THE ENGLISH WITNESS (15 page)

There was no further
conversation that evening. They checked into a cheap hotel on the outskirts of
the town and retired to their rooms with little appetite for food.

Jack sat on the edge of the hard, plastic-encased mattress and reached
into his pocket for the photo—the one he had taken from Antonio’s retreat
before explosive charges had destroyed the computer drives. Why would Antonio
have done that? What could have been on the drives that would justify such a drastic
security protocol? He held the tiny faded rectangle up to the weak light and
stared at his twenty-year-old self. “Who are you?” he asked the face in the
picture. “I’m not sure I relate to you. And the smiling friend holding the
camera: Who is he? Is he a friend? Is he a killer?”

Then something worrying occurred to him. If
Antonio was the killer, what did that make Jack? And here was a photograph of him
standing alongside the chief suspect’s car. Not good. He flipped the offending
piece of evidence in his fingers with the intention of tearing it into as many
pieces as possible and flushing the remains down the lavatory. It was then that
he saw the word scrawled across the back. It said, quite simply,
Adolfo
.

Jack felt as if he had been punched.
Specks of light danced before his eyes. With enough time and effort he could
probably have dug that name out of memory without prompting. But far from
trying to do so, he had been doing everything in his power to keep it buried.
To have that name of all names rudely thrust back into his consciousness – and
from beyond the grave – was more than he knew how to deal with.  But one
thought kept him focused: there was a purpose. Killer or not, Antonio had been
a friend. He wouldn’t have caused Jack grief for nothing.

In that case, the photograph was a message.
But what was the message? Had Antonio simply been making sure that Jack would
remember a name? Or was it a clue—perhaps the key to finding information that
had been on the Mac drives before the idiots from forensics blundered in.

Jack went over the features of the office
in his mind’s eye. The computers… the printer and scanner… the one chair on
casters… the gun locker. He briefly wondered whether there was anything in
there worth looking at, but remembered the police leaving with several long
canvas bags. What about the other side of the unit? There had been a table
there with a very old desktop PC on it—no more than a piece of junk. And then
the end wall, built of brick and mortar where there should have been a…

His mind jumped back to the old computer.
There was something that he had noticed but dismissed as insignificant. Now he
could not remember what it was that had struck him. However, he knew that
elusive memories sometimes have to be crept up on from downwind, so he went out
to the drinks station to see if there were any teabags. He had to settle for a
sachet of instant coffee, and as he sipped at it he cast his mind back to the
details of the carnage in Guadix. He thought of the tiny patch of unburned
paint in the doorjamb, and in his mind’s eye he saw the blue and white paint
bubbling and cracking.

Suddenly it came to him: the odd thing
about the old computer. The casing had a metallic blue finish, and someone had carefully
stuck a tapering strip of white masking tape to each side.

It was nearly 2 a.m. when Jack stopped
outside Julio’s room and tapped lightly on the door. When there was no answer,
he memorised the room number and made his way down to the front desk. Knowing
that he was putting himself in a very dangerous position, he spoke to the clerk
in deliberately slurred English. “I’m shorry, old chap. I sheem to have locked
myshelf out. You haven’t got a shpare key, have you?”

The night clerk looked at him with ill-concealed
scorn. “I can programme you a spare, but we will have to add ten euros to your
bill.” He clicked buttons on his data terminal. “Which room was it? Ah, Meester
Burlton… 229, yes?”

“No actually two of ush shwapped,”
answered Jack, mildly ashamed that lying could come so easily to him. “He
fanshied the view over the town. I took 232.”

“It’s against hotel rules to change rooms
without notifying management,” droned the clerk, but to Jack’s relief he swiped
another card key through the terminal. Taking care to lurch slightly as he
walked back to the lift, Jack went straight to Julio’s door. He knocked lightly
once again, and when no response came he let himself into the room.

He felt no better than a thief going through
someone’s pockets while the victim snored gently nearby, but he quickly found
the car keys and left the room. He dreaded what would happen if he was found
out, and he was not even sure he could get to Almería and back before morning.
What would they do if they came down and found the car missing? Would they put out
an arrest warrant?

There was no alternative. He had to go, or
this would haunt him for the rest of his life. He slipped back down through the
foyer and out into the car park. Ten minutes later he was on the ramp joining
the main road back to the coast. Would he be able to find Antonio’s flat when
he reached Almería? He could only hope.

Back in Room 232, Julio was
sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, talking on a mobile phone. “He
knows something he hasn’t told us… Yes, he got into my room a few minutes ago and
took the car keys… No idea, but I’ll catch him red-handed when he tries to put
them back, and then we’ll have him over a barrel. Yes, thank you. And a good night
to you.”

It had been a stressful day for Jack, and by the time he reached Almería
he was half asleep at the wheel. It took him another half an hour to find Antonio’s
apartment block. He turned off his lights as he drove into the yard, and then
realised that this simply made him look suspicious. Putting the lights back on,
he revved the engine once or twice as if he were no more than an inconsiderate
neighbour, and parked facing the access road.

Taking out a tiny neon torch that he had
bought at a petrol station en route, Jack picked his way round the back of the
garage block. To his surprise there was no police tape over Antonio’s private
door, and he stepped straight in. The place was still permeated by the
nauseating reek of burnt metal and insulation. The gun locker had been emptied
and its door left open. And worst of all, several thousand pounds worth of
beautiful technology had been ruined beyond repair. Gaping black holes showed
where Antonio’s charges had vaporised sections of outer casing. Jack could barely
imagine the destruction inside.

Setting his mind on the task in hand, he
turned and examined the old desktop PC. It took him only seconds to find what
he had come for. He simply pressed the eject button on the front panel, and a
3.5-inch diskette popped out of its slot. The letters JB were printed on the
front in ballpoint pen. Jack slipped it into his pocket and turned to go. But
before he reached the door, he heard voices outside.

There was no hesitation; instinct took
over. If the enemy found him in here, he was doomed. He simply lowered his eyes
to the ground, stepped out into the open and shone his neon torch straight into
the eyes of one the two men. There was a sharp intake of breath and he lowered
the beam straightaway. “Evening, Sir,” he mumbled in approximation of the local
working class patois, hoping that the men he was facing came from somewhere
else. “Sorry for startling you,
señores
. Night watchman. Just checking
there’s no more risk of fire after the explosion earlier. Seems safe now, but I
wouldn’t go in if I were you. Nasty fumes. Could give you cancer.”

With that, he put his head down and
shuffled slowly along the back of the garages as if he had the whole night to
fill. His heart was pounding, though, and as soon as he had rounded he corner he
broke into a sprint. A second later there was a shout from back the way he had
come, but he had allowed for a quick getaway. The door was unlocked, the key in
the ignition and the gear lever in first. All he had to do was wrench the door
open, dive in, stamp on the clutch and turn the key.

The next moment, Jack was leaving the yard
in a squeal of rubber and a spray of grit. He sensed someone in the darkness
behind him and flinched in expectation of a shot, but none came. The next
minute he was breaking the speed limit in his dash for the open road.

The adrenalin rush kept Jack awake for the first hour as he raced back
up to Guadix, but after that he faced a constant struggle to stay awake. It was
broad daylight when he pulled into the hotel car park to find Miguel and Julio
waiting for him in the foyer, and he was too tired to care. At his insistence
they set off for Valencia without delay, with Miguel driving and Julio beside
him. Jack had the back to himself and slept fitfully for the first three hours
of the journey.

By mid-morning, he had woken up and
cleared his throat as if to resume his story. But he was mistaken if he thought
he could distract Miguel from interrogating him about his nocturnal activities.
At the earliest opportunity, the detective instructed Julio to follow the signs
to a run-down shopping mall on the outskirts of an isolated market town. Once
there, Jack was able to fulfil his desperate wish to buy fresh underwear and a
change of shirt. Then the three found a dusty café-bar and sat down at an
outside table with cups of fresh coffee: an Americano for the Englishman and
the more intense
café solo
for Miguel and Julio. Old women sat gossiping
in twos and threes, while dispirited young mothers showing all the signs of bad
diet chivvied small children from shop to shop. A kid rattled over the cracked
and uneven paving stones on a peeling skateboard as Miguel fired the opening
salvo.

“Driving away a vehicle without
permission. Driving without valid insurance. Fraudulent misrepresentation to
the hotel management. Theft from a locked hotel room. Trespass. You’re good for
at least three years’ imprisonment and probably more. If I don’t make an arrest
and it gets out, my career is in jeopardy. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”

For once, Jack seemed to have no fight in
him. He gazed down absently at the jet-black, slightly frothy coffee in front
of him and spoke in a low, expressionless voice. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep.
I felt homesick and desperately needed to be somewhere I felt a connection to.
It was sad being there, but I managed to get my head together. I think I’ll be
able to talk about Valencia when we get there. Before, I wasn’t so sure.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?
Julio could have driven you down there, instead of you breaking half a dozen
different laws.”

“I needed to be there by myself. If you
need to charge me, then you’ll have to get on with it. But I want to find out
what happened to Antonio, and I don’t see how I can do that when I’m in a
cell.”

“You wouldn’t be in a cell,” sneered
Miguel. “We’d just take you to buy a bail bond.” But he recognised that he had
lost the skirmish. Little as he liked it, he needed to humour the Englishman if
he wanted his cooperation. He tried to think of a way of changing the subject
while still keeping the threat of consequences still hanging over his witness.
“In the end,” he said at length, “it all comes down to how much use your
testimony is to us. And so far you’ve helped us see the bigger picture, but you’ve
yet to give us a chickpea of evidence we can use in court.”

Jack thought of the plastic-encased
diskette in his pocket. He had an idea that it contained all the evidence
needed to solve the riddle of his friend’s murder and put an end to this ordeal.
But whatever value it might have for Miguel, Jack needed it himself as a
bargaining tool; he thought his freedom and even his life might come to depend
on it.

That left him in a quandary. Where should
he resume his narrative? He had been looking forward to talking about his exhausting
but hilarious twenty-hour journey to Valencia in the company of an overcrowded
trainload of Australian backpackers. It had been one of the high points of his
travels, and lingering over it would put off the moment he was dreading. On the
other hand, the only way of diverting Miguel from the true secret of Antonio’s
garage was to give him something dramatic. And so, shrinking from the numinous horror
whose jagged outline now disturbed the once sheer surface of its concealing
veil, he jumped forward to a fifth floor landing in the Valencian
ensanche
.

JAMES

For long seconds after opening the front door, Trinidad looked at me
blankly. I experienced a moment of fear that I was going to have to reintroduce
myself. Then, in a replay of the scene on Antonio’s doorstep the previous week,
her face cracked open in a smile of recognition.

"Jimmy, how amazing. What a surprise.
What are you doing here? Where have you been? You stopped writing and I was
furious, so I threw away your address." Cackling with glee, and sharing
aloud her stream of consciousness, she led me through into their lounge. She
took it for granted that I’d stay there. These days her mother had a job and
wasn’t taking in students in any more, but she’d make an exception for me, and
it was so terrific and so funny. What would she say? She was going to be so
surprised…and so it went on.

She was still sensationally pretty, but intensely
vulnerable and desperate for affection in the aftermath of her parents’
separation a few months earlier. She was working the early shift in a hospital
maternity unit, and each afternoon at siesta time I’d return from my rambles around
the city to find her already at home. Then, for the couple of hours until her
mother came in from work she’d talk frankly and incessantly about sex: her
lurid dreams, her fantasies, her body. Looking back, I find it quite disturbing—a
desperate play for attention if not something darker. But at the time I simply
read it as come-on. And as the week went by I began to think, Why not?

JACK

“Ah, nothing like a bit of romance to enliven a story,” trilled Julio,
and Jack was unable to tell whether he was being sympathetic or sarcastic.

“There’s no need to patronise him, Julio,”
barked the detective. But then he twisted round in his seat to fix the
Englishman with an unfriendly stair. “I don’t want to know if you got her into
bed, OK? You’ve made your point: you were both gagging for it but neither of
you had the balls to make the first move. That’s enough for the record.”

There was silence in the car as they resumed
their journey, and nothing was said until they passed the Valencia city limits
– very slowly due to traffic congestion – just after 7 p.m. Julio pulled onto
the forecourt of the first budget hotel he saw, and as soon as the car had
stopped Jack climbed out and stalked off by himself. They did not see him until
the following morning.

“Hey, I needed some space,” he explained the
next day over coffee. “I took the bus and got myself a room nearer the centre.
Actually, I didn’t spend more than a couple of hours in the room. I was walking
around most of the night. Thanks for giving me space yesterday, and sorry about
the car thing. All I can say is, I had to do it.”

Miguel did not quite know how to deal with
Jack’s frankness. He simply nodded and asked, “Can you carry on with the story
now.”

“Yes, but not here. Can you check out and
relocate to my hotel? It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s the
right
place.”

After some debate, in which Julio seemed
the more reluctant of the two to change accommodation, Miguel agreed on behalf
of both of them. It was Julio who now seemed uncommunicative as they drove into
the city centre, and Miguel who took an interest in the colourful, bustling
streets and squares. Eventually they turned down a ramp into an underground
garage and parked. They took the lift up to reception, and Miguel checked
himself and his colleague in.

At Jack’s request they took coffee up to
his room, which occupied a corner of the building on the 6
^th
floor. It
featured a striking double aspect window looking along and across a busy
thoroughfare.

“The streets are on a grid pattern,”
announced Jack, “with the traffic going in alternate directions. You can see
that all the traffic on this street is heading towards the city centre. If you
look where the bus has stopped, then just across the road is the apartment I
stayed in twice: once on a school trip in 1970, and again in ’73.” He paused
and showed little inclination to carry on.

“I sense this is going to be the most
harrowing part of the story, Jack,” whispered the detective with unaccustomed sensitivity.
“There’s no rush. Take all day if you need to,
just a step at a time.”

Jack was more hesitant now, and even more
evasive than usual with his eye contact. His voice was thick and seemed on the
verge of breaking. “OK. I spent my last morning in Valencia touring round ever-seedier
hotels, bars and shops looking for a few hours’ paid work. I was wasting my
time. My only hope was to go to the Consulate for assistance—not necessarily
safe given my situation and with all the political fallout over Gibraltar. In
the end I headed back to the
ensanche
, cheering up at the thought that
Trini would be waiting for conversation and possibly more.

When I reached the landing, I saw that she
clearly had more on her mind than chatter. She’d left the front door ajar so
that she wouldn’t have to get up to let me in and spoil her surprise. Then I
walked into the living room and…”

“Take your time, Jack,” whispered Julio.
“There’s no rush. Do you want anything?”

“The shutters are casting stripes of black
shadow across the room. It’s hard to see…”

There was a pause that stretched to
minutes before Jack spoke again. “She’s lounging there on the sofa. Like a
proper little diva. She’s got nothing on but a pair of dark panties. They’re swallowing
the light like a hole in the universe. I’m just standing there looking. Drinking
in the sight. She doesn’t say a word, keeps her face coyly turned away like I’m
not there. One foot on the floor, the other stretched out along the cushions...”

Another long pause.

“The effect is gorgeous. But something’s spoiling
it. There’s a bad smell in the room. And…”

JAMES

I stopped as the picture turned inside out. I didn’t gag the way I had
at the sight of Gato’s body, but this was infinitely worse. Her mouth had been
taped over, and her hands were trapped out of sight under the small of her back.
What I’d thought was a trick of the light oozing through the shutters was a
series of long, deep, parallel slashes encrusted with drying blood, running
from her collarbone down to her pelvis. The cushion and floor were stained dark,
and up close it was far worse: intricate, sadistic butchery that I still can’t bring
myself to put it into words.

I’d already dialled the emergency number
when my sense of self-preservation took over and I slammed the handset back
onto its cradle. If the authorities were already after me, I was going to have
a hard time arguing my innocence. I was sure they’d have the forensic skills to
prove that someone else had done it, but I had no confidence that they’d even bother
trying when they could place a foreign trouble-maker right there in the
apartment with the victim.

My head still spinning, I went to my
bedroom to get a blanket to cover her. Then, pausing just long enough to offer
up a prayer to anyone who might be listening, I gathered my stuff together and
went to the front door.             At
that point, however, I realised that I’d be seen leaving.

It didn’t make a lot of difference –
Trini’s mother would be able to give a good description of me – but if I could conceal
my movements that might give me a head start. And I suddenly realised with horror
that I still had the killer to contend with. He must have come for me – I couldn’t
see any other explanation for the carnage – and he might still be hanging
around.     

My heart pounding, I took out and loaded the
air pistol I’d been carrying since Almería. Nervously holding the weapon in
front of me, and knowing that it would make little difference in a life-and-death
struggle, I checked the bathroom. Finally I headed for the main bedroom and
gingerly pushed open the door.

No one was going to have to break the news
of Trini’s death to her mother. And she wouldn’t be giving my description to
the police. She lay there, face-down on her own bed, a nylon stocking embedded
in the folds of her swollen neck. She was fully dressed and there were no signs
of sadistic play. I guessed she’d been nothing more than a nuisance to be
disposed of. She must have come home early and interrupted the evil bastard at
his work. She unquestionably saved my life.

JACK

Jack stopped, pulled a small, flat bottle of brandy from his pocket,
unscrewed the cap and took three or four mouthfuls. He was about to put it away
again when he remembered his manners and offered the bottle to his companions.
Each of them took a polite sip, Julio wincing as he did so.

“I think that’s the hardest bit over,”
announced Jack, his face white and his lips not much darker. “You know, this is
the first time in decades that I’ve uttered a word about all this or even
acknowledged its existence. It’s a relief in a way. But there’s a lot more to
come, and the next bit is so embarrassing that I’m curling up inside just
thinking about it.”

He drained the bottle, stood, and walked
across to the other side of the room. There he turned a cheap, hard armchair to
face the wall, and they sat back-to-back: Jack in the chair and his two
companions perched on the edge of the bed facing the window.