“Yes. No doubt it would become an issue if he were involved in an accident. He bears this in mind and drives very well.”
You could have fooled me. I was sitting directly behind him, with Baz on the other side. For most of the way Juan steered with his left hand, lay back into the corner between door and front seat with his right hand draped over the back of it. That way he was able to keep up a lengthy and animated conversation with Baz shouted over the roar of the horn-blasting diesel lorries he successively passed.
Baz’s Spanish is fluent and perfect — she spent three years of her adolescence there studying guitar with Segovia amongst others — while mine hardly goes beyond the ‘Un tubo de cerveza, por favor’ level, but I picked up some of it, and pieced together the rest from subsequent events — enough to offer the reader an approximate and much truncated transcription.
“How’s Dad, Juan?”
“Not good. Very upset indeed. He’s left the house and gone on the boat. He’s there on his own, refuses to have anyone with him. He says the moment he sees Stride or McClintock, Allison or Clough coming out after him, he’ll start the engine and make for the open sea.”
“What good will that do him?”
“None at all. But the boat’s very fast. And very manoeuvrable too. He reckons he can get through the straits and out into the Atlantic before anyone catches him — unless they are prepared to rocket or shell him.”
“What then?”
Juan shrugged, head forward on his neck, left hand twisted palm up.
“That’s it. Adíos Papa.”
Baz thought, then said, “A bad scene, Juan.”
“Very bad.”
“What does your mother think of it all? And the rest of the household?”
“The household shifts from catatonic trance to histrionic hysterics. Especially the girls, and all my cousins. The servants too. But Mama is doing the full dignified matriarch bit. Clytemnestra when she hears about Iphigenia, you know? But if he goes she’ll probably throw herself off the quay. Anyway she’ll try to but I shall be on hand to stop her.”
“You won’t be strong enough.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you fat friend should be there too to help me.”
After about twenty miles we swung off the autovía and into the hills between it and the sea. The hills were covered with urbanization — small villas in lots of a hundred or more, all in each group exactly identical to its neighbours. They all had rosebushes and bougainvillea and tiny swimming pools, all were painted white, had red-tiled roofs which clashed with the bougainvillea, and heavy wrought-iron gates, multi-padlocked.
The radio phone bleeped and Juan picked up the handset without slowing down. Indeed after the briefest exchange he was accelerating with the thing still in his hand.
“Yes?” asked Baz.
“Stride’s arrived. We have a friend in the Guardia Civil Cuartel and he says they’re planning to move on the stroke of midday, in ten minutes’ time. We might well be late.”
The next five minutes were a hell of screeching tyres and a blaring klaxon. I was thrown from side to side, and when I held on to the fairing of the rear passenger door I lost the straw hat I had bought in Liberty the day before. It had a board paisley-pattern silk band and streamers and cost thirty-nine ninety-nine, and that was the sale price.
Presently the view opened up and improved enormously. A small unspoilt fishing village huddled round a little harbour, set within a wider cover. There was a small marina beside the harbour, and about fifteen larger boats at anchor in the bay. The hillsides round the bay were dotted quite sparsely with large houses in varying styles of architecture, though 1970s Moorish predominated. The whole area was fenced but very discreetly; only as you approached the red and white striped barrier with its big notice proclaiming Zona Particular y Privada etc. did you see the ribbon of twelve-foot fencing snaking over the hillside amongst the olives An armed security man heard us coming, he would have had to be deaf not to, and had the barrier up just in time. I have no doubt Juan would have crashed it if he had not.
Juan had to slow a bit — the streets were narrow and crowded, the car rumbled over cobbles and occasionally clanged against sharp corners. Then the bay opened up, we zipped along a short promenade of palm trees, oleanders and cafés, and out on to the mole that separated the harbour from the marina.
There was quite a crowd at the end. Three green Guardia Civil jeeps with the officers dressed in full fig for the occasion — black patent hats, yellow lanyards, black belts and gun holsters, the men in combat gear with automatic weapons. There was a black unmarked Renault 21 and Chief Inspector Stride was leaning against it. There were two television crews and about twenty journalists with cameras and cassette recorders. Above all there was the household. All the adults were dressed in black, but magnificently, especially three dolly-birds, no other word will do, in flouncy tops, fanny pelmets, and sheer black stockings. Eight children, uneasily aware of crisis but bored too, played listlessly while nannies and servants clucked over them if they went too near the water’s edge. But above all was Mother — Señora María Pilar Ordoñéz, a veritable pillar of a woman indeed — tall, pale, handsome with an aquiline nose, heavy eyebrows beneath her fine black mantilla. It was impossible to believe she had ever been a chambermaid.
All eyes were fixed on a large but powerful-looking cabin cruiser at anchor in the roads between the headlands. One could discern the Spanish flag on the forearm, the Blue Peter at the yard, and the red duster of the British mercantile marine over the stern. A little putter of sound came across the nacreous water that just rose and fell with a small swell not strong enough to break the surface, and blueish-white smoke swirling behind the exhaust outlets. Hicks had the engine running, was ready to slip his anchor.
When Stride, a big man in a suit he’d grown too fat for, big pursy lips above turkey jowls, saw us, he lifted his hat and big, arched, bushy eyebrows. He’s head of the City of London Police Serious Fraud Squad now and has often clashed with Baz, knows her well. He had been given the job of arresting Hicks, dead against all rules and precedents, solely because he was the last officer still operational who had actually worked on the Grosswort and Spinks bullion robbery back in 1970.
I expect he was about to say something too boringly obvious to be worth recording when the village church clock struck twelve, the notes bleeding across the air above the water. A Guardia Civil colonel, no less, touched his elbow and he and a party of Guardias began a slow descent down stone steps to a smart little cutter that was waiting for them. As they got to the bottom the village clock began to strike twelve again.
“In case you didn’t count it the first time,” Holmes murmured.
“Aren’t you going to do anything for your fine friend?” I asked.
She shrugged with unusual stoicism, and sighed.
“I fear this time for once, my dear Watson, we are too late.”
As the last note bled away into silence the cutter edged out from the quay and began to pick up speed. At the same time a figure appeared on the bow of the cabin cruiser and we saw him fling the anchor rope into the sea. He disappeared into the glassed-in cockpit, the cabin cruiser began to move, accelerated, began a wide turn throwing up a brilliant gash of bow-water against the black-blue of the sea and then... blew up. Blew up really well, into lots of little pieces that went soaring into the immaculate sky only to rain down again within a circle fifty metres across. The bang reverberated between the cliffs and sea-birds swooped up and away in a big soaring arc. It was not impossible to believe the soul of Don Hicks was amongst them.
Doña María Pilar at least thought so. With her hand to her throat she stifled back a cry of grief and oved with determination towards the unfenced edge of the quay. Her purpose was clear. I launched myself across the intervening space and grasped her round the waist at the last moment, causing her, and myself, to fall heavily on a cast-iron bollard and cobbles.