Medusa

Flórez saw me then, and as he switched on a smile and got to his feet, the man sitting with his back to me raised his hand as though for silence. ‘You want a drink with your coffee, Mr Steele?’ Flórez called the order to the barman and pulled up a chair. ‘Later we go over to the ship.’ He didn’t introduce me to any of the others, merely saying I was the man he had been talking about.

There was a short, awkward silence after I had sat down. I was between Flórez and the man I took to be the skipper. He wore an old reefer and his neck stuck out of the collar of it like a column running straight up into the long, narrow head. His face, what little I could see of it in that light, was weathered to a dark brown, a strong, flamboyantly handsome face with a powerful jaw line and a nose that hung straight and sharp over a narrow, tight-lipped mouth. It was an almost Gallic face, the eyes very bright, the brilliance of the whites under the thick head of black hair giving them a wide-eyed look that was almost a stare. A little black moustache, turned down over the corners of the mouth, seemed to split his features in two, dividing the jaw and the mouth from the sharp, pointed nose and staring eyes. If it hadn’t been for the moustache, I think I might have recognised him at once.

‘That fishing boat of yours …’ he said. ‘Señor Flórez took me to see it this morning. Just what I and my two friends here are looking for.’ His two friends, seated across the table from me, nodded. One of them was small and sharp-featured, the other much larger, a big barrel of a chest, broad shoulders, his crumpled features reminding me of a boxer from Dublin I had picked up one time in Gib and delivered to Tangier. ‘We got to earn a living.’ He smiled an engaging, friendly smile. ‘Nice place, Mahon. Fishing good, too.’ There was a softness in his voice, the accent faintly Irish.

‘What he means is we’re just about broke,’ the man beside me went on. ‘We need a fishing boat and somewhere ashore where we can live and store our gear. You happen to have what we want. I saw that villa you’re building this afternoon. I also had a look at Port d’Addaia. If we had the villa we’d keep the boat there. Nice and handy. Well sheltered, too.’ He wasn’t looking at me now, his eyes on his coffee as though talking to himself and his hands flat on the table. They were big, fine-boned, very capable-looking hands. ‘Now tell me something about this fishing boat of yours — speed, range, charts on board, sails, etc. I’ve read the details, of course, and one of your men showed me over her, but I’d like to hear about her from you, okay?’

My coffee came as I began to run through the inventory and the performance, and all the time I was thinking of that catamaran and trying to build up the value of the Santa Maria, knowing that the exchange was heavily weighted in my favour. To build a cat like that at the present time — good God, it would cost a fortune.

A glass had come with my coffee. He reached for the bottle and filled it for me. ‘Salud!’ We drank, raising our glasses as though the deal were already completed.

‘I saw you come in this morning,’ I said. ‘Where were you from?’

He stared at me, and there was something about the eyes … but then he had turned away. ‘Fishing,’ he said. ‘We’d been fishing.’

‘You had a passenger on board, so I naturally thought …’

‘I tell you, we’d been fishing.’ He looked at me again, his eyes coldly hostile. ‘There was a friend of mine with us. We enjoy fishing. All of us.’ He stared at me hard for a moment. ‘Don’t we?’ he said to the other two, and they nodded. ‘Okay.’ He knocked back the rest of his drink and got almost violently to his feet. ‘If you’re interested in the deal, then we’ll go over to Thunderflash and you can poke around down below. But — ’ and he leaned suddenly over me, prodding my chest with a hard index finger, ‘don’t go asking stupid questions, see. One of the reasons we’re all here is because Flórez said you were discreet — when it was to your advantage. Right?’

I didn’t say anything. Looking up at him and seeing those eyes staring down at me, I suddenly realised who he was. This was the man Gareth Lloyd Jones had been looking for. Evans. Patrick Evans. Slowly I got to my feet, the others too, and we all went out and across the road to the dock. The American was below as we clambered across his boat and dropped on to the deck of the catamaran. Evans unlocked the door, ushering me below in a way that left me in no doubt that he was the owner, and the moment I stepped down into that great saloon, with its breadth and comfort and the fabulous view for’ard, I was hooked. I had never been in this type of craft before. Even at the Boat Show in London, the last time I had been there, I hadn’t seen anything like this, so immaculately designed, so perfectly suited to cruising in the Mediterranean.