The Lost Relic

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Northeastern Portugal

A few kilometres from the Spanish border

A couple of hours’ rest around dawn had done little to make Ben feel refreshed or any stronger, but the fear of being discovered curled up asleep in the old Daihatsu by a farmer or one of the hands had been all the incentive he’d needed to move on early.

Some horses in a nearby paddock had stopped munching and stared at him warily as he took a drink from a rainwater barrel that was fed from their stable-roof guttering. Then the strange, furtive creature seemed to vanish as suddenly as it had appeared, and the horses relaxed and went back to their grazing.

Through the morning and the early afternoon, Ben had kept moving on foot. Public transport was less risky in the city, where people tended to ignore each other and individuals could lose themselves in the crowd. In country areas folks took much more interest, especially in strangers, and a sleepy railway station or half-deserted bus stop could spell disaster out here. All it took was one curious local to recognise his face from the TV news, and he’d have Darcey Kane and her troops back after him like greyhounds running down a hare. Hitching a lift was too risky for the same reason, and trying to steal a vehicle from one of the villages or farms he passed by was just asking for trouble – and maybe a couple of barrels of bird-shot from someone’s twelve-gauge into the bargain.

He kept shy of main roads, keeping to the rural lanes as much as he could and avoiding built-up areas. The effort of the long walk quickly tired him again. His arm was burning in agony under the clean dressing he’d wrapped over the stitches. There were still some codeine tablets left, but the narcotic drug could affect judgement and reaction time; he needed to keep his wits about him as best he could.

Just after four in the afternoon, near the town of Castelo Branco, he heard the chug of an old diesel coming up the road and ducked into the trees as it came by. The pickup truck had seen better days. Its motor sounded like a bag of nails and a hazy blue mist of burnt oil smoke hung in its wake. Behind the pickup was a large trailer heaped with loose straw. Ben saw his chance to gain some ground. It was better than hitch-hiking. The driver, an old man with a face like leather and one deeply tanned arm dangling out of his window, looked too half-asleep to notice an uninvited passenger joining him en route. Ben waited until the pickup had lumbered past, then ran after it, grabbed hold of the tailgate of the trailer and jumped aboard. The straw was prickly as he dug in, concealing himself from any vehicles that might come up behind.

After a bumpy, rattling, twenty-five or so kilometres westwards, the pickup lurched off the road and headed up a sun-cracked earth track towards a farm in the distance. Ben parted ways with it, picking bits of straw out of his hair as he carried on walking. By his reckoning, Brooke’s place wasn’t more than about another nine or ten kilometres away.

The closer he got, the more he kept thinking about her. The thoughts helped him to forget the pain that lanced through him with every step – but brought a different, deeper kind of pain, a sense of desolation and terrible loneliness. He wished he could call her, just to hear the sound of her voice. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He trudged on.

Another hour passed. His step was getting heavy, as if he were wading through desert sand, and having to skirt around the edge of a village slowed his progress even more. The heat was stifling and oppressive. Ben wiped sweat from his face and looked up at the dark clouds that were rolling in from the distant hills, gradually amassing to blot out the clear blue sky. His lips were dry and his throat was parched, but he had a feeling that before too long he’d have all the water he needed, and more. A storm was brewing.