Bones of the Buried (12 page)

‘We tried to bury him but the ground is solid rock there so we tossed him down a cliff.’

‘So his body would be difficult to identify?’ Edward felt revulsion at the coolness with which Griffiths-Jones recounted what must have been murder.

‘Yes, and I had to be sure to be the one to identify the body.’

‘But why did you leave your knife there?’

‘That was just a bad mistake. It must have fallen out of my pocket when we tossed the body down the cliff and, as luck would have it, was found beside the body.’

‘And the bloody jersey?’

‘Believe it or not, that was nothing to do with it. I got blood on it when I had a fall in the mountains a few weeks back and never got round to washing it.’

‘And the ring?’

‘I didn’t notice it wasn’t on my finger until I was back in Madrid.’

‘But why did Tilney need to disappear?’

‘Well, someone has to organise delivery of the arms we receive and in any case, he believed his life was in danger in Madrid. He refused to give me the details but he had had death
threats, so it seemed a good time for him to vanish.’

‘But he did not know you would be suspected of his murder?’

‘No, we thought it could be blamed on brigands or whatever but it turned out I was the obvious suspect.’ He grinned wryly.

‘But why didn’t he send word or give any sign to prove you were innocent when you were on trial?’

‘That’s what I don’t know,’ said Griffiths-Jones in obvious puzzlement. ‘Every day I have expected to be released. After all, Tilney must have heard what happened.
Even cut off from newspapers, he would have met someone who would have told him. He had to know what was happening in the world.’

‘You hadn’t quarrelled? I mean, it occurs to me he might want you dead.’

‘No, we were both fighting on the same side. Personal feelings didn’t come into it.’

‘But you kept quiet about why you were on the mountain?’

‘Yes, it was my duty, and,’ he added grimly, ‘if I had started talking about what we were really doing, I would have been found knifed to death even here in prison.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Edward. ‘You are in a hole.’

‘Yes,’ Griffiths-Jones agreed, ‘a hole four foot wide and six foot long unless . . .’

‘Unless . . .?’

‘Unless you can find Tilney and get him to come forward or something . . . but it’s hopeless. I know that.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Edward had to agree. ‘Is there anyone who might know where he is?’

‘I’ve thought about that. There’s a girl he used to . . . he was close to . . . an actress of sorts . . . called Rosalía Salas. I only met her once. She didn’t mix
with the foreigners much, though I remember she spoke good English. In fact, Tilney kept her away from everyone. I don’t even know where she lives. If you could find her she might know
something.’

‘You didn’t see her at your trial, then?’

‘No, never, which I suppose was a bit odd.’

Edward sighed: ‘Well, thanks to Basil Thoroughgood we’ve got a bit more time. By the way, in exchange for the help he is giving, keeping you alive, he wants you to spy on your
friends in the Party for him.’

Griffiths-Jones laughed for the first time since Edward had seen him, and at once he looked much younger. ‘I suppose you told him I would tell you to go and boil your head or you
wouldn’t have . . .’

‘Yes,’ Edward said, smiling too. ‘As you pointed out, we don’t live by the same rules but I would never accuse you of betraying your principles, much as I detest
them.’

Griffiths-Jones laughed again: ‘No, you’re right there, but I don’t want to die for them if I can possibly avoid it.’

‘Yes, well, I had better get going,’ Edward said, getting up from the chair. ‘Oh by the way, can you tell me what sort of arms you were collecting that day?’

‘Hand-grenades, rifles – mostly Vetterlis, Arisakas and Lebels – whatever we could lay our hands on – pistols, machine-guns – Maxim MG 08s and Hotchkiss M 09s
– cartridges of course . . . That last time we took delivery of a Fokker trimotor and a small Nieuport fighter.’

‘Good heavens!’ Edward exclaimed.

‘But not nearly enough and mostly old stuff. You see, the Americans, the French and our own beloved government have refused to sell arms to Spain. They say they want to stay absolutely
neutral but actually they want to see the Popular Front overthrown.’

‘So, who do you buy arms from?’

‘The Soviet Union of course . . . and . . .’

‘And . . .?’ Edward prompted.

‘Well, you’ll think it odd and it was this that the Spaniard who died objected to when he saw the markings on the crates. We also buy from Germany. I know what you are going to say
but . . . ends justify means and bullets have no smell. If we have to buy bullets from Fascists in order to kill Fascists – then that’s what we have to do.’

She wasn’t sure how it had happened. She had been lonely, of course, and apprehensive, but still . . . The problem was she had no idea how to be a foreign correspondent.
There were no instruction manuals, no university courses, and her Baedeker, purchased hurriedly at the W H Smith bookstall in Victoria Station just before she caught her train, restricted itself to
describing buildings of historic interest although, to be fair, the author, Albert F. Calvert, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Alfonso XII, had included some interesting statistics about
the population of Madrid and its geography. It was natural, therefore, that she gratefully received the paternal support offered by Ben Belasco. She called him ‘papa’ which he seemed to
like and, though she knew he had a wife back in America somewhere, she put up little resistance when he suggested they spend the long, Madrid siestas in bed together.

It was partly David’s fault, she told herself. It was on his orders – he said it was the Party’s but as far as she was concerned it was his orders – that she had come to
Spain and then he had more or less abandoned her. He seemed to be so busy with Party matters, which he was unwilling to discuss with her, that he had no time left for her. He told her to learn
Spanish and get to know the people and wait. It made her fretful and sapped her self-confidence. It had all been so urgent – the call to leave England for Spain – but, now she was here,
there was nothing to do but wait. But wait for what? A change of government? Governments were changing all the time but it seemed not to make any difference. Wait for some conflagration, some civil
conflict on which the Party would ride to power? Possibly, but there was no real evidence that this would happen.

In the meantime, she travelled round the country, mostly with Hester driving the Hispano. She learnt Spanish at the British Council – and picked it up quite quickly – but it was
another matter getting anyone to talk to her. She had somehow assumed that people would want to use her to put across their views on the current political situation and plans for the future. She
had taken it for granted that there would be a Ministry of Information through which she could meet ministers and government officials but there was none. Whether it was because she was a woman or
a foreigner or both, no one with any influence would let her interview them. Spanish politics was an all-male affair. Women, with a few notable exceptions such as the communist Dolores Ibarruri,
were there to cook for their men and breed, not to interfere in matters of state.

Doggedly she set about analysing Spain’s political institutions but it was hideously confusing. Governments might change but the cast of characters remained the same and it was almost
impossible for a foreigner to make sense of it all – who was who, who was in power this week, who had made deals with whom. She worked out that there were no fewer than twenty-six parties in
the Cortes – Republicans, Radicals, Radical Socialists, moderate Socialists, Social Democrats, left-wing Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and pure Anarchists. Most confusing of all, there
were two communist groupings, Stalinist and anti-Stalinist, and they hated each other far worse than any of the right-wing parties.

David, as a prominent Stalinist and a foreigner, was always in danger of a stab in the back and Verity suspected that Marxist-Trotskyists were behind his being framed for the murder of Godfrey
Tilney. With David ignoring her, bored and homesick for London, it was inevitable that she would drift into the orbit of the most charismatic male of her acquaintance who spoke her own language.
She did not quite see it this way. She considered herself to be firmly independent and, if she embarked on an affair with ‘papa’, that was because she needed . . . not love exactly.
Thinking about love made her think of Edward. She missed him badly. It surprised her how much. Sometimes she thought she loved him but she wasn’t ready to be in love. To be in lust, yes, but
how could she love? She had a career to make. Her whole concentration was on making a success of her time in Spain as a foreign correspondent. Her feelings for Edward were so . . . so complicated.
Days went by when she did not think of him, but never whole weeks. Without meaning to, she silently compared him with the little group of English-speaking foreigners who gathered each night at
Chicote’s on the Gran Vía and found them lacking. She could hear him, in his clipped upper-class accent, dismiss them all as ‘second rate’. Even Belasco – for all his
animal magnetism, his experience with women, his glamour and fame – lacked something of Edward’s gravitas.

At the beginning, she had admired Belasco and felt safe in his company, delighted that this distinguished writer had chosen her as his muse rather than, say, Hester who, on the face of it, was
much more his ‘type’. It did not take her long to find out his faults. For instance, when he wanted to be, Belasco was a brilliant raconteur but there came a time when she began to find
his story-telling tiresome. It wasn’t just that he repeated himself. To put it bluntly, she discovered he was a liar. An American journalist passing through Madrid had told her he had spent
less than a month in the front line during the war and had spent most of the year he had lived in France not in the muddy, insalubrious trenches he had described so vividly in his book, but in
Paris in the luxury of the Hotel Crillon. She had disbelieved the journalist at first but in the end he had convinced her that it was Belasco who was lying. It was odd really because one of his
favourite words of condemnation was ‘shonky’, Yiddish for phoney.

It was not that he was a coward; far from it. She had seen with her own eyes that he had courage. He had insisted on taking her to a bullfight – he was writing a book on the subject
– and for a week before had regaled her with stories of death and glory in the dust and heat of the arena. Hester had said to him – in Verity’s presence – that he ought to
call his book ‘Bullshit’, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He was mad about the colour and frenzy of the bullring. On the day when they elbowed their way through the crowd into the Plaza de Toros, he had been almost beside himself with excitement. The
smell of the people, the animals, the dirt in the arena, intoxicated him. ‘It’s not a sport, V, because the bull can never win. It’s a tragedy, a ritual,’ he shouted to her
above the roar of the crowd.

She watched him getting ever more feverish as the bullfight progressed, ecstatic with the brutalism of the sight, almost as though he was on drugs. When a particularly ferocious bull had beaten
down one of the wooden barricades protecting the onlookers, he alone had not run away but had helped the toreadors and the matadors chase the maddened animal back into the ring. He had returned to
Verity, hot, sweaty and triumphant. Verity suppressed the thought that it might have been more chivalrous if he had remained beside her instead of dashing off to chase bulls. The event had been the
basis of one of her most successful pieces for the
New Gazette
and Lord Weaver had himself wired her his congratulations. It was a secret that Belasco had helped her write the article and,
in doing so, taught her how to select just the right word and ‘tweak’ the facts, as he put it, to give life and colour to a piece of reportage.

Belasco, she now knew, was a liar, a braggart and a bully but she was fascinated by him despite herself. For one thing he was a famous writer, and for another he was so ugly. Once when she had
half-heartedly asked him why he felt he needed to lie about his experiences when he had in truth done so much more than most men, he answered her with unexpected seriousness: ‘A man is what
he hides. A writer’s job is to tell the truth and his standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything
factual can be.’ He added after a pause: ‘What I invent is truer than what I remember.’ And on another occasion, when Maurice Tate asked Belasco why he liked to live the life he
did – big-game hunting, getting caught up in wars which were none of his business, drinking too much and getting into fights – he said, ‘I want to be remembered not as a man who
has fought in wars, not a bar-room fighter, not a shooter, not a drinker but as a writer.’ It made sense to Verity that he should see his life as ‘copy’.

They did not live together – that would have destroyed her reputation – but she spent most of the time at his rather grand apartment near the Plaza Mayor, writing or making love. He
was a good lover, if rather brisk. She sometimes wished the men she took to bed were a little more tender. Neither David nor Belasco went in for tenderness and Belasco, once he had had his orgasm,
could not remain in bed another moment. Verity suspected that Edward might be a more imaginative and considerate lover but she reminded herself that could never be – for so many reasons.

Then when David was arrested and, to her amazement, condemned for a murder she knew he had not committed, she realised that Belasco, Tate, Tom Sutton, even Hester, were useless. Not one of them
would lift a finger to stop him being executed. As though waking from a nightmare, she suddenly realised what she must do. She had to get hold of Edward; only he could help. That he might not wish
to help was not something she ever let herself consider. She was confident that, if she could only appeal to him face to face, he would. She discovered, after wiring Lord Weaver, that Edward was
due back in London within the week and determined she would be knocking at his door at eight the morning after his arrival. And now here he was, tired and out of place among the people she now
called her friends, but somehow, for the first time in weeks, she felt able to relax. Lord Edward Corinth, class enemy, ineffectual member of a dying caste, was here in Madrid and she felt safe.
How mysterious.