Ibiza Surprise (27 page)

It had been a mistake to look up. I missed my footing in earnest this time and, tumbling forward, fell head over heels down a steep, earthy slope, landing in blackness, all the breath knocked clean out of me.

There is no aid like cowardice in a quick-reaction alert. I got to my feet while my robed friend was still coming and made off like a hare.

I was running, I found, in a ditch. It was man made and excessively deep, and the sides were formed by slopes of sieved, heavy, dry earth, down one of which I had just tumbled. I tried running up them again. It was like trying to climb into the top of an hourglass. I wasted time on it, while the thudding footsteps behind me got closer, and gave up and sprinted, as fast as my shaking sinews would make it, along the foot of the ditch.

It ended in a blocked tunnel. Just that. Why, I never knew. I never knew either what they were building there, or laying, or why they wanted a tunnel at all. I just knew I ran into it and turned, cornered, and stood motionless, my pent-up breath mewing with exhaustion, while he groped all over the blackness, coming closer and closer. I made a break for it in the end, running headlong for the dim mouth of the tunnel, the way I’d come in.

I fell. As he flung his full weight on me, I thought the roof of the tunnel had caved in. Then I saw his black robe fly up, and his foot came over, hard, pinning mine.

All the penitents I had seen wore black shoes. All the holiday-makers I mixed with wore light Spanish shoes in fine leather or suede. The man gripping me now, and heaving me up, breathing fast, grunting, with the gun in his hand, wore neither of these. He wore sneakers. White canvas sneakers, liberally stained with grass and with salt.

I stopped struggling, and he dragged me upward, the grip on my arm became sickening. I heard him draw breath to tell me, this is the end of the road.

‘Clem, don’t be silly,’ I said.

I didn’t really believe it myself, until I felt his arm sag. I was nearly sick, then. Flo would have been sick. I said again: ‘Don’t be silly. We all know who you are.’

‘You’re lying,’ he said. It was Clem’s voice.

‘I’m not,’ I said. Steam was coming out of my brain. ‘Jorge and Gregorio are in Mummy’s house. Johnson took them there.’

‘You’re lying,’ he said again, and his voice had got three notes higher.

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘How else do you think Johnson knew there was another replica of the Saint Hubert collar? He only wanted you to betray yourself.’

I wasn’t sure, even then, if what I was saying made sense. All I knew was that somehow I had to make him believe that Johnson knew who he was. That way, there was no need to kill me. That way, he needed me as a hostage for a little while yet, because he couldn’t just go back to
Dolly
and pretend to have been there all night, lying faint with a bump on his head. (Who had done that? Austin?) Somehow, Clem Sainsbury had to escape.

You could see the thoughts going through his head as, automatically, he started to move once again. The hand with the gun had come down, but he hadn’t released me. He had only shifted the point of the gun from my head to my back. Then we stood in the entrance of the tunnel and waited.

It was very quiet. Over the wasteland and beyond the sides of the plaza, you could hear the intermittent sounds of the procession: the tiny bugles, the flat thud of the drums, marking all the slow stages. Soon, when the Portal was clear, Clem would try to get through.

Clem. He had taken his hood off and now, maintaining his gun carefully in my ribs, he was dropping his robe. No need for concealment now, not from me. If I was telling the truth, it would make no odds with Johnson, either. And if I wasn’t, he could bluff. He might even, gun pressed in my side, misdirect the hunt. So I suppose he was thinking. He didn’t say anything. And in the dark I could make out almost nothing, just the humid heat of his bulk, his short hair sticking with sweat above the pale blur of his face, and the raucous sound of his breath.

He said, suddenly: ‘What a pity I can’t trust you, Sarah. Damn you, why can’t I trust you?’ His voice was like a boy’s, petulant and he pulled me with his gun hand close, hard to his body, so that his mouth was close to my cheek. He licked my ear.

I nearly screamed. I drew in my breath with a shrieking whisper, and stopped the sound as he jerked off, groaning with anger, and brought the gun butt across the side of my head. A lot of lights sprang about in front of my eyes, and I lost my balance. When I got over it, I was leaning against the cold side of the archway with the hot, hard grip still on my arm, but there was space between us again. The drums had faded.

‘The next time,’ said Clem, ‘I’ll scoop your brains out like seeds from a melon.’

He seemed to enjoy the expression. Then we started moving again.

I had had a hope, I believe, that he would try to emerge in the square and that the police would stop him. How I thought this would save my own life, I don’t know. I don’t remember being concerned by much except a desire to see him under lock and key. At any rate, he didn’t even look at the square. He walked instead along the ditch and back up to the wall of the battlement. He followed it, walking carefully, round all its points until it took two left-hand turns and came out, incredibly, above the roofless square of the chamber which lay just inside the Portal de las Tablas, the main gateway of Dalt Vila.

There was no float there now jammed blazing under the balcony. There were no policemen either; these were all in the square.

I saw Clem’s teeth flash in a strong, healthy smile, and he said: ‘You managed to follow me up, darling. So you shouldn’t find it too hard to get down. Just take my hand.’

And the next moment we were through the low door, scrambling down that damned creeper.

The ramp down to the market was empty but for a child or two, laggard to bed, and a disbanding family party. There were plenty of lights, and in the town groups of people turning away, to catch a bus, to have a last drink, to talk with chance-met friends. White-robed penitents, having delivered their image, were gathered chatting outside their church, a litter of flowers at their feet. Inside the church, a priest was dismantling the palanquin. The lamps were unscrewed and the Virgin’s gown had gone, disclosing the rusty metal of the two heavy batteries. A girl of about six, with pigtails and a frilled blouse and a round Hapsburg chin, was fooling about with a palm leaf. We hurried on.

No one looked at us, the brawny young man and the girl he was holding so closely. And yet, I supposed he had the Saint Hubert rubies in his pocket.

I said: ‘Where are you going?’

He couldn’t kill me here, not unless he were cornered. But if he were cornered. I thought, he would do it, out of sheer bravura and hate. You would have to hate people to kill as he must have killed – Austin. Coco. Father.

He didn’t answer. But suddenly, as the silence continued, as we made our way to the quayside, I knew where he was going. He had to get out of Ibiza. No man could hide on an island. No plane would take him. But there was a boat which would take him very well. . .

Dolly. Dolly, with her powerful engine, sitting unattended in her berth, along by the yacht club.

By the quay, he found Mummy’s Humber, parked there by Dilling through the gentlemanly offices of the chief of police. The keys were still in it. Clem stopped, drew a breath, and then, flinging me in by main force, got the thing started and the gun again in my side before I recovered. Moving like a runaway hearse at a funeral, the Humber thundered across the wide space of the quayside and along to the right, on the road to the clubhouse. Clem drove all the way without changing down, with one hand on the wheel, and made the turn into the yard of the yacht club at the same speed, putting both feet on the pedals with such force that I was nearly flung through the windscreen. Then he snapped up the handbrake and motioned me out.

The gates were shut. For a moment I hoped they’d be locked and realised, then, that they wouldn’t be. Men living on boats could hardly be held to a curfew. In fact, Clem heaved at one of the new, silvery leaves and, pushing his gun in my back, forced me through. Then, pushing me, he began to run down the steps and along the quay towards
Dolly.

We passed them one after the other, the beautiful boats with the yacht-club hieroglyphics: kyc; nrv; cni, and the orange and blue nylon ropes. Boats whose owners liked swimming and sunshine and had no need to count time. Those who could leave their offices, if they had offices, to fly to the Med and take on a casual boy, the son of a friend, a student down for vacation, and float with a party of friends – a bridge four, a drinking party, a sex foursome with congenial wives – from port to port and island to island, while the weather went along with the whim. I knew all the names. I knew some of the people. Daddy, probably, had known them all. We came, running, to the bollard where
Dolly
was berthed.

And
Dolly
was missing.

I heard Clem’s breath go in like a whistle. He looked round, heavily, like a bull. Had she changed berths? Was she out at a mooring? Was she sailing?

I looked at him. It mattered to me. Pushed to the end of his nerves, he was unpredictable. I didn’t know what he might do. I couldn’t see
Dolly
either, not anywhere: although we ran back along the whole frontage, desperately, and then retraced our steps. He stood gazing at the space where she’d been, his eyes black and open, as he wondered if he’d gone mad. Perhaps he had. His face was heavy and unlined, without any real stamp of living, as it had always been. I had envied him his lack of anxieties, in the simple, open-air life he had chosen. I hadn’t realised that, perhaps, his brain didn’t accept normal worries, that its scale of reference was quite different.

He stared at the water, and then for the last time he turned round, and I turned with him. We both saw
Dolly,
I think, at the same moment.

She wasn’t in the water at all. She was lying, her masts sloping above us, in the boatyard, and she was moving slowly as the chains pulled her up, up to where a blinded horse walked in a circle, loading the core of the winch.

I think then Clem went crazy. He left me. He dropped even his gun and ran through the gate, scrambling into the boatyard past tar barrels and lumber and tarpaulined boats. Then, seizing the horse, running after it as it shook its head and tried to jerk free, he tried to get it to turn, to reverse the laborious circle and unwind, so that the chains would slacken and
Dolly
would slip back into the water again – the life-giving water, where his only hope lay.

He was on the horse, urging it, when the Maserati flew down the road, and Johnson piled out, with Spry and Dilling and three Spanish police officers, hanging on by their eyebrows. A moment later, the Buick came along too. driven by Gilmore, with his father and my mother in the back. I didn’t see what happened as they streamed over the weedy sand into the enclosure: I had stopped looking as soon as Clem got near the horse. In fact, I think I was crying, in horrible, great, uncouth gulps, when Mummy came over the rubble, picking her way with her flounces hitched up round her calves, and sitting down, proceeded to fish out and light a cheroot.

She said: ‘Organised games: I never could go along with them. I didn’t tell you, She-she, at the time, but I got real worried when St Tizzy’s made you captain of cricket. If your body’s all that healthy, I reckon there’s something gone soft in your mind. Look at Derek. He was never the same after those nut cutlets.’

I swallowed. I don’t know why Mummy doesn’t talk like other people.

I said: ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. I suppose you’d prefer Coco.’

‘But that proves my point,’ Mummy said, taking her cheroot out of her mouth. ‘Think of the tennis. The fact that he was doped to the eyeballs doesn’t make all that difference.’

I said, carefully: ‘I’m not sure, but I think you’re saying Coco was soft in the head?’

‘Well, he’d have to be, to let me keep him, dear, wouldn’t he?’ said Mummy. ‘He poured all the rest of himself into his concrete, poor darling. To die young is not always a sorrow. Look how fat your gym mistresses always used to become.’

‘But you don’t want to kill off my gym mistresses,’ I said. The running, the scuffling, and the subdued shouting had retired in the direction of the yacht clubhouse.

‘Where would we be without all those chest-developing exercises?’

‘You wouldn’t have had to wear your girdle under your armpits during all last year’s fashion,’ pointed out Mummy, with justice. ‘The healthiest people are those who never think of their health.’

‘Well, Christ, they don’t need to,’ I said, ‘if they’re healthy. They’ve got leisure then to stir up trouble sticking their noses into other people’s business. You don’t find hypochondriacs staging a thirty-six hour sit-down protest in sleet outside the Central Iguanian Embassy. Or Olympic medallists, either.’

Mummy stared at me. ‘There’s no such place as a Central Iguanian Embassy.’

Johnson’s pipe glowed, suddenly, in the dark close beside us.

‘But there ought to be,’ he said. ‘If you’ve finished the cross talk, Mr Lloyd has kindly offered to run us all back to his house for a meal.’

‘He
what?’
I said, straightening my knees.

‘Oh, hard luck, She-she,’ said my mother, shaking the dust from her flounces and rising, cheroot holder extended, to touch me absently on the cheek. ‘I don’t suppose it has struck him that you’ll have to cook it. If you would bear in mind my small problem. My diet doesn’t permit me to take any fat.’

‘Your
diet,’
I said. ‘Did you say your d . . . ?’

Mummy’s stare would have impaled a lizard.

‘Beauty,’ she said, ‘and symmetry. To have regard for the case of one’s instrument is a matter of simple aesthetics. I believe we are summoned.’

She stalked off into the darkness in the direction of the cars. Johnson tucked his arm around mine.

‘High-speed wander in the steering-unit,’ he said. ‘But the engine’s terrific. Come with us and get drunk.’