the nightmarish art reproduction on the wall. He did not look away from it even as he began to speak. And when he finally began to talk about the past, the last vestiges of his coherence and composure had vanished. “OK,” he admitted. “Things happened. But they happened decades ago. My memory of them is more than a little confused. I was…unwell. For months afterwards. Years, if I’m honest.” More silence. “I still get flashbacks—sudden images and sounds in my head that bring me to a standstill. You saw me down at the station, when the gun came out—that was a mild one. And dreams...”
Jack shuddered visibly before drawing a deep breath and carrying on, a little more sure of himself now. “I have a jumbled, impressionistic idea of what I lived through. But when it comes to the precise sequence of events, it’s hard to put things in order. And it’s harder still to distinguish what actually happened from forty years’ worth of bad dreams and what-ifs. And anyway, to be blunt, I don’t see how something that happened in the early seventies – something that seemed all played out at the time – could reach down and do harm four decades later. There can’t be a connection. It has to be a coincidence.”
“There are few coincidences in politics, Jack. May I call you that? And in Basque politics there are none. Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever forgiven. But it’s a very private war, Jack—a very claustrophobic, incestuous war. And I don’t know how the hell you managed to get sucked in. How did it happen?”
“It all started with a guy named Txako. We smuggled him across the border and then somehow the secret police got onto us, or at least onto me, at least I think it was the secret police, I don’t see who else it could have been. And there was a guy named…hang on, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, he...”
“Slow down, Jack,” interrupted the detective. “You’ve lost me already. We need to start at the beginning, and you need to explain who people are as you go along. Above we’re going to need a record. I’ve got a little digital recorder that I’m going to set running while we talk, and in due course Julio will condense it down into a formal witness statement for you to sign. He has a gift for interviewing witnesses and a rather elegant way with words. I’ll be setting the agenda, but I think you’ll find him very skilful at drawing out half-remembered details and helping you sort them into their correct sequence.”
“Hang on,” said Jack as Miguel reached for the record button, “don’t you need to read me my rights or something?”
“You’ve been watching too much television,” answered Miguel with a smile. “You’re not under arrest. You’re not even a suspect—just a guest freely helping us with our enquiries.” He pressed the red button on a small, silver recording device. Then, having recited some legal details including the date, time and names of those present, he sat back and nodded at the Englishman to proceed.
The early results were not encouraging. For half an hour they were swamped with vague reminiscences: a nostalgic catalogue of bars, bar-crawls, reckless exploits and long-lost friends. From time to time Jack’s sprawling monologue would seem to be heading in the direction of something darker and more disturbing, but then his eyes would glaze over for a few moments before he seized once again at some trivial detail of a life given over to innocent fun.
Visibly frustrated, Miguel called a halt, switched off the recorder and ushered Julio out of the room. The younger man pulled the door closed and waited in the apartment’s spacious hallway while the detective took a comfort break. Then they slipped into a spare bedroom that was mainly given over to storage, confident that two closed doors would enable to them talk out of Jack’s earshot.
“This is hopeless,” began Miguel gloomily. “There’s a real mental block there, you can hear it.”
“It is going to be a long haul,” admitted Julio. “I think we can get there in time. That is if we have enough time.”
“Time is the killer. We have a few days, but we don’t have time to let him ramble on in the hope that he might eventually give us something relevant. And I’ve no idea what questions to ask or how to ask them. He’s badly damaged, that’s all too clear. And if we ask the wrong questions, or even the right questions the wrong way, I think we could end up implanting false memories that will make it impossible ever to get what we need from him.”
“Would you like me to try?” offered Julio. “With all due respect, I sense he has his guard up with you. I accept that there’s a protocol issue here, but if you’re agreeable I can try to steer his recollections gently down the avenues we can both see he’s trying to steer clear of.”
“I guess it’s worth trying,” replied Miguel rather curtly. “We’re certainly not getting anywhere at the moment.”
“Very well. But with respect it means being gentle with him. He’s not going to confront his anxieties unless he feels safe and secure. That doesn’t mean we can’t play the nice-cop-nasty-cop game if we really have to. But if we go down that route, it needs a light touch. And we need to switch roles from time to time, or it could easily turn into a one-to-one with Mr. Nasty Cop out in the cold.”
Miguel face was as dark as thunder as they headed back to the living room, but as the interview resumed they seemed immediately to make more progress. Jack’s explanations were still oblique, hesitant and disjointed, but a part of him seemed actually to enjoy flirting with the darkness he so clearly carried within. As the red light blinked tirelessly on the recorder, the first hints of an ordered narrative began to emerge.
For Jack it was to be a long drawn-out and harrowing ordeal. But much later, with the aid of the little recording device, his fragmented oral account would be edited into a reasonably coherent story.
JAMES
(Spring through Autumn, 1973)
I remember the beginnings clearly enough. I came to San Sebastián in April 1973 with a group of around two dozen language students from a university in the north of England. I was James then, or Jimmy to my friends: a stocky twenty-year-old with a massive IQ but somewhat limited social skills.
Where we came from – a tiny inner-city campus surrounded by sprawling post-industrial wasteland – it had been cold and wet for ten months of every year. Down here it was so different. There were plenty of warm, sunny days even in early spring. We had the run of a beautiful, welcoming city with fine beaches and a stunning, rugged backdrop. Food and drink cost barely a tenth of what we were used to. In short, we were in heaven. There was college to attend during the mornings, but after lunch we had the lovely beach almost to ourselves. We spent the weekends exploring and night after night on endless bar crawls. And in the process, we made dozens of new friends.
Of all those exciting new acquaintances, our favourite was a moody but funny guy in his early twenties named Txako. Frowned on by the authorities and his peer-group alike for his long hair and hippy clothes, he looked like one of us and quickly became a close friend.
One day in late spring Txako went missing. A few of us had arranged to meet up with him and some other local kids for beach football after college. He didn’t show up, the game went ahead without him, and afterwards we drifted into the Old Quarter for a late lunch.
One by one, after potato omelette sandwiches
and a couple of glasses of red wine, people began to drift away. Soon I was left with just two companions: a lovely girl of Italian parentage called Gina, and a tall, dark chick-magnet named Steve. In hindsight they were probably waiting for me to leave as well, but after a couple more rounds Steve suggested that we pay Txako a visit.
We’d never asked our friend about his freedom to join us on the beach when others of his age were at work, and he’d never opened up about himself or his home life. But Steve had once walked back with him after a bar-crawl to an address in the drab residential district of Gros, and thought he could find the right block if not the actual apartment.
The three of us turned up at the block that Steve remembered as Txako’s around mid-afternoon. At that point, we realised to our own surprise that we had no idea of his surname. We hovered there in the foyer for several minutes, and we were just scanning the nameplates on the mailboxes when the warped front door squealed again and a white-haired old man hobbled in. “Buenas tardes,” said Steve, his speech still mildly slurred from lunchtime. “We’re looking for a friend named Txako. Do you have any idea where he might live?”
“Buenas,” replied the man. “Txako? Sorry, means nothing.” But then he paused. “Unless that’s what young Santiago calls himself these days. Pretty boy in number eight. You can try his door but I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
We waited patiently for the old man to climb the narrow, dusty staircase, and at last we heard a door slam somewhere up inside the building. Then we made our own way up three flights to flat number eight, where Steve rang the bell. There was no answer. We rang again at least three times, and then Steve called aloud, “Come on, Txako, where the hell are you?”
There was no response for a moment, then we heard a door being unlocked at the far end of the landing. It opened a crack, and a voice whispered in English, “Thees way, queeckly.”
The door swung open a little further, and we stepped through one by one into a completely empty apartment—no furniture, no rugs, not even light bulbs. Through an open doorway in one of the rooms we could see a pile of blankets and clothes. It was cold, and Txako was wearing an outdoor coat. He looked tired, scared and unwell.
As we pieced the story together, it emerged that he was involved with one of the region’s countless Basque separatist cells. His father had disappeared following a police raid while Txako was still at school. Now, barely out of his teens, he was getting paid by one of his father’s old associates to run errands. His mother led a complicated life that left him free to come and go as he liked.
The previous afternoon, Txako and two other aspiring urban guerrillas had staged a pathetic raid on a bank out near the docks. We’d heard a politically spun version of events on the evening news. Armed with nothing more than sticks and a cheap replica pistol, they’d thought they could relieve the bank of some cash for the separatist cause without anyone getting hurt.
It had never occurred to them that the police would have no such scruples. Only Txako had escaped. One of his associates was dead, and our friend was certain that the police would beat his name out of the other. In desperation, he’d clambered between balconies and forced his way into the empty neighbouring apartment. Only once inside had he found a key to the front door.
Later on there would be no shortage of people calling what we did heroic, but to be a hero you have to understand the danger. We were simply reckless. I came up with a plan that the others liked, and we had a whip-round for cash. Gina went shopping and came back with a shaving kit, scissors and a pair of swimming trunks. Txako shaved for what must have been the first time in months, and Gina cut off some of the long hair that along with the beard had made him so instantly recognisable. And Steve donated a bright red Manchester United tee-shirt that he’d been wearing under a baggy open-necked shirt.
The makeover and the swimming trunks were my idea of a double bluff. The Civil Guard were notoriously intolerant of improper dress but under orders not to harm the all-important tourist trade. We calculated that if we could make Txako look enough like a foreign student, they’d look the other way. And it nearly worked. We passed a civil guardsman without being stopped; he shook his head in disapproval as we strolled past in the direction of the beach, but then turned his back and walked away. We were just debating whether to head straight to the railway station, which was our real objective, when we heard a shout from behind us.
“Halt!” the voice bellowed, and Txako flinched. “Keep going. Don’t look round,” urged Steve, but when a whistle started blowing we turned to see a military policeman glaring at us. Officially his jurisdiction would have been limited to off-duty soldiers from the nearby barracks, but I guess bullying foreign kids was his idea of fun.
“Where do you think you’re going, dressed like a whore?” shouted the soldier. Gina flinched, but the question had been addressed to Txako with his subversively bare legs. He made a brave attempt to speak Spanish like a foreigner, stammering that he no understand, he tourist, he no speak Spanish. Then in a stroke of genius, seeing Txako start to panic, Gina interrupted him: “My friend does not speak very good Spanish,” she purred with her flawless accent. “What is the problem, Señor Soldado?”
For a moment I thought she might have defused the situation, but the soldier’s mean streak ran deep. “He’s not properly dressed. It’s disgusting—an insult to everybody.”
“We’re just on our way to the beach,” explained Gina,
“You are not at the beach now. Tell your friend to cover himself up properly.”
Gina cleverly took the time to translate this into English, ostensibly for Txako’s benefit. Then she turned back to the soldier and explained that our friend did not have any other clothes with him.
“That’s his problem,” replied the man with a smirk. Then the smirk turned to a wide leer. “You’d all better come down to the barracks, and we’ll give you some lessons in how to dress.”
“This is bad,” muttered Steve. “When I say run, run.”
I’d been looking the soldier up and down. He was wearing a sidearm, but I doubted he’d fire it in the street over a pair of swimming trunks. And tough as he was, he wasn’t built for speed. I nodded at Steve. The soldier noted this and began shouting again. “Run!” yelled Steve in his face.
We sprinted down the street half-expecting to be shot at, but all we heard was the whistle blowing furiously behind us. Knowing that any civil guardsmen nearby would hear the whistle and that running would attract their attention, we returned to a normal walk as soon as were out of his line of sight.
“Brilliant, Steve,” I said when we had got our breath back, “but we need to split up. If he reports us they’ll be looking for three blokes and a girl. What say we meet at the station in an hour?”
“Make it two hours,” answered Steve, a calculating look in his eyes. “Better still, two and a half. Don’t forget we still need to get hold of a passport. Gina, could I have a word before we split?”
It had been my idea to borrow a passport for Txako and shepherd him across the border in a group of British students. I’d also volunteered some ideas on how to disguise his appearance – including a rather frivolous suggestion that perhaps he should go in drag – but I’d left the details for Steve and Txako to work out. And so, when I finally reached the station, I failed to realise that I was the last to arrive. I saw Steve and Gina standing by the ticket office, but Txako was nowhere in sight. Then a tall, angular blonde who’d been standing alone a few metres away sidled over. Without any warning she hugged me and gave me a big wet kiss on the lips. I raised my hand to wipe it off, but she took my wrist and subjected it to a grip like an all-in wrestler.
“Ees me, Txako,” she whispered. I must have looked shocked.
“Act natural, Jim,” whispered Steve as he came up behind me. Then he continued in a louder voice, “This is Sally. Sally, meet my friend Jimmy.” His voice dropped to a whisper again, “We’ve got you a ticket, and there’s a train to Irún in a
quarter of an hour.”
I peered sidelong at Txako in his tight cowgirl jeans, chequered blouse, pointed boots and wavy blond wig. The final make-over had been judged to perfection, more daringly than anything I could have imagined. I was struck by how feminine he looked: somehow too delicate to be a bloke, and revealing improbable poise and dignity. I decided not to ask questions, but he saw me looking. “You thought you knew me,” he said with a smile, and I left it at that.
The journey up to Irún went off without any more drama, although every time someone came through from the next car my heart skipped a beat. The robotic mentality of an unknown passport inspector now seemed a hopelessly fragile lifeline, and by the time we left the train at the frontier I felt sick with dread. However, we were not stopped when we walked through passport control into France as two couples: Steve went first, hand in hand with the primly buttoned-up Txako. Gina and I followed close behind, relying on Gina’s studied carelessness in buttoning her blouse to distract the official from looking too hard at Txako. In the event she even got a smile.
We waited with our friend beside the next train to Bayonne. We knew there was a sizeable community of political exiles there who would take him in, but I think we were all wondering what life now held for him. As the departure time approached he hugged each of us, tears running down his face and streaking the expertly applied make-up. Then he climbed aboard and made his way to a seat, but just as the train was starting to move he rushed back to the door and pulled the window down. He was waving something at us: a dark rectangle. “Oh God!” breathed Steve before running to the moving train and taking the object.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Getting the passport back,” smiled Steve with relief.
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “That’s a British one. Whose is it?”
“My, my, James, you are quick on the uptake today. It was your idea, remember? And anyway, how many blondes do you know called Sally?”
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 2