Olura (19 page)

I was of course interviewed by Lieutenant Pedro Gonzalez, whom I found to be hurt by Olura’s treatment of him. I could appreciate his point of view, though I do not know what else he could
have expected. I had to explain to him that Olura and the secret policemen of a dictatorship were irreconcilable. I also endeavoured tactfully to point out the blazing idiocy of suggesting that she
and her Group would be privy to an attempt on Mgwana.

Yes, he said, he thought so too. But it was difficult to convince his superiors. I dare say it was. Communists and trigger-happy Africans had tried in vain to assassinate Mgwana, and it was
believable enough that anarchists—whom any Spanish Government finds far from merely comic—would not wish to be omitted from the list.

I remember myself telling Mgwana that I could raise a hundred million for his country if the City thought it odds-on that he would live for ten years. He replied very simply that he trusted in
God and his Chief of Police. I refrained from remarking that it was a pity neither of them were in a position to underwrite the issue.

Gonzalez was eager to impress it on me that interrogation of suspects was not his normal duty. The last thing the Government wanted at this stage was to commit Olura to gaol or even to allow her
to appear formally before a police magistrate; it did not wish to provoke headlines on the subject of imprisoning prominent British citizens; it was well aware of our excitable and superstitious
respect for Habeas Corpus.

So Gonzalez was left holding the baby, as I believe the expression is. He sometimes felt, he admitted after his sixth sherry-and-bitters—a custom of my Edwardian youth to which I had
introduced him—as if he were torturing a Christian saint. I fear he was not proof against my goddaughter’s physical attractions and her devastating ability to act out, unconsciously and
to perfection, whatever high-minded part she had conceived for herself. I was relieved to notice in her narrative that she was also capable of self-dramatisation in less moral but possibly
healthier causes. The affinity to tall white heather was more marked at sixteen than twenty-four, but is still undeniable.

I emphasised for Gonzalez the ambiguity of the two men in the black car, one of whom seemed to be a Frenchman called Vigny. He was not so sure of their importance. Vigny had a perfect alibi and
could be the reddest of red herrings. Sauche and his Alliance des Blancs, he said, might welcome an accident to Mgwana—the first indication I had that they were involved, for I had not then
heard Ardower’s story—but it was inconceivable that the former general would plot assassination on Spanish soil, well knowing that he would be returned to France and his sentence on the
slightest suspicion of anything of the sort. I was not impressed by this argument. Organisations which use plastic bombs to blow up children are unlikely to shrink from blowing up adults by means
of a corpse.

I tried to lead him on into further disclosures, but he realised that he had already said too much. His candour was not, I think, due so much to my finesse as to his admiration for Olura. In
face of her guardian he permitted himself indiscretions. To be allowed to worship at a distance is one of the rights of man; but, like so many of them, is incompatible with security.

When I asked him where Ardower was, he was thoroughly evasive. Doubtless Madrid would know, he said. It was out of his province, he said. I detected a love–hate relationship with Ardower
which was not wholly due to jealousy. He both resented and admired a quality in that then unknown character which came through to me as a sort of impenetrable cheerfulness.

I shall now append the second half of Ardower’s narrative, having, as I say, somewhat arbitrarily divided it into two in order to clarify facts and motives should this case ever be
reopened, and my actions as well as those of other interested parties be submitted to political scrutiny which, I am satisfied, will be as peevish as it must be futile.

I was taken down to Madrid by Gonzalez’s companion, a sulky and self-important fellow who gave me little information except that his name was Captain Feria. Everybody in
this affair seemed to have officer status. The cell in which I was duly and perhaps deservedly incarcerated was clean, and the food more to my taste than in, let us say, an English boardinghouse. A
diet of beans and chick-peas was evidently considered to be punitive, but they were extremely well cooked.

In the usual Spanish way I was at first left to meditate upon my crimes without any person in authority adding insult to injury by saying exactly what they were. I comforted myself between
meal-times by remembering that the Clerk in Holy Orders who had occupied my college rooms some five centuries ago would have been amply content with such simplicity as his successor now
enjoyed.

Until they gave me something to read—a matter which Spanish criminals are not expected to consider urgent—I tried to channel my longing for Olura into fantasies more constructive
than those which are inevitable in solitary confinement. What future could there ever be for us and how?

Her voice, which I succeeded in analysing, vowel sound by vowel sound and intonation by intonation, until I had recreated its soft impetuosity, became so vivid that I heard it. Easier still to
summon up was a mental tape-recording of the Master of my College, harsh and intensely friendly, like the cawing of the rooks behind his lodgings, as he broke to me my lack of any future.

‘I do not mind your involvement in a political scandal, dear boy,’ he would say. ‘I am prepared to overlook murder on the assumption that a Fellow of this College would not
permit the ephemeral to interfere with his research. Fornication I should never describe as a deadly sin, though I personally have not felt it a frequent necessity. But you must realise, as I am
sure you do, that in these days when we can no longer afford openly to ridicule so-called public opinion, the College cannot be expected to condone scandal, murder and fornication
simultaneously.’

To this I could only reply (I am sorry to give you these dreams of a criminal, but they did have a definite bearing on my problem of whether I should hope for a future or renounce it) that I was
guiltless of murder, that a gentleman must deny fornication in the particular while he may confess to it in general and that scandal, like debt, was unavoidable in our witless flight across the
hall from dark to dark.

My duty to resign would, however, be plain. Marriage to Olura, difficult in any case since I had only my professional achievement to set against her money, became absolutely impossible. There
would be nothing for it, after serving my sentence, but to hunt for the compound nouns of primitive man among Mgwana’s mangrove swamps.

After a couple of unpleasant weeks—which I could not resent for I was caged and nourished as good-naturedly as some rare acquisition in a zoo—I came up before the Police Magistrate
for my third interrogation. It was at once clear that the worst had happened. So long as Livetti was believed to have been killed on the road or the beach and so long as there was no conclusive
proof that Olura and I had disposed of the body, I was only No I suspect and far from convicted. But now they knew that Livetti, dead or alive, had been at the Hostal de las Olas. Obviously the
police had hammered away at Olura’s relations with him, whatever the devil they were, and got a full confession out of her.

In the light of the new evidence the magistrate questioned me for half an hour on London Anarchists, Prebendary Flanders and assassination theory. Had I met Mr Mgwana and Miss Manoli before this
holiday? No, I hadn’t. Had I been employed by Mgwana or by any public or private security agency? No, I hadn’t. Then why did I interfere? Because a fellow-countrywoman in trouble
appealed to me. If I did not kill Alberto Livetti, why did I get rid of his body? To oblige Mr Mgwana. At least I could answer that one without involving Olura. I pleaded a mistaken and
irresponsible sense of public duty.

My interrogator nodded to the guard who stood at the door. A tawny little Spaniard with Arab features and lank, black hair was led in and made to sit down opposite me. Asked if I knew him, I
replied that I had a vague impression I had seen his face before but could not remember where or when; he might, for example, be a waiter or a hairdresser’s assistant.

I felt sorry for him. Much as I love Spain I cannot deny that the treatment an offender receives from the police depends on his education and social class. This one looked helpless and guilty
and the worse for wear. I could not distinguish any weals or bruises, but he faintly reminded me of a boxer efficiently patched up by his seconds. Also he walked clumsily, with his legs far
apart.

When he had mumbled sulkily that he recognised me, that I was someone they all called Don Felipe who spoke Basque and stayed in the Hostal, the magistrate told me that his name was Araña
and asked what I knew of him.

At last I could answer with relish. I explained how the Deighton-Flagg woman had been warned by an anonymous telephone call that News was likely to break in the Hostal, and that she should talk
to Araña if she wanted inside information; and how I had thought that Arizmendi, the sympathetic old waiter employed on temporary security duties, might be Araña. Then Arizmendi had
told me that he was a gardener and odd-job man.

The magistrate looked through the file of depositions on his desk and nodded approvingly. I should think it was about the first time that somebody’s story had exactly confirmed somebody
else’s. He turned ferociously on this poor little bastard who had unwittingly landed himself in a case of sinister importance by taking a bribe of a few hundred pesetas.

‘Araña, who paid you to unlock the shaft and put a ladder in it?’

‘I have told you,’ Araña whined. ‘A man in a café.’

It was a professional whine which destroyed all confidence in his word. I should think he was at least half gipsy.

‘What excuse did he give you?’

‘The English lady’s lover wanted to visit her—the English lady who was staying with a black man.’

‘You said on another occasion that it was the English lady who gave you the money.’

‘What language did you speak?’ I interrupted.

My impertinence seemed to be taken as fair comment. I remembered later that when witnesses are confronted with each other, the police magistrate is only too satisfied if they start a row.

‘Christian! Christian!’ he exclaimed.

‘The lady does not speak a word of what you call Christian,’ the magistrate said coldly.

‘I do not know what you want from me,’ Araña complained. ‘I will say whatever you like.’

A man in a café. It is such an unsatisfactory answer from a policeman’s point of view. Every thief, crook and receiver must try it. Guv, it was a man in a café who gave me
the crown jewels. I swear I’d never seen him before! Yet I suspected that this time it could well be the truth. If Vigny was the man who had brought Livetti and the ladder together, he
certainly would not have approached Araña in person. He didn’t speak Christian either. And thought it a damned sight less!

When Araña had been removed, the magistrate asked me in a much more friendly tone:

‘What is your own explanation of this murder?’

‘I am sure that Livetti came to the Hostal because he had been paid to blackmail or compromise Miss Manoli and Mr Mgwana, but by whom he was killed or why I do not know.’

‘Miss Manoli states that he had a camera slung round his neck. If he did, where is it?’

‘Under a stone to the right of the ford a hundred metres below the spring of Iturrioz. The Civil Guard at Matquiña will tell you where Iturrioz is.’

So direct an answer seemed to take him aback. He was human enough to smile and then returned to business.

‘Miss Manoli never told you that she knew Livetti?’

I admitted that she had not. I thought it wise not to lie, even if I deepened for a moment the cloud of suspicion around Olura. From my experience of her, I knew that once she had decided to
tell the truth she would tell all of it.

‘Did she show any sign of recognition?’

I said that we were all so revolted that I wouldn’t have noticed it if she had.

‘If you do not believe that Miss Manoli invited Livetti to the Hostal,’ he said, ‘you must admit that the fact that they knew each other is a most improbable
coincidence.’

‘She did not invite him. She was not in any way responsible for his arrival,’ I answered. ‘I saw her surprise and horror, and it was genuine. I also reject coincidence. A
possible theory is that Livetti’s death was directly due to the fact that the persons who tried to compromise Mr Mgwana found out too late that she would recognise him.’

He did not reply to that, and changed the course of questioning to suspicions which I found far more satisfactory.

‘You knew two Frenchmen, named Vigny and des Aunes?’

‘As hotel acquaintances, yes.’

‘They left the Hostal the morning before Mr Mgwana arrived. Did they appear to you afraid?’

They did not. But the more difficulties I could create for them, the better. So, remembering Vigny’s impatience about the lunch hour, I said they seemed nervous and on edge.

‘The rooms occupied by these two gentlemen also had bathroom windows opening on the central shaft?’

I replied that I did not know the lay-out of the hotel well enough. They had two cheaper rooms which did not face the sea, but it was probable that the bathrooms were on the shaft.

‘Do you know anything of the past of M. des Aunes?’

I saw no reason to give away Gonzalez who might well be censured for telling me as much as he did while he was still playing with the idea that I might be Mgwana’s bodyguard. So I said I
knew nothing.

‘He is General Sauche.’

‘How lamentable!’ I exclaimed—which didn’t commit me to anything.

‘When you and Miss Manoli left the Hostal on the 22nd July with Mr Mgwana and Lieutenant Gonzalez, you believed that Vigny and another man deliberately followed you?’

‘I am sure they did. One of them had already telephoned Mr Mgwana to say he knew we had the body.’