Authors: Thomas Mogford
Hollow Mountain (5 page)
Spike turned onto Irish Town, a street that took its name from the prostitutes who’d once used it as a shopfloor. ‘I’ve never told my parents I’m a lawyer,’ Galliano used to quip to clients. ‘They still think I play piano in a brothel’. These days the street was full of shipping firms and accountants. Two long-established pubs gave it some life; as Spike passed the first – The Three Owls – he glanced in and saw a heavy-set man in a leather jacket staring back at him from the bar. The man was dark, Romani almost, with a prominent brow and thick stubble. He held Spike’s eye unflinchingly, causing his breath to quicken and an unfamiliar panic to flutter in his chest.
‘
Harampai
,’ an old woman called out, ‘you watch where you’re going.’ Spike started in shock, then put a hand to the woman’s frail shoulder, steering her in the right direction. As she clattered away her shopping cart, he heard her mutter, ‘Sanguinetti,’ a threat perhaps that she might see fit to inform his father that he’d just been seen stumbling outside a pub. Inside the bar, the Romani was ordering a pint and flirting with the waitress. Spike shook his head, then turned up a set of stone steps leading to Line Wall Road.
A bus was waiting at the stop above, filling with passengers, most of whom shook the driver’s hand as they got on, no money exchanged. One perk of life in Gibraltar: residents rode for free. A distant cousin waved at Spike as the bus rumbled off, heading for Both Worlds, the retirement village on the eastern side of the Rock.
Crossing Line Wall Road, Spike breathed in the warm sea air, trying to ease the paranoia that had dogged him since his return from Genoa. First Peter. Who would be next? And what would happen to Zahra, abandoned somewhere on the Gulf of Paradise?
To his left, a pair of enormous black cannons were ranged on the pavement, captured from the Russians during the Crimean War and awarded by the British to Gibraltar in recognition of her loyal service. Line Wall Road had once marked the end of the Rock, a two-mile stretch of protruding bastions, the Straits sloshing at their base. Since then, so much land had been reclaimed from the sea that the cannons were now aiming at the Morrisons mega-mart. Not a bad target, Spike thought, remembering the local shops that they’d put out of business.
No more military distractions: the glass and steel facade of St Bernard’s Hospital loomed ahead. Spike took a final gulp of sea air, then stepped inside.
The original hospital had been housed in a damp ex-military facility midway up the Rock. When the opportunity had come to relocate it, the planners must have been carried away by the possibilities of cheap reclaimed land, as the current site was vast, all glass-roofed corridors and empty, echoey wards. The only time capacity was likely to be reached, Spike thought as he passed a cobwebbed bust of Queen Elizabeth, was if there were a terrorist attack on the Rock. Perhaps that was what the authorities had had in mind.
The lifts were out of order, so Spike continued down a corridor of floor-to-ceiling windows giving onto a rear courtyard, where a wooden bench stood beside an oil drum teeming with fag butts. ‘No Loitering’, read a sign on the wall. Next came the Rehabilitation Unit, sponsored by Lionel Sacramento, owner of a chain of cigarette shops on the Rock, a man so wealthy he was rumoured to manage his money through his own hedge fund in London. Once past the mortuary – and its bank of drinks machines for the living – Spike had reached his destination, the ICU.
A nurse with standard-issue cheerful smile and dark ponytail glanced up from the desk. Spike caught a glimpse of the ‘Facebook’ logo before she minimised the screen. ‘
Indamai
!’ she exclaimed in
yanito
. ‘Your friend’s a popular man today.’
‘Not too late, am I?’
The nurse consulted her watch. ‘Last visit is at 7.45 p.m. You’re OK.’
She stood up and led Spike past the desk, smoothing her blue uniform over well-covered haunches. Clumsy acrylics of ships decorated the walls, each sponsored by a local company. An over-pressed air-conditioning unit hummed hoarsely.
The ward had eight beds, seven of them empty. In one corner, beside a window overlooking the smokers’ courtyard, lay Peter Galliano. At least he would appreciate the view, reasoned Spike – Peter was a sixty-a-day man, after all.
‘Well, come on,’ the nurse cajoled.
Spike picked up a plastic chair from an empty bay. ‘How is he today?’ he asked, putting off the moment when he would have to look at Galliano’s face.
‘There’s been no deterioration.’
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘He’s been under for ten days. With a head trauma of this severity, I think we’d like to see him wake up quite soon.’
The whirr of Galliano’s iron lung seemed to confirm this discouraging prognosis. The nurse tucked the sheets beneath his gowned body, running her hands down the heavy backs of his thighs. ‘I was watching you the other day,’ she said, bending in a way that Spike might have found provocative, had he been interested in picking up any signs. ‘You should talk to him, you know. Not just sit there in silence. No one’s sure yet how much they can understand.’
She drew out one of Peter’s strong arms and checked the cannula affixed to the back of his hand. Written on the band was ‘GALLIANO, PETER HORATIO; GHA 97739; 23-MAY-1959’. Spike smiled. He’d forgotten about Peter’s middle name: Somerset and Horatio, they were quite the pair.
‘Handover’s at 8 p.m.,’ the nurse said. ‘You can stay till then.’
He nodded as she left, then scanned the empty bays, wondering who’d lain there recently, if anyone mourned them now. Finally he forced himself to look round. Beneath a heavily bandaged brow, Galliano’s left eye was still grotesquely swollen, the bruise around it a yellowy-brown. The stubble merging into his goatee suggested the nursing staff had decided that a full beard would require less work. Spike noted with a little pleasure that the double chin had reduced. It’s an ill wind, as Galliano might have joked.
‘Hello, Peter.’ Spike’s voice sounded foolish. He glanced round, seeing the lights flicker then go out in the corridor behind. When he turned back, he focused on Galliano’s good eye, its dark and rather beautiful lashes splayed below a trembling lid. ‘I’ve been working on your cases, Peter . . .’ He pressed on, telling him about the meeting he’d lined up with the CEO of Neptune Marine. He was about to mention the visit from the Grainger widow when he stopped. ‘Listen, Peter,’ he said, leaning in. ‘I think it may be my fault you’re in here.’ He turned again, hearing a rapid squeak of rubber on linoleum. A long shadow spread across the doorway; he waited for the nurse to appear, but the shadow withdrew. Galliano’s chest rose and fell in a slow mechanical rhythm. In the twilight, the rows of empty white beds took on an eerie hue.
Suddenly the footsteps returned, hurried and loud, as though someone were sprinting past the door, trying not to be seen. ‘
Hola
?’ Spike called out, but no one replied. ‘Hang on a sec, Pete,’ he said, realising this was the first time he’d spoken naturally.
The nurses’ station was empty. Handover already? What was it she’d said earlier? ‘He’s a popular man today.’ Who else could have been visiting? Peter’s sister had three young children, so she tended to come in the mornings while they were at school. The nurse wouldn’t have been on shift then anyway. A clatter came from ahead as Spike moved down the corridor. Just around the corner was an amenity room – locked – and a patients’ bathroom. He eased down the handle of the Gents and went inside.
The dying halogen bulb created an uncomfortable strobe on the ceiling. The door to the shower room hung open, cloudy water pooling on the coarse green plastic, smooth bars and handles fitted to assist the infirm. Alongside stood a toilet cubicle. The red-crescent dial read ‘OCCUPIED’.
Spike crouched down, but found no feet beneath the frame. Feeling his pulse quicken, he straightened up and put a hand to the door. The clasp was engaged: pressing an ear to the plywood, he made out the tremor of controlled breathing and the slow, careful creak of a window being pulled open.
He slammed his shoulder against the door – ‘Who’s there?’ – before a response came, ‘
Lo siento, lo siento
. . .’ The dial rolled to ‘Vacant’, and Spike stepped back as a timid head peered round. A yellow-skinned youth in a hospital gown, standing on the lavatory seat, drip stand in one fist, fag-end quaking in the other.
Spike offered the boy a hand to help him down. ‘Those things will kill you,’ he said as the boy hurried away, drip stand rattling on the floor. I must be going mad, Spike thought to himself as he walked back to the ward, finding the nurse sitting at Galliano’s bedside, scribbling onto his chart. ‘Thought you’d gone home,’ she said, lowering her biro. ‘Listen, a few of us are going for a drink later in Casemates. If you’re at a loose end . . .’
The idea of getting blitzed gave Spike’s heart a momentary lift, until he imagined what it would be like to spend an evening surrounded by medics. ‘Sorry. Got some work to do.’
The nurse gave a teasing frown. ‘All work and no play . . .’ she chided as she plumped the pillows. Spike looked again at Galliano’s inert face. ‘Thanks all the same,’ he said as he walked away.
The broad, new-build avenues of the Europort ceded again to the dark labyrinth of the Old Town. Spike thought back to Genoa, to the
caruggi
of the Porto Antico: at least it had been light in there. As he entered Bombhouse Lane, he felt the moist levanter breeze blow on the nape of his neck, ruffling his hair like a clammy hand. Ahead rose the facade of the Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned, the pavement outside it wide and uneven. Beneath the ground lay hundreds of corpses, mostly Genoese émigrés who’d paid to be buried close to the Cathedral at a time when the graveyards were full and the Rock under siege. Spike had always dismissed them as superstitious fools, but now as he remembered a favoured line of his father’s –
By night an atheist half believes in God
– he didn’t feel quite so sure.
He glanced back down Main Street: in the half-light, the wrought-iron balconies and blue wooden shutters took on the air of a Riviera fishing village. The Genoese again – always the largest immigrant population in Gib – making their mark. Spike found his mind turning once more to Zahra. Would it have made a difference if he’d stayed in Italy a few days longer? He might have been just yards away from her, yet he’d jumped at the first chance to abandon his search and slunk back home.
Wiping the perspiration from his brow, he walked through the open doors of the Royal Calpe pub. Casey, the barmaid – crop-haired, peroxide blonde – glanced round from the muted TV. If Spike had hoped for a smile to lift his spirits he was to be disappointed.
‘What’ll it be?’ Casey snapped.
‘Pint of London Pride, please. And a vodka and tonic.’
She fixed the drinks, then snatched Spike’s ten-pound note and turned back to a subtitled omnibus of
Coronation Street
.
Shaking his head, Spike moved deeper inside the pub. Though the decor remained resolutely 1970s British – fruit machines, cask ales, Sunday carvery, diamond-patterned glass above the bar – the real change had come in the clientele. Where once had sat tables of brawling squaddies, now just the occasional soldier or sailor perched alone, texting on a break from a training exercise. The former hordes of British expats – Tesco bags of Marmite and Heinz Baked Beans at their feet – had diminished to the odd leather-faced couple waiting for the frontier queues to ease before driving home to Marbs. Defence cuts, property crises . . . The one group still out in force were the locals. No longer mere tourist-industry workers, they now wore a uniform of power suits and silk blouses, rictus grins affixed as they explained to moon-faced Russians or anxious Italians exactly why their money would be safe on the Rock. Financial services had come to Gibraltar, and the natives – once in the employ of the British garrison – had adapted.
Spike’s eye was caught by a lawyer from a rival firm, something of a high-flyer, people said. She was sitting with her back to a wall adorned by a series of hunting prints, a nod to the pub’s name, The Royal Calpe, a Victorian foxhunt which had exploited a brief good period of Anglo-Spanish relations to secure permission to ride with hounds over the border. The lawyer was using the hunt to open a discussion on the political idiosyncrasies of Gibraltar, but seemed to be struggling with the etymology of ‘Calpe’. ‘It’s a reference to the fact that the Rock has a hollow centre,’ she said in her lilting Gibraltarian English. ‘“Mons Calpe” – “Hollow Mountain”. It’s Greek, I think. Or Latin . . .’
A few years ago, Spike might have taken the opportunity to join her and reveal that the word was actually Phoenician. Now he just sat back in his chair and drank his beer.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
Spike looked up to find Jessica Navarro standing by his table. As usual, he’d forgotten how pretty she was: even in her white jeans and man’s grey V-neck, the eyes of other drinkers were pulled towards her. Slung over her slim shoulder was a gym bag that he knew would contain her police uniform. She glanced down at his empty pint glass, then over at the vodka and tonic. ‘Onto the chasers now?’
‘It’s for you.’
‘Sorry. Let me get you another.’
‘I’ll do it . . .’ He half-stood, but she was in no mood for indulging his old-fashioned chivalry and was already at the bar, where she drew a warmer greeting from Casey. By the time she returned, dropping her change into the British Red Cross collection box, Spike had stashed his empty glass on the shelf behind the table where the day’s English papers lay half-read and abandoned.
