Olura (32 page)

That done, I could afford to indulge my anxiety for Olura, and boarded the first plane for Madrid. I knew that reverence for the Manoli balance sheet would ensure that she was treated with
respect, and it was not the imprisoned part of her which worried me; it was the free Olura, which no cell could confine, wandering out into the Ermita in ignorance and despair.

Her eyes had nothing in them but a question. I told her guardedly that a friend had arrived by sea and was occupying her bedroom in excellent health. She splendidly controlled any expression of
emotion which might have given away the secret, leaving it to the touch of arms and cheek to say what she thought of me. Guiltily remembering my hesitation, I may have been outwardly the more moved
of the two. At the end of our conversation she reminded me to call on Miss Mary Deighton-Flagg.

Prejudice, such as Ardower’s, against the Press is absurd. It is not the object of journalists to instruct the public, but to entertain it. I have always found them excellent and helpful
people whose gratitude can easily be earned by giving them information which, for forty-eight hours, will be near enough to the truth. Miss Deighton-Flagg was not of course in this responsible
class, but obliging in every way and very ready to sympathise with the limited demands of a much older man though initially she misunderstood their nature. As a freelance society correspondent I
could see no abnormality in her to criticise.

Intimacy, in the conventional sense, developed with most satisfactory frankness. It had been Livetti himself who telephoned her. He had two motives: to get a background story for his photographs
and to have a lady of the Press on the spot who would and could scream in print for the Liberty of the Photographer if there were a row.

What she said confirmed Vigny’s account of the murder. Livetti, when he spoke to her on the telephone from Zarauz, was only aware that Mgwana had taken some London deb down to the Hostal
de las Olas. She herself had not known till she arrived at the hotel that Mgwana’s companion was not a juvenile with a taste for publicity, but Olura. What, she asked me, had happened to
Livetti? Had he called the whole thing off and returned to Rome? When Gonzalez and his service desired to interrogate without giving anything away, their technique must have been masterly.

I found that the young woman, in spite of a very creditable pose of bright courage, was in fact appalled at the prospect of indefinite exile. She saw no hope of remaking her life except by
devoting herself to a novel. As I had no doubt that it would be of modish and profitable obscenity, I offered to serve the cause of literature by financing two years of comparative comfort while
she wrote it. All that I wished in return, as her disinterested patron, was that she should swear in any court of law whenever required that the telephone conversation which brought her up to the
Hostal had been in French.

‘Of course it was,’ she said at once. ‘How stupid of me to have forgotten!’

In the morning I flew to Bilbao to see Gonzalez. The complexities of the case were now beginning to have their own intrinsic interest, so that I was no more tired than if I had been engaged on
any series of delicate financial negotiations.

I gave him Olura’s compliments, and asked whether it would be possible for me to have rather obvious police protection if I were to call in person at the Zarauz villa. He agreed at once,
and was glad that I wished it to be obvious. It would be extremely embarrassing to the authorities, he said, if there were any discourtesy to me.

I stayed the night at a most comfortable hotel where, in the bar, I met a French tourist and his pretty, schoolteacherish wife who were collecting Basque folk-songs on a tape recorder. The
ingenuity of these devoted servants of state both delights and disturbs me. I had previously thought it utterly absurd that Ardower, a transparent don, could be suspected by Gonzalez of being a
security officer. The two naive folklorists, equally transparent, gave me the news that Bozec and his crew had been arrested, that the rendezvous with the
Isaura
was known and that the
Phare de Kerdonis
was ready to sail whenever I gave the word.

On the morning of September 4th I drove over to the villa at Zarauz. The chauffeur of the hired car was accompanied, as chauffeurs often are, by a friend. His stern and closed solidity made it
plain to any observer that he was not the normal type of friend. There was also a uniformed policeman lounging at the villa gate.

Sauche received me very cordially. Both officers in their manner and tact were an advertisement for the French Army. One regretted that there was no war to occupy them. My name meant nothing to
Vigny. Sauche had heard of me and was searching his memory. I assisted him by mentioning several common acquaintances. Before his defiance of de Gaulle, the general was noted for his excellent
political contacts.

As soon as I explained that Olura Manoli was my goddaughter and ward, they assumed that I had called to do business. That, at least, was what I judged from the faintest possible air of
mercantile rather than military insolence. I admit that I prefer the French generals of my youth who looked immensely stupid and distinguished and in fact were neither. Sauche reminded me of a shop
assistant who had taken a correspondence course in management. I simply do not believe that Ardower recognised him straightaway as a professional soldier.

‘You are naturally aware, gentlemen,’ I asked, ‘that you are under surveillance by agents of the French Government?’

‘They are even very well known to us,’ Vigny replied.

‘Yet it is not likely that out of three murders they would not have noticed even one.’

‘Only three?’ Sauche retorted. ‘In France I am never accused of less than a dozen.’

‘The police are often excitable, my general. But here we know of only three: Livetti, Duyker and Ardower.’

I suppose that as a corps commander Sauche could deal effectively with a surprise attack in the field. In conversation he could not. His face and his hesitation invigorated me.

‘Livetti, of course, was no great loss,’ I admitted casually.

He strolled across to the window. To his practised eye there could be no doubt that the police had taken precautions for my safety. It seemed to me that I might usefully refer to them.

‘The authorities have been good enough to inform me that Ardower visited this house on the evening of August 25th. He has never been seen since. Two witnesses state, however, that a man
with his head bandaged was driven out, accompanied by the late Piet Duyker and a third person: presumably yourself, Major Vigny. I suggest that on the orders of General Sauche Duyker executed
Ardower. You then buried the body and killed Duyker to ensure his silence.’

‘This is a monstrous figment of the imagination!’ Sauche exclaimed. ‘The police will never find any such burial!’

‘They will, my general. In the next day or two they will. My friends and I lack experience. It is taking us a little time to find a convincing spot for the grave which the police have not
already searched.’

I felt that with this remark I might have overplayed my hand, encouraged to the edge of fantasy by the pleasure I took in crossing swords with them. But not at all! To them graves and their
contents were instruments of policy.

‘It would help our negotiations if I knew your reasons for killing him,’ Sauche said. ‘A question of Mlle Manoli’s present difficulties, or perhaps of her
estate?’

Oddly enough neither of them ever doubted that Ardower was dead. After all, the admirable Gonzalez had interviewed them in all good faith.

‘The bullet which cut the femoral artery is still in place,’ I told them. ‘Somebody, therefore, removed Duyker’s gun.’

‘And if Duyker fired in self-defence against a lunatic?’

‘You will still have to explain why Ardower left this house with a bandaged head, where he found the rope which he tried—too feebly—to use as a tourniquet and why the other
half of the rope is still knotted round his ankle.’

After a short pause, Sauche very sensibly remarked:

‘M. Sequerra, I observe that my enemies have persuaded you to collaborate with them up to a point. But since you thought it worth while to call on me with this story, I must assume that
you personally are prepared to offer terms. What are they?’

‘Not very hard. I only want your signed confession to the outrage upon my ward, and I will allow you to say that Duyker killed Livetti. Whether he did or not, he is no longer here to deny
it.’

Vigny burst into protests, insisting that he would fight this nonsense to the last. He said with a strained smile that he himself was prepared to face any court and to prove that the quarrels
between Duyker and Livetti and Duyker and Ardower, whatever they were, had nothing to do with the general or himself.

‘And the Press of the whole world will be in the court room,’ he added. ‘What about La Manoli and her distinguished nigger then?’

An intelligent man! He had attacked the point of least resistance. It seemed a very good moment to throw in the reserve which Olura had provided.

‘You would succeed in creating all that publicity which I prefer to avoid,’ I admitted to Vigny. ‘But you would find yourself accused of complicity in the murder of Livetti. We
know that you arranged for the presence of an English newspaperwoman in the Hostal de las Olas.’

He denied it furiously. It was curious how those two always sounded less convincing when they told the truth than when they were lying.

‘So far she has only admitted to the police that she was sent there by an anonymous telephone call. But she is now prepared to swear that the conversation was in French and she will
recognise your voice.’

‘We are finished,’ Sauche said as superbly as he could. ‘We are perhaps a little to blame. But that little, when inflated by bankers and the agents of the so-called Fifth
Republic … I take it that you have made some arrangements for our safety in return for the statement you require?’

I replied very truthfully that I had not. I suggested that they should escape as they had come in, across the Pyrenees.

Vigny, white with fury, was about to exclaim that they had not crossed the Pyrenees and could not return to France. Sauche, the more discreet of the two, silenced him with a gesture.

‘I think we shall be able to leave tonight,’ he said.

That certainly was rather sooner than I dared hope, allowing me to fulfil the optimistic estimate of four days’ confinement to bedroom by which I had encouraged Ardower. I learned
afterwards that they had paid the skipper of the
Isaura
to stand by in port ever since the death of Duyker.

What their plans were I did not know and could not ask. My guess is that they meant Bozec to drop them in Portugal, where no unnecessary questions would, I think, have been asked so long as they
declared their intention of taking the first plane to South America and actually took it.

The document which we drafted was dignified but satisfactory. We had, however, some difficulty over the timing. Sauche was willing to accept my word that I would not deliver it to the
authorities until the following morning. Vigny disagreed. So we compromised by taking, all three of us and my plain-clothes escort, an amicable stroll to the Post Office where I sent the envelope,
registered, to my address in Maya. They on their part dispatched an apparently innocent telegram to St Nazaire, a town conveniently large but only seventeen miles from Le Croisic.

After calling on my folklorists at the gay little Camping where they had set up their car tent and private transmitter, I was back at Maya in the late afternoon with a basket containing the most
luxurious picnic that the very civilised shops of Zarauz could produce. When my car had left, I broke the door seals of the notary public and displayed to Ardower, I fear too pretentiously, a copy
of the confession.

Left alone so long with only a diminishing sausage for company, his morale was at low ebb. Looking over again the sheets which in my absence had poured from Olura’s typewriter I can
distinguish the point at which he began to be overwhelmed by this cruel brooding on his difficulties and to be convinced that there was no way out.

He congratulated me with warmth and simplicity on my success in freeing Olura and said that he would now give himself up and stand his trial. All that bothered him was what story he could tell
of the death of Duyker which would omit all mention of Olura and Mgwana. His unselfishness seemed to me as remarkable as his temporary want of intelligence.

‘My dear Philip,’ I said, for it was ridiculous even to my conventionally mannered mind not to experiment with his Christian name, ‘it does not appear to have occurred to you
that you can tell any story you please since there is nobody to accuse you of lying.’

And I pointed out that the Livetti case was closed by the confession, the authenticity of which was assured by the signatures of Vigny and Sauche as well as by their sudden flight. As for the
evidence against him, there wasn’t any beyond Vigny’s statement to the police, now hopelessly discredited. The Algerian, well out of the affair, had no incentive whatever to talk. Bozec
did not come into it at all, and did not know the identity of the caller he had escorted to Zarauz.

However, to avoid being arrested on a charge of affront to the Civil Guard and held for six months in case any other charge could be pinned on him, I recommended that he should immediately try
to return to France. He interrupted me, exclaiming in unacademic language that illegal crossing of frontiers was not a job for amateurs.

In that I agreed with him. If it is necessary to disobey government regulations, one should always employ a professional. Still, it seemed to me that his friend Allarte would have some inkling
of the proper way to set about it and could put him ashore at night on the beaches of the Landes. Philip objected that Allarte had a family, never far from hand-to-mouth existence in the winter,
and that he could never afford to pay him so much that he would risk a gaol sentence.