“And the driver?” asked Jack breathlessly.
“Burned to a crisp,” answered the detective. “But before you go to pieces on me, it obviously wasn’t your friend. You said there were three in the Merc, and remember only two bodies were found. Secondly, I said they died in an incident, not an accident. They were killed by shots to the head at close range.”
“And what about the man in the blue Renault,” insisted Jack.
“Unidentifiable. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the victim of a petrol fire. I hope you never have to. Even the bones shrink, and human tissue fuses to the metal and plastic. It could have been Elvis Presley in there for all they knew. But if you want my theory, your friend Antonio murdered all three of them before putting one of the bodies in his own car and torching it.”
“Then he finally got what was coming to him,” said Julio grimly.
“As I said a moment ago, they couldn’t trace him at the time,” explained Miguel. “The plates were missing from the Renault, and there were no readable engine or chassis markings. And of course the only surviving witness to Señor García’s presence left the country. Not your fault, Jack. But don’t go calling him a hero in my earshot.”
There was no further conversation that evening. They checked into a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the town and retired to their rooms with little appetite for food.
Jack sat on the edge of the hard, plastic-encased mattress and reached into his pocket for the photo—the one he had taken from Antonio’s retreat before explosive charges had destroyed the computer drives. Why would Antonio have done that? What could have been on the drives that would justify such a drastic security protocol? He held the tiny faded rectangle up to the weak light and stared at his twenty-year-old self. “Who are you?” he asked the face in the picture. “I’m not sure I relate to you. And the smiling friend holding the camera: Who is he? Is he a friend? Is he a killer?”
Then something worrying occurred to him. If Antonio was the killer, what did that make Jack? And here was a photograph of him standing alongside the chief suspect’s car. Not good. He flipped the offending piece of evidence in his fingers with the intention of tearing it into as many pieces as possible and flushing the remains down the lavatory. It was then that he saw the word scrawled across the back. It said, quite simply, Adolfo.
Jack felt as if he had been punched. Specks of light danced before his eyes. With enough time and effort he could probably have dug that name out of memory without prompting. But far from trying to do so, he had been doing everything in his power to keep it buried. To have that name of all names rudely thrust back into his consciousness – and from beyond the grave – was more than he knew how to deal with. But one thought kept him focused: there was a purpose. Killer or not, Antonio had been a friend. He wouldn’t have caused Jack grief for nothing.
In that case, the photograph was a message. But what was the message? Had Antonio simply been making sure that Jack would remember a name? Or was it a clue—perhaps the key to finding information that had been on the Mac drives before the idiots from forensics blundered in.
Jack went over the features of the office in his mind’s eye. The computers… the printer and scanner… the one chair on casters… the gun locker. He briefly wondered whether there was anything in there worth looking at, but remembered the police leaving with several long canvas bags. What about the other side of the unit? There had been a table there with a very old desktop PC on it—no more than a piece of junk. And then the end wall, built of brick and mortar where there should have been a…
His mind jumped back to the old computer. There was something that he had noticed but dismissed as insignificant. Now he could not remember what it was that had struck him. However, he knew that elusive memories sometimes have to be crept up on from downwind, so he went out to the drinks station to see if there were any teabags. He had to settle for a sachet of instant coffee, and as he sipped at it he cast his mind back to the details of the carnage in Guadix. He thought of the tiny patch of unburned paint in the doorjamb, and in his mind’s eye he saw the blue and white paint bubbling and cracking.
Suddenly it came to him: the odd thing about the old computer. The casing had a metallic blue finish, and someone had carefully stuck a tapering strip of white masking tape to each side.
It was nearly 2 a.m. when Jack stopped outside Julio’s room and tapped lightly on the door. When there was no answer, he memorised the room number and made his way down to the front desk. Knowing that he was putting himself in a very dangerous position, he spoke to the clerk in deliberately slurred English. “I’m shorry, old chap. I sheem to have locked myshelf out. You haven’t got a shpare key, have you?”
The night clerk looked at him with ill-concealed scorn. “I can programme you a spare, but we will have to add ten euros to your bill.” He clicked buttons on his data terminal. “Which room was it? Ah, Meester Burlton… 229, yes?”
“No actually two of ush shwapped,” answered Jack, mildly ashamed that lying could come so easily to him. “He fanshied the view over the town. I took 232.”
“It’s against hotel rules to change rooms without notifying management,” droned the clerk, but to Jack’s relief he swiped another card key through the terminal. Taking care to lurch slightly as he walked back to the lift, Jack went straight to Julio’s door. He knocked lightly once again, and when no response came he let himself into the room.
He felt no better than a thief going through someone’s pockets while the victim snored gently nearby, but he quickly found the car keys and left the room. He dreaded what would happen if he was found out, and he was not even sure he could get to Almería and back before morning. What would they do if they came down and found the car missing? Would they put out an arrest warrant?
There was no alternative. He had to go, or this would haunt him for the rest of his life. He slipped back down through the foyer and out into the car park. Ten minutes later he was on the ramp joining the main road back to the coast. Would he be able to find Antonio’s flat when he reached Almería? He could only hope.
Back in Room 232, Julio was sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, talking on a mobile phone. “He knows something he hasn’t told us… Yes, he got into my room a few minutes ago and took the car keys… No idea, but I’ll catch him red-handed when he tries to put them back, and then we’ll have him over a barrel. Yes, thank you. And a good night to you.”
It had been a stressful day for Jack, and by the time he reached Almería he was half asleep at the wheel. It took him another half an hour to find Antonio’s apartment block. He turned off his lights as he drove into the yard, and then realised that this simply made him look suspicious. Putting the lights back on, he revved the engine once or twice as if he were no more than an inconsiderate neighbour, and parked facing the access road.
Taking out a tiny neon torch that he had bought at a petrol station en route, Jack picked his way round the back of the garage block. To his surprise there was no police tape over Antonio’s private door, and he stepped straight in. The place was still permeated by the nauseating reek of burnt metal and insulation. The gun locker had been emptied and its door left open. And worst of all, several thousand pounds worth of beautiful technology had been ruined beyond repair. Gaping black holes showed where Antonio’s charges had vaporised sections of outer casing. Jack could barely imagine the destruction inside.
Setting his mind on the task in hand, he turned and examined the old desktop PC. It took him only seconds to find what he had come for. He simply pressed the eject button on the front panel, and a 3.5-inch diskette popped out of its slot. The letters JB were printed on the front in ballpoint pen. Jack slipped it into his pocket and turned to go. But before he reached the door, he heard voices outside.
There was no hesitation; instinct took over. If the enemy found him in here, he was doomed. He simply lowered his eyes to the ground, stepped out into the open and shone his neon torch straight into the eyes of one the
two men. There was a sharp intake of breath and he lowered the beam straightaway. “Evening, Sir,” he mumbled in approximation of the local working class patois, hoping that the men he was facing came from somewhere else. “Sorry for startling you, señores. Night watchman. Just checking there’s no more risk of fire after the explosion earlier. Seems safe now, but I wouldn’t go in if I were you. Nasty fumes. Could give you cancer.”
With that, he put his head down and shuffled slowly along the back of the garages as if he had the whole night to fill. His heart was pounding, though, and as soon as he had rounded he corner he broke into a sprint. A second later there was a shout from back the way he had come, but he had allowed for a quick getaway. The door was unlocked, the key in the ignition and the gear lever in first. All he had to do was wrench the door open, dive in, stamp on the clutch and turn the key.
The next moment, Jack was leaving the yard in a squeal of rubber and a spray of grit. He sensed someone in the darkness behind him and flinched in expectation of a shot, but none came. The next minute he was breaking the speed limit in his dash for the open road.
CHAPTER 12
The adrenalin rush kept Jack awake for the first hour as he raced back up to Guadix, but after that he faced a constant struggle to stay awake. It was broad daylight when he pulled into the hotel car park to find Miguel and Julio waiting for him in the foyer, and he was too tired to care. At his insistence they set off for Valencia without delay, with Miguel driving and Julio beside him. Jack had the back to himself and slept fitfully for the first three hours of the journey.
By mid-morning, he had woken up and cleared his throat as if to resume his story. But he was mistaken if he thought he could distract Miguel from interrogating him about his nocturnal activities. At the earliest opportunity, the detective instructed Julio to follow the signs to a run-down shopping mall on the outskirts of an isolated market town. Once there, Jack was able to fulfil his desperate wish to buy fresh underwear and a change of shirt. Then the three found a dusty café-bar and sat down at an outside table with cups of fresh coffee: an Americano for the Englishman and the more intense café solo for Miguel and Julio. Old women sat gossiping in twos and threes, while dispirited young mothers showing all the signs of bad diet chivvied small children from shop to shop. A kid rattled over the cracked and uneven paving stones on a peeling skateboard as Miguel fired the opening salvo.
“Driving away a vehicle without permission. Driving without valid insurance. Fraudulent misrepresentation to the hotel management. Theft from a locked hotel room. Trespass. You’re good for at least three years’ imprisonment and probably more. If I don’t make an arrest and it gets out, my career is in jeopardy. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”
For once, Jack seemed to have no fight in him. He gazed down absently at the jet-black, slightly frothy coffee in front of him and spoke in a low, expressionless voice. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I felt homesick and desperately needed to be somewhere I felt a connection to. It was sad being there, but I managed to get my head together. I think I’ll be able to talk about Valencia when we get there. Before, I wasn’t so sure.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you say so? Julio could have driven you down there, instead of you breaking half a dozen different laws.”
“I needed to be there by myself. If you need to charge me, then you’ll have to get on with it. But I want to find out what happened to Antonio, and I don’t see how I can do that when I’m in a cell.”
“You wouldn’t be in a cell,” sneered Miguel. “We’d just take you to buy a bail bond.” But he recognised that he had lost the skirmish. Little as he liked it, he needed to humour the Englishman if he wanted his cooperation. He tried to think of a way of changing the subject while still keeping the threat of consequences still hanging over his witness. “In the end,” he said at length, “it all comes down to how much use your testimony is to us. And so far you’ve helped us see the bigger picture, but you’ve yet to give us a chickpea of evidence we can use in court.”
Jack thought of the plastic-encased diskette in his pocket. He had an idea that it contained all the evidence needed to solve the riddle of his friend’s murder and put an end to this ordeal. But whatever value it might have for Miguel, Jack needed it himself as a bargaining tool; he thought his freedom and even his life might come to depend on it.
That left him in a quandary. Where should he resume his narrative? He had been looking forward to talking about his exhausting but hilarious twenty-hour journey to Valencia in the company of an overcrowded trainload of Australian backpackers. It had been one of the high points of his travels, and lingering over it would put off the moment he was dreading. On the other hand, the only way of diverting Miguel from the true secret of Antonio’s garage was to give him something dramatic. And so, shrinking from the numinous horror whose jagged outline now disturbed the once sheer surface of its concealing veil, he jumped forward to a fifth floor landing in the Valencian ensanche.
JAMES
For long seconds after opening the front door, Trinidad looked at me blankly. I experienced a moment of fear that I was going to have to reintroduce myself. Then, in a replay of the scene on Antonio’s doorstep the previous week, her face cracked open in a smile of recognition.
"Jimmy, how amazing. What a surprise. What are you doing here? Where have you been? You stopped writing and I was furious, so I threw away your address." Cackling with glee, and sharing aloud her stream of consciousness, she led me through into their lounge. She took it for granted that I’d stay there. These days her mother had a job and wasn’t taking in students in any more, but she’d make an exception for me, and it was so terrific and so funny. What would she say? She was going to be so surprised…and so it went on.
She was still sensationally pretty, but intensely vulnerable and desperate for affection in the aftermath of her parents’ separation a few months earlier. She was working the early shift in a hospital maternity unit, and each afternoon at siesta time I’d return from my rambles around the city to find her already at home. Then, for the couple of hours until her mother came in from work she’d talk frankly and incessantly about sex: her lurid dreams, her fantasies, her body. Looking back, I find it quite disturbing—a desperate play for attention if not something darker. But at the time I simply read it as come-on. And as the week went by I began to think, Why not?
JACK
“Ah, nothing like a bit of romance to enliven a story,” trilled Julio, and Jack was unable to tell whether he was being sympathetic or sarcastic.
“There’s no need to patronise him, Julio,” barked the detective. But then he twisted round in his seat to fix the Englishman with an unfriendly stair. “I don’t want to know if you got her into bed, OK? You’ve made your point: you were both gagging for it but neither of you had the balls to make the first move. That’s enough for the record.”
There was silence in the car as they resumed their journey, and nothing was said until they passed the Valencia city limits – very slowly due to traffic congestion – just after 7 p.m. Julio pulled onto the forecourt of the first budget hotel he saw, and as soon as the car had stopped Jack climbed out and stalked off by himself. They did not see him until the following morning.
“Hey, I needed some space,” he explained the next day over coffee. “I took the bus and got myself a room nearer the centre. Actually, I didn’t spend more than a couple of hours in the room. I was walking around most of the night. Thanks for giving me space yesterday, and sorry about the car thing. All I can say is, I had to do it.”
Miguel did not quite know how to deal with Jack’s frankness. He simply nodded and asked, “Can you carry on with the story now.”
“Yes, but not here. Can you check out and relocate to my hotel? It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s the right place.”
After some debate, in which Julio seemed the more reluctant of the two to change accommodation, Miguel agreed on behalf of both of them. It was Julio who now seemed uncommunic
ative as they drove into the city centre, and Miguel who took an interest in the colourful, bustling streets and squares. Eventually they turned down a ramp into an underground garage and parked. They took the lift up to reception, and Miguel checked himself and his colleague in.
At Jack’s request they took coffee up to his room, which occupied a corner of the building on the 6th floor. It featured a striking double aspect window looking along and across a busy thoroughfare.
“The streets are on a grid pattern,” announced Jack, “with the traffic going in alternate directions. You can see that all the traffic on this street is heading towards the city centre. If you look where the bus has stopped, then just across the road is the apartment I stayed in twice: once on a school trip in 1970, and again in ’73.” He paused and showed little inclination to carry on.
“I sense this is going to be the most harrowing part of the story, Jack,” whispered the detective with unaccustomed sensitivity. “There’s no rush. Take all day if you need to, just a step at a time.”
Jack was more hesitant now, and even more evasive than usual with his eye contact. His voice was thick and seemed on the verge of breaking. “OK. I spent my last morning in Valencia touring round ever-seedier hotels, bars and shops looking for a few hours’ paid work. I was wasting my time. My only hope was to go to the Consulate for assistance—not necessarily safe given my situation and with all the political fallout over Gibraltar. In the end I headed back to the ensanche, cheering up at the thought that Trini would be waiting for conversation and possibly more.
When I reached the landing, I saw that she clearly had more on her mind than chatter. She’d left the front door ajar so that she wouldn’t have to get up to let me in and spoil her surprise. Then I walked into the living room and…”
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 15