Peter May - The Chessmen

His search had come up with a return flight from Glasgow to Malaga in two days’ time, departing just after 9 a.m., returning the following day. He would have to fly to Glasgow tomorrow and stay overnight. He hit the return key to purchase the flight and proceed to checkout.

When he looked up again over the top of his screen, Marsaili had gone.

The arrivals hall was very nearly deserted by the time Fin passed through customs and immigration. The tour groups had all vanished in the direction of waiting coaches, and only a handful of independent travellers ventured through the barriers into the big, dark, empty hall. The midday sun was high, and very little light from it fell directly through the tall glass walls that stretched all along one side. Outside it was very bright, overexposed, fierce sunlight bleaching colour out of cars and buildings.

Mairead stood, a solitary figure, in the middle of a large floor that darkly reflected overhead lights. Fin slung his bag on to one shoulder and walked across the concourse to meet her. There was no smile of greeting, no warmth in her eyes. ‘I’m parked on the roof,’ she said, and turned on her heels towards the door.

Outside, the heat came as something of a shock after the Hebridean autumn, and Fin quickly discarded his jacket, wishing he had brought lighter clothing.

Mairead was driving an automatic dusty-blue Nissan X-Trail. It wasn’t a rental, and Fin wondered if it were hers, or whether it belonged to the band, a runaround for when they were down recording their latest set of songs.

It was a fine day. The palest of blue skies, devoid of clouds, stretched as far as the eye could see. They turned from the A7 on to the coastal toll road, and Fin saw the Mediterranean sparkling below them on their left, a simmering blue only slightly darker than the sky, lines of fast-moving cars in front of them heading south and west, windscreens reflecting sunlight in intermittent flashes.

‘Where are we going?’ Fin glanced across at Mairead, who sat tight-lipped behind the wheel, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

‘The villa,’ is all she said.

Fin contained his curiosity, and took advantage of their elevated position on the road to look across the parched Spanish coastal plain through which the six lanes of motorway cut a swathe. Away to their right, the purple slopes of the Sierra Bermeja rose up to rugged heights, sharply delineated against the sky like paper cut-outs. Clusters of white buildings nestled in valleys and hilltops, ancient villages that had survived since the time of the Moors. All in stark contrast with the thousands of unfinished apartments in high-rise developments that lined the highway on either side, long since abandoned by contractors whose money had dried up in the recession. Cranes had been removed when construction had stopped, and trees and shrubs were already starting to reclaim the building sites. Those apartments which had been finished lay empty.

Mairead glanced at him and followed his gaze. ‘They can’t give these away,’ she said. ‘No one wants to be the sole owner in an empty block. Too spooky.’

They passed under road signs for places Fin had only ever seen in holiday brochures. Marbella. Algeciras. Cadiz. Through two garitas de peaje , where Mairead pulled in to pay their tolls. It was nearly an hour before she turned off the motorway at Estepona, following signs for a place called Casares. The road then swept them up through a huge area of municipal parkland known as Los Pedregales, past a vast electricity-generating power station, and a sprawling recycling plant that pumped its perfume out into the fibrillating heat of the early afternoon.

They drove by small country restaurants gearing up for the late Spanish lunch — Venta Victoria, Arroyo Hondo — before turning off into a narrow, pitted roadway that began a steep ascent up into the mountains through forests of pine trees and cork oaks.

Dust billowed out behind them as they pitched and bumped their tortuous way up through the trees, passing occasional gates beyond which driveways wound off to hidden houses caught only in occasional glimpses. It was twenty minutes before the road finally levelled off and the land fell steeply away on their right, tree-lined slopes sweeping down into dry river valleys that snaked their way through the mountains. The sun shone in dazzling silver glitter on the distant ocean, the faint outline of the coast only just discernible through the haze.

White villas tucked themselves away among the foliage, each isolated in a sea of green and parched brown, forest rising all around. And Fin wondered what would become of them if ever fire were to sweep through these tinder-dry trees.

‘That’s our place.’ Mairead pointed down into a ravine, and Fin saw a jumble of roman-tiled red roofs and white walls assembled around a terrace halfway up it, buzzards riding thermals in the sky overhead. Even from here you could tell that it must command the most extraordinary views. And almost as if she read his mind, Mairead said, ‘On a clear day you can see all the way across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa and the Atlas Mountains.’ Anything further from the featureless peat bogs and storm-lashed coastline of the Isle of Lewis would have been hard to imagine. It seemed extraordinary to Fin that it was here in the heat, and the wild mountain forests of southern Spain, that the Celtic music spawned by his homeland was written and recorded, and sung in Mairead’s clear, beautiful Gaelic.

At the top of a rise in the road, Mairead suddenly turned right, and the X-Trail tipped nose-first down into a steep concrete drive between high, white-painted gateposts, the name of the villa cemented on one of them in blue and white tiles. Finca Solas .

They descended into a flat, walled parking area, and Mairead turned the vehicle to point back up the drive before switching off the ignition. When he stepped down on to the concrete, Fin felt a blast of heat that was almost shocking after the chill of the air conditioning.

Below the wall to their right, beyond a screen of trees, a turquoise-blue swimming pool lay shimmering invitingly in the afternoon sun. Fin followed Mairead down steps and through a garden of prickly pear cactus and wild aloe vera. They passed beneath an archway that led to a cool, covered passageway which opened out at its far end on to a terracotta-tiled terrace of fountains and fish-ponds.

At the far end of the terrace, beneath the shade of a fleshy-leaved fig tree, a man sat at a table, his back to them, looking out over the view towards the sea. There was a tall glass of something red at his right hand, ice not yet melted, condensation gathering on the table beneath it. A MacBook laptop was open in front of him, and he was tapping at the keyboard.

He turned as he heard the gate opening on to the terrace, a man in his middle years, quite bald on the top of his head, but with hair growing in thick, luxuriant curls all around the sides and back. Once fair, perhaps, it was already turning grey. He carried more weight than was good for him, nutbrown legs in three-quarter-length shorts and open sandals, a white shirt hanging open over the bulge of a large, tanned, beer gut. His brown face cracked into an all-too-familiar smile, and he extended a still-slender hand. He looked to be in rude health for a man they had buried twice.

‘Hello Fin,’ Roddy said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

They left Mairead sitting in the dappled shade provided by rush matting stretched across a frame above the table. She had been subdued, with clouded eyes, and said very little. Perhaps she had realized that this first crack in their seventeen-year silence could only mark the beginning of the end.