THE ENGLISH WITNESS (8 page)

JACK

“Troubled
times,” commented Miguel in a sympathetic tone of voice. “For you and for her,
by the sound of it.”

“Yes, she was in a bad way,” admitted Jack. “It was
only later that I found out just how bad.”

“And did you get her full name?” asked Julio with his
pen hovering.

“Yes and no. As with Gato, I didn’t know her
name at the time, and I’ve been trying hard to keep things in chronological
order. But I did work out later who she was. And if you’re going to cut me
loose tomorrow it’s only fair that you set the agenda. I believe her name was Remedios
Echeverría. But she can’t help you with your enquiries. She’s been dead for
forty years.”

“Are you really going to jump forward now
and give me what I need? The salient facts? The people and places?”

“With respect,” answered Jack cagily,
“that’s not what I just offered. It’s not something I
can
offer. As I’ve
tried to explain, I’m reconstructing things as I go along. I have isolated
flashbacks all the time, but I’ve never tried to join up any of the dots. And
here’s the worst thing: I have a pretty good idea of how badly damaged I am,
and I don’t think the stuff in the flashbacks is bad enough to account for it. My
big fear is that there’s other stuff, stuff that will blow my head apart if it ever
comes to the surface. And that fear is fighting against the part of me that
wants to help you.”

“So what have we been doing here,” asked
Miguel, “up to the point where I said you could go?” His voice was bleak as he
continued. “And for all the endless narrative you’ve given us, what chance have
we ever had of getting to the truth about Antonio’s death?”

“What we’ve been doing has
been putting things into order—making sense of what I
can
remember. And
in the process, new details are coming thick and fast that I’d completely
forgotten. I wish I’d done something like this decades ago. But I realise that there
isn’t time for me to carry on the way I have been doing. And what that means,
I’m afraid, is that the story ends here. I can give you the few names and
landmarks that I’ve been holding back because they belong later in the story. And
I’ll answer any questions to the best of my ability, but that’s it.”

There was a long silence after Jack’s
tirade. The two officers glanced back and forth, one moment peering at the
Englishman as though they might have misheard him, the next moment locking eyes
as if each expected the other to intervene.

PART 2

At precisely 5.30 a.m., Jack Burlton was watching from a ground floor
window as the steel gates of the safe house swung open and a dark Mercedes Viano
pulled onto the drive. The heavy people-carrier with its deeply tinted glass
offered him some reassurance, but he had not slept well and felt uneasy about
the day ahead. Partly the unease was to do with a troubled conscience; he could
not get over the feeling that he was running away from justice and from his own
past. But the knowledge that his decision to back out might involve risks of
its own was an additional burden.

The departure was a hurried affair. Julio rode
in front with the driver, a thickset and balding ethnic Basque in an
ill-fitting chauffeur’s uniform. Jack sat behind the driver, with Miguel on his
right. He was glad they were with him, but even more relieved that they did not
seem in the mood for conversation.

The vehicle’s unforgiving suspension on a poor
road surface quickly churned up Jack’s empty stomach. He wished he had accepted
the offer of breakfast, however little he had felt like eating. And the winding
road downhill from the gated community added to his discomfort—not so much from
the motion of the car but because now, in daylight, the landscape brought back
fleeting but bitter impressions of an ordeal undergone long before.
 Carbolic
soap. Petrol. Smoke.

Eventually the ground levelled out and
they joined the Tolosa road—a gently winding highway through wooded hills that
placed San Sebastián within a few minutes’ driving time. Jack knew the road
layout well: a motorway
ran along the northern edge of the country just inland
from the coast, connecting the city with the French border to the east and
Bilbao to the west. In contrast, decent connecting roads to the interior were
few and far between, but Jack guessed that they would pick up the motorway
where
it bypassed the city’s southern edge. They ought to be in the border town of
Irún within little over half an hour.

Jack was thus alarmed when the driver
flicked the wheel to the left without warning, slewed across the opposite
carriageway and headed up a narrow lane between two run-down industrial sites.
He turned his head sharply towards Miguel and saw that the detective too was
taken aback; indeed he had reached under his jacket and drawn the bulky 9mm
pistol that made him look so badly dressed. Julio, travelling in the front
passenger seat, was also on the alert and peering sideways at the driver with
suspicion in his eyes.

The driver was aware of the tension his
actions had created. “Relax,” he said, “but don’t get too comfortable because I
think we’re being followed. That is, we
were
being followed. I can’t see
if they’ve turned up this way. But we’ll know any second because we’re about to
hit a straight section about five hundred metres long.”

“Doesn’t prove anything,” challenged
Julio, whose body language suggested that he would rather have been driving
himself.

“We’ll see,” responded the driver evenly.
“This road doesn’t go anywhere. After the straight it takes a sharp left-hand bend
and rejoins the main road below the turn-off we just took. Nobody’s going to come
this way for the sake of it.”

At that moment the road straightened out
and could be seen disappearing into the distance between serried ranks of
conifers. The driver kept one eye on the mirror and all three passengers
twisted round to watch the road behind them. Seconds later, a low-slung black
Audi coupé rounded the bend. It was clearly gaining on them, and they knew that
the bulky people-carrier had no chance of outrunning it.

“We can’t outrun them,” observed the
driver unnecessarily, “but there’s no way they can get past us. I can run them
off the road easily if they try.”

“Good man,” said Miguel. Then without
warning the three passengers, still twisted round in their seats, were thrown
roughly sideways as the driver hauled the Viano into a tight left-hand bend. A
moment later three things happened almost in the same instant: the driver’s
side window went opaque, the air in the car was filled with a foul pink mist,
and the vehicle lurched towards the edge of the road.

By lunging sideways and grabbing the
wheel, Julio managed to keep the Viano on the road. And with the dead driver’s foot
still resting lightly on the accelerator the vehicle retained some forward
momentum. It was barely under control, however, and the chances of keeping the
Audi from overtaking were slender. Miguel undid his seatbelt and laboriously heaved
his bulk round until he was hunched on his knees facing the rear. Then, drawing
his service weapon and stabbing at the power window button, he leaned out
through the opening and got off two shots in the general direction of the black
car. The only effect was that their pursuers pulled up closer. There was a
flash from the region of its nearside door pillar, and the next moment the
Viano’s rear windscreen had grown a giant spider’s web.

Jack could stand it no longer. Undoing his
own belt and twisting round more quickly than Miguel had been able to, he
reached his hand out towards the detective. “Quickly, give me the gun,” he
shouted.

Miguel hesitated. “Police weapon,” he said
curtly. “It would be a crime to relinquish it, even to a Spanish national.”

“For God’s sake, we’re going to die in a
minute,” shouted the Englishman. “You’ve got to let me have it.”

“Do it, Chief,” shouted Julio as he
wrestled with the steering wheel.

There was a moment’s further hesitation
before Miguel took the heavy pistol by the barrel and handed it to Jack
butt-first. “Careful, safety’s off,” he warned.

“I can see that,” said Jack calmly. And
with that he braced his arms across the backrest in between the head
restraints. He lowered his head and paused for a moment to check his breathing.

“Hey, you’ll…” warned Miguel. But Jack
shouted over him, “Steady now”.

Then the confined space was filled with a
deafening blast from the gun. A section of the damaged rear windscreen vanished,
and Jack fired two more shots through the hole in quick succession.

The effect was dramatic. The Audi’s
windscreen starred and its engine note rose to a howl. Thrusting forward, it virtually
disappeared below their line of sight before striking the Viano sharply in the
rear. At that moment, Jack adjusted his aim and fired another 9mm Parabellum
round clean through the padded metal panelling below the glass.

The passenger in the Audi saw their own windscreen
crystallise before his eyes and the driver slump in his seat. He heard the
engine note rise and felt the car surge forwards as the man’s right leg
twitched uncontrollably. As it struck the rear of the Viano, he drew his right
arm back in through the window and dropped the gun in his lap. Then, as he
snatched at the parking brake, he saw a chink of bright, clear light appear in
front of him. Instantly there was a sickening blow to the side of his face, and
his mouth filled with warm liquid. In blind desperation he tugged on the brake
lever.

Jack and Miguel watched as the rear end of the Audi slewed from side to
side. Then Julio pushed on the wheel of the Mercedes to drag it round a
right-hand kink in the road, and the Audi went straight on. Leaving the
metalled surface, it hit a low embankment at the side of the road, flew over a
drainage ditch and came to a dead halt against a stand of mature trees beyond.
Julio knocked the drive selector into neutral. Freed from its load, the engine
began to race as he edged the vehicle into the vegetation growing along the
side of the road and allowed it to coast to a halt.

The engine note sank to a murmur as Julio reached
across and tugged the dead driver’s leg clear of the accelerator, flicked the
transmission selector into park, and leapt out into the ditch that he had so narrowly
missed. Scrambling out behind the vehicle, he jogged back to where the Audi had
left the road, his gun held in a double grip and pointing straight ahead of
him. He veered off among the trees, and a few moments later Jack heard one quick
double shot followed by another. Shortly afterwards Julio reappeared, breathing
heavily and his face a little pale. “Half revenge, half mercy,” he muttered
before pulling the driver’s body out of the Viano and dragging it into the
trees. “We’ll come back for him,” he promised, “but it would be embarrassing if
we were stopped in his company.”

Finally, Julio used the butt of his weapon
to smash out the remaining shards of glass from the driver’s window and the
rear windscreen. “A missing window attracts less attention than a bullet hole,”
he explained before climbing into the driving seat and fastening the blood-stained
seatbelt. He restarted the engine and put the selector into drive, but before
driving off he turned and made eye contact with Jack. “Very good work,” he
said. “I’d love to know where you learned to shoot like that. But – and this is
really important – if there are any questions you’re going to have to let us
take the credit. Otherwise you could end up on a charge of unlawful killing, and
that wouldn’t help anybody.”

With that, he pressed down hard on the
accelerator. The wheels span for a moment, and then the Mercedes surged forward.
Within two minutes they were back on the main road and travelling towards San
Sebastián at 80kph with the wind buffeting at the missing windows. Five minutes
later, Jack turned to look at Miguel who was slumped listlessly in his seat
with the safety belt still undone. He waited until the detective noticed his
stare and turned to face him, then dropped his bombshell: “I’ve changed my
mind.”

Miguel instructed Julio to turn back
south, and to keep the speed down so that they could talk more comfortably over
the wind and road noise.

“You know something of where the story is
heading,” began Jack. “Yesterday’s session wasn’t a complete waste of time. But
you didn’t get much more than a broad itinerary and a few names. Now I’m
staying, it’s going to make a lot more sense if I fill in the connecting story.
And in the process I know that fresh details will come out. For a start, the
questions you asked yesterday got me thinking about Father Ignacio. I remember
he had a fairly elaborate theory about what was going on.”

“Will it add anything worthwhile to what
we already know?” asked Miguel bluntly.

“I think so. As a young activist, and latterly
as a priest, he knew a lot of the key players. He told me Gato had been living on
borrowed time for years. In the months leading up to his death he’d become a
virtual recluse, employing Txako as his eyes, ears and feet around the city. Of
course, once Txako went off the rails with his half-baked bank job, Gato was
left in limbo. And it was only a matter of time before his past caught up with
him.”

“I’ve been assuming that what started the
ball rolling was your little adventure with Txako, but it sounds as if the ball
was ready to roll all by itself.”

“Correct, I think. Gato was getting cabin
fever. Carlos, who you’ve probably worked out was his son, was being groomed to
fill Txako’s shoes and didn’t have the right stuff. It was because of me that
it happened when it did, but it would have come about before long whether I’d
been there or not.”

“Then logically, there was nothing
directly connecting Gato’s death with Txako’s earlier escape. Which means that whoever
was responsible for Gato’s death, in all likelihood it was they who put you
under surveillance in the weeks afterwards.”

“I don’t quite see your logic, but it’s
hard to argue with the conclusion. And according to Ignacio it had to have been
the security services who were involved, because the criminal police wouldn’t
have had the resources for that long a stakeout.”

“But there was that sudden switch of
tactics,” commented Julio as he drove. “Things progressed from mere observation
to abduction. What triggered that?”

“I never found out for sure. But whatever
the reason, the game plan was completely different from that point onwards.
Once they’d tried to pick me up and been given the slip, it was inevitable that
they’d try again. And worst of all, from my point of view at least, another run
for home was out of the question. If they were that keen to pick me up, they’d certainly
be watching the border crossing less than a twenty kilometres up the road. We felt
that the only option was to lose myself in the Spanish interior for a while and
hope the heat died down.”

“Why didn’t you just go to a British consulate?”

“We talked about that, but there were two
problems. First, I’d have had to get to one, and that was a predictable move. And
more seriously, Anglo-Spanish relations were going through a difficult patch:
there was Franco’s refusal to extradite wanted criminals, and above all the festering
dispute over Gibraltar. We weren’t sure an isolated consulate would risk stirring
up more bad feeling. In any case, it didn’t occur to us that I could be enough of
a public enemy to justify a nationwide hunt. And so the plan was for me to travel
south for a while before heading across to one of the busy tourist checkpoints
on the Mediterranean coast.”

“You wouldn’t have been able to stay in
paying accommodation, or the authorities would have had your name first thing
the following morning.”

“Again, yes and no. We agreed that I’d
sleep rough until I was well clear of the city, but Ignacio told me of places I’d
be able to get food and shelter. One of those places was the massive Catholic shrine
at Lóyola, which I reached on the third day out. In the event that was a
let-down. I was assuming they’d put me up for a night or two, but in the event
the priest whose name I’d been given was petrified. He let me have an old bicycle
and some food, but he couldn’t wait to see the back of me. And that put me in a
difficult…”