Loss of dignity: That’s the problem for most eighty-six-year olds.
It’s like a sad return to the time when you were carried everywhere, were fed on milk and wore diapers but I’m luckier than some. During the previous few days, I’d shown I was still capable of doing the sort of things I did fifty years ago. More importantly, I’d completed a job that had been outstanding for fifty years.
I wiped my eyes with a handkerchief and watched the silhouette drag up a chair and sit down opposite me. “Come on Mr Thomas,” it said. “Why would someone of your age fly to Spain, smuggle a gun past all the airport checks and surveillance gear and threaten another old man in his nineties?”
Did he really want to know? If so, how long did he have?
I glanced at the untouched pot of tea and the two mugs that sat between us. My interrogator was getting impatient but I was in no hurry. Patience is a positive feature of old age. When you reach eighty-six you’ve come to accept that time is running out. You stop thinking about time. Time has passed and time will continue. So why rush the present? For me, right then, nothing seemed to matter anymore. The job was finished.
“Tea, Mr Thomas? Milk?”
I looked down to check for my stick and the glasses. The glasses were retrievable. They were lying next to my black bag so I picked them up. The stick was another matter.
“Thank you,” I said watching the tea and then the milk being poured into the two mugs and noting how pale and unappetising it looked. “Would you remind me of your name again?”
“Andy Wilson: Inspector Andy Wilson,” he replied. It might have been the tenth time he’d told me but it was the Wilson part I kept mishearing. Wilton? Willman?
“Ah, yes, of course,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling. My hearing’s OK but people always say their own names too quickly. Perhaps he thought I was stringing him along or taking him for a ride because he then tried his question again. “So, any chance of an explanation?”
I tried the tea. I was right. It was cold, weak and insipid.
“As we used to say in the RAF, a shit, shower and shave would be my preferred priority,” I said, aware of combining politeness with perhaps some unnecessary frankness. “One of my colleagues used to add the word shag to that list but I don’t feel like one at present.”
He seemed slightly amused. “Really? But would you please answer my question?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “It goes back sixty years so it’ll take that long to tell.”
“Then give me a summary.”
“Your friend who marched me in here said I’d need to start from scratch.”
“Clive’s got more patience. Just give me a summary. The only thing I know so far is that your name is Oliver James Thomas and you’re from Gloucester. We got that from your passport but perhaps you could start by explaining why you had such a problem with a ninety-year old gentleman living in quiet retirement in a nice villa in Malaga that you shot him.”
I looked at him and let him continue.
“Is it any wonder that the Spanish police have asked us to detain you, Mr Thomas? When a British national goes to Spain, uses a smuggled hand gun on another British national and then runs away or, as in your case, walks away using a walking stick, it poses the question of why.
“And while we’re at it, what are you doing with five thousand Euros in a brown envelope? Is it unspent, holiday money?”
I’ve never done holidays. Holidays are a generational thing as if long weeks off work are an entitlement, but he wasn’t to know that. “Did your Spanish friends confirm the name of this so-called gentleman?” I asked.
“Mr Alex Donaldson,” he replied, “Which I’m sure you know anyway. So, I ask again. What’s going on?”
I took a deep breath. “My wife, Sarah, died,” I said, which must have sounded irrelevant to him. It wasn’t to me. “And so, did Beatie,” I added thinking that would confuse him into thinking this was a case of geriatric infidelity or promiscuity that had got out of hand and I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t to know. “So is the bastard dead?” I asked.
Andy Wilson picked up his own cup, drained the contents and shrugged.
“Oh well,” I said. “The bastard was far from well when I last saw him. He seemed about to suffer a heart attack as well. Perhaps I did him a favour.”
Andy Wilson watched me and I suspect he was thinking I couldn’t care less, that I was sitting back, relaxing after a job well done. In a way, that was true.
“I’d be happy to explain,” I said. “But I trust you were taught the art of patience during your police training. As it all started more than sixty years ago, I need to start from the beginning. That could take a while.”
“Go ahead,” Andy Wilson said, “Make yourself comfortable.”
Home comforts are not something that have ever bothered me but there was something else I desperately needed. “First of all, I’d be grateful for a toilet to avoid disgracing myself,” I said.
Perhaps he’d been thinking whilst I used the toilet because when I finished he suggested moving to another room. “It’s a spare office with softer chairs. Here’s your stick and your bag. That suit you?”
I tried to sound appreciative. “Thank you,” I said. “If we don’t finish by midnight, I am sure I can find a room somewhere and we can continue tomorrow. I don’t have any other pressing engagements right now and, frankly, the thought of returning home to the empty house in Gloucester and running the gauntlet of my nosy neighbour Fred Carrington is quite depressing.”
The new office was much nicer. It had bookshelves, filing cabinets, a coffee table and, in the corner, a potted plant – a sad-looking Malaysian miniature coconut. I pointed to it. “I feel sorry for it,” I said. “Trees like that should be left where they were born. I hope it isn’t one confiscated by customs.”
“You know something about customs regulations, Mr Thomas?” he asked.
“I ran an export and import company for most of my life,” I said. “I know most of the dodges.”
“You certainly know how to carry a gun onto a plane undetected, Mr Thomas. How many other little tricks are you up to?”
We were interrupted. A phone rang and he answered it. I thought it might be news from Malaga but no.
“Well, you won’t be going far, Mr Thomas,” he said. “We have another little problem. The long-term car park office reports that your car, an old Jaguar that you parked there some days ago, has no tax and no insurance.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Things were rather hectic when I left home. I hadn’t driven it for a while. But what about Malaga? Is the bastard dead?”
“He is in intensive care. Though I understand the Spanish police are also now taking an interest in some other matters.”
“Good,” I said. “Better late than never.”
“So, tell me about your business, Mr Thomas. Are you still running it? I imagined you were retired. Is this some sort of business feud or just an argument over girlfriends?”
“It’s far more complicated than that, Inspector. Do you want me to start from the beginning or not?”
Andy Wilson shrugged so I took that as a go-ahead.
“I started the business after the war,” I began. “Sarah and I had just got married and moved to live in Croydon which was near enough to London, far enough into the country and yet near to the airport. Sarah called the house ‘Brick View’ and I knew she didn’t like it but it was an era of austerity, ration books, waste not, want not and beggars can’t be choosers.
“You wouldn’t understand, Inspector, as you’re far too young. But it was a good time for those with ambition and energy and I had ideas to start my own business. Exporting was what I had in mind.
“Ever since I was a boy and read about Captain Cook and stared at the illustrations I had always wanted to travel to more exotic places. I then progressed to books on Africa, Persia and India from the library. After the war, I decided I wanted to visit some of those places. That’s how Thomas Import Export Limited was born. My son was born soon after.”
I was just getting going when Andy Wilson interrupted. “Let’s cut out the family history shall we, Mr Thomas? Are you still in business or not?”
“Yes,” I said, disappointed by the interruption. “I suppose you could say I am – or, at least, I was. I’ve stopped doing tax returns but I suppose you could say my long-term business plan was not complete.”
I saw him look at his watch and knew he’d quickly lose patience but I’d anticipated this. Talking was never going to be enough. I’d already written it all down but there was no harm in setting the scene.
“In the beginning I had big plans for Thomas Import Export,” I said. “If you had asked me sixty years ago, how I imagined it might have grown I would probably have described a multi-national trading company with offices in New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires.
“But looking at me now, Inspector, in my old jumper, jacket and stained trousers how do I look? Do I look like a successful businessman who worked his socks off and risked his neck for fifty years? Do I resemble some of your flash, modern jet setters with their credit cards, laptops and exaggerated stories about top level meetings with bankers in Sheraton Hotels in places like Singapore and Los Angeles? Or do I look like one of the few who ventured abroad before the days of telexes, internet and international telephones and were to be found waiting around at squalid airports carrying tattered cases of samples and staying at doss houses in places like downtown Lagos?
“How, Inspector, do I compare with your vision of Mister Alexander Donaldson, as you are apparently required to address him, who is living, as you so politely put it, in quiet retirement in a nice villa in Spain?
“That bastard ruined my life, Inspector. And that of many others. I disliked him from the first time I met him but the feeling got worse the older I got and the more I realized what he was really up to. But since Sarah died and I found myself with the time and enough energy left I felt it was time to act.
“It all started in a pub, Inspector. Having been in the Royal Air Force, a few army and RAF chums used to meet up in the Feathers in Mayfair.
“Do you know the Feathers?” I asked him It was unlikely but I was trying to engage him in the story. “Is it still there?” I added. “Is it now covered in hanging baskets of geraniums and petunias and other tinsel? Does it now offer gastro food and serve organic quiche salads for lunch? If so, it has changed a bit since I frequented the dive in the fifties.
“But relationships between old chums often soured as we recognized our differences outside our uniforms. One sour relationship has taken me far longer to deal with than it should.
“The old man in his nineties, as you so decently refer to him, is a bastard of the first order, Inspector.” I paused. “Have you ever met an old-fashioned money launderer, Inspector? Do you know any ninety-year-old gun running arms dealers or drug dealers? Tell me, how many of your friends are associates of Sicilian or Russian Mafia and hide out in places like Malta?
“Are you familiar with the big money that can be made by being the instigator of military coups or other subversive plots in places like Algeria, Sierra Leone or Chad? And do you know any nice people who ran the Provisional IRA?
“In your career, Inspector, have you ever found it necessary to arrest a really nasty but clever piece of shit that operates internationally and is still going strong and unidentified like some New York Godfather? Perhaps you have so perhaps you know the sort. Perhaps, with luck, your Spanish friends are going to find one who’s been hiding in their midst for too long. Yet it’s me who is under detention and I find that strange. But then, that’s been the story of my life. Shall I go on, Inspector?”
What Andy Wilson was now thinking about me I had no idea. Perhaps he thought I, too, was an ex gangster, arms dealer, drugs dealer or money launderer. Whatever he thought, I didn’t really care. It was all written down, cross-checked and referenced.
He looked at his watch again. “It’s getting late,” he said. “We need to decide what to do here but we’re still waiting on information from the Spanish police.”
“So, I’m not being charged?” I asked.
“You’re being detained pending further enquiries.”
“So, where am I to be detained?”
“Somewhere nearby. A hotel. Your car has been impounded and your passport is with us here.”
He looked down at my black bag lying on the floor. “You’re not carrying very much, Mr Thomas. When we checked inside it was just a bundle of old clothes, some keys and your brown envelope of euros. Is that it?”
I looked at it, too. I’m very fond of that bag.
“Italian leather,” I said. “Made to order forty years ago by a craftsman in Naples. But you missed something Inspector. As did most customs and immigration officials for all the years. I used it to conceal things like my other passports. I held several at various times. On this occasion, it contains something else.”
I bent down, ran my hand between the double lining and pulled out a copy of my handiwork of the past few months – a pile of paper held together with a bulldog clip.
“For you,” I said handing it over like an overdue Christmas gift. “It’s as good a police statement as you’ll find anywhere. I wrote it just in case I didn’t get back but there’s a carbon copy, with my lawyer along with some other papers. I hope you enjoy it.”
Andy Wilson took it and raised his eyebrows. Perhaps he’d never had a detainee arrive with a pre-prepared statement before. I watched him flip through the hundred odd pages. I admit it didn’t have the sleek look of modern documents because I’d used an old typewriter which required a whole day of practice to remember how to use it. But it was all there.