Daggers Drawn

Some Sunny Day Julian Rathbone

On more than one occasion Baz has abused her great reputation as a criminal investigator for very dubious ends. The ‘murder’ of Don Hicks was a case in point. On our return from Las Palomas we quarrelled quite bitterly on the subject. Then, as she has also done on subsequent occasions, she produced a line of reasoning, which, were it not put into practice with remarkable results, I would find endearingly old-fashioned — a naïve amalgam of Hobbes and Nietzsche with a few other ‘philosophers’ like de Sade filling in the harmonies.

Standing with her back to the forty-eight-inch TV screen which plays continuously but always silently in her living-room, and which serves the social purpose of an open fire, she rocked back and in her Tibetan snow leopard slippers came on like a pompous don.

“My dear Julia,” she said, full of smug self-satisfaction because things had gone so well, in spite of my efforts to put them right, “there wis only one personal morality that deserves more than a moment’s consideration. Follow your own individual star, the promptings of your innermost soul — be true to that and nothing else—”

I interrupted as mockingly as I could: “Do it my way?”

Baz went on, unruffled.

“The morality you appeal to, the communally shared sense of what is right and wrong, is a fiction, a tissue of lies invented by man in his short aspect to allow society to function, to regulate the transactions we make one with another in our social lives.” She sipped ice-cold Russian vodka — neat with a scatter of freshly ground black pepper. “My dear Julia, you are not ill-educated, and you are trained in the social sciences — you are therefore perfectly well aware that all societies hold their own moralities to be the only good ones, yet all societies swiftly and hypocritically change their moralities as soon as their survival is threatened it they do not...”

I attempted an interruption: “I cannot recall a society which condoned or encouraged wholesale robbery on the scale perpetrated by your friend Hicks.”

She froze, then gave me that long cold stare which she knows I hate because of its element of Olympian scorn for the foolishness of a mere mortal.

“You forget Ruskin’s truism that the wealth of Victorian England was built on the loot of empires.”

“And you forget”, said I, pleased to find a rejoinder on the spot and not half-way down the stairs, “that he also said you cannot put an unearned sovereign in your own pocket without taking it from someone else’s.”

Well, enough of that, I leave the reader to judge between us.

I am well aware that Hicks’s demise was well-aired in the media at the time, and that a couple of hacks have since cobbled together books about the whole affair, but I am also aware that such sensations are less than seven-day wonders and the more intelligent readers of these memoirs will have quite rightly by now forgotten all but a hazy outline of the sordid business. If however you have that sort of mind that does retain in detail the trivia of what passes for news, then I suggest you skip the next page.

In 1970 a gang of three evil hoodlums carried out the Grosswort and Spinks bullion robbery. In the process they killed a security guard but got clean away with thirty million pounds’ worth of gold bars which were never recovered. Their getaway van had been stolen for them by a petty London car thief called Don Hicks, who also drove it in the second stage of the robbery. He was arrested for the car theft and later accused of being an accessory — but the prosecution on the major charge was later dropped and he went down for only two years. The three hoodlums were arrested almost certainly on evidence supplied by Hicks, and they got twenty years each.

When Hicks came out he sold up his south London assets, a garage and a terrace house in Tooting Bec, and opened a small car workshop in Marbella, where he claimed to be providing an essential service a Spaniard could not supply — talking English to the English residents who needed their cars fixed.

Six months later he met and married María Pilar Ordoñéz, who was working as a hotel maid and cleaner. Two months after the wedding they moved into a luxury pad in Las Palomas, the smartest little bay between Marbella and Gibraltar. They had won the big one, the fat one the Spaniards call it, the Christmas lottery — six million in sterling at the then rate of exchange. No one believed them, nobody doubted that the money was the Grosswort and Spinks bullion, but no one could prove it, least of all Detective Inspector (as he was then) Stride, who had been in charge of the case. He was furious at this outcome — that Hicks should get off lightly for turning Queen’s evidence was one thing, that he should end up seriously wealthy was quite another.

Sixteen years well-heeled contentment followed, but then Hicks’s paradisaical life took two nasty knocks. First, his first wife, Sandra, went to Stride and said she was prepared to tell him all about Hicks’s part in the Grosswort and Spinks robbery, including how he had masterminded the whole thing, but most important of all, where what was left of the bullion was, and so on. Second, the three hooligans he had shopped were let out. No one had any doubt at all they would head straight for Las Palomas — in the dock eighteen years before they had promised Hicks, in song, that don’t know where, don’t know when, we’ll meet again some sunny day. The only question was: would Strike get there first?

It turned out not to be a coincidence at all that Holmes and I were also on our way, club BA Gatwick to Málaga. I passed her the plastic ham from my plastic tray and she gave me her orange.

I asked her, “Why?”

“Because,” she said, smoothing her immaculately glossy, sleek black hair behind her small perfect ear, “Don is a very old friend. A very good friend.”

“You made a friend out of a robber?”

“He has wit, charm, and he is very, very clever.”

“But I thought you occupied yourself with putting criminals behind bars.”

“I occupy myself solving human problems whose ironic intricacies appeal to the intellectual side of my personality.”

And she terminated the conversation by turning her head slightly away from me so the bony profile of her remarkable nose was silhouetted against the flawless empyrean of space at thirty thousand feet.

We were met at Málaga airport by an urchin in an acid house T-shirt which also carried the slogan Don’t Worry, Be Happy. He wore jeans and trainers and locked every inch a Spanish street Arab until you saw his eyes which, beneath his mop of black hair worn fashionably stepped, were deepset and blue. He shook hands very politely with me, but to my surprise was awarded a kiss on both cheeks from Baz.

“¡Madrina!” he cried, “¿Cómo estás?”

“Madrina?” I asked, as he picked up our bags.

“Godmother,” Baz replied.

I was stunned. I was even more stunned when Juan Hicks (‘Heeks’) Ordoñéz led us out to the car-park, threw our bags into the trunk of a large silver-grey, open-top Merc, and himself settled, with keys, into the driver’s seat. I made rapid calculations.

“Baz,” I said, “this lad cannot be more than sixteen.”

“Sixteen next September.”

“But he’s driving. Isn’t that illegal?”

“Yes. No doubt it would become an issue if he were involved in an accident. He bears this in mind and drives very well.”

You could have fooled me. I was sitting directly behind him, with Baz on the other side. For most of the way Juan steered with his left hand, lay back into the corner between door and front seat with his right hand draped over the back of it. That way he was able to keep up a lengthy and animated conversation with Baz shouted over the roar of the horn-blasting diesel lorries he successively passed.

Baz’s Spanish is fluent and perfect — she spent three years of her adolescence there studying guitar with Segovia amongst others — while mine hardly goes beyond the ‘Un tubo de cerveza, por favor’ level, but I picked up some of it, and pieced together the rest from subsequent events — enough to offer the reader an approximate and much truncated transcription.

“How’s Dad, Juan?”

“Not good. Very upset indeed. He’s left the house and gone on the boat. He’s there on his own, refuses to have anyone with him. He says the moment he sees Stride or McClintock, Allison or Clough coming out after him, he’ll start the engine and make for the open sea.”

“What good will that do him?”

“None at all. But the boat’s very fast. And very manoeuvrable too. He reckons he can get through the straits and out into the Atlantic before anyone catches him — unless they are prepared to rocket or shell him.”

“What then?”

Juan shrugged, head forward on his neck, left hand twisted palm up.

“That’s it. Adíos Papa.”

Baz thought, then said, “A bad scene, Juan.”

“Very bad.”

“What does your mother think of it all? And the rest of the household?”

“The household shifts from catatonic trance to histrionic hysterics. Especially the girls, and all my cousins. The servants too. But Mama is doing the full dignified matriarch bit. Clytemnestra when she hears about Iphigenia, you know? But if he goes she’ll probably throw herself off the quay. Anyway she’ll try to but I shall be on hand to stop her.”

“You won’t be strong enough.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you fat friend should be there too to help me.”

After about twenty miles we swung off the autovía and into the hills between it and the sea. The hills were covered with urbanization — small villas in lots of a hundred or more, all in each group exactly identical to its neighbours. They all had rosebushes and bougainvillea and tiny swimming pools, all were painted white, had red-tiled roofs which clashed with the bougainvillea, and heavy wrought-iron gates, multi-padlocked.

The radio phone bleeped and Juan picked up the handset without slowing down. Indeed after the briefest exchange he was accelerating with the thing still in his hand.

“Yes?” asked Baz.

“Stride’s arrived. We have a friend in the Guardia Civil Cuartel and he says they’re planning to move on the stroke of midday, in ten minutes’ time. We might well be late.”

The next five minutes were a hell of screeching tyres and a blaring klaxon. I was thrown from side to side, and when I held on to the fairing of the rear passenger door I lost the straw hat I had bought in Liberty the day before. It had a board paisley-pattern silk band and streamers and cost thirty-nine ninety-nine, and that was the sale price.

Presently the view opened up and improved enormously. A small unspoilt fishing village huddled round a little harbour, set within a wider cover. There was a small marina beside the harbour, and about fifteen larger boats at anchor in the bay. The hillsides round the bay were dotted quite sparsely with large houses in varying styles of architecture, though 1970s Moorish predominated. The whole area was fenced but very discreetly; only as you approached the red and white striped barrier with its big notice proclaiming Zona Particular y Privada etc. did you see the ribbon of twelve-foot fencing snaking over the hillside amongst the olives An armed security man heard us coming, he would have had to be deaf not to, and had the barrier up just in time. I have no doubt Juan would have crashed it if he had not.

Juan had to slow a bit — the streets were narrow and crowded, the car rumbled over cobbles and occasionally clanged against sharp corners. Then the bay opened up, we zipped along a short promenade of palm trees, oleanders and cafés, and out on to the mole that separated the harbour from the marina.

There was quite a crowd at the end. Three green Guardia Civil jeeps with the officers dressed in full fig for the occasion — black patent hats, yellow lanyards, black belts and gun holsters, the men in combat gear with automatic weapons. There was a black unmarked Renault 21 and Chief Inspector Stride was leaning against it. There were two television crews and about twenty journalists with cameras and cassette recorders. Above all there was the household. All the adults were dressed in black, but magnificently, especially three dolly-birds, no other word will do, in flouncy tops, fanny pelmets, and sheer black stockings. Eight children, uneasily aware of crisis but bored too, played listlessly while nannies and servants clucked over them if they went too near the water’s edge. But above all was Mother — Señora María Pilar Ordoñéz, a veritable pillar of a woman indeed — tall, pale, handsome with an aquiline nose, heavy eyebrows beneath her fine black mantilla. It was impossible to believe she had ever been a chambermaid.

All eyes were fixed on a large but powerful-looking cabin cruiser at anchor in the roads between the headlands. One could discern the Spanish flag on the forearm, the Blue Peter at the yard, and the red duster of the British mercantile marine over the stern. A little putter of sound came across the nacreous water that just rose and fell with a small swell not strong enough to break the surface, and blueish-white smoke swirling behind the exhaust outlets. Hicks had the engine running, was ready to slip his anchor.

When Stride, a big man in a suit he’d grown too fat for, big pursy lips above turkey jowls, saw us, he lifted his hat and big, arched, bushy eyebrows. He’s head of the City of London Police Serious Fraud Squad now and has often clashed with Baz, knows her well. He had been given the job of arresting Hicks, dead against all rules and precedents, solely because he was the last officer still operational who had actually worked on the Grosswort and Spinks bullion robbery back in 1970.

I expect he was about to say something too boringly obvious to be worth recording when the village church clock struck twelve, the notes bleeding across the air above the water. A Guardia Civil colonel, no less, touched his elbow and he and a party of Guardias began a slow descent down stone steps to a smart little cutter that was waiting for them. As they got to the bottom the village clock began to strike twelve again.

“In case you didn’t count it the first time,” Holmes murmured.

“Aren’t you going to do anything for your fine friend?” I asked.

She shrugged with unusual stoicism, and sighed.

“I fear this time for once, my dear Watson, we are too late.”

As the last note bled away into silence the cutter edged out from the quay and began to pick up speed. At the same time a figure appeared on the bow of the cabin cruiser and we saw him fling the anchor rope into the sea. He disappeared into the glassed-in cockpit, the cabin cruiser began to move, accelerated, began a wide turn throwing up a brilliant gash of bow-water against the black-blue of the sea and then... blew up. Blew up really well, into lots of little pieces that went soaring into the immaculate sky only to rain down again within a circle fifty metres across. The bang reverberated between the cliffs and sea-birds swooped up and away in a big soaring arc. It was not impossible to believe the soul of Don Hicks was amongst them.

Doña María Pilar at least thought so. With her hand to her throat she stifled back a cry of grief and oved with determination towards the unfenced edge of the quay. Her purpose was clear. I launched myself across the intervening space and grasped her round the waist at the last moment, causing her, and myself, to fall heavily on a cast-iron bollard and cobbles.

Naturally, she was the first to be helped to her feet. She looked down at me and said, in Spanish which Holmes was good enough to translate for me later:

“Who the fuck is this great fat scrotum, and what the fuck does he think he’s doing?”

“We know,” she said, two hours or so later, “who did it. What Señora Basilia has to do is prove it. If,” and she waved a fork from which long strands of spaghetti still hung, “you can prove it so well that the police here will lock up McClintock, Clough, and Allison for ten years or more, then I shall pay you twenty million pesetas.”

Well, at that time, just before the British economy went into what will probably turn out to be terminal decline, that was one hundred thousand pounds.

We were all, and I mean all, about fifteen of us, in the big dining-room in Casa Hicks. This was a splendid room, the central feature of which was a big, heavy, well-polished Castilian oak table with matching chairs, up to twenty could be found, for the Hicks family entertained often and lavishly, in the old style. The ceiling was coffered cedar. Three walls were done out with tiles to waist height, the patterns reproduced from Alhambra. Above thee were alcoves filled with arum and Madonna lilies. Persian carpets hung between the niches, except on the wall opposite Doña María Pilar, at the far end of the long table, where the carpet space was filled with a full-length painting of Don Hicks done eight years earlier in the style of Patrick Proctor, possibly by Patrick himself. It portrayed him full length in a wet suit, with a harpoon gun in his right hand, while his left held a three-foot shark just above the tail so its nose rested on the floor. Hicks, done thus, was a striking figure, a very handsome, broad, tanned face set off by a leonine mop of silver hair, the suit concealing the no doubt well-padded shoulders, the swelling tum, and the varicose veins.

The remaining wall was glass on to a verandah with a view of the harbour, but on this occasion rattan blinds were drawn on the outside and looped over the wrought-iron balcony, probably to cut out the mid-afternoon sun and heat while allowing air to circulate, possibly also because none of those assembled were prepared to look down on the spot of oily water, still with some debris floating, where their lord and master had suffered his demise.

“I have already determined to do so,” said Baz, “and only required your permission before initiating my inquiries.”

There was a murmur of appreciation from all those round the table who were silently or not so silently weeping. It was not a household in which one could readily grasp the relationships unless or until one accepted the unacceptably obvious. María Pilar ruled a harem, or more properly I should say a seraglio. There were her own three children — Juan who had driven us from the airport, his younger brother Luis and Luis’s twin sister Encarnación. Then there were three, well, I’m sorry, but there’s only one word for it, concubines: Dolores (or Lola), Carmen, and Purificación (or Puri). Lola and Puri were curvaceous and very, very feminine, Lola with deep red hair, Puri’s black and gypsyish, both worn long. Carmen was tall, athletic, with natural dark-honey blonde hair worn short above green eyes. Between them all they had, I later gathered, six more children whose ages ranged from one to thirteen, though only the older three or four were with us from lunch.

What was even more scandalous was that Baz herself was apparently to some extent responsible for these arrangements. María Pilar had approached her fourteen years earlier with a problem: after the birth of her twins the doctors had told her more children would kill her. Since she was deeply Catholic this posed a problem: Don Hicks had not risked a lifetime in prison in order to end up a celibate on the outside. María Pilar’s pride was such that she could not accept his having clandestine affairs, nor would she tolerate the gossip and innuendoes that would arise if he did. Baz proposed the solution: concubines. María would remain in control and in charge, the locals would have nothing to be sly about because it would be all in the open, and so on. It had been difficult to begin with but once Lola’s first child arrived and Carmen moved in, it had worked beautifully — María Pilar finding great fulfilment in playing the role of super-mum to the whole household. As a sociologist I have to say I approve — since it works. As a strongly anti-Catholic feminist I’m not so sure...

“As soon as the shops reopen,” Baz continued, “I shall be grateful if Juan will be good enough to take me to the nearest reliable shop selling underwater equipment, I imagine the one his father used to use is reliable, and tomorrow, weather and the police permitting, I shall examine what is left of the wreck.”

“You will charge the expenses to Don’s account.”

Baz inclined her head in acceptance of this offer.

“Meanwhile,” she asked, “I need to know when McClintock, Clough, and Allison arrived here.”

Luis, an attractive lad, fairer than Juan, chipped in. “They were first seen only yesterday morning. But they went straight to one of the smaller villas on the other side of the bay. It had been booked and prepared for them in advance, so it is likely they have confederates already working in the area.”

“In any case,” said Baz, “twenty-four hours would have been ample (she pronounces the word ‘Ah-mpull’, an irritating affectation) for them to have put a bomb in place, or more probably a mine. What very few people are aware of is that Brian McClintock is a member of the IRA and no doubt learnt the technology that blew up your father from those who did much the same to poor dear Louis.”

The meal over, I declined a second opportunity to enjoy Juan’s driving skills and pronounced myself eager, as eager as one appropriately could be in a house suddenly plunged into mourning, for a siesta. I was shown to a room at the back of the house, which yet had good views of the distant sierra above the alive and almond groves, and which shared a bathroom with the room on the other side, which had been allocated to Baz. My luggage was there ahead of me, and unpacked — a service I always find mildly impertinent on the rare occasions it happens to me.

However, sleep did not come easily, the excitements of the day had been too intense, and presently I pulled on my Bermuda shorts with the passion flowers and plainer but comfortably loose orange top, and set off for a quiet and, I hoped, discreet exploration of the property. In truth I was hungry too. No doubt out of consideration for both the dead and bereaved, María Pilar had allowed lunch to consist only of the spaghetti, which normally would have been the first course merely, and fruit, and the so-called breakfast on the plane had been so relentlessly aimed at carnivores that I had not been able to take on board as much as I like to at the beginning of the day.

I padded down the corridors and stairs I had already climbed, into the spacious circular hall with a glass dome. For the most part the house was silent — the ghastly tragedy that had occurred may have stifled appetites for food, but not apparently for sleep. Though I was surprised at one point to hear two girls giggling behind a door, and then again sevillanas played quite loudly on Radio Málaga with castanets added in real. Servants, I supposed, less moved by their master’s death than they appeared to be in front of his family.

In the hall, also tiled and with alcoves filled with roses this time, there was no mistaking the door to the kitchens and similar offices: it was slightly ajar, lined with green baize, and the stone steps led down. I now entered a quiet and blissfully cool world of larders and pantries lit only by small grills near the ceilings. It was all very clean and neat too — one could imagine María Pilar’s influence was as strong in these partially subterranean halls as everywhere else. Presently I was in the kitchen — hung with whole sets of copper pans, with assorted knives in racks, and, precisely what I had hoped to find, a row of blackish-brown sheep cheeses, one of which had already been cut. The cheese was almost pure white, a sort of creamy marble, and crumbly — in short à point, or as the Spanish have it, al punto. It was with me the work of a moment to cut myself enough to fill half a barra. I wondered where the wine was kept. Such good cheese deserved a fruity red.

At that moment I heard a totally indescribable noise. Nevertheless I shall do my best. It was a sort of rhythmical combination of squelching and slapping, each beat ending with a brisk noise somewhere between a squeak and the noise of torn cloth. It happened about twelve times, then stopped.

Of course I was petrified. Fat people, and I am very fat, live in constant dread of the ridicule which is provoked by the situation I was then in. Nevertheless curiosity, and a loyal feeling too that Holmes should be aware of anything untoward that was going on in the house, prompted me presently to move in the direction from which the sounds had come. I passed through an open but bead-curtained doorway into a short narrow defile between white walls from which the sun’s glare was instantly blinding. I waited until I could see — of course I had not brought my shades with me — and followed it into a wide sort of patio. It was clearly used by the gardener as a marshalling yard for potted plants — there were rows and rows of them, mostly perlagoniums in all their wonderful variety ranging from the brilliant simple vermilion people call geranium red, to wonderful concoctions in purples and mauves that to all but the most over-educated tastes rival orchids for exotic beauty.

The floor was of polished terrazzo chips. Pools of water lay round the bases of the flower pots, which, in spite of the adjustable rattan roofing which shielded the plants from direct sunlight, steamed gently in the heat. So too did the strangely shaped splodges of water which tracked, arrow-shaped, pointing away from the door of what was obviously a potting shed, across the yard, and out on to a gravel walk, and finally a steep slope of dried grasses and immortelles that dropped beneath olives to the sea — and I mean the sea, not the bay, for the house was set on the headland between the two. Unable to make anything of this, I returned to my room and ate my bocadillo, little mouthful. A little duty-free Scotch with water helped it down faux du vin, and soon I felt able after all to have a zizz.

“I hope, Julia, you have brought your long spoon with you.”

“We are then, my dear Holmes, invited to sup with the Devil?”

“Precisely so. You know I do not readily indulge in hyperbole or other forms of linguistic excess: so you will heed me when I tell you the invitation came from one of the most evil men I have ever had to deal with.”

Generally speaking, Baz’s opinion of the male sex is low. We were then to dine with the lowest of the low. I was relived, however, to learn that dining was at least on the agenda.

“The Devil has a name?”

“Brian McClintock. And I imagine Frank Allison and Malcolm Clough will be in attendance.”

The bad news was that, Spanish style, dinner would not be served till ten. We were invited for drinks at half-nine.

I asked Baz if her shopping trip to Málaga had been successful.

“Indeed yes. And apart from the underwater equipment I bought one or two other odds and ends which will help us in our endeavours.” From her silk and wool shoulder bag, woven in Samarkand, she pulled a small black plastic bag. It was sealed with black plastic tape.

“This,” she said, “is a radio transmitter, part of an eavesdropping device of exceptional accuracy and power. While we are dining I shall attach the microphone and micro-transmitter to the underside of the dining-table. Later you will go to the ground-floor toilet which is in a vestibule off the main hall and close to the dining-room. I know all this, my dear Watson, because I also went to the agent who manages the villa our evil trip has rented. All I ask of you this evening is that you simply place this package in the cistern. The micro-transmitter will send its signal to the RT in the cistern, which will then relay whatever it picks up to the Guardia Civil Cuartel in Las Palomas.”

“What if they frisk us on the way in?”

“I don’t think they will. But if they offer to we shall plead our sex and go home. Not much will be lost, this is simply a back-up to my main strategy.”

“I think they will. In their position I would.”

“Ah, but what you do not understand is that they believe we are on their side. In fact they have already paid me a retainer.”

“My dear Holmes, this is too much!”

“Isn’t it just? But it will work out, you’ll see.”

The evil trio’s villa, on the other side of the bay, was perhaps one of the nastiest buildings I have ever been to. Built some ten years earlier, probably on the cheap, it was already showing marked signs of wear. The outside wall by the front door was streaked with orange stains, and the stucco rendering was coming away off the corners to expose ill-laid cheap brick. The door itself was made of pine stimulating oak, studded with nail-heads and with a cast-iron grill simulating a convent gate. The varnish was lifting. Fortunately we could not see much of the garden as the dusk was already upon us, but there was the inevitable bougainvillea clashing with a profuse variety of nicotiana.

We were welcomed into a hall, where black mould grew up the outside wall, by Frank Allison, a tall dark man once handsome and strong, now a ruin of himself. He offered us what must once have been a conman’s charm and was now the wheedling flattery of a conniving ex-con. The only good argument for the death penalty, and not one I would discount until the situation is reformed, is what long prison terms in our appealing prisons do to the inmates. I write as one who has been a Prison Visitor.

The interior he took us into had been furnished to appeal to the lowest common factor in taste and had sunk below even that. There were stained-glass lanterns over the lights, others were lacquered brass fittings from which the lacquer had peeled. The upholstered furniture was covered in grubby, ill-fitting loose covers of a wishy-washy design. The upright chairs were made from turned pine with stick-on mouldings, painted black. Cracked leatherette simulated leather. On a wall table a large bowl of opalescent glass in the shape of a stylised swan held English lilac which was no longer factory fresh. Worst of all was a painting of a gypsy girl, pretending to sell sardines but really it was her boobs that were on offer, heavily framed in a bright, shiny gilt above a false fireplace that the occupants had been using as an ashtray.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” said Brian McClintock, coming in behind us. He was a short, compact, tough-looking man, with a pale pock-marked face, and eyes the colour of year-old ice. He ran his fingers over the gypsy girl’s boobs. “Original, see? You can feel the impasto. Glad you could make it, Holmes. And your friend. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

I took the grey claw he proffered and repressed a shudder at its chill. No shudder though for the chill of the strong g-and-t, well-iced, that came after it, accompanied by canapés of anchovy on Ritz biscuits, cream cheese with tiny pearl onions. Really, one might as well have been in Balham, though I doubt the drinks there would have been served so strong.

Incidentally all what he called ‘the doings’ were handed round (and probably had been prepared) by the third of the evil trio — Malcolm Clough. He was fat and bald but with forearms and fists still solid and strong, the skin not gone loose, supported by muscle as well as fat. He affected a slightly camp style that went with the apron he was wearing. I got the impression that he supplied the muscle, Allison the mean, low cunning, but that McClintock was the leader — in terms of pure nastiness he had the edge on the others.

After that one drink, taken with the five of us standing and remarking on the continuing brightness of the weather and the possibility of thunder by the end of the week, Malcolm declared his paella would be sticking and would we be so kind as to go through. He showed us to places round an oval table with cracked veneer, dressed with plastic mats and Innox cutlery. Before he ‘dashed’, he used a Zippo lighter on the single red candle set in a tiny tin chamber-pot bearing the legend ‘A Present from Bognor Regis’. The place settings were already filled with bowls of gazpacho — which, I have to say, I found perfectly acceptable. Allison filled wine glasses with a semi-sweet, which was not. McClintock lifted his to Holmes.

“Cheers. Well, Baz. How’s it going?”

“Early days yet, Bri, early days. I’m still not quite sure how it was done, but tomorrow I shall find out. Or the next day.”

“We saw you was in Málaga,” commented Allison, “and bought the under-water gear. Have much trouble explaining why you wanted it?”

“None at all,” replied Baz. “You will recall that the other side has retained me to fit you up as Hicks’s assassins. In order to do that they expect me to recover faked evidence from the ocean floor. Little do they realize that I shall in fact use the opportunity to discover how Hicks got away from the boat in the second or so between when he was seen on the deck and the moment of the explosion. The evidence has to be there somewhere.”

“But we retained you to locate the bastard. Not figure out how it was done.”

“Of course, Bri. But since I am sure he has not returned to Casa Hicks, figuring out how it was done will provide essential clues as to how far he has got. And in what direction. So it is important that I should work out just how he did get away. From that we should be able to deduce how far he was able to get in whatever he was using as a getaway vehicle. I already feel fairly sure that it was a heavily armoured midget submarine of Russian design. We know some of your bullion turned up on world markets via the Eastern bloc. If I am right, and there will be cleats on the hull of his cruiser and a hatch to link the two, and these are what I shall be looking for tomorrow, then I think we can safely say he got no further than Tangier, or the coast near by. In fact I already have people working for me there, scouring the souks and bazaars, the pubs and above all the male brothels. Did you know Hicks was that way inclined?”

“I’d believe any filth of a creepy cunt like Hicks,” said Allison.

“Come, come,” said Clough, returning to serve the paella, “nothing wrong with a bit of bum every now and then.”

After the paella there was whisky-soaked bought-in ice-cream gâteau, and as it was served I felt the pressure of Baz’s foot on my own. From that I understood that the microphone stroke micro-transmitter was in place, and that the ball was in my court as regards the more powerful transmitter. In fact this was a great relief since the cold of the ice-cream hitting the oily glutinous mass of rice, mussels and prawns had provoked a reaction that brooked no delay. It had become a problem — for if I went the once, how would I explain a second ‘visit’ so soon after?

“Scuse I,” I said, and pushed back my chair. Fortunately a glance at Baz’s stony face brought me to my senses just in time, and I managed the obvious question I had been about to omit out of foreknowledge. “Where is it?”

“The ladies’ room? Upstairs, second on the right,” said Malcolm Clough.

I looked a question at Baz and received a tiny shrug which seemed to say go ahead anyway.

Up there, I popped the bag in the cistern — it was a high-level one but I was able to manage just by lifting the lid — unclipped my braces, negotiated the satin-edged cover on the seat, and then thought again, I did not fancy that the Civil Guard headquarters in Las Palomas should hear the first effects of tarta al whisky on paella. I rehosted the nether garments and stood on the seat — necessary now because the bag had sunk to the bottom of the cistern. The seat, thin pink plastic, shattered. I retrieved the bag, pushed it outside the door, and contrived, with some haste now, and in spite of the shards of broken plastic, to answer one of Nature’s more peremptory calls, perched on the cold porcelain pedestal. Then I retrieved the bag from the landing. But, I thought, when they discover the broken seat they may guess I stood on it and for why. I placed it instead in another pink plastic receptacle instructing ladies in terms so coy I cannot recall them to deposit tampons and sanitary towels in here and not down the loo. On my way back down I pondered some of what had happened, and had been said, and came to the conclusion that Baz was playing a pretty fishy game.

“Baz,” I said, on the way home, “you’re playing a pretty fishy game.”

“So it may seem to you, dear Julia, so it may seem to you.”

“And that bag you gave me, it’s in the upstairs loo. Does that matter?”

“I think not.”

We were wending our way down the short drive to the electronically controlled gate. The garden of the evil trio’s rented villa was of course untended, and branches of hibiscus and plumbago brushed my face.

“It would be fairer for me, and render me more likely to play my part properly, if you told me the truth.”

“Julia, so far you have performed magnificently — and as for the truth, remember, he who tells it is sure to be found out — but, as they say, hist!”

Her sudden movement banished from my lips my riposte to her second-hand epigram and she pulled from I know not where, for she was wearing a single-piece, pocketless garment cut like a boiler suit but made out of yellow wild silk, a small but powerful pencil torch. Its beam, as if laser-guided, fell instantly on the head of a woman standing pressed up against a cypress tree. As the light fell on her she flung up an arm to cover her face, but not before we had both recognized the tall, athletic and sullenly beautiful Carmen — the second of Hicks’s concubines.

“We shall ignore her,” said Baz, extinguishing the torch, and taking my arm. “She has served her purpose. I imagine too she has the means of opening the gate we are approaching and hopefully has left it open for us.”

This turned out to be the case.

Baz was never an early riser, her preferred hours of alertness and work being from midday until two, then from ten at night to five in the morning. She therefore engaged to be on the Hicks’s second cruiser, with her underwater gear, no earlier than half-eleven — an arrangement which the Hicks family, being Spanish by birth or habit, found perfectly acceptable.

I, on the other hand, wake at seven and have to be up and doing by eight at the very latest, and that was the hour that found me next morning again padding about an almost perfectly silent house, bored and hungry. This time I felt no compunction about going straight to the kitchen: a hostess who cannot provide breakfast for her guests at a reasonable time must not be surprised if they fend for themselves. I found coffee in a filter jug, which I reheated, milk in a big fridge and a pack of four croissants in a cupboard. I found the means of heating them through, and I speedily got outside the lot. The moment then arrived which I dread — it is precisely as I pour my second cup of coffee that I most feel a dreadful urge to smoke again. I gave up five years ago, but still the only way to keep myself from a mad scramble for the nearest fag is to resort to displacement activity.

I recalled the extraordinarily handsome perlagoniums in the garden’s patio outside and resolved to pinch a few cuttings while no one was about. I supplied myself with several sheets of kitchen roll soaked in water and a pair of kitchen scissors, and stepped out into the already hot sunlight. I took my time selecting them, for I felt it would be impractical to take more than eight.

I had just snipped the fourth when I heard noises from the kitchen, much the same sort of noises as I had made a half hour earlier. What to do? Some people can be surprisedly shirty when they catch you taking cuttings, especially if they are of hybrids they have themselves created, as well might have been the case in this instance. I decided to hide in an alcove where there was a stone sink and a coiled hose, and wait until whoever was in the kitchen had gone. I gathered up my impedimenta, and did just that, turned to face outwards and found I was looking across the patio at the man who had to be the gardener himself. He was tall but old, with short white hair and a big white moustache, and a big white beard, both stained yellow. He was dressed in an orange mono splashed with mud and perhaps cement, wore heavy-duty gardening boots.

“¡Hola!” I offered. “¡Buenas días!”

He said nothing, which is unusual for a Spaniard when offered the time of day, but unbuttoned his breast pocket, took out a pack of Ducados, shook one out and lit it. The smell recalled painfully just why I had been caught so obviously in flagrante delicto. Then as he expelled the first puff, sandalled feet tick-tocked out of the kitchen and there was Lola, in a short and transparent nightie as well as gold sandals, carrying a tray with a bowl of coffee and a large chocolatina.

She didn’t see me, but put the tray down on a large upturned flower-pot, perched on to her toes and gave the gardener a big kiss.

“¡Hola, Papa, croissants, no quedan. No sé por qué...!”

So. The gardener was Lola’s father — not an unlikely arrangement. I put down my stolen cuttings and sidled away muttering apologies in mixed Spanish and English which they ignored.

At midday then we were all out in the bay on the Hicks’s second major craft, an elegant reproduction of a Victorian steam yacht, but with modern engines, radar and so on, and just over the spot where his more conventionally modern cruiser had been blown up. Presently Holmes and Juan appeared from below, clad in wet suits. On the deck they hoisted oxygen cylinders on to their backs, fixed masks, all that scene — one has seen it a thousand times on TV — and finally to the manner born toppled backwards over the taffrail.

When I say ‘all’ I mean all — not only María Pilar and her children, the concubines including the strange and at the moment clearly agitated Carmen, and their older children, but also Stride, and the Colonel of the Civil Guards — again in full fig, black hat, black moustache, Sam Browne and the rest. Twenty minutes or so went by during which we all watched the rise and plop of bubbles through the oily water. After a time a brown scum crept by on which floated panty-pads and used contraceptives. I was amused that the efforts of the ayuntamiento de Las Palomas to cast a cordon sanitaire round their unspoilt haven were visited by the sea — the flotsam of the Costa del Sol, recently named Costa del Mierda, could not be so easily kept at bay. During all this Holmes apparently kept up a laconic conversation with the Colonel by phone.

Suddenly a big break of bubbles through the heaving scum heralded a shout of triumph. The Colonel stood up and explained, in Spanish of course but the gist was clear: “She’s got it.”

An underling in round, peaked cap strode across to the small funnel that rose in front of the staterooms, and yanked on a small lever. A shiny copper or brass horn near the top of the funnel emitted two short blasts and a long one that echoed across the bay. Our attention was drawn to the villa the evil trio had rented and its purlieus. It was nearer the water and nearer our boat than I had expected. What one saw was a platoon of Guardias, in full combat gear, snaking up over the terraces towards the house. A PA system boomed incomprehensibly, presumably calling upon the occupants to surrender. It was answered by the crackle of small arms, and tiny puffs of blue smoke drifted across the frontage. The Guardias replied and most of the villa’s windows, shutters and all, disintegrated in the firestorm. Five seconds and a white flag was waved. Clough and Allison appeared on the terrace, their hands on their heads.

At this moment Carmen uttered a cry expressing horror and despair and jumped from the taffrail. Undeterred by my effort the previous day, I again launched myself at her, but she was too quick for me and I fell on my boobs and face on the spot where she had been standing. She was last seen doing a powerful crawl through the filth of the bay and out to sea. No one, apart from me, seemed bothered to stop her.

A familiar voice behind me: “Well, you could have got us up a bit smarter than that. We’ve missed all the fun.” And Holmes, followed by Juan, both holding black plastic bags, squelched and smacked past me towards the companionway. I looked at the frog-footprints they left, arrow-shaped but pointing back to the rail they had climbed over, and all fell into place.

Lunch on board was, I have to say, magnificent though served as a finger buffet — a system that I normally find unsatisfactory: besides various hams and chicken and so on that I can’t take there were giant prawns, calamares romana, Canary potatoes in hot cumin sauce, Russian salad, six other salads, and a huge cold sea bass. There was French champagne and the best in Spanish brandy. Oh yes, I almost forgot, there was cream Catalan, Pyjama ice-cream, water melon, peaches, loquats, and so on. And unlimited coffee.

When it was over we were all called into the main stateroom. A table had been set across one end beneath a second portrait of Hicks, this time one of him steering the boat we were on. Behind the table sat Holmes, Stride and the Colonel of the Civil Guards. The rest of us sat if we could, or stood in a crowd at the back. The Colonel opened the proceedings and Juan, whose English could be as good as his father’s, whispered what he said in my ear.

The gist was simple. Condolences to the bereaved family delivered somewhat perfunctorily. Then congratulations to Holmes for so speedily sorting out and proving by whom and how the dreadful deed had been done. Three criminals with an unjustified grudge against Hicks had mined his boat and detonated their explosives by a remote control device, blowing him to bite-size pieces. They had been assisted by Carmen, a close friend of Hicks, but who had also developed a grudge against him. She had been caught on the other side of the headland and confessed all. Meanwhile Holmes had recovered evidence of how the mine was detonated from the sea-bed and the device used to transmit the signal would shortly be discovered in the villa. The Guardias under his command had attempted a peaceful arrest of the three murderers but they had resisted. One of them, Brian McClintock, had been shot dead.

Applause.

Stride took the floor. He was, he said, very grateful indeed to his colleague of the Spanish Guardia Civil, so long a force for law and order respected all over Europe and the world, for this magnificent achievement. Speaking on behalf of the English equivalents, his senior officers in Scotland Yard and in the Special Branch, he would like to say how pleased he was that these three nasties had been wrapped up for good, especially McClintock who was known to have had a hand in the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, even though he had been in prison at the time. No doubt the lefties back home would bleat as they usually did, as they had after the Gibraltar affair, at summary justice executed against known terrorists, but he was confident that Spain’s handling of the whole business would be unequivocally endorsed by HMG.

He paused, sipped water, dropped his voice by an octave. He was, he said, saddened by the death of Don Hicks. He had always had a sneaking admiration for the man and had regretted quite deeply the duty that had brought him to these shores — namely to arrest him for a crime nearly twenty years old. So in a way it was a relief not to have to do this, and a great relief to be able to write once and for all finis to the Grosswort and Spinks bullion case. He had no reservations at all about adding his condolences to the Colonel’s and offering them to the bereaved family.

Applause.

“Hang on,” I said. My voice squeaked but I was determined. “This won’t do, you know. Don Hicks is alive and well and living in his garden shed—”

“Julia!” Holmes’s voice was like frozen prussic acid, but I ploughed on.

“Those three men were villains, I know, but this time they have been fitted up—”

“Watson!”

“I saw Hicks this morning. Lola, Delores, over there, she brought him his breakfast. In the garden shed. Yesterday I saw his frogman-footprints—”

María Pilar intervened this time: “If no one else will silence that fat scrotum, I shall.” And she came for me with a knife.

I don’t know why she calls me that. I know I wear mannish clothes, but she can’t really believe I’m a man...

On the way back to the airport, Juan driving, my remonstrations with Holmes were again interrupted by a bleep on the radio phone. Juan passed the handset to Holmes.

“It’s for you.”

Holmes listened, then said, “I’ll ask her.”

She turned to me and her eyes, deep violet, dilated by the drugs she often uses at the successful outcome of a case, seemed to penetrate the inner recesses of my soul.

“Julia, the police cannot find the radio transmitter that detonated the bomb, and which you hid for me in the cistern of the upstairs toilet of the villa. Please tell me where it is.”

Defeated, I told her.

A shadow of a smile crossed her lips though not her eyes.

“I imagine that being men they preferred not to look for it there.”

One last footnote. When I got back home I found eight perlagoniums, fully grown, of real magnificence, delivered by a florist who is on the Designer Living Card list, of which more anon in a later tale. The card read ‘Gratefully yours, DH’. They are very lovely and I cherish them. But plants bought ready grown never give the same pleasure as those one has reared from stolen cuttings — do they?