Medusa

She was waiting for me in the chandlery, her large, comfortable-looking body seeming to fill the place, but all the vivacity gone out of her, a worried look on the round, olive-complexioned face, her large eyes wide below the black hair cut in a fringe. She had been trying to phone me, she said. About Miguel. She was speaking in a rush and obviously in a very emotional state. He hadn’t been home for two nights and she wondered whether I had seen him or had any idea where he might be. She had been to the Guardia, of course, and the hospitals, but everything was so confused following all the happenings of the last two days … And I just stood there, listening to her, a sickening feeling inside me, remembering how her husband had driven up to that villa in his battered estate car. Christ! I’d forgotten all about it until that moment.

What the hell could I tell her? That Miguel, innocent and unsuspecting, had driven straight into a bunch of men loading arms and ammunitions from an underground cache and on the brink of a desperate coup? And then, as I stood there, speechless and unable to give her a word of encouragement, it hit me. That cellar, that hole in the floor. An oubliette. Oh, God!

I told her he might have had business somewhere, and in the circumstances he might not have been able to let her know he was delayed in some other part of the island. She nodded, drinking in my words, clutching at hope — and my own heart thumping. Would I know — if she were alive, or if she were dead? Would Miguel’s wife, her hands folded and on the verge of tears, know if he were alive?

The car arrived and thankfully I escaped into the routine of taking it over. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ I told her. ‘But I’ll keep an eye open and if I see him …’ I left it at that, the sickening feeling with me again as I offered her a lift. But she was all right. Her daughter had a shoe shop just by the Club Maritimo. She would take her home. Her hands were warm and pudgy as she clasped mine, thanking me profusely, her lips trembling. ‘You will telephone me plees.’ She was very near to tears now. ‘If you hear anything. Plees, you promise.’

I promised, escaping quickly out to the car, close to tears myself as I thought of what might have happened. Evans wouldn’t have taken any chances. He wouldn’t have left her body lying about. And the villa of that absent German businessman was barely four miles from Addaia, ten minutes by car. Less if the Santa Maria had been shifted to the seaward end of the inlet and had been waiting for him at Macaret The villa wasn’t two miles from Macaret, and I had been so busy trying to find somebody in Mahon who might have seen her or know where she was that I hadn’t thought of it.

I dropped the driver off at his garage on the Villa Carlos road, then took the shortest route to the waterfront, cutting down the General Sanjurjo to the Plaza España. It was getting dark already, the lights on in the shops and the narrow streets thronged with people, most of whom seemed there just to meet their friends and express their pleasure at the return to normality. And when I finally reached the waterfront even the Passo de la Alameda was full of people come to look at the Spanish warships anchored off.

There was considerable activity at the three Naval Base jetties, a coastal minesweeper coming alongside with what looked like a fishing boat in tow and a fishery protection launch pulling out. Standing off was a fierce little warship that I knew, the Barcelo-class fast attack patrol boat that Fernando Perez had taken me over one hot September day the previous year. All this, and the destroyers, with the Manuel Soto, the big white ferry from Barcelona, towering over the Muelle Commercial, was enough to give the Menorquins back their confidence. There was a lot of drinking going on in the port, an air of gaiety, and at the bottom of the Abundancia I had threaded my way through a crowd of about a hundred dancing in the street to a guitar.