14

TO DRIVE TO Galicia in two days would have been an exhausting experience under any circumstances. To do so in a battered Land Rover which transmitted every unevenness in the road as a bone-jangling jolt was, Derek discovered, to turn exhaustion into a form of torture. The effect was heightened by Frank Griffith’s uncommunicative nature. Try as Derek might to relieve the boredom of endless rattling kilometres along featureless French autoroutes by starting a conversation, Frank was not to be drawn. He would say no more than he already had about what they would do when they arrived. Aside from navigational necessity, he scarcely seemed willing to speak. His jaw was clenched as firmly as his hands were fixed upon the wheel and his eyes upon the road ahead. Their destination was all that mattered, its attainment all that concerned him. The rest was silence – and a hunched intensity Derek found increasingly disturbing.

Studying his companion in lengthy interludes of idle discomfort between such unconsoling road signs as tours 107 – poitiers 211, Derek began to regret the promise he had made. He knew why he had volunteered to come and he also knew how pitiful the reason was. To impress Charlotte. To convince her of his loyalty. To demonstrate his love without declaring it. But what had any of that to do with a girl he had met only once? Or with an old man he could not trust because he could not fathom? Nothing. Nothing for sure and certain. Yet still he found himself in search of one along with the other. At first the impetuosity of what he had done had excited him. Now, left with too much time for thought and doubt, his self-confidence had all but vanished. From the flat grey horizons on every side, reality was encroaching.

They spent Sunday night at a motel near Bordeaux. From there Derek made his first scheduled telephone call to Charlotte. It was reassuring to speak to her again, to remind himself there really was a sane and vital purpose to what he had embarked upon. But neither could find much to say. Both were waiting upon events. And it was for Derek to set those events in motion.

They set off again early the following morning and crossed the Spanish border well before midday. It was raining now and continued to do so as they drove west along the Cantabrian coast, the sky descending to meet them in black and churning cloudfuls. The sea, when they glimpsed it, was grey and wind-whipped, the countryside a misty switchback of dank green hills. This was not the Spain Derek had sub-consciously expected, not the arid sun-charred land of his Costa Blanca memories. The contrast depressed him still further. He felt cold and tired and faintly ill, hopelessly unfit for whatever lay ahead. Yet one glance at Frank told him it could not be avoided. There was a gleam in the old man’s eyes, a flush of colour in his cheeks. He showed no sign of fatigue or irresolution. And Derek knew he would not – until he had done what he meant to do.

Where Galicia began in their westward progress Derek could not have defined. But, as the rain intensified and they turned inland, the landscape and the settlements huddled within its creases acquired for him a sullen and ever less welcoming character. The patchwork fields and mud-choked farmyards, the ancient black-clad women labouring behind lethargic oxen, the stark concrete skeletons of buildings begun but never finished: all these offended his English sense of order and efficiency; and reminded him how far he had strayed from the world he understood. He did not want to be here and would secretly have given a great deal not to be. But here he nonetheless was, tasting the tomb-damp air and peering vainly through the curtain of rain.

They reached Santiago de Compostela in the gloom of late afternoon and approached the centre through narrow crowded streets. The stone buildings rearing on every side looked centuries old to Derek, but the students bustling between them seemed oblivious to the dripping gargoyles and lichen-rimmed archways. To them it was just a picturesque old university city, whereas to him it was a place of menace and uncertainty.

Weary and dispirited as he was, he was glad he had telephoned ahead from Bordeaux to book rooms at the best hotel, physical comfort offering the only kind of security he could hope to find. Frank had viewed this as a needless extravagance, but, since Derek was paying, he had grudgingly consented. The hotel in question, the Reyes Catolicos, was housed in an old pilgrim inn forming one side of the plaza at the heart of the city. Glancing along its gorgeously carved façade, then back to where the cathedral’s still more intricately worked and vastly higher west front loomed through the mist, Derek felt awed and intimidated by such largesse of antiquity. He was not here to worship at the shrine of St James, nor even to admire the baroque architecture, but, without such a motive, his true purpose seemed foolish and inadequate, a fleeting delusion flying in the face of piety and wisdom.

If such thoughts crossed Frank’s mind, he did not show it. No sooner had they stowed the Land Rover and booked in than he was quizzing the concierge in rusty Spanish about the exact location of Pazo de Lerezuela. A map was produced and directions given. The village of Lerezuela lay twenty kilometres south of the city and the pazo ‘muy cerca’ – very close by. All too close, Derek could not help reflecting as they trailed behind the porter through moss-damp courtyards and echoing corridors to their adjacent rooms. He needed more time to adjust to his environment, more time to plan and prepare. But even if delay had been possible, Frank would have opposed it.

‘Shall we meet for dinner?’ Derek lamely enquired as they parted.

‘No. I’ll have them send me something. I don’t want much – except a good night’s sleep. We’ll leave at nine in the morning.’

‘So early?’

‘Why wait?’

‘No … no reason.’

‘Then we’ll leave at nine.’

With which Frank closed his door, leaving Derek to unpack the little he had brought and wash away some of the grime of the journey before calling Charlotte.

Once again neither of them had much to report. Charlotte had telephoned Fithyan & Co. as planned, claiming to be Derek’s cousin in Leicester, with whom he had been spending the weekend when struck down by influenza, a fiction which seemed certain to win him a few days’ grace. For his part, he could only say they had arrived and would tomorrow seek the meeting with Delgado on which their hopes were pinned. Charlotte wished him luck and urged him, as ever, to be careful. He rang off in a manner he feared she might think abrupt, but it could not be helped. To say any more would have been to risk revealing just how deeply his misgivings ran.

With the Spanish hour for dining still some way off, he went to the bar and downed several bottles of the local beer without achieving the faintest degree of intoxication. Trepidation and sobriety went hand in hand, he concluded, wandering out into the plaza and surveying the floodlit majesty of the cathedral from the shelter of a colonnade.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told himself. ‘Tomorrow we’ll learn Delgado’s dead. Or senile. Either way, not guilty. Of the kidnapping, that is. But then …’ He rubbed his eyes and swore under his breath at the folly of what he had done. All this way and all this risk – of embarrassment or dismissal or far far worse. And for what? Charlotte had not said she loved him. She had not even implied it. Yet it was for her sake that he stood alone in this city of rain and darkness. And for her sake he must remain.