Free THE ENGLISH WITNESS by John C. Bailey Page B

account, they would press me to cut short my stay and return home. My fellow
students would treat it as either a joke or a melodrama, and either way my
reputation would haunt me until the day I graduated. The police might help, but
in Franco’s Spain they might just as easily have been involved in the killings.
    More than once I was on the point of
waking Steve and confiding in him, but by morning I had decided to bide my
time. By midday, the story that a boy from the neighbourhood had gone missing
was all around the college. And by evening the death of two “ETA terrorists”
was on the national news. Life in the Basque Country went on.
    JACK
    It
was a tortuously slow telling, Jack’s emotional state becoming visibly more
disturbed and his narration more erratic as the story progressed. It chilled
Miguel to the core. He was used to encountering raw emotions during an
investigation: fear, grief, resentment, even anger. And all those were present
on Jack’s face as he told his story. But there was something else, something
darker, something the detective was not sure how to classify. He called a halt
to the questioning earlier than he had planned to, and suggested they resume in
an hour’s time.
    Jack withdrew to his room, where he turned on the TV
and dozed off in the middle of a maiden news conference by the disabled but
impressive new Justice Minister. It seemed that the politician had big plans
for the reform of interrogation and jury trials, but by the time he got onto
the subject of anti-terror legislation Jack was dreaming of blood and thunder.
    He woke up an hour or maybe two hours later with an
intuition that something was wrong. Darkness. Silence. Presence. He fought
off the ominous impressions crowding in on him, and spent a few moments
wondering if this was just a shadow of the disturbing dream from which he had
woken. But as he lay motionless in the pitch darkness he was able to identify
the real source of his unease. He had fallen asleep with the lights and the
television on. Now there was not so much as a glimmer from the television’s red
standby light. There had evidently been a power cut. It could have been a mere
service outage, but Jack was losing his faith in coincidence.
    He quickly climbed into the ill-fitting pair of
trousers that had been delivered that morning together with a couple of shirts
and a selection of cheap underwear. Then he put on his shoes and listened
carefully for sounds in the building or outside. He desperately craved his own
clothes, but his suitcase had been abandoned along with the police cruiser that
had picked him up at the station an eventful thirty hours earlier.
    Hearing nothing, he put his ear to the bedroom door
just as a key was inserted roughly from the other side. He jerked backwards in
alarm, but not quickly enough to avoid a sharp knock on the temple as the door
was thrown open. He stumbled backwards and sat down in disarray on the bed as
Alonso stepped into the room with his finger pressed to his lips.
    “We’ve got to go,” announced the incompletely uniformed,
unshaven policeman. “They’re onto us.”
    “How the hell…”
    “No time. Just come.”
    Alonso stepped back out into the corridor, only to be
hurled sideways as if by an invisible attack dog a split second before a short,
sharp noise reverberated down the corridor. Not a single shot, thought Jack,
but a short burst from a machine pistol.
    He leapt from the bed, his pulse racing. He had the
presence of mind to wrench Alonso’s key from its position in the outer face of
the lock, before slamming the door shut and twisting the latch back to the
locked position. He was dimly aware of renewed gunfire in the corridor outside,
but by that time he was concentrating on his escape.
    The first step was to haul the dressing table round
the end of the bed and brace it against the door. It was an exhausting task,
and the fact that he could move it at all meant that it would not present the
attackers with