I called again as I started up the ladder and Carp’s tonsured head popped out of the wheelhouse. He was his usual gloomy self as he showed me another frame with its fastenings gone, also at least three deck beams that needed replacement. ‘Won’t ever finish in time, will we?’ he grumbled as he indicated one of the knees rotted where water had been seeping from the deck above. ‘And the engine still to be fiddled in, all the rigging. I’ll ‘ave to take Rod off of the American boat for that.’
I told him that was impossible. He already had Luis varnishing the brightwork. With Rodriguez, that would make two of our locals, as well as himself, working on the one boat. ‘Well,’ he said, looking me straight in the face, ‘d’you want ’er finished on time, or don’t you?’ And he added, ‘Up to you. I didn’t promise nothing.’
In the end I agreed, as he knew I would. And all the time we were talking I had the feeling there was something else on his mind. It wasn’t until I was leaving that he suddenly blurted it out – ‘That man outside the shop this morning – did you see him? A little red car. He was there just as I left. Did he come into the shop?’
I was on the ladder then, beginning to climb down, my face almost level with the deck. ‘Yes. I sold him a couple of charts.’
‘Did he say who he was?’ I told him the man’s name and he nodded. ‘Thort so. He must have recognised me, but he didn’t want to know me, did he, so I thort I was mistaken.’ He leaned out towards me. ‘If it wasn’t for me that man would’ve died of cold. Well, not just me. There was four of us in the pilot boat, see, but it was me wot cut him down off the Woodbridge Haven buoy. Did he give you any sort of rank?’
‘No,’ I said, curious now and climbing back up the ladder.
‘Mebbe he hasn’t got one now. There was a lot of talk at the time.’
‘About what?’
‘Well, it was an arms run, wasn’t it, and he was a Navy lieutenant.’ And then he was telling me the whole story, how the Deben pilot at Felixstowe Ferry had seen something odd fixed to the Haven buoy and the four of them had gone out in the dawn to find a man fully clothed and tied to the side of the buoy with a mooring line. ‘Poor bastard. We thort he were dead. Cold as buggery off the bar it was, the wind out of the north and beginning to whip up quite a sea. Then later, when he’s out of hospital, he comes and buys us all a pint or two in the Ferryboat, so he knows bloody well I was one of those that rescued him. Funny!’ he said. ‘I mean, you’d think he’d come and say hullo, wouldn’t you? I’d seen ‘im before, too. When he were a little runt of a fella living with a no-good couple and their son on an old ‘ouseboat in a mud creek back of the Ferryboat, an’ I wasn’t the only one that recognised him. That’s what started tongues wagging.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you bin there, when you was looking for a boat that spring. You know wot it’s like there, an’ a couple of kids, no proper man to control them. They broke into a yacht moored back of the Horse Sand and got at the drink locker. No harm done, but later they had a go at the RAF mess over at Bawdsey – for a lark they said. People remember that sort of thing.’
I didn’t see what he was getting at. ‘What’s that got to do with arms-running?’ I asked. ‘You said something about arms-running.’
‘That’s right. But we didn’t know about that at the time, did we? There was just a lot of rumours flying about on account of strangers poking around in the mud at the entrance to the King’s Fleet. Then, after those terrorist attacks on police stations at Liverpool and Glasgow, and on that court in Clerkenwell, the papers were full of it. This Lieutenant Jones, he makes a statement, about how he’d been bird-watching an’ had seen them unloading the arms at the King’s Fleet, about half a mile inside the Deben mouth. It was an IRA gun run, you see, and they caught him watching ‘em from the high bank of the river as they landed the stuff. That’s how he come to be on the buoy. Didn’t shoot him, instead, they threw him overboard out beyond the Deben bar, so he’d drown and it would look like an accident.’
He shook his head slightly, muttering to himself: ‘Funny that – him not wanting to talk to me.’ And then he brightened. ‘Mebbe they sacked ‘im. That’d account for it. There was a swarm of investorigaty journalists digging into his background, and some of the stories they ran …’ He gave a little shrug and turned away. ‘Well, better get on if we’re ever goin’ ter finish this job.’ And without another word he went back to the wheelhouse and disappeared below.
Was that it? Was he now into some smuggling racket, having been forced to resign his commission? All those questions about coves and inlets … I was wondering about him as I drove home along the waterfront, wondering whether I would be able to get anything out of him during the evening.
Chapter Two
He was punctual, of course, the bell of the chandlery sounding virtually on the dot of 20.30. I called down to him to come up, and introducing him to Soo, I said, ‘Is it Mr Lloyd Jones or do you have anything in the way of a rank?’
‘Gareth Lloyd Jones will do,’ he said, smiling and taking Soo’s outstretched hand. Some sort of a spark must have passed between them even then, her cheeks suddenly flushed and a bright flash of excitement in those dark eyes of hers as she said, ‘I think you’ll enjoy this evening. Manuela and her friends have done a great job of the preparations.’ But I didn’t take note of it at the time, still thinking about the way he had parried my question. If my suspicions were correct I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be seen entertaining a man who might land himself in trouble.
Petra was usually late and that evening was no exception. She was a large-boned girl with a freckled face and wide mouth that always seemed to be full of teeth. But her real attraction was her vitality. She came thundering up the stairs, that broad grin on her face and breathless with apologies. ‘Sorry. Found I’d ripped my pants dancing the other evening and had to change.’ She saw Lloyd Jones and stopped. ‘I’m Petra Callis.’ She held out her hand.
‘Gareth Lloyd Jones.’ And then, as I was getting her a drink, I heard her say, ‘Soo will have told you what I’m up to, digging about in megalithic holes. I live out there on Bloody Island, a leaky tent among the ruins.’ She jerked her head towards the window. Then she asked with blatant curiosity, ‘What’s your line of country? Yachts, I suppose, or are you a villa man?’
‘No, neither.’
But Petra wasn’t the sort of girl to be put off like that. She opened her mouth wide and laughed. ‘Well, come on – what do you do? Or is it something mysterious that we don’t talk about?’
I glanced back over my shoulder to see Lloyd Jones staring at her, a shut look on his face, mouth half-open and his eyes wide as though in a state of shock at the blatantness of her curiosity. Then he smiled, a surprisingly charming smile as he forced himself to relax. ‘Nothing mysterious about it. I’m a Navy officer.’
As I passed Petra her gin and tonic Soo was asking him what branch of the Navy. ‘Exec,’ he replied, and she picked that up immediately. ‘So was my father. Came up through the lower deck.’ A moment later I heard the word Ganges mentioned.
‘HMS Ganges?’ I asked. ‘On Shotley Point just north of Harwich. Is that the school you were referring to this morning, the one you and Evans were at?’ And when he nodded, I said, ‘It’s called Eurosport Village now, or was when I was last there. I know it quite well. There’s a commercial range and I used to practise there before going on to Bisley for the Meeting.’
‘These cups, they’re for shooting then, are they?’ He couldn’t help noticing them. He was standing right next to the pinewood cabinet I had purchased to house them and Gloria, our help, was a determined silver polisher. We talked about Shotley for a moment, then Soo butted in again, asking him how it had been when he was being trained there. From that they progressed to Malta. It was her mother who was Maltese. Her father had been a naval officer posted to Malta back in the days when there was a C-in-C Med and an old frigate fitted out as the Commander-in-Chief’s yacht for showing th
e flag and entertaining. He had been the Navigating Officer on board and though she had been far too young to remember anything about it, she was always ready to talk of the parties he had described on the open lamplit deck.
It was past nine before we finally left, and though it was barely a mile away, by the time we had found a place to park the car and had walked through the quarry, somebody had already lit the bonfire. The effect was magic, the flames lighting the great square stone buttresses, flickering over the lofty limestone roof, shadows dancing on the moonlit cliffs, so that the whole effect was like some wild biblical scene. In the great rectangular cavern itself the dirt base of it had been levelled off to provide a makeshift dance floor round which chairs had been placed and trestle tables bright with cloths and cutlery and bottles of wine.
The band began to play just as we found our table. Manuela came over, and, while Soo was introducing Lloyd Jones, Petra and I were momentarily on our own. ‘You wanted to talk to me,’ I said.
‘Did I?’ Her eyes were on the movement of people towards the dance floor, her foot tapping, her body moving to the beat of the music.
‘Now, what have you discovered?’ I asked her. ‘Another of those hypostilic chambers or is it an underground temple to the Earth Mother like that place in Malta?’
‘The Hypogeum?’ She shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that. Just a charcoal drawing. But it could be a lot older. I’ve only seen part of it. I don’t know whether it represents a deer, a horse, a bison or a mammoth. I don’t know what it is. A woolly rhinoceros perhaps.’ She gripped hold of my arm. ‘Come on, let’s dance. I’ll settle for a woolly rhinoceros and tell you the rest while we’re dancing.’
But she couldn’t tell me much. ‘You’ll have to see it for yourself. I think it’s early man – cave-dwelling man – but of course I don’t know. Not yet.’
‘Then why consult me? I don’t know the difference between the drawings of early man and a potholer’s graffiti.’
She hesitated, then said, ‘Well, it’s not just that I’ve unearthed what looks like a section of a cave painting, it’s the fact that people have been digging in that cave.’
‘Archaeologists, you mean?’
‘No, no. People who haven’t the slightest idea they’ve uncovered anything. And if they did know, I imagine they couldn’t care less. The charcoal drawing was only uncovered because they had been clearing a roof fall, and part of the drawing has already been sliced away when they were shovelling the rubble clear. They’ve dug out a hole I think I could have wriggled through, but I wasn’t going to risk that on my own, it looked too unsafe.’ And she added, ‘I could hear water slopping around, Mike, and there was a draught of air. I think they’ve opened up a way through to the sea. But why?’ She stared up at me, her body close against mine. ‘Do you think that’s what they were up to, cutting a way through to the sea?’
‘How do I know?’ I said. ‘I’d have to see it …’
‘Exactly. That’s why I want you to come over there with me. Now. Before they have time to block it up, or do whatever it is they plan to do with it. They may be working on it this minute, so if we went now …’
‘What – right in the middle of the party? I can’t leave Soo, and anyway –’
‘Well, afterwards. As soon as the party is over.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s quite out of the question.’ And I told her the sensible thing would be to wait for daylight and then go back in with the curator from the museum or somebody from the Mayor’s Office, one of the planning officials. It crossed my mind that this might have some connection with the squatters who had been sleeping in the villa Lennie was repairing, but I didn’t tell her that. ‘Wait till the morning,’ I said again, ‘and take one of the local authority officials in with you.’
‘No.’ She stopped abruptly, standing back from me in the middle of that dancing throng staring me in the face. ‘Tonight. Please.’ And then in a rush: ‘You know how things work here, or rather don’t – not always. It could be days before any official bothered to come out. They’re not interested in caves and digs. A few people are, Father Pepito for instance, but none of the officials I know, not really, and I want somebody to see it now, before the charcoal outline of that figure is totally destroyed or the roof collapses again. Please, Mike. It’s important to me.’
I’ll think about it,’ I said, and we went on dancing, which was a mistake with Soo in her condition. She had been watching us and she was furious, telling me I had humiliated her in front of everybody. That was after I had returned to our table and Lloyd Jones had taken Petra off to dance. It made no difference that we had only been dancing together because Petra had wanted to get me to visit the cave and see what it was she’d discovered.
‘So you’re going with her. When?’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ I said. ‘She just wants to show me a bit of a charcoal wall painting, that’s all. It won’t take long.’
‘When?’ she repeated, and there was a hot flush on her cheeks.
‘Tonight,’ I told her. ‘She wants me to go tonight.’
‘I see.’ Her tone was icy, and after that she wouldn’t speak to me. In the end I went over to the bar and got myself a large Soberano to chase down the wine I had been drinking. A hand gripped my elbow and I turned to find Manuela’s husband, Gonzalez, beside me. ‘You come to our table for a moment if you please. The Alcalde wish to speak with you about the opening of the new urbanización near the lake at Albufera next month. Jorge has been asked to make the opening and he wish you to take part in it, okay?’
I was not altogether surprised that Jorge Martinez should ask me to take part in the official opening of a new urbanización. I was one of the founder members of an unofficial association of resident English businessmen and I had on occasions acted as spokesman when the bureaucrats in the ayuntiamento had proved to be more than usually difficult over a planning application so that I knew Jorge in his official capacity as Mayor at the Mahon town hall as well as socially. In any case, since I was involved in property it was important for me to keep in with him.
In the post-Franco era, the political structure of what had become a monarchical democracy had steadily developed. The Baleares islands became one of the seventeen autonomous regions with its own elected parliament. The centre of this local government was at Palma, Mallorca. Foreign policy, finance and defence was, of course, still administered from Madrid through a Provincial Governor appointed by the ruling party. There was also a Military Governor. But Palma was over a hundred sea miles from Mahon and the comparatively recent introduction of this regional democratic autonomy had increased the importance of the local town halls and their councils, and in particular the power of the mayors who were elected by those councils. At least that’s how it seemed to me, and I mention it here because I cannot help thinking that this dissemination of power may have had a bearing on what happened later.
Jorge Martinez was a lawyer, a slim man with sharp features and a way of holding his long, narrow head that suggested a cobra about to strike. He was, in fact, a very formidable little man and quite a prominent member of the ruling party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español or PSOE. He had only been Alcalde in Mahon a short time, but already he had his hands firmly on the local power reins, his political sense acute. He got up as I reached the table, shook me by the hand, holding my elbow at the same time, and waved me to an empty seat opposite him. His wife was there, a dark-eyed, vivacious woman, also another lawyer and Colonel Jiménez of the Guardia Civil. Gonzalez topped up my glass with more brandy.
The Alcalde not only wanted me to attend the opening, but would I make a speech? ‘Five, ten minutes, what you like, Mr Steele.’ And he smiled, his use of the English address rather than the Spanish señor quite deliberate. ‘You are very much known in your community and you will comprehend that here in Menorca we have problems – political problems arising from all the villa people. Not those who come to end their lifes here, but the summer migration. It is
a question of the environment. So you speak about that, hah?’
He stopped there, waiting for some acknowledgement, and when I made no comment he said brusquely, ‘You speak about the regulations the developers are agreeing to. Also you say this urbanización is a good developing; it is small, villas not too close, the environment of Albufera acknowledged, and it is good for our island. It brings work, it brings money, some foreign currency. Okay? You speak first in Spanish, then in English, so very short speaking, but the political point made very clear.’ And he added, ‘I am informed you always have good co-operation with my officials at the ayuntiamento. So you agree, hah?’
He had that explosive way of asking a question and insisting on agreement at the same time. In any case, when you have had a few drinks, and the commitment is over two weeks away, it is easier to say yes than to think up some convincing excuse on the spur of the moment. ‘Bueno, bueno.’ He smiled, a glint of gold teeth. ‘So nice to talk with you, señor.’ I was dismissed, and I left the table with the feeling that if I had declined his invitation he would have seen to it that next time I needed a permit for something from the Mahon town hall it would not be forthcoming. But a speech in Spanish – or did he mean the local Catalan, which is very different? In any case, my Spanish was a hybrid of the two, having been picked up quite haphazardly as occasion demanded.
Somebody had thrown a pile of furze on the fire, the band half-drowned in the crackle of the flames. Florez passed, light on his feet, the young woman in his arms glittering with tinsel, the button eyes in his round face fixed on the table I had just left as though watching for an opportunity to ingratiate himself. I went back to the bar and stood there watching the shadows of the dancers moving against the limestone roofing and the far recesses of the great cavern. The dancers themselves were a flicker of fire-red images, the whole scene so lurid and theatrical that it seemed almost grotesque, the band thumping out a brazen cacophony of sound that ricocheted off the stone walls, the beat so magnified it almost split one’s ears.
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