Free Tomb in Seville by Norman Lewis Page B

the attraction of the place. Why on earth did people go there? ‘The mountains,’ he explained. ‘The Guadarramas. Tourists come here for the view. We bottle up the water from the river down there and sell it for the nerves.’
    Casas Viejas was round the next corner and proved to be just as expected. Order of a kind has to exist in these old places by the simple fact that everything worth having is kept, and nothing’s thrown away. There is no rubbish. This could have been a village scene put together for an exhibition and tidied up every morning before the show opened. It was empty and silent, with its people housed in hutments with minute, square windows built as high as they could be from the ground, and a massive door sagging on its hinges. A notice stuck to a shed in the tiny square said, ‘Viva España Soviética.’ An old man, with a woman at his back, was at a door. The man bowed. ‘There’s no one here to talk to you but us people,’ he said.
    ‘Which direction did they take?’ the driver asked. ‘The People’s Army, I mean.’
    The man straightened up to point ahead. ‘They went up that road,’ he said, ‘and then the next turning to the left just before you get to the top of the hill.’
    ‘There should have been a fair number of them,’ I told him. ‘People’s Army men with red flashes on their tunics.’
    ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘red flashes as you say. I don’t know one army from another, but I noticed the flashes. I’m only on holiday up here for a couple of days. Mind you, you couldn’t get an army up that road. This wasn’t an army. It was just a few soldiers.’
    ‘Give me a rough idea how many. Fifty? A hundred?’
    ‘Well, say fifty. Maybe less. This wasn’t an army of any kind. Red or otherwise. You could say there was a half-company of soldiers at most. Some didn’t even have guns. If the Guards go after them they won’t stand a chance.’
    ‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘What Guards are you talking about?’
    ‘The Assault Guards from Madrid.’
    ‘What, here?’
    ‘There’s a few of them down past the village. They came in when I was down there and pulled in off the road behind the Egg-Cup Hill.’
    ‘But what are they doing there?’ I asked him.
    ‘Nothing.’ He smiled as if at his inner thoughts. ‘Just waiting’s my guess.’
    ‘They’re waiting,’ Eugene said, ‘to take our friends in the rear.’
    By the greatest possible luck the driver who’d given us the lift was still there and quite happy to take us to the junction with the Madrid road. ‘I’m a widower,’ he said, ‘with nothing to do with my time. I’ll have to leave you to look after yourselves at the turning to Madrid. If the Guards catch me with you they’ll blow my van apart. Used to be a football ground up there once, but the people lost interest and it’s all thorn bushes now. The Guards go up in their four-wheel drives but you’d never get anywhere in an old wreck like this. Lucky you came after they’ve just done the autumn cut-back of the jungle, otherwise you’d never even get through.’
    It was three or four hundred yards to the turn-off but when we were halfway there we were already breathing in the sharp odour of the sap still oozing from cut stems. The opening into what was left of the bushes would have taken two cars but it soon narrowed to a bottle-neck and Eugene, who suffered from hay-fever, began to sneeze. Rodrigo, our driver, was proud of the barbarity of the past. ‘Used to be a prison camp up here,’ he said. ‘That was before my time. Rapists were given six months in an open camp. The way they made them work they couldn’t breathe properly. Most of them died of lung trouble before they could finish their sentence.’
    The van, picking its way in low gear round the stumps, overheated, lost power, and finally we stopped. Rodrigo lifted the bonnet and let it drop. He switched off the engine and looked at his watch. There was a moment of silence, then