The Butcher Beyond

by Sally Spencer

  ‘It’s a joke,’ he explained to the immigration officer.

  ‘A joke? What is funny?’

  ‘She’s pretendin’ to think that it’ll be no rest for her with me here – because I’ll be expectin’ her to wait on me hand an’ foot.’

  ‘But of course you will expect it,’ the official said. ‘It is no more than a wife’s duty.’

  ‘No, you see …’ Woodend began.

  And then he gave up, because it was plain he was never going to get through to this feller.

  The conversation was obviously starting to bore the official. He picked up a large rubber stamp and slammed it down with some force on an open page in Woodend’s new passport.

  ‘You may go,’ he said. Then – as if suddenly recalling a half-forgotten directive from the immigration officer’s handbook – he gave the two visitors an insincere half-smile and said, ‘Have a pleasant stay in my country.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll certainly try to,’ Woodend replied.

  Woodend stood at the airport exit, taking his first look at Spain. Last time he’d set foot on foreign soil it had been on a beach in Normandy, under the hail of enemy bullets. This time, he thought, his welcome had been a little friendlier – but not that much friendlier.

  ‘It’s a bit barren, isn’t it?’ Joan said.

  It was indeed, Woodend agreed.

  Lancashire was green – it rained too bloody much for it to be anything else – but the Spanish coast had an arid look which reminded him of another wartime memory, his time in North Africa.

  ‘Still, I expect the hotel will be nice,’ Joan said, with the optimism of a woman who had never travelled abroad before – and could not therefore imagine that there was any place in the entire world which did not have its share of British fish and chip shops.

  ‘You will come now, please!’ called the young man in the blue blazer who had met them a few minutes earlier and informed them that he was Jesus María, their courier.

  Woodend picked up the suitcases – what the hell had Joan put in them to make them so heavy? – and carried them over to the bus. The vehicle had hard wooden seats, he noted, but at least it looked more roadworthy than most of the battered cars parked around it.

  He found himself, instinctively, running his eyes over the other passengers who were waiting to get on the bus. The greater part of the group was made up of families – mum, dad and two or three kids. But there were also several young couples, probably on their honeymoons, and one other pair who – like the Woodends – were no longer quite so young.

  Judging by their dress, Woodend decided that the majority of the men were either low-ranking office workers or skilled craftsmen. From their looks of uncertainty, he deduced that this was their first holiday abroad, and they were not yet quite sure whether they were going to enjoy it. They were, in other words, just the kind of people he would have expected to be travelling with.

  It was not until most of the party had climbed on to the bus that Woodend even noticed the man who didn’t fit in. He was in his late fifties, the Chief Inspector guessed, and had a bald head which – since it seemed to be covered with sweat – was reflecting more light than the average mirror. He was sporting a moustache thick enough to be called fully mature, yet he kept fingering it as if surprised to find it there under his nose. He didn’t look comfortable in his suit, either. He twitched and stretched his arms, as though he were used to a much better fit. And despite the fact that he had taken his tie off – as most of the other holidaymakers had – he didn’t seem at all at ease about it.

  But it was his general demeanour which made him really stand out. He was not looking as if he didn’t know what to expect next, but rather as if he did – and was greatly troubled by the knowledge.

  ‘Stop it, Charlie!’ Joan said sharply.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Stop bein’ a bobby, for goodness sake! You’re on holiday. An’ you’re goin’ to enjoy it if it kills you.’

  As the bus bumped along the coast road, Woodend looked out of the window at the blue sea, and felt almost like a kid again, on the way to his annual holiday in Blackpool.

  Except, of course, that it was not really the same at all, he thought somewhat ruefully.

  He was forty years older, for a start – though there’d been times recently when he’d felt as if at least a hundred years had passed since he’d last worn short trousers and knee socks. And this was not the Fylde Coastline – not by any stretch of the imagination.

  On the Fylde, the only donkeys you saw were carrying screaming children along the beach. Here, on the open roads of Alicante, the animals seemed to be being used as everything from goods vans to taxis.

  There were other differences, too. The villages they passed through had several small shady bars instead of one big public house. The shops were little more than holes in the walls, and while shopping in them might turn out to be a slow business, they held out the promise of unexpected treasures which would never be discovered in the shops back home. And then there were the people themselves. They were darker than their Lancashire counterparts, less encumbered by layers of clothes, and seemed to be going about their business in a far more leisurely manner.

  ‘It’s a rum sort of place this, isn’t it?’ said a voice from a few seats behind him.

  Aye, it was, Woodend agreed silently. Very rum. Like nothing he had ever seen before. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he was really going to enjoy his time in the town of Benicelda!

  ‘Your mind’s still back in Whitebridge, isn’t it?’ Joan said, in an accusing voice.

  ‘No,’ Woodend promised.

  ‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ Joan persisted.

  ‘Yes! Honestly!’

  And he meant it. Here was a whole new world, full of exciting new experiences, and he meant to savour them all.

  Then he thought of the bald-headed man again, and realized that while the mind of the Holiday-Woodend might be in Spain, he had brought the mind of Policeman-Woodend along with him for company.

  Two

  The road entered Benicelda at the edge of its sweeping bay, so that most of the town’s treasures were spread out in front of the coach party from the very start.

  At first sight it was a difficult place to categorize, Woodend thought, as he looked through the bus window. It would be easier to describe what it had been – and what it was about to become – than to talk about what it actually was.

  What it had been was a fishing village. There was ample evidence of that in the whitewashed shacks the bus was trundling past. They were spread out, these shacks, and they put Woodend in mind of a row of decaying teeth, separated by wide gaps. The reason for the spacing was obvious. Each house needed somewhere to beach its sturdy wooden fishing boat, and – more importantly – somewhere to spread out its large trawling net, so that it could be mended between expeditions. A number of men were at work on their nets at that moment – small, broad men with strong arms and weather-beaten skins. And while they were busy painstakingly repairing the mesh, their women – all dressed from head to foot in black – were either washing clothes in large wooden tubs or grilling fish over charcoal.

  As he heard the cameras of his fellow passengers clicking all around him, Woodend found himself wondering how long the way of life they were photographing had been playing itself out undisturbed – and how long it would be allowed to remain now that the tourists had started to pour in.

  They were approaching the other part of the town – the town as it was about to become. And what it was about to become, Woodend thought, was a kind of small-scale Blackpool, with the added advantage of guaranteed sun. The bus passed a number of four- and five-storey hotels – with names like Gran Sol and Vista del Mar – which looked so new that it was possible to believe the paint had scarcely had time to dry. And clustered in their shadow were smaller buildings which owed their very existence to the hotels – bars and restaurants, offering enticing menús del día; chemis
ts’ with prominent displays of sun cream; accessory shops which sold mats, buckets and spades, everything the visitor needed to take with him for his days spent turning crispy brown on the beach.

  Progress! Woodend thought – and was not sure whether or not he was being sarcastic.

  As the holidaymakers trooped off the bus – mothers telling their children to be careful, kids not taking a blind bit of notice – Woodend caught himself watching the bald man again. He was still wary, the Chief Inspector thought, but now he too seemed to have been caught up in the holiday spirit.

  Except that that was not quite right either. He was looking round – taking in the sights – but not, Woodend suspected, with the eyes of one who had never seen them before.

  And even that wasn’t quite right. He was looking at them as if to note the changes which had occurred since the last time he had been there – whenever that was.

  ‘The bags, Charlie,’ Joan said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The driver’s taken our bags out of the boot. They’re sittin’ there on the pavement – ready for you to carry them into the hotel. Or are you waitin’ for me to do it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Woodend said hastily.

  No Northern man worth his salt would ever allow his wife to hump the cases while he was around to take on the job himself. Yet even though he didn’t expect Joan to do it, there’d been a time when she could have – easily – Woodend thought, as he bent down to pick up the suitcases which his wife had obviously packed with large rocks.

  Joan had always been what he’d considered a real woman, but like most Northern women of her generation – brought up to pound the washing in the boiler, and then wring it through a heavy mangle – she’d never have been taken for a delicate flower. Yet all that had changed over the last couple of years. She’d started getting tired. She’d asked him to do things around the house which she would once have done herself without a second’s thought.

  ‘I’m not saying there is anything seriously wrong with her,’ the doctor had told him, in a private chat after the consultation, ‘but I’d certainly like her to have a complete rest before we do any more tests.’

  I’m not saying there is anything wrong with her, Woodend repeated silently. But that was a long, long way from saying that there wasn’t.

  The foyer of the hotel was as bright and modern as any English tourist worried about travelling in foreign parts could possibly have wished for. Yet with the decorative tiles on the walls and the fans overhead, it could never have been accused of being like a new hotel back home.

  Woodend sat Joan down, then joined the queue to register. The bald man was a couple of places in front of him, he noticed – which was just the position in the queue he would have chosen for himself if he’d been trying to remain relatively inconspicuous.

  Stop bein’ a bloody bobby, Charlie! he rebuked himself silently.

  He looked around. Prominently displayed behind the reception desk was the photograph of another bald man, though this one was wearing a military uniform, rather than a blue suit. The face of the man in the picture showed none of the uncertainty of the man in the queue. Quite the opposite, in fact. His jaw was set in arrogant contempt, and his small, piggy eyes were looking straight ahead and seemed to express both disapproval and distrust of what they were seeing.

  ‘Who’s that, Dad?’ asked one of the children in the queue. ‘Is he the king or summat?’

  ‘Nay, lad, that’s General Franco,’ his father told him.

  It was indeed, Woodend agreed. Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The Caudillo – by the grace of God, the absolute ruler of Spain.

  The bald man had reached the front of the queue, and Woodend strained his ears in an attempt to hear what words passed between him and the young male receptionist.

  ‘This is your first visit to our country, Señor Holloway?’ the receptionist asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  What was the accent? Woodend asked himself.

  Northern, certainly. And semi-posh, although undoubtedly acquired semi-posh. The man came from a modest background much like his own, the Chief Inspector guessed, but had now risen above his origins and was either a civil servant or a successful business executive.

  So what the bloody hell is he doin’ on holiday with a bunch of plebs like us? Woodend wondered silently.

  ‘The reason I ask if it is your first visit is because you have already had a phone call,’ the receptionist told Holloway.

  ‘A phone call?’

  ‘Yes, a gentleman – a foreigner, but I do not think English – called up and asked if Mr Holloway had already arrive.’

  ‘Must have been another Holloway.’

  ‘Another Holloway?’

  ‘It’s a common enough name in England.’

  Someone in the corner of the room coughed. Woodend turned his head. Sitting on one of the cane chairs, close to Joan, was a man dressed in an olive-green uniform and a three-cornered hat. He was also wearing full-length black boots, despite the heat, and had a pistol strapped to his waist.

  A policeman of some sort, Woodend told himself – but not the kind of jolly local bobby who helps old ladies across the street, and let’s kids off with a clip round the ear when he catches them stealing apples.

  ‘The gentleman who called described you most clearly to me,’ the receptionist insisted to Holloway. ‘I recognize you from that description.’

  The bald man shrugged, though the shrug did not, perhaps, appear quite as casual as he would have liked it to.

  ‘Still doesn’t ring any bells with me,’ he said.

  ‘¿Qué?’

  ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The policeman in the corner was watching the scene intently. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he did not speak enough English to understand the exchange properly, but it was equally clear that he knew that something was not quite right.

  ‘It has to be a mistake,’ Holloway said. ‘If the man rings again, please tell him he’s got the wrong person.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the clerk said. He reached up to the pigeon holes and took down a heavy metal key. ‘Your room is number twenty-six, Señor Holloway. It has a balcony with a splendid view of the sea.’

  ‘That will do fine,’ Holloway said, in a tone which made it perfectly clear that he couldn’t have cared less if it had given him a splendid view of the ventilation shaft.

  The bald man picked up his suitcase. It was obviously new, but was made of cardboard rather than leather. It was as much a part of his disguise as the suit and the newly grown moustache, Woodend thought. But why should he bother with a disguise at all?

  The queue shuffled a step forward, and Woodend with it. When it came to his turn to be processed, he would not have been totally surprised if the receptionist had told him that some mysterious man had called up and asked to talk to him, too, but all the clerk actually said was that his room was number 27 and it had a splendid view of the sea.

  Three

  The hotel that Joan had selected, after first carefully studying all the glossy brochures, was not one of the newer ones built near to the beach – although, travelling vertically, it was undoubtedly even closer to the sea than they were. It had been constructed at the top of the town’s only hill – a steep-sided rock which the bus had coughed and complained about as it had struggled to reach the summit – and standing on his balcony, Woodend could look down at an almost sheer drop of perhaps two hundred feet to the water below.

  The balcony afforded Woodend an excellent view. To his left he could see the fishing shacks they had passed earlier – square white blocks alongside which tiny figures were still working on their nets as the sun began to set. To his right were the fronts of some of the other buildings which shared the hill – buildings which, like the hotel itself, seemed to be teetering dangerously close to the crenellated cliff edge.

  There was a church, amber-brown in colour – ‘You can’t go paintin
’ a church amber-brown,’ they would have said in Whitebridge – and though it had a bell tower like the churches back home, that tower contained only one single, lonely bell. There was an official-looking building with plateresque decoration on its façade, which was probably the town hall, and would be considered effete by the local councillors in Lancashire, who were used to conducting their business in solid and stolid Victorian edifices. And there was a square which contained no statues or municipal gardens, but was filled instead with bars at which people seemed to be actually enjoying themselves.

  Woodend closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene as it would have been several hundred years earlier. This hill must have been where the local people fled to when pirates appeared on the sea, he thought. He saw them driving their goats up the steep paths, while desperately holding on to the rough sacks containing the few valuables they owned. He imagined them – simple fishermen, olive growers and shepherds – armed with whatever crude weapons they could muster, and ready to fight to the death against these invaders who were intent on raping their women and selling their children into slavery.

  Now those days seemed so long gone – and if this were England, they would have been – but Woodend reminded himself that less than thirty years earlier thousands upon thousands upon thousands of innocent Spanish civilians had been massacred simply for holding views that were not popular on their particular side of the battle lines.

  He went back into the room. Joan was lying on the bed. She looked very pale, and though she was making an effort to control it, he was almost certain that she was short of breath.

  ‘Is there anythin’ that I can for you, lass?’ he asked worriedly.

  His wife shook her head. ‘I’m just a bit tired from the journey,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be right as rain after a good night’s sleep.’

  Woodend nodded, and started to take off his jacket. ‘Well, I suppose it won’t do either of us any harm to have an early night for once,’ he said.

  Joan laughed weakly. ‘What rubbish you do talk sometimes, Charlie Woodend,’ she said. ‘You’ve never gone to bed before the pubs closed for as long as I’ve known you.’