Page 94 of The Last Postcard

Could have been, but wasn’t. I avoided that fate not through luck or cunning or trickery, but through friendship.

As ignorant as the British police were, it did not take them long to realize their mistake. I still remember their pink faces, pale beneath their sunburn when I told them for the last time that I was not Langham and finally proved it. If I hadn’t been so frightened, I would have laughed.

They were incensed by their mistake, and declared that, whoever I was, I must be involved with Langham’s criminal activities, seeing as I was dressed like him and carrying his papers, his pocket watch, his writing case. I had to think faster than I ever had before.

It wasn’t hard to make myself cry – for I was terrified – and through the tears I told them that I worked in Langham’s house as a cook and that it was his particular perversion to have me dress up in his clothes. The passport I couldn’t explain. I supposed, between sobs, that he must have left it in his jacket. Eventually, they came to the obvious, and correct, conclusion: Langham had used his silly, trusting domestic as a decoy, in order to secure his escape from Tangiers.

By this point, the clock on the police station wall read a quarter past five. Langham had won himself over three hours’ head-start. More than enough for a man like him. The police knew it, and they vented their frustration on me. They grilled me for hours. What had Langham done in the days prior? Who did he talk to? Who visited the house? Again and again, I pleaded ignorance. I was just the cook, a poor girl Langham had taken a fancy to, who he liked to see dressed up in men’s clothes. I didn’t know about his business, I was always in the kitchen.

I knew they were getting desperate when they asked me about Cabrera.

You won’t see him again, I almost said. But I didn’t. Instead, I gambled that Cabrera had kept the information about me to himself, for future use. I told the police that a man of that name had once come to dinner, that was all.

I told them my name was Alejandra del Potro, praying they wouldn’t check it with the consulate. I’m just a poor silly girl, I tried to make my demeanour cry, taken in by her corrupt employer. Of course, they wanted my papers; they wanted proof of who I was. My story would have unravelled then, and I would have found myself headed for a Spanish jail and the garrotte, had it not been for the cool, familiar voice that rang out beyond the cell door.

Hilde. It was Hilde. And though I could hear the panic in her voice, she was strong enough and smart enough to hide it from them. In icy British tones, I heard her complain of the police tramping through her bedroom all night. I heard her declare that she had no notion of where Mr Langham might be – though she was sure he would return in a day or two – and that in the meantime, she would like her cook released, since she, Lady de Luca Bailey, couldn’t so much as boil an egg on her own.

She vouched for my story. She dismissed their charges of impersonation and immorality with a haughty laugh and a casual reference to her solicitor. She paid the desk clerk to discharge me, took me by the arm and swept me from the station towards Langham’s car, which stood, gleaming in the first light of day.

Only when we pulled away from the station did I see how much her hands were shaking, how she had started to cry, every breath turning into a sob.

‘My god,’ she said as she raced through the deserted streets, half-blinded by tears. ‘My god, Alejandro, what has he done?’

I couldn’t answer, slumped in the passenger seat in my beautiful, crumpled suit. In that moment, it was too much. I had envied Langham his wealth and freedom; I had wished for all the things he had, everything that been denied me as a poor woman without family or name. And now here I was, sitting in the front seat of an expensive motorcar, being driven around by a Lady in an evening gown. I almost let out a bitter laugh. As twisted as it was, I had been granted my wish.

Dar Portuna had been ransacked. No one had cleaned up after the party, and the tiled floors were scuffed with boot prints, with spilled drinks.

‘Bouzid?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

Hilde shook her head. Like Langham, he had vanished.

‘The police came through,’ she told me as she looked around, her make-up smudged from crying. ‘They took everything they could find from the study, all of Arthur’s papers. Except …’

I followed her to her bedroom, where she pulled open the bottom dresser drawer. There, hidden in the lining, beneath a layer of sanitary napkins and knickers and stockings, she revealed a dozen green cardboard files, stashed alongside her own, secret Italian ones.

‘I wagered they’d be too squeamish to look closely at a lady’s necessities,’ she said, with a bleak smile. ‘I don’t know what else they got, but I think these are the most important. As soon as I heard hammering at the gate, I knew something had gone wrong. I went and snatched these up from the study, just in case.’ She sank on to the edge of the bed. ‘I was so frightened. I hoped both of you might have got away, but then the police told me that they had arrested you, in place of him and I …’ She trailed off, tears on her face.

Clumsily, I pulled out a file. It was filled with papers written in French. There was another entirely in German. I saw addresses in Marseille and Tripoli, Cape Town, and Trieste, shipping manifests and pages of drawings, like Hilde’s prototypes, photographs of buildings and people who stared darkly from the paper, lists of names written beneath them. Whatever the documents were, I had no doubt that in connection to Langham, they were incriminating.

‘Maybe he thought they’d let me go, once they realized their mistake.’ My voice sounded hollow. I didn’t have it in me to believe my own excuses any more.

Hilde sniffed, and pushed back her hair. ‘Even if that’s true, he knew what you were running from. He knew all it would take was for the British police to liaise with the Spanish, and then …’ She looked at me. ‘I’m so sorry, Alejandro. I never dreamed.’

I went to her, and we held each other tight, until our tears subsided and we were able to turn our burning eyes to the mess before us.

The days that followed were terrible. We leapt every time the telephone rang; we broke into cold sweats when a fist hammered on the gate. Police came at any hour of the day, not just the British, but gendarmes, guardia, polizei, even. It was clear that Langham’s activities stretched far, far further than any of us had imagined.

Cabrera had thought of Langham as an easy catch; he obviously had no idea what kind of person he was dealing with.

Then came the news of Langham’s boat, abandoned on the strait, and a call from the station, a few hours later, to say that a body had been recovered. Hilde was the one to identify it. She came back shaken and pale, but strangely excited.

The corpse was almost unrecognizable, she said, battered by the rocks. Most of the hair was gone, as well as the eyes. But it was wearing the remains of Langham’s clothes, the white flannel suit, the saffron shirt, torn and spoiled, his gold ring, which for some reason was jammed above the knuckle, as if the fingers had swelled.

Neither of us said what we were thinking: that it didn’t matter at all whether the body was Langham’s or that of a man with yellow, goat-like eyes. In that moment, we made a silent pact to keep it a secret, to never mention his name to anyone. Even if somewhere in the world, someone was walking around wearing his face, the man we had known as Arthur Langham – the man we had loved – was dead to us. Our silence would ensure he stayed that way.

Langham had been clever in some ways, and rather stupid in others. He had left Hilde in charge of Dar Portuna, counting on her loyalty, perhaps intending to reclaim it from her one day, when the British had moved on to other targets, and her anger had faded enough to forgive him. A mistake. The very day Hilde returned from the coroner’s office, we set about securing our future. We made a good team, Lady Bailey and I; she beyond reproach with her title and fine manners, me with my knowledge of the streets and petty scams.

It didn’t take us long to hack out a will on Langham’s typewriter, even less time for me to dress up in one of his suits and find some poor backstreet notaire half-blind with opium withdrawal to witness the document, no questions asked. If he noticed that the will was dated June, rather than July, he didn’t say a word, just took the generous fee and shook my hand and murmured, Merci, Monsieur Langham.