Medusa (28 page)

Cala Pedrera. Punta de Medio. I could see Punta de Cala Fonts coming up, and beyond the point, the Villa Carlos promenade with its hotels and restaurants and the Cafayas light. ‘Stand by, sir.' The engines were slowing, the sound of water slipping past the plates dying away. I caught a glimpse to starb'd of the Plana de Mahon light. ‘Ready?' The CPO took one end of the sailboard, I took the other.
A few steps, a heave, and it was overboard, the slim board surfing alongside as he held it by the line. ‘Away you go, sir, and whatever you do, hang on to the beard. Entertainments want it back.' He was grinning as he clapped me on the shoulder. Not quite a shove, but it reminded me of the one occasion I had parachuted under instruction. I jumped, my head in my arms, my knees up in a foetal position. Wham! I hit the water, the ship still moving, its displacement dragging me under. And then I was up, the grey stern moving past, the board within yards, anchored by the sail which was lying flat on the surface.

It was over two years since I had been on a sailboard. The technique doesn't leave one, but, like skiing, the muscles lose their sharpness. I flipped on to it all right, but instead of getting myself and the sail up in virtually the same movement, it was all a bit of a scramble. The wind was funnelling down the harbour, a good breeze that had me away on the starb'd tack and going fast before I was visible to the escort vessel, which was on the far side of
Medusa
and lying a little ahead of her, one of the old minesweepers by the look of it.

There was a moment, of course, when I felt naked and unsure of myself, but as my arms and knees began to respond to the drive of the sail, confidence returned, and after I had snapped the harness on I began to enjoy myself, steering close to the wind, my weight a little further aft and the speed increasing, my exhilaration, too. I found I went better if I railed it down to leeward. Gradually, as I became more relaxed and let the harness take some of the strain off my arms, I was able to glance over my shoulder at the pale grey shape of the frigate with its bristling antennae. I was paralleling her course and going faster, so that I was soon abreast of her for'ard guns. There was a little group of men gathered on the fo'c's'le ready for anchoring and the four international code flags flying from the yardarm. Ahead of me, and beyond Villa Carlos, I could
now see Bloody Island, with the old hospital buildings looking even more like a stranded steamer.

I swung round, passing the sail across as I went through the wind on to the other tack. I was heading directly towards the patrol boat now and there were other boats about – a launch, two motor cruisers and a sailing yacht, several rowing boats and a tug moving across to Cala Figuera to perform its regular job of taking the small supply tanker in tow. Without thinking I put my hand to my chin. I knew the beard was still there. I could feel it. But I still had to touch it, to be sure nobody could recognise me. By then I had worked the board up to about twelve knots and it was really skimming across the flat surface of the water. The tug hooted, and as though that were a signal,
Medusa's
anchor splashed down, the clatter of the chain running out echoing back from the rocky shore, a cloud of seabirds rising from the small boat gut in the middle of Villa Carlos.

I turned again, driving the board hard on the wind through the gap between Bloody Island and the shore, heading straight for the north side of Cala Figuera until I could see the quay I'd built and the chandlery and my home tucked tight in against the cliffs. There were two boats moored stern-to by the quay, figures moving about their decks and the chandlery door wide open. So the business was still operating. I passed within two hundred metres of it. No sign of Soo, but the office balcony window was open. I was then heading straight for the Club Maritimo, and seeing a big inflatable coming out from the huddle of yachts moored at the pontoon, I swung away towards the other shore.

If I hadn't been distracted by a small freighter coming out of Mahon itself, I would have recognised that inflatable sooner. Or would I? The fact was that I was thoroughly enjoying myself now, the water and the sailboard having temporarily divorced me from reality, so that perhaps I had no desire to recognise it, subconsciously aware that
reality and all the problems of the future were at the helm. I ploughed my way into the freighter's wake, swinging down-wind and surfing in the turbulence. And then, when I was almost back at Bloody Island and could see the inflatable heading straight for it, I knew, and in the instant I couldn't resist the joke of heading straight for it, just to see what she'd do, a bearded stranger sailboarding alongside.

It was Petra all right. She smiled and waved, her features half-hidden by that ridiculous sombrero she sometimes wore. She held up the tail end of a rope, offering me a tow, and I felt a pang of jealousy, seeing her suddenly as a girl on her own making overtures to an unattached male. Or did she guess who it was? I swept round and chased her all the way to Bloody Island, running the sailboard in right behind her and flopping into the water alongside the inflatable, ‘I thought we might have dinner together,' I suggested.

She was out on the rock that did service as a quay, leaning down, her shirt gaping. Her eyes lit up. ‘Where?' She was smiling that big-mouthed smile of hers, the lips open so that her strong features looked all teeth.

‘Here,' I said. ‘On the island. I'm told you have a tent …'

‘That beard of yours.' She was squatting down on her hunkers, her eyes very wide and bright in her tanned face. ‘It's crooked.' She began to giggle uncontrollably.

Reality closed in on me before I had even hauled the sailboard out of the water, words pouring out of her, a rush of information as she moored the inflatable and began unloading her stores. There had been several quite large political demonstrations ahead of next week's election and during the night a bomb had gone off in the little square in the centre of Villa Carlos. Two soldiers on sentry duty outside the military HQ and one of the
Guardia
had been injured, and it had affected the telephone exchange, all lines between Villa Carlos and St Felip being cut. ‘Two-thirty in the morning. It woke me up. I thought one of the
big guns on La Mola had gone off. And now I've just heard there was another bomb went off in that big new hotel at Santa Galdana and fires started at several of the most congested
urbanizacións
– St Tomas in particular and St Jaime. None of your properties are involved. At least, Lennie doesn't think so.' She asked me what I had been up to. ‘You've been in Malta, I gather. Were you mixed up in that disturbance? I was picking up newsflashes about it as I waited at Gatwick for my plane.'

I told her a bit of what had happened as I helped her hump her shopping up to the camp, which was in the lee of one of the hospital's standing walls, close by the old burial ground and the dig. There was just the one big tent. Now that the hypostile was fully excavated she was using that as an office-cum-storeroom, the big stone roofing slabs covered with vegetation providing protection from sun as well as wind and rain.

Her father was dead and she had only been back a few days, having stayed on after the funeral to help her mother move up to her sister's in Nottingham. ‘I've traded in my car, by the way. The little CV2 had just about had it and that old rogue Flórez offered me a Beetle – very cheap!' I asked her if she had had time to see Soo since she had arrived back in Mahon and she said she had been talking to her only a few hours before.

‘How is she?' I asked.

‘Oh, she's fine, and very full of what her Lieutenant Commander has been up to, and now that he's right here …' She was grinning at me and I told her not to be bitchy, but she only laughed. ‘You can't blame her when every time she looks out of the window now she can see his ship anchored there.' And then she switched to her work. ‘You remember the drawing on the cave roof I took you to see?'

‘The night of the Red Cross barbecue?' I stared at her angrily. ‘I'm hardly likely to forget it.'

She ignored that, telling me how she had checked on it
while she was in England. They don't think it can be anything important, probably done with a burnt stick in roughly the same period as the megalithic remains. Certainly no older, which is a pity because Lennie knows of some more drawings – drawings that are fully exposed, human figures as well as animals – in a passageway leading back into the headland above that big underwater cave Bill Tanner told me about at Arenal d'en Castell.'

By then she had disposed of the stores she had brought out and, still talking, she began to help me off with my wet suit. I asked her for more details about the night's bombings, whether she had picked up any gossip about the reaction of the authorities, but she had no official information, only what she had heard from Lennie when she had met him coming out of the chandlery. ‘He said it's been panic stations since the early hours with the
policia
and the
Guardia
rushing around all the major foreign developments.' The violence had been directed exclusively against foreign-owned property. ‘Except for the Villa Carlos bomb. It was in a parked car and they think it may have gone off by accident. There's talk, too, of disturbances in Alayor and Ciudadela, but nothing serious – just demonstrations, no bombs.'

‘Well, that's something,' I murmured and asked her for the loan of a towel as she pulled the wet suit clear of my feet. But instead of handing it to me she insisted on towelling me down with the inevitable result that we finished up in each other's arms arguing hilariously as to how we should proceed, her camp bed being designed strictly for one person and the floor being bare earth and rock. We had just settled for a sleeping bag opened out and spread on the floor when we were interrupted by the sound of an outboard coming steadily nearer. ‘Oh hell! I forgot.' Petra pulled herself away from me and glanced at her watch, which by then was the only thing she had on. ‘Lennie! I told him to be here by ten.'

‘Why?' I was annoyed and frustrated, suddenly suspicious.
‘Lennie should be painting a villa over by Cala en Porter.'

‘Well, he's not painting it today,' she said, struggling into her trousers. ‘Or any other day.' God! She was a big, powerful girl. I watched her button up her shirt, no bra and her breasts big and round as melons, and suddenly a picture flashed into my mind of her wrestling with Lennie on that narrow bed of hers, the morning sun heating the canvas of the tent above them. And then she said, ‘Lennie's old-fashioned, you know. Shot his mouth off to Soo about her playing around with a Navy officer when her husband was in trouble. Said it wasn't fair on you and she shouldn't have had Gareth up to the house when you were busy with that catamaran and under suspicion of being implicated in a political murder. Tore her off quite a strip. She didn't like it, so she fired him.' The engine note died. ‘I told him he could come and work for me. This whole complex is opening out. Just before Daddy had that crash I found what I thought was the base of a fallen taula.'

She slipped her big feet into a pair of flip-flops, tied her scarf round her neck, and standing there, looking down at me, she said with that endearing giggle of hers, ‘It's a foine upstanding figure of a man you are, Mike, lying there on the floor of my tent without a stitch on. But I think you'd better get dressed.' And then she was gone, and as I reached for my bundle of clothes, I heard her calling a welcome to Lennie, her voice powerful as a bullroarer.

Lennie was one of those men who seem to wear the same clothes year in, year out, who will doss down anywhere and have no interest in the ownership of anything. He had no car, not even a motor bike, and would go to endless pains to cadge a lift or avoid paying for a drink. He was one of the meanest men I had ever met, except where scuba diving was concerned. For that he treated himself to the very latest equipment, his diving boat a replica of one of those big inshore lifeboats that have an alloy hull with inflatable surround, the power of the outboard such that
the sound of it was unmistakable and the boat packed with all the latest gadgets for locating objects on the seabed.

While he was fussing over the mooring of it, the battered remains of an Aussie-type hat jammed on his head and the tails of his khaki shirt flapping in the breeze, I walked over to the dig, which was on the north side of the island about fifty metres from the flashing beacon and facing across the narrows to the shore just west of Cala Llonga. The exposure of a flat stone surface about eight feet long was the only change since I had last seen the site over six weeks ago, except that it was now a riot of wild flowers, even the rock steps leading down into the hypostile half-hidden by a tangle of some blue rock creeper. The hypostile itself was an extraordinary place, a large chamber with walls of up-ended stone slabs and a stone slab roof supported by stone columns. There were rock couches, or perhaps sacrificial altars, around the walls, and the human bones that showed here and there between the roofing slabs were a grisly reminder of the wars that had filled the island's hospital. It was the result of reading a letter from a soldier to his girlfriend in England after he had had his arm amputated at the hospital that had started Petra digging on the burial site, and looking down into the stone chamber she had uncovered in the shadow of the hospital ruins, it was difficult to disassociate the two and see it as a megalithic religious complex.

I remember that moment very well, the hospital ruins dark against the sun, the entrance to the hypostile yawning open at my feet like some ancient burial vault, and my mind on what Petra had told me. The political implications of what had happened in the night were disturbing enough, particularly if the army were unable to stop a recurrence of the violence, but I was thinking of the haste with which we had left Malta. Remembering Gareth's tenseness, I wondered what information he had received that had despatched him so abruptly to Mahon. And now,
in the sunlit morning, everything appeared so deceptively peaceful, the town white above the waterfront, the surface of the great harbour inlet barely ruffled by the breeze and the only sound the murmur of traffic moving between Villa Carlos and Mahon.