‘What about charts then?’
‘Not your problem. I got all the charts.’ And he added, ‘You ring Flórez, eh? Tomorrow, right after you pick up your wife from the hospital.’
I told him that might not be long enough to talk her into the deal, but in fact Soo proved much easier to persuade than I had expected. She was more interested in the man’s friendship with Gareth Lloyd Jones at Ganges than in the future of the villa she had so recklessly acquired the day before she lost the child. ‘But didn’t you ask him?’ she demanded almost angrily when I told her I had no idea what the relationship of the two men had been after the flagpole episode. ‘I’m certain there was something between them, an intimacy – I don’t think it was sexual. You don’t think Gareth’s in any sense gay, do you? I mean, he doesn’t behave like one.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he is.’ In fact, I hadn’t given it a thought.
‘Hero worship?’ She was sprawled on the old couch we had picked up in Barcelona, her head turned to the window, staring at the sea. ‘Was that why he was looking for this man?’ Her smooth, darkish forehead was slightly puckered, her eyes half-closed, her body slim again, no lovely curve to her belly and the madonna look quite gone from her face so that it was now pinched, even a little haggard.
I think she was quite glad not to have to cope with the problems of overseeing the completion of that villa. At any rate, she accepted the situation. But later, much later, she was to insist that if I hadn’t been so obsessed with my ‘new toy’ I would have known what was going on. She was, of course, much closer to the people of the island than I was. She had a lot of friends, not only in Mahon and Ciudadela, but out in the country among the farms, and she did pass on to me some of the talk she picked up about the growing popularity of the separatist movement. It was backed by the two communist parties, the Partido Communista de España, or PCE, and the Partido Communista de los Pueblos de España, or PCPE, and appeared to be gaining ground. Menorca, the Diario Insular or local paper, and even La Ultima Hora of Palma in Mallorca had carried the occasional article on the subject. But now I had no time any more to read the local newspapers. I was fully stretched getting Thunderflash ready for sea.
Once I had agreed the deal with Patrick Evans and checked the share ownership certificate, which showed him to be the sole owner, with sixty-four-sixty-fourths of the shares, I had pictures taken of the catamaran, some with the sails up, others of the saloon with the table laid, a vase of wild flowers and a large Balearic crayfish as the centrepiece. These I mailed off to a dozen of the most up-market agencies specialising in Mediterranean travel, together with a plan of the layout and full details. Three of them I actually phoned, and within a week two of these had expressed interest, and one of them, representing an American agency, had their representative fly in from Mallorca to inspect the boat and cable a report direct to Miami. Two days later I received a cable offering a two-week charter if I could pick up a party of eight Americans at Grand Harbour, Malta, on May 2. There was no quibble about the price, which would mean that in just one fortnight Thunderflash would earn more than the Santa Maria had made the whole of the previous season.
Moments like this make one feel on top of the world. I didn’t stop to wonder why Evans had gone fishing instead of chartering the cat himself. I simply cabled acceptance, asking for twenty per cent deposit, and when this came through by return, I hardly thought of anything else, my energies concentrated on getting Thunderflash repainted and in perfect condition, the hulls white, not blue, and the boat in tip-top condition.
We finished her just three days before I was due to speak at the opening of the Albufera urbanization, and when I got back that night Soo was almost starry-eyed, not because Thunderflash was back in the water and moored right outside, but because she had received a note from Gareth Lloyd Jones in Gibraltar. ‘He says he was piped aboard at fifteen thirty-two on Wednesday afternoon.’ And she added, the letter clutched in her hand, ‘It’s there in the log – Captain piped on board HMS Medusa.’ She looked up at me then. ‘Medusa was one of Nelson’s ships, wasn’t she?’
‘Ask Carp,’ I said. ‘There’s a Medusa buoy off Harwich. I sailed past it once on a navigational course.’
‘But you were Army.’
‘The outfit I was in, they expected you to be able to find your way at sea.’
‘It made me feel good – that’s all he says.’ She folded the letter up. ‘What a wonderfully exciting moment it must have been for him – the piercing whistle of the bo’s’n’s pipes, his salute to the quarterdeck, and thinking all the time that he’d made it, from Ganges and the lower deck right up to the command of a frigate.’
I went through to the office and checked the mail. Another charter – that made two lined up for the summer. Things were beginning to look real good. At least the boating fraternity weren’t to be put off by the threat of bombs following the Libyan raid, or the fall in the dollar. Not even the information that another of our villas had been paint-sprayed could dampen my spirits. It was the usual slogan – URBANIZAR ES DESTRUIER SALVEMO MENORCA, and Miguel had written me a long letter of complaint in Spanish. I told Soo to deal with it, my mind still on Thunderflash.
The weather was set fair for the moment and next morning, standing at the open window in the blazing sun, drinking my coffee, I could hardly believe it, the twin hulls so beautiful, such a thoroughbred, lying there to her reflection, no wind that early in the morning, the surface of Mahon harbour absolutely still.
I called Soo to come and look at her. ‘We’ll take her out under engines as far as La Mola, wait for the wind there.’ But she had promised to pick up one of the Renato girls at their vineyard farm beyond St Luis and picnic on the limestone rock ledges of Cala d’Alcaufar. Carp appeared with the semi-inflatable from the direction of the naval quay, the aluminium bows half-lifted out of the water as the big outboard thrust the tender close past the Club Maritimo, the metal masts of the yachts alongside the pontoon winking in the sun as they bobbed and swayed to the sharp-cut wake.
East Coasters tend to keep their emotions under control, but though he didn’t show it, I sensed Carp’s excitement as the two of us scrambled aboard and got the engines started and the anchor up. He had never skippered anything like this before and the fact that I had put him in charge of the boat had done wonders for his ego. He had bought himself one of those baseball-type hats with a long America’s Cup peak and he couldn’t stop talking as we motored out past Bloody Island, rounding the northern end of it, bare earth showing where Petra had trenched beyond the great stone capping slabs of the hypostilic chamber she had been excavating. The water was so still we could have nosed in for her to jump on board.
She would have loved it, but two days after Soo had left hospital I had had the unpleasant task of taking a telex out to her camp with the news that her father had been badly injured in a car crash. A vacant seat on a charter flight had enabled her to leave that same afternoon. We had not heard from her since, and now, sitting there at the wheel, driving the big catamaran close-hauled past the La Mola fortifications, I missed her. It was such a perfect day for trials, the wind coming in from the south-east and building up through the afternoon, so that the B and G instruments showed us touching fifteen knots as we ran back into the harbour under full main and spinnaker, the spray flying, the sun shining, the wind hard on the side of my face. And the boat behaved perfectly. Nothing more to do to her, except a few replacements to the rigging, a little fine tuning.
‘I’ve talked to Miguel on the phone,’ was Soo’s greeting as I came in, tired and elated. ‘He’ll have a word with you on Monday, after the Albufera ceremony.’
‘What’s his problem?’ I asked, pouring myself the Balearic version of a horse’s neck. ‘We’ve paid him for the work to date.’ I was thinking of the speech I had promised Jorge Martinez I would make. In the excitement of getting Thunderflash ready I had forgotten all about it.
‘It isn’t the money,’ Soo said.
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‘What is it then?’
‘It’s the work. He’s short of work.’
‘What does he expect?’ With the vandalism that was going on, builders were finding life difficult. ‘He’s lucky to have a villa to complete.’
‘That’s the trouble. Evans has told him to stop work. He and his two mates have moved into the ground floor and Miguel’s been told to clear the site. Anything still to be done they’ll do themselves. The agreement, you remember, was that we’d employ him to finish the building.’
‘You may have told him that. I didn’t.’ I went over to the window, propping myself on the desk top and enjoying the ice-cold fizz of the brandy and ginger ale, my mouth still dry with salt. The lights were coming on, the old town showing white above the steps leading up to the Port Mahon Hotel and the Avenida Giron. ‘He’s got no claim on us at all.’
‘He thinks he has.’ And Soo added, ‘A matter of honour, he said.’
‘Oh, bugger that,’ I told her. ‘There’s nothing in writing. I saw the lawyers early last week.’ But in the end I agreed I would have a talk with him. ‘It’s not far from Albufera to Codolar Point. We could easily run over there either before or after the ceremony and see what Evans has to say about it, if he’s in residence. Do you know if he is?’
‘Miguel says not. He moved in with his two mates, did a quick do-it-yourself job making the lower half habitable, then brought the Santa Maria round into the bay at Arenal d’en Castell and the following morning they were gone.’
‘When was that?’
‘Last week. Friday, I think.’
‘Then they should be back by now. Nobody stays out fishing off Menorca two weekends at a stretch.’
But they did. At any rate, there was no sign of them on the Monday morning when I drove out to the point just before the opening ceremony. This was due to start at twelve-thirty followed by a buffet lunch in the hospitality pavilion on the Addaia-Arenal approach road. The villa was deserted, some of the windows covered with sheets of plastic, the scaffolding still there and the whole place a mess of builders’ rubble. People I spoke to on the approach road to the development said they had seen no sign of anybody there for more than a week.
The site for the ceremony was a newly completed villa standing on a rise a little back from the road and close to the entrance to the Albufera development. A white tape had been stretched across this road and a little crowd was already gathered on the villa’s terraces and by the shrubbery that covered the hillside. The sun was shining and there was a magnificent view across Arenal to the Fornells peninsula. There was a guard of honour provided by the military, also a band, which began to play just after Soo and I had taken our seats. The Renatos were there and several other friends, the atmosphere that of a provincial function almost anywhere, except for that view and the ever-present Menorcan wind.
The Mayor arrived, only eight minutes late, accompanied by a Guardia motor-cycle escort. His car drove straight up to the tape and Jorge Martinez jumped out. Waving and smiling, he came running up the steps, his body slim in a sky-blue suit, his face dark in shadow and full of vitality. ‘You speak after Seóor Alvarez,’ he said to me as he shook hands. Mario Alvarez was the construction engineer for the project. ‘First in English, then in Spanish – just a few words. Okay? I speak last.’
I nodded and he took his place, sitting quickly down and signalling for the band to stop. In the sudden silence the voices of the children playing hide-and-seek among the shrubs seemed startlingly loud, and I could hear the gulls calling as they planed above the cliffs.
Alvarez spoke for perhaps five minutes, a very flowery speech, both in his reference to the project and to the Alcalde, who looked pleased. So did the workmen, who were also complimented, the faces of all those present wreathed in smiles suitable to the occasion. Then it was my turn, and since I made a point of referring to the activities of the separatists, the smiles disappeared. Jorge Martinez understood English better than he spoke it. He was not amused, but a reference to the involvement of the PCE and PCPE had him nodding his head vigorously. He was a right-wing socialist and detested the communists. And when, after I had repeated my remarks in Spanish, I sat down, he was smiling again and nodding as he clapped his hands, and everybody did the same, apparently happy at what I had said.
Abruptly, he jumped to his feet, and just as abruptly, the clapping ceased and everybody fell silent, except the children. As always, he spoke very fast, not reading his speech, but talking as though straight from the heart. His line was that Menorca was a small island with few natural resources. But it had the sea and it was warm. Tourism and the foreigners who purchased villas such as this one, bringing much-needed foreign currency – hard currency so that the life of the people could be improved and made less hard …
It was as he was saying this, his arms outflung as though embracing the island and all its people, his face lit by that broad political smile of his and his voice carrying conviction across the little gathering to the rock outcrops of the cliff line beyond, it was then that a sound cracked like a whip over the proceedings. His head jerked forward, the smile still there, a rictus in a spreading welter of blood and grey matter, his whole body toppling forward, a staggering, headlong fall that took him down the flight of six steps that led from the upper terrace where he had been standing.
I remember my eyes recording with a sort of instant paralysis of horror the neat round hole in the back of his head as he fell sprawling forward. Then his body hit the lower terrace and rolled over, the eyes seeming to hang loose in that dreadful, bloody mash-up of a face. Manuela let out a stifled cry, Soo was retching, her face white and her eyes closed. From shocked silence, the little crowd was suddenly in an uproar of noise, women, and some men, screaming, soldiers moving forward as their officer shouted an order, the Guardia abandoning their motor bikes, drawing their pistols and looking about them in bewilderment.
Somebody shouted for a doctor. But there was no doctor, no need of one anyway. Jorge Martinez was patently very dead, killed instantly by a single bullet, and no sign of the killer who must have been an expert marksman. The soldiers were running now, up over the terraces and round the back of the villa, sealing it off. But though the shot had obviously come from behind us, perhaps from one of the villa windows, the gunman could equally have fired from the shrubbery on the hill above.
The minutes passed in a seemingly aimless search, the official guests and the little crowd of local people all beginning to talk as the initial shock wore off. A small boy was brought to the Guardia corporal, his little face white and creased with tears, his mouth hanging loose, his eyes large. Word spread in a sea of whispering – the child had seen the gunman as he went into the bushes behind the villa. No, he wasn’t playing with his friend. We could hear the child’s voice now, high and very frightened. He had gone to have a pee and had found the man lying there with a gun. The kid had been right there when he had fired, only feet away, and then the killer had scrambled to his feet and disappeared up the slope.
Soldiers and bandsmen fanned out, climbing the slope behind us, and Alvarez in a shaken voice asked us all to go down to the pavilion where there would be some wine and something to eat. Would we go now please, then the authorities could take any statements they might need. He glanced down at the body of the Mayor. A soldier was covering it with a plastic sheet encrusted with cement. Alvarez made the sign of the cross and turned abruptly, walking stiffly erect down to the road. I watched Gonzalez Renato stand for a moment, head bowed over the body, then go to his car. Most of the guests did the same, and watching them pay their respects to the inert bundle that only a moment before had been so full of vitality, I had the feeling they were not thinking about Jorge Martinez, but about themselves, and wondering what would happen now. Politically he was the nearest to a strong man the island had known since the end of the French occupation in 1802. Now he was dead and nobody to replace him, nobody who had the charisma and the public appeal to guide a volatile, insul
ar and basically peasant people into an increasingly uncertain future.
We were held in the hospitality pavilion most of the afternoon. Plain-clothes police arrived, noting down names and addresses, interviewing those nearest to the murdered man and anyone who might have had a glimpse of the gunman. The food disappeared almost at a gulp, the wine too, the babble of voices on a high pitch as speculation reached the verge of hysteria. Who had done it – the extreme right, the extreme left, Eta? Or was it a delayed reaction to events in Africa? Salvemo Menorca. For myself, and the scattering of other ex-pats attending the ceremony, it was not a pleasant experience. We might not be directly responsible, but you could see it in their eyes – we were to blame.
There was something quite primitive in the way some of them looked at us, as though we had the Evil Eye. And the Guardia in particular reacted in a similar manner, their manner of questioning increasingly hostile. It was almost as though they had convinced themselves that one of us, one of the extranjeros, must know who had done it and be connected with it in some way. You could see it from their point of view. This was an island. To kill like that, in cold blood, it had to be somebody from outside – a terrorist, some representative of a foreign organisation, not one of their own people. It was a gut reaction. They were looking for a scapegoat, but the fact remained that all of us who were being questioned, all except the children and a mother who had gone looking for her little boy, we were all of us gathered there in full view, so that in the end they had to let us go.
Soo and I didn’t talk much on the drive back. It was late afternoon, the air full of the clean smell of pines and everywhere the fields massed with colour, the predominantly golden carpet of flowers patched with the startling white of wild narcissi, the sun blazing out of a blue sky. What a lovely day for a killing! What the hell was wrong with Man that he couldn’t enjoy the beauty of the world around him? Politics. Always politics. I felt almost physically sick. There was so much here in Menorca that I loved – the sea, the sun, the peace. And now it was shattered. Martinez had been much more than just the Alcalde of Mahon. He had been a power throughout the island.
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