ONE

The time difference between London and Mexico City is six hours, and because we had been travelling with the sun, it was still quite high in the sky as we descended into the sepia haze that hung over the whole flat expanse of what had once been a great lake. Dust! That was my first impression of a city whose disastrous birth rate has made it the largest in the world, a vast expanse of concentrated housing broken only by open spaces of baked earth where the wind-blown dust swirled, and far away to port the snow-capped volcanic hulks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl towering huge through the burnt brown atmosphere.

‘We’ll dump our things at the hotel,’ Ward said, ‘and if there’s time we’ll have a look round.’

The landing was a smooth one, but once we were inside the terminal building everything moved at a snail’s pace, the queue at immigration long and slow moving. When it was our turn I found he had been right about the word antiquarian giving the immigration officers something to think about. They were a good ten minutes arguing over what it meant, even calling in the senior officer on duty, who spoke a little English. ‘Old books? Why you want old books? You are tourist, no? In transit.’

‘Aye, Ah’m booked out on the flight to Lima in the mornin’.’ Ward was smiling a bright, happy, almost drunken smile, playing the innocent Scot and putting on his broadest accent. ‘Dae ye no’ like books yersel’? Books are me most prized possessions, ye ken. There’s the binding now. An’ inside ye’ll find all the truth about the world in which we live. An’ auld books, the woodcuts, the drawin’s – dae ye no’ ken the drawin’s o’ Leonardo da Vinci? – the beautiful illustrations, the illuminations o’ the monks an’ priests – it’s a fabulous world, an’ all there inside o’ the gold-lettered covers.’

He went on like that until the chief officer nodded him through with a glazed look in his eyes. He never glanced at the visas, never looked at my passport. ‘Just as I said,’ Ward murmured, no trace of an accent as we collected our baggage. ‘Covers a multitude of sins.’

As soon as we had cleared customs he made for a bank of telephones, and when he rejoined me he was smiling. ‘That’s all fixed. He got my cable and he’ll meet us fur dinner.’

‘Who?’ I asked as we picked up our overnight bags and moved towards the exit.

‘The author of that book, Luiz Rodriguez. He lives here.’

At the hotel he told the taxi to wait, and after checking in and having a quick clean-up in our rooms, we drove out to Teotihuacan. ‘Ah’d have liked to take a look around the Archaeological Museum, but Ah fear we’d never make it in time through the rush-hour traffic. It’s the other side of the city, whereas Teotihuacan is relatively handy.’ He passed me a map and a brochure he had picked up at the hotel. ‘At least we shall be able to say we’ve seen the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Street of the Dead, and the great Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon.’

Teotihuacan was some twenty kilometres north-east of the centre of Mexico City and I thought I had probably glimpsed those pyramids through the dust haze as we flew in. The brochure said that the Pyramid of the Sun was over sixty metres high, larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and the Street of the Dead more than three kilometres long, but even though it contained a plan, as well as photographs, I was still not prepared for the colossal dimensions of the place.

We had barely forty minutes there, but we still managed to walk the whole huge complex, even climbing to the top of the smaller Pyramid of the Moon. Ward had his camera with him, and though he led me round at a breathless pace, talking all the time about the terrible religious cult of the Aztecs, he also took quite a few pictures, usually with myself or some other human in the foreground to give an indication of the scale of the place. In addition to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of learning, he talked of Tezcatlipoca, the sky god, Tlaloc, the rain god, and the name I have’ most difficulty in pronouncing or even spelling, and the most terrible god of all – Huitzilopochtli.

I have a picture in my mind still of endless queues of captives waiting under guard to mount the steps of the Aztec temples where the priests of Huitzilopochtli stood waiting with obsidian stone knives, hands and faces black with caked blood, their robes stiff with it, as they worked industriously to open up each human chest, extract the still-palpitating heart, offering it to their filthy god, then tossing the torn-open body back down the steps to the waiting warriors below, who hacked it into joints for the ritual cannibalism that ensured both the pleasures of the flesh and added prowess from the absorption of the captive joint into their own live bodies.

It is a picture indelibly imprinted, Ward’s voice painting it in quiet words, neither excited nor repelled by the horror of it, but simply repeating information he had obtained from one of the books he had borrowed from his Glasgow library as soon as he knew the route he would be taking to Punta Arenas and the Antarctic. I have referred to it here because, to me, Mexico was a curtain-raiser to the horrors we were to uncover later.

The sun was setting in a red blaze as we drove into the centre of Mexico City the long geometrically laid-out streets already darkening into canyons filled with the lights of cars. There were men half-hidden by piled-up mountains of coloured balloons at some of the street corners, a relic, Ward said, of the magnificent feathered headdresses of the Aztecs, and with the stillness of evening the dust haze had gone, so that the huge square of the Zócalo had a brooding sense of peace, the cathedral’s twin towers still touched with the sunset’s warmth and the great mass of it dominating the presidential palace.

The restaurant Rodriguez had chosen was in one of the streets behind the cathedral, a small sombre place which served only Mexican food. He was tucked away in a corner, the only man on his own, a solitary candle illuminating his face as he pored over the paper on which he was writing. It was an unusual face, the skin stretched tight across high cheekbones and of a yellowish-ochre colour like old parchment, the features themselves almost patrician with their high forehead and prominent nose.

He didn’t look up as we crossed the room, his head bent and the pen moving swiftly across pages held in a clipboard. I had the sense of a withdrawn person, a loner. ‘Rodriguez?’ There was no warmth in Ward’s voice.

The man raised his eyes, nodded, then closed the clipboard and got to his feet. ‘Señor Vord, eh?’ They shook hands, eyeing each other warily. Ward introduced me and we sat down.

‘What’s that you’re drinking?’ Ward asked, leaning forward and putting his big nose down to sniff the pale liquid.

‘Tequila.’

‘Ah yes, made from the Agave tequilana, the sisal tree plant.’

Rodriguez nodded. ‘You like some tequila?’

Ward nodded. ‘I suppose so. You going to have one?’ he asked me. ‘It’s pretty fiery stuff.’ And when I nodded, he flicked his fingers at a passing waiter. ‘Dos tequilas. What about you, Señor Rodriguez?’

‘Gracia.’

He ordered three, then sat back, staring at the man we had come to see. ‘You writing another book?’

‘No. An article for an American magazine.’

‘About the Desaparecidos?’

‘No. It concern the drug traffic on the Mexican-US border. Cocaine. It come mainly overland from Colombia and Ecuador.’ There was a short silence. ‘You want to see me about something?’ It was a question, not a statement, and the man was nervous. ‘What is it you want to see me about?’

Ward didn’t answer. He just sat there, staring at the man.

‘You say it is urgent, a matter of life or death for me.’ Rodriguez spoke softly, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. ‘What is it about then?’

Ward hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Later.’ He picked up the menu. ‘We’ll talk about it later, after we’ve fed.’ But Rodriguez wanted to know right away. He still had his biro gripped in his right hand and he was fiddling with it tensely, his brown, slightly almond-slitted eyes fallen to the table, unable to meet the directness of Ward’s gaze.

The drinks arrived, three thick-rimmed glasses full of a slightly syrupy liquid, rather like mead, but with a sharper, more aromatic flavour, and as Ward had said, very fiery. He ordered sopa de mariscos, which was crab, mussels and shrimps with cilantro, onions and rice, followed by guacamole and chile salteados with a tortilla. Rodriguez had already ordered for himself. I followed Ward’s lead as he seemed to know what the dishes were.

Rodriguez was part Indian, a short man with lank black hair. ‘I have a touch of the Quechua in me.’ He announced this in English, an explanation of something he had said that Ward had not understood. They had been talking in Spanish. ‘You must excuse,’ he said. ‘I am not speaking altogether correctly. My Spanish is of the Argentine. There are many variations all through South America, and of course here in Central America it is different again, particularly in Mexico.’ He pronounced it Mehico.

Ward’s excuse for talking in Spanish had been that he was accustoming himself to using it freely. The soup came and with it the three bottles of beer he had ordered. Rodriguez was starting with prawns wrapped in bacon. At this point the conversation, still in Spanish, seemed to be about politics and the Mexican economy, but when Ward had finished his soup, he suddenly reverted to English. ‘Mario Ángel Gómez.’ He pushed his plate away and stared at Rodriguez. ‘When did you last see him?’

There was silence, the writer’s eyes gone suddenly blank. Like an animal sliding away from an unwelcome confrontation, he took refuge in a displacement activity, taking the last of the little pastries hot with spice that had come with the drinks and waving the empty plate at a passing waiter.

‘Well?’

‘When I am finishing the book. You say you have read it. It is all in my book, everything about. Gómez that I know.’

‘He went to Peru, didn’t he?’

‘He was going to Peru. That’s what he told me when I interviewed him that second time in Buenos Aires.’

‘And you didn’t visit him there?’

‘No, I don’t visit him.’

‘You mean you haven’t seen him in Peru? You haven’t talked to him after he took up residence there?’

The man shook his head. But before he did so there had been a fractional hesitation.

‘He is in Peru, isn’t he?’

Again a shake of the head, and when Ward pressed him, repeating the question, Rodriguez said, ‘Maybe. But I don’t know for sure.’

The waiter arrived with the next course and they reverted to politics, talking Spanish again, Ward’s tone, his whole manner softened. He was trying to put Rodriguez at his ease. But then he suddenly asked, ‘Why did he leave Argentina?’ He was a fast eater and now he was leaning forward across his empty plate, his English sharp and abrupt. ‘Why?’

Rodriguez shrugged. And when Ward persisted, he said almost reluctantly, ‘Why does any man leave? There were rumours. I have said that in my book.’

‘Rumours concerning the Desaparecidos?’

‘Per’aps.’

‘But nothing ever proved?’

‘No. It was just stories in one or two of the papers, the Peronista journals mainly.’

‘And that’s why you interviewed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You wrote that you caught him at his flat just at the time he was leaving the country.’

‘The second time, yes. That’s right. He was already packing.’

‘Because he was afraid if he stayed he would be arrested?’

Rodriguez shook his head.

‘When Alfonsin came to power was there never any talk of arrestin’ him?’

‘I tell you nobody ever accuse him of anything. After the Mahdnas war he is something of a hero. In Puerto Argentina his plane is destroyed on the ground. All the aermacchis are destroyed, so he takes some marines to make a reconnaissance across the island, his objective Goose Green. Shortly after he is flown back to the mainland, to the most south naval base of Río Grande in Tierra del Fuego. From there he fly a Learjet, acting as pathfinder for the Skyhawks, and I believe once for the Super Etendards. At that time they have one Exocet left.’

‘Yes, but what about before the Falklands war, when he was a youngster, before he was commissioned? Was he a member of the Triple A?’

‘The Triple A?’

‘Aye, the right-wing Peronistas who destroyed the Montoneros back in ’73 – June 20, wasn’t it, at Ezeiza Airport? You mention that in your book, too.’

Rodriguez’s eyes were fixed on his plate, his short dark fingers crumbling the remains of his tortilla. Ward leaned forward across the table, his eyes fixed on the man’s face, his tone aggressive as he said, ‘The Triple A was based on the ESMA, the Navy Mechanics’ School.’ He reminded me of a barrister I had once watched interrogating a hostile witness and I was sure his switch to English was not for my benefit, it was done to put Rodriguez at a disadvantage. ‘Your book doesn’t say whether or not he was at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada, but the implication –’

Rodriguez was shaking his head angrily. ‘What you read into my book is more what you want, I think. There was some talk, but nothing proved, no accusations.’ He emptied his glass and poured himself some more beer. ‘All I know is that he is with the naval air forces. At the start of the Malvinas war he is with the Escuadrilla de Ataque based at Punta Indio, flying Aermacchi 339As and he is sent to Puerto Argentina –’

‘You mean Port Stanley. But that was much later. The time that interests me is before he was posted to the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, before he became a flier. Also why he has now left Argentina. You don’t say why in your book, so perhaps you tell me now.’ Ward leaned quickly forward again. ‘Come on, man – why?’ And when Rodriguez did not answer him he said very quietly, ‘Was it because of anything that happened when he was at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada?’ A pause, and then, ‘Ángel de Muerte, that was his nickname, wasn’t it? And he was proud of it. He had it painted on his aircraft, that’s what you say.’

There was a long silence, Rodriguez sitting there, dumb.

‘Well, just tell me where he is now. Surely ye can do that. Where dae Ah find him – in Peru, where?’

‘Te digo, no sé.’ Rodriguez said it in Spanish, in an obstinate tone of voice that suggested finality. ‘I don’t care to talk about him – not to you, not to nobody.’ He slapped his hands flat on the table and got to his feet. Then, leaning down, staring into Ward’s face, he said nervously, ‘Who are you? Why do you ask me all these questions about him? He is not important. Not any more.’

He was scared. It showed in his eyes, and in the way his voice had become increasingly sharp, almost strident.

‘Sit down.’ Ward’s tone made it a command, but his voice was quiet.

Rodriguez shook his head. ‘I cannot answer any more questions.’ And he added, ‘I don’t know who you are, why you want to ask me –’

‘Please!’ Ward raised his left hand, a placating gesture. ‘Por favor. As your host I have perhaps been a little too brusque. Please sit down again. And please try to give me some indication of where this man can be found.’

‘Why you want to know?’ His voice was high-pitched, his English slipping. His short, stout body was very still as he stared down into Ward’s face.

Silence then, the two of them facing each other. I could hear the talk at the next table, the staccato clatter of Mexican, and behind me the piercing voice of an American woman.

‘All right, I’ll tell you why I’m interested in the man.’ Ward waved him back to his seat and called to the waiter to bring the coffee. ‘Y tres más tequilas,’ he added. And to Rodriguez – ‘Come on. Sit down, fur God’s sake. Ah’m not goin’ to shop ye!’

‘What is shop?’

Ward frowned. He had used the word quite automatically. It expressed his intention exactly, but to explain it … ‘Let’s say that Ah’m not going to the police or anybody in authority. This is a purely personal enquiry. Now sit down and Ah will explain just why I am interested in this Mario Ángel Gómez.’

There was a further moment of hesitation, then Rodriguez suddenly made up his mind, and with a brief nod of his head, resumed his seat. ‘Okay, señor. Why is it, then, that you are so interested?’

Ward began to explain, about Iris Sunderby and the boat waiting for us in Punta Arenas. The coffee came and with it three more glasses of tequila. ‘Señora Sunderby should have flown straight to Punta Arenas, but instead she stopped off in Lima. Her name before she married Charles Sunderby, an English glaciologist, was Iris Madalena Connor-Gómez. My information is that Mario Ángel Gómez sometimes uses the double name Connor-Gómez and that they are related. In fact, they both have the same father. Is that right?’

Rodriguez shook his head. ‘I never meet this woman you speak of.’

They stared at each other for a moment, then Ward said, ‘All right. What about Carlos then? She told my friend here that he was some sort of cousin. Do you know who his mother was?’

Rodriguez shook his head again.

‘The boy was in London, a student at the university, and according to our immigration people he gave his name as Borgalini, his address care of a bank in Lima. Why Lima?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it because Ángel Connor-Gómez is in Lima?’

Rodriguez shook his head violently. ‘I tell you, he is packing up to leave Buenos Aires the last time I saw him. He don’t say where he is going.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘No.’

A pause then as the waiter brought the coffee and refilled our cups. Rodriguez leaned forward. ‘Sometimes, you understand, is not very safe to ask questions.’

‘So you did regard him as dangerous?’

‘No, I don’ say that. It is just that one learns to be careful, particularly if one is a writer. Look what happened to that Indian chap of yours who wrote about the Koran.’

‘There is nothing blasphemous in your book. Nobody has issued a fatwa or put out a contract. So why are you scared?’ There was a silence then, an uneasy stillness between the two of them as they sat facing each other. ‘Is it because he was called Ángel de Muerte?’

‘No, no.’ Rodriguez shook his head emphatically. ‘That is something that come out of his reconnaissance to Goose Green. It became a last stand, all very dramatic. His marines, suddenly faced with the British paras, took up a defensive position in some abandoned trenches and under Gómez’s leadership fought very last ditch, full of courage. They were killed almost to the man. That is probably when they give him that name – the Angel of Death.’ He said it in English, slowly, as though enjoying the sound of the words, and he added with a secret little smile, ‘That happened just before he was recalled at the request of Lami Dozo himself. His navigational skills were required at Rió Grande and it was then he painted his Learjet with the name Ángel de Muerte, on both sides, so that on the radio beamed to the English they could say the Angel of Death was coming with his French missiles loaded to kill.’

‘Then the nom de guerre was nothing to do with the Disappeareds?’

Rodriguez hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who can tell? As I have said, there were rumours. That is all.’

‘You questioned him about it?’

‘Not directly. I tell you, it is dangerous to ask questions like that. But I make enquiries. Nobody can tell me anything that is certain. There is no record.’

‘But he was at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada?’

‘Si.’

And then Ward asked him what had happened to Iris Sunderby’s father, Juan Connor-Gómez.

‘He kill himself. I say that in my book. He is Chairman and Managing Director of the Gómez Emporium, a big store in the centre of Buenos Aires. When it is burn down he lose everything, so …’ He shrugged.

‘You wrote that he was arrested.’

‘Yes. The company was in difficulty. This is at the beginning of the Malvinas trouble. It was thought he may have set a match to it himself. For the insurance, you see. But nothing is proved, so he is released. That was about a year before he commit suicide. The insurance people are still fighting the claim in the courts.’

‘And his other son? What happened to Eduardo? You don’t mention him, except to say that he was a biologist and that he went to England to work for two years at the chemical weapons experimental establishment at Porton Down. You don’t say what happened to him.’

More tequila arrived and Rodriguez sat there staring down at the yellow-green liquid in his glass.

‘Well?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what happen to him.’

‘Is he one of the Desaparecidos?’

‘Could be. I don’t know. A few months after he return from England he bought a flight ticket to Montevideo in Uruguay. That is the last anybody hear of him.’

Ward switched then to the Gómez family background. They were talking in Spanish again so that I couldn’t follow what was said, only the gist of it, and that largely from the names they referred to: Iris Sunderby’s, of course, her grandfather, too, and the Connors, Sheila Connor in particular, and there was constant repetition of the name Rosalli Gabrielli. Suddenly Rodriguez’s eyes widened. ‘¿Me acusás a mi? ¿Por que me acusás? No escondo nada’ His eyes darted to the door.

‘Och, relax, man. Ah’m not accusin’ ye of anythin’.’ Ward was leaning forward, his gaze fixed on the Argentinian’s face. ‘All Ah’m askin’ from ye is the man’s present whereabouts.’

‘I tell you, I don’t know.’

Ward’s left hand crashed down on the table, spilling coffee from the cup he had just filled. ‘Ye’re lyin’. Tell me his address –’

Rodriguez jumped to his feet. ‘You do not speak to me like that. You have no right. If I tell you I don’t know, then you must accept –’

‘Balls!’ Ward’s hand slammed the table again, his voice gone quiet, almost menacing, as he said, ‘He’s in Peru. Ye just tell me where –’

‘No. I am leaving you now.’

Ward was on his feet in a flash, his gloved right hand reaching out for the other’s arm. ‘Sit down! Ye haven’t finished yer drink yet.’

‘No, no. I go now.’ Rodriguez’s face was screwed up with pain as the grip of that dummy hand on his arm forced his body slowly sideways towards his seat. ‘¡Dejame ir!’ It was almost a squeal.

‘Ah’ll let ye go when ye give me his address. Now sit down.’ Ward pushed him back into his chair. ‘Got a pen?’ he asked me. His hand was still gripping the man’s arm, holding him there, and when I nodded he said, ‘Give it to him. And pass him one of those paper napkins; he can write the address down on that.’

Rodriguez was still struggling and out of the corner of my eye I could see the patron watching us uneasily. I thought he might phone the police at any moment. Ward was leaning forward again, his weight dragging at the arm he was still holding. Rodriguez hesitated, his eyes shifting from Ward to the silent faces of the other diners, all watching us. Then suddenly he seemed to sag back into his seat, his hand reaching slowly for the pen I was still holding out to him. It shook slightly as he scribbled an address, then pushed the serviette across the table, his body slowly relaxing as Ward let go of him and picked up the serviette.

‘Cajamarca?’ He passed the serviette to me, his eyes fixed on the man. ‘Why Cajamarca?’

‘It is where he lives.’

‘Yes, but why? Why there? Why not in Lima or Trujillo or Cuzco?’

The other shook his head, shrugging his padded shoulders. ‘He has a hacienda there. The Hacienda Lucinda.’

‘At Cajamarca. Where’s that?’

Rodriguez’s face looked blank.

‘All right, you haven’t been there, you say. But you must have been sufficiently curious to check it out on a map. So where is it?’

There was a pause, then Rodriguez said, ‘Cajamarca is in the north of Peru.’ He pronounced it Cahamarca. ‘It is inland from the coast, behind the Cordillera do los Andes.’

Ward nodded. ‘Ah remember now. It’s where Pizarro ambushed the Inca army, right?’ He was suddenly smiling. ‘Very appropriate.’ He seemed to wait for his words to sink in, then added, slowly and with emphasis, ‘Pizarro was a thug. An avaricious, cruel bastard.’

‘He was a brave man,’ Rodriguez muttered. They might have been referring to somebody they knew.

‘Oh yes, he was brave all right.’ He turned to me. ‘If ye read Prescott ye’ll get the impression Pizarro crossed the Andes and destroyed the great empire of the Incas with just forty horse and sixty foot. But it wasn’t quite like that, was it?’ He had turned back to Rodriguez. ‘He had guns and armour, and the God of the Catholics behind him, and a whole army of dissident Indian auxiliaries in support. Still, Ah grant ye, an incredible feat.’ And he added, his voice quietly emphatic, ‘A brave, very determined, very obstinate man. Not a gentleman like Cortés, but a peasant, with a peasant’s cunning and greed. The Mafia would have loved him.’

Rodriguez was getting to his feet again, the uneasy look back on his face. He seemed to find something disturbing in what Ward had said.

‘Sit down, man. There’s a little matter we haven’t touched on yet.’ Ward pointed to the chair. ‘Sit down, for God’s sake.’ He leaned back. ‘Here in Mexico the Spaniards topped every Aztec temple to Huitzilopochtli, every pyramid, either with a church or a statue of the Virgin Mary. Ye’re a Roman Catholic, Ah take it?’

Rodriguez nodded slowly.

‘A very pragmatic church. A lot of glitz.’ He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Ah wonder what Christ makes of all the horrors done in his name. And now we have fanatical variations of the Muslim faith breathin’ hate and venom all over the Near East.’

I didn’t follow the relevance of his religious digression. Nor I think did Rodriguez, who had subsided into his seat again, a sad, dazed look on his face.

‘¡Salud!’ Ward raised his glass.

‘¡Salud!’

‘Tell me –’ His tone was mild, almost conversational – ‘how much did he pay you?’

The man’s eyes slid sideways to the street door. ‘No comprendo.’ The door was open and he started to rise.

‘You understand perfectly well.’ Ward was very much the old Etonian now, his manner still mild, but with something in the voice that held Rodriguez riveted, both hands on the table and his bottom half out of his seat. ‘You went to Peru.’

‘No.’

‘You went to Peru,’ he repeated, ‘and you saw Gómez. He still uses his service rank, does he?’

‘Yes, he is Capitán now.’

‘So you saw him.’

The other didn’t answer.

‘How much?’ Ward’s voice had hardened.

‘I don’t go to Peru. I come here to Mexico City where it is not too far by airplane to visit my publishers in San Francisco.’

‘You went to Peru.’ Ward said it very quietly this time, but with an emphasis that made it sound like a threat.

‘You cannot prove anything.’

‘No?’ Ward left his enquiry hanging there, smiling quietly. Then he said, ‘What I need from you is not so much what he paid you, but why. You went to Peru –’ He pulled a diary out of his breast pocket and checked some notes at the end – ‘on March 5 this year. That is just two months before your book came out. What were you going to write into the book if he didn’t pay you?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, I tell you. He pay me nothing.’

Ward glanced at his diary again. ‘According to my information your book has sold some eight thousand copies in the English language and the print figure in the Spanish edition was twenty-five thousand. You have two wives to keep, the one you are living with here, who is really your mistress, and I believe rather expensive, particularly as she already has a daughter, and your wife proper who will not divorce you and is living in the Argentine with your two children, a boy and a girl. You also run a big Chrysler and have two addresses, one here in Mexico City, the other in Cuernavaca. In other words, you live an expensive life, more expensive than you could possibly afford on the basis of the royalties from your two books and the articles you periodically write for newspapers and magazines in the States. So – what is it you haven’t told me about this man?’

Rodriguez didn’t answer. He subsided back into his seat, staring down at his drink, while Ward watched him, waiting. Their eyes met. Then Rodriguez glanced at the door again as though seeking escape, but it was shut now. His eyes flickered round the restaurant. There were still several people watching us, conversation muted.

‘Well?’

He shook his head, suddenly reaching for his drink and swallowing it in one quick gulp. He stared at the empty glass for a moment. I think he would have liked another, but instead he pulled himself slowly to his feet.

Ward had also risen, the two of them facing each other. ‘You mention in your book that some time after the capitulation at Port Stanley, Gómez was given the job of testing an aircraft for its long-range capabilities, flying it out of that Argentine base at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego. You suggest he was secretly testing it for work on the Antarctic land mass, flying it south over the pack ice. How far south? Do you know where?’

‘No.’

‘As far as the Ice Shelf?’

‘No sé.’

‘It couldn’t have been entirely secret since you say it was reported in the papers. You even have a picture of him taken on his return. It was a German plane, a Fokker I believe?’

‘Si.’

There was a moment’s silence, the two of them standing there and the restaurant quite still now. ‘We’ll be stopping off in Lima,’ Ward said. ‘If Gómez is not at the address you have given me I shall presume it is because you’ve been in touch with him, so don’t phone him. Okay?’ And he added, ‘I will not, of course, mention our meeting here in Mexico City.’

The other nodded and turned towards the door. But then he paused, a look almost of malice. ‘If you go to Cajamarca you should know el Niño is running.’

‘So?’

‘El Niño is the counter-equatorial current.’

‘I know that.’

‘Every six or seven years it overruns the Humboldt.’

‘And then?’

‘And then … per’aps you will see.’ He smiled, adding, ‘When el Niño run the fishermen don’t earn nothing because fish like the cold of the north-flowing Humboldt, not the warmth of the Equatorial, and with no fish, the birds die.’

‘How do you know what’s happening down there in Peru? Have you been there again?’

‘No. It is in the papers. The birds are dying.’

‘And how’s that concern us?’

‘I am never on the Pacific coast in el Niño year,’ Rodriguez said, still smiling, ‘but if the rains of the Amazon slip across the Cordilleras you will maybe have a bad flight to Cajamarca. ¡Buen viaje!’ he added, not bothering now to hid his malice as he turned quickly to the door and made his escape.

Ward knocked back the rest of his tequila and called for the cuenta. ‘Time we got some sleep. The next few days could be a wee bit hectic.’

All the way back to the hotel he sat hunched and silent in the rear of the taxi, his eyes closed. He only spoke once, and then he was merely voicing his thoughts aloud. ‘That aircraft was fitted with long-range tanks. He could have got to the South Pole and back. Or he could have flown it around in the wastes of ice where Shackleton lost the Endurance. Nobody would see him there.’ And he added, ‘Ah wonder how much Iris knows?’

I failed to follow his train of thought, my mind still on the meeting with Rodriguez. ‘You really think he was blackmailing the man?’

He looked at me then, a quick flick of the eyes. ‘Of course. And not just Gómez. A book like that, it’s a great temptation fur a journalist who knows so much he’s scared to go on livin’ in his own country.’

I said something about the political climate in the Argentine having changed since the Falklands War. I thought I knew that much about the country. I suppose I had read it somewhere. But he laughed and shook his head.

‘That’s a very naïve assessment. Nothin’ has changed. Not really. The Argentines are still ethnically the same, the population still predominantly Italian, most of them havin’ their roots in the south of Italy and in Sicily. The Camorra and the Mafia are part of their heritage, violence in their blood.’

I started to argue with him, but all he said was, ‘Leopards don’t change their spots just because the fashion in political leadership alters. And remember, the Junta that decided on the invasion of the Malvinas, at least tae of them, were of Italian extraction. They’re finished, of course, now, but there will be others – others that are lyin’ low fur the moment. Rodriguez knows that. Probably knows who they are. That’s why he’s scared to remain in Buenos Aires.’

He relapsed into silence then, and because my mind was still trying to grapple with the politics of a country I knew very little about, I failed to ask him whether Gómez had made that flight on his own or if he had had a crew with him.

It was only later, when I was lying in my bed, with the neon lights of a bar across the road flickering on the curtains and music blaring, that I remembered Ward standing in the saloon of the Cutty Sark and asking Iris Sunderby who she had in mind as navigator, who the man was who had convinced her he had also seen a ship locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea. I had thought at the time she had been referring to an officer on some survey vessel, the British Antarctic Survey’s supply ship perhaps, or else a pelagic fisherman or whaler, even an Antarctic explorer. But now it came back to me. She had said, A man I’m convinced has actually seen what my husband saw. Those had been her words, and if she was being exact, they would mean that he had seen the icebound vessel from the air, exactly as Sunderby had seen it.

I lay there for a long time thinking about that, the loud insistence of the Mexican music from across the way drumming in my ears and gradually merging into the crashing ice of layering floes as my mind drifted into a fantasy of trekking with Iris Sunderby towards the dim outline of an icicle-festooned ghost of a ship, the man at the helm towering like a giant question mark over my jet-lagged brain. Had Charles Sunderby imagined it, or had he really seen the figure of a man standing frozen at the wheel?

I woke in a daze, the music replaced by the roar of traffic and the sunrise showing like a great red orange through a gap in the buildings opposite. There was no wind, the air crystal clear. I was too excited at being in such a strange city on the other side of the world for there to be any question of going back to sleep again. I got up, dressed and went for a walk, my limbs lethargic with the altitude, my brain sluggish after the disturbed night. The shops were opening and I browsed for a while in one that sold books as well as newspapers and magazines, but I failed to find the American edition of Rodriguez’s book. Instead, I came away with an old copy of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru. It was dusty and the spine was broken, but at least it was in English. Even so, it cost me rather more of my American dollars than I expected.

By then the sun was risen above the tops of the buildings and it was hot. I walked slowly back to the hotel. No sign of Ward, so I had breakfast, then rang his room. First time I tried his phone was engaged. When I finally got through to him he said very brusquely, ‘Don’t phone again. Order a taxi fur ten-forty-five and hold it till Ah come down. Ah’m waitin’ fur a call.’

‘It’s getting late,’ I said.

‘Ah know, but this call is important. Anyway, they’ll not take off on time.’

It was almost eleven before he appeared, looking as though he hadn’t slept at all. ‘Taxi there? Good. Make sure it doesn’t go off.’ He dumped his overnight bag with mine and I went out to tell the driver we were just coming. When I got back he was at the cashier’s desk settling the bill. It was in US dollars, not Mexican pesetas. ‘And there is also’, the clerk said, ‘two hundred and seventy-nine dollars owing for your calls, señor.’

Ward paid with American traveller’s cheques and we hurried out to the taxi. ‘Aeropuerto.’ He flopped into his seat.

‘That was quite a telephone bill,’ I said as we moved off.

‘International calls are expensive.’ He closed his eyes.

‘London? Or were you phoning Lima?’

I don’t know whether he was asleep or not, but he didn’t answer. He was equally uncommunicative when we reached the airport. His guess that the flight would be delayed proved correct. Security, they said. Apparently there had been a bomb scare recently. The transit baggage had not been loaded and customs officials and police were insisting on all cases being opened and everything laid out on the floor. It all took time and it was past midday before we finally got away.

Ward ordered vodka, drank it straight and went to sleep with ¿Muerto O Vivo? open on his lap. The meal came. He waved it away and went back to sleep. We had just passed over a gaggle of eighteen-thousand-foot volcanoes, great slag heaps of ash with gaping vents pointed at the clear blue bowl of the heavens, when he finally shifted in his seat and leaned across me to look out of the window, blinking his eyes. ‘Know where Ah’d like to be goin’? The Galapagos.’ He nodded his head towards a white line of distant cloud far out over the starb’d wing tip. ‘Out there. Can’t be more than a thousand miles. Mebbe Ah’ll dae that when Ah’ve extricated mesel’ from the Southern Ocean an’ all that ice.’

He picked up his book again, opened it at the marker and settled himself in his seat. He was back, playing the Glasgow boy and wearing his tourist hat like a hired costume. The stewardess came down the aisle, a big-breasted young woman exuding a strong odour of perspiration. He ordered another vodka and turned to me. ‘What about ye? Horse’s Neck?’

I nodded.

He gave the order and we returned to our books. I had become totally absorbed in William Prescott’s account of the Inca civilisation, which had been destroyed by the greed of Pizarro’s Conquistadores. It was a fascinating glimpse of a people who in the sixteenth century had never seen a wheel or a sea-going ship, had never faced an armoured knight on horseback or the fire power of crossbows and guns, but whose roads and lines of communication through the incredible terrain of the Andes, whose methods of agriculture by irrigation and whose whole political set-up, so close to what we know as Communism, was in some ways more advanced than that of their conquerors.

The drinks came and Ward sat back, watching me out of the corner of his eye. ‘When ye’ve finished absorbin’ Prescott Ah guess ye’ll know as much about Peru as most Peruvians. Probably more.’ And he added, ‘This will be the first time Ah’ve visited the country, but havin’ read Prescott myself Ah don’t think Ah’m goin’ to like the Spaniards and what they and the mestizos have done to it.’ And then he said suddenly, ‘That phone call Ah was waitin’ fur – it was from the hotel Iris had given me as her address in Lima. They say she pulled out three days ago.’

‘Then why are we stopping off in Lima?’ I asked him.

‘You don’t have to. You can go straight on to Punta Arenas if you’d prefer.’

‘But you’re stopping off?’

‘Yes. She didn’t fly on into Chile. Ah checked with both Lan Chile and UC Ladeco. Also Aero Peru. In any case, she had a hire car delivered to the hotel. The assistant manager said when she left she was drivin’ it herself.’

My thoughts of the night came back to me. ‘You think she’s gone up to Cajamarca?’

‘Well, she’s certainly not drivin’ herself all the way down through Chile to Punta Arenas. That’s well over three thousand miles and God knows what the roads are like south of Valparaíso, if there are any. It’s all mountains and deep-cut fjords.’ He smiled at me. ‘So ye’ve reached the same conclusion as Ah have, that Mario Ángel Gómez is the navigator she referred to as the man who can lead her to that icebound ship. Ah doubt there’s anybody else has had the sort of opportunity he’s had for flyin’ around at will in that part of the Antarctic’

‘There are bases,’ I said, ‘Half a dozen countries have survey and exploration establishments around the fringes of the Antarctic land mass.’

He nodded. ‘But they fly set pattern routes on direct lines from their southern supply points to their Antarctic bases. Ah had a look at the Royal Geographical Society’s latest maps, some of the charts, too. None of the supply routes go close to the point where Sunderby’s aircraft ditched. And Ah had a word on the phone with a Cambridge don they put me on to – he was somethin’ to dae with the Scott Polar Institute, and he confirmed that supply aircraft would not normally be overflying the area we’re interested in.’

The fact that Sunderby’s plane was en route for the American base at McMurdo made no difference except that the operational word was ‘normally’. ‘There were tae things that were not normal about that flight. In the first place, the plane made an emergency landin’ at Port Stanley to have an electrical fault put right. That’s how Sunderby came to be on the flight. Secondly, he was a glaciologist and it may well be that he persuaded the pilot to swin’ away to the east. It would only call fur a small diversion from the direct route from Stanley to McMurdo Sound to give him a glimpse of the Ice Shelf and the area where Shackleton’s Endurance was beset and finally sunk.’

His point was that the Americans did not normally fly supplies out of the Falklands. I asked him what Gómez’s point of departure had been and he replied, ‘Ushuaia, accordin’ to Rodriguez. That’s the Argentine base in the south-west of Tierra del Fuego, on the Beagle Channel. Not ideal, Ah’m told, but that may have been part of the test.’

‘You say he was refuelled. He must have had some sort of a flight plan.’

Ward was silent for a moment. ‘He was testin’ a plane. It had probably been modified fur work in Antarctica. The Argentinians have a short strip airbase in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Visecomodorio Marambio Ah think it’s called.’ He spoke hesitantly as though trying to work it out for himself. ‘Maybe he flew the final stage from there. And he must have been testin’ in part fur flight refuellin’ because Rodriguez says in his book he was refuelled somewhere over the Bellingshausen Sea, which is a long way west of the area where Sunderby lost his life.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked. ‘That as soon as he was refuelled he took the opportunity of seeing if he could locate the remains of that American plane?’

‘No. The plane’s sunk. Ah don’t think there’s any doubt about that.’

‘Then what?’

‘Ah don’t know.’ His voice had slowed again, little more than a murmur. ‘Ah’m just thinkin’ aloud.’ He turned his head towards me. ‘And Ah saw an angel come down from Heaven, havin’ the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his band. D’ye recognise that?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘You’re quoting from the Bible, are you?’

‘The Revelation of St John.’ He smiled. ‘Wonderful stuff. Ye should read it.’ And then, suddenly practical, he said, ‘When ye’ve finished yer drink Ah suggest ye put Prescott away, turn yer light out and try and get some sleep. There should be a car waitin’ fur us at the airport when we get in to Lima. Ye’ve got your international driving licence?’

I nodded.

‘Good. Ye’ll be drivin’ when we take it over. It’ll save time. There’s always the chance they’ll query the validity of my own licence –’ He tapped the steel forearm and gloved hand resting on his lap. ‘Foreigners can be a wee bit difficult about it sometimes.’ Somewhat pointedly he closed his own book and tipped his seat right back, preparing himself for sleep. ‘We’ll go to the hotel first. Ah’d like a word with the doorman if they’ve got one. Then we’ll head fur the coast and the Pan-Am Highway, drive right through the night. Okay?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘We’ll drive and sleep in turn. With luck we should be in Cajamarca in time for breakfast.’ And then he switched abruptly from practicalities, quoting in a stage whisper: ‘And I saw a new Heaven and a new earth; for the first Heaven and the first earth were passed away: and there was no more sea.’ He spoke it without a trace of a Scot’s accent. ‘Patmos,’ he murmured. ‘I was there very briefly a couple of years back. There’s a great white fortress of a monastery crowning the top of the island. It was once full of treasures, but all I could think about as I stood on the battlemented roof, looking out over the Aegean, was that a disciple of Christ’s had sat in his cell in a little monastery half-way up the hill recording the extraordinary revelations he had been vouchsafed. Was he mad? The Emperor Domitian condemned him, so he had evidently seemed so, to a Roman. But it’s great reading.’

He settled himself more deeply in his seat. ‘Och well, we’ll see whether those lines fit when we reach the top of the pass over the Andes.’ He switched out his overhead light, closed his eyes, and instantly, it seemed, he was asleep.

When we arrived in Lima it took time to go through the formalities. Again the immigration people questioned him about his occupation, even going so far as to check the word antiquarian in an English-Spanish dictionary. ‘Useful, ye see,’ Ward said as we went through to the baggage claim area. ‘He was so busy worryin’ over what “antiquarian” meant that he hardly glanced at our visas. And yer occupation of wood preservation consultant is not exactly a description he comes across every day.’ He was smiling as we took our place by the baggage conveyor belt.

When we had finally retrieved all his excess baggage, it took us even longer than in Mexico to clear customs because he insisted on unrolling a big holdall right there on the bench to get at his oilskins. ‘We’ll almost certainly need them at Punta Arenas. Iris said it blows and rains like hell just about every day in the Strait of Magellan. Better get yers out, too. It’s rainin’ up in the mountains accordin’ to that nice immigration laddie. He said he’d heard it on the radio this mornin’. There’s floodin’ too, in places. The Niño factor. Rodriguez was right.’

We checked all but our oilies, hand baggage and briefcases into the airport lock-ups, and after what he had said about the weather, I was glad to see, when we got to the car desk, that he had laid on a four-wheel-drive land-cruiser. While he was signing the hire and insurance papers, the girl produced a parcel from a cubby-hole at the back. ‘Ees left for you this morning, señor. A courier from the Librerío Universal bring it. There is some extra to pay, plees.’

He nodded without looking up as she placed it on the counter. ‘Books,’ he said.

She nodded, asked for our driving licences, then took us outside to where the vehicle was parked in the shade of a tree. ‘It may not be as comfortable as an ordinary saloon,’ Ward said on a note of apology, ‘but buggered if Ah was takin’ any chances in a country like this.’ He pulled open the rear door and tossed the package of books on to the back seat, together with his gear. ‘Ye check the vehicle over while Ah see that we’ve got a manual and all the necessary papers.’

The girl was already producing the car’s documents from a compartment below the instrument panel. ‘What are the roads like? Bad I suppose.’ I was walking round the vehicle, peering underneath to check the state of the tyres and the exhaust line.

‘The coastal road is fine, macadam all the way. The turn-off to Cajamarca is north of Trujillo, so we’ve got about six hundred kilometres of fast drivin’.’

The speedometer read 62805, but that was kilometres, not miles. The vehicle was dusty and there was some rust. I lifted the bonnet. ‘What about the mountain road?’ I asked. ‘We have to cross the first of the cordilleras according to the map you showed me.’

‘Rodriguez said it was okay. Macadam until we run out of the coastal plain and start to climb. After that it’s a dirt road, but fairly new. It seems heavy trucks use it every day, so it can’t be too bad.’

I finished checking the leads and cooling pipes. ‘Nothing to worry about then.’ And I closed the bonnet.

He nodded, paid the deposit, again in US dollars, and passed me the keys. ‘Ye’re drivin’. Okay?’

‘¡Buen viaje!’ The girl flashed us a brilliant smile and took her brightly uniformed efficiency off to deal with another customer, a big American with a broad-brimmed stetson shading his leathery features.

The hotel we were headed for was in the centre of the city, a nightmare ride with everybody driving like crazy and blaring their horns. And it was hot, the humidity very high with a miasma hanging over the buildings as though the clouds were so heavy with moisture they needed to rest themselves on terra firma.

There was no doorman at the hotel where Iris Sunderby had stayed, but the woman at reception confirmed that she had left by car shortly after eight on Sunday morning. She remembered because she had seen her drive off and it was unusual for ‘a señora of her quality’ to be driving herself with no companion.

All the time Ward had been talking to the receptionist his head had been half turned to the street doors, which were wide open, framing an incessant movement of people in an iridescent haze of hot sunlight. His eyes darted from door to lift, watchful and alert, as though he were expecting somebody. It had been the same at the airport and I had thought then that perhaps he half expected Iris Sunderby to materialise out of the crowd. Now it worried me, but you can’t ask a man like Ward if he’s scared. I felt he was as tensed-up as that.

It was the same as we drove off, but my attention was then concentrated on the traffic. ‘Turn right at the corner here.’ He said it abruptly, his body twisted round so that he could look back at the hotel.

‘It’s straight on,’ I said. I had looked up the directions for the Pan-Am Highway at the hotel.

‘Ah know it is, but turn right. Turn right, damn ye – here!’ A horn screamed from behind us as I swung the wheel over without indicating. ‘And right again.’ He wanted me to go round the block and park the car about fifty metres short of the hotel.

‘Why?’ There was a car close behind me.

‘Just do as Ah say.’

The car was still with us as I slid into the kerb just short of the hotel entrance. It passed us then, a very battered American car with a young Indian at the wheel. He gave us a hard stare as he passed, very slowly. A moment later he also parked, right outside the hotel entrance. ‘Quick! Pull up close behind him!’

Ward had his door open and was out in a flash before we had even stopped. The Indian had got out too and was coming round the back of his car. Ward’s left hand shot out, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him past me. ‘Drive on!’ The door behind me was flung open, the man bundled in. ‘Go on – drive!’ Torrents of Spanish as I backed away and pulled out into the traffic. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand Ward’s behaviour, so I just concentrated on getting out of the city as fast as I could.

‘We’ll dump him somewhere up the Pan-Am.’ Ward’s voice was close against my left ear.

‘What’s it all about?’ I could hear the Indian struggling in the back. ‘For God’s sake! You can’t do this sort of thing …’ A main intersection was coming up, the traffic lights not working and a policeman on duty. He waved me through so that I didn’t even have to slow. ‘Let him go,’ I yelled. But Ward didn’t answer. He was talking to the Indian, sharp, barked questions in Spanish.

It went on like that all the way out of Lima, Ward’s voice sometimes hard and accusing, sometimes dangerously quiet, and the Indian mumbling his replies, and sometimes answering in his own tongue. ‘He’s from Puno,’ Ward said at one stage. ‘Thirteen thousand feet up on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Says he has a woman and two boys to keep and needs money.’ And he added, ‘Can’t blame him. If Ah lived in a clapped-out city like this with inflation at two hundred per cent, or whatever it is, Ah’d dae just about anythin’ fur payment in solid US dollars.’

It occurred to me that Ward’s early background couldn’t have been all that different. ‘What’s he got in his mouth?’ I had caught a glimpse of the Indian’s face in the rear mirror, a flat, rather moon-shaped face with high cheekbones, blackened teeth and dark eyes that were so slitted he had a Mongol look. His hair was lank and very black and his right cheek bulged where he had something wadded behind his teeth. ‘There’s a smell, too,’ I said.

Ward laughed. ‘Nothin’ to the way ye probably smell to him. But it’s coke. That’s what he’s chewin’. The coca leaf. They all chew it. Keeps hunger at bay.’ And he added, ‘Ah wish Ah’d known about coke when Ah was a kid.’

‘Why, have you used it?’

‘Of course Ah have. But Ah was put where the poppy grows so Ah started on hashish and stuff like that. Not good. But cocaine – no, let’s say the coca leaf … Hell, if ye know how to use the stuff it can dae ye a power of good. There was a man way back at the beginnin’ of this century made an elixir of it, sent it to all the crowned heads of Europe, the Pope, too. They all loved it, thought it was the greatest thing they’d ever drunk.’

We crossed the Rimac river, which was swollen, running brown and very fast. I knew the way then, for we were backtracking the route we had taken from the airport. ‘He was following us, wasn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Aye.’

‘Why? Has he told you why?’

To earn some money.’

‘Yes, of course. But who paid him to follow us?’

‘The other one, the man he was with. He doesn’t know where he got his orders from.’

Directions for the great north-south coastal highway came up and suddenly we were on a dual carriageway that cut through the remains of a giant sand slide. I was doing over a hundred k.p.h. then through a miasma of mist, the Pacific glimmering opaquely away to our left and the light fading. ‘Stop at some nice convenient pull-in and we’ll take leave of our friend.’

I pulled over and Ward and the Indian got out. There was a hot, wet wind, but no dust blowing. It was too damp. ‘¿El Niño?’ Ward said, and the Indian nodded. ‘Si, si. El Niño.’

‘His name is Palca.’ Ward handed him a ten-dollar note. ‘¡Buen viaje!’ He laughed and clapped him on the back.

The Indian looked at the note, then at Ward. His face was impassive. It showed neither surprise nor pleasure. ‘Momento.’ He jerked his poncho up, felt about in the pocket of his filthy jeans and producéd a screwed-up bit of paper which he handed to Ward with a few muttered words. Then he turned, and with a little gesture of farewell crossed the highway and headed back towards Lima, a small, shambling figure glancing back every now and then in search of a truck that would give him a lift.

Ward opened up the paper to reveal two tiny clay figures interlocked, the woman with her head bent over the man’s huge phallic erection. ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘Some sort of votive offerin’, Ah imagine. Ah’ve seen this sort of thin’ in the Mediterranean, but not as erotic.’ He held it out to me. ‘Look at the self-satisfied smirk on the man’s face. Good, isn’t it? He said it was Mochica, from a grave south of Lima. It’s typical of Mochica pottery – a lot of it is highly erotic. Ah’ve seen pictures of drinkin’ vessels where the only way of gettin’ at the liquor is through the penis, but Ah’ve never seen fellatio depicted or pictures of miniatures like this … Maybe it’s just a copy. But if so, it’s remarkably well done.’

He was staring at it almost lovingly. Then he turned and stood for a while gazing out at the Pacific. ‘Ah feel like stout Cortés, silent upon a peak in Darien.’

‘That’s a long way further north,’ I said. ‘And anyway it was Balboa.’

‘Ah know.’

He got back into the front seat and we started up the coast. ‘Ah don’t like it,’ he said at length. There was a long silence, night closing in fast. I switched the headlights on.

‘What don’t you like?’ I said at last.

‘He was just a driver. Ah should have grabbed the other one. Ye didn’t notice him, did ye? He was waitin’ fur us at the airport, a mean-faced little mestizo dressed in a pale blue suit. Ah didn’t see him at first. He was standin’ half-hidden among a group of American tourists.’

‘Where was this?’

‘In the baggage claim area. He watched us go through customs, followed us to the lock-up, then out to the parkin’ lot. Remember Ah asked ye to go slowly at the start? He was running then to that old heap the Indian was drivin’. They were behind us all the way to the hotel.’

‘If he was following us,’ I said, ‘why didn’t he stay in the car?’

Ward shrugged. ‘Wanted to make certain we weren’t bookin’ in fur the night, Ah suppose, find out what our plans were. He was lurkin’ in a doorway while Ah was grabbin’ the driver.’

‘But why? Is there something you haven’t told me?’

‘Such as?’

I hesitated. But what the hell, better have it out with him now. ‘Are you something to do with Intelligence?’

I would like to have been watching the expression on his face, having put the question to him so bluntly, but just at that moment I had to slam on my brakes for two gaudily painted trucks, one of them with La Resurrección elaborately painted in red. They loomed up ahead of me, travelling side-by-side at just over 80 k.p.h. and completely blocking the highway. I flashed my headlights and the one on the left gradually pulled ahead.

I heard Ward laugh. ‘Whatever gave ye that idea?’ He brushed the question aside and I realised it had been silly of me to ask it. If he were Intelligence he certainly wouldn’t tell me. ‘Ye have too vivid an imagination,’ he said.

By then the faster truck, La Resurrección, had pulled over and I had a blurred impression of brilliantly painted pictures of Bethlehem, the birth and the Virgin Mary as I passed it. ‘It must cost them a fortune.’ Ward was changing the subject and I let it go at that. Time would probably answer my question. Meanwhile, there was the more urgent matter of why we had been followed. ‘Who sicked those two on to us?’ I asked.

‘Aye, who did? Yer guess is as good as mine, Pete.’

‘Gómez?

‘Ah’d imagine, yes.’

‘But why?’

That’s what Ah don’t know.’ He leaned forward and pulled the map from the dashboard shelf, flashing his torch on it. ‘The first town we go through is Huacho.’ He spelled it out for me. ‘About a hundred kilometres. There’s a hotel marked. We’ll stop there. Ah could do with a drink.’

‘Maybe we could get something to eat.’ I slowed as headlights blazed, dazzling, out of the mist. A great mammoth of an American truck went thundering past, forcing me on to the dirt shoulder.

‘Pisco sour,’ he murmured, settling himself on his seat and closing his eyes. ‘Ah’m sure lookin’ forward to my first pisco sour.’

The sea mist was thicker now, the road worsening with potholes in places. Roadworks came and went, unlighted piles of debris looming suddenly. ‘What is pisco sour?’ I asked him, but he was already asleep and I drove on to Huacho, wondering what sort of a man Gómez would turn out to be and why Iris Sunderby had broken her journey at Lima and driven up to Cajamarca. Was he really going to join ship as navigator? And if so, why had he paid those two to watch for us at the airport? What was the point of their following us?

I was still worrying about this when I pulled into the hotel at Huacho, the mist thicker than ever and my eyes so tired they felt as though they had been sand-blasted.