Isvik (19 page)

‘Adnams?'

‘Aye. Yer part of the world and one of the best bitters –' His words were cut short by a clap of thunder very close.

But it wasn't thunder. It was something else, more like a cannon, and before the echo of it had died away, there was a rumbling sound, growing to a roar. In the same instant Ward had revved the engine and rammed the gear lever home. The vehicle shot forward, and as it did so the first rocks from above came hurtling down onto the track just behind us.

Leaning forward I had a view of it in the side mirror, the bend we had just rounded obliterated by a great mass of avalanching rock and mud that went spilling down over the edge to disappear into the cloud vapour below. ‘Christ!' My voice was barely audible above the noise of the slide and the sound of our engine. My eyes were on the far side of the valley where the track was clear and unbroken to the next turn above the main gorge. If we could make it through the torrent to the bend ahead … ‘What is it?'

Ward had jammed on the brakes. ‘Ye take her. See ye on the other side of the bend, if ye make it.' He was out in a flash, scrabbling for a foothold on the steep side of the track. Above him was a path of sorts trailing along the mountainside.

‘What is it?' I asked him again, shouting to make myself heard above the grumble of thunder and the sound of water. ‘Where are you going?'

His only answer was a wave of the arm, signalling me to drive on. He was climbing like a goat, moving with extraordinary speed. And then I lost him among the boulders and small trees that marked the course of the torrent.

By then the noise of the avalanche had died away, only the echoes of it reverberating across the valley, and when I shifted into the driving seat and looked back, the road behind us had ceased to exist. Where the bend had been there was now nothing but a piled-up, slithering mass of wet glistening rubble. I looked up the line of the torrent. No sign of Ward. He had disappeared entirely, leaving me to wonder what the hell he was playing at. I was on my own now, faced with that half-obliterated turn at the V-point of the side gorge where water pouring over the track was eating away at the surface.

There had been a bridge there once, or perhaps a culvert. I could just make out part of the stonework, though most of it was under water. I checked the four-wheel drive lever, eased off the brake and started forward. No good putting it off. At any moment the whole track might go.

When I reached the turn I found half of it gone already. The roar of the water coming down the gully drummed at my ears as I inched the Toyota into the bend. It was virtually a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and very sharp, the culvert blocked with stone and the remains of a small tree, so that the full volume of the water coming down the gully was swirling across the track to disappear over the edge, thundering down into the main gorge of the Jequetepeque. There was only just room to scrape through between the roots of the tree and the edge.

I inched forward. Did I take it slow or fast? How deep was the water? Was it deep enough to sweep the vehicle over the edge? The nearer I got to it, the deeper it looked. And what was the track like underneath? Would it hold up for the half-minute or so it would take me to drive across? The devil of it was the vehicle was a left-hand drive, so that I was on the side that would go over the edge first.

I hesitated, and as I did so a big stone that marked the outer edge of the track began to move. I didn't wait. I let in the clutch and gripped the wheel, taking it gently, not using too much power and just willing the tyres to maintain a grip on the rotten surface below the water.

I was about half-way across when I felt the rear begin to swing sideways under the weight of the torrent. I gunned the engine then, slipping the clutch slightly, clawing for a hold. That way I had the power ready to hand and as the front wheels began to grip a solid surface and the snout of the Toyota reared up, I banged the clutch in with my foot hard down. Something clanged by the back axle, a rock presumably, and then, with the back still slithering sideways and the rear left wheel beginning to race as it fell off into space, the vehicle gave a sort of shudder and we were out, clear of the water and on a hard surface again.

That was when I saw it, right in front of me, a large lump of rock bang in the middle of the track. I stopped, the roar of the torrent drumming in my ears. The rear of the Toyota was only just clear of the water as I jumped out, checking to see if it would be possible using the low gear to push the rock over the edge. The inner side of the track was almost sheer at this point, brown broken rock glistening with water, and I could see at a glance where the rock had come from, a gaping hole oozing mud as though a giant molar had been extracted.

Lightning forked across the black belly of the clouds, and the rock that had moved as I was negotiating the bend had disappeared into the gorge below, the torrent running smooth as it lipped the broken edge of the old roadway. Still no sign of Ward, the cloud-mist hanging grey over the mountainside above. I felt very alone at that moment, stuck there on that track somewhere in the Andes, my body chill with sweat and my hands still trembling with the nervous tension of getting safely through the rutted mud of the bend.

I was just getting back into the driving seat when there was a shout and a figure emerged from the gully about fifty metres above me. It wasn't Ward. This was a much slighter man with a broad-brimmed hat and a poncho over his shoulders. He was moving fast down the side of the gully, Ward appearing suddenly behind him. ‘Hold him!' The shout echoed in the rocks and at the same moment the man saw me. He checked, but only momentarily, then he had jumped down onto the track a knife in his hand.

There was only one thing for me to do and I dodged behind the Toyota. He went past me, running. But then he stopped. Ward was angling across the slope above to cut him off. I reached into the door pocket and pulled out the heavy wheel nut spanner. By then Ward was coming down onto the track, his false arm and dummy hand hanging limp at his side.

I think it was the realisation of his disability that decided the man to go for him first. He was already advancing up the track as Ward slithered down onto the flat surface of it. The knife flashed, a steely glitter as lightning struck again across the far side of the gorge, the crackle of it hitting the rocks and followed almost instantaneously by a single shattering crash of thunder.

He went for Ward in a crouching run, and Ward just stood there, as though transfixed. ‘Get out of his way,' I yelled and started forward.

But Ward didn't move and I was still several yards away when the two of them met. I saw the knife flash, a cold gleam as the man swung his arm back to strike at Ward's belly. Then, as the knife slammed forward, driving upwards for the heart, Ward's right arm extension came up, the glove-covered steel fingers of his hand open like claws. They closed on the knife blade, twisted it out of the man's hand, and then he was using the whole false arm as a metal club slamming down on the upraised arms, jabbing for the face, forcing the man back step by step until the edge of the track was only one more step away.

I think I called a warning, but Ward ignored it. I saw the man give a terrified glance over his shoulder, then that metal flail slammed into the side of his head. He was off-balance, his defences down as Ward drew back his right arm and slammed that gloved hand straight into the sallow face.

I can still see the blood starting from the man's nose, the way his arms reached out as his feet rocked back on to nothing, and still hear the dreadful high-pitched rabbit cry as his body disappeared over the edge. For all of a minute, it seemed, we could hear the sound of his body falling, the rattle of the stones it dislodged.

But when I looked over the edge there was no sign of him, or of the river – only the mist swirling.

I turned to Ward. ‘You killed him.' My voice sounded strange in my ears. ‘You did it deliberately.'

His only answer was to pick up the knife and hand it to me. Then he was climbing back up the bank he had slithered down and I watched as he walked in a leisurely fashion across the slope of the mountain to the gully. He seemed totally relaxed, and I felt the prickle of my fear. I had never seen a man deliberately killed before and I was more scared even than I had been before.

When he came back he was carrying something in his left hand. ‘Ye seen one of these before?' He dumped it on the bonnet of the Toyota.

‘Only in films.' It was one of those plungers that generate the electric spark for setting off blasting charges. ‘Where did you find it?'

‘Up there, where Ah expected.' He nodded to the mountainside beyond the gully and walked over to the rock that was blocking the road. ‘Ye didn't think that fall behind us was an accident, did ye? But he then had to get across the gully and connect up the wires to brin' this lot down on top of us.' He waved his dummy hand towards the sheer rock above us.

‘You didn't have to kill him,' I said.

‘No?' He looked up at me, a quizzical lift of his eyebrows. ‘Are ye happy with the thought of being buried alive under tons of rock?' He straightened up and moved to the driving seat. ‘Well if ye are, Ah'm not. With luck they'll never know what happened to him. And that may worry them.'

‘Who?'

But he had started the engine and he didn't hear me as he inched the vehicle forward in low gear. The wheels churned, the engine labouring, and slowly the rock that was blocking our way shifted. He forced it close enough to the edge to allow the Toyota to creep past on the inside. I got in, and as he drove on I was watching his face, fascinated. I had never been with a killer before.

Round the bend ahead the road ran fairly straight, a narrow ledge cut out of the mountainside. The clouds hung like a grey-black roof over the valley. He slowed at a view point, leaning out and examining the wet stone surface. ‘There were tae of them,' he said as he drove on. ‘Looks like his mate went off with the car. Ah couldn't see the little bugger clearly enough to be sure, but Ah think he was Indian. The guy who did the blastin' was a mestizo.'

‘Why?' That's what I didn't understand. Why should we have been followed on our arrival in Peru? And now this crude attempt to kill us. The strong features, the massive head – the man radiated an extraordinary sense of inner strength.

‘Why?' I asked again, and he said, ‘That's what we're goin' to find out.'

‘We?'

He looked at me, smiling. ‘We,' he said. He drove in silence after that, leaving me alone with my chaotic thoughts, and at the end of the long straight slash across the side of the cloud-hidden mountain, we picked up the new road again, swinging right, away from the Jequetepeque. We were in cloud then, feeling our way again through a grey void. We had almost half an hour of this, then brown, wet walls of rock closed us in, the sound of the engine grinding upwards reverberating in a deep cut, the foglights accentuating the macabre theatricality of our struggle up the path through which Pizarro and his four hundred armoured hidalgoes had climbed to destroy the Inca Empire half a millennium ago.

Ward must have been thinking along the same lines, for as the road flattened out and the mist began to glimmer with a strange brightness, he said something about the Promised Land. The road dipped and we picked up speed.

‘That's it,' he said with grim satisfaction. ‘We made it,' and he slapped the gloved hand twice against the steering wheel. ‘There was a moment, Ah'll admit … Look!' The thinning veil of cloud eddied in a gust of wind, and suddenly we were below it, looking down on to the flat roofs of a town spread out in a broad valley of rain-washed green. ‘Cajamarca.'

‘And the Hacienda Lucinda. Do you know where it is?'

‘Past the Baños del Inca, out by a hill that's honeycombed with grave apertures. We'll have to ask.'

We seemed a million miles from the Weddell Sea and that ice-encrusted vessel, but I had a feeling now that this was all a part of the voyage to come. ‘What are you going to say to Gómez?'

He smiled and shook his head. ‘Nothin'. Ah think he'll dae the talkin'.'

‘And Iris Sunderby?'

‘We'll see.'

THREE

When you have travelled half across the world, with the background of the man you are going to meet gradually being filled in for you, a picture of him inevitably forms in the mind. There was the suspicion, too, that it was he who had arranged for us to be followed on our arrival in Lima, may even have planned our death by that gully on the old road up to the pass.

Twice I asked Ward about this, the first time just after we had come out of the cloud on the eastern slope of the pass and had caught our first glimpse of Cajamarca far away in the valley below, and then again when we stopped at the
Baños del Inca
to ask our way, the hot springs steaming beside the public baths. Each time he had given a little shrug, as though to say, ‘We'll see', and left it at that.

But even if he had given me a direct answer, I don't know that I would have believed him. He had such a talent for self-dramatisation that I wouldn't have put it past him, on finding that plunger, to have invented the whole thing – except that I had watched in horror as he deliberately forced the wretched mestizo over the edge, thrusting at his face with that dummy hand until he had disappeared into the gorge below. I couldn't make up my mind about him, regarding him at times as some grotesque theatrical maniac, at other times as no more than a pleasant, if somewhat mysterious, travelling companion.

There was no such dichotomy in my mind when picturing Gómez. By the time we were enquiring for the Hacienda Lucinda he was growing in my mind as something wholly evil, as deformed and monstrous as Victor Hugo's hunchback of Notre Dame without the saving grace of simplicity. This view of him had been built up gradually, partly as a result of that interview with Rodriguez back in Mexico City, and partly from the bits and pieces of information Ward had let fall.