Hammond Innes - Medusa

He was referring to Petra, of course. The huge, hulking ruins of the old hospital were what had given Illa del Rei the nickname of Bloody Island. ‘Well, go on,’ I said. ‘What about her?’

‘Workmen up the road say they’ve seen her several times. I was asking them about these two bastards.’ He tossed the bundle of rags into the back of my estate car. They couldn’t tell me a damned thing, only that a girl in a Der Chevoh had been going into one of the caves. And this morning, just after Ramón and I got here, she come skidding to a halt wanting to know where she could find you. She was bright-eyed as a cricket, all steamed up about something.’

‘Did she say what?’

He shook his head, the leathery skin of his face stretched in a grin. ‘You want to watch it, mate. You go wandering around in them caves alone with a sheila like that and you’ll get yourself thrown out of the house — straight into the drink, I wouldn’t wonder.’

‘Soo wouldn’t even notice.’ I couldn’t help it, my voice suddenly giving vent to my anger. ‘She’s just bought a villa and now I’ve got to go over there and sort out the details.’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ he said, suddenly serious. He looked then, as he often did, like an elderly tortoise. ‘You go taking that girl on your next delivery run … Yeah, you thought I didn’t hear, but I was right there in the back of the shop when she asked you. You do that and Soo’d notice all right.’

I caught hold of his shoulder then, shaking him. ‘You let your sense of humour run away with you sometimes. This isn’t the moment to have Soo getting upset.’

‘Okay then, mum’s the word.’ And he gave that high-pitched, cackling laugh of his. Christ! I could have hit the man, he was so damned aggravating at times, and I was on a short fuse anyway. I had been going through a bad patch with Soo ever since she’d found she was pregnant again. She was worried, of course, and knowing how I felt about having a kid around the place, a boy I could teach to sail …

I was thinking about that as I drove north across the island to Punta Codolar, about Lennie, too, how tiresome he could be. Half Cockney, half Irish, claiming his name was McKay and with a passport to prove it, we knew no more of his background than when he had landed from the Barcelona ferry almost two years ago with nothing but the clothes he stood up in and an elderly squeezebox wrapped in a piece of sacking. I had found him playing for his supper at one of the quayside restaurants, a small terrier of a man with something appealing about him, and when I had said I needed an extra hand scrubbing the bottoms of the boats we were fitting out, he had simply said, ‘Okay, mate.’ And that was that. He had been with us ever since, and because he was a trained scuba diver he was soon indispensable, being able to handle yachts with underwater problems without their having to be lifted out of the water. It was just after Soo had lost the child and she had taken to him as she would have to any stray, regarding him virtually as one of the family.

While the distance between Port Mahon in the east and the old capital of Ciudadela in the west is at least fifty kilometres, driving across the island from south to north it is only about twenty. Even so it always seems longer, for the road is narrow and winding and you have to go through Alayór, which is the third largest town and the central hub of the island. I toyed with the idea of dropping off at the Flórez garage to see if I could get him to increase his offer for the Santa Maria . Juan Flórez, besides being alcalde , or mayor of the town, ran the largest garage outside of Mahon and was a very sharp dealer in almost anything anybody cared to sell that was worth a good percentage in commission. For the past few months he had been trying to persuade me to part with the old fishing boat I let out on charter. But the sun was shining, so I drove straight across the main Ciudadela-Mahon road and up through the old town to the Fornells road.

Here the country changes very noticeably, the earth suddenly becoming a dark red, and away to the left, Monte Toro, the highest point on Menorca, the only ‘mountain’ in fact, with its rocky peak capped by the white of the Sanctuary buildings and the army communications mast dominating the whole countryside, red soil giving way to gravel after a few kilometres, cultivated fields to pines and maquis, the scent of resin and rosemary filling the car.

It is the constant variety of the scene in such a small island that had attracted us in the first place, particularly Soo after living most of her life on an island that is about the same size, but solidly limestone with very little variation. Just short of Macaret, and in sight of the sea again, I turned left on to the road to Arenal d’en Castell, a beautiful, almost perfectly horseshoe-shaped bay of sand totally ruined by three concrete block hotels. Beyond the bay, on the eastern side, a rocky cape that had once been hard walking was now crisscrossed with half-finished roads so that one could drive over most of it. The few villas that had been built so far looked very lost in the wild expanse of heath and bare, jagged rock.

The villa Miguel Gallardo was now building stood right on the point, a little south and east of one he had completed two years before. There was a turning place nearby, but instead of swinging round it, I edged the car into the cul-de-sac beyond where it dipped steeply to the cliff edge. A tramontana was beginning to blow and even before I had switched the engine off I could hear the break of the waves two hundred feet or so below. I sat there for a moment, looking out towards the coast of France, remembering how it had been two years ago when I had taken a boat over to Genoa and a tramontana had caught us, a full gale, straight off the Alps and as cold as hell. We had been lucky to get away with it, the boat leaking and one of the spreaders broken so that we could only sail on the port tack.

I put the handbrake hard on, turned the wheels into the rubble of rock at the roadside and got out of the car, the breeze ruffling my hair, the salt air filling my lungs. God! It felt good, and I stretched my arms. There were little puffs of cloud on the horizon, the scene very different from the quiet of the southern coast, no protection at all. The urbanization , when it was built, would be facing the open sea and the full brunt of the north winds, so why the hell buy a villa here? I tried to see it in summer, all white stucco and red tiles, cacti on the retaining wall, passion flowers and bougainvillaea, with trailers of morning-glory over a Moroccan-style façade. It would be cool in summer and a breathtaking view, the dreadful hotels of Arenal d’en Castell hidden by the headland and the rock coast stretching east all the way to the lighthouse of Faváritx on the dragon-toothed finger of land after which it was named.

The engine of Miguel’s cement mixer started into life and I climbed back up the slope, making for the gaunt skeletal structure of the half-completed villa. He was waiting for me at the foot of a ladder lashed to the wooden scaffolding. ‘ Buenos dias . You come to inspect, eh?’ He was a thickset man with a long, doleful face and a big hooked nose. He was from Granada, from the Arab district of Albacein, and claimed kinship with both Moors and Jews, his family going back five centuries to Ferdinand and Isabella and the Inquisition that followed their conquest of the last Moorish stronghold in Europe. ‘Iss your property now.’ He said it hesitantly, seeking confirmation, the inflexion of his voice making it a question rather than a statement.

‘Let’s have a look at it,’ I said.

I saw the sudden doubt in his eyes, his dark, unshaven features solemn and uneasy. ‘Okay, senor.’ The formality was a measure of his unease. He normally called me by my Christian name. ‘But you have seen it before, also the plans.’