‘Did you put the collar in there?’
Austin sobbed and, panting, got some words out.
‘Yes! They were there seconds ago! The effing bastard! The double-crossing . . .’
They were the last words he spoke. He was still honking when a spark of flame lit the far end of the room, and there was a sharp pop, a clang, and the zinging noise of a ricocheting bullet. Austin fell back in his chair. One of the steel chimpanzees developed a navel. And the final bagged landscape, shot true in the belly, began to shed slowly out of its lining a drip of Bueche-Girod watches.
Austin was dead. I was looking at him, stupidly – the nice man who had held my hand on the plane to Ibiza – when the impact of a robed body knocked me back on my heels. A hooded figure, the gun still smoking in its hand, flung itself on me, twisted my arm hard up my anoraked back, and shoving me sideways began to carry me with it through the door and off down the stairs.
I saw everyone in the gallery stop moving, suddenly, and realised that if they hadn’t, I was going to be shot. I realised if I struggled, I was going to be shot anyway. The man holding me was powerful enough to drag me as far as the door before he had time to say ‘Walk!’ and to make sure that I did walk by shoving the gun hard into my skin. I stumbled down the staircase beside him and discovered I was squealing, anyway, at the top of my voice. Above, I could hear Johnson’s voice shouting something, an order, in Spanish.
Ahead was the doorway, with an armed policeman in it. He must have heard what Johnson shouted. On seeing me, he dropped his gun and stepped back. Hauling me with him, the Penitent Brother dodged out into the street. Without conscious effort I was still shrilling like an alarm clock; my assailant stopped, for a second, in the dark, echoing street and clouted me once on the ear with his gun.
‘Be quiet.’
I cut out, and with a jerk that nearly took my ball and sockets apart, he started to run.
A roomful of grown, bloody men, and a fat lot of protection they’d been.
Behind, I could hear people pelting down Austin’s tiled hall. Above, here and there, dim faces attracted by the brief screeching looked down, with interest, from the lit balconies. And in the street, one or two knots of people turned around.
The tricky thing was the gun. I could have yelled, or tripped the brute up, if it hadn’t been for the gun. I’m as strong as most men, though this one was big, bigger than a Spaniard, I’d say, and he’d spoken in English. The words, whispered, told me nothing at all. There was no smell of curry.
That, at least, had a negative value. It wasn’t Gil or his father, hastily got up in robes. It wasn’t Spry, because I’d seen him a moment before. It wasn’t Derek, because I know the feel of Derek, and anyway, he’d been the one who caught Austin. And it wasn’t poor Austin. It was someone whom Austin knew – an ally, a partner, who had robbed Austin, in turn, of the rubies Austin had stolen. And who had killed Austin to prevent his name being known.
We were running fast, dodging people, while I was thinking. My Penitent Brother had problems as well. He had to gain enough ground to get out of those clothes without being recognised. Until then, he’d need me as a hostage. Afterwards, he wouldn’t want me at all. Living, that is.
I was gasping. The gun was now in my side, and it tightened when I made to look round. I couldn’t tell if the others were following. My heart was drumming: it seemed to me that bugles rang in my ears, that the music had come back, louder, with the hum of crowds watching. I suppose I realised at the same moment as my captor that it wasn’t a dream. It was eleven-thirty, and the Easter Procession of Silence was on its way back from the Monument, about to enter the Portal, and retrace its weary steps up to the top square again. In a moment, the road we were on was going to be crowded with people.
There were steps on our left, wide cobbled steps with trim marble edges plunging clean down into the dark below Austin’s handsome paved Calle de San Guillermo. The hooded man beside me shifted his grip on my arm and, swinging me round hard against him, drove me before him down the black stairs. I thought I heard, as we went, the sound of running footsteps behind. So long as pursuit stayed quite close, I didn’t see how this man could kill me. The moment he shook it off, he most certainly would.
We went down those stairs like two roller coasters, slewed right round the blank wall of a house, and debouched into a narrow, dirt lane full of uneven white houses with broken steps and poles of washing like ghosts over our heads. A low wall on the left showed, as we flew, a glimpse of tiled roofs, lights of the harbour, and distant hills black against the dark sky. It looked peaceful and free. Turning, I missed my footing and stumbled and for a second was dragged off balance down the black, stony track.
The lane was a cul-de-sac. The hand on my arm spun me round, and we reached the steps again and resumed the headlong rush downward, twisting again and again between narrow, high walls until we reached another flat, stony space in the darkness, lined with dim, peeling houses, their blinds rolled up over rusty railings, the windows all empty except, here and there, for a flickering light and the sound of a child’s thin voice, wailing. A wireless spoke, and a cat, surprised, made a high sound. I thought of the dead rat in the ditch, the night I met Austin, and shivered. The man with me slowed down and stopped. Then, pulling me, he melted into a deep, broken doorway.
It was very dark. A lantern fixed to one of the houses threw a limited light, like dust, on the ground, and a lizard, moving into its circle, rustled off into the rubble. The bugles, starting up somewhere not too far away, were like a sudden scratch on the nerve endings. I felt the man beside me jump too: we were both breathing hard, trying to subdue it, but not hard enough to drown the light patter of steps coming down the stairs we had left and continuing past us. They receded into the blackness below, and the sound vanished with them.
We waited, and I thought: ‘This is it. Goodbye, Sarah.’ A shot through the heart – the crochet wasn’t going to offer much resistance. And then my Penitent Brother, whoever he was, would merely peel off his Penitent clothes, walk up and mix with the crowds, in his usual identity. I felt the hand on my arm beginning to relax and his other hand, his gun hand, lift and alter its grip.
A voice, calling, said: ‘Cassells? Sarah!’ from below, from the foot of the steps.
Not near enough to come back and spot us. But too near for murder.
The man beside me said something under his breath, and the hand on my arm tightened, and the gun muzzle moved back again to my side. Then he said: ‘Run!’ in the same eerie, hoarse whisper and set off, pulling me up, to the main street again.
Just now, I had been lucky. This time, his luck was in. In a burst of torchlight and music, the procession had reached the end of the calle but only just. The drumbeat echoed: Tuck, Tr-r-uck, tru-uck, truck, tuck; and the sound pattered, like shuttlecocks, back and forth along the double row of fine houses. We didn’t wait for the crowd. My hooded friend ran before it, deeper down the dark street, and found the steps he must have been seeking, I realised, the first time. As the main road curled steeply up to the left, a stepped, cobbled lane led downward, past big houses set at different levels, with double doors and light shining bright through their fanlights.
Perhaps I hesitated as we passed. Certainly the gun hurt my ribs, grating against my side as we went, and the hand on my arm was hot and soaking with sweat. The steps were wide, sweeping down between white walls covered with roses. Their scent came plain as the bugles in the quiet night air, and through a wrought-iron gate you could see a garden, the lacework of a trellis, a glimmer of water, and the sparks of two cigarettes being smoked at ease, under the palms. At the bottom was another narrow dirt lane, with a row of low white houses facing us to left and to right, flowers on their deep sills. A lantern, glowing dimly, showed an orange bead curtain, still swaying, and on the left, a bastion of the old wall, on which stood a Gothic gallery, with arched windows and mas
sed flowers in pots.
We swept past it and into an unpaved square with a concrete pump in the middle. Two men, talking in low voices, stood beside it and watched us, with curiosity, as we strode past. A Penitent Brother, called away perhaps in emergency, by his wife or his daughter. It was no use calling out. Not with the gun there.
There was a choice of two lanes. He took the darker one, always sinking, bending down through cobbled steps to the right; taking the right again when it forked to shrink to almost nothing between tall, broken houses, with netting hung in the doorways and the glimpse of a chair and a curious face, here and there, just inside.
On the right was a yard, part cobbled, part dirt, part cement. Broken tiles lined the high doorsteps, and the doors were warped and weathered pale silver, and the windows were broken, rusty, and barred. A falling building, propped up by timber, leaned across a flight of worn steps leading downward, past locked doors and blind, netted windows. The steps disappeared into darkness: only I could see a greater darkness arching over them, and I guessed that they entered a tunnel, made by two joined buildings above. A tunnel with no open doors, no prying eyes in it. The gun moved, and I was driven to the steps and down towards it.
I think, perhaps, I would have attempted to trip him. I certainly was going to scream. I knew this branch of the Cassells line had pretty well come to an end, but I didn’t see why he should rat out of payment. I had my mouth open when I heard the running footsteps again far behind, spaced out, as a man runs when he is taking two, three, four steps at a time. Fast enough to overtake another man before he can disrobe. The grip on my arm propelled me suddenly again into motion, and I saw that the tunnel was just a short archway and that it stood over a perpendicular flight of black steps, whose lower reaches were flooded with clear yellow light.
It led directly into the main square of the Dalt Vila, with the Portal framing the end. And curling round the archway and up the steep cobbles on its way back to the cathedral were the torches, the shuffling figures, the jerking, flickering fitters of the Procession of Silence. The main exit to the low town and safety was closed.
The man beside me looked round. There were people in the square, quite a lot of them. There were people, too, in the steep street to the left which ran, I suddenly remembered, to another gateway, the New Port, on the west. I wondered why we didn’t make for it, and then saw the lamps glittering on the folded black hats of the police. My captor moved and then, without warning, strode straight across the lit square and through the space between two houses opposite. It was wasteland and dark. I stumbled, trying to keep my footing, and was hurried across ridges of half-broken wall and piles of crumbling earth in a darkness which was almost total. Behind, over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the square and the gap through which we had come, empty of following figures. Ahead was a great blackness topped by a dim, irregular line, the wall of the battlements of San Juan, overlooking the town. Above it, the sky was full of stars.
It had been a mistake to look up. I missed my footing in earnest this time and, tumbling forward, fell head over heels down a steep, earthy slope, landing in blackness, all the breath knocked clean out of me.
There is no aid like cowardice in a quick-reaction alert. I got to my feet while my robed friend was still coming and made off like a hare.
I was running, I found, in a ditch. It was man made and excessively deep, and the sides were formed by slopes of sieved, heavy, dry earth, down one of which I had just tumbled. I tried running up them again. It was like trying to climb into the top of an hourglass. I wasted time on it, while the thudding footsteps behind me got closer, and gave up and sprinted, as fast as my shaking sinews would make it, along the foot of the ditch.
It ended in a blocked tunnel. Just that. Why, I never knew. I never knew either what they were building there, or laying, or why they wanted a tunnel at all. I just knew I ran into it and turned, cornered, and stood motionless, my pent-up breath mewing with exhaustion, while he groped all over the blackness, coming closer and closer. I made a break for it in the end, running headlong for the dim mouth of the tunnel, the way I’d come in.
I fell. As he flung his full weight on me, I thought the roof of the tunnel had caved in. Then I saw his black robe fly up, and his foot came over, hard, pinning mine.
All the penitents I had seen wore black shoes. All the holiday-makers I mixed with wore light Spanish shoes in fine leather or suede. The man gripping me now, and heaving me up, breathing fast, grunting, with the gun in his hand, wore neither of these. He wore sneakers. White canvas sneakers, liberally stained with grass and with salt.
I stopped struggling, and he dragged me upward, the grip on my arm became sickening. I heard him draw breath to tell me, this is the end of the road.
‘Clem, don’t be silly,’ I said.
TWELVE
I didn’t really believe it myself, until I felt his arm sag. I was nearly sick, then. Flo would have been sick. I said again: ‘Don’t be silly. We all know who you are.’
‘You’re lying,’ he said. It was Clem’s voice.
‘I’m not,’ I said. Steam was coming out of my brain. ‘Jorge and Gregorio are in Mummy’s house. Johnson took them there.’
‘You’re lying,’ he said again, and his voice had got three notes higher.
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘How else do you think Johnson knew there was another replica of the Saint Hubert collar? He only wanted you to betray yourself.’
I wasn’t sure, even then, if what I was saying made sense. All I knew was that somehow I had to make him believe that Johnson knew who he was. That way, there was no need to kill me. That way, he needed me as a hostage for a little while yet, because he couldn’t just go back to Dolly and pretend to have been there all night, lying faint with a bump on his head. (Who had done that? Austin?) Somehow, Clem Sainsbury had to escape.
You could see the thoughts going through his head as, automatically, he started to move once again. The hand with the gun had come down, but he hadn’t released me. He had only shifted the point of the gun from my head to my back. Then we stood in the entrance of the tunnel and waited.
It was very quiet. Over the wasteland and beyond the sides of the plaza, you could hear the intermittent sounds of the procession: the tiny bugles, the flat thud of the drums, marking all the slow stages. Soon, when the Portal was clear, Clem would try to get through.
Clem. He had taken his hood off and now, maintaining his gun carefully in my ribs, he was dropping his robe. No need for concealment now, not from me. If I was telling the truth, it would make no odds with Johnson, either. And if I wasn’t, he could bluff. He might even, gun pressed in my side, misdirect the hunt. So I suppose he was thinking. He didn’t say anything. And in the dark I could make out almost nothing, just the humid heat of his bulk, his short hair sticking with sweat above the pale blur of his face, and the raucous sound of his breath.
He said, suddenly: ‘What a pity I can’t trust you, Sarah. Damn you, why can’t I trust you?’ His voice was like a boy’s, petulant and he pulled me with his gun hand close, hard to his body, so that his mouth was close to my cheek. He licked my ear.
I nearly screamed. I drew in my breath with a shrieking whisper, and stopped the sound as he jerked off, groaning with anger, and brought the gun butt across the side of my head. A lot of lights sprang about in front of my eyes, and I lost my balance. When I got over it, I was leaning against the cold side of the archway with the hot, hard grip still on my arm, but there was space between us again. The drums had faded.
‘The next time,’ said Clem, ‘I’ll scoop your brains out like seeds from a melon.’
He seemed to enjoy the expression. Then we started moving again.
I had had a hope, I believe, that he would try to emerge in the square and that the police would stop him. How I thought this would save my own life, I don’t know. I don’t remember be
ing concerned by much except a desire to see him under lock and key. At any rate, he didn’t even look at the square. He walked instead along the ditch and back up to the wall of the battlement. He followed it, walking carefully, round all its points until it took two left-hand turns and came out, incredibly, above the roofless square of the chamber which lay just inside the Portal de las Tablas, the main gateway of Dalt Vila.
There was no float there now jammed blazing under the balcony. There were no policemen either; these were all in the square.
I saw Clem’s teeth flash in a strong, healthy smile, and he said: ‘You managed to follow me up, darling. So you shouldn’t find it too hard to get down. Just take my hand.’
And the next moment we were through the low door, scrambling down that damned creeper.
The ramp down to the market was empty but for a child or two, laggard to bed, and a disbanding family party. There were plenty of lights, and in the town groups of people turning away, to catch a bus, to have a last drink, to talk with chance-met friends. White-robed penitents, having delivered their image, were gathered chatting outside their church, a litter of flowers at their feet. Inside the church, a priest was dismantling the palanquin. The lamps were unscrewed and the Virgin’s gown had gone, disclosing the rusty metal of the two heavy batteries. A girl of about six, with pigtails and a frilled blouse and a round Hapsburg chin, was fooling about with a palm leaf. We hurried on.
No one looked at us, the brawny young man and the girl he was holding so closely. And yet, I supposed he had the Saint Hubert rubies in his pocket.
I said: ‘Where are you going?’
He couldn’t kill me here, not unless he were cornered. But if he were cornered. I thought, he would do it, out of sheer bravura and hate. You would have to hate people to kill as he must have killed – Austin. Coco. Father.
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