If Martin had been in the case he hadn’t taken anything. But why would he want to see inside? He knew I had nothing. I thought about confronting him but if he denied it, all I could call him was a liar and that would be me back on the street.
Let sleeping dogs lie was the order of the day.
Chapter 47
Thursday July the 24 ^th 2008
I quit the hotel early. Too much like hard work and my mind is firmly on Spain. My boss surprised me by pulling me to one side and asking if I fancied the role as his number two. I was a slightly at a loss for words. He told me he needed someone that had both smarts and was a grafter. His current number two was retiring in three months.
I declined but I think it is the first time I’ve been offered a legitimate job since my days on the factory floor. I was quite touched.
I now have an outline plan of action for Spain, but it is hard to pin down exactly what I’ll be doing. For a start I have three or four ideas as to how to get into the safety deposit box but I’m not even sure that there is a box — or, even if it exists that it contains anything — or if it does exist and does contain something that I will be able to get at it — or — or — or — or — you see the problem.
There is also no sign of the goons. Not even a whiff. That could be good or bad news. The good would be that Dupree considers me such a low level threat that he has reassigned his resources to better usage. The bad news is that I may now mean so little he could decide that getting rid of me might prevent a problem in the future.
I remember a lesson at school where we were discussing the Coliseum in Rome. Our teacher made the mistake of telling us that, although Nero had planned the building he had never given the famous ‘thumbs down’ sign in it because he died before it was completed. This opened the floodgates — ‘thumbs down’ — what did that mean. As soon as we found out it was a signal for the victor to kill the defeated, we were over it like a rash.
Playtime was spent ‘thumbing-down’ everyone in sight. That day I learned a small but valuable lesson. Even at playtime ‘thumbing-down’ a friend or someone you respected was far harder than ‘thumbing-down’ a nonentity. In fact the game showed quite a few people who their real friends were, as ‘thumbing-down’ often resulted in some painful punishment.
Dupree would think nothing of ‘thumbing-down’ me and I knew it and he probably knew that I knew and we probably both had the Kursal Flyers single ‘Little Does She Know’.
Martin seems cool, if not cold but he isn’t showing signs of throwing me out and, as far as I can tell, he’s not been back inside my luggage.
I fly out on the 1 st of August and I’m beginning to feel like a cross between a schoolboy going on his first trip abroad and someone looking at death row.
Chapter 48
Thursday July the 31 ^st 2008
D-day tomorrow. I need to be up with the sparrow fart but I don’t care. This needs to be done. I’m not on a standard holiday package — it seems Inca isn’t a hotspot for the visiting Brits — but I’m on a charter flight. Heaven help me — screaming kids, early morning boozers, cramped seating, delayed flights — the joys.
Martin is dropping me at the airport — not a happy bunny given the hour — but he’ll oblige. He has been very quiet on the whole thing. I’ve been expecting a grilling on my plans but it hasn’t happened. He knows the rough gist of the Charlie Wiggs conversation but not all of it and I’m keeping it that way.
He did ask me what the plan was when I get home and I realised I didn’t have one. I’ve been so focused on the trip to Spain that I haven’t given a second thought to what comes next. I’ve just assumed that whatever happens out there will dictate what happens back here. Martin was more practical. For instance where was I planning to stay? Where was the cash for living coming from? The basic stuff.
I asked if I can have one more month at his and I’ll be out of his hair. As to cash, that is something I’ll worry about on my return.
Early to bed.
Chapter 49
Friday August 1 st 2008
That was hell. I mean hell. Why would anyone put up with that nonsense to go on holiday? Forget the screaming kids, early boozers and delayed flights — let’s talk about the woman next to me with the social graces of an ill bred monkey.
I’ve never hit a woman in my life but twice I had to go to the toilet — an experience in itself — to avoid assaulting her. What didn’t she get about me? All I wanted to do was endure the two and half hour flight and get off the bloody plane. All she wanted to do was — and this is in rank order — chat, sing, ask me to move (three trips to the toilet), chat, borrow a pen, borrow some paper, read my newspaper, read my book, chat, fart, sing and chat — and that was all in the first hour.
She wasn’t even on the pop — although she should have been on something — Valium would have been good.
Palma airport was a surprisingly cool experience — my experience of Spanish airports, albeit more than 15 years ago, revolved around planes parked on the apron and being emptied on to saunas on wheels, then standing in industrial length queues to show my passport followed by a crazy length of wait for my bags.
Instead we were offloaded through an air conditioned air bridge. The passports queue went like snow of a dyke and the bags were as quick as I could have reasonably expected.
I breathed a massive sigh of relief when my bag appeared and I wasn’t stopped at customs — the tool kit had weighed on my mind for the whole flight.
Finding the car hire company was a battle. The office in the airport terminal, logically, had nothing to do with hiring cars. I was directed to a multi storey building two hundred yards away and had to dodge inbound cars and vans to find the service desk. I finally found a Spanish type queue and an hour later I was away.
Inca is not tourist central. It lies in the middle of the island and is by-passed by one of the island’s few motorways. It’s highly industrial and the main tourist attraction seems to be the weekly fair that runs every Wednesday. Other than that there is little to note.
My hotel is small but clean and, importantly, has the benefit of killing the climate through working air conditioning.
I dropped my bags and changed into something a little less heat retaining and went for a walk.
I found the bank quick enough and just down the road was the office of Mallorca Security. The one question still bouncing around my head is the link to the bank. The first note clearly decoded as the Colonya Caixa de Pollenca in Inca but the second sheet seems to refer to Mallorca Security. I’m working on the theory that the box, if it is a box, is in Mallorca Security and will have some connection to the bank.
I had formed the impression that Mallorca Security was a bit of a tuppence hapenny affair. Certainly Charlie’s description of the web site led me to believe that.
The truth is slightly different. The building is barely two hundred yards from the bank and looks more like a bank than the bank. It has a large frontage, which puts it at odds with the shops around it. To the left there is a shop that seems to specialise in art that is connected to light — lamp shades, chandeliers, lit sculptures — that sort of thing. It was open and a quick visit ruled it out as an entry point to my target.
The entire adjoining wall is floor to ceiling with racking, filled with every knick-knack imaginable. The wall behind looks solid concrete. There is a door at the rear to a small storage room and fortunately it was ajar. A quick glimpse inside and it was obvious the wall runs the length of the shop. If I had a jack hammer and three days to spare I might get through to the next shop.
On the other side of my target is a cafe and it doesn’t look any more promising. This time there is no storage room, just the adjoining wall that acts as the back drop to the serving counter. It is filled with an espresso machine, a rack of various crockery and a painting of a footballer in mid scissor kick. No way through.