Medusa

The rattle of tools made me turn. It was Lennie wheeling a barrow with an assortment of picks, spades and shovels. ‘Looks like the prospect of two of us on the island with nothing better to do has gone to the lady’s head.’ He parked the barrow and shook my hand. ‘Glad to see the Navy delivered you safe and sound. And the beard kinda suits you.’ He looked me over, a gap-toothed grin lighting his craggy features. ‘Stable door’s wide open, mate. Better zip up before I jump to any conclusions.’ He took a pick from the barrow and approached the exposed slab of pale stone, standing there waiting for me to fix my trousers. ‘Petra says to work round it with care, like it was a piece of Ming porcelain. She’s making some coffee for us.’ He hesitated, looking across to where Medusa’s superstructure showed above the back of the island. ‘Chris’sakes, that’s an old frigate. I was in the Navy once, so whether they’re Aussie or Pom, I don’t much go for Navy ships, but by God I’m glad to see that one here. You heard what went on last night?’

I nodded. ‘Petra told me.’

‘Okay. Well, while we’re trying to clear a little more of the rubble round this stone she thinks is a taula, I’ll tell you what happened to me last night. It concerns you in a way since it was your boat until a few weeks back.’ He cocked his head at me sideways. ‘I haven’t told her this, so keep it to yourself. She thinks we’re going to have a look at rock drawings.’ He began picking gently away at the weed growth along one side of the exposed stone as he told me how Miguel had taken him over to Arenal d’en Castell one evening to show him some plastering work he wanted done in one of the hotels. They had then driven back by way of the villa he had been building on Punta Codolar. ‘Up there, you know, you look across to that cave and the villa above it where I did a bit of work on the side.’

He grinned at me, leaning on his pick, waiting I think for me to complain that he had been working for two people at the same time. ‘It was a funny sort of night, no wind and black as hell with the clouds hanging right on top of us. I wouldn’t have seen it except that Miguel had to turn the car and on the slope there the beam of the headlights swept across it. Your boat.’ He nodded. ‘The old Santa Maria. No doubt about it. I had Miguel turn back and hold the headlights right on her for a moment.’

Apparently she had been lying close in, right opposite the mouth of the cave. He couldn’t see whether she was anchored or not. What he did see was that there were men on deck lowering a case into the water. He paused there and I asked him what he thought they were up to. ‘Well, I tell you this, mate, they weren’t fishing.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Had Miguel turn the car and drive off, double quick. You see something like that, you don’t hang around.’

‘No.’ I was thinking of Gareth Lloyd Jones and the King’s Fleet. ‘So what are you planning to do tonight?’

‘Go and look at rock drawings.’ He gave that funny grin of his and turned back to picking at the weed growth round the stone slab. ‘You want to come?’ And he added, ‘But don’t let on to Petra what I’ve told you. She’d be thinking of what happened that night at Cales Coves.’

The paths leading one deeper and deeper into trouble can be very tenuous. If Lennie hadn’t shot his mouth off to Soo on my behalf, if Petra hadn’t heard he was out of a job and asked him to help out on Bloody Island, if his arrival there hadn’t coincided … But there are so many ifs in life, and the threads that weave the pattern of our existence seem so haphazard that we are inclined to attribute to accident what older races of men put down to fate. At that moment, on Bloody Island, I thought I couldn’t be more deeply involved than I was. And yet, standing there in the sunshine, with all of Mahon and Villa Carlos spread out before me, the Golden Farm of Nelson fame red-roofed across the water on the long peninsula that ran out to the military casements and the big gun positions of La Mola, and the stone of the hospital ruins dark in shadow, I was on the threshold of something that would make my present circumstances seem totally irrelevant.

But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was watching the Spanish patrol boat steaming back to the naval quay and passing through the narrows so close I could have thrown a stone on to its deck if I’d been standing by the beacon. And there was movement on Medusa now, a launch manned by bluejackets coming out from under her stern and pointing its bows to pass the other side of Bloody Island. There was an officer standing in the stern and somehow I knew it was Gareth, knew where he was going. I climbed to a vantage point at the south end of the hospital ruins and watched as the launch powered past me, cutting an arrowhead wake that pointed straight at Cala Figuera. A few minutes and it was alongside the quay we had built, Gareth clambering out and going straight across the road and in through the open door of the chandlery.