‘We shan’t find him,’ I said. The general support and hilarity were making me incautious. ‘He’ll be with Jorge and Gregorio.’
‘Who?’ said Mummy.
There was no harm in telling the story. Mummy was in no position to spread slanderous rumours, and Clem was on Johnson’s side anyway. I related the tale of the rubies.
‘Why?’ said Mummy, at the end. ‘Did he hope to sell them as real?’
‘He couldn’t do that, they were too well known. And they were bad copies anyway,’ I said. ‘No, our guess was that they were meant to replace the real ones somehow, while the genuine collar was stolen and sold.’
‘I thought they kept them in the bank,’ Clem remarked. ‘Or is there a vault in the church or something?’
‘I think they’re kept in the bank. Somewhere safe anyway,’ I said, ‘eleven months of the year. The only time they come out .’
‘Is in the holy processions. Of course,’ said Mummy, delighted.
‘The night procession of penitents. They must have planned to take the real ones today,’ I said. I’d heard Johnson work it all out. ‘Tonight is the great procession, and they go back to be locked up right after. Just think of it. Someone was going to have Asprey luggage this summer. And now he’s got to run for his life.’
‘Suppose Gregorio turns up and says he knows nothing about it?’ said Clem. ‘You haven’t much proof. It might have been Mandleberg.’
‘Well, hardly,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t even there. And tell me how he could have a false safe not only made but put in, without Jorge or Gregorio knowing? He wouldn’t even have known he had been burgled, if Mr Lloyd hadn’t rushed down with a gun.’
‘What about Tony Lloyd then?’ said Mummy. ‘Maybe he was directing this man Gregorio in Mr Mandleberg’s absence. That would explain why the two men haven’t turned up. Maybe he spent the morning quietly getting them out of the country.’
I must say the thought had been in my mind too.
I said: ‘The only thing is, he hardly needs the money, you’d think. He runs half the foreign commerce in southern Spain already. And I don’t suppose even these rubies, broken down from their mounts, would give more than, what, twelve thousand, eighteen thousand pounds?’
‘It isn’t much,’ Mummy agreed. ‘But it mounts up, honey, you know. Maybe that’s just how he got to run half the trade on the coast. It sure helps grease the wheels.’
I said: ‘The thing is, do you think Daddy found out? Do you think that’s why he was killed, not the other thing? And do you think Derek might know it?’
She took off her glasses. Inside the rings of horsehair I could see that her eyes after all were bloodshot and a good deal less than fresh after her violent night.
‘My darling girl, I don’t know,’ said Mummy. ‘For all I can detect behind the nut cutlets, Derek might be preparing to pinch the rubies himself.’
‘That,’ said Clement firmly, ‘is nonsense. Lady Forsey. Apart from anything else, how could Derek possibly organise a thing like that from a large firm in Holland? He’s probably never even heard of the rubies.’
But he had. Janey had phoned him last night. Although we didn’t know that, of course, when we spotted Derek at the cross-roads to the airport, with one foot on a bicycle. Mr Lloyd’s Buick was standing beside him.
Clem saw them first and got Dilling to draw in behind them, while I explained to Mummy who Mr Lloyd was.
‘I know, honey. You told me,’ she said. ‘The gentleman with a gun who tried to blow apart your Mr Johnson. If you would bring him, I’d like to meet your Mr Johnson someday.’
‘His fees are a thousand guineas and over,’ I said coldly.
Mummy is pathological about being painted. She has been done in forms tachist, surrealist and cubist, in paint, wax, mud and gravel. Someone even sculpted her once in Scotch cheddar, and she kept it until the microbes had chinchilla earmuffs and the housekeeper fainted.
She tapped me on the neck with her reading glasses as we got out.
‘Don’t be old-fashioned, no one uses money nowadays,’ she said. ‘You arrange payment in kind.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said rather nastily. ‘You’ve got lots of kind.’
‘And you keep yours for special occasions. Let’s see,’ said Mummy, ‘who gets painted first? Dear Derek. Whoever would have thought of a push-bike?’
I put on my dark glasses. Derek would have thought of a push-bike. If he didn’t want to be followed. We piled out and walked over to join them.
Derek stood quite still and glared, but Mr Lloyd waved when he saw me. He was evidently alone in the Buick. I introduced Mrs van Costa and Clem, and he gave a quick look at the pale blue trouser suit and the chains and kissed Mummy’s hand.
He said to her: ‘I don’t know how much you know?’
‘I know it all, pretty well, I guess,’ said Mummy. ‘Sarah here has been telling me. But what brings you out here?’
Derek said: ‘We think we’ve found what happened to Jorge and Gregorio.’
The subsystem logic flip-flops were working. Since Janey phoned, he’d been on the track of Jorge and Gregorio all night. Gregorio had gone to church and then had visited the house of some friends, which he had left about three in the morning, since when no one had seen him at all. At Jorge’s lodgings, Derek had discovered that a man had called for Jorge in the early hours of the morning with an urgent message from Mr Mandleberg. Jorge had dressed and gone out, and had been seen no more.
‘It wasn’t Austin,’ I said. ‘He was flat out and besides, there was someone with him until at least three o’clock.’
Clem said: ‘There is a third person in the ruby thing, then. Do you think, Derek, this is why your father was killed?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ Derek said, plainly.
Mr Lloyd said: ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of this theory, but I’ll tell you my end. The airport clerks tell me neither Jorge nor Gregorio has flown out. The
Compostela
left Ibiza for Barcelona at four o’clock yesterday, so they weren’t on that. The steamer people know them both well and say likewise that they haven’t sailed on anything else: they haven’t bought tickets, and they couldn’t have slipped on board unseen. Now the airport and the docks are alerted, they won’t get out either way. And I imagine, now they know the game’s up, it’s very important to them and to the unknown third man that they do get out. And there are only two ways they could do it. One is by private boat, and I’ve checked that no one put out after 2 am this morning in a boat likely to make landfall anywhere else. In fact, only one large boat did leave the island very early this morning, with a crew list we can’t check.’
‘The foreign ship. The steamer from sa canal, the anchorage for the sale mines,’ said Derek. ‘I thought of it too.’
They had just met, I gathered, and formed an anti-Johnson alliance, and good luck to them. We parked Derek’s bicycle. Clem and I got back into the Maserati and Mummy and Derek and Mr Lloyd into the Buick, and we set off down the road to the airport. Just past San Jorge, we took the left turn for the salt flats.
It was the watery sort of plain we had seen from the airport, Austin and I: a shallow lake marked into squares and stretching for miles. You could see the control tower sticking up, and every now and then a big passenger plane would come droning in. Then we turned our backs on the airport, and the road dived in between a set of low, scrubby hills and turning to the right, became a sort of causeway across the flat water. On the same side, not very close, was the long sort of table of salt that we’d seen that first day, with railway tracks running from it, and beside us was a road sign showing a dear little steamy black train.
‘Train?’
I said.
Clem had his arm round my shoulders and it was sort of wandering: I hoped Dilling hadn’t noticed. I must say, Clem had improved, but it might just have been the hot climate. I wondered when he was coming back to London.
He said: ‘They used to run the salt in trucks to the anchorage along here, but they use lorries now. I think the rails are under repair. How much do you really like Gilmore Lloyd?’
‘He’s fun,’ I said. ‘We had a ride the other day. And a swim. I wish I could look at the salt. What does it taste like?’
‘Salt,’ said Clem.
Beyond the railway lines on our left, the water stretched into the distance, broken by patches of trees and small buildings. On the right, the ground rose abruptly in a long, low escarpment, covered with small, cushiony pine trees, and juniper, and masses of purple and yellow and white Spanish flowers. It was baking hot, and the smell of the pines and the thyme and the flowers came off the hill like an ounce bottle of Floris and stirred me up too.
Clem said: ‘Wait. There’s some salt. Dilling, could you draw in just there?’
‘Never mind the salt,’ I said, getting out. I could see it, where it had dropped from the lorry, in a drift of dirty-white chips at the roadside. ‘What’s the heavenly smell?’
‘Lavender,’ said Clem. ‘Come and see.’
I looked along the road. The Buick’s dust was just visible at the end.
‘To hell,’ said Clem, quickly. ‘They’ll wait.’
I saw the lavender, I suppose, out of the corner of my eye. The stalks looked about six feet tall, with a spike like a delphinium at the end, all open and reeking of perfume, and stuck full of bees. It grew in big, pillowy mounds all over the hillside, and I was going over them like Mary Rand, at the rate Clem was hauling me up that damned hill. We struck a level space, where a new road was half under construction, and then plunged into the fir trees beyond. Then Clem grabbed me and got going.
He got going so fast that my zip was half down before I grabbed hold of his wrist. He let go at once and, instead, got me in a half nelson and proceeded to kiss.
There are kisses and kisses. That one had about thirteen stone behind it and a lot of big silver cups. It gradually became apparent what Clem had been training for. It never crossed my mind in a long and varied experience that one could ever be kissed actually unconscious, but we nearly made it right then. I remember making a hollow, booming noise, inside my head, since I’d been deprived of all the usual agencies for communication, and Clem lowered me on to the grass and drew off, looking as if he were going to cry.
‘Cassells,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve done it. You’ll hate me.’
‘No,’ I said, panting. My zip had lost the top three inches of teeth. ‘I’m just surprised. Clem, I thought you didn’t like girls?’
‘I thought so too,’ he said. He looked even more worried. ‘I haven’t any income to speak of. I don’t know what I’ll do. You won’t want me, anyway.’
He sat there on a stone, big and brawny and simple, and rubbed his face with one trembling hand. It left a red smear.
I went, quite unexpectedly, off my rocker. I took his hand in both of mine, and said: ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Oh, Cassells,’ he said, in a kind of whisper, and sort of tumbled across to me, taking little short breaths, on his knees. Then he put his head on the undone zip, and I held him, my heart going like a road-making machine. I wasn’t even thinking of his worn-out jeans and his overdraft, but I knew I should have to. I think that apart from knowing very well what was going to happen next, I was chiefly thinking: Flo’s mother would be my aunt as well. Then we heard Dilling’s voice, calling.
Something always happens when I’m out with a boy. By the time Dilling reached us, I’d wiped the smear off Clem’s face and he’d lent me a safety pin. I even had grabbed a big bunch of lavender. We got back down into the car and set off and didn’t say anything at all.
The road came to an end at the anchorage, and by the time we got there, the Buick was already standing empty. It was quite a big settlement, dumped in the midst of the hills and the sea, with a long, marble-tiled office and its own generating plant on the landward side, together with a number of decent white houses with gardens and washing and children running around. On the other side, on a low cliff overlooking the shore, were the working installations: rollers for crushing the salt, warehouses for equipment and so on, and a deep well like a bullring, half full of salt, with long yellow wheeled chutes, standing ready for loading. Next to it was the jetty, reached by iron stairs from our level. A notice barring it said
Salinera Espafiolas, Zona de Trabajo Prohibido el Paso.
I took a handful of salt, which looked like white coffee sugar but tasted, as Clem had predicted, of salt, and wandered along past the buildings. Up on the wall, was a rusty green bell and two coloured lamps: below them, two labels said
Menos sal
by the red lamp and
Mas sal
by the green. I giggled and then stopped. Reaction, Sarah. Then I turned and walked past the thumping powerhouse and under the trees to the houses. Among them was a bar.
It was cool inside. Mr Lloyd and Mummy were drinking Cointreau which, at 125 pesetas a bottle, I noticed everyone was putting down like milk shakes. Derek had a bottle of cold pasteurised drinking chocolate. Clem, who still hadn’t spoken a word, let them fill the glass right up with brandy. I had fizzy stone ginger. It was a day I felt I might need to be quick off the mark.
Mummy’s eyes, of course, went straight to the safety pin, but Mr Lloyd saw nothing wrong. They’d been to the office. A Swedish boat had left at first light with a cargo of salt, but no one knew whether she had taken two extra passengers or not. A car had arrived at some point through the night, and people had been heard to get out. The car had then driven off. There was an inlet next to the jetty with any number of small rowboats in the water or on the slipway. No one knew if there was one missing or not, but there were some footprints on the grit there this morning which had definitely not been made by salt workers’ boots.
It was pretty conclusive.
‘Where does the Swedish ship make her first landfall?’ asked Clem. He had, clearly, pulled himself together. ‘Couldn’t we call at the Salinera head office in town and find out?’
‘If they’re on board, they may well have landed already,’ said Mr Lloyd thoughtfully. ‘Of course, we could always ask the company to contact the captain. Let’s do that. Let’s get back to Ibiza.’
It then appeared Mummy was dying of hunger. She lifted her hedge-clipping lashes to Mr Lloyd, and he agreed it was maybe too hot. There was between them already, a certain air of
rapport.
Clearly all the stuff about Coco had already been covered, on Mummy’s terms, in the car. Mr Lloyd was not only softened up: he was melted. Mummy is nothing, if not expert.