‘You’re going sailing, is that it?’ Her tone had sharpened.
A bit of a breeze was coming in, ruffling the water so that the surface of the harbour had darkened. She had always resented the sailing side of my life, my sudden absences. ‘I’ll take the dinghy, and if the wind holds I’ll sail across to Bloody Island, see how the dig’s going. You coming?’ She enjoyed day sailing, for picnics and when the weather was fine.
‘Petra’s not there,’ she said.
The phone rang and she answered it, speaking swiftly in Spanish. A long silence as she listened. Then she turned to me, her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Miguel. He’s had a firm offer.’
The bell sounded from below and a voice called to me urgently from the chandlery. ‘Tell him to take it then,’ I said as I went down the stairs to find Ramán standing at the back of the workshop by the storeroom door, his teeth showing long and pointed as he smiled nervously. He had picked up Lennie, the Australian who did most of our repainting, but when they had arrived at the villa near Binicalaf Nou they had found the patio door ajar. It had been forced open and one of the bedrooms had been occupied. Both beds had been used, sheets and blankets grubby with dirt, a filthy pile of discarded clothes lying in a corner, and in the bathroom a tap left running, the basin overflowing, the floor awash. He had left Lennie clearing up the mess and had come back to pick up lime, cement and sand, all the materials they would need to replaster the kitchen ceiling immediately below.
We went through into the store, which was virtually a cave hacked out of the cliff that formed the back wall of the building. I don’t know what it had been originally, probably a fisherman’s boathouse, but it was bone dry and very secure, almost like having a private vault. As we went in Ramán said, ‘No good, these people, senor. They make much dirt.’ And he added, ‘I not like.’ His long face was tight-lipped and uneasy.
If only I had gone for a sail earlier … But it would probably have made no difference. There are days in one’s life, moments even, when a whole series of small happenings come together in such a way that in retrospect one can say, that was the start of it. But only in retrospect. At the time I was just angry at the way Soo had acted. Instead of telling Miguel to take the offer, she had called out to me as she put the phone down, ‘I’ve told him we’ll match it.’ She came halfway down the stairs then, clutching at the guard rope, her eyes bright, her mouth set in that funny way of hers that produced holes like dimples at the corners of her mouth, adding breathlessly, ‘I’m sure we’ll get it now. I’m sure we will.’
I was on my way out to the car with a cardboard box of the things Lennie would need and I stood there, staring up at her flushed, excited face, thinking how quickly one’s life can be caught up in a web of material responsibilities so that there is no time left for the things one really wants to do. But it was no use arguing with her in that mood, her big, very white teeth almost clenched with determination, and in the end I went out, kicking the door to behind me.
My anger drained away as I headed out of Mahon on the San Clemente road, the sun a welcome change after weeks of cloud and blustery outbreaks of rain. The sudden warmth had brought the wild flowers out, the green of the fields a chequerboard of colour, yellow mainly, but here and there white splashes of narcissi. And there were kites hanging in the blue of the sky.
I passed the talayots by Binicalaf, my spirits lifting as they always did approaching this area of concentrated megalithic remains, the stone beehive-like mounds standing sharply outlined. The place where Lennie was working was on a track to the west of Cales Coves. It was about the nicest of the fifty or so villas we looked after. From the main bedroom you could just see the first of the coves, the cliffs beyond showing the gaping holes of several caves. He had cleared up most of the mess by the time I arrived, the sodden plaster stripped from the kitchen ceiling. It could have been worse, but it was unfortunate the squatters had picked on this particular villa, the owner being a man who argued over almost every item on his account. ‘Where are the clothes they left behind?’ I asked, wondering whether it was worth bringing the Guardia into it.
Lennie showed me a dirt-encrusted bundle of discarded clothing. He had been over it carefully, but had found nothing to indicate who the men were. ‘Looks like they been digging. Two of them, I reck’n.’ He thought perhaps the rains had flushed them out of one of the caves. Some of the old cave dwellings were still used and in summer there were women as well as men in them, kids too, often as not the whole family wandering about stark naked. ‘It’s like snakes out in the bush,’ he muttered, holding up a filthy remnant of patched jeans. ‘Always discarding their old skin. There’s usually bits and pieces of worn-out rag below the cave entrances.’
In the circumstances there didn’t seem much point in notifying the authorities. Lennie agreed. ‘What the hell can they do? Anyway, look at it from their point of view, why should they bother? It’s another foreign villa broken into, that’s all. Who cares?’ And then, as I was leaving, he suddenly said, ‘That girl you’re so keen on, mate –’ and he grinned at me slyly. ‘The archy-logical piece wot’s digging over by the old hospital …’ He paused there, his pale eyes narrowed, watching for my reaction.
He was referring to Petra, of course. The huge, hulking ruins of the old hospital were what had given Illa del Rei the nickname of Bloody Island. ‘Well, go on,’ I said. ‘What about her?’
‘Workmen up the road say they’ve seen her several times. I was asking them about these two bastards.’ He tossed the bundle of rags into the back of my estate car. They couldn’t tell me a damned thing, only that a girl in a Der Chevoh had been going into one of the caves. And this morning, just after Ramón and I got here, she come skidding to a halt wanting to know where she could find you. She was bright-eyed as a cricket, all steamed up about something.’
‘Did she say what?’
He shook his head, the leathery skin of his face stretched in a grin. ‘You want to watch it, mate. You go wandering around in them caves alone with a sheila like that and you’ll get yourself thrown out of the house – straight into the drink, I wouldn’t wonder.’
‘Soo wouldn’t even notice.’ I couldn’t help it, my voice suddenly giving vent to my anger. ‘She’s just bought a villa and now I’ve got to go over there and sort out the details.’
‘Don’t push your luck,’ he said, suddenly serious. He looked then, as he often did, like an elderly tortoise. ‘You go taking that girl on your next delivery run … Yeah, you thought I didn’t hear, but I was right there in the back of the shop when she asked you. You do that and Soo’d notice all right.’
I caught hold of his shoulder then, shaking him. ‘You let your sense of humour run away with you sometimes. This isn’t the moment to have Soo getting upset.’
‘Okay then, mum’s the word.’ And he gave that high-pitched, cackling laugh of his. Christ! I could have hit the man, he was so damned aggravating at times, and I was on a short fuse anyway. I had been going through a bad patch with Soo ever since she’d found she was pregnant again. She was worried, of course, and knowing how I felt about having a kid around the place, a boy I could teach to sail …
I was thinking about that as I drove north across the island to Punta Codolar, about Lennie, too, how tiresome he could be. Half Cockney, half Irish, claiming his name was McKay and with a passport to prove it, we knew no more of his background than when he had landed from the Barcelona ferry almost two years ago with nothing but the clothes he stood up in and an elderly squeezebox wrapped in a piece of sacking. I had found him playing for his supper at one of the quayside restaurants, a small terrier of a man with something appealing about him, and when I had said I needed an extra hand scrubbing the bottoms of the boats we were fitting out, he had simply said, ‘Okay, mate.’ And that was that. He had been with us ever since, and because he was a trained scuba diver he was soon indispensable, being able to handle yachts with underwater problems without their having to be lifted out of the water. It w
as just after Soo had lost the child and she had taken to him as she would have to any stray, regarding him virtually as one of the family.
While the distance between Port Mahon in the east and the old capital of Ciudadela in the west is at least fifty kilometres, driving across the island from south to north it is only about twenty. Even so it always seems longer, for the road is narrow and winding and you have to go through Alayór, which is the third largest town and the central hub of the island. I toyed with the idea of dropping off at the Flórez garage to see if I could get him to increase his offer for the Santa Maria. Juan Flórez, besides being alcalde, or mayor of the town, ran the largest garage outside of Mahon and was a very sharp dealer in almost anything anybody cared to sell that was worth a good percentage in commission. For the past few months he had been trying to persuade me to part with the old fishing boat I let out on charter. But the sun was shining, so I drove straight across the main Ciudadela-Mahon road and up through the old town to the Fornells road.
Here the country changes very noticeably, the earth suddenly becoming a dark red, and away to the left, Monte Toro, the highest point on Menorca, the only ‘mountain’ in fact, with its rocky peak capped by the white of the Sanctuary buildings and the army communications mast dominating the whole countryside, red soil giving way to gravel after a few kilometres, cultivated fields to pines and maquis, the scent of resin and rosemary filling the car.
It is the constant variety of the scene in such a small island that had attracted us in the first place, particularly Soo after living most of her life on an island that is about the same size, but solidly limestone with very little variation. Just short of Macaret, and in sight of the sea again, I turned left on to the road to Arenal d’en Castell, a beautiful, almost perfectly horseshoe-shaped bay of sand totally ruined by three concrete block hotels. Beyond the bay, on the eastern side, a rocky cape that had once been hard walking was now crisscrossed with half-finished roads so that one could drive over most of it. The few villas that had been built so far looked very lost in the wild expanse of heath and bare, jagged rock.
The villa Miguel Gallardo was now building stood right on the point, a little south and east of one he had completed two years before. There was a turning place nearby, but instead of swinging round it, I edged the car into the cul-de-sac beyond where it dipped steeply to the cliff edge. A tramontana was beginning to blow and even before I had switched the engine off I could hear the break of the waves two hundred feet or so below. I sat there for a moment, looking out towards the coast of France, remembering how it had been two years ago when I had taken a boat over to Genoa and a tramontana had caught us, a full gale, straight off the Alps and as cold as hell. We had been lucky to get away with it, the boat leaking and one of the spreaders broken so that we could only sail on the port tack.
I put the handbrake hard on, turned the wheels into the rubble of rock at the roadside and got out of the car, the breeze ruffling my hair, the salt air filling my lungs. God! It felt good, and I stretched my arms. There were little puffs of cloud on the horizon, the scene very different from the quiet of the southern coast, no protection at all. The urbanization, when it was built, would be facing the open sea and the full brunt of the north winds, so why the hell buy a villa here? I tried to see it in summer, all white stucco and red tiles, cacti on the retaining wall, passion flowers and bougainvillaea, with trailers of morning-glory over a Moroccan-style façade. It would be cool in summer and a breathtaking view, the dreadful hotels of Arenal d’en Castell hidden by the headland and the rock coast stretching east all the way to the lighthouse of Faváritx on the dragon-toothed finger of land after which it was named.
The engine of Miguel’s cement mixer started into life and I climbed back up the slope, making for the gaunt skeletal structure of the half-completed villa. He was waiting for me at the foot of a ladder lashed to the wooden scaffolding. ‘Buenos dias. You come to inspect, eh?’ He was a thickset man with a long, doleful face and a big hooked nose. He was from Granada, from the Arab district of Albacein, and claimed kinship with both Moors and Jews, his family going back five centuries to Ferdinand and Isabella and the Inquisition that followed their conquest of the last Moorish stronghold in Europe. ‘Iss your property now.’ He said it hesitantly, seeking confirmation, the inflexion of his voice making it a question rather than a statement.
‘Let’s have a look at it,’ I said.
I saw the sudden doubt in his eyes, his dark, unshaven features solemn and uneasy. ‘Okay, senor.’ The formality was a measure of his unease. He normally called me by my Christian name. ‘But you have seen it before, also the plans.’
‘I didn’t know I was buying it then.’
‘And now you are?’ Again the question in his voice, the dark eyes watching me, his broad forehead creased in a frown.
‘Let’s have a look at it,’ I said again. ‘Starting at the top.’
He shrugged, motioning me to go ahead of him. The scaffolding shook as we climbed to the first storey, the heat-dried wooden poles lashed with ropes. Everything – boards, scaffolding, ladders – was coated with a dusting of cement that only half-concealed the age-old layers of splashed paint. A younger brother, Antoni, and a cousin whose name I could not remember, were rendering the southern face of the building.
‘It will be a very beautiful villa,’ Miguel said tentatively. ‘When we have finished it, you will see, it will look – pretty good, eh?’ He prided himself on his English.
We climbed to the top, and he stood there looking about him. He was one of a family of thirteen. Back in Granada his father had a tiny little jewellery shop in one of those alleys behind the Capila Real, mostly second-hand stuff, the window full of watches with paper tags on them. I think his real business was money-lending, the contents of the shop largely personal items that had been pawned. ‘Buena vista, eh?’ And Miguel added, ‘You can have a garden here. The roof is flat, you see. And the lookout … all that sea.’ His tone had brightened, knowing I was a sailor.
‘There is also a fine view of the water tanks on the top of those bloody hotels at Arenal d’en Castell.’
‘You grow some vines, you never see them.’
‘In tubs and trained over a trellis? Come off it, Miguel. The first puff of wind out of the north …’
He looked away uncomfortably, knowing how exposed the position was. ‘It will be nice and cool in summer. It was good here when we make the foundations.’
We worked our way down to the ground floor, which was almost finished. He was using one of the rooms as an office and we went over the costings. I suggested certain adjustments, chiefly to the lighting, cut out the air-conditioning and one or two other luxuries I considered unnecessary, agreed a price for completion, and we shook hands on it.
There was never any need to have Miguel put anything into writing. His family had been small traders on the banks of the Darro and in the Plaza Bib-Rambla for generations. I had first met him when he was filling in as a guide to the Alhambra Palace and the Generalife. Then a few days later I had found him working on repairs to a building near his home, which was in the Cuesta Yesqueros, a stepped alley running steeply up the hillside opposite the old Puerta Monaita. I was staying at the Alhambra Palace Hotel at the time, waiting for an Italian to turn up who owed me quite a lot of money, and to this day I have no idea whether I was the cause of Miguel shifting to Menorca or not. He has never mentioned it, but I think it highly probable.
‘Who was it made you the offer my wife agreed to match?’ I asked him as he accompanied me back to the car. ‘Or did you make that up?’
‘No, of course I don’t make up.’ He glared at me angrily. ‘You know me too long to think I play games like that.’
‘Well then, who was it?’
‘Somebody I don’t trust so much.’
I got it out of him in the end. It was Flórez. And then, as I was settling myself behind the wheel, he leaned forward, peering in over my shoulder at the back seat, his eyes narrowed
and a frown on his face. ‘A friend of yours?’
I turned to find I had tossed the photograph Lloyd Jones had left with me into the back and it was lying there face-up. ‘You know him, do you?’ I asked.
He shook his head, the frown deepening.
‘It was probably taken some time ago,’ I told him. ‘He may not have a beard now.’
‘No beard, eh?’ I saw the dawn of recognition in his eyes and he nodded. ‘Si. No barba.’ He looked at me then. ‘Who is, plees?’
‘You’ve seen him, have you?’
He glanced at the picture again, then nodded emphatically.
‘When?’
‘A month ago, maybe more. He come here and look over the work. Says he knows the owner and he want to see the progress we make in the construction of the villa as he is thinking he will make Seóor Wilkins an offer.’
‘Did he say how much he was prepared to offer?’
‘No, he don’t say.’
‘What was his name? Do you remember?’
But he shook his head. He had been into Macaret that day to phone his suppliers and he had come back to find the man standing on the scaffold’s upper staging staring eastward, out towards Faváritx. It was only when he had asked him what he was doing there that the man said anything about making an offer.
‘And he didn’t give his name?’
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