Olura (11 page)

I trotted off along the sands, upset at being late for our daily rendezvous. When delight is of unknown duration, to lose five minutes of it is to lose a year. But there was no Olura, for which
I was illogically thankful. A little later I saw Lieutenant Gonzalez leave the inn and drive off. Then I watched her hurrying upstream along the Maya side of the estuary, hugging my joy, uneasy
though I was, at the rare blend of grace and determination in her movements.

When I had swum across, it was a rather still and statuesque Olura who greeted me. She told me that Gonzalez had been most friendly, excusing his sudden call by explaining that he had to compile
his official report on Mgwana’s short visit. He had, however, asked her one question: what was I doing with her car on the Wednesday night?

‘Oh, my God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What did you say?’

‘That I didn’t know you had taken it out. I pretended that I thought they wanted you for stealing it, and said that I’d given you leave to use it whenever you liked.’

Brilliant! That didn’t clash with my own story. I told her how I too had been asked the same question at the same time, and assured her that we should get away with the mischance of the
dropped passport and hear no more. I am not sure how far I really believed it; but I was not standing any further interference from Livetti. He had done his duty in bringing us together.

I should have remembered—if I hadn’t been too enchanted by the present to worry about the future—that Livetti was a foreigner and connected, however disreputably, with the
press; that meant that his case would be ruthlessly investigated. When a country gets half its foreign exchange from tourists, it is more sensitive to a foreign than a native corpse.

Gonzalez, as I knew, was not normally employed on criminal investigation; but Leopold Mgwana and Olura were V.I.P.s and called for tactful handling. Since Gonzalez was personally known to us and
himself a witness to oddities in our behaviour, he was the obvious choice to put us through a preliminary interrogation.

He was on our tails again in the evening, which showed very clearly that we were under surveillance, though I had not noticed a following car or a plain-clothes cop. I doubt if anything less
than an armoured troop-carrier on either side of us would have distracted my attention from Olura. I had taken her out to dinner in Santurce at the entrance to Bilbao Harbour. When we left the
restaurant, Gonzalez bobbed up.

He had the decency to express surprise at meeting us. Since it was so, could we give him five minutes of our time? Wherever we liked, of course. But the offices of the Port Police were close and
very comfortable.

They were, and conveniently empty except for the night duty staff. When Gonzalez had provided us with coffee and cigarettes, and polished his French by a few courtesies to Olura, he said how
sorry he was that we were being unnecessarily bothered by this affair of Livetti but—just to clear it all up—what
had
we been doing in Pobeña on the night of July 22nd
after we left him in Amorebieta?

There was a shocking guilty silence from which Olura was the first to recover.

‘Have I got to say?’ she asked with a charming helplessness straight out of drawing-room comedy.

This was the devil. I couldn’t even start to guess how much they knew. The disturbance in the quarry on the night before the body was washed up would certainly have been reported by local
police; but how could investigation of it lead to us? Anyway, the legal pathologists had established that Livetti had been dead for at least a day.

‘It would be as well.’ Gonzalez recommended.

‘M. Ardower was being very difficult.’

‘But, excuse me, Mademoiselle,’ he murmured in some embarrassment, ‘you meet daily and appear to be on intimate terms.’

‘We were not then on such good terms, lieutenant.’

‘And what made you choose Pobeña?’ he asked me.

I put down these questions and answers verbatim, for it is the easiest and most concise way to give you a clear picture of what I have been asked, what I have admitted, and when and why I have
deliberately misled the police. Me, too, it assists—for the hardest task of a suspect is to keep tab of his own lies.

‘I knew there was a tourist hotel where one might find a room,’ I answered.

‘And did you?’

‘But no and no!’ Olura interrupted indignantly. ‘I told M. Ardower that if he was not prepared to treat me with respect he could walk home.’

‘And you started to do so?’

‘I took a stroll round to let her cool off.’

‘What shoes were you wearing?’

I had been wearing rope-soled alpargatas which do not slip on wet turf or rock. But he might not have noticed what the soles were made of, for on that hasty journey to Amorebieta his
professional attention was fixed on the more distant surroundings of Mgwana, and my unimportant feet were generally out of sight in the front of the car or under the table.

‘I don’t remember,’ I replied, ‘but you should. You must have seen them when we were together.’

He let that pass, to my infinite relief.

‘What time did you arrive in Pobeña?’

Olura answered for me that it was about 2 a.m., as it was.

‘What had you been doing since leaving Amorebieta?’

‘I think you had better ask
him
that,’ she replied, as if some disgust at my behaviour still remained.

‘Just going from place to place,’ I said, ‘until she threw me out.’

‘I see. Now, M. Ardower, what was the reason why you persuaded a taxi-driver named Echeverría to block the passage of a black Seat car which was parked alongside the
café?’

I had given no thought at all to Echeverría. Mgwana told me that on the way back from Amorebieta to the hotel the taxi-driver and Gonzalez had chatted amicably together, and that he
hadn’t understood what they were saying. It was improbable that Echeverría would then have gone into any details, for he was not the type to chatter about the private business of
someone he considered to be practically a fellow Basque. So it looked as if he had since been forced to make an official statement.

Gonzalez therefore knew that my sudden departure with Olura had been deliberately plotted. But an ardent lover, when on holiday and unaccountable to anyone, might be expected to indulge in
eccentricities. It was quite believable that I had tried to get Olura away from some former and jealous admirer and to prevent him following.

So I took a chance that Vigny had in fact been in the black Seat. My story could then be made to fit, more or less, into the vague and preposterous yarn I had told Echeverría.

‘Mlle Manoli had made another conquest in the hotel,’ I said, ‘a Frenchman called Vigny. He was very determined that I should not be alone with her.’

Gonzalez nodded approvingly, as if to say that he was glad I had told some of the truth. Then to my alarm he switched the conversation into Spanish which Olura did not understand.

‘Don Felipe, if you are not what you appear to be, it would naturally be a help to tell me.’

‘No, there’s no mystery about me,’ I replied, wondering what on earth he was getting at.

I knew there might be some distrust. Any foreigner who speaks Catalan or Euzkadi inevitably hears a good deal of wild separatist talk from his friends. It is, in fact, mere talk, for no one has
any intention of renewing violence. But the police like to keep an eye on foreigners who might not be aware that the Civil War is over.

‘Perhaps we should have been working together,’ he hinted.

‘But I am not in any way in your business.’

‘In England we know it is organised differently.’

The reputation of our older universities! It all started, I suppose, with Hogarth and Lawrence in the first war and gathered force in the second, when the Government very sensibly stuffed its
intelligence services with dons. Naturally they made efficient and imaginative staff officers, but I have never read that higher education contributed anything notable to the arts of security.
However, once a legend, always a legend.

‘Who on earth gave you that idea?’

I got some of it out of him. He had certainly been asking a lot of questions before he tackled us direct. One of his informants was Miss Mary Blasted Deighton-Flagg. Well, I had only myself to
blame there. Then Arizmendi had confirmed that I stuck closely to Mgwana, and was always popping up where I wasn’t expected. Gonzalez hinted at yet another source of misinformation. Possibly
Vigny himself? The French can never rid themselves of the vice of seeing British agents under their beds.

It occurred to me that our safety was far too critically in the hands of the occupants of the black Seat, whom I had never expected to hear of again. Gonzalez must have memorised the number of
the car when the driver overtook us and suspiciously changed his mind about stopping. Echeverría would have repeated the same number. So it was a fair bet that the sunburnt man in the
café had been identified and interviewed, and probably Vigny too. True, they did not dare tell whatever the truth was, but their frightened lies were unpredictable and sure to be ingenious.
And they might well wonder why I was conveniently on the spot, and so ready to protect Mgwana and Olura.

That was what had been in the back of Gonzalez’s mind: I could just possibly be Mgwana’s unofficial bodyguard—though it must have seemed damned unlikely in view of my movements
before I arrived at the Hostal—and I might have had a good reason for killing Livetti or keeping quiet about his death.

Well, the police could have as many conferences as they pleased over that theory. In the end they were bound to reject it as absurd. As soon as they had traced the background, career and
antecedents of Livetti, it would be clear that there was no conceivable connection with any of us.

Gonzalez gave up, expressing his regret that a series of coincidences had compelled him to question us. That offered a useful opening, and I said that I couldn’t see why the police had not
accepted them as mere coincidences.

‘After all,’ I added with such innocence as I could manage, ‘if somebody followed us to Pobeña, he must be able to confirm what we were doing.’

‘Unfortunately nobody did follow you.’

‘Then I don’t understand.’

And indeed I did not. Quarrymen? Vigny? Police? Who in God’s name could have trailed us? Yet it was so simple.

‘There are valuable cars parked in the village,’ Gonzalez explained. ‘As a matter of routine, the
sereno
takes a list of numbers every night. When this body was washed
up, his list became of interest.’

Knowing the educational attainments of village watchmen, I said, probably irritably, that I was surprised the list was legible.

‘It was not,’ he admitted. ‘But one of the GB cars could possibly have been Miss Manoli’s. And since you were good enough to confirm that it was. …’

So a bold lie right at the start would have saved us! I have always wondered why criminals when arrested deny everything and later confess what they must; it seems such devastating proof of
guilt. But experience counts. After all, one hears nothing more of those cases in which blank denial has succeeded.

As Olura and I were driving back to Maya, we decided that the police must already have suspected something like the truth and rejected it. The Pair of the Civil Guard had—by a blessed
sense of duty—thoroughly examined the boot and interior of the car on the night of July 21st, and found them empty.

Still, we were very uneasy, not without finding a satisfaction in our unity like any young happily married couple faced by their first external crisis. One wakes from the daze of delight to find
that unpleasant reality is not a wedge dividing, but an encirclement which compresses.

We went over the circumstantial evidence and had to admit that it was not limited to the two facts that Livetti’s passport had been found close to the point where I ran out of petrol and
that we had been in Pobeña on the night of the 22nd before he was washed ashore. Besides this, they had (
a
) Arizmendi’s report that I did not leave the Hostal on the night of
the 21st, when they knew that I did; (
b
) information from the Deighton-Flagg woman that she had been anonymously warned to visit the hotel because some News might break there; (
c
)
shoes, which both Gonzalez and I had left with a question mark.

Gonzalez must be well aware that my picture of Vigny as the jealous lover was pretty doubtful—questioning of the hotel staff would soon show him that Vigny had never even spoken to
Olura—and that an examining magistrate would tie us into knots if he interrogated us separately. But if we had anything to do with the death of Livetti, Mgwana was in it up to the neck, and
that could involve world-wide publicity. The confidential approach had to be tried before we were delivered into the crunch of the Law.

The following day we wished to heaven that we were over the frontier, but could not make up our minds to run. Wouldn’t it be an admission of guilt? Olura thought not. She said indignantly
that the natural reaction of innocent people tormented by questioning was to clear out. I remember gasping at the word
innocent
. Women so often seem unable to distinguish between absolute
and relative truth. I suppose that the more intelligent are aware of the difference, but even for them words must conform to mood. They have no respect for language.

Personally I thought that we should not be allowed out of the country, and that when we drove up to the frontier either the car’s papers or ours would be found to be out of order—all
with the utmost regret and no mention at all of the Livetti enquiry. Olura did not agree. She had a limited view of police—all police—that they were cruel, corrupt and therefore
incompetent. She could not believe that frontier posts would be warned to look out for us.

So we did nothing except drink rather more wine than usual—I fear that I had been debauching her prim opinion that two glasses were enough for a lady—and allow it to inspire us to
transports of affection, as the Victorians called it. At least I think that was what they meant. I did not do my Leander act and go home before dawn. Such insistent respectability seemed even more
futile than it was when I considered that we were both suspect criminals.