‘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.
The rattle of tools made me turn. It was Lennie wheeling a barrow with an assortment of picks, spades and shovels. ‘Looks like the prospect of two of us on the island with nothing better to do has gone to the lady’s head.’ He parked the barrow and shook my hand. ‘Glad to see the Navy delivered you safe and sound. And the beard kinda suits you.’ He looked me over, a gap-toothed grin lighting his craggy features. ‘Stable door’s wide open, mate. Better zip up before I jump to any conclusions.’ He took a pick from the barrow and approached the exposed slab of pale stone, standing there waiting for me to fix my trousers. ‘Petra says to work round it with care, like it was a piece of Ming porcelain. She’s making some coffee for us.’ He hesitated, looking across to where Medusa’s superstructure showed above the back of the island. ‘Chris’sakes, that’s an old frigate. I was in the Navy once, so whether they’re Aussie or Pom, I don’t much go for Navy ships, but by God I’m glad to see that one here. You heard what went on last night?’
I nodded. ‘Petra told me.’
‘Okay. Well, while we’re trying to clear a little more of the rubble round this stone she thinks is a taula, I’ll tell you what happened to me last night. It concerns you in a way since it was your boat until a few weeks back.’ He cocked his head at me sideways. ‘I haven’t told her this, so keep it to yourself. She thinks we’re going to have a look at rock drawings.’ He began picking gently away at the weed growth along one side of the exposed stone as he told me how Miguel had taken him over to Arenal d’en Castell one evening to show him some plastering work he wanted done in one of the hotels. They had then driven back by way of the villa he had been building on Punta Codolar. ‘Up there, you know, you look across to that cave and the villa above it where I did a bit of work on the side.’
He grinned at me, leaning on his pick, waiting I think for me to complain that he had been working for two people at the same time. ‘It was a funny sort of night, no wind and black as hell with the clouds hanging right on top of us. I wouldn’t have seen it except that Miguel had to turn the car and on the slope there the beam of the headlights swept across it. Your boat.’ He nodded. ‘The old Santa Maria. No doubt about it. I had Miguel turn back and hold the headlights right on her for a moment.’
Apparently she had been lying close in, right opposite the mouth of the cave. He couldn’t see whether she was anchored or not. What he did see was that there were men on deck lowering a case into the water. He paused there and I asked him what he thought they were up to. ‘Well, I tell you this, mate, they weren’t fishing.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Had Miguel turn the car and drive off, double quick. You see something like that, you don’t hang around.’
‘No.’ I was thinking of Gareth Lloyd Jones and the King’s Fleet. ‘So what are you planning to do tonight?’
‘Go and look at rock drawings.’ He gave that funny grin of his and turned back to picking at the weed growth round the stone slab. ‘You want to come?’ And he added, ‘But don’t let on to Petra what I’ve told you. She’d be thinking of what happened that night at Cales Coves.’
The paths leading one deeper and deeper into trouble can be very tenuous. If Lennie hadn’t shot his mouth off to Soo on my behalf, if Petra hadn’t heard he was out of a job and asked him to help out on Bloody Island, if his arrival there hadn’t coincided … But there are so many ifs in life, and the threads that weave the pattern of our existence seem so haphazard that we are inclined to attribute to accident what older races of men put down to fate. At that moment, on Bloody Island, I thought I couldn’t be more deeply involved than I was. And yet, standing there in the sunshine, with all of Mahon and Villa Carlos spread out before me, the Golden Farm of Nelson fame red-roofed across the water on the long peninsula that ran out to the military casements and the big gun positions of La Mola, and the stone of the hospital ruins dark in shadow, I was on the threshold of something that would make my pre
sent circumstances seem totally irrelevant.
But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was watching the Spanish patrol boat steaming back to the naval quay and passing through the narrows so close I could have thrown a stone on to its deck if I’d been standing by the beacon. And there was movement on Medusa now, a launch manned by bluejackets coming out from under her stern and pointing its bows to pass the other side of Bloody Island. There was an officer standing in the stern and somehow I knew it was Gareth, knew where he was going. I climbed to a vantage point at the south end of the hospital ruins and watched as the launch powered past me, cutting an arrowhead wake that pointed straight at Cala Figuera. A few minutes and it was alongside the quay we had built, Gareth clambering out and going straight across the road and in through the open door of the chandlery.
He was only there a short time. No reason for me to feel hurt, but I did, and when I returned to the dig, neither Lennie nor Petra made any reference to my absence. They were drinking coffee, and when we had finished, the three of us got to work.
All through the day we were hard at it, picking and shovelling with care and carting the rubble away. At one point we were involved in the awkward removal of a complete skeleton, and then, after only a short break for lunch, we hit what I thought at first was the island’s bedrock. Petra was back by then, and as we uncovered more of it, she became very excited, her conviction growing that what she was unearthing really was a fallen taula. She had reason to be excited, for if it was a taula it would confirm the site as a megalithic religious complex. The centrepiece of such sites was always a huge stone monument of two rectangular slabs, one slotted into the top of the other in the form of a T, the upper slab like a lofty table raised sometimes as much as twelve to fourteen feet above the ground. Occasionally two slabs supported the top.
Petra’s excitement was infectious and my mind gradually became concentrated on the dig. Before her father’s death she had been working largely on her own. Now in one day the three of us had exposed all one side of a fallen upright, also part of the jointing of the capping slab, which unfortunately was broken into three pieces. I knew of at least eight taulas in Menorca, some of them either raised up or still standing, but this was the first I had ever seen on one of the subsidiary islands.
We went on until just after sunset, when we went back to the tent, lit the pressure lamp and had a celebratory drink. There was no doubt then about what it was we had uncovered. ‘A taula here on Bloody Island –’ Her eyes were bright in the sizzling light. ‘If only the professor I saw at the V and A about that cave drawing had been a little more enthusiastic, then with what I have discovered here I could have developed my theory on the growth of the Mediterranean culture to the point where I could have written a paper on it.’
Chapter Two
We had a quick meal and left shortly after dark. Petra wasn’t all that keen. I think she had accepted that any cave drawing she discovered on Menorca would be what she would call recent. It was Lennie who insisted on our taking a look at the water-worn passageway he had discovered by accident below the villa where he had been moonlighting. He was very determined I should see it. It was all open country, he said, and even if we were stopped the chances of my being recognised were slight. Anyway, I wanted to know what Evans had been doing with the Santa Maria moored above that cave entrance.
Petra had a bag full of archaeological papers to justify her journey in the unlikely event that we ran into a roadblock, also she had fastened the beard more securely to my chin with some adhesive tape. Having forced myself to wear it all day, I had become quite used to it and she assured me it was a great improvement in my appearance. ‘Very macho,’ she whispered to me with a grin as she finally stuck it in place.
It was a clear night, no wind, and the stars very bright. We only passed two cars between the turn-off to the little fishing port of Es Grau and the crossroads where we turned right for Macaret and Punta Codolar. The warm air coming in through Petra’s open window was full of the resin scent of pines and the more pungent smell of the maquis growth that blanketed much of the gravel country we were passing through.
The villa to which Lennie directed her was only a short distance from the half-completed one I had traded for Thunderflash, and as we swung down the western slope of the headland, I caught a glimpse of it, still with the scaffold up and what looked like a big removal van parked outside it, the box-like shape momentarily in silhouette against a naked light bulb shining from one of the downstair windows. I wondered if it was Evans and how he would react if Petra dropped me off there and I walked in on him. But then we were on the eastern arm of Arenal d’en Castell’s little horseshoe cove and Lennie was telling her to drive on past what he called the cave villa. ‘We’ll park down by one of the hotels.’
The villa was in darkness, one of those architect-designed summer homes built into the rocky slope on several layers, its garden stepped in terraces. The owner was apparently a German bank executive, and Miguel, who looked after it for him, had told Lennie he was not expected until the middle of June. We left the car at the first hotel, parked among a covey of hired Fiats, and climbed back up the hill, Petra with her bag of archaeological stuff slung over her shoulder, Lennie and I with the torches, pressure lamp, a bottle of wine and a coil of rope taken from his boat. The driveway swung off direct to the garage, which was built into the hillside at the bottom of the garden. ‘We had to blast that out of solid rock.’ Lennie had done the blasting. ‘That was what he wanted me for.’ He had worked at one time in one of the Kalgoorlie mines. He had been a prospector, too. ‘It’s limestone here, nice easy stuff. That’s why there’s caves and blowholes.’ We climbed up the terraces and let ourselves in through the garden door, the house very dark inside and smelling faintly of paint and sea damp. ‘Better not show a light.’ Lennie closed the door and pocketed the key. ‘Had it copied,’ he said with a wink. ‘You never know.’ And he added, ‘You two wait here while I locate the cellar door.’
The cellar itself was reached by a curving flight of half a dozen concrete steps. It had been blasted out of the solid rock, an area of about thirty square metres lined with wine racks. He swung his torch over the array of bottles that hid the naked rock of the walls. ‘Got some good stuff here, certainly has. Haven’t been in the cellar since he got it fully stocked.’ He went over to the far corner where there was an olive-wood table and two seats made out of oak-staved barrels standing on a sheet of corrugated iron. When we had shifted the furniture and pulled the tin sheet aside, there was a jagged-edged hole dropping away into what looked like nothingness with the slop and gurgle of water faintly audible.
‘Well, there it is,’ he said to Petra. ‘Down you go. Turn right at the bottom and you’ll find the drawings on the roof about twenty yards away. If you get to the rock fall where I blasted out the blowhole to make the garage you’ve gone past it, okay?’ He was fastening one end of the rope to the base of one of the bottle racks, then he put a couple of foot loops into it before passing the end of it down the hole. ‘Bout ten feet, that’s all, then you’re into the blowhole.’ He passed Petra one of the torches and held her while she got her foot into the first loop. She looked very strange, her body disappearing into the floor, shadows flickering on the walls and the bottles watching with a dusty glint.
We lit the pressure lamp and passed it down to her. Then we lowered ourselves into the cave-like passageway beside her. It was wider than I had expected, the walls very irregular, and quite different to the cellar, for the rock here had not been blasted, but was carved out by centuries of pressurised sea water as the waves of the tramontana crashed against the coast.
‘We’ll leave you for a moment,’ Lennie told her.
‘Why? Where are you going?’
Lennie nodded in the opposite direction. ‘We’ll head down the slope. I want Mike to see how the blowhole drops into the cave. Won’t be long.’ We left her then, moving quickly down the irregular passageway. At times we were almost crawling, then s
uddenly the passage would open out into an expansion chamber so that we could walk virtually upright. Here and there Lennie paused, the beam of his torch directed at the scuffed dust of the floor, and all the time the sound of the sea increasing as it slopped and gurgled in the cavern ahead. Round the first bend he paused, ‘I wasn’t telling Petra this. She’s hooked on cave drawings and such. But this is what I came to check on.’ His hand was on my arm, a tight grip as he pulled me down to take a closer look at the floor. ‘A lot of stuff has been dragged along here. Heavy stuff in cases, I’d say. And here and there the imprint of a shoe. Look!’ And he let go my arm, tracing a blurred imprint in the dust.
‘Smuggling?’ I was thinking of Gareth, all the questions he had asked over that lunch at Fornells – and that story of his about Evans in the King’s Fleet. ‘You say you saw the Santa Maria lying off here?’
‘Sure did.’ Lennie straightened up. ‘Come on. And be careful now. It gets steeper. Then I’ll show you how it’s done.’
We continued on, another expansion chamber opening up, the sound of the sea suddenly very loud. At the far end the blowhole tunnel fell right away, an almost vertical drop, the nearside of which had been heavily scored as though by a large shovel or scraper. Rigged across the hole was a lattice of small scaffolding poles bolted together to hold a heavy metal pulley. We slithered down till we could clutch the scaffolding, then, leaning out over the abyss and probing downwards with our torches, we could see the surge of the waves in the cave mouth, the water in the cavern itself rising and falling against a steep little beach of dark sand and round, water-rolled stones that gleamed wetly.
There was also something else, a heavy old anchor, brown with rust and half-buried in the beach. A heavy-duty purchase of the type used in large yachts before the switch to winches was shackled to the eye of the stock, and nylon sheets or warps ran through the pulleys and out into the sea. ‘That’s what I came here for.’ Lennie’s voice was a whisper as though at any moment he expected one of the smugglers to rise like a genie out of the blowhole. ‘To see how they did it.’
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