In the end, he gave up trying to sleep and focused on getting back to San Sebastián as quickly as possible. In the dark it had been difficult to track the progress of the SUV in which he was held prisoner, but he did not think he could be more than fifteen or twenty kilometres out of the city. Under different conditions he would have walked or even jogged that distance. But handcuffed, with his muscles cramped from confinement, and with the need for haste, transport was a necessity.
Clumsily staggering to his feet, the strongman retraced his earlier route across the barn. He picked his way carefully between sharp, rusted implements and crumbling wooden enclosures. Very cautiously, knowing the danger of even a small open cut in a place like this, he worked his way out via the same jagged rust hole through which he had entered. Once out in the open he stopped and listened carefully, relishing the sweet night air as it purged the fetid miasma of mud, mould and old animal dung from his airways. A moment later, he was stalking away from the building and looking around for signs of habitation.
Jack Burlton slumped on the bed and wearily kicked off his shoes. It was gone midnight, and he had not fared well on the misleadingly named sleeper train from Paris. He could not believe that so much could have happened in one day, and it still bewildered him that events from before the start of his working life could be catching up with him in retirement.
He cast an eye around the room that had been assigned to him. It was cramped and airless, musty from disuse but reasonably well appointed: a firm double bed, a tiny en-suite shower room, a wall-mounted television, a matching pair of bedside cabinets, and a heavy modern dressing table positioned in front of the window recess. There was nevertheless the same institutional feel that he had noted in the communal area. For all the effort that had gone into making it physically comfortable, the establishment was drab and austere—a training facility, perhaps, or a conference venue. He went to open the window for the sake of some fresh air, but steel shutters stood between him and the glass, and with the heavy dressing table in the way he could not get near them.
Tired though he was, Jack retrieved the TV remote from the bedside table and began to flick through the channels. There was nothing of any real interest to see, but he stayed with a late night news bulletin. The usual international events unfolded: conflict, persecution, famine—all familiar but with a slightly different spin compared to home. Then the national news came up, and even this was familiar in flavour if not the specific content: a succession of minor disasters, pouting celebrities and posturing politicians followed by the inevitable human interest story.
Just one item stuck in Jack’s mind: the appointment of a new Justice Minister named José María Gallego. Elderly but charismatic, hairless but largely unlined, wheelchair-bound but still vigorous, there was a disturbing but attractive quality about him—not unlike Patrick Stewart in that movie series about kids with superpowers. Perhaps it was Jack’s own recollection of suffering at the hands of the legal establishment that touched a nerve, perhaps it was the airlessness of the room, but something kept him awake for over an hour after he had put the lights out.
Juana Echarri peered anxiously through the windscreen of her elderly Clio, looking for the lonely farm cottage to which she had been summoned. She was sure the caller would have rung in plenty of time, but as a midwife it was her perpetual fear that she would not reach a patient in time to assist with the birth. She chugged along in second gear with the windows open, looking and listening for any sign of life. Then suddenly she saw in the beam of her headlights exactly what she had been expecting: a distraught looking man frantically beckoning her over to the side of the road. Relieved, she pulled over, tugged on the handbrake and shifted into neutral.
As soon as the man was within speaking distance, Juana knew something was wrong. He looked more like a TV wrestler than a farmer, and the cuts and bruises to his face filled her with horror. But it was the handcuffs that cemented her fear, and she tried frantically to get the car into gear before he reached her.
She was too slow. Two beefy arms snaked through the open window and grasped her round the neck. Then, over the rising whine of the engine, the man spoke in a surprisingly girlish voice: “This car moves, your head’s staying right here with me.”
A minute later, the Clio was bowling down the road towards San Sebastián. The petrified midwife was driving, while Martí’s massive frame was squeezed into a passenger seat that had been pushed back to the limit of its travel. His cuffed hands lay in his lap and his chin rested on his chest. But he was not sleeping; he was browsing Juana’s smartphone and making plans.
Meanwhile, Juana knew better than to try anything foolish. Behind the obvious anger and fear she did not think the hijacker was a truly bad man, and she believed that with a little intercessory help from the Holy Mother of God she would survive the night. Her main worry was that somewhere out in the darkness an anxious family was wondering when she was going to turn up.
“So, Jack,” began Miguel after a breakfast of fresh bread and croissants that had materialised from somewhere, “you explained last night how pride and inquisitiveness dragged you into a rendezvous with a self-styled gangster kid called Carlos, and how this Carlos set you up on a blind date with a Mister Big who went by the street handle of Gato, or Tomcat in your language. It’s all a bit fanciful sounding, isn’t it? I mean, there’s nothing verifiable, nothing documented, nothing that relates to any event on record.
“It means I’ve no way of knowing if you’re telling me the truth. In fact, the only evidence I have that’s worth a bean is your friend’s dying words and a cryptic note in some old paper archives. It seems that in 1973, a foreign national named James Burlton came to the attention of one of Franco’s many security agencies. The agency in question has long since been disbanded, and there’s no further information on file. I suppose that was you.”
“Of course. I’ve already told you that I was known as James in those days. It was only when I went on to study in France that our tutor insisted on calling everybody by a French name. I chose Jacques, the French equivalent of James. And apart from family and a few old school-friends it’s stayed with me ever since.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Jack. I believe most of what you’ve told me and I want to believe all of it. But at the moment, all I have is a story of underemployed youngsters playing urban guerrilla games. Somehow, somewhere along the line, things suddenly turned really nasty. I’m still not clear why and how they took that turn, and I believe that information is the key to why people are still dying today. So come on, make it all clear to me.”
“We’re getting there,” said Jack. “Slowly.”
JAMES
The funicular ride up the cliff the following morning was quite ravishing, as was the hike down the far side of the headland. The steep slope down to the sea formed a lightly wooded semi-circle, lush and green in the morning sunlight. The sound of the waves on the rocks drifted up from below, accompanied by birdsong all around and the gentle, rhythmic chinking of beer bottles in my little backpack. It was almost an anti-climax to emerge from the stunted, scrubby trees into the rocky cove where I had arranged to meet the infamous Gato.
I called out two or three times in greeting, but I was wasting my breath. My voice was completely drowned by the thunder of the Atlantic breakers as they rolled in from the Bay of Biscay and smashed against the rocks just yards from where I stood. In any event I seemed to have the rocky cove to myself, but as I picked my way through the jumble of boulders and outcrops that littered the shoreline my eyes were continually sweeping the middle distance for any sign of the man I’d come to meet. Perhaps that’s why I stumbled two or three times in the first few dozen yards, and it’s almost certainly why I tripped over the corpse before I saw it.
I was overcome with nausea at my first sight of a dead body. Not that there was a lot of blood—in fact I thought for a split second that I’d stumbled over a sunbather. Words of apology were already queuing up on my lips before I real
ised the significance of the reddish-brown stains on his white shirt. Even then my first impulse was to see if I could offer any assistance, but it took only a moment to see that the victim was far beyond any help I could give. And it was when I looked into the inert, staring eyes that my stomach heaved.
Once the gagging had run its course I was able to examine the body more closely. It was clearly Gato. This was my first sight of him, but even in death he closely matched the description I’d been given. He’d been a big man: unusually tall for a pure-blooded Basque but characteristically broad and well-muscled. The splayed nose and crumpled ears spoke of his past as a prize-fighter, but his close-cropped hair had been thinning on top and he exhibited the round belly so common among men of his ethnic group. He appeared to have been shot twice: once high up in the right shoulder and once just to the left of the breastbone.
In shock at my discovery, I stood for a minute or two gazing distractedly at the corpse. I had no idea how to handle this turn of events. I’d been brought up to trust the police, but the heavily armed grises who cruised the streets of San Sebastián were infamously harsh in their dealings with the public. I decided that the first step was to consult my new friend Carlos; he’d set up the meeting and he seemed more streetwise than I could claim to be.
Retrieving my backpack from the ground, I’d just begun to pick my way back towards the foot of the path when something hit me in the small of the back. Spinning round, I saw nothing at first. Then another pebble came sailing through the air, straight towards my face. Dodging the missile just in time, I stumbled angrily in the direction it had come from, and was about to launch into a tirade of abuse when I saw Carlos hunched down between two boulders. He was clearly in a state of shock.
“Hey, what the hell….?” I began, but then saw that he had a finger to his lips while his other arm was frantically gesturing at me.
“Just get down,” he called out, as loudly as a hoarse whisper would allow. “They’re still here.”
“Who’s still here? What the hell is going on?”
“I’ve no idea, but my… Gato… is….”
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” I acknowledged as I squatted down beside him. “Come on, don’t we need to get to the police?”
Carlos looked at me wide-eyed. “The police?” he gasped, hunching down even further between the rocks. “Don’t be stupid.” He took a moment to recompose himself before continuing, “We can’t let them find us. Don’t talk now; we need to get out of here.”
With that, he levered himself forward onto his hands and knees and began crawling towards the path. As he did so, I could see that something had fallen from his pocket; it was his national identity card encased in a slippery plastic sheath. I snatched it up and slid it into my own pocket, intending to hand it back with a flourish as soon as I had the chance, then set off after him.
I could see only one route out of the steep-sided, semi-circular cove: the same meandering path down which I’d so recently strolled from the crest of Monte Igeldo. By the time we reached the foot of the path my knees were raw, but a more serious concern was that we would have to leave the cover of the rocks. A few dozen metres up the slope, the scrubby trees would provide some cover for our movements. But for as much as half a minute we’d be right out in the open. I looked at my friend and could see even from behind that he was shaking. To my own surprise I was now as cold as ice. I would have to give the signal to move.
I cautiously raised my head and looked around, and then I was off, whispering to Carlos as I passed him that it was time to go. He stayed put and I stopped in my tracks, aware that I was now fully visible to anyone still in the area. “Come on,” I urged him. “We have to go.” And amazingly, he moved. Awkwardly at first, stiffly, but with increasing drive at every step, he came towards me. I turned, and we ran together up the steep, uneven path. At every step I expected to hear gunshots, but at last to my relief we reached the cover of the trees and stopped to get our breath back.
It was then that the sound came—not the full-throated roar I would have expected, but something more akin to the crack of a whip. As a former military cadet, with the passion for weaponry that other kids of my age reserved for motorcycles or guitars, I recognised that noise. It marked the passage of a small, light bullet – probably .22 calibre – travelling faster than the speed of sound. The echoing quality was provided by the muzzle report as it reached me a fraction of a second later. This was not a police or military weapon—a .22 bullet doesn’t have enough destructive power for use in combat. This was a lightweight precision tool, the stock-in-trade of a marksman rather than a soldier.
The sound came twice in quick succession, and then a third time. In a detached kind of way I began to think, ‘Oh no, they’re shooting at us.’ I glanced across at Carlos, and he was looking detached as well, as though the sound meant absolutely nothing at all. “Come on, quickly!” I urged him, and reached out to pull at his arm, but once again he seemed reluctant to move. “Quickly,” I repeated. Only then did he look at me and open his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a trickle of blood that ran down his chin and dripped onto his shirt. His eyes were now unfocused, quivering, and beginning to turn upwards. A moment later he collapsed. I turned and sprinted up the path in a panic, but after a few dozen metres another whip-crack sent me diving off the path.
I don’t know how long I lay hiding in the damp hillside undergrowth, or how much of that time I spent in haunted sleep, but the light was fading from the sky as I scrambled up onto an unfamiliar stretch of road. There, light-headed with exhaustion and dehydration, I stopped by the roadside and vainly attempted to thumb a lift. Finally, as large, soft, warm drops of rain began to fall, I found my way to the funicular railway. And having once reached the base of the cliff I was able to get a taxi back to my lodgings.
I lay awake most of the night, flipping Carlos’ identity card over and over in my fingers as I listened yet again to Steve’s wet snoring and fretted over the future. My problem was that there was nobody I could trust to respond appropriately. If my parents actually believed my account, they would press me to cut short my stay and return home. My fellow students would treat it as either a joke or a melodrama, and either way my reputation would haunt me until the day I graduated. The police might help, but in Franco’s Spain they might just as easily have been involved in the killings.
More than once I was on the point of waking Steve and confiding in him, but by morning I had decided to bide my time. By midday, the story that a boy from the neighbourhood had gone missing was all around the college. And by evening the death of two “ETA terrorists” was on the national news. Life in the Basque Country went on.
JACK
It was a tortuously slow telling, Jack’s emotional state becoming visibly more disturbed and his narration more erratic as the story progressed. It chilled Miguel to the core. He was used to encountering raw emotions during an investigation: fear, grief, resentment, even anger. And all those were present on Jack’s face as he told his story. But there was something else, something darker, something the detective was not sure how to classify. He called a halt to the questioning earlier than he had planned to, and suggested they resume in an hour’s time.
Jack withdrew to his room, where he turned on the TV and dozed off in the middle of a maiden news conference by the disabled but impressive new Justice Minister. It seemed that the politician had big plans for the reform of interrogation and jury trials, but by the time he got onto the subject of anti-terror legislation Jack was dreaming of blood and thunder.
He woke up an hour or maybe two hours later with an intuition that something was wrong. Darkness. Silence. Presence. He fought off the ominous impressions crowding in on him, and spent a few moments wondering if this was just a shadow of the disturbing dream from which he had woken. But as he lay motionless in the pitch darkness he was able to identify the real source of his unease. He had fallen asleep with the lights and the television on. Now there was not so much as a glimm
er from the television’s red standby light. There had evidently been a power cut. It could have been a mere service outage, but Jack was losing his faith in coincidence.
He quickly climbed into the ill-fitting pair of trousers that had been delivered that morning together with a couple of shirts and a selection of cheap underwear. Then he put on his shoes and listened carefully for sounds in the building or outside. He desperately craved his own clothes, but his suitcase had been abandoned along with the police cruiser that had picked him up at the station an eventful thirty hours earlier.
Hearing nothing, he put his ear to the bedroom door just as a key was inserted roughly from the other side. He jerked backwards in alarm, but not quickly enough to avoid a sharp knock on the temple as the door was thrown open. He stumbled backwards and sat down in disarray on the bed as Alonso stepped into the room with his finger pressed to his lips.
“We’ve got to go,” announced the incompletely uniformed, unshaven policeman. “They’re onto us.”
“How the hell…”
“No time. Just come.”
Alonso stepped back out into the corridor, only to be hurled sideways as if by an invisible attack dog a split second before a short, sharp noise reverberated down the corridor. Not a single shot, thought Jack, but a short burst from a machine pistol.
He leapt from the bed, his pulse racing. He had the presence of mind to wrench Alonso’s key from its position in the outer face of the lock, before slamming the door shut and twisting the latch back to the locked position. He was dimly aware of renewed gunfire in the corridor outside, but by that time he was concentrating on his escape.
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 6