TWO

Pisco sour proved to be a local brandy whisked up with white of egg and the juice of fresh limes with a few drops of angostura bitters lying like dark bloodstains on the white bed of foam. I can’t remember how many I had in the course of that meal, or what I ate. Ward was due to take over the driving and at the end of it I slumped into the seat beside him in a happy daze which insulated me from all sense of reality. I didn’t care where I was going or what was going to happen to me. I just drifted away to the sound of the engine as we hammered our way up the Pan-Americana.

The rain hit us somewhere north of Huarmey, a solid wall of water lit by flashes of lightning. We were in desert country, the thick, cloying smell of fish oil from the port of Huarmey lingering in the car. There were oleanders and an untidy tumble of bamboo dwellings. The cloudburst switched itself off as abruptly as it had started, and the moon, peering momentarily out from an ink-black cloudscape, showed a coastal desert of pure white sand backed by low hills of chemical-green and violent reds, cactus everywhere and trucks parked on the dirt verge, most of them painted in livid crimson on white – Optimista, Primero de Mayo, La Virgen.

We rolled into Casma just after three in the morning, the stink of fish oil hanging over the port and an old adobe fort peering at us out of mist. The ugliness and poverty of the place is all I remember of it, and Ward saying, ‘Ah’ll drive as far as Chimbote, then ye take over.’ He sounded half asleep and an approaching truck was flashing its lights. The green of sugar cane showed above dry yellow stalks as we crossed another river bed, the sound of rushing water drowning the engine. ‘Light me a cigarette, will ye?’ He fumbled a packet from the pocket of his anorak and I lit one for him with the dashboard lighter. ‘We’ll need to get gas somewhere.’ He drew on the cigarette as though his life depended on it.

‘Trujillo,’ I said. ‘Are we all right till then?’

‘That’s another hundred and twenty to thirty kilometres.’ He was peering at the petrol gauge. ‘Should just about make it.’

Chimbote was a dreadful place, litter everywhere and smelling to hell of oil. Miles of poverty with modern adobe dwellings either being built or falling into ruin. I took over and we lost our way where a blackened adobe town sprawled over a hill above a steelworks. Corrugated iron, cardboard, paper and sand were in constant motion as a wind came in gusts off the Pacific. We found a solitary gasolene pump and got the owner of it up from his couch of rags in a kennel-like shelter of tin and packing cases that rattled and moaned in the fitful wind. Fish oil chimneys and workers’ shacks, fish boats lying at the quays, trucks and oil tankers as dirty as the town; only the central square showed a glimmer of respectability, with a hotel and flowers; but still the all-pervading stink, and there were pelicans scavenging in the blackened sand between the shacks.

Dawn broke as we reached Trujillo, the only decent-looking town we had seen since leaving Lima. There was a good hotel, too, but when I braked to a halt in front of it and suggested stopping there, Ward shook his head, muttering something about our still having two hundred miles to go and the coastal cordillera of the Andes to cross.

‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked him.

‘Iris,’ he mumbled.

I was tired by then. We both were. ‘Why the hell don’t we stop here and get some sleep?’ I think we were also suffering from jet-lag.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes and staring out at the mist that hung over the grey stone building. ‘Drive on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got gas. No point in stoppin’ now.’

But I’d had enough. ‘I’m stopping here,’ I told him, switching off the engine and opening my door.

I was just getting out when his left hand closed like a clamp on my arm. ‘Shut that door!’ He had swung his head round, glaring at me, his eyes hard as glass. ‘What’s the matter with ye? Ye haven’t done a hundred miles yet. Now get movin’.’

‘I’m staying here,’ I repeated, my voice sounding obstinate, almost petulant. I don’t know what it was, the mist, the way it hung, hot and heavy like a blanket, the weirdness and the exhaustion of the long night drive up the coast, but I suddenly realised I was scared. Scared of the country, scared of Ward. Most of all of Ward. I think it was then, with his powerful fingers digging like claws into my arm, that I realised how formidable the man was.

I turned away, no longer able to face the eyes that looked at me so coldly in the gleam of the dashboard light. He let go of my arm. ‘All right, Pete.’ His voice was quiet, almost relaxed. ‘Off ye go.’ He made a noise that was something like a laugh. ‘Got yer passport?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘Good! But ye’ll need money. Quite a lot of money to get yerself back to England, if that’s where ye’re thinkin’ of goin’.’

He let me think about that, a long, tense silence between us. He reached into his door pocket and pulled out the map. ‘Pacasmayo,’ he said quietly. ‘No, San Pedro de Lloc. That’s about another eighty miles. The Cajamarca road joins the Pan-Am a mile or so further on, at San José.’ He looked at me, then nodded. ‘Ah’ll take over then.’ He returned the map to the shelf in front of him and leaned back in his seat. ‘Now fur fuck’s sake drive on.’

Slowly I reached out to my open door and pulled it shut. I had no alternative. Maybe I could have had the hotel ring the British Embassy in Lima, but I was too exhausted, physically and mentally – particularly mentally – to face all the complications. We should have been over the pass by now and starting to look for the Hacienda Lucinda. Instead, we had only reached Trujillo and the mist had clamped down thicker than ever.

I glanced once more at the hotel, thinking of the comfort of sheets, the softness of a bed. Then I started the engine and drove back to where I had seen the Pan-Am Norte sign.

I suppose we were in that meteorological horror that is called an inversion, heat and humidity pressing down on us, numbing the brain and starting the sweat from every pore of the body. I didn’t see the great walled city of Chanchán, only the mist and rain, the blur of the headlights and the windscreen wipers clicking endlessly across my vision. I had the strange feeling I was driving back in time, groping my way into a world of Inca and Chimú people, a world of great empires that built roads and temples and forts of mud on the coast and of cut stone in the Andes, stone that was dove-tailed to resist the trembling of its foundations when the earth quaked.

Finally the rain stopped. Miles of sugar cane, followed by miles of flat desert country, all seen through a damp haze so that nothing seemed real. Rice, too, in river outlets to the Pacific that were like oases of green in the waste of sand that fringed the coast. For a few minutes the sun glimmered through the mist to my right, a red ball just risen above the mountain. Then the mist closed in again thicker than ever.

Ward stirred and asked me the time in a voice heavy with sleep. No play-acting now, no switching of accents. He was still barely conscious and hadn’t the energy to be anything but himself. I glanced at my watch, found I had forgotten to adjust it and read the time for him from the digital clock at the base of the instrument panel. It was 08.07. And then, more for the comfort of hearing my own voice than with any certainty, I said, ‘We should get in to Cajamarca some time between ten and eleven.’

He gave a snort. ‘We’ll be lucky. It depends what conditions are like when we start climbin’ up to the pass.’ He reached for a cigarette and lit it. ‘Want one?’ He seemed to have forgotten I had tried to walk out on him fifty kilometres or so back.

I shook my head. The mist was now so dense it was more like a sea fog, the humidity very high and the sweat dripping from my forehead as I leaned forward, my eyes straining to see through the murk. I had the windscreen wipers on again and our speed was down to less than 30 k.p.h. Neither of us spoke after that, Ward smoking in silence, and then, when he had finished his cigarette, he seemed to drift off to sleep again. Only the sound of the engine, and my eyes shifting from the mist and the road to take covert glances at his face; I knew no more about him now than when I first met him, except what he had told me on the flight down from Mexico. But that, unusual though it was, had been only the outline, the skeletal framework of the man. What his real nature was, what made him tick, I had no idea.

It is difficult to explain my state of mind. Fear, real fear, is something I had only experienced once in my life, and that, strangely enough, was not on the round-the-world race, but in my own little boat, and in my own waters off Blakeney. I had been following some seals in bright sunshine, stripped to the waist and taking photographs. I had no VHF then, only a transistor, and I was so preoccupied I missed the weather forecast.

Suddenly I was enveloped in one of those bitter North Sea murks and it was blowing quite strong from an easterly direction. I was off Cley at the time, so I lowered the main and ran for home. I never saw Kelling or Salthouse churches, or any sign of the coast at all, and I landed up sailing right over the ridge called Blakeney Overfalls, wind over tide, a filthy sea and virtually nil visibility.

That was the only time I had known real fear. Like most of my generation, I had never known a war, had never had fear rammed down my throat time and time again like the older generation. I was thinking particularly of my great-uncle George, the stories he had told, men pulled out of the sea half burned alive, the sudden explosions as another slow cargo vessel slid to the bottom, nobody stopping for survivors and the feeling of terror as the U-boats gradually picked the ships off until the one he was on was alone in the pattern.

He had been a gunner on three different merchantmen, first on Atlantic convoys, then on the Murmansk run. Twice he had been torpedoed, and each time he had finally been picked up; then on PQ17, when the destroyers left and they had been ordered to scatter …

He is dead now, but I’ve never forgotten his description of how he had felt as the German bombers came in from Norway, picking the scattered merchant ships off, the sound of the bombs, and the cold, always the cold. Cold and fear. It crippled your guts before you were even hit. And all the time telling us about it in that slow, unemotional Norfolk voice of his.

Maybe my imagination was running out of control, but the weather, Gómez, the pass ahead, everything became distorted and magnified in my mind. Gómez in particular. Ángel de Muerte. By the time I was through San Pedro de Lloc and had reached the turn-off to Cajamarca at San José my mind had built the man up into some sort of a monster. I didn’t believe what Rodriguez had said about the reason for that soubriquet. No man gets to be called the Angel of Death just because he tells his men to stand fast and fight. There had to be some more deadly reason than that.

Ward was still asleep when I turned right and headed eastwards towards the Andes, the mist a white vapour, the rice fields, the cacti, the occasional trees, all having a weirdness about them that matched my mood and added to my growing fear of what lay ahead, beyond the mountains I could not see. There were moments when the sun almost burst through the mist and I kept on driving, waiting and hoping for a first glimpse of the cordillera, my mind groping for some answer to the enigma of Iris Sunderby’s behaviour. I think it was then I tried to work out her relationship to Gómez, but the complexity of it made it difficult to grasp. He was the son of a woman who had been a nightclub singer and briefly married to Juan Gómez, that was all my tired mind seemed able to grasp. That and the fact that Juan Gómez was her father, too. He had owned a big department store that had burned down, and he had then hanged himself.

So why had she gone rushing north from Lima to see this half-brother of hers? Why? Why? Why? Was he really coming with us as navigator? Winter in the Antarctic. Pack ice grinding. Bergs lowering over us, thrashing through the pack, and that ghost ship seen by a frightened glaciologist …

‘Look out!’

Ward’s voice smashed into my consciousness and I slammed on the brakes. A man had suddenly emerged out of the blinding iridescence of the mist, a vague figure standing in the middle of the road with his back towards us.

I only just stopped in time. Even then he didn’t turn round, just remained there, motionless, staring straight ahead at the road, and there was a roaring that filled the inside of our vehicle with the solid, continuous sound of water on the move.

The road ran straight ahead of us until it disappeared in the mist, except that at the man’s feet it was gone and there was a gap some fifty metres or so wide through which a brown torrent ran so high and in such furious waves that it almost lipped the broken macadam where the road had been swept away.

The man himself was small, with a brown and red poncho hung from his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat of brown felt rammed tight on the lank black hair that covered his bullet head. He took no notice of us, just standing there, gazing at the swirling brown tide of water almost lapping his sandals as though lost in the wonder of such a happening.

‘He is in the presence of his God,’ Ward whispered to me. And when I asked him what he meant, he said irritably, ‘Oh, don’t be more stupid than you need be. He’s lookin’ at something too big for him to understand. And so am Ah,’ he added, slapping me on the back as he got out of the car. ‘Buenos días.’ He had to repeat his greeting twice before the Indian came out of his trance-like reverie and turned to face us.

‘Buenos días, señores.’ He had a broad, high-cheekboned face, a straight beak of a nose, and dark eyes that stared at us without expression. In fact, the whole face was expressionless, the only feature with mobility being the mouth, which was broad and thick, always seeming to be on the point of making a statement without actually saying anything. Having greeted us, he just stood there, gazing at us totally without curiosity or any sign of interest.

‘What’s the river?’ I asked Ward.

‘How the hell dae Ah know?’

‘You had the map. I was driving, remember?’

I heard him question the Indian and I reached into the car for the map which he had left on his seat. The word ‘Hecketypecky’ passed between them, and when I eventually found it – the Rio Jequetepeque – I could hardly believe the spelling. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘That mad flood of a torrent runs beside the road all the way up to the top of the cordillera.’

‘Of course it does. That’s why there’s a pass.’ He turned to the Indian again, asking questions in Spanish and getting nowhere. The man just stood and stared at him blankly.

‘Why don’t you phone Gómez if you want to find out whether Mrs Sunderby has arrived safely in Cajamarca?’ He should have done that before instead of insisting on our groping our way up the Pan-Am Highway in darkness and bad visibility. ‘Have you got his phone number?’

‘No.’

‘Then I suggest we go back to the hotel in Trujillo, get hold of his number and phone him from there.’

‘Why?’

Why? I stared at him, wondering what was going on in that complex mind of his, what his real motive was in pushing north by car when we could have had a good night’s sleep and flown up in daylight. The Indian had turned away, ignoring his questions and gazing across the swollen waters of that ridiculously named river. A wind had risen, the mist swirling and vague shapes of mountains looming through ragged gaps.

‘If you’re worried about Iris Sunderby surely the quickest way …’ But he had swung round at the sound of a vehicle approaching. The ghost of what looked like a Land Rover took shape in the billowing curtain of the mist, emerging as a Japanese four-wheel drive rather like our own, with two people in it. A woman was driving and she parked beside our land-cruiser, nodding to us briefly as she stepped out onto the road and flung a series of questions at the Indian, half in Spanish and half in a more guttural tongue, which I took to be Quechua.

She was a startling sight in that setting, for she was immaculately dressed in riding clothes, her breeches almost white, boots black and so highly polished I could see the flood waters reflected in them. But it was the face that held me. It was a strange, very beautiful face, the mouth a broad gash of red, heavily made-up, the nose finely pointed with delicately arched nostrils, the eyebrows black like two thin pencil lines, and she wore a broad, flat-brimmed hat.

Her manner, the way she stood, everything about her suggested breeding. I couldn’t help thinking she was like a racehorse, and when Ward started questioning her, she answered him with such haughty condescension, such arrogance, that his face went white and I swear he’d have play-acted the Gorbals slum kid and thrown a lot of four-letter words at her if he’d known how to do it in Spanish. She said the word Chepén several times, as though she was speaking to a particularly stupid servant, Tolambo, too, the Hacienda Tolambo, and at the same time she made a circling motion with her hand, ending up with her finger pointed at the road ahead and the jagged peaks of the cordillera disembodied in a ragged mist hole.

She said something to the man who was with her, a thickset, dark-featured fellow, who stood with his hands in the pockets of his anorak frowning at the flood water. He nodded, and then they were both moving back to their vehicle, the Indian drifting light-footed into the back. The woman paused before getting into the driving seat and said to Ward in near-perfect English, ‘I think you’re a bloody fool, but if you’re determined to press on, I suggest you have a word with Alberto Fernandez when you get to Tolambo. He’s the manager. He may be able to give you some idea what the road is like further on.’ She suddenly smiled, a glimmer of warmth. ‘Good luck, señor!’

‘One more question,’ Ward said quickly. ‘There’s a man named Gómez lives at Cajamarca. The Hacienda Lucinda.’ Her face froze and he hesitated. ‘D’ye know him?’

‘I have heard speak of him.’ She climbed in and slammed the door, the sound of the starter drowning Ward’s next question. He watched as she backed and turned, then drove off, the grey curtain of the mist suddenly swallowing her up. ‘Bugger the woman,’ he grumbed. ‘I have beard speak of him.’ He was mimicking her English. ‘What did she mean by that, d’ye think?’

He took the wheel after that and drove at a furious speed back to San José, where he turned right on to the Pan-Am. ‘Chepén,’ he said. ‘How far?’

‘You’re going on then?’

‘Of course Ah’m goin’ on. Ah’ve not come this far just to put my tail between my legs … How far is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, wondering what I could do to stop him.

‘Well, look at the map, man.’

It seemed so pointless, the mist thicker than ever now. No sign of the cordillera, no glimmer of sun, and the Pacific invisible somewhere away to our left.

‘Look at the map, damn ye!’

‘All right.’ My voice was taut with anger as I pulled it out of the shelf in front of me and opened it on my knees. Chepén. We were driving north and I saw it at once. ‘It’s the next town up the Highway.’

‘How far?’

I told him I was trying to work it out. ‘About thirty kilometres I would guess.’ And I added, ‘There’s a minor road runs up over the cordillera via San Miguel and Llata to Hualgayoc where you can turn south to Cajamarca. It’s a good deal longer, but there’s no river marked, and it might be sensible –’

‘No, we’ll follow the woman’s instructions. She lives here. She knows the country.’

He drove in silence after that and I fell asleep until the roughness of the road made me open my eyes. We were bumping our way between pale yellow walls of sugar cane. ‘Where are we?’ I mumbled.

‘Tolambo,’ he said. ‘Sorry to spoil yer beauty sleep.’

My eyes were heavy-lidded with fatigue, and despite the jolting, I must have drifted off again, for suddenly we were stopped, everything quiet, only the sound of voices – Ward talking to a tall, dark man wearing dungarees and a sombrero. There was a narrow-gauge rail track stretching away through acres of cut cane, and in the distance a little tank engine panting wisps of smoke as a gang of men loaded its trailer wagons. They were talking in Spanish and I was only half awake. ‘Adiós?

‘Adiós, señor.’

The sun was burning up the mist as we drove on. ‘Did he tell you what the road was like over the pass?’

Ward’s reply was lost in the sound of the engine, and when I opened my eyes again we were bumping along the bank of what looked like an old Inca canal. The sun was blazing hot, the skin of my bare arm beginning to burn. Away to the left, black menacing clouds of cu-nim were piled up over mountains dimly seen through a haze of humidity. ‘When do we hit the road again?’

‘Soon.’ Ward, peered at the control panel. ‘Another kilometre to go, according to the foreman back at Tolambo.’ He was holding the bucking steering wheel with his artificial hand while he felt under the dashboard for his cigarettes.

‘What about the pass?’

‘He thought it might be a bit peligroso. Nobody has been through fur twenty-four hours and the telephone to Chilete, the last village before the summit, is out of action. So’s the railway, of course.’

‘And Cajamarca?’

‘He talked to Cajamarca yesterday.’

Everything about us, the rocks, the yellow earth, the patches of vivid green in the valley, sparkled with moisture, the old irrigation canal half-full of stagnant brown water. Thunder rolled through the mountains, jagged forks of lightning splitting the black folds of the cu-nim. ‘I think we should turn back.’

He didn’t answer, lighting his cigarette one-handed, and I didn’t press him. I was too tired, only vaguely conscious that we had come off the canal bank and were angling down across a steep slope of stony ground to the rice-green flatness of the valley floor.

Finally we climbed a bank and were on the road again, the smoothness of it lulling me into such a deep sleep that I never saw the barrier at the railway crossing, did not even hear them telling Ward the Jequetepeque had broken its banks a little further on. It was the violent jolting of our wheels on the sleepers that finally woke me to the realisation that Ward had switched from the road to the railway line itself and was bumping his way along the track towards the gaping mouth of a tunnel.

I sat up then, suddenly wide awake. ‘What the hell?’

‘River’s cut the road again. They say we’ll see the break when we cross the bridge.’

‘The bridge?’

‘Aye. It’s just beyond the tunnel. A girder bridge.’

‘Anybody else taken this route today?’

‘No.’

I was staring at him, at the set, aquiline face, the great beak of a nose and the hard line of the jaw, his features in silhouette. ‘You’re mad,’ I said.

He nodded, smiling. ‘Maybe, but right now Ah think the wind is southerly.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ The tunnel entrance had grown big, the stone arch of it rearing up ahead of us like the open jaws of some petrified monster.

‘Hamlet, Ah think – Ah am mad north-north-west, but when the wind is southerly … Most times with me ye’ll find the wind is southerly.’

A curtain of dripping water spat at the bonnet as the darkness of the tunnel engulfed us, the sound of the engine louder now and a sense of finality as the rock walls closed about us. It was like being in the adit of a mine, and I was driving into the bowels of the earth with a man who seemed hell bent on risking our lives for no apparent reason. I thought of the Weddell Sea, the ice and the ghost of that Flying Dutchman, visualising the friction that could develop in the close confines of a yacht. My God! I thought, the chances of coming out of that alive with this madman as the owner and driving force … It was crazy. Absolutely crazy.

The dark of the tunnel hammered the engine noise back at us, water drumming on the roof above my head. Ward switched on the headlights, glancing at me quickly, a tight little smile. ‘Ye got to take a positive attitude. Ah enjoy this sort of thin’. Ah like excitement, the unexpected, shovin’ against the closed door of the unknown.’ He nodded ahead of us to where the tunnel showed an arched embrasure of light. ‘Darkness is only fur ever when ye’re dead.’ He dipped the headlights and the far end of the tunnel seemed to leap towards us, bouncing up and down to the thump of our tyres on the sleepers.

Suddenly we were into daylight and right ahead of us the waters of the Jequetepeque ran brown and white, the river’s level close under the rails of the girder bridge as it flowed, deep and very fast, through the gorge. The sound of our wheels changed to a hollow banging of wooden boards as we drove across. But then the stupid bastard stopped right in the middle of the bridge. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ He switched the engine off. ‘Just admirin’ the view.’ He was pulling the sun roof open and thrusting himself to his feet. The sound of the river increased to a roar. There was wind, too, funnelling through the gorge, whining through the girders and causing the whole structure to tremble. The sun came and went, thunder clouds growling and swirling up the valley.

I didn’t like it. Twice the road had been cut and we hadn’t even started the climb up to the pass. I could hear boulders grinding on the river bed and the grumble of thunder was like the sound of distant gunfire.

Ward slipped down into the driving seat again and slammed the roof shut. ‘You’re turning back, are you?’

‘Of course not.’ And then, as he started the engine again, he turned to me and said, ‘If the sight of a storm in the Andes scares ye, what’s yer reaction goin’ to be when we’re headed into the pack with a Southern Ocean gale up our backsides?’ He stared at me very hard for a moment. ‘Think about it, laddie.’ This with a grin on a lighter note. ‘There’s no room fur cold feet on the sort of expedition we’re embarkin’ on.’ He reached for the gear lever and we began to move slowly off the bridge.

I sat back, wide awake now and cursing the man for goading me so unpleasantly. But at least I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, and shortly afterwards we were able to leave the railway and get back on to the road. The surface was dirt, but despite all the water the going was good. It looked as though a grader had been over it just before the Amazonian rains had spilled over the Andes.

‘Last night two Indians in a pick-up came down from Chilete.’

I didn’t say anything, though the way he had said it made it clear he expected some comment.

‘They went as far as the railway crossin’ on the other side of the tunnel, talked to the man on duty at the halt there, then turned back. That was before the road was cut. They said things were bad up at Chilete with several houses already fallen into the river.’ He looked at me, obviously annoyed by my silence. ‘Well, say somethin’, can’t ye? Don’t just sit there, sulkin’.’

‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘And I just don’t see the point of pressing on through that muck.’ I nodded towards the black murk of cloud that blocked off the valley and all but the lower slopes of the mountains. ‘Apart from the storm, we don’t know what the road is like, how bad it will be when we reach the pass.’

‘It’s not the road that worries me. It’s those two men.’ We were climbing now, the lower slopes of the mountains patched with the terraced green of small rice fields. We passed through Tembladera, a scattering of houses clinging to the mountain side. ‘They knew about us, the type of vehicle we were drivin’, and they instructed the keeper of that crossin’ to tell us the road over the pass was open, that it was okay.’

‘Why?’ The question was wrung out of me by the absurdity of it. ‘Why should they do that? How did they know about us?’

‘Telephone. From our friend in Lima. They were both of them from Chimbote.’

That was the filthy coastal town smelling of fish oil where I’d taken over the driving. ‘All the more reason why we should turn back.’

He snorted. ‘All the more reason why we should go on.’ And he added, ‘Ah’d like to have a wee chat with those two, find out a bit more about them. Reach into the back, will ye, and open up that parcel of books. There’s a knife in the pocket of my anorak.’

It was one of those all-purpose knives with a flick blade sharp as a razor. I slit along the seam of the cardboard wrapper where it had been taped over. Inside were three fat volumes of Mark Twain tied together with gold tape and a card with Complemento de Librerío Universal on which had been written in green ink primera editión. ‘How ever did these get to Peru?’

He glanced at me sideways, smiling. ‘Ah told ye it was useful when travelling to enter antiquarian as one’s occupation.’

‘First editions of Mark Twain! They must be worth quite a bit – in America.’ But what was he going to do with them in this economically bankrupt country?

‘Cut the gold tape and pull them apart. They’re not quite what they seem.’

I didn’t need to pull them apart. As soon as I had cut the tape the bottom volume dropped into my lap. The centre of it was a plastic mould in which the metal of an automatic gleamed snugly. The upper volume I had to prise loose from the middle one. It contained ammunition in three spare magazines, also a very light plastic armpit holster. Ward glanced in the rear-view mirror, then all round, finally pulling up in the middle of the road. ‘Ye’ll have to give me a hand.’ He opened his door and got out, leaving the engine running.

I didn’t move. I just sat there, my brain numb.

He was taking off his anorak. ‘Well, come on, man. It’s damp out here.’ He was in his shirt sleeves staring through the side window at me. ‘Come on, damn ye. Move it!’

I looked at him, feeling I had reached the end of the road. ‘If you want to play cops and robbers,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘you’ll have to do it without me.’

He reached in and wrenched the little bundle of plastic bands out of my hands, and I sat there, silent, watching as he fumbled the bands into position with the little cup to hold the weapon under his right armpit. It took him a little while, but he got it fixed in the end, then held out his dummy hand for the gun.

I should have told him to go to hell. I should have flung the damned thing out of his open door so that it would bounce down the mountainside up which the road was climbing. Instead, I handed it over to him. I don’t know why. Thunder rumbled high above us, the clouds reaching down towards us, wisps of mist sweeping down the valley.

He had put his anorak on again, no sign of the gun, no bulge as he climbed in and we started on up the mountain road, windscreen wipers slashing back and forth. ‘Getting quite chill out there.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘How far up d’ye reckon we are, a thousand feet?’

He was trying to ease my mind, to make me feel it was all right and quite normal for a man to have a gun in an armpit holster in Peru. ‘Just in case.’ I could have said it for him. In case of what? ‘Are you going to use it?’ The words seemed dragged out of me, my voice subdued.

A pause, then very gently, ‘Only if Ah have to.’

‘And what constitutes have to?’

‘Ah’ll know when the time comes. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

He drove in silence then and I closed my eyes, pretending I was asleep, my head nodding, and all the time my mind reaching forward to the future, trying to visualise what it would be like on the boat. That he’d use the gun if he had to I was quite certain. But why did he feel the need of a gun? What gave him the right to have it? And the way it was delivered to him, so neat, so innocent-seeming a package. Somebody had acquired it. On his instructions? Somebody had gone to considerable trouble and expense to acquire the books and have them hollowed out, then delivered to the car hire people just before our plane arrived. It all added up to an organisation, but what organisation? Who did they represent – a government, the Mafia, some drug ring? Cocaine? Was he mixed up in cocaine smuggling?

We never saw Chilete until suddenly we were in among the grey ghosts of houses, the road rutted now and full of mud. The sound of water, when Ward rolled down his window, was a solid roar that overlaid everything.

He pulled up and we could look down through the grey cloud-mist to the centre of the village where an old stone bridge and several houses were crumbling into the river. There was a little group of men gathered outside what looked like a café, Indians some of them, their faces dark and sombre as they stood arguing over the ruins of their village. ‘Maybe they’ll know if there’s been any traffic over the road.’ Ward got out and strode down the mud-sodden road to join them. I stayed by the vehicle, wondering what to do. But I knew the answer to that. There wasn’t anything I could do and, knowing that, I was conscious of my own inadquacy, weighed down by a sense of helplessness.

Perhaps it was the village. There was something about Chilete and the cloud-mist drizzle of that dreadful morning that was utterly depressing. The last point of habitation before the pass and every dwelling a-gleam with water as though the whole place was deluge-cursed and waiting to fall into the river. I felt not only miserable, but strangely scared, as though the pass above me was in itself a terrifying manifestation of dark imaginings, like the entrance gate to the place where the dead wait in limbo.

‘Two of them came in yesterday evenin’.’ Ward was back, climbing into the driving seat. ‘The word is that five or six miles further on we’ll find the new road washed out. Apparently it’s entirely blocked with mud and rocks.’ He started the engine. ‘But the old road is still passable. They’ve put stone markers at the intersection.’

‘Who were they? The same two Indians who talked to the railway crossing keeper?’

‘I guess so. The laddies back there had never seen them before. They thought they were probably road maintenance men from the Cajamarca region.’

The tumbled ruin that was Chilete disappeared almost immediately, swallowed up by the mist, as we drove out along the broad, freshly graded road, the walls of a valley gorge closing in. ‘How far to the pass?’ I asked him, but he didn’t answer, peering into the grey void as the road doubled back on itself, climbing steeply. There were hairpin bends and soon we were lipping the edge of a two-thousand-foot drop, the river below occasionally glimpsed through ragged wind-torn holes in the cloud.

It was like that all the way to the intersection where the new road swung away to the right, the way blocked by stones placed in a line across it. They were not large stones, merely a warning. The old road ran straight on along the gorge edge. As far as surface was concerned, and even width, there was little to choose between them. Ward checked, a momentary lift of his foot on the accelerator, then he was powering straight on. ‘Shorter this way,’ he said. ‘That’s what they told me, anyway.’

‘But less convenient,’ I muttered. ‘How long before we get back to the proper road?’ More frequent glimpses now, through swirling cloud, of the river far below. Half a dozen parrots cut a brilliant green streak across our bonnet before disappearing into the looming darkness ahead. Lightning flashed, followed almost instantaneously by the sharp crack of thunder. ‘What do we do if this road is blocked?’

He didn’t answer and shortly afterwards he slowed for a right-hand bend, his body bent forward, the dummy hand clamped tight on the steering wheel. He took it slowly in four-wheel drive, the road much narrower here, the outer edge of it crumbling away. Round the bend it broadened out again with just room for two vehicles to pass, but ahead was the deep V of a side gorge with water pouring down it, spilling a flood across the road. He braked then, bringing the vehicle to a stop and sitting there, the engine ticking over. He wiped his face with one end of the brightly coloured sweat rag he wore round his neck, staring at the problem ahead. ‘Know what Ah’d like right now? Ah’d like a nice cool pint of that Southwold brew.’

‘Adnams?’

‘Aye. Yer part of the world and one of the best bitters –’ His words were cut short by a clap of thunder very close.

But it wasn’t thunder. It was something else, more like a cannon, and before the echo of it had died away, there was a rumbling sound, growing to a roar. In the same instant Ward had revved the engine and rammed the gear lever home. The vehicle shot forward, and as it did so the first rocks from above came hurtling down onto the track just behind us.

Leaning forward I had a view of it in the side mirror, the bend we had just rounded obliterated by a great mass of avalanching rock and mud that went spilling down over the edge to disappear into the cloud vapour below. ‘Christ!’ My voice was barely audible above the noise of the slide and the sound of our engine. My eyes were on the far side of the valley where the track was clear and unbroken to the next turn above the main gorge. If we could make it through the torrent to the bend ahead … ‘What is it?’

Ward had jammed on the brakes. ‘Ye take her. See ye on the other side of the bend, if ye make it.’ He was out in a flash, scrabbling for a foothold on the steep side of the track. Above him was a path of sorts trailing along the mountainside.

‘What is it?’ I asked him again, shouting to make myself heard above the grumble of thunder and the sound of water. ‘Where are you going?’

His only answer was a wave of the arm, signalling me to drive on. He was climbing like a goat, moving with extraordinary speed. And then I lost him among the boulders and small trees that marked the course of the torrent.

By then the noise of the avalanche had died away, only the echoes of it reverberating across the valley, and when I shifted into the driving seat and looked back, the road behind us had ceased to exist. Where the bend had been there was now nothing but a piled-up, slithering mass of wet glistening rubble. I looked up the line of the torrent. No sign of Ward. He had disappeared entirely, leaving me to wonder what the hell he was playing at. I was on my own now, faced with that half-obliterated turn at the V-point of the side gorge where water pouring over the track was eating away at the surface.

There had been a bridge there once, or perhaps a culvert. I could just make out part of the stonework, though most of it was under water. I checked the four-wheel drive lever, eased off the brake and started forward. No good putting it off. At any moment the whole track might go.

When I reached the turn I found half of it gone already. The roar of the water coming down the gully drummed at my ears as I inched the Toyota into the bend. It was virtually a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and very sharp, the culvert blocked with stone and the remains of a small tree, so that the full volume of the water coming down the gully was swirling across the track to disappear over the edge, thundering down into the main gorge of the Jequetepeque. There was only just room to scrape through between the roots of the tree and the edge.

I inched forward. Did I take it slow or fast? How deep was the water? Was it deep enough to sweep the vehicle over the edge? The nearer I got to it, the deeper it looked. And what was the track like underneath? Would it hold up for the half-minute or so it would take me to drive across? The devil of it was the vehicle was a left-hand drive, so that I was on the side that would go over the edge first.

I hesitated, and as I did so a big stone that marked the outer edge of the track began to move. I didn’t wait. I let in the clutch and gripped the wheel, taking it gently, not using too much power and just willing the tyres to maintain a grip on the rotten surface below the water.

I was about half-way across when I felt the rear begin to swing sideways under the weight of the torrent. I gunned the engine then, slipping the clutch slightly, clawing for a hold. That way I had the power ready to hand and as the front wheels began to grip a solid surface and the snout of the Toyota reared up, I banged the clutch in with my foot hard down. Something clanged by the back axle, a rock presumably, and then, with the back still slithering sideways and the rear left wheel beginning to race as it fell off into space, the vehicle gave a sort of shudder and we were out, clear of the water and on a hard surface again.

That was when I saw it, right in front of me, a large lump of rock bang in the middle of the track. I stopped, the roar of the torrent drumming in my ears. The rear of the Toyota was only just clear of the water as I jumped out, checking to see if it would be possible using the low gear to push the rock over the edge. The inner side of the track was almost sheer at this point, brown broken rock glistening with water, and I could see at a glance where the rock had come from, a gaping hole oozing mud as though a giant molar had been extracted.

Lightning forked across the black belly of the clouds, and the rock that had moved as I was negotiating the bend had disappeared into the gorge below, the torrent running smooth as it lipped the broken edge of the old roadway. Still no sign of Ward, the cloud-mist hanging grey over the mountainside above. I felt very alone at that moment, stuck there on that track somewhere in the Andes, my body chill with sweat and my hands still trembling with the nervous tension of getting safely through the rutted mud of the bend.

I was just getting back into the driving seat when there was a shout and a figure emerged from the gully about fifty metres above me. It wasn’t Ward. This was a much slighter man with a broad-brimmed hat and a poncho over his shoulders. He was moving fast down the side of the gully, Ward appearing suddenly behind him. ‘Hold him!’ The shout echoed in the rocks and at the same moment the man saw me. He checked, but only momentarily, then he had jumped down onto the track a knife in his hand.

There was only one thing for me to do and I dodged behind the Toyota. He went past me, running. But then he stopped. Ward was angling across the slope above to cut him off. I reached into the door pocket and pulled out the heavy wheel nut spanner. By then Ward was coming down onto the track, his false arm and dummy hand hanging limp at his side.

I think it was the realisation of his disability that decided the man to go for him first. He was already advancing up the track as Ward slithered down onto the flat surface of it. The knife flashed, a steely glitter as lightning struck again across the far side of the gorge, the crackle of it hitting the rocks and followed almost instantaneously by a single shattering crash of thunder.

He went for Ward in a crouching run, and Ward just stood there, as though transfixed. ‘Get out of his way,’ I yelled and started forward.

But Ward didn’t move and I was still several yards away when the two of them met. I saw the knife flash, a cold gleam as the man swung his arm back to strike at Ward’s belly. Then, as the knife slammed forward, driving upwards for the heart, Ward’s right arm extension came up, the glove-covered steel fingers of his hand open like claws. They closed on the knife blade, twisted it out of the man’s hand, and then he was using the whole false arm as a metal club slamming down on the upraised arms, jabbing for the face, forcing the man back step by step until the edge of the track was only one more step away.

I think I called a warning, but Ward ignored it. I saw the man give a terrified glance over his shoulder, then that metal flail slammed into the side of his head. He was off-balance, his defences down as Ward drew back his right arm and slammed that gloved hand straight into the sallow face.

I can still see the blood starting from the man’s nose, the way his arms reached out as his feet rocked back on to nothing, and still hear the dreadful high-pitched rabbit cry as his body disappeared over the edge. For all of a minute, it seemed, we could hear the sound of his body falling, the rattle of the stones it dislodged.

But when I looked over the edge there was no sign of him, or of the river – only the mist swirling.

I turned to Ward. ‘You killed him.’ My voice sounded strange in my ears. ‘You did it deliberately.’

His only answer was to pick up the knife and hand it to me. Then he was climbing back up the bank he had slithered down and I watched as he walked in a leisurely fashion across the slope of the mountain to the gully. He seemed totally relaxed, and I felt the prickle of my fear. I had never seen a man deliberately killed before and I was more scared even than I had been before.

When he came back he was carrying something in his left hand. ‘Ye seen one of these before?’ He dumped it on the bonnet of the Toyota.

‘Only in films.’ It was one of those plungers that generate the electric spark for setting off blasting charges. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘Up there, where Ah expected.’ He nodded to the mountainside beyond the gully and walked over to the rock that was blocking the road. ‘Ye didn’t think that fall behind us was an accident, did ye? But he then had to get across the gully and connect up the wires to brin’ this lot down on top of us.’ He waved his dummy hand towards the sheer rock above us.

‘You didn’t have to kill him,’ I said.

‘No?’ He looked up at me, a quizzical lift of his eyebrows. ‘Are ye happy with the thought of being buried alive under tons of rock?’ He straightened up and moved to the driving seat. ‘Well if ye are, Ah’m not. With luck they’ll never know what happened to him. And that may worry them.’

‘Who?’

But he had started the engine and he didn’t hear me as he inched the vehicle forward in low gear. The wheels churned, the engine labouring, and slowly the rock that was blocking our way shifted. He forced it close enough to the edge to allow the Toyota to creep past on the inside. I got in, and as he drove on I was watching his face, fascinated. I had never been with a killer before.

Round the bend ahead the road ran fairly straight, a narrow ledge cut out of the mountainside. The clouds hung like a grey-black roof over the valley. He slowed at a view point, leaning out and examining the wet stone surface. ‘There were tae of them,’ he said as he drove on. ‘Looks like his mate went off with the car. Ah couldn’t see the little bugger clearly enough to be sure, but Ah think he was Indian. The guy who did the blastin’ was a mestizo.’

‘Why?’ That’s what I didn’t understand. Why should we have been followed on our arrival in Peru? And now this crude attempt to kill us. The strong features, the massive head – the man radiated an extraordinary sense of inner strength.

‘Why?’ I asked again, and he said, ‘That’s what we’re goin’ to find out.’

‘We?’

He looked at me, smiling. ‘We,’ he said. He drove in silence after that, leaving me alone with my chaotic thoughts, and at the end of the long straight slash across the side of the cloud-hidden mountain, we picked up the new road again, swinging right, away from the Jequetepeque. We were in cloud then, feeling our way again through a grey void. We had almost half an hour of this, then brown, wet walls of rock closed us in, the sound of the engine grinding upwards reverberating in a deep cut, the foglights accentuating the macabre theatricality of our struggle up the path through which Pizarro and his four hundred armoured hidalgoes had climbed to destroy the Inca Empire half a millennium ago.

Ward must have been thinking along the same lines, for as the road flattened out and the mist began to glimmer with a strange brightness, he said something about the Promised Land. The road dipped and we picked up speed.

‘That’s it,’ he said with grim satisfaction. ‘We made it,’ and he slapped the gloved hand twice against the steering wheel. ‘There was a moment, Ah’ll admit … Look!’ The thinning veil of cloud eddied in a gust of wind, and suddenly we were below it, looking down on to the flat roofs of a town spread out in a broad valley of rain-washed green. ‘Cajamarca.’

‘And the Hacienda Lucinda. Do you know where it is?’

‘Past the Baños del Inca, out by a hill that’s honeycombed with grave apertures. We’ll have to ask.’

We seemed a million miles from the Weddell Sea and that ice-encrusted vessel, but I had a feeling now that this was all a part of the voyage to come. ‘What are you going to say to Gómez?’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘Nothin’. Ah think he’ll dae the talkin’.’

‘And Iris Sunderby?’

‘We’ll see.’