Medusa

The villa was in darkness, one of those architect-designed summer homes built into the rocky slope on several layers, its garden stepped in terraces. The owner was apparently a German bank executive, and Miguel, who looked after it for him, had told Lennie he was not expected until the middle of June. We left the car at the first hotel, parked among a covey of hired Fiats, and climbed back up the hill, Petra with her bag of archaeological stuff slung over her shoulder, Lennie and I with the torches, pressure lamp, a bottle of wine and a coil of rope taken from his boat. The driveway swung off direct to the garage, which was built into the hillside at the bottom of the garden. ‘We had to blast that out of solid rock.’ Lennie had done the blasting. ‘That was what he wanted me for.’ He had worked at one time in one of the Kalgoorlie mines. He had been a prospector, too. ‘It’s limestone here, nice easy stuff. That’s why there’s caves and blowholes.’ We climbed up the terraces and let ourselves in through the garden door, the house very dark inside and smelling faintly of paint and sea damp. ‘Better not show a light.’ Lennie closed the door and pocketed the key. ‘Had it copied,’ he said with a wink. ‘You never know.’ And he added, ‘You two wait here while I locate the cellar door.’

The cellar itself was reached by a curving flight of half a dozen concrete steps. It had been blasted out of the solid rock, an area of about thirty square metres lined with wine racks. He swung his torch over the array of bottles that hid the naked rock of the walls. ‘Got some good stuff here, certainly has. Haven’t been in the cellar since he got it fully stocked.’ He went over to the far corner where there was an olive-wood table and two seats made out of oak-staved barrels standing on a sheet of corrugated iron. When we had shifted the furniture and pulled the tin sheet aside, there was a jagged-edged hole dropping away into what looked like nothingness with the slop and gurgle of water faintly audible.

‘Well, there it is,’ he said to Petra. ‘Down you go. Turn right at the bottom and you’ll find the drawings on the roof about twenty yards away. If you get to the rock fall where I blasted out the blowhole to make the garage you’ve gone past it, okay?’ He was fastening one end of the rope to the base of one of the bottle racks, then he put a couple of foot loops into it before passing the end of it down the hole. ‘Bout ten feet, that’s all, then you’re into the blowhole.’ He passed Petra one of the torches and held her while she got her foot into the first loop. She looked very strange, her body disappearing into the floor, shadows flickering on the walls and the bottles watching with a dusty glint.

We lit the pressure lamp and passed it down to her. Then we lowered ourselves into the cave-like passageway beside her. It was wider than I had expected, the walls very irregular, and quite different to the cellar, for the rock here had not been blasted, but was carved out by centuries of pressurised sea water as the waves of the tramontana crashed against the coast.

‘We’ll leave you for a moment,’ Lennie told her.

‘Why? Where are you going?’

Lennie nodded in the opposite direction. ‘We’ll head down the slope. I want Mike to see how the blowhole drops into the cave. Won’t be long.’ We left her then, moving quickly down the irregular passageway. At times we were almost crawling, then suddenly the passage would open out into an expansion chamber so that we could walk virtually upright. Here and there Lennie paused, the beam of his torch directed at the scuffed dust of the floor, and all the time the sound of the sea increasing as it slopped and gurgled in the cavern ahead. Round the first bend he paused, ‘I wasn’t telling Petra this. She’s hooked on cave drawings and such. But this is what I came to check on.’ His hand was on my arm, a tight grip as he pulled me down to take a closer look at the floor. ‘A lot of stuff has been dragged along here. Heavy stuff in cases, I’d say. And here and there the imprint of a shoe. Look!’ And he let go my arm, tracing a blurred imprint in the dust.

‘Smuggling?’ I was thinking of Gareth, all the questions he had asked over that lunch at Fornells — and that story of his about Evans in the King’s Fleet. ‘You say you saw the Santa Maria lying off here?’

‘Sure did.’ Lennie straightened up. ‘Come on. And be careful now. It gets steeper. Then I’ll show you how it’s done.’