They stopped as the waiter brought a pot of coffee.
‘I don’t live here, Mr Gillespie, not even near here.’
‘I see.’
‘You won’t find me again, and I won’t be going back to Ireland.’
‘Do you think I’m here to take you back?’
‘You’re a policeman.’
‘I’m not only here as a policeman.’
‘No, Mikey told me about your wife. I know who she was. Maeve Joyce. I do remember her a bit, as a girl I mean, when she’d be staying in the valley with her cousins.’
Stefan took out a cigarette and offered one to Collins.
‘You are Albert Neale, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not sure I know who Albert Neale is. It’s twenty years since I was in Ireland. I’ve lived in Spain a long time. I have children. The only place I’d even speak English at all was at the college.’
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
‘With Billy, when he was here?’
‘Start where you like, but it began with Charlotte Moore, didn’t it?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘No, I’m assuming Billy was right about that.’
‘I had no choice but to run. If I’d stayed they’d have hanged me.’
Stefan nodded.
‘They had me down for it from the start. I’d always been friendly with the young ’uns. I worked in the forestry the Sinclairs had up on Mullacor sometimes, and there was always gangs of kids playing up there. Charlotte was a sweet girl. Not too clever, but friendly, that’s all. And I worked with her father, for God’s sake. It was true she had a bit of a crush on me, the daft way of the age she was. She’d follow me sometimes. She liked to talk. Maybe I had time for her, I don’t know. It was a joke so, the way she followed me about, harmless. Even her dad laughed about it. And I never thought anything of it. I’d never have touched her.’
‘But somebody touched her,’ said Stefan, ‘and you knew who.’
‘No one would have believed me. And I’d told lies, you see. Who was going to believe the truth after that? It was then I saw them behind my house, digging. I never knew what they found till after, but I saw they had something. It was clothes with blood on them. I never put them there. But I didn’t wait to see what they were doing. I ran. I got to Dublin and then I got across to England. I was away while they were still looking for me in Wicklow.’
‘So then you came here?’
‘No, I was in London for a year, working in pubs, using another name. But wherever I went there’d be Irish fellers, and I knew the peelers were still looking. They wouldn’t give up, would they? I met a feller with a pub in Gibraltar and he said he’d give me a job if I was ever there. I took the money I had and I went. Jesus, it was worse than London. The size of the place, like living in fecking Glendalough, everyone knowing everyone, and the peelers still walking round in helmets. And fecking Irishmen off the ships by the bucket load again. Jesus, we’re everywhere!’
He laughed, then stopped, taking tobacco out to roll a cigarette.
‘One day there was an Irish feller in the pub. I knew him. He was from Arklow, I think. He knew me. Least he thought he did. He asked me where was I from. I made something up. I knew he’d remember in the end. Then he’d remember what they said I done.’
‘So you ran again?’
‘Into Spain. I had no real papers, hardly any money. I ended up on the tramp. I was picked up for begging in Salamanca. When they found I was Irish the Guardia Civil took me to the college. The priests gave me a bed. I was there a week, so I started working in the garden, mending things, to say thanks. The rector offered me a job to get me on my feet. I stayed. And I met a woman. I settled down. I forgot it all. I thought it was over.’
‘And then Billy Byrne turned up, and Billy knew you.’
‘He knew me straight away. I had no idea who the fuck he was. I must have met him, but he was younger than me and he lived down in Rathdrum. But he’d worked in Laragh and Glendalough. I don’t know how he recognized me. He had a nose for it. I said he was talking bollocks . . .’
‘So what did he do?’
‘He didn’t do anything. I thought I’d have to run. If he went to the rector, he’d go to the police. I was a suspected murderer. He couldn’t ignore it. But I had a family. Running wasn’t easy. So I told Billy what really happened. I thought if he knew I didn’t do it he’d leave me alone. He believed me, but he wouldn’t let go. I offered him money. It wasn’t much. He said, “We can do better than that, Jimmy.” He said it was good as a pension for us both.’
‘Because you told him who really killed Charlotte Moore?’
Collins said nothing, staring down at the table.
‘And now you need to tell me,’ said Stefan quietly.
‘He wasn’t much more than a boy himself when it happened. I helped him, God save me. I helped him hide her body. I believed him. I believed it was all an accident . . .’
‘So who was it?’
‘The man’s name was Stuart Sinclair. You wouldn’t know him.’
Stefan stared. He knew Stuart Sinclair. He had met him only a couple of times, a long time ago; once at his wedding. But he knew him well enough. He knew him above all as a childhood friend of Maeve’s. He was the brother of Alex Sinclair, the man he had met on that first day in Glendalough after Christmas, searching for Billy Byrne.
‘I know who he is. What happened, Jim?’
‘I felt sorry for him.’
‘So sorry you helped him hide a dead body?’
‘It’s hard to say it after all these years. He was sweet on her. He was a bit older – and he wasn’t right – if you know him, you’ll know that. When he got angry he couldn’t always control what he did. One time he attacked the young lad, Alex, and nearly cracked his skull with a shovel. Other times he wouldn’t talk to anyone. He’d be on his own in the woods or walking the hills, like he was frightened of people. I’d say it got worse once they started sending him away, in and out of asylums. He didn’t understand how a girl like Charlotte . . . he said he loved her. He wanted . . . he thought she wanted the same. And he couldn’t control – I know that’s not a reason – but he was with her in the woods, by the Upper Lake, and he tried to make her . . . she must have been terrified. He said she ran into the lake, out of her depth. She couldn’t swim. He saw what he done – and he tried to get to her, but she . . .’
Stefan saw the shore of the Upper Lake, and a body.
‘I found him there,’ continued Collins, ‘with her . . . drowned. He was talking to her – crying, shouting – he wouldn’t believe she was dead.’
‘So why didn’t you go and tell someone?’
‘I knew what they’d do. They wouldn’t hang him, but they’d lock him up for the rest of his life. There was no bringing Charlotte back – and it was an accident – I believed that then – if she hadn’t gone in the water . . .’
Stefan could see the pain in those words; he said nothing.
‘We took her up above the mines, on a pony. I don’t know where we put her. An old shaft I think. I wanted to turn back. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it. There was a part of him that did too. But we didn’t turn back. You know the rest. Maybe the peelers could see I done something. I gave them different stories, where I was, what I was doing – I couldn’t remember what I’d said. When I saw them digging . . . I was right to go. I would’ve hanged.’
‘So who put the clothes there?’
‘Stuart wasn’t right in his head. It didn’t make him stupid. Who’d have believed me? The Sinclairs owned half the valley. What was I? A murdering child molester trying to blame a halfwit? I had no chance.’
‘And you told Billy Byrne all that?
‘I told him, yes.’
‘And he went back home to get money out of Stuart Sinclair.’
‘I couldn’t stop that. It was nothing to do with me.’
‘And what about Maeve and Marian Gort?’
‘I th
ought it was over. Then he started writing about things he found out, talking to Stuart, watching him. He came up with this story about Miss Gort and another woman. I didn’t know it was Maeve Joyce. I hardly remembered her. I ignored the letters but they kept coming, going on about the Sinclairs and their money, and how Stuart would cough up to keep us quiet. I burnt them. I didn’t want anything to do with it. But I was the threat, see. He told Stuart I’d come back and point the finger. I’d tell where Charlotte’s body was, and then they’d start on the other deaths, and he’d hang so. Billy wouldn’t go away. The letters kept coming. So I did what I said I’d never do. I took my wife and kids and ran. No address, no way to contact me. I only told Mikey. He knew what an evil bastard Billy was. I thought I’d got rid of it. But it’s still here. I did forget, for a long time. I can’t now. It’s not just what Stuart did to Charlotte. I believe every word Billy wrote about him. Charlotte wasn’t an accident. Two other women are dead because of me, because I never said what happened.’
As Stefan walked up the hill to the Colegio de los Irlandeses there was a military truck outside being loaded with boxes and files. Stefan knew what it was. It was information; names, addresses, contacts, connections; copies of letters and lists of informers; lists of people’s friends and acquaintances, families, lovers; lists of those on the wrong side, even the right side, who needed spying on or were ready to spy on each other; lists of the dead who no longer needed spying on but whose families did. There wouldn’t only be lists of enemies, socialists, communists, Jews, German exiles finding their way through Spain to Portugal, British agents, French agents, Soviet agents, American agents; there would be lists of friends who could be bought and blackmailed too. Watching it all being carried out of the Irish College by the Abwehr officers, it smelt too much like Dublin Castle, only more rank.
He had already seen Otto Melsbach, who was in Salamanca to supervise the Abwehr’s departure from the city. Melsbach was happy to chat as if neither of them knew each other and had never been on the Asturian coast with an Irishman called Frank Ryan. What made Stefan so ill at ease, talking to the colonel in the college cloisters, was the feeling that it could almost have been a conversation with Terry Gregory. Whether Melsbach had always been an Abwehr plant during the Spanish Civil War, or whether he had played both sides until he knew where his best interests lay, the image of the superintendent in the Police Yard, handing information to the IRA’s Quartermaster, didn’t seem so far away. Stefan felt that his silence about that made him Gregory’s man, just as Eckhart and Triebel were Melsbach’s.
He turned away from the college and walked back the way he had come, thinking about what faced him in Ireland. He had what he came for. He had done what had been asked of him too. He had the information his government wanted. He knew why Frank Ryan had been pulled out of Burgos by German Intelligence; he knew what the real secret was. They were rebuilding an IRA leadership that was in ruins in Ireland, cementing its fractured pieces. What they could do with that he didn’t know. It was for other people to fathom. He had something else to do now. In his head was the man who had killed Maeve. He could barely remember what he looked like. But he knew Maeve had seen him only a day before she died, taking flowers to Marian Gort’s grave. It seemed nothing at the time, but it was everything.
He turned over the little he knew about Stuart Sinclair. Maeve had cared about him, as she cared about all wounded things. She remembered him as an ordinary boy she played with on her summer holidays. She had watched him change. Stefan recalled her saying it. She had seen him become a confused, disturbed young man, torn in some unfathomable way, not by anything anyone could see but by what was inside him. That was it; that was all Stefan knew. He tried to think back into those last days at Glendalough again. He had not been surprised that seeing Stuart troubled her. He was sick; clearly worse rather than better. But there had been something she wanted to say. It hadn’t seemed important then; it seemed so unimportant that he made no connection to her death twenty-four hours later. How did that happen?
He walked through Salamanca, seeing not its bright, sunlit stone, but the dark waters of the Upper Lake. He reached the river with no real intention of doing so. He walked out across the Roman bridge. Traffic still used it but it was quiet now. A few cars passed; a few pedestrians; a horse and cart. He stopped halfway across where the wall curved out into a bay and he stood looking down on to the muddy Río Tormes and the dense beds of reeds. Somewhere there, only days before, María Duarte’s body had been discovered. Whatever the reasons, all he could feel now was that she was another woman who should not be dead.
The noise of birds was everywhere. There were swallows nesting above the arches, sweeping the sky overhead to feed in the afternoon heat. The chatter of the year’s first broods came up from the stonework below. He took the Irish passport from his pocket. He opened it and saw the intense face and the bright eyes and the black, unbrushed hair. He leant over the parapet and let it fall into the water. There was a flash of gold from the embossed harp.
It was as he turned from the river that he realized Otto Melsbach was only a few yards away, watching. The Abwehr colonel stepped towards him.
‘I followed you here. I saw you outside the college.’
‘Well, now you can see me here too, Colonel.’
Melsbach’s next words were in German.
‘Why don’t we speak in German?’
Stefan didn’t answer, but he knew the colonel knew.
‘You intrigued me. Nothing much to say except to Ryan, but always watching. I’d say watching too much. I am a very thorough man. I don’t like loose ends. I took the trouble of asking someone in Dublin about you. There wasn’t much but I discovered you speak good German. My mistake. The name should have told me. Stefan, not Stephen. I’m irritated that I didn’t pick that up when I looked at your passport. You have German parents?’
‘A German grandmother.’ Stefan spoke in German too.
‘There were no great secrets, Inspector, no need for subterfuge.’
Oberst Melsbach was looking hard at Stefan despite his amiable smile. He was confident there was nothing for the Irish policeman to know. Stefan had been on the train to Santander when the real business was transacted in Pendueles, the meeting between Frank Ryan and Seán Russell. But he wanted to reassure himself. He wanted to confirm nothing had been overheard. His opinion of himself was high enough that he believed he would know immediately if it had been. It was information that should not reach Ireland, not yet. German Intelligence suspected that anything that got to the Irish found its way to the English eventually. And he was irritated that Stefan had fooled him too, even if it achieved nothing.
‘My government wanted to know that Frank Ryan was okay,’ said Stefan. ‘We weren’t convinced you just wanted to get him out – and set him free.’
A little bit of truth carried more conviction than a lie.
‘And are you convinced now?’
‘It’s no secret you want to use the IRA against Britain. Ryan was a senior IRA man. We can’t have any truck with that as neutrals. If our citizens play any part in the war, on whichever side, they are still subject to Irish law.’
The Abwehr colonel shook his head. It was enough truth to convince him; enough truth to make it impossible to suppress a sneer. He laughed.
‘There will be no neutrals in this war, you all know that.’
‘Well, when that day comes, I’m sure I’ll do my job differently.’
Stefan looked back at the river.
‘Someone should tell Frank that María Duarte is dead.’
‘I’m sure someone will, Inspector.’
‘It wasn’t necessary, was it?’
‘Nothing to do with us, I can assure you. The Spanish manage their own housekeeping. But there is a price to pay for choosing the wrong side.’
Neither Stefan nor Otto Melsbach noticed the dark van that drove by, heading into the city. At the end of the bridge it turned and stopped in the Calle de Ribera
del Puente so that it was facing back the way it had just come.
‘Have a safe journey home, Herr Gillespie.’
Oberst Melsbach walked back along the bridge towards the city. As Stefan watched him a taxi approached and stopped. The door opened; he saw Mrs Surtees.
‘You look like you’re in search of a lift, Mr Gillespie.’
‘I appreciate it, Mrs Surtees,’ he said, startled, ‘but I’d rather walk.’
‘You misunderstand me. You really do need a lift. Please get in.’
She wasn’t smiling; she was deadly serious.
‘Get into the bloody taxi, man!’
Her voice was so commanding that Stefan Gillespie did exactly as she said. He pulled the door shut. The taxi drove off, quickly passing Otto Melsbach.
‘It’s always awkward dealing with the police in a foreign country,’ continued Mrs Surtees, now quite relaxed, ‘especially if they don’t speak English, and so few do.’
The van that had crossed the bridge passed back unnoticed.
‘Mr Kerney wouldn’t want you involved under the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances?’
Stefan spun round, hearing the rattle of a machine gun behind him. He looked through the back window. Mrs Surtees didn’t turn her head.
He saw the van in the middle of the bridge. The back doors were open. A man was firing a machine gun at a body on the cobbles. It was Otto Melsbach’s.
‘You don’t only paint pictures then, Mrs Surtees.’
‘Death has an awful intimacy, why not call me Florence?’
‘I take it that was for Simon Chillingham?’
‘You met him, of course. The powers that be in London decided the Abwehr had overstepped the mark. There is a war on, as they keep telling us, as if somehow we’re all about to forget. The Germans can’t be allowed to do what they like on the Iberian peninsula, not without consequences.’
She spoke in a faintly scolding way that reminded him of a teacher he once had. He said no more. It was still their war, after all, just about.
‘I gather Mr Ryan is no longer a guest of the Spanish government.’
The City in Darkness Page 26