Collusion: Chapter 9
Who can you trust? Things come to a head at a Spanish civil war mass grave
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll publish a section from the novel. Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 are here for those who missed them. The story so far: What started as an investigation into right-wing football fans has escalated. New information suggests to Ashton that his companion may have nefarious motives. A confrontation occurs in the woods near Granada
Chapter 9 Duende
Their next stop was the Alhambra Palace hotel. They relaxed on the terrace overlooking the south of the city. Titch was particular about sitting at Lorca’s favourite table. He clearly felt a kinship with the murdered writer.
“We’ll leave the car,” he said and over a beer began to explain that there was a theatre downstairs where the poet’s plays had been performed. “It’s closed to the public but they’ll let us in,” he said. It was obvious that the Englishman was a well-known character about town and liked by almost everyone. The talk of plays led on to Lorca’s fascination with gypsies and in turn to Titch’s other Andalusian obsession, flamenco.
“Do you know what duende means, dear boy? I think you might.”
Ashton sat silent, waiting for a clue.
“It’s that dark sound you cannot explain. You might, in other cultures, call it soul. But that’s not quite right, either. It’s a transmittable emotion, a cry from the deepest recesses of your being. That quality that turns a wail into art. You see it when singers lose themselves in the music and their own pain. They are no longer performing. They are radiating. They assume that thousand-yard stare and do not care if there is an audience or not. Death, god and beauty emerge like spirits from duende. Do you understand?”
Ashton nodded.
“Well I don’t,” Titch snapped. “But I know it when I hear and see it. You will, too, I think. Tomorrow we will go to the Pena Flamenca La Plateria in the Albaicin. The thrill of the voices can change your life. They will take you to your darkest moments” – Ashton briefly imagined wet cloth clogging his mouth and nose – “and spark flashes of joy. Drink up, drink up. To the palaces. The Alhambra has duende.”
He was right. The Moorish palaces amazed Ashton with their delicate, Islamic workmanship, exquisite design and tranquillity. The last visitor was in the process of leaving and the staff inside the network of rooms knew Titch well enough to leave him and his guest to their own devices. They sat in the Court of the Myrtles as dusk began to fall and bats swooped over the long pond. “Everything was created around water,” Titch said. “Running water cooled the rooms in the summer and the sound settled the mind. The Moors channelled clean, beautiful water from the Sierra Nevada to nourish the palace and the town. They turned a desert into an oasis. The balance of rock and liquid, both crafted into something glorious, is as close to perfection as you can get.”
Titch had a thorough grasp of history and relished his role as guide. They stood in the Court of the Lions admiring the fountain. “The 12 big cats represent the 12 tribes of Israel,” Titch said. “At the heart of one of Islam’s finest creations there is proof that Muslims and Jews coexisted in Andalus.” Life was not all harmonious, however.
“Here,” he said, leading Ashton towards a colonnaded walkway, “Is the Sala de los Abencerrajes. Bobadil was the last Islamic ruler of Granada. His father invited the family’s enemies to a banquet and slaughtered them here. The blood is said to have stained the marble.” He pointed to the reddish patch of colour on the floor. “Now look up.”
The ceiling was square, a symmetrical honeycomb of intricately carved golden and blue cascades. “That,” Titch said, “is duende.”
They walked downhill, through darkening woods with channels of water running alongside the roadway. They lingered a while at the bottom of the slope because, among the stores selling tat, were craftsmen’s workshops dedicated to creating fine acoustic guitars. Afterwards they strolled down to the Plaza del Carmen and ate in the Del Puerta, an elegant restaurant that fulfilled all Ashton’s preconceptions about how a Spanish bar should present itself. Titch was a friend of the owner and ordered huge, pink gin and tonics, enlivened with floating fruits. Not being a fan of the spirit, Ashton was mildly annoyed that he was not given a choice in the matter. The waiter prepared the drink at the table and poured seven seconds’ worth of the liquor into the glasses over ice and berries before adding the mixer. Despite Ashton’s misgivings it was delicious. The tapa was excellent, too. Next, they ate steak and drank heavy local red wine. It was another excellent evening but both of their thoughts drifted back to home.
“I’d like to call Orlanda tonight, if possible,” Ashton said.
“Yes, I’ve a phone you can use. It’s secure,” came the reply. “She’s had a tough couple of days. There have been angry altercations between Conservatives. The Brexit bully-boys have no doubt been pretty abusive. And that’s inside the House.”
“I can imagine it’s been heated outside.”
“Joseph is in court. His cronies will surely take a step back, especially after the weekend and the knifeman. Let’s go back to the villa. It’s 8pm at home.”
Titch made a call and within minutes his taxi-driver friend turned up. He scowled at Ashton, who sat in the back, and spoke rapid Spanish to his front-seat passenger all the way to the villa. It sounded like a tiff.
There was no sign of affection when they were dropped off and they watched as the car sped away. “I don’t think he likes me,” Ashton said.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s that,” Titch said. There was something about the tone that made Ashton stop.
“You haven’t given him the impression that…” he stood and faced his friend in the dark. “That… you and me? No, surely not!”
Titch looked smug. “He has drawn his own conclusions, dear boy. It never hurts to let your paramour think that there’s competition. The edge that was dulled is sharpening again!”
“You disgust me,” Ashton said.
Inside, they went downstairs. Titch unlocked the basement office and directed Ashton to the desk inside. As expected, the room was filled with electronic equipment and a screen showing various views of the approaches to the house. “You can log on to that computer,” Titch said, “to check your email and get access to your address book. You might want to think of using something more secure than Gmail to store your numbers. Emails from this computer are secure but, please, don’t give anyone any indication where you are. Use this phone.” With that he was gone.
Assuming that Orlanda would not pick up what he presumed would be an unknown number, he left a message: “Hi, it’s Mike. I hope you’re well and it has not been too difficult for you. I’ve been following events on the news.
“I’m safe. Sorry I haven’t called but I’m on security lockdown. I can’t give you a number but, if you pick this up, I’ll ring back at 9.15pm.”
He checked his emails. There was one from Barry Pierce marked ‘urgent.’ He opened it but all it said was: “I need to talk to you. Very important.” There was little else in his inbox that could be addressed in the circumstances so he flat-batted a couple of work inquiries and then tried Orlanda again. She picked up after a single ring.
“How are you,” he said. “Have they got you in a safe place.”
“Yes,” she said wearily. “Nice flat with a live-in policewoman. In the Square.” He was glad it wasn’t a man.
“How’s work?”
“Toxic.” It was said with a hint of contempt and hysteria but she immediately changed tone. “I didn’t mean it like that, sorry. People have been ignoring me, or hissing as I pass and some of them have been very brave on the MPs’ Whatsapp group but won’t look me in the eye in person.
“The Independent Group are trying to pressurise me into crossing the floor but I’m staying put and trying to retain my sanity. The whole place is going mad. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
He gave her a rundown of what had happened. “We don’t think they were looking to harm you on Sunday night,” he said. “They were probably waiting for me to come out. I should have left you in the flat. I’m so sorry. It’s likely I put you in danger.”
That brought a scoffing laugh. She clearly wasn’t a woman who had thought too much about it.
“You believed you were doing the right thing. Do not feel bad.”
“They knew I was there, though. Do you remember who you told I was coming round?” She was silent for a moment and then sighed. “I’ve had to go through this with Cathy. It turns out she’s quite an impressive lady. A few people. Friends. Colleagues. I told them I’d met an interesting man.”
That threw him off his line of thought. “I was talking about you, too,” he said. “I was thinking about you today. This is a beautiful place. I saw a Moorish palace that took my breath away.”
“Not the Alhambra?” she said eagerly. His silence was eloquent.
“I’m not supposed to tell you where I am.” He paused, indecisive, and then blurted it out. “It’s the sort of place you should see with someone you love.”
He thought he had gone too far but she responded quietly. “It sounds lovely. If it’s where I think it is, I’ve always wanted to go.”
“It’s got duende,” he said. “I’ll explain that when I see you.”
Quickly, he got back to business, telling her about the Finn and the Misanthropic Division. “That would be a perfect name for some of the Brexiteers,” she said, astounded at how preposterous it all sounded. Finally, he tried to lighten the conversation again by describing – without naming Lorca – Titch’s obsession with the poet. He left out the details of the death and the parallels with today’s growing extremism and hatred. She was laughing as he wound up the call.
“Oh,” she said, as they prepared to hang up. “I spoke to Barry about an hour ago. He said it’s crucial that he speaks to you. Really, really important.”
“He’s probably drinking with a Liverpool fan and he’ll put him on to ask whether they’ll win the league.”
“Barry sounded sober, Mike. I think it’s something to do with everything that’s going on. If you can, call him. I got the impression it’s something to do with your safety.”
The intimacy of a few moments earlier had gone. They said their farewells formally. “I’ll ring you when I can,” he said. “Unknown numbers at this time of night will be me.”
“OK, speak soon.”
Upstairs, he found Titch with a 75cl bottle of De Ranke Hop Harvest 2018 and a sympathetic look on his face. “I thought you might need cheering up so I have brought this from my stash. I know who you would rather be with but I can at least provide a modicum of consolation.”
Ashton took the glass gratefully but he was already wondering how he could contact Pierce without his host knowing. The PR man had been asking questions about Titch in London. Whatever he had found out, he was obviously desperate to impart the information as soon as possible.
*
It was a restless night for Ashton. He went to the basement just after 8am to find Titch pounding away at a heavy bag. “Are you joining me for exercise?” he said.
“I need to run,” Ashton replied. “I need to do some miles. Do you mind?”
The big man stopped and appraised his friend. “He knows what I’m up to,” Ashton thought. After a long pause Titch nodded. “Have you got your kit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, two things. Be careful. The pavements are uneven. And don’t get lost. It might be just as well that you’re out. Jose is bringing the car back.” He chuckled. “I can have a bit of fun with him – one way or the other.”
Ashton did indeed have his running shorts with him. He also had three €50 notes that he had taken out of a cashpoint in Ireland. Secreting them in his shoe, he went through an elaborate charade of warming up to kill time until he imagined the shops were open.
At about 9.30 he left the villa. “I’m due a long one. Only start worrying if I’ve been gone more than three hours,” he said. “I’m going to keep the motorway in sight and the mountains will help me retain a sense of direction.” With that he was off, heading west out of town.
The plan was to reach the next big urban area about 8km away and find a mobile phone store. There he aimed to buy a cheap pay-as-you-go handset, a local prepaid sim card and phone London.
It proved more difficult than he thought. The central area of the next town was a warren of narrow streets and his paucity of Spanish – and unwillingness to draw attention to himself – meant it was not possible to ask directions. Finally, he found a shop and, with great difficulty, made his purchase. Using hand gestures he persuaded the salesman to charge the handset.
He had now been out for more than two hours. Watching the battery slowly fill up he began to fret. It would take at least 50 minutes to get back and he needed to find time to talk.
As soon as the charge reached 25 per cent, he turned the phone off and, leaving the plugs and wires with the shopkeeper, bolted out the door. Running as fast as he could, he reached the end of the street where the villa stood. Sure enough, waiting on the patio and surveying the approaches in all directions was Titch. Even at a distance of 500 yards Ashton could see the huge physique relax. He did a twirling motion in the air to suggest that he was planning to run another lap of the area and then darted down a narrow track that crossed the arroyo. He had bought himself another half hour.
There was a copse of trees surrounding a disused farm building so he went across, sat on a ruined wall and turned on the phone. No signal.
He needed to go back towards the town so he retraced his route, waving to Titch and making a shrugging gesture to imply he’d been lost. At the main road he stood behind a tree and saw that there were two bars on the device’s display. He knew Pierce’s number by heart and texted it. “Call me now. Ash. Not later. Now only time I can talk.”
Five minutes passed. He was just beginning to despair when the phone buzzed. “Barry, thank god,” he said. “No bullshit mate. I’ve not got long. Tell me what I need to know.”
“Sherwood Titchfield does not exist,” Pierce said bluntly. “I’ve had him checked. There’s no trace of him in the Sherwood Foresters. No one remotely connected with 14 Intelligence Company has heard of him. You need to get away from there. He’s setting you up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But every minute you are with him you are in danger. Where are you?”
“I can’t say. Are you sure Titch doesn’t exist?”
“He exists alright,” Pierce said scornfully. “Whoever he is, he’s playing you for a fool.”
“To what end?”
“Who knows? But didn’t you say that he’s always telling you to be careful about professions that attract ex-soldiers? Well, what is he? And what happens to you when he gets the information he needs?”
It was a disturbing prospect. Then Pierce dropped the bombshell. “And what does it mean for Orlanda? You may be putting her in danger, too.” That sealed it.
“I’m in Spain,” Ashton said.
“Malaga? The Costas? Maybe I can send someone to pick you up.”
“Granada,” Ashton said, head spinning. “Just outside.” He took a deep breath.
“Let me have a think,” he said. “I’ve got this phone. I’m going to turn it off now but stay alert. I might be calling you very soon to get me out of here.”
“Don’t think too long,” Pierce said abruptly. “You may not have the time.”
*
Ashton walked back. Numerous thoughts bounced across his mind. Titch occupied two safe houses. They were expensive enough, especially the mews, but they were filled with equipment beyond the price range of anyone except a multimillionaire or a government agency. He wasn’t a millionaire, so which government?
The basement worried Ashton, too. It was too much like a detention centre, even down to what seemed to be an interrogation room. And the gun in London was a concern. Did he have weapons in Spain?
On the other hand, there was never any suggestion that Ashton was a prisoner. It had been an enjoyable stay. But the time had come to find out the truth about Sherwood Titchfield. It could well be a difficult day.
Titch, by contrast, was planning more sightseeing. “London is not making any headway,” he said, “so let’s not sit around here. Shower and dress, dear boy. Would you like to go skiing? Of course you wouldn’t. You’re a man who appreciates culture. Let’s have a little lunch and take a drive.”
It was a sullen meal and Titch was perplexed by his friend’s mood. In the early afternoon they departed, drove through Granada and turned east on the motorway. They travelled for another 10 minutes and came off the main road at Viznar. “They brought Lorca this way from the city,” Titch said. “In the early days of the Civil War, they did not want the citizens of Granada to know what they were doing. Later on, it didn’t matter – they took their captives to the cemetery and let the entire town hear the shooting. But, at first, they hid their foul deeds.”
Titch took Ashton’s silence for depressive respect. Exiting Viznar, they pulled into a small layby overlooking the valley. “Down below was a mill,” Titch said. “It was turned into a boys’ summer camp called La Colonia and then commandeered by the Falange. This is where the poet spent his last night. That running water you hear, he heard it in the hours before he died. He loved water. The foundations of other cities are stone. Granada is built on water.”
There were little more than foundations left of the building. A few scraps of marble tiling were visible. The stream that once fed the mill tumbled down towards Viznar but otherwise there was silence. Titch mounted an uneven wall and stepped across the deep channel of flowing water on to what must have once been a room. For a moment he was lost in thought.
Ashton walked downhill a little and discovered, to his surprise, a rectangular industrial pool with grating on top. Dozens of frogs plunged under the surface as he approached. In the distance the thunderheads were rumbling. A mile away a goatherd was following his animals down a precipitous gulch. The view would have been similar in 1936, he reflected with a shiver. A scene that should have been pastoral felt sinister, with danger lurking in the dead ground and crevices.
Titch was using the raised platform as a stage and had moved on past his moment of reflection. “The Falange used this place as a detention centre,” he said. “Who knows what they did to the little group that night. Did they abuse them? Or leave them to lie awake and contemplate the morrow? A poet, a teacher and two bullfighters. They knew what was coming.”
With remarkable litheness he skipped back across the water channel and turned uphill to the road, marching with purpose back to the car. Ashton followed. The confrontation was looming.
They drove wordlessly along the ridge towards Alfacar. A small aqueduct guided the stream across a hairpin bend and, some 50 yards on, there was another untidy and rugged layby at the base of a trail into the woods. They stopped again.
“It all sounds so innocent,” Titch said, pointing uphill. “They’d say, ‘Let’s take a little walk.’ Paseo. Come on.”
The treeline was not far away. As they got further along the path and widened their angle from the road, the dropoff became steeper. Ashton instinctively moved away from the edge – and Titch. The bottom of the barranco was a long way down.
They came over a crest into a grove of trees and shifted on to level ground. There was a depression in front of them and, at first, Ashton thought they had come across a small, shaded park. The sides of the hollow were supported by low brick walls and a wooden bridge spanned one of the deeper dips in the land. Then he realised what he was there to see.
“A paseo to somewhere like this,” Titch said. “Just far enough from houses, from civilization, from decency. Kneel down in front of the ditch here and a bullet in the head. There are mass graves like this all over the area. All over Spain.”
“What are you trying to do?” Ashton snapped. “Frighten me? Am I going to disappear in the woods?”
Titch seemed confused. “You’re not Sherwood Titchfield. You were never in the Sherwood Foresters. No one connected with the 14th Intelligence Company has heard of you. You’ve lied to me from the start. I’m finished being afraid. Who are you and whose side are you on?”
The big man slumped down and sat on one of the walls. “I’m not trying to scare you. I was trying to underline the significance of what we’re trying to do.” He started in a sad, downbeat manner but grew angrier with every word. “This is reality. Men with guns killed their neighbours in places like this. They dehumanised them with ideology and murdered them because of political differences that barely make a shred of sense in retrospect. I brought you here because too few people are prepared to make a stand against those who would repeat this sort of outrage. Go, go look at the plaques.”
On the other side of the dip were what appeared to be flat stone benches. When Ashton walked round he could see they were covered with small memorial tablets. Each had the names and dates of groups or individuals that were killed and buried here.
“I brought you here to see the end result of fascism. So you would understand the importance of your bravery.”
There was real sincerity alongside the fury in Titch’s voice but it was crucial that Ashton was unmoved. He said: “Who are you?”
“I’ve been Sherwood Titchfield for so many years that it’s who I am,” he said. “Yes, they nicknamed me Sher when I joined the Det because I’d come from the Foresters. I’d been called Titch because I was so big at school so when I needed to change my name it seemed obvious to choose a variant on it.”
“Why would you want to change your name?”
The rage drained out of Titch for a moment. “It was not a case of want, dear boy,” he said rising. “It was necessity.”
“Why?”
“Because there were dangerous people who wanted me dead. The old me was erased a long time ago.” He sounded tired.
Then a thought struck Titch. He was suddenly more alert, less friendly. “Why didn’t you bring this up before? Something’s changed. What did Orlanda say to you?”
“It wasn’t her.” This came out before Ashton had a chance to consider the implications. He was so keen to defend Orlanda that he spoke without regard for the consequences.
“Then who was it and when? And, most importantly, who knows you’re here?”
It was Ashton’s turn to sit down heavily. “She knows – suspects – I’m near Granada,” he said.
Uncharacteristically, Titch swore. “Fuck!”
“She guessed. I didn’t tell her. I was talking about the Moorish palace and she said…”
“Yes, the Alhambra. Of course she did. Either she or someone around her is giving information about you to ExSat. Are you stupid?”
“Not her,” Ashton shouted.
“Who else knows?”
Titch’s anger was so apparent that Ashton decided not to mention Pierce and the illicit mobile phone.
“Come on. Let’s get back to the villa and think about this.”
Ashton was abashed but still defiant. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are and who you work for.”
The older man swung round and, for a moment, Ashton thought he was going to throw a punch. “My name is Sherwood Titchfield and I’m working to make sure you do not end up in a shallow grave like these people. I’ll be at the car. If you are not there in two minutes you are on your own.”
It was a very frosty journey back to the house.
Chapter 10: Hit and run
My other novel, Good Guys Lost, a very different story of gangsterism, the music industry and working-class Liverpool, is available here