Alex shrugged. ‘So I send in a team, we arrest everyone who’s there, and we get the answers.’
‘You get bodies; that’s the only certainty. We have a man with a gun, we have a man with a secret, and we have a man with whom they both seem to have a grievance. If you send people in there with big boots, Kevlar helmets and assault rifles, someone, maybe all of them, will die. I was sent here to secure Robert Palmer, and to make him safe. That’s still my objective. I don’t care about the Wigwes, father or son. I propose that you and I go up there, Alex; first to establish if they’re in the building at all, and then to find out why.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘In my experience, the best way is to ask.’
‘Are you forgetting Uche’s gun?’
‘You’re a cop. Your uniform’s bullet-proof, because only a lunatic would shoot at it.’
Alex frowned. ‘Yours isn’t. Or is that stick all the protection you need?’
‘I’m still here,’ Mark pointed out, cheerfully. ‘And I’ll bet I have a lot more experience than you of situations like this. If I wasn’t here you’d probably fly in someone like me, as a negotiator.’
‘Shit! Okay, we go up there and we do what you say. But the decision on calling in back-up will be mine. You may be here to protect Palmer, but you’re a civilian, a foreign national, and my first task will be to protect you.’
‘Boys,’ I said, quietly, ‘if I may interrupt your pissing contest. If either of you think you’re going up there without me, then take a reality pill.’ They stared at me. Alex started to speak but I cut him off. ‘I’m coming, end of story. You don’t seem to realise that I’m the only one of us who’s actually met all of these people. Two out of the three aren’t remotely dangerous, and the third? Last seen, he’s been rendered harmless and anyway, if he’s what we think he is, he gets someone else to do his close-up work.’
‘And what if that person gets there before us?’ Mark asked.
‘I’ve got a feeling that’s what this whole kidnap thing is about, don’t you? In which case. . let’s get a fucking move on.’
Alex let out a great sigh. ‘What’s the point of arguing with this woman?’ he moaned, then stood. ‘But before we go, I have to ask this, and I’d appreciate an honest answer. Mr Kravitz, are you carrying a gun? That I couldn’t allow.’
The reply was instant and firm. ‘No, I’m not; search me if you want to be sure. I can still hit a target with a rifle, from a prone position, but my MS makes me useless with a handgun. I’d be dangerous to everyone except the person I was trying to shoot.’
We took my jeep. The car that Alex had arrived in was an ordinary saloon, and from Shirley’s description of the road we’d be tackling, a four-by-four would be needed. I didn’t need directions to get to Darnius, since it was only forty minutes from L’Escala, but I’d have driven right past the turn for La Central if Alex hadn’t been there.
The road to the hotel should have been labelled ‘Proceed at your own risk’. Most of it was single track and every one of the many bends seemed to be blind, but at least it had a hard top. That ended as soon as we reached La Central and crossed the tiny, narrow bridge that sat just beyond, with a yellow sign advertising a restaurant in what had once been Robert’s Mill, and with an arrow pointing the way.
We began the ascent, and it didn’t long for me to wonder what the hell a couple of sixty-somethings had been doing walking up a small mountain like that. Winter rains had left deep ruts in the dirt surface and once or twice I had to steer around the remnants of fallen trees. There was woodland on either side of the camino and some of it was pretty thick. Once or twice I thought we might be in among it, so narrow were some of the twists and bends. It could have been worse, though; in muddy conditions I wouldn’t have gone much further than the hotel, but spring had sprung early in Catalunya and we’d enjoyed almost four weeks of sunny weather.
It took around fifteen minutes to reach the fork that Shirley had described. When I saw it I could see how they had got it wrong. There was another restaurant sign, but without an arrow. Guesswork, if you weren’t smart enough to work out that there were no windmills in woodland country, only watermills, and that no rivers run in ground as high as that which we’d reached, far less along a track that continued to climb for as far as I could see.
I hadn’t thought that driving conditions could get any worse, but they did. The way grew narrower and rougher; the jeep even bottomed out a couple of times, despite its underside being normally well clear of the ground. I had to concentrate even harder, so I was more than a little annoyed when Mark, in the front passenger seat, patted my arm.
‘What?’ I snapped.
‘Ease off, Primavera,’ he said. ‘There’s a dustcloud up ahead. I think there’s another vehicle ahead of us.’
I stopped, and looked. He was right; the surface was bone-dry and I could see billowing dust in the distance, the same sandy-grey colour as the fine film that had formed on my hood. As far as I could judge, it was a few hundred metres away, and heading in the same direction as us.
‘Ten minutes earlier and we might have been waiting for them,’ I murmured.
‘No,’ Mark contradicted. ‘They’ll have come straight here from the airport, and I don’t imagine they’ve just nipped out for an early lunch. Someone else. . unless of course this is a through road; that we don’t know for sure.’
‘It isn’t,’ Alex volunteered from the back.
‘Then wait. Roll down the windows and listen.’
I did as I was told. Funny thing, but even although we were in the middle of a wood, there was no birdsong, only the sound of a high-revving engine in the middle distance. And then there was nothing. ‘He’s stopped,’ I whispered. Why did I whisper? No idea.
I reached out to turn the engine on once more, but Mark stopped me. ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We could hear him, so. . We’re on foot from here.’
‘Are you okay with that?’ I asked.
‘As long as it’s not too far. If I start to struggle you two go on.’
We climbed out of the jeep and set out up the track. In truth we travelled almost as fast as we had on wheels, sticking to the side of the road and avoiding the deepest ruts; some of them looked like small ravines. We’d gone a couple of hundred metres when we reached the other vehicle, the one we’d been following. It was a mid-range Volkswagen saloon, new, metallic blue beneath the dust, totally unsuited to the terrain, as out of place as Rudolf Nureyev in a Wild West saloon. Incongruous also because there were two kid seats in the back.
I looked ahead and I could see why the driver had stopped. The nose of another vehicle was sticking out from a gap between two trees that might have been intended as a passing place. It hadn’t been new for some years. It was a crappy old off-white Seat, the kind that a car hire company will only keep in the hope that a renter might write it off, or steal it.
Mark had fallen a few metres behind. ‘Careful,’ he murmured as he caught us up. ‘Let’s go steadily. This changes things.’
We walked on, but slowly, taking care not to kick any loose rocks and send them clattering. We’d only gone for another fifty metres when the forest on our right track opened out into a clearing, in the middle of which was an old stone building, but not so derelict that it didn’t have a front door, through which a man was stepping. We had the briefest glimpse of him, but it was enough to tell us that he was very large, and that he was carrying something in his right hand, an object with a polished wooden stock.
Before any of us could react, he was inside the old house. ‘That’s a sawn-off shotgun,’ Alex exclaimed. ‘This is where I send for back-up.’
Neither Mark nor I tried to stop him as he reached for his phone. Then, from inside the house, there came a crash and a yell, then another. . We waited for the blast of a firearm, but after that there was only silence.