The Butcher Beyond

by Sally Spencer

  He grinned, self-consciously. ‘That’s not strictly accurate, you know, love,’ he said.

  ‘It’s accurate enough,’ Joan countered.

  ‘It’s mainly been work which has kept me out so late,’ Woodend protested, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. ‘We’re on holiday now.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Joan agreed, ‘we’re on holiday. So why shouldn’t you have a few pints before you turn in?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t like leavin’ you alone.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s not much point in goin’ out, is there? I’ll never be able to find any Lion Best Bitter in a place like this.’

  ‘You’ll find somethin’ else that’ll suit you just as well. So stop fussin’, get off out an’ start enjoyin’ yourself.’

  He didn’t want to go – he really didn’t want to go – but he could tell that Joan would continue to argue with him until he did go – and that she was already finding it a strain to do so.

  He straightened his jacket again. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Be as long as you like, you daft ’apporth. I’ll probably be asleep when you get back, anyway.’

  He walked to the door, opened it, looked back once, and was gone. Joan breathed a sigh of relief. The pain in her chest had been bothering her for some time, and now that Charlie had left she could let it show.

  The streets in the old town were narrow, twisting, and designed for hoofed traffic rather than the motorized variety. Even in the early evening, many of the small shops were still open, and the bars – most of which had managed to squeeze at least a few tables on to the crowded street – were doing a thriving business.

  Woodend came to the shady square in front of the old church. He had several bars to choose from, he thought. In fact, he was almost spoiled for choice, but since there was no point in wasting valuable drinking time by weighing up their respective merits, he selected one at random, sat down, and signalled a waiter.

  ‘Beer?’ he asked hopefully.

  The waiter looked perplexed. ‘Bee-yar?’ he repeated.

  Woodend mimed a pint pot. ‘Beer.’

  ‘¿Vino?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘Could be,’ Woodend admitted. ‘Given that I don’t speak a word of Spanish, it could very well be.’

  ‘¿Blanco o tinto?’

  ‘El señor quiere una cerveza,’ said a voice to Woodend’s left. ‘Una cerveza grande.’

  ‘Ah, cerveza!’ the waiter said, and disappeared into the bar.

  Woodend looked up at his rescuer. The man was in his early sixties, he estimated. He was not particularly tall, but he had a good, well-muscled body for his age. He also possessed a pair of quick, intelligent, dark eyes, a firm jaw, and a mouth which betrayed a sense of humour.

  ‘You speak English?’ he asked.

  ‘Enough,’ the Spaniard replied, in an accent which seemed to have a slightly American edge to it.

  ‘Would you care to join me?’ Woodend suggested.

  The other man shrugged. ‘Why not? It is always pleasant to speak with visitors to our beautiful town. And it is a long time since I have been able to share a drink with a policeman.’ He sat down awkwardly, as if there were stiffness in his left leg, then held his hand out across the table. ‘Paco Ruiz.’

  ‘Charlie Woodend,’ the Chief Inspector told him, taking the hand and shaking it firmly. ‘How did you know I was a policeman?’

  Ruiz smiled. ‘A guess,’ he admitted, ‘but an informed one. I was watching you as you made your way to this table. You were looking around. Taking note. If I was to ask you to close your eyes and describe the whole square, you would be able to do so with ease. There are not many occupations which train you to look on the world in that way.’

  ‘Are you in the same game yourself?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I was. Once.’

  ‘What kind of policeman were you?’

  ‘I was considered by many – myself included, I must say – to be the best homicide detective in Madrid. Then the Civil War broke out …’ Ruiz glanced quickly around him, ‘… and I chose to fight on the wrong side.’

  ‘The war was a long time ago,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Not in the mind of our great and wise leader,’ Ruiz told him. ‘Those who opposed him then are still being punished even now.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Take the case of army officers as an example. Those who fought with Franco receive a generous pension. Those who stayed on the side of the democratically elected government – who upheld the oath they had sworn, to defend the Republic – get no pension at all, and live in poverty. I know a number of them who feel they would have been better off being executed – as so many of their comrades were – once the war ended.’

  The waiter emerged from the bar. Ruiz held up two fingers to indicate that he should double the order.

  ‘I should not complain, I suppose,’ the Spaniard continued. ‘My situation is considerably better than that of many.’

  ‘An’ why’s that?’

  ‘Long ago, I did the General a service of a sort.’ He paused, as if remembering that service with an element of regret. ‘I would have been shot if I’d refused, but that is not why I did it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No! A real man will always choose death before dishonour, and I like to think I am enough of a real man to have chosen the correct path.’

  ‘So why did you do him this service?’ Woodend asked, intrigued.

  ‘Because, for once, the General’s interests and the interests of Spain were the same. And so, despite my temerity in opposing almighty Franco, there is a little something in my credit column which allows me a small leeway. Besides, I have an American wife. True, she was forced to take Spanish nationality in order to marry me, but she is an American nevertheless. The Spanish authorities do not wish to do anything which might offend the Americans, especially one who has influential friends in the Spanish Section of the State Department, as my Cindy does.’

  The waiter brought the beers. Woodend took a gulp of his. It was lighter and more gaseous than the best bitter he was used to, but having said that, it still wasn’t half bad.

  ‘So what do you do now?’ he asked Ruiz.

  ‘Officially, very little,’ the Spaniard replied.

  ‘And unofficially?’

  Ruiz grinned. ‘Unofficially, I am what, I suppose, you might call a private investigator.’

  ‘An’ what does that entail, exactly?’

  ‘Where the Spanish police force is not actually corrupt, it is at the very least inefficient. If people wish to learn the truth of what has happened, rather than merely accepting the official version of events, they sometimes come to me for help.’

  ‘You’re bein’ very open an’ frank for a man who lives in a police state,’ Woodend said suspiciously.

  ‘As I have already said, it is an inefficient police state,’ Ruiz replied. ‘It is possible that our meeting will have been observed – perhaps even noted down – but in all probability the report of it will be left to moulder in a filing cabinet somewhere. Besides, if I cannot speak openly with a brother officer, then who can I speak openly to?’

  Woodend found himself warming to the other man. Ruiz had said that he’d been a very good detective, and Woodend could well believe that he had been. It was plain, too, that Ruiz had judged him to be in the same class of investigator as he was himself – and everyone is open to flattery.

  He looked up, and saw the bald man in the new blue suit crossing the square and coming to a halt before the church.

  ‘What do you make of him?’ he asked on impulse.

  Ruiz glanced across in the direction he had been looking. ‘The pilgrim?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Only that that is what he seems to me.’

  ‘Because he’s standin’ by the church?’

  Ruiz laughed. ‘I did not mean that kind of pilgrim. I can tell nothing about his religious be
liefs. But it is apparent that he cares deeply about something – and the something he cares about is connected to this place.’

  ‘He’s a foreigner,’ Woodend pointed out. ‘An Englishman.’

  ‘That much, I could have guessed.’

  ‘An’ he says this is his first visit to Spain.’

  ‘On that matter, at least, he is undoubtedly lying.’

  Which is just what I thought earlier, back at the airport, Woodend reminded himself.

  A second man of roughly the same age as the first was crossing the square. This one had thinning brown hair and was wearing a light jacket of red and black check.

  ‘Another foreigner?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Ruiz replied. ‘Though, from the way he is dressed, I would guess that this one is an American.’

  ‘And is he another pilgrim?’

  ‘Let us just say that he is doing all he can to appear not to be.’

  The man in the check jacket was maintaining his pace, and heading straight for the bald man. Holloway appeared not to have noticed him, and it seemed that, if the man in the check suit did not alter his course, a collision was inevitable. At the last possible moment, the American swerved to the right. The two men’s bodies missed each other by inches, but their hands briefly brushed as the man in the check jacket slipped something into Holloway’s waiting palm.

  ‘Now what do you think of that?’ Woodend asked.

  Ruiz sighed. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that there are times when I wish I was a real policeman again.’

  Four

  There was a note taped to the dressing-table mirror, where he was bound to see it as soon as he entered the room.

  ‘Took a pill,’ it said. ‘Should be spark out till breakfast time. Love, Joan. XXX’

  Just like Joan to remember to pack the sticky tape, Woodend thought, smiling and looking down fondly at his sleeping wife.

  The smile soon changed to a frown. Joan was snoring loudly. Very loudly. She’d never snored at all during the first twenty-odd years of their marriage, but now she seemed incapable of closing her eyes, even for a second, without emitting a noise like a pig being suffocated.

  He wondered if it was merely the onset of middle age which was causing this change in her, or whether it had anything to do with the disturbingly unspecified medical condition which the doctor in Whitebridge wanted to test her for once she’d had a good rest.

  ‘You’ll be all right, lass,’ he said softly. ‘Two weeks in the sun, an’ you’ll be as fit as a butcher’s dog again.’

  He heard the door open in the next room. So the mysterious Mr Holloway was back.

  Through the wall came the sound of voices, low enough for Woodend to be unable to distinguish the words – or even the language – but loud enough to tell him that there were two of them, and they were both male. Perhaps, after pretending not to know each other on the square in front of the church, Holloway and the American had met up somewhere else and decided to return to the hotel together.

  It was about time to turn in, Woodend decided, but before he did that it would probably be a wise move to empty his bladder of all that gassy Spanish ale. He opened the bedroom door as quietly as he could – not that there seemed much chance of waking Joan up – and stepped out into the corridor.

  The toilet was four doors down the hallway, and Woodend was away from the bedroom for a little more than two minutes. When he returned, the sound of voices was still coming from the next room, but now those voices seemed to have grown much louder – and much angrier.

  ‘Who’ll look after Charlie?’ Joan mumbled. ‘Whoever will look after Charlie?’

  She turned over, then twisted around in the bed to find a comfortable position. She was still asleep, but even with the pills working on her, there was a good chance that if the argument on the other side of the wall continued to rage at its present level, it would eventually wake her.

  Woodend opened the door again, and stepped into the corridor. His impulse was to bang angrily on Holloway’s door, but since the object of the exercise was to ensure Joan’s continued sleep, he settled for tapping lightly.

  He could still hear the voices, but they seemed further away than they had from his own room.

  He knocked again, risking being a little louder this time, but there was still no response.

  They were on the balcony!

  That was why they couldn’t hear him – because they were on the bloody balcony!

  He sighed with annoyance, took a step back, and returned to his own room. Joan had shifted position in the bed again, and was mumbling soft, unintelligible words to herself. Much more of the racket from the next room and she’d be wide awake, he thought furiously, as he crossed the room to the balcony door.

  Later, he would be able to reconstruct events as they must have happened in those few seconds before he stepped on to his balcony. At the time, however, all he saw was the tail-end of those events – the final few seconds before the death!

  It was, in a way, almost balletic. Holloway was leaning heavily against the rail, as if he were looking down at the sea below. But he was positioning his weight wrongly. His legs, which should have been his anchor, were hardly touching the floor at all. His torso, in contrast, seemed to be concentrating the mass of his body at its centre.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, be careful!’ Woodend gasped.

  He didn’t know – would never know – whether Holloway actually heard his warning, but even if he did, it went unheeded. The bald man slumped forward, so that his waist was pressing down even harder on the rail, and his upper body was actually hanging over the other side of the balcony.

  The two balconies were about eight feet apart. Too wide to reach across and grab the other man. Too wide – given the drop below – to even risk jumping the gap.

  Holloway slumped even further forward. His nose was now touching the outside of the railing. The palm of his hand was brushing against the tiling that ran along the outer edge of the balcony floor.

  ‘Do something, you bloody fool!’ Woodend shouted. ‘Push yourself backwards – while you still can!’

  Holloway’s legs left the ground. His trunk – working hand-in-hand with gravity – was now firmly in control, and would have its way.

  The body rocked gently for perhaps a second, then the upper half took the plunge, and the lower half was forced to follow.

  They would ask Woodend later if he thought Holloway had been conscious while all this was going on, and the Chief Inspector would answer, honestly, that he had no idea. But there was one thing he was sure of – that the moment he left the balcony, Holloway was all too terribly aware of what was happening to him.

  His horrified scream – as he plummeted through the air – was ample evidence of that.

  The policeman who always lurked somewhere in Woodend’s large chassis was once more firmly back in the driving seat. The Chief Inspector rushed from his own room to the one adjoining it. Holloway’s door was wide open now, but even a cursory glance into the bedroom was enough to establish that the visitor he’d been arguing with was long gone.

  Woodend took the stairs two at a time, his heavy footfalls giving the receptionist below ample indication that everything was far from as it should have been.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the scream?’ the Chief Inspector demanded when he reached the lobby.

  ‘I … I hear something,’ the receptionist admitted. ‘I not know what it was. It was a scream?’

  ‘Get on to the police,’ Woodend told him. ‘Say there’s been a mu— … an accident. One of your guests has gone over the edge of his balcony.’

  ‘But that is …’

  ‘How do I get down to the rocks?’

  ‘There … there are steps round the side of the hotel which will take you down the cliff. But please, señor, they are most treacherous in the dark, and I do not think you should …’

  ‘Get on to the police!’ Woodend repeated. ‘Ask for an ambulance, as well. Not that I think
it’ll do much bloody good now!’

  The receptionist had been right about the steps being treacherous in the dark. Woodend almost lost his footing twice on the way down. But finally, as much by luck as by judgement, he did reach the pebble beach below the hotel.

  From the grotesque angle at which Holloway was lying, it seemed likely that he had managed to turn whilst still in mid-air, so that instead of landing on his head, he had hit the ground feet first. Not that that had made an ounce of difference to his fate. The impact had been hard enough to completely rearrange his skeleton. The legs would certainly be smashed. The spine, too. Organs would have been shifted around. Bones would have been thrust up into areas they had never been intended to penetrate, piercing and destroying with ruthless efficiency as they went.

  At least it would have been quick, Woodend thought. After those few, terrifying seconds in mid-air, the shock of the impact would certainly have been enough to kill Holloway immediately.

  He bent down beside the corpse. There was some light provided by the street lights at the top of the cliff, he discovered. Not much – but enough for a rough preliminary examination.

  The look on Holloway’s face was as chilling as Woodend would have expected on the face of a man who had known with absolute certainty that he was about to die. But it was not his expression the Chief Inspector was interested in. He ran his index finger gently across the top of the bald head, and was not surprised when he encountered a contusion on the right side of the skull.

  The bruise wasn’t caused by the fall. He’d already established that Holloway had hit the ground feet first. Nor had it occurred after the initial impact. The blow had been landed before Holloway ever went over the balcony. Indeed, the blow was what – indirectly – had made him go over.

  For the first time since events had begun to unfold, Woodend began to consider the incongruity of the position he had allowed himself to blunder into. He was not a policeman here in Spain. He had no official standing of any kind. And he certainly had no business examining the body of a man who had died in violent circumstances.