Medusa

I nodded. He wouldn’t know about Soo, of course. None of them would, except Mault. At least I hoped he was the only one. For the time being anyway. The midshipman saw it solely in terms of naval tactics, the sort of move Nelson or Cochrane might have made, not realising that what Gareth had done was to take the one positive action that could nullify absolutely his half-brother’s threats. God knows what it had cost him in mental anguish to take such a gamble, not just with Soo’s life, but with his own, and with the lives of all his men. He had called Evans’s bluff and he had won, and I was hearing it from this kid of a midshipman, who was standing there, starry-eyed and bubbling with excitement, as he told me how he had spent the first half of the night in charge of half a dozen seamen on the hospital tower, acting as lookouts and armed with hand-held rocket-launchers.

It was hot as the launch slowed to run alongside our quay, the sun blazing out of a blue sky, the surface of the water oily-calm, and traffic moving on the steep road from the Martires Atlante to the Carrero Blanco. Everything looked so normal it was hard to believe that there had been several hours during the night when the future of Menorca had hung in the balance, the threat of hostilities looming.

And then I was ashore, the chandlery door open and Ramón coming out of the store in answer to my call. No, he had no news of the señora. I raced up the stairs. Somebody had cleared the place up, the maid I suppose. The telephone was still working. I sat down at the table by the window and rang the Renatos, but Manuela had no information about her. She suggested I ring the Gobierno Militar. Gonzalez had been there since early morning and might have heard something. But her husband was no longer there, and when I finally tracked him down at the ayuntamiento, he had heard nothing. I tried the policia, the Guardia Civil, finally in desperation I rang the Residencia Sanitaria. They had quite a few casualties in, but they were all men, including an Australian who had just been brought in from the English warship. When I asked how serious his injuries were, they said he had not yet been fully examined. If I liked to enquire a little later …

I said I would ring back in an hour’s time, and then as a last resort tried to get through to Perez at the Naval Base, but the phone was engaged and when I finally did manage to reach his office, he was out and the officer who answered the phone had no idea when he would be back. I rang the Army then, out at La Mola, and to my surprise I was connected immediately with some sort of duty officer. He put me through to somebody in one of the casements, who said a woman had been seen with a group of the ‘soldadi del revolution’, but where they had taken her he did not know. Needless to say he was not prepared to discuss what had happened the previous day nor even where she had been held.

All this took time and it was late afternoon before I had exhausted all possible sources of information and was forced to the conclusion that I would have to go out to Addaia, or wherever it was they had embarked, in the hope of finding somebody who had actually witnessed their departure. But first I needed a car. Mine had disappeared. I tried to borrow one, but everybody I rang was either out or their car was in use, and I couldn’t hire one because my driving licence was in the pocket of my own car. In the end I persuaded the people who provided cars for tourists staying at the Port Mahon Hotel to let me have one of their little Fiats on the understanding that I applied immediately for a copy of my licence.

I tried the hospital again while I was waiting for one of their drivers to bring it round. After some time I was able to speak to one of the sisters, who told me Lennie’s cheek had been stitched up and the knife wound in the chest, which had narrowly missed the heart, had pierced the lung. He was under sedation at the moment, so no point in my trying to see him. She advised me to ring again in the morning.

As I put the phone down Ramón called to me from below. I thought it was to say the car had arrived, but he shouted up to me that it was Miguel Gallardo’s wife, asking to see me.