Back at the garden door we waited, listening. No sound now, only the door squeaking as he pulled it gently open. The garden was in three terraces, dropping away steeply to the garage driveway. Two cars were parked there, and where the garage itself disappeared into the hillside, the protruding section was merged with the body of a truck that looked like the one we had seen parked outside the Punta Codolar villa. A figure appeared out of the garage, heading for the nearest car, then turning towards us and slowing. Finally, beside the thin pencil point of a cypress, he stood quite still, feet apart, head thrown back, staring straight at us.
Could he see us in the starlight? Could he see that the door we were peering out of was half-open? We stood there, the three of us, absolutely still, waiting. The man bent his head, both hands to his front, as though holding a weapon. Then he turned and went back to the garage. 'Pissing.' Lennie breathed a sigh of relief, and Petra giggled under her breath as he added, 'It was his cock, not a gun. He was just relieving himself.' He closed the door and led us up through the villa's three levels, up into a large room that faced both ways.
From a circular porthole window we looked out on to the hilltop where barely twenty metres of shrubland separated us from the road. Here a low stone wall marked the limit of the property and a brick arch framed an elaborate wrought-iron gate. A gravel path flanked by stone urns planted with cacti led to the heavy cedarwood door beside us. Lennie eased the catch and pushed it gently open, leaning his head out through the gap. The stars were very bright. 'Looks clear enough.' His scrawny neck, the lined, leathery features, the way he cocked his eyes over the landscape — I had the sudden impression of a turkey checking that nobody was going to grab him for their Christmas dinner. My mind also registered a picture of Gareth being grabbed as he ran from the King's Fleet towards Felixstowe Ferry.
'Shut the door,' I hissed.
He turned, eyeing me curiously. 'Wot's up? Nobody there.'
'If it's Evans loading that truck, he'll have somebody hidden up this side of the villa, just in case.'
'Okay. So we wait.'
He was just shutting the window when we saw lights approaching, and heard the sound of an engine. It was a car, moving fast, and as it passed the villa's gate Lennie sucked in his breath. 'Jesus Christ!' he muttered and half leant out of the window as though to call to the driver. 'Why the hell does he come out here now?'
'Who?' I had only caught a glimpse of the car, a battered estate. I hadn't seen who was driving it.
'Miguel,' he said, still peering out of the window as the car slowed on the dip and turned into the villa's driveway. 'The poor stupid bloody bastard — to come here now, just when they're loading up.' The car's lights flickered through the shrubbery, then they were gone, snuffed out by the comer of the building. The engine note died abruptly.
We listened, but there was no sound — no shouts, no outcry or altercation. Just nothing.
We felt our way across to the other side of the room, standing at the window there, looking down across the flat-topped roofs of the villa's lower levels to the truck, the whole shadowy shape of it now visible as a sort of elongated extension of the garage. And beyond it, on the sweep of the drive, as well as the two cars they had come in, there was the estate car standing black and seemingly empty.
A hand gripped mine, Petra's voice in my ear whispering, 'What is it?' Her fingers tightened convulsively, but it wasn't fear. It was excitement. Her breath was warm on my cheek, her hair touched my ear. 'Is it to do with what happened last night?'
I couldn't answer that. I didn't know. In any case, I was wondering about Miguel. Was he one of them? Was that why he was here? Or had he walked right into it, unarmed and unprepared?
'It's arms, isn't it? It's an arms cache.' And when I still didn't say anything, she whispered urgently, 'If it's arms, then we have to notify somebody, warn the authorities.'
'Not yet — when they've gone..' And I added, 'Maybe we can follow them.'
She had moved her head slightly so that it was outlined against the window. I saw the shape of it nod against the stars, her hand still in mine, still the grip of excitement, so that I was reminded that between school and college she had done a VSO stint in the Andes, trekking alone on the borders of Chile, Peru and Bolivia looking for old Inca remains. I don't think she knew what fear was, otherwise she would never have been able to go it alone at such high altitude with only the Quechua Indians for company. 'What's the time?'
Lennie glanced at the luminous dial of his diving watch. Twenty after midnight.'
'Do you think it's arms?' she asked him.
'Yes, I do.'
Then if they're going to use them tonight they'll have to get a move on.'
At that moment, as though the hoarse whisper of her voice had carried to the garage below, the dark shadow of a man came hurrying up through the garden, leaping the steps between the terraces and angling away to the right. Abreast of the upper part of the villa he put his hand to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle on two notes like the call of a bird. A figure rose out of a dark mass of shrubbery beside the road some two hundred yards away, glanced quickly round, then hurried to join the man below. The two of them went back down the terraces to the garage where half a dozen men were now heading for the parked cars. The slam of a door came to us faintly, then the truck's engine started up. The men got into the cars, all three of them, including Miguel's estate, and the little convoy moved off, slowly and without lights, then swung left at the driveway end and from the front of the villa we watched them pass along the road, dark shapes in silhouette against the stars heading for Punta Codolar.
'What do we do now — get the car and follow them?'
'Depends how good you are at driving without lights/ I told her.
She laughed. 'Won't be the first time.'
Lennie had the door open and we were out into the night, slamming it behind us and running to the road. It was all downhill to where Petra had parked the Beetle and took us barely two minutes. 'Where now?' she asked breathlessly as she started the engine. I hesitated. There was only one road out until the crossroads junction with the main Mahon-Fornells road, unless they were heading for the ports of either Macaret or Addaia. 'Back up the hill,' I said. 'It's just possible they'll stop at the Punta Codolar villa.' If Evans was involved and they were operating to an exact timetable, then I thought they might be using it as a rendezvous.
She drove fast, a lot faster than I would have cared to drive in that dim light, up past the villa where they had been loading the truck, over the shoulder of the cove's sheltering arm and out on to the bleak empty heathland beyond. There was more light here, cliffs all round us dropping to the sea which reflected the starlight, and against that milky glimmer the Punta Codolar villa stood out solitary and square like a concrete pillbox, and beside it, also outlined against the stars, was the black rectangular shape of the truck.
Petra slammed on the brakes and we rolled to a stop. 'Where now?'
We had just passed a service road under construction and some two hundred yards away to the right there was a road roller hull-down in the heathland. I told her to back up and park beside it. Close against the road roller, our front wheels hard into the rubble of an open trench where an electricity cable was being laid, the Beetle was almost indistinguishable from the heavy mass of the roller's iron.