The cellar itself was reached by a curving flight of half a dozen concrete steps. It had been blasted out of the solid rock, an area of about thirty square metres lined with wine racks. He swung his torch over the array of bottles that hid the naked rock of the walls. 'Got some good stuff here, certainly has. Haven't been in the cellar since he got it fully stocked.' He went over to the far corner where there was an olive-wood table and two seats made out of oak-staved barrels standing on a sheet of corrugated iron. When we had shifted the furniture and pulled the tin sheet aside, there was a jagged-edged hole dropping away into what looked like nothingness with the slop and gurgle of water faintly audible.
'Well, there it is,' he said to Petra. 'Down you go. Turn right at the bottom and you'll find the drawings on the roof about twenty yards away. If you get to the rock fall where I blasted out the blowhole to make the garage you've gone past it, okay?' He was fastening one end of the rope to the base of one of the bottle racks, then he put a couple of foot loops into it before passing the end of it down the hole. ''Bout ten feet, that's all, then you're into the blowhole.' He passed Petra one of the torches and held her while she got her foot into the first loop. She looked very strange, her body disappearing into the floor, shadows flickering on the walls and the bottles watching with a dusty glint.
We lit the pressure lamp and passed it down to her. Then we lowered ourselves into the cave-like passageway beside her. It was wider than I had expected, the walls very irregular, and quite different to the cellar, for the rock here had not been blasted, but was carved out by centuries of pressurised sea water as the waves of the tramontana crashed against the coast.
'We'll leave you for a moment,' Lennie told her.
'Why? Where are you going?'
Lennie nodded in the opposite direction. 'We'll head down the slope. I want Mike to see how the blowhole drops into the cave. Won't be long.' We left her then, moving quickly down the irregular passageway. At times we were almost crawling, then suddenly the passage would open out into an expansion chamber so that we could walk virtually upright. Here and there Lennie paused, the beam of his torch directed at the scuffed dust of the floor, and all the time the sound of the sea increasing as it slopped and gurgled in the cavern ahead. Round the first bend he paused. 'I wasn't telling Petra this. She's hooked on cave drawings and such. But this is what I came to check on.' His hand was on my arm, a tight grip as he pulled me down to take a closer look at the floor. 'A lot of stuff has been dragged along here. Heavy stuff in cases, I'd say. And here and there the imprint of a shoe. Look!' And he let go my arm, tracing a blurred imprint in the dust.
'Smuggling?' I was thinking of Gareth, all the questions he had asked over that lunch at Fornells — and that story of his about Evans in the King's Fleet. 'You say you saw the Santa Marialying off here?'
'Sure did.' Lennie straightened up. 'Come on. And be careful now. It gets steeper. Then I'll show you how it's done.'
We continued on, another expansion chamber opening up, the sound of the sea suddenly very loud. At the far end the blowhole tunnel fell right away, an almost vertical drop, the nearside of which had been heavily scored as though by a large shovel or scraper. Rigged across the hole was a lattice of small scaffolding poles bolted together to hold a heavy metal pulley. We slithered down till we could clutch the scaffolding, then, leaning out over the abyss and probing downwards with our torches, we could see the surge of the waves in the cave mouth, the water in the cavern itself rising and falling against a steep little beach of dark sand and round, water-rolled stones that gleamed wetly.
There was also something else, a heavy old anchor, brown with rust and half-buried in the beach. A heavy-duty purchase of the type used in large yachts before the switch to winches was shackled to the eye of the stock, and nylon sheets or warps ran through the pulleys and out into the sea. That's what I came here for.' Lennie's voice was a whisper as though at any moment he expected one of the smugglers to rise like a genie out of the blowhole. 'To see how they did it.'
'So what do you think they were bringing ashore?' I asked him.
'Dunno, mate. I thought it would be just ordinary household things, TV sets, electric cookers, glassware, jewellery, anything that was taxable. But after last night…'
'What are you suggesting- arms?'
'Well, it certainly ain't drugs. The Menorquins haven't gone for that so far and the villa people..' He stopped abruptly as Petra slithered down to join us, the pressure lamp casting her shadow behind her, lighting up the latticework of steel tubing on which we leaned.
She was panting, her eyes wide and a little wild. 'Some silly bugger's been playing around with candles. They're not cave drawings at all.' She gulped for air. 'But it's not that. I thought I heard voices, the sound of an engine.'
'Where?' Lennie asked.
'Beyond the garage.' She took a deep breath, pulling herself together. 'There's no cave-in there, no rock fall. It's all been cleared away.'
'You mean you went inside the garage?'
'No.' She shook her head, the dust stirring in her shoulder-length hair. 'No, it was boarded up. A jagged hole stopped up with what looked like fresh matchboarding.'
Lennie didn't wait to hear any more. He pushed past her and started back up the slope, clawing his way up on all fours. I followed, dragging Petra after me. We were all together in a bunch as we ducked past the rope we had rigged from the cellar and came to the boarded-up hole into the garage. 'Look at it!' Petra held the pressure lamp up and her voice was an angry whisper as she rubbed at the blurred black outline of some four-legged animals on the roof. 'Candle-black.' She showed me the palm of her hand. It looked as though she had been handling a badly printed newspaper, and the head of the beast was smudged. 'The sort of thing a schoolboy would do, and I was fool enough to hope…'
Lennie's hand clamped suddenly over her mouth. 'Listen!' He opened the valve of the pressure lamp, his torch switched off, the hiss of the gas mantle dying away and in the darkness the scrape of a door sounding muffled and a voice, very faint from beyond the boarding, instructing somebody to back right up to the door. An engine revved, more directions, then a babble of whispering voices barely audible as the engine noise died away and was suddenly cut. A tailboard slammed and somebody said, 'Quiet! Keep everything quiet.' There was no more talking after that, only the sound of heavy boxes or crates being loaded.
The cellar/ Lennie breathed. 'Follow me and keep hold.'
We felt our way back down the blowhole till we came to the rope again. Lennie went first, then Petra. My foot was in the first loop, ready to follow her, when the crash of breaking wood sounded hollow along the passageway. I froze, thinking for a moment they had heard us and were breaking through from the garage. Somebody swore, a muffled voice — 'That was my fucking foot, you bastard.' An answering voice, then the two of them arguing until somebody shouted at them to cool it. By then I was on to the second loop and reaching up to clutch hold of Lennie's hand. As soon as I was out of the hole he unhitched the end of the rope, coiling it and slinging it over his shoulder, then he swung the torch to show us the steps leading up to the cellar door. 'Just follow me.' Black darkness as he switched off the torch again and we felt our way up to the room above.