Olura (5 page)

As we returned with the bottle of African rot-gut, down the main staircase and along the passage, we passed the open door of a pantry and a floor waiter sleepily packing together the debris of
somebody’s late supper. It seemed to me that he should have finished that job long ago. We said good-night to him—thus creating a worth-while complication, though hardly an
alibi—and knocked at Olura’s door. Since she was expecting us to come back through the window, she was alarmed. Her response of
who’s there?
sounded as high-pitched as
that of a child in an empty house. I hoped that it would pass, if heard by the waiter or anyone else, as the reaction of maidenly modesty.

If that palm toddy was the best Africa produces, I am appalled to think what the suffering masses consume; but taken like medicine in a tumbler of water it relieved my dazed sensation of dashing
to and fro like an experimental rat in an emergency. Mgwana, too, it must have helped, for he sighed and then showed his gladiator’s teeth in a grin. I cannot remember how much we actually
talked about what must be done. Little, I think. The next move was so obvious.

The back of the hotel was supported on concrete pillars, and the space beneath acted as a garage for the guests’ cars. The door giving access to the shaft had to be there, for it certainly
was not in the resplendent and terraced front. So long as we didn’t make a noise, there should be no great difficulty in getting our puppet into Olura’s car unseen.

We asked Olura to stay in her bathroom in case of need and then went down the ladder. The key from Livetti’s pocket was indeed that of the door to the shaft. It was unlocked, so I locked
it. Just as we were about to move the ladder Mgwana whispered that we ought to replace the screws in Olura’s window frame. I agreed reluctantly, for we should cut off our only way of retreat
if someone started hammering at the door; but I could not help admiring Mgwana’s potentialities as a careful criminal and thinking that it was just as well for the Governor-General that he
achieved his country’s independence without having to use violence.

That done, the rest was an interminably long job. It was pitch dark in the shaft, and we could not tell where the devil my room was. So back went the ladder to Olura’s window. I tossed my
key through the now discreet opening and asked her to go to my room and hang out a towel.

As soon as it appeared we followed the technique which we had learned, and unscrewed my window bar. A desperate task it was, too, for one of the screws had rusted in. Then I passed the lower
half of the puppet to Mgwana, and somehow managed to support the upper half. We took such precautions to keep ourselves and our burden from scraping or falling that it seemed like five minutes
before we had negotiated the mere fifteen feet to the bottom of the shaft.

After replacing the screws in my window and laying the ladder on the ground—God only knew where it ought to be—Mgwana opened the shaft door and reconnoitred the garage and the back
of the hotel. He then helped me to curl Livetti up inside the boot of Olura’s car. Having left the door unlocked, with the key in it, I drove away. Mgwana meant to stroll about the terrace
for a bit in statesmanlike meditation and go in casually by the front entrance without, if possible, disturbing the night porter.

I had originally intended—in mere visual imagination, quite unplanned—to drop Livetti into the dark water at the bottom of an abandoned iron mine; but we had taken so long to remove
him from Olura’s bathroom and the hotel that I had no hope of reaching the mine before dawn. Some temporary solution would have to be found, and his final disposal left till the following
night. I had little fear that we could now be involved in his disappearance. What did trouble me, and especially Olura, was the possibility of the body being found and of someone—not, I mean,
the real criminal—being accused of murder. Then the whole lot of us would have to confess, with a poor chance of our innocence being believed.

Driving south along the deserted, winding country road, heading inland for the mountains, I tried to make some sense out of all the vague notes which my mind had registered when there was no
time to think about them.

Since Mgwana and I had managed the operation in reverse, it was obvious how Livetti, alive or dead, had been introduced into the shaft. The back of the hotel was a fairly busy spot. Besides the
open garage, there were the wash-house, a staff lavatory, the garbage cans and an empty bottle store. But to anyone who knew the excited chaos of a Spanish hotel, invariably understaffed, at
meal-times, with every employee intently rushing on his or her own business, a quick move from car to shaft door was reasonably safe. So long as you kept clear of the kitchen, the passages and the
wine bins, you could run a funeral parlour outside and nobody would have the time to notice it.

At dinner, then. Say, between ten and eleven, taking an average between early foreigners and late Spaniards. But since Olura had taken a bath between eleven and twelve, Livetti must have been
pushed through the window after that—indeed when she and Mgwana were actually in the bedroom.

There was no certainty, however, that they would be. I could understand Livetti waiting up his ladder on the off chance that he would get his compromising photograph; but to kill him and stage
the revolting scene when it might be useless was crazy.

Very well then. The decision to kill Livetti could only have been taken after the murderer was sure that Olura and Mgwana were in the room. That fitted, for nobody would hang around with a
corpse longer than he had to. So Livetti had entered the shaft alive, accompanied by his employer or confederate, and Mgwana’s confident opinion that the murder had nothing to do with the
business in hand was untenable.

He seemed very sure, that unknown companion of Livetti’s, that Mgwana would not leave Olura’s room until he or she had visited the bathroom. Well, if their relations were as intimate
as Vigny believed, he could count on that. This bit of rumination nearly sent me over the edge on a hairpin bend. It was a shock, for I had liked Vigny. Even the most casual acquaintances have no
right to be murderers. Yet Vigny could well be the unknown companion, or, if he wasn’t, he knew who was. Who but Vigny had been so slanderously certain of Olura’s tastes? The rest of
the hotel, guests and staff—and I had talked to most of them—had shown curiosity about her without any recognition of her past and identity.

But that evidence which was convincing to me was not really evidence at all; at the most it might make a very intelligent policeman think. In any case I had no interest in bringing Vigny and des
Aunes to justice for killing an unsavoury press photographer, if they did. All I wanted was to get rid of him.

For that uncharitable thought I was promptly punished. Olura’s car stopped. I discovered that she had finished her long run of the afternoon on the reserve tank and in all the excitement
had never thought of telling me. I had nearly reached Amorebieta on the main road from San Sebastian to Bilbao. Once across it and on the edge of the high sierras, I had every hope of finding a
temporary hiding place for Livetti and of returning to the hotel garage before anyone was up to see me come in. As it was, I was stuck on a fine stretch of open road. The headlights showed bare
agricultural land ahead of me. So far as my memory of the road in daylight went, it ran through one of the few parts of Vizcaya without a tree or a rock.

A couple of miles back I had passed a Pair of the Civil Guard and noticed—to my horror—that they were in two minds whether to stop me or not. They must have remembered in time that
it was government policy to treat holidaymakers and their cars with the utmost respect and that it was no business of theirs what I was doing on a minor road at 4 a.m. But I knew very well that
when they caught me up and offered their assistance they might look at the car’s papers and mine, ask me if I had permission to drive it and very politely take the opportunity to look in the
boot to assure themselves that it contained only a tourist’s baggage.

Up to then I had been pleasantly surprised to see myself a man capable of cool, competent action. That delusion, I have observed, is regrettably common among the young. I felt uneasily that
philologists in their early but responsible thirties might not be free of it either. That sinister Pair in grey-green cloaks was steadily tramping towards me through the night; and they were sure
not to be Basques—for it is the policy to station a civil guard far away from his home—with whom I could talk myself out of almost anything.

Behind the bank which bordered the road I found a field of maize. It would have to do. I hauled Livetti out of the boot. He was beginning to set in his foetus position, and it was difficult to
drag him through the first few rows of tall stalks without knocking them down. Worse still, the farmer had been growing runner beens between the rows using the stalks as supports. I left a track
which the powerful flashlights of the Civil Guard could easily pick up. Myself, I hadn’t a torch at all; or, if I had, I couldn’t guess where Olura chose to keep it.

Panic was complete until some part of my brain which wasn’t busy putting the blame on Olura began to work. There was just enough slope for the car to run backwards. I turned off the
lights, heaved and jumped in. We trickled down the slight gradient for a hundred yards and scored up another fifty on the flat. The Pair could now examine the verges of the road as much as they
pleased.

They did—on the off chance that I had ditched something. They also requested me to open the boot. I saw that in my hurry I had left Livetti’s camera there, but that did not matter;
it could well have been mine. They had the remote and severe air of the Guardia, which is partly responsible for its unpopularity, but were most helpful. Yes, there was a filling station on the
main road which would open soon after dawn or earlier if there was a lot of holiday traffic on the road. They would see that someone drove out with a can of petrol.

I gave the Pair ten minutes and then walked after them. Already there were pin-points of light in the upper windows of the farms. At first I could not find Livetti. That seems incredible, but I
had done a thorough job of hiding him. Add to that holes left by a blasted cow which had been barging at some time into the beans, the impatience due to abject terror and the fact that my landmarks
were no longer blocks of black but definite shapes of dark grey.

At last I got him. He would not fit on my back in his acquired form and was too heavy for me to carry in my arms like a baby. Partly I dragged him and partly I hugged him. When he was safely
back in the boot, I felt faint and sick. His cold cheek had touched mine too often.

Waiting in the growing light for petrol, I had time to think out my next move more responsibly. The wild immensities of Vizcaya, with its abrupt and forested mountains and its rivers racing
through shallow gorges presented to the eye a perfect landscape for the getting rid of unwanted burdens. But I knew the life of the countryside too well to take that gamble in daylight. The roads
follow the valleys; and the valleys, though often appearing empty, are well populated. You cannot see the forester, or the farmer walking ahead of his draught oxen down the deep-cut lanes, but from
his higher ground he can see you.

Away from the roads and on the bare green tops of the huge hills, bogs and falls of rock offered plenty of discreet possibilities—but all useless since there was no way of packing Livetti
on a donkey. Then there was the sea. Beaches and the busy corniche roads were ruled out; but there ought to be places, though I didn’t know one, where a car could be driven close enough to
the merciless brown cliffs between Arminza and Lequeitio. That was the easy solution, and I suspected even then that it might have to be taken. I did not like the sea; it held no finality. It could
heave him anywhere, but it could not unfortunately put any water into his lungs. No, my deserted iron mine was by far the best, and till nightfall the safest hiding-place for Livetti was the locked
boot of the car.

It was nearly five when Amorebieta’s only taxi came out to my rescue with petrol. I knew its proprietor well. He was a gnarled Vizcayan called Echeverría whose face looked as if it
had been cut out of teak by a do-it-yourself sculptor with a heavy hand and an odd sense of humour. He had driven me from the station to the Hostal de las Olas when I first arrived, and had
lectured me—as one honest Basque to another—on the folly of dressing up like foreigners on holiday and wasting money on flunkeys and sons of bitches when there were half a dozen decent
taverns where I would be taken in and treated as a brother. Like many of these plain and sturdy charmers, he flattered himself that he had far too much common sense to be fooled by anybody. When he
found that he had been, he enjoyed the joke so thoroughly that his affection was won.

He read me another lecture now: on my carelessness in running out of petrol which was the sort of mismanagement to be expected of Castilians, but not of Basques and Englishmen. I explained that
I had come from San Sebastian, taken a roundabout route after a considerable evening out and lost my way. That amused him. He wanted to know what I had been eating and drinking and whether there
were any girls; so I invented for him a surpassing local menu and a night-club singer. He had a protective attitude towards me, like that of an indulgent father whose son had risen out of the
working class and could always be trusted to produce eccentric entertainment.

After paying Echeverría the fare he would have charged his next-door neighbour, I drove straight back to the garage under the hotel. So far as I could tell, my arrival was unobserved.
Cautiously I tried the kitchen door. It was open, and the service stairs took me up to my room. The key, I then remembered, was with Olura. I did not want to alarm her or perhaps waken her from an
exhausted doze by tapping at her door, so I called on Mgwana. He took a bit of rousing. He had the politician’s trick of snatching some sleep in spite of anxiety.