Paul Nash looked up and down the road, scanned the surrounding fields.
“Has anybody else got any complaints?”
Melody realised he was only talking to her.
“No. I just wish you wouldn’t keep killing people!”
“Trust me. They all had it coming to them.” Next, he turned to Albert Stanton. Briskly, he asked: “Tell me you can drive?”
“I can drive,” the other man agreed.
“Good, I need my hands free,” Nash retorted, frowning at Melody, “just in case we run into somebody who needs killing.”
The women and Pedro settled in the back seat of the car, a Blohm and Mertz late 1960s model, made themselves comfortable, careful not to dislodge the blankets covering the fresh blood of the vehicle’s former occupants as Albert Stanton, with a crashing of gears and tearing of the clutch, eventually turned the car around to point north.
“I’ve got a Morris Roadster back home,” he apologised. “This thing is, well, different in every imaginable way. I’ll get used to it, hopefully.”
Henrietta had clutched Pedro to her bosom, covering his face so that he caught no sight of the men Paul Nash had executed with his silenced automatic pistol.
“I still don’t understand how you found us again, Paul?” She asked.
Of course, he had not found ‘them’ because he was only looking for her. Five people had died in less than half-a-day, a woman had been left writhing on the floor as they stepped over her agony-wracked body, because of her, because of who and what she was, the daughter of the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England. Henrietta’s old, pre-Chinchón self would have been guilty, full of remorse. Today, she simply recognised the reality of her situation. If she was not who and what she was she, Melody, Pedro, whom she could not bear to let go off, Albert, they would all be dead by now. Alonso had made what plans he could to save them, fearful the World was about to be turned upside down, Don Rafael, Don Jose in Navalperal de Tormes had all been prepared to risk everything… just for her.
“I got lucky,” the man explained. “I guessed Don Jose’s people would have got you out of that ambush at El Barco de Avila any way they could. I didn’t reckon you’d get far on foot. So, I went down river. Luckily, I bumped into those two kids, Jesus and Felipe, you mislaid. They told me the story. It took me a while, poking around Congosto to figure out the lay of the land, then I saw that Mariano cove and his friend walking up through the village with Albert. I probably wouldn’t have found you two ladies for hours if you hadn’t been making such a kerfuffle!”
He chuckled, so lowly the others were surprised the windows of the car did not vibrate in sympathy.
“Anyway, the noise you were making had already extricated Brother Mariano from doing God’s work between Donna Consuela’s thighs by the time I kicked down the door of their humble abode. I think the other chap was hanging around gathering his courage to visit you ladies in your outhouse. Presumably, with evil thoughts on his mind. Or at least that’s the conclusion I usually draw when I shoot a man whose got one hand holding onto something substantially erectile in his pants.”
The car chugged along the road, pitching and rolling even though Albert Stanton tried to avoid the worst potholes. Here and there people walked along the roadside, a mule or two being led, or a cart half-blocked the road, otherwise there was little traffic and they encountered nothing else powered by an internal combustion engine.
“Are we driving all the way to Salamanca?” The Manhattan Globe man inquired.
This drew a curt shake of the head.
“No.”
“What’s the plan, Paul?” Melody demanded.
“Playing pilgrim works if we use the river,” the man announced thoughtfully. “I reckon the Tormes is navigable by boat downstream from Alba, that’s about twenty miles north of here, more by road in this part of the world, obviously. We might get within a few miles of the Portuguese border. As far as Ledesma, maybe. If we get lucky, we might just float straight past Salamanca.”
“There seem to be a lot of ‘mights’ in this?” Melody objected.
“Be fair,” the man grunted. “I thought we’d all be dead long before we got this far.”
Henrietta chipped in: “Now you tell us!”
Everybody laughed or sniggered, even, to the two women’s delight, Pedro, who threatened to smile.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Paul Nash apologised laconically. “Seriously, past Ledesma we’re talking about rapids and a sheer-sided valley. But Ledesma is close enough to the Way of St James to be plausible. All we need is for a bad guy to think twice at the wrong time and we’ll get the drop on him…”
Nobody felt very talkative for a while after that.
The road twisted and turned down off the relatively high ground through which, over untold millennia the Tormes had carved a broad, swampy gorge, then negotiated an ancient stone bridge just wide enough to allow their car passage. Now the scenery became less dry, dusty, replaced by the greenery of a plain recently flooded, above which the route north followed the river on a low, undulating raised bank past isolated dwellings, each as apparently derelict and forgotten as the next except for the smoke rising from stone chimneys and here and there, the ragged children or hard-faced women or men herding sheep or bony cows who stopped, looking up to view the brief intrusion of modernity that the Blohm and Mertz sedan represented, in this rural backwater of what was still, away from the big cities, a third-world country.
“Er,” I think we have a problem,” Albert Stanton suggested, peering intently into the middle distance, wishing, not for the first time in the last few hours that he had not lost his spectacles.
Fortuitously his problem was, essentially, short-sightedness but his regular spectacles, the ones that had survived his landing in the olive grove at Navalperal, also sharpened up his long vision…
“I see it,” the man in the front passenger seat drawled, untroubled.
“What is it?” Melody asked, leaning forward, squinting hard to see what lay farther down the road.
“A roadblock,” Paul Nash said.
The women bouncing around on the bench back seat looked to each other in near panic, before they focused on the wallet the man was brandishing above his right shoulder.
“What’s that?” Henrietta prompted anxiously.
“A warrant card,” the man replied smugly. “Well, the equivalent document carried by all ‘Sergeants’, which was what those chaps we left in the ditch back at Pelayos were, by the way, of the Office of the Inquisitor General of Castile and León. It’ll get us through the first roadblock. Hopefully, we won’t need it again before we ditch the car and move back onto the river.”
“Hopefully?” Henrietta queried, unimpressed.
“Being on the run isn’t an exact science, My Lady!”
Both Henrietta and Melody were about to interrogate him further.
“Now, if you two fair maidens would shut up and look very, very downcast and frightened, that would be a big help. The Policia will want to look inside the car. Albert here,” he nodded to their driver, “and I are taking two foreign harlots we captured down south to the big city. God’s will to be done, and all that tosh and neither of you is looking forward to getting to our destination. So, sad, scared, pale, submissive works best in the circumstances? Are we all singing from the same hymn sheet?”
“Yes,” the women agreed and Pedro, not understanding English, echoed this.
“Excellent,” Paul Nash grunted. “This is one of those rare occasions when I want, if at all possible, not to have to shoot anybody. It’ll take several days for anybody to report, if they ever do, those bodies back in the ditch. With any luck the locals will rob the bodies and bury them and nobody will ever be the wiser. But if we have to shoot our way through a roadblock,” the man shrugged, his tone philosophical, “that’s going to attract a lot of unwelcome interest.”