After that one drink, taken with the five of us standing and remarking on the continuing brightness of the weather and the possibility of thunder by the end of the week, Malcolm declared his paella would be sticking and would we be so kind as to go through. He showed us to places round an oval table with cracked veneer, dressed with plastic mats and Innox cutlery. Before he ‘dashed’, he used a Zippo lighter on the single red candle set in a tiny tin chamber-pot bearing the legend ‘A Present from Bognor Regis’. The place settings were already filled with bowls of gazpacho — which, I have to say, I found perfectly acceptable. Allison filled wine glasses with a semi-sweet, which was not. McClintock lifted his to Holmes.
“Cheers. Well, Baz. How’s it going?”
“Early days yet, Bri, early days. I’m still not quite sure how it was done, but tomorrow I shall find out. Or the next day.”
“We saw you was in Málaga,” commented Allison, “and bought the under-water gear. Have much trouble explaining why you wanted it?”
“None at all,” replied Baz. “You will recall that the other side has retained me to fit you up as Hicks’s assassins. In order to do that they expect me to recover faked evidence from the ocean floor. Little do they realize that I shall in fact use the opportunity to discover how Hicks got away from the boat in the second or so between when he was seen on the deck and the moment of the explosion. The evidence has to be there somewhere.”
“But we retained you to locate the bastard. Not figure out how it was done.”
“Of course, Bri. But since I am sure he has not returned to Casa Hicks, figuring out how it was done will provide essential clues as to how far he has got. And in what direction. So it is important that I should work out just how he did get away. From that we should be able to deduce how far he was able to get in whatever he was using as a getaway vehicle. I already feel fairly sure that it was a heavily armoured midget submarine of Russian design. We know some of your bullion turned up on world markets via the Eastern bloc. If I am right, and there will be cleats on the hull of his cruiser and a hatch to link the two, and these are what I shall be looking for tomorrow, then I think we can safely say he got no further than Tangier, or the coast near by. In fact I already have people working for me there, scouring the souks and bazaars, the pubs and above all the male brothels. Did you know Hicks was that way inclined?”
“I’d believe any filth of a creepy cunt like Hicks,” said Allison.
“Come, come,” said Clough, returning to serve the paella, “nothing wrong with a bit of bum every now and then.”
After the paella there was whisky-soaked bought-in ice-cream gâteau, and as it was served I felt the pressure of Baz’s foot on my own. From that I understood that the microphone stroke micro-transmitter was in place, and that the ball was in my court as regards the more powerful transmitter. In fact this was a great relief since the cold of the ice-cream hitting the oily glutinous mass of rice, mussels and prawns had provoked a reaction that brooked no delay. It had become a problem — for if I went the once, how would I explain a second ‘visit’ so soon after?
“Scuse I,” I said, and pushed back my chair. Fortunately a glance at Baz’s stony face brought me to my senses just in time, and I managed the obvious question I had been about to omit out of foreknowledge. “Where is it?”
“The ladies’ room? Upstairs, second on the right,” said Malcolm Clough.
I looked a question at Baz and received a tiny shrug which seemed to say go ahead anyway.
Up there, I popped the bag in the cistern — it was a high-level one but I was able to manage just by lifting the lid — unclipped my braces, negotiated the satin-edged cover on the seat, and then thought again, I did not fancy that the Civil Guard headquarters in Las Palomas should hear the first effects of tarta al whisky on paella. I rehosted the nether garments and stood on the seat — necessary now because the bag had sunk to the bottom of the cistern. The seat, thin pink plastic, shattered. I retrieved the bag, pushed it outside the door, and contrived, with some haste now, and in spite of the shards of broken plastic, to answer one of Nature’s more peremptory calls, perched on the cold porcelain pedestal. Then I retrieved the bag from the landing. But, I thought, when they discover the broken seat they may guess I stood on it and for why. I placed it instead in another pink plastic receptacle instructing ladies in terms so coy I cannot recall them to deposit tampons and sanitary towels in here and not down the loo. On my way back down I pondered some of what had happened, and had been said, and came to the conclusion that Baz was playing a pretty fishy game.
“Baz,” I said, on the way home, “you’re playing a pretty fishy game.”
“So it may seem to you, dear Julia, so it may seem to you.”
“And that bag you gave me, it’s in the upstairs loo. Does that matter?”
“I think not.”
We were wending our way down the short drive to the electronically controlled gate. The garden of the evil trio’s rented villa was of course untended, and branches of hibiscus and plumbago brushed my face.
“It would be fairer for me, and render me more likely to play my part properly, if you told me the truth.”
“Julia, so far you have performed magnificently — and as for the truth, remember, he who tells it is sure to be found out — but, as they say, hist!”
Her sudden movement banished from my lips my riposte to her second-hand epigram and she pulled from I know not where, for she was wearing a single-piece, pocketless garment cut like a boiler suit but made out of yellow wild silk, a small but powerful pencil torch. Its beam, as if laser-guided, fell instantly on the head of a woman standing pressed up against a cypress tree. As the light fell on her she flung up an arm to cover her face, but not before we had both recognized the tall, athletic and sullenly beautiful Carmen — the second of Hicks’s concubines.
“We shall ignore her,” said Baz, extinguishing the torch, and taking my arm. “She has served her purpose. I imagine too she has the means of opening the gate we are approaching and hopefully has left it open for us.”
This turned out to be the case.
Baz was never an early riser, her preferred hours of alertness and work being from midday until two, then from ten at night to five in the morning. She therefore engaged to be on the Hicks’s second cruiser, with her underwater gear, no earlier than half-eleven — an arrangement which the Hicks family, being Spanish by birth or habit, found perfectly acceptable.
I, on the other hand, wake at seven and have to be up and doing by eight at the very latest, and that was the hour that found me next morning again padding about an almost perfectly silent house, bored and hungry. This time I felt no compunction about going straight to the kitchen: a hostess who cannot provide breakfast for her guests at a reasonable time must not be surprised if they fend for themselves. I found coffee in a filter jug, which I reheated, milk in a big fridge and a pack of four croissants in a cupboard. I found the means of heating them through, and I speedily got outside the lot. The moment then arrived which I dread — it is precisely as I pour my second cup of coffee that I most feel a dreadful urge to smoke again. I gave up five years ago, but still the only way to keep myself from a mad scramble for the nearest fag is to resort to displacement activity.