I first noticed something was wrong when Sue started walking around in circles at home, complaining of a piercing headache. At first, I thought maybe she had had one drink too many but that thought was quickly dispelled. From the look on her face I could tell something was seriously wrong.
I took her to a private doctor in Marbella. He was one of the first in the Costa del Sol to offer a CT scan, the computerised brain imaging diagnosis tool, and he saw her straight away. Once he had the results he told me to come quickly. She didn’t come into the consulting room herself but the doctor showed me an image of a growth the size of a tennis ball in her skull. The doctor said that without an operation in the next few days she would die. Sue was waiting outside to hear the outcome. It was down to me to break it to her. ‘I am so sorry,’ I said, trying to keep a lid on my emotions. ‘You have a brain tumour. The doctor says you need an operation immediately.’
She was understandably shocked, but there was no time to feel sorry for ourselves. We had to get help, fast. The doctor had recommended a specialist in Gibraltar. I took Sue immediately but it was no use. To our horror and great sorrow, he said her condition was too advanced and he couldn’t help. Our only option was to get back to London as soon as possible, where we could seek help at the Charing Cross hospital. It felt as though our lives were falling to pieces around us. I was in a terrible panic at that point, but I tried to think rationally. I called Sue’s parents, John and Mary, to come and look after our children while we flew to London. At the Charing Cross the doctor carried out another scan but it was the same outcome. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said. ‘It is a stage three myeloma.’ He explained that stage three meant the tumour was terminal. ‘Your wife will be dead in a couple of weeks.’
I couldn’t believe it. We were devastated. As I held her in my arms, our short life together flashed before my eyes: we’d met not long after I graduated from the City & Guilds of London Art School. I was working in a hotel and had moved into a flat in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Just along the Thames was the Chertsey Lock nightclub and that’s where I saw her for the first time – and fell in love completely. Her name was Sue Hobbs, she was nine years older than me and was working as a window dresser. I was struck by Cupid’s arrow and before long I moved in with her at her place in Stoke Poges, near Slough. I planned to ask her to marry me back at the place where we first met and we had a night at Chertsey Lock, where I had booked a table.
At the right moment, I produced the ring, popped the question and . . . she burst out laughing and pointed at my head. I was confused. I was no expert but I was sure this wasn’t the usual reaction. I swiftly realised that, in my nervous excitement, I’d leant too close to a candle and my hair was now on fire. She called a waiter who sprang to my aid, unceremoniously dousing my head with his soda fountain.
Less than a year after our first meeting, we were having our wedding. I wrote to Gregorio, inviting him to come. Sadly, however, by then he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was unable to travel. It would have been lovely to be reacquainted with my beloved godfather. He replied with a telegram wishing us all the best for the future. It was the last time I ever heard from him.
For Sue and me, life improved immeasurably with the arrival of our first child, Jonathan, in 1985. We gave him the middle name John to honour Sue’s father. When our daughter was born in 1988 our family was complete. We called her Anna – with the middle name May, in memory of my dear grandmother at whose home I had spent such long and wonderful summers. By then we were living in Spain, where we’d moved when I got the opportunity to take a job as a graphic designer. Sue was incredibly supportive, viewing the change as a big adventure. She wasn’t just my wife; she was my partner and best friend. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. It didn’t seem fair. Our lives should have been just beginning together, not on the verge of being torn apart.
In the aftermath of that terrible prognosis, we were faced with a decision. We did not know how long we had left but I was determined that she had access to the best care available. I moved her in with my parents at Gainsborough Court, Walton-on-Thames, the house that Dad bought with the proceeds of selling the Calatrava estate house in Colombia, while I returned to Spain to look after the children and work out a short-term solution.
Sue went on a programme of radiotherapy and, for three months, Dad took her for her treatment. She maintained a positive attitude for as long as she could and defied the doctor’s bleak prediction, surviving for three years. Eventually, however, it was fight too big even for her. She tragically passed away in 1993. I was by her side when she died, wishing until the end for some miracle to spare her. Just one month later I would be doing the same thing again for another person I loved dearly, devastated that a second incredible story was coming to an end.
*
On one of those memorable evenings in Madrid, in that period when Dad opened up about his life, he asked me to accompany him for a short walk. As he said this, he pointed to his left ear with an exaggerated gesture and waved his hands towards various parts of the ceiling. I got it straight away. He thought his flat might be bugged. Given what he had already disclosed within these walls I could hardly even imagine what was coming next.
A few minutes’ walk led us to the corner of a fairly ordinary street lined on both sides by high-rise apartment blocks. The only activity was that of a couple of maids, hanging out washing on the balconies, and the only sound was a distant radio. Most of the other balcony balustrades were draped in pot plants that spilled over and hung down to make a kind of static green waterfall. Dad stopped at a gate leading into a basement parking facility belonging to a relatively modern block. It was sandwiched between much higher, older buildings. Dad signalled for me to look at the small set of buttons situated on an aluminium panel at about eye-level on the left of the garage door. There was another panel just above these buttons with what looked like a card-swipe facility.
‘Only someone with the right card can enter,’ he said.
As he swiped, the vast garage door burst into life and opened upwards. From the depths of the cavernous interior, I could see the faint glimmer of a lift door. Dad explained there was a special storage area further down, accessible through another card-operated lock. I assumed we would be using the lift but Dad shook his head and closed the outer door again. ‘It is here we hide the cash,’ he whispered.
On the way back to the apartment I asked what he meant. To my complete and utter amazement he proceeded to tell me. When Escobar was in fear of being extradited and effectively living on the run, unable to return to his luxury estate and constantly moving to avoid capture, he started to make contingency plans. At the height of his operation, Escobar was making so much money he could not spend it all. Some of it was stashed into the walls of houses, some was buried, some he lost track of. Yet some of the cash, while not immediately accessible to him, he did control – a large amount he’d siphoned off for Dad to hide for him way back in 1976. This was secretly moved from De La Rue’s vaults to the underground store in Madrid. Dad did not expand on how they did it, but I suspected they’d used a private charter flight. I remembered that rattling old DC-4 they chartered to move Escobar’s cash from Medellín to Bogotá around the same time.
We were almost back at the apartment when I asked Dad if we could go down in the lift to see what was in the basement. He pondered the request for a moment. ‘OK. Tomorrow.’ I had trouble sleeping that night, imagining what would be revealed in that underground vault. It would be the start of another adventure.
We had a quick breakfast in a nearby café where the waiter knew Dad so well that he didn’t even have to make an order. When we arrived at the garage I imagined the big metal door was all that stood between me and piles of neatly stacked dollars. Dad swiped his card and the door juddered and grinded open. We entered the gloomy interior that smelled of damp cement and diesel. All I could make out in the semi-darkness were a few boxes and some rusty old portable generators partially covered by a tarpaulin sheet. Dad produced a little pocket torch and, with its beam lighting the way, we crept towards the back and the small elevator door. A swipe of a second card brought the lift to life. Inside, there weren’t many buttons, Dad pressed the bottom one and we descended. He shone the torch ahead as we ventured out. Just as I was thinking we were going to have to feel our way in the dark, Dad found the light switch. The flickering tubes instantly transformed the room. I was taken aback, not only by the sudden light, but also by the sight of a pile of black sacks neatly placed on a pallet in the middle of the room. It was not quite the mountain of dollars I imagined but it was intriguing nonetheless.
I approached the sacks and looked to Dad for approval. He gestured for me to go ahead. There were four sacks, each about the size of a large sports bag. I looked for an opening in the top one. I had to jostle it to get it into position and was surprised at how heavy it was. More memories of Dad’s people carrying the bags from Medellín off the DC-4 all those years ago came flooding back. Could this be one of those sacks? This was now a much more exciting prospect and, as I pulled the sack open, I caught sight of neatly wrapped bundles of notes. They were American dollars bundled in tight cellophane wrapping. A thin strip denoting the denomination value enveloped the bundles, which were about an inch thick. Those I could read were hundred-dollar bundles. If they were the same all the way through, there was a considerable amount of money here. Dad’s tap on the shoulder and hand gesture directed my attention to another part of the room. To the right, about ten feet away, a sheet of tarpaulin was draped over another large shape, several feet high. We lifted the canvas sheet together to reveal around six or seven more of these black sacks. Having put everything back as we had found it, we made our way to the lift. I wanted to talk about it all, but it didn’t seem like the right time. For some reason I couldn’t express, silence was the appropriate response to seeing all that money.
On the route home to Dad’s apartment we walked through a park and I mustered up the courage to ask him about the money. He told me De La Rue had started to collect money from criminal gangs way back in 1965. The money came from a variety of sources for some years but, latterly, it was all from Escobar and, due to the special relationship with Dad, included Pablo’s own personal stash. Some of it had been used to build the Calatrava estate and what I’d seen represented a portion of that which he had been able to get out of the country. Dad believed it amounted to several million dollars but he said it was virtually impossible to use in any straightforward way. It had been brought out of Colombia once the authorities there had started to tighten the noose on the Medellín cartel. Most of the cash had already been moved from Madrid. This was all that was left of a much larger horde.
Dad and I never mentioned the money again and he never said what happened to those last remaining sacks in Madrid. Other things took precedence. To begin with, my wife’s illness was my main concern but, as we nursed her over the few remaining years of her life, we realised we had to face another terrible truth. Dad’s own health was deteriorating rapidly. From the curvature of his spine to his weakened hand, we saw a rapid decline in his movement and stature.
His physical condition had really started to get bad when he worked in Pakistan in the late 1980s. He was in Karachi when he caught diphtheria, a highly contagious and potentially life-threatening infection of the nose and throat. On his return he was kept in the Hospital For Tropical Diseases in London. He was kept in over Christmas and we had to don full medical gear to see him because of the risk of infection. He eventually recovered, but the toxins must have had a lasting effect. When he heeded our repeated pleas to see a specialist, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Tragically, over the same period that Sue was receiving radiotherapy to prolong her life, Dad went downhill fast. Eventually, I had to answer the phone for him as he was too weak to speak. My mother struggled to cope so I tried to do as much for him as I could.
It broke my heart to see this powerful chap so diminished. I loved him to bits and admired him for fighting evil on behalf of the government. His operation in Karachi had been successful. By 1991 a long-running investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which once had been the seventh-largest bank in the world, resulted in its offices in several countries being raided and its records seized. Among many crimes being investigated were money-laundering practices on behalf of a number of notorious figures and organisations, including, curiously enough, the Medellín cartel and Manuel Noriega. So wide did the corruption extend that investigators began referring to BCCI as the ‘Bank of Crooks and Criminals International’ for the amount of business done with regimes and organisations that dealt in arms and drugs. The bank was shut down and its directors indicted.
I owed everything to my father. He saved my life many times over. Without him, who knows if I would have made it out of that remote Colombian house alive? He had given me a home and an education and, even when that looked like it wasn’t paying off, he provided the means for me to ultimately follow my dreams. I remembered being sixteen, on the balcony of our house in Santo Domingo, Dad sitting in the rocking chair that would follow him back to England. He said: ‘Your education has cost a lot of money. What have you learned from it all?’
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I might not have done all that great in my exams but I have learned one thing.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’ve learned that you do what you can to get around the rules without getting caught.’
He laughed. ‘You’re such a Colombiano.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said, ‘by the time I am twenty-two I will be a millionaire.’
I had no idea how significant those words were; not because I came close to achieving that bold ambition but because, years later, I would discover that it was the same pronouncement my natural father made at a similar age. When I spoke like that, I think Dad understood that I was a bit of a rebel. He could see that side of my nature and, knowing the stock I had come from, he was perhaps concerned about the direction I might take upon leaving school.
On some level he had a right to be concerned. He didn’t know the half of what I got up to at school, apart from the misdemeanours that resulted in letters home. Perhaps due to my fiery temper, I got into a lot of fights. I was also party to several moments of highjinks, like the time when the headmaster’s car ended up on the tennis courts. Such boisterousness I would take years to work out of my system, perhaps not until I left school and played rugby, latterly for Weybridge Vandals, and fencing, which I really took to and at which I went on to represent the all-England club in my capacity as second sabre. When I was still at school, I struggled academically but, as I told Dad, I developed the wits needed to survive a place like Lucton.
I had always loved drawing and painting and it was Dad, while I was at boarding school, who encouraged this passion. He arranged for me to have a tutor – and what a teacher it was. Roy Reynolds, a descendant of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founding president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was a realist painter who taught me the many tricks of painting. I used to cycle from the school for our private lessons. He showed me how to use layers of paint sitting inside varnishes to achieve vibrancy, which I used to achieve translucent effects in my own work. At the City & Guilds of London Art School I studied under its principal, Roger de Grey. That learning gave me a foundation to later develop a technique of my own and forge a career as an artist. Sadly, Dad would not survive long enough to see me fully benefit from the education he helped provide.
Dad’s condition deteriorated until we had no choice but to admit him to Walton-on-Thames Cottage hospital in 1993. As I had done for Sue, I often sat on his bedside holding his terribly emaciated hand. On one occasion two nurses approached the bedside and asked Dad if he wanted a drink of water. By this stage of his illness he was sipping little gulps through a straw that had to be held for him. It was so sad to see a man who had done such great things reduced to this pitiful wreck. I felt utterly powerless and, as he gazed into my eyes, I could feel his emotional pain. His shallow breathing was accompanied by a rattling sound that I knew signalled the end was near. I will always remember the haunting, glazed stare of his eyes.
Once the nurses had gone, he became agitated. His voice, which was practically incoherent by now, seemed to reach me. Any movement he made required enormous amounts of effort. I was therefore hypersensitive to anything he was trying to say. It was almost as if nothing else mattered. The world outside the little hospital became irrelevant. My whole life was, for this fleeting moment, concentrated on the dreadful tragedy being played out in front of me. The stuttering sounds and the tiny gestures were all I needed. We understood each other perfectly.
Somehow, I knew he wanted something from his faithful old DAKS jacket. Throughout his life he had carried a slim-line diary in the top inside pocket. The contact details of anyone who was anyone in his world of secrets had been jotted down on the pages of this treasure, albeit with no clue included as to their importance. I handed it to him. Tragically, his grasp was failing and it fell open on the bed. In doing so, a piece of paper slipped out on to the blanket. On one side it had the letterhead of the Home Office nationality department in Tolworth, Surrey. The neatly typed letter, dated 23 August 1967, confirmed my British nationality had been accepted. As I read it, Dad signalled with a finger to turn over. On the back were some strange symbols and some numbers.
M 25 . . . . TWO / 5s. = 10.˚
M 14 . . . . TWO / 4s.6d = 9.˚
Dad beckoned me close. I could just make out his whispered words. ‘The cash . . . remember.’ It was so hard to understand him now. Another gargantuan effort brought forward the same words, only this time he added, ‘Madrid.’
I looked again at the symbols and numbers. It looked like some kind of addition or quick sum one would write in a rush on the back of an envelope. I asked, ‘Is this where the money is?’
His brief smile and relaxed shoulders were all I needed as confirmation. His feeble body sunk back into the soft pillows. I could see he was ready. I couldn’t bear it; it was so painful. I was going to be alone, with no one to look up to any more. The nurses arrived and suggested I let him rest. They assured me that when his breathing slowed down they would call me. It wasn’t long before they did.
My beloved dad’s life ended with dignity and strength that day. For him, a remarkable story was finally over.
For me, it was just beginning.