A dead man of Barcelona

Chapter One

'The coffins came out of the church…’

‘Yes?’

‘And the men put them down on the ground…’

‘Yes?’

‘And then — then the lids opened and the bodies got out.’

There was a short silence.

‘Got out?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The bodies?’

‘Yes. There were three of them. Look, I know it’s hard to believe-’

‘It certainly is,’ said the Deputy Commissioner.

‘It gave me a shock, I can tell you.’

‘Well, it would. I can see that.’

‘You obviously don’t believe me,’ said Hattersley.

‘No, no, of course I believe you,’ said the Deputy Commissioner heartily, looking at the clock.

‘One of them was a young woman.’

Yes, thought Seymour, sex probably went with it, poor chap.

The Deputy Commissioner looked at him sharply and frowned. Surely he had not said that out loud?

‘Three of them, did you say?’ he said hastily, hoping to cover up.

‘Yes. Of course, they weren’t really dead.’

‘No, no. Of course. No, they wouldn’t be.’

‘I spoke to one of them. The young woman. And she said it was to remember those fallen in Semana Tragica.’

‘Semana Tragica?’ said Seymour, waking up. ‘Tragic Week?’

‘Yes. That’s why I thought…’ Hattersley looked at the man from the Foreign Office who had brought him but, receiving no encouragement, his voice tailed away.

Then he continued determinedly however.

‘And then she said, “You’re English, aren’t you?” “From Gibraltar,” I said. “Ah, then you’ll have known Sam Lockhart?” “I know Sam Lockhart, yes.” “And do you know how he died?” she said. “Yes. No, that is, at least, not exactly.”

“‘Well, you ought to find out,” she said. “Tell your English friends that. Tell the English people.” And then she went back into the church.’

Hattersley looked round the table.

‘Well, that’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s all. But I thought — ’

‘You did quite right to tell us,’ said the man from the Foreign Office. ‘Thank you, Mr Hattersley.’

‘A nut,’ said the Deputy Commissioner.

‘Yes. Quite possibly,’ said the man from the Foreign Office. ‘But — ’

‘You are surely not expecting us to take an interest?’ said the Deputy Commissioner.

‘Well — ’

‘Someone ought to,’ said a man who had not yet spoken. Seymour had somehow formed the impression that he was an Admiral.

‘But not, I think, us,’ said the Deputy Commissioner. ‘The Foreign Office, perhaps?’

‘Of course we have taken an interest. From the first. Naturally, since he was an Englishman.’

‘What’s all this about Gibraltar?’

‘He came from Gibraltar.’

‘In that case, I think it’s all the more a question for the Foreign Office. I mean, he’s hardly even English!’

‘Hold on, hold on!’ said the man from the Foreign Office hastily. ‘That is, actually, one of the points in dispute. We say he is, the Spanish say he’s not.’

‘Surely that can easily be established?’

‘Easily be established?’ said the man from the Foreign Office, reeling back. ‘We have been arguing about it with Spain for over two hundred years!’

‘Hmm, yes, I see,’ said the Deputy Commissioner. ‘Nevertheless, I still feel it is something for you to address rather than for Scotland Yard.’

‘Of course, we have been addressing it.’

‘For two years,’ snorted the man whom Seymour took to be an Admiral.

‘Well, it takes time,’ protested the man from the Foreign Office. ‘One has to go through the right channels and they are not always responsive.’

‘They wouldn’t be, would they?’ said the man whom Seymour took to be an Admiral. ‘Since he was in their hands when he died.’

‘In their-?’

‘He was in prison when he died,’ said the man from the Foreign Office.

‘In prison?’ said the Deputy Commissioner incredulously. ‘You mean… No, really, this doesn’t sound at all like the thing for us. A foreign national? Or the next best thing to a foreign national. In a foreign country.’

‘Just a minute!’ said the Admiral.

‘And now you tell me he was actually in prison when he died? No, really,’ the Deputy Commissioner said, shaking his head, ‘this really is not the thing for us.’

‘The Prime Minister doesn’t think so,’ murmured the man from the Foreign Office.

‘Prime Minister?’ said the Deputy Commissioner, taken aback. ‘What the hell does he know about it?’

‘Nothing,’ said the Admiral. ‘But he knows about us.’

‘Us?’

‘The Navy.’

‘Well, I’m sure. But — ’

‘Gibraltar,’ said the Admiral, as to an idiot. ‘ Ships. Docks.’

‘Oh, yes, I see. And the Navy is taking an interest — ’

‘It certainly is.’

‘Well, of course, that puts a different complexion on it.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘But,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, ‘I’m afraid I still don’t see why Scotland Yard-’

‘We feel,’ said the man from the Foreign Office, ‘that the thing calls for professional investigation.’

‘We certainly do,’ said the Admiral.

‘So naturally we turn to-’

‘Yes,’ said the Deputy Commissioner glumly. ‘Yes. But-’

‘And so does the Prime Minister.’

‘And the Navy,’ said the Admiral.

‘Yes, well — ’ said the Deputy Commissioner, depressed.

‘Of course,’ said the man from the Foreign Office cunningly, ‘Scotland Yard need not be formally involved.’

‘Needn’t it?’ said the Deputy Commissioner, brightening.

‘In fact, it might be best if it’s not.’

‘Well, there is that,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, brightening still further.

‘All that’s needed is a man. And he could be seconded.’

‘To the Foreign Office?’ said the Deputy Commissioner hopefully.

‘Oh, no. No, I don’t think so. That would not be appropriate. To the Navy.’

‘What?’ said the Admiral.

‘You’re always having stores pinched, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t quite say-’

‘We could put it out that you’ve asked for a man from Scotland Yard to be assigned to help you with the inquiries you are no doubt making.’

There was a pause.

And then, unexpectedly, the Admiral gave a great laugh.

‘That’ll put the fear of God into a few people!’ he said.

‘Well, then! And I think we’ve got just the right man, haven’t we? Mr Seymour has worked with us before and we have every confidence in his ability to handle things discreetly. And he speaks Spanish.’

‘And he knows about docks,’ said the Deputy Commissioner.

‘Do you?’ said the Admiral eagerly, turning to Seymour.

‘English ones,’ said Seymour hastily. ‘And dockland rather than docks. I normally work in the East End.’

‘At least you’ve bloody heard of them,’ said the Admiral.

‘What the hell is Tragic Week?’ said the Deputy Commissioner, as they walked down the stairs.

‘It happened two years ago,’ said Seymour. ‘The Spanish Government called up reserves to fight in Spanish Morocco. The reserves were conscripts, mostly from Catalonia, the bit of Spain that Barcelona is in. When they were ordered on to the ships, they refused to go, and most of Catalonia supported them. There were riots in the streets and the Army was called in to put them down. Which it did. Bloodily.’

‘And this man Lockhart was mixed up in it?’

‘Apparently.’

‘It sounds even less our kind of thing,’ said the Deputy Commissioner. ‘In fact, it doesn’t sound our kind of thing at all.’

That was Seymour’s private opinion, too. When the Deputy Commissioner had called him in, however, he had jumped at the chance. This was because he had his own reason for going to Spain: and her name was Chantale.

Chantale did not come from Spain, actually, but from Morocco, and French Morocco, not Spanish, at that. But the two were next door to each other and both were just across the Straits and it would surely be possible for him to slip across at some point in the assignment?

And he needed to slip across, for there were things to be resolved. Chantale was half Arab, half French. This had been awkward for her in Morocco because she had been neither fish nor fowl. The French had eyed her askance, conscious all the time of what some of them referred to as the touch of the tar-brush. The Arabs had mistrusted her because they had never known to which side she would fall when the chips were down. Chantale herself had not been sure, either; which was why she had been tempted by Seymour’s argument, at the end of a previous mission in Tangier, that the thing to do was put both sides behind her and become something else: British, for instance. With him.

Tempted, but there had been other things to consider. Her mother, for instance; definitely Arab and definitely Moroccan. Could she be abandoned? Her mother, strong-willed, had said yes. Chantale was not so sure. And then, what about all that emotional investment she had made in the Nationalist hopes she had had for a new, young country independent of foreign domination? Or was that all a waste of time, anyway, now that the French had taken over and should she make the safer investment with the people currently on top, the French occupying power? All this had been precipitated a year ago when Seymour had been sent to Morocco on an assignment; and she was still dangling.

Seymour was dangling, too. He wanted, more than anything in the world, he told himself, to be with her. But with her in London’s grimy East End? Where the sun she was used to never penetrated through the pea-soup fog? Where you never quite shook off the chill of the docks? Was it fair to ask her?

Never mind the fairness, he had come to the conclusion; just ask her. But, in a way, he had not been sorry at her uncertainty. It reflected his own.

So they had both jumped at the chance when he had been given the assignment in Spain. It was neutral ground and maybe that would help them to sort things out. For Seymour, who always thought the glass was half full, it was well on the way to England. For Chantale, in whose experience the glass was nearly always half empty, it was a tentative step from which she could easily retreat.

The looseness of the assignment favoured them. It would give Seymour a chance to compose his own programme; and surely that programme could be tweaked to enable him to slip across the Straits to see her?

At the last moment, though, it had been Chantale who had decided to slip; and she would be arriving the day after Seymour.

And what he was thinking now, as he waited at the bottom end, the docks end, of Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s great, humming, tree-lined boulevard, was that Chantale would feel at home here. This part of Barcelona, the part nearest the docks, was like an Arab town. There were Arabs in long galabeahs lounging at street corners, women in dark veils and burkas keeping to the walls as they walked down the street with their baskets. In the open doorways of the houses men were sitting smoking bubble pipes, the bowls bubbling on the ground beside them. Further along the street was a little market and at the stalls, loaded with giant tomatoes, bursting peppers and bulging aubergines, he could hear people speaking, and what they were speaking was not Spanish but Arabic.

In front of him was a small church, the church Hattersley had spoken about. It had white walls, dazzlingly white in the bright sunshine, but blackened doors. He went across to it and looked in.

And reeled back. The porch was full of arms and legs!

Arms and legs? He looked again and saw now that they were plaster, like the two statues standing beside the door.

And there were also plaster casts, used surgical ones, neatly cut off and obviously taken from people’s limbs when they had served their purpose. Some had come from children and had little pictures drawn on them.

He realized now what they were. They were votive offerings, thanksgivings for injuries received and now cured. He had seen some once in a Catholic church in the East End. They had seemed to him at first grotesque but then rather moving.

In among the casts were stained bandages. Bloodstained bandages. He was looking at them when a voice beside him said:

‘Semana Tragica. The Tragic Week.’

It was an elderly man.

‘Tragic Week?’ said Seymour. ‘But that was — well, two years ago.’

‘The memories are still here,’ the man said. ‘Although sometimes not the people.’

‘Not the people, no.’

‘You are, perhaps, remembering someone?’

‘No. At least — well, yes, I suppose. There was an Englishman. His name was Lockhart.’

The elderly man looked at him sharply.

‘I knew Lockhart,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t die here.’

‘No. He died in prison.’

‘You know this, then?’

‘Yes. But not much more. I would like to know more.’

The man was silent. He seemed to be thinking. Then he made up his mind.

‘A coffee, perhaps!’

There was a cafe nearby and they went in. The man ordered two coffees but then didn’t seem in any hurry to begin. He looked at Seymour once or twice as if considering.

‘You speak Spanish well,’ he said, ‘but you are not Spanish.’

‘I’m British.’

‘Ah, British. Like Lockhart.’

‘That’s right.’

The man nodded, as if satisfied.

‘It is as well to establish these things,’ he said, ‘before you talk. They are always sending round informers.’

He looked round the cafe.

‘We shall be all right here,’ he said. ‘This is a Catalan cafe.’

And now Seymour understood. He had been listening with half an ear to the conversation in the cafe and had been puzzled. More than puzzled: disconcerted. He had thought he understood Spanish pretty well, but he had found it oddly difficult to follow the conversation in the cafe. It seemed Spanish and it was easy to make out the sense of it. But it was not Spanish. There were different words and different inflexions.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it. Catalan is new to me. But I can see now-’

The man put his hand on Seymour’s arm.

‘One moment, Senor. I will let them know you’re English.’

He went over to the counter and said something to the man at the till.

Then he came back.

‘It’s all right now,’ he said. ‘They can relax.’

He sipped his coffee and put the cup down.

‘You speak Spanish very well,’ he said, ‘but Spanish is not the thing to speak here.’

Seymour nodded.

‘Thank you for telling them,’ he said. ‘And for telling me.’

He sipped his coffee.

‘There are people here who knew Lockhart.’

‘Can I talk to them?’

‘You had better talk to Dolores.’

He signalled with his hand and a waitress came over.

‘Dolores, this is a friend of mine. He would like to talk to you.’

‘Senor?’

‘I am an Englishman and I would like to talk to you about an Englishman. His name is Lockhart.’

‘I knew Lockhart,’ she said.

‘Well?’

‘Too well. He was my husband.’

‘Dolores!’ said the elderly man reprovingly.

‘Well, almost. That’s what he used to say. As good as. He always used to stay with me when he came to Barcelona. And he used to say that one day he would take me back with him.’

‘To Gibraltar?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Dolores,’ protested the elderly man, ‘he had a wife already.’

‘I know, but there would have been room for another. I wouldn’t have made any fuss. We could have managed.’

‘Dolores, he was spinning you along.’

‘Don’t all men do that?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mind. It was nice to think of him in that way. That’s the way he thought of me, too. As his wife. Almost.’

‘He was staying with Dolores that night,’ said the elderly man.

‘When-?’

‘When it happened,’ said the elderly man, pulling up a chair for her to sit down. ‘Tell him.’

‘We heard shooting,’ she said. ‘There had been trouble. Those boys. They were making them go on the ships. There had been shooting before but this time it was close, just outside, in the street. “This is the stuff!” he said. He was quite excited. And then he wanted to go out. “You’d do better to stay in,” I said. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this. You stick to business.” “Ah, but this is business,” he said. ’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t know what he was talking about.’

‘What was his business?’

‘Something to do with the docks. He had an office down there. Just past the church. But I never quite knew what his business was. We didn’t talk about it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? In bed? Anyway, that night he insisted on going out. And then he didn’t come back.

‘There was more shooting, not just in our street but in all the streets, and I got frightened and ran back here to the cafe. And Manuel — he’s the boss, he owns the cafe — said, “You stay right here until it’s all over.” He said that to all of us, and we all stayed. “There’s no point in getting mixed up in it,” he said. “It’s not your fight.”

‘But Inez — she’s another of the waitresses — said it was her fight. She’s Catalan, you see. Well, I am, too, but not like her. I mean I wasn’t sure it was my fight. But she said it was our boys, and she went out. And she didn’t come back, either.

‘I was in a hell of a state, I can tell you. We were all in a state. But Manuel said, “Just stay here. You’ll be all right here.” Although it didn’t seem so.

‘It was hours before the shooting stopped. But then Manuel went out. There were a lot of bodies, he said, but hers wasn’t among them. He came back and said we should stay inside.

‘But I wanted to see. I mean, he had looked for Inez but I wanted to look for Lockhart. So I went out and another of the girls came with me. But I couldn’t find anything. He wasn’t among the bodies. “That’s good,” Marie said. “It means he’s alive.” But I couldn’t believe that. Not until I’d really seen him. They said a lot of people had been taken to the prison so I went along and asked to see him. But they wouldn’t let me, they wouldn’t let anybody. And then Manuel said to come home and he would fix it when things had settled down. So I went back to the cafe.

‘And a couple of days later he did fix it and I went to see him.’

‘You saw Lockhart when he was in prison?’ said Seymour.

‘Yes. I couldn’t see him really properly, though, it was so dark. He was lying in a corner and I thought maybe he had been wounded, but he said not. He told me to go away and not come again. “Don’t get mixed up in this!” he said. I said I could bring him things, food, perhaps. I wasn’t sure that they’d fed him and I’m damned sure they weren’t giving him enough water, but he said keep out of it. “Don’t come back,” he said. But I would have gone back. But then we heard that he was dead. Those bastards had killed him — killed him in the prison!’

Her voice had risen. Everyone else in the cafe had stopped talking. Then a man’s voice said soothingly, ‘It’s okay, Dolores, it’s okay. You come here now. Get back into the kitchen.’

Dolores got up from the table.

‘I’d better go,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Or Manuel will have my ass.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Only to tell Nina.’

‘Who’s Nina?’

‘She’s a girl in Barcelona. He always used to go and see her when he was over here. Why, I can’t think, because she’s a real pain in the ass. I used to wonder if he had a thing for her but I reckon not. It wouldn’t be easy to get a thing going with Nina. It would be like being in bed with a hedgehog.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘No. Just told me to tell her. Well, I did, but that was a waste of time. She knew anyway. She just looked at me with those cold eyes and nodded. That was all. A hard bitch. As well as prickly.’

She set off across the room.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

She was back, however, after two steps.

‘Why do you want to know about Lockhart?’ she demanded.

‘Friends are interested in what happened to him,’ he said. ‘Friends in England,’ he added with emphasis.

‘Tell them to go on being interested,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tell them to ask questions and go on asking questions. In the end someone’s got to answer.’

The conversation in the cafe resumed.

‘You see?’ said the elderly man. ‘You see now how it was?’

‘I am sorry,’ said Seymour. ‘I did not mean to upset her.’

The man shrugged.

‘She’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘It may even help her.’

He got up from the table and put out his hand.

‘Marques,’ he said. ‘Ricardo Marques.’

‘Seymour.’

‘Do what she says: go on asking questions. Perhaps we will be able to help you.’

He shook Seymour’s hand once more.

‘We shall meet again,’ he said.

An hour later Seymour was walking up Las Ramblas with Chantale. As it left the port area the street opened up and became an airy boulevard crowded with people. They seemed in no particular hurry, stopping frequently to chat with acquaintances or study the great bunches of flowers hung above the flower stalls. There were flowers everywhere, not just on the stalls but spread out in swathes of colour along the side of the road and bunched in miniature fields at the foot of the trees: roses, sweetpeas, carnations, chrysanthemums and great streaked tiger lilies whose powerful scent reached out right across the boulevard.

Everywhere, too, there seemed to be street performers, fire-eaters, jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and strange figures straight from a carnival, huge figures sometimes on stilts with grotesquely large papier-mache heads. A Spanish word came into his mind: cabezudos. That’s what they must be, cabezudos, the bizarre, capering figures that were part of every procession at carnival time.

The whole street was like a carnival. There were floats, there were musicians, there were clowns. From the floats people in bright costumes were throwing sweets for the children. The children dashed in among the cabezudos to retrieve the sweets and the cabezudos affected to trip over them. Everyone was laughing. Surely this must actually be a carnival? But no. He learned later that every day was like that on Las Ramblas.

Chantale, responding to the mood, had unbound the headscarf she normally wore in Tangier, even when she was in European dress, and let her hair fall down on to her shoulders.

If she had done that in Morocco it would have caused a riot. For some reason a woman’s hair seemed especially sexually inflammatory to Arabs.

But here, on Las Ramblas, Chantale suddenly felt a great expansion of personal freedom, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She let her hair fall and felt as if she had come out into the sunshine.

Seymour had been recommended a hotel in a small square off Las Ramblas. The square was little more than a patch of baked mud surrounded by apartment blocks. The blocks were three or four storeys high and many had rooms with little balconies fenced in by a kind of iron fretwork. Children played on the balconies and from time to time women dressed in black would come out and pick one up. Then they would lean on the balcony and monitor events in the plaza below. There was a play area in one corner of the plaza and perhaps they were keeping an eye on other offspring.

Seymour suspected that a good deal of monitoring went on in the square. He knew that his arrival in the square earlier that day had been noticed and now Chantale’s arrival with him was registered too. When he had asked for a room he had wondered whether to make it a double room but the suspicious eye of the proprietor suggested that it might be unwise. She was one of the landladies, he felt sure, who could tell at once whether a woman was married or unmarried: and he sensed that even in Barcelona that could still make a difference. In the end he had booked a separate room for Chantale.

After she had checked in they returned to Las Ramblas. There seemed to be more people there even than before. It was growing dark and the lamps had been lit. The street entertainers were out in force, often performing around braziers where they could be seen better.

In one place there were several braziers together and a space had been cleared where gypsy-like figures were dancing the flamenco. There was the click of castanets and someone was tapping on a small drum.

Cabezudos were stalking round the edges of the cleared space chatting to the spectators in Catalan.

‘Does that cabezudo know you?’ asked Chantale.

‘No.’

‘Well, it seems to be wanting to speak to you.’

‘It can’t be.’

The cabezudo, which was about eight feet tall, loomed over him.

‘Senor, Senor!’

‘Si?’

‘Lockhart,’ it said quietly, and then capered away.

He followed it to the edge of the crowd.

‘You want to know about Lockhart?’ it said in a hoarse whisper.

‘I do; but how did you know that?’

‘Ricardo told me.’

‘Ricardo Marques?’

‘Si.’

Seymour nodded. ‘You’re right, I do.’

‘Talk to Nina.’

‘Who is Nina?’

‘A teacher. She teaches at the school in your square.’

Your square? He had moved into the hotel only the day before. How did they know about him?

‘Just a minute!’ he said.

But the cabezudo had danced away into the crowd, the huge head jerking comically as it chatted to people, throwing a gigantic, grotesque shadow as it emerged for a moment into the light of the braziers.