Medusa

Back at the garden door we waited, listening. No sound now, only the door squeaking as he pulled it gently open. The garden was in three terraces, dropping away steeply to the garage driveway. Two cars were parked there, and where the garage itself disappeared into the hillside, the protruding section was merged with the body of a truck that looked like the one we had seen parked outside the Punta Codolar villa. A figure appeared out of the garage, heading for the nearest car, then turning towards us and slowing. Finally, beside the thin pencil point of a cypress, he stood quite still, feet apart, head thrown back, staring straight at us.

Could he see us in the starlight? Could he see that the door we were peering out of was half-open? We stood there, the three of us, absolutely still, waiting. The man bent his head, both hands to his front, as though holding a weapon. Then he turned and went back to the garage. ‘Pissing.’ Lennie breathed a sigh of relief, and Petra giggled under her breath as he added, ‘It was his cock, not a gun. He was just relieving himself.’ He closed the door and led us up through the villa’s three levels, up into a large room that faced both ways.

From a circular porthole window we looked out on to the hilltop where barely twenty metres of shrubland separated us from the road. Here a low stone wall marked the limit of the property and a brick arch framed an elaborate wrought-iron gate. A gravel path flanked by stone urns planted with cacti led to the heavy cedarwood door beside us. Lennie eased the catch and pushed it gently open, leaning his head out through the gap. The stars were very bright. ‘Looks clear enough.’ His scrawny neck, the lined, leathery features, the way he cocked his eyes over the landscape — I had the sudden impression of a turkey checking that nobody was going to grab him for their Christmas dinner. My mind also registered a picture of Gareth being grabbed as he ran from the King’s Fleet towards Felixstowe Ferry.

‘Shut the door,’ I hissed.

He turned, eyeing me curiously. ‘Wot’s up? Nobody there.’

‘If it’s Evans loading that truck, he’ll have somebody hidden up this side of the villa, just in case.’

‘Okay. So we wait.’

He was just shutting the window when we saw lights approaching, and heard the sound of an engine. It was a car, moving fast, and as it passed the villa’s gate Lennie sucked in his breath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he muttered and half leant out of the window as though to call to the driver. ‘Why the hell does he come out here now?’

‘Who?’ I had only caught a glimpse of the car, a battered estate. I hadn’t seen who was driving it.

‘Miguel,’ he said, still peering out of the window as the car slowed on the dip and turned into the villa’s driveway. ‘The poor stupid bloody bastard — to come here now, just when they’re loading up.’ The car’s lights flickered through the shrubbery, then they were gone, snuffed out by the corner of the building. The engine note died abruptly.

We listened, but there was no sound — no shouts, no outcry or altercation. Just nothing.

We felt our way across to the other side of the room, standing at the window there, looking down across the flat-topped roofs of the villa’s lower levels to the truck, the whole shadowy shape of it now visible as a sort of elongated extension of the garage. And beyond it, on the sweep of the drive, as well as the two cars they had come in, there was the estate car standing black and seemingly empty.

A hand gripped mine, Petra’s voice in my ear whispering, ‘What is it?’ Her fingers tightened convulsively, but it wasn’t fear. It was excitement. Her breath was warm on my cheek, her hair touched my ear. ‘Is it to do with what happened last night?’

I couldn’t answer that. I didn’t know. In any case, I was wondering about Miguel. Was he one of them? Was that why he was here? Or had he walked right into it, unarmed and unprepared?

‘It’s arms, isn’t it? It’s an arms cache.’ And when I still didn’t say anything, she whispered urgently, ‘If it’s arms, then we have to notify somebody, warn the authorities.’

‘Not yet — when they’ve gone …’ And I added, ‘Maybe we can follow them.’

She had moved her head slightly so that it was outlined against the window. I saw the shape of it nod against the stars, her hand still in mine, still the grip of excitement, so that I was reminded that between school and college she had done a VSO stint in the Andes, trekking alone on the borders of Chile, Peru and Bolivia looking for old Inca remains. I don’t think she knew what fear was, otherwise she would never have been able to go it alone at such high altitude with only the Quechua Indians for company. ‘What’s the time?’

Lennie glanced at the luminous dial of his diving watch. ‘Twenty after midnight.’

‘Do you think it’s arms?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Then if they’re going to use them tonight they’ll have to get a move on.’