Ken McClure - The Anvil

The sun was up and shining brightly on the cliffs of Malaga when they drove into town and looked for somewhere to park near the harbour. MacLean, not wishing to presume too much on the good nature of his friends, suggested that they book into a hotel for a bath and a decent sleep before they continued. Leavey and MacFarlane would not hear of it, insisting that they weren’t tired at all. Instead of putting off time they would have breakfast and then start shopping for maps of the surrounding district.

To his surprise, MacLean came across a booklet entitled, MIJAS, among the maps and tourist guides to Andalucia. He picked it up with a strange feeling of guilt and bemusement. In his mind, the name had come to symbolise a most secret place, the place that Jean-Paul and Eva had died to discover, the place that Lehman Steiner would kill to keep anyone away from and here it was being advertised as a tourist attraction. It didn’t seem right.

MacLean felt a thousand imaginary eyes follow him as he bought the booklet along with two other maps. As they walked back to the harbour, an awful doubt began to nag away at him. Could there be more than one place in the world pronounced May Haas? They had all been so pleased at Tansy’s deduction that none of them had considered this possibility.

MacLean read through the booklet by the harbour wall. Eventually he sighed and snapped it shut with a shake of the head.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Leavey.

‘Maybe,’ said MacLean. ‘According to this, Mijas is a pretty little Andalucian village cut into the mountains with lots of little white houses, all with geranium-filled window boxes, donkeys in the streets and the sound of guitars. Plenty of bars and cafes but as for pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories, forget it. There aren’t any.’

‘Maybe they keep that sort of thing away from the tourist area,’ suggested Leavey.

MacLean was worried. ‘It’s high in the mountains,’ he said. ‘Not exactly the location for an industrial estate.’

They got back into the Seat and set off to find the bus station in Malaga, having decided it would be unwise to drive up to Mijas. Leavey had convinced MacLean for the time being that Tansy had not been wrong and that they were on the right track. This being the case, they must continue to take all precautions.

The bus station was crowded, not with the young tourists that the summer would bring, but with the old who were escaping the misery of winter in northern Europe. Their faces were tanned and the sun was easing arthritic joints. MacFarlane found the correct queue but Leavey came up with a better alternative.

A property company was promoting sales of their villas in a new development near Mijas by running guided tours of their site. A bus would leave for the mountains in ten minutes and there was room on board for the three of them. They would tour the site, be shown around one of the company’s villas and then be given time to look around Mijas to ‘capture the atmosphere of the place’. MacLean agreed that this would be the ideal safe way to visit Mijas. They would be as near to anonymous as they could get in such a party.

The bus climbed slowly up into the mountains of the Sierra de Mijas, labouring in low gear all the way up the zig-zag road until they had reached the property development. It was located on the eastern edge of Mijas itself and afforded them a spectacular view out over the coastal resort of Fuengirola to the Mediterranean and even, their guide insisted, to the coast of North Africa beyond. MacLean shivered slightly as he waited patiently for the guided tour of the villas to end. It had been pleasantly warm down on the coast but up here in the mountains it had become markedly chilly.

Clutching their presentation packs in blue folders, the twenty or so people on the tour were taken into Mijas itself and invited to look round for themselves. The bus would leave for Malaga in an hour. MacLean and the other two had decided in advance that they would split up and search independently before meeting up again at the curiously small bullring which sat on the western edge of the village.

MacLean had to admit that Mijas was indeed pretty but the more he saw of it the more his fears were being realised. There was no way that these tiny Andalucian streets and alleys were concealing an 18 million-dollar research project financed by Lehman Steiner. With fourteen minutes left before he was due to meet up with Leavey and MacFarlane, he sat down at an outside table of a pavement cafe and ordered coffee and a Cognac. He was feeling low.

MacLean could tell before anyone spoke that Leavey and MacFarlane had had a similar lack of success in their searches.

‘Nothing,’ said Leavey.

‘Nothing,’ echoed MacFarlane.

‘Nothing,’ agreed MacLean. ‘The place is totally wrong for what we are looking for. Any kind of research establishment would stick out like a sore thumb.’

‘Not that they’d even be allowed to build it here anyway,’ said Leavey.

‘So we’ve failed,’ said MacLean, throwing a pebble into the dust of the arena.

‘I suppose we might have missed something?’ tried MacFarlane, but there was little conviction in his voice and he got no support from the others.

‘It was such a good idea,’ said Leavey wryly. ‘It deserved to be right.’

They left the bullring and circled the ramparts on the south-west edge of the town, looking out to sea over olive groves, which basked on the lower slopes of the Sierra. MacLean found it hard to think about the view when failure was weighing so heavily on his shoulders. Time was passing for Carrie and now they were back at square one with the prospect of having to go back to Geneva after all.

‘Do you know why Olive trees have a split trunk?’ asked Leavey quietly.

MacLean shook his head.

‘The Arabs say that the Olive tree broke its heart when Mohammed died.’

MacLean smiled distantly and empathised with the tree.

‘God, that sea looks inviting,’ said MacFarlane who joined them at the wall.’

MacLean looked at him and then at Leavey. He said, ‘Let’s go swim in it. We need a break. We’ll eat, get drunk and then face up to reality. What do you say?’

‘Sounds good,’ said Leavey. MacFarlane readily agreed.

They started to make their way down the mountain towards Fuengirola on foot, not only because they had missed the return journey on the tour bus from Malaga and a service bus was not due for another half hour but also because they agreed that they needed the exercise. The long journey down from Valencia had left them with a series of aches and pains, most of them derived from trying to sleep in awkward positions in the car.

At first it felt good to be stretching their legs but as time went on the steepness of the slopes began to take its toll on their knees and ankles. They stopped in the cool shade of a high white wall, which spread out on either side of an imposing black wrought-iron gate. The words Hacienda Yunque were emblazoned on the arch over the gate.

‘Not exactly a but-and-ben,’ said MacFarlane.

The others concurred with admiring glances as they walked up to the gate to look at the building. It was set into the rock face some two hundred metres away and fronted by orchards of orange and lemon trees. There was no indication of what the building was or who owned it.

They sat down and rested their backs against the wall to watch the heat shimmer off the high sierra in silence for a while and until their legs had recovered sufficiently for them to continue. In the end, it took well over two hours to complete the descent and reach the dusty, busy streets of Fuengirola.

Just as the bus station in Malaga had been, the broad esplanade of the Paseo Maritimo was thronged with the aged from the north, sweatered and cardiganed against the imagined threat of sudden chill.