THE SPANISH WAITER: PROLOGUE

How Ivan Maybe's nightmare began

SUMMER 1997

The day that Ivan Maybe had a blazing row with the hook-nosed Gaddy Carter was a day that defined how the next many years of Ivan’s life would turn out. Known to his very few if any friends and many enemies as Bonehead, Gaddy was hardly a shining example of intelligence because the general opinion of his acquaintances was that he was stupid beyond belief, and most of those acquaintances weren’t much better.

At the time Ivan was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was working on Gaddy’s old banger of a car in that man’s disgusting garage at the time. He liked to think he was a bit of a mechanic in his spare time because he knew how things, particularly cars and their parts, worked. His gainful employment was being a teacher at the local comprehensive, and he had a surfeit of spare time during the summer holidays. Those holidays stretched out to be a long and lonely six weeks, and in order to alleviate the monotony of his being he often turned his hand to tinkering with anything mechanical.

Gaddy had begged him to attend to his steering which thteatened to stop steering altogether and even though he would prefer to occupy any place in which Gaddy never appeared he took the job on because of the promised reward. Money was always in embarrassing short supply on account of the ability of his estranged wife Caroline to soak it up using her health as an excuse for spending as much as she could on just about nothing.

So he attended to the job only to discover that Bonehead’s car was almost beyond repair and it was when he told Gaddy that it would cost more than the elderly vehicle was worth to repair it that Bonehead started shouting. The tirade he poured out at Ivan, and he used many expletives that impressed his two companions, hovering behind him and just about out of sight almost hiding, with their crudity, made Ivan simply say,

“If that’s what you think, Bonehead, then I’m done, and stuff your old banger,” and turn away with a shrug.

“You a*s-sucking twit, you’ll fix my car like you said, or else,” snarled Gaddy.

“I never said I’d do the impossible,” he replied, “and if you could see the mess down there,” he pointed vaguely in the direction of where Gaddy suspected the steering bits and pieces of metal might be, “then you’d know you’ve go to part with real money or take this hunk of rust to the nearest scrap yard!”

It was when he mentioned rust thaat Bonehead got really nasty and insinuated that Ivan was only a teacher because he could get his hands on pretty teenage girls.

“And lads,” he ended cruelly, “in their pants whenever you reckon nobody can see ya, ya pervert!”

It ended with Ivan trying to out-stare Bonehead, failing and pushing his way out squeezing between the two companions of the raging Gaddy (making a half-hearted attempt at stopping him in order to keep in the good books of their still cursing leader) and disappeared to his own home round the corner and in the next street, taking his toolbox with him.

Which was the last time he saw Bonehead before a severe looking plain clothed Inspector Hewitt knocked on his door a few days later and reminded him about the row in Gaddy’s garage.

It started off with Gaddy being missing.

“Do you know where he might have gone to?” asked Inspector Hewitt, trying to make his eyes look keener than they actually were.

“I’ve no idea,” replied Ivan, wondering why he was expected to know the comings and goings of Gaddy Carter, “He’s not a personal friend.”

“So what were you doing in his garage?”

“He wanted me took at his steering, but its shot. It needs a whole lot of new parts and he didn’t like the news.”

“You’re a car mechanic then, are you?”

Ivan could tell that the Inspector knew full well that he was nothing of the sort.

“You know I’m not,” he told him, “I just know quite a lot about cars, teaching engineering at the comp as I do,”

“And you’ve got soft spot for some of the girls there,” leered Inspector Hewitt.

“What are you trying to suggest?” he asked.

“There are rumours. And the boys,” gunned Hewitt, “I’ve heard about them, you know.”

“Oh. So you’ve been listening to some of Bonehead’s mates have you, Mr Policeman? Well you’d do well not to because they only parrot what they hear from their boss man, and he’s not got a brain worth calling a brain,” snapped Ivan.

“So you’ve no idea where he is?” concluded the Inspector, returning to his main point.

“Of course I haven’t! Why should I?” asked Ivan in a far more gentle voice than he felt like using.

“Well that’s all for now, sir,” grunted the Inspector, “but I may be back…”

And he was, a couple of weeks later.

He wanted to ask Ivan Maybe if he knew anything about the murder of Mr Gaddy Carter.

“Murder? And Mr? He’s not dead! The planet couldn’t be that fortunate!” He snapped, “and even if he was what’s it got to do ith me?”

“You were reported having a furious row with him, sir,” reminded the Inspector, “and there’s forensic evidence…”

“What forensic evidence?” demanded Ivan.

“Finger prints. A drop or two of blood which if it proves to be yours, and we’ll have a blood test if you don’t mind, and take your prints to check them against those in the garage…”

“Help yourself. I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide! Of course I was there! I was trying to fix his rust bucket of a car! And I did gash one finger on a sharp protrusion of rust, so I guess you’ll find my blood somewhere there. I was trying to help the man, for goodness’ sake.”

“We’ll see about that!” snapped the Inspector.

And they did see about that. Weeks passed and no matter how hard they searched for Bonehead they could find no sign of him. The ports and airports were alerted. Even a few abandoned buildings in the countryside were almost dismantled in their enthusiasm to find the body of the missing Bonehead, but they found o trace of him, not even when divers went into the river to see if his decomposing corpse was there.

In the end they decided that his lifeless body was either buried in the woods or had long since been thrown into the river Avon where it had probably drifted lifelessly to the sea rather than hang around locally, and the sea wasn’t so far away as the crow flies.

Then his own car was taken to pieces as they searched for evidence that the mssing man may have been in it and, of course, they found some. Hairs, it was, on the back seat, hairs that were both long and unwashed and proved to belong to the missing Gaddy Carter.

“Of course there are hairs of his in there!” snapped Ivan, “he’s been in there! More than once! We’re neighbours of a sort, aren’t me? It would only be natural for me to give him a lift in wet weather, wouldn’t it, what with his own banger being not very well?”

But truth to tell he couldn’t remember when that had happened and even didn’t think it had happened, not that he mentioned such a possibility to the Inspector.

He was arrested and charged with a murder he didn’t believe had been committed because there was no body as evidence, but the police said that the man being missing under mysterious circumstances was enough evidence for them. Who needs a body when there is forensic proof? He was refused bail and ended up on remand in Brumpton Jail from where what seemed half a lifetime later he was sent to court. It was there that the judge, although seeming doubtful because the evidence was, in his own words as he summed up, entirely circumstantial, passed his sentence.

But the sentence he handed down was long enough to give Ivan the idea that death might well be preferable. Twelve years! Long enough for him, if he was free, to find a second wife and start a family of his own, something he would rather have liked to do.

He refused to admit that he was guilty of the crime he hadn’t committed and served the entire twelve years without remission because of that obstinate streak that refused to damn himself in the eyes of whatever gods monitor human behaviour.

When he was released it was another century. He had no job, no home and nothing to call his own. Even Caroline stopped lining up for whatever money he could give her. He had less than nothing, except a seething anger that somehow the British justice system had let him down.

He wanted to be anywhere but where he was.

© Peter Rogerson 20.10.22