ONE

‘So what did she say about him?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Ye were in that room alone with her. She must have said somethin’.’

I shook my head.

‘Jesus Christ, man! Didn’t ye ask her?’ He was leaning forward across the table, staring at me with a sort of frustrated belligerence. ‘Weren’t ye curious?’

‘I was packing her things.’

‘Ah know ye were. But ye were there all the time Ah was talkin’ to Gómez. Must have been quarter of an hour at least. Surely to God …’ He stretched out his left hand and gripped my arm. ‘Come on, ye had the opportunity, and after that extraordinary scene in the garden ye must have been bubblin’ over with curiosity.’

‘She was drugged,’ I reminded him.

‘Ah know that.’ His voice had risen, his impatience spilling into anger so that other guests were beginning to watch us. ‘Now just go back in yer mind to that room, tell me everythin’ she said, or even how she looked in answer to your questions, that would help.’

‘I didn’t ask any questions,’ I said. ‘Not the sort of questions you want answered. I asked where her suitcase was and she said, under the bed, where else? Oh, and before that, before she collapsed on to the bed, she called him a bastard. She said that several times, walking round the room.’ I didn’t tell him how she had caught hold of my hair again when I was reaching under the bed. I could still hear her voice, the way she had said, ‘You don’t approve, do you?’ As though my approval mattered to her.

There was no room service and we were breakfasting in the hotel dining-room at a table looking out on to a square adorned by several yuccas and some dusty oleanders. Iris hadn’t surfaced yet. She had told Ward she didn’t want any breakfast.

‘Anythin’ else?’

I hesitated, but in the end I told him: ‘She said something about how else could she get the location out of him?’

‘The location of the ship, d’ye mean?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Tradin’ her body fur the information?’ His grip on my arm had tightened, his voice, dropped to a whisper, suddenly quite menacing. ‘That’s what ye’re implyin’, isn’t it? Or was it …?’

I shook my head, unwilling to answer him.

‘And did he give her what she wanted?’

His persistence annoyed me. ‘Sex or information?’ I asked. ‘Which do you mean?’ The way I put it was intentional and I think if we hadn’t been sitting in full view of some dozen of the hotel’s guests he would have hit me.

‘The location,’ he almost snarled.

‘No. She was suddenly flat out.’

He stared at me a moment, as though he suspected I might be hiding something from him. Then he let go of my arm. ‘Och well, Ah’ll have to get it out of her myself.’ He sat back, evidently considering how to go about it, then finished his coffee and got slowly, almost reluctantly, to his feet. ‘Aye, Ah’d best have a wee talk with her myself.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘On the road at nine-fifteen, okay?’

He was just turning to leave the room when the door opened and Iris appeared. It was almost as though there were some telepathic understanding between them. Later I was to find this sort of coincidence recurring. They were after all, both of them, Sagittarians.

As she came over to our table I was amazed at the change in her. The olive colouring of her skin was back in full bloom, and though she was wearing little or no make-up, her lips, or rather her mouth, which, with her nose, was the most notable part of her features, was bright red. Her cheeks, which had been so white the previous evening, now had colour, and instead of sagging with exhaustion she radiated the extraordinary vitality that had so attracted me at our first meeting on the Cutty Sark. ‘Isn’t it about time we hit the road?’ She was addressing Ward, not me, and she glanced pointedly at her watch.

‘Ah was just comin’ to call ye,’ he answered gruffly.

She ignored that and asked him whether he’d booked her a seat with us on the flight south from Lima.

‘Ah was plannin’ to drive down through Arequipa to the Chilean border.’ His manner was slightly defensive. ‘There are quite a few archaeological sites Ah’d like to have a look at while Ah’m here.’

‘There’s also a boat waiting for us down at Punta Arenas. We may find something wrong with her, items we need for overwintering in the ice. She’s a long way from any source of supply and if there’s something that has to be specially made, or is too bulky to fly out – a new engine, for instance …’ They stared at each other for a moment, not exactly hostile, more two people measuring each other up. ‘We can discuss that while we drive, no? Have you settled the cuenta?’ Her tone was imperious, deliberately provocative.

I saw Ward hesitate, then he smiled and nodded. ‘Aye, we can talk about it – while we’re lookin’ round the mud ruins of Chanchán.’ He, too, was being provocative, quite deliberately making it a clash of wills, but still smiling as he told me to get the bags into the Toyota. ‘And don’t let that briefcase out of yer sight.’ He nodded to the case, which was under the table, and strode out.

The route we had taken through the cordillera from Cajamarca had brought us virtually into the outskirts of Trujillo and we had put up at a hotel in the centre of the city, all three of us more or less out on our feet. Now, in the brightness of a cloudless morning, the air clear after a night of rain and surprisingly dry, we started out thoroughly refreshed. Certainly I felt, for the first time, that sense of anticipation, of excitement almost, at the prospect ahead of me – a journey down the whole coast of South America, and then on to the very southernmost rim of the world. Even the digression up to Cajamarca now seemed in retrospect more like an adventure than something to send shivers down the spine.

But though my spirits were high, the shadow of that man, who liked to be called the Angel of Death, travelled with me, the memory of his good looks, his well-oiled virility, above all Iris Sunderby’s apparent infatuation, constantly there in my mind.

Ward took the wheel as we left the hotel, but instead of heading south, he turned north, and when Iris Sunderby remonstrated with him, all he said was, ‘Chanchán. Ah’m bloody well goin’ to have a look at Chanchán.’ Adding, by way of explanation, that it was the old Chimú capital. ‘Pre-Inca and almost as powerful.’

Like Iris, I was impatient now to get on with the journey south and see the vessel that was to be our home, but when I saw Chanchán … It was incredible, so incredible, so lost in time that it did something to me – changed my perspective, my outlook, something strange that even now I barely understand.

To begin with it was vast, a huge mud city fallen into ruin, desolate, remote as the moon, and gloomy as hell, for a mist had rolled in, completely obscuring the sun. It was only a short distance off the Pan-Americana, all grey mud dust, the outer walls towering so thick, so solid, that, after the better part of a millennium, they were still standing eight or nine metres high, only the ramparts showing the erosion of time. It was virtually desert country, the irrigation channels blocked with debris, nothing that could be called a tree to be seen anywhere. Once inside those walls, it really was another world, more than fifteen square kilometres of streets bordered by the crumbling walls of houses, public buildings, cemeteries and reservoirs, some with bits and pieces of bone lying exposed where long-dead looters and grave-robbers had been at work. Looking back towards the Pan-Americana, the huge mud complex appeared ringed with peaked and desiccated mountains. Westward its bulwark was the Pacific. I could hear it, a steady, grumbling sound, like an earthquake.

I walked right through that fantastic ruin. It was the largest I had ever seen, split up into walled units, ten of them Ward had said, and when I reached the western limit of it I was face to face with the heaving bulk of the ocean. A big swell was rolling in, building waves like mountains in the mist and breaking with a thunderous and persistent roar.

There was a slight onshore breeze. I stood there with the salt spray and the mist damp on my face, and the vastness of it, and the antiquity of the desolate remains behind me, made all my life to date seem insignificant and of no account. I can’t explain it, but it was as though I were transported outside of myself, on the verge of grasping the significance of being. In the atmosphere of the place there was something almost biblical, and yet this was a pagan world I had stepped into. How could it be so full of meaning? Was it the monstrous, heaving power of the waters confronting me, or was it my conscious awareness of the dead of a great city?

I don’t know what it was, but I felt almost disembodied, ten feet tall and near to God. The impact was so great that the effect of it was to remain with me in the months ahead and give me strength when I most needed it.

I must have stood there for at least ten minutes, quite still as though transfixed. Finally I turned and started back, not conscious of anything, my mind still locked in on the impression the place had made so that I only vaguely heard a voice calling me. She was sitting in a gap in the outer wall, and as I approached her, she said, ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’ She smiled. ‘What were you staring at?’

‘Nothing – just the sea.’

She was looking up at me with an expression of concern. ‘You are thinking about what lies ahead.’

I nodded. I was looking down at her, brown knees drawn up to her chin and the open V of her shirt showing the round of her breasts, even the pinking of the nipple circles. She patted the broken wall beside her. ‘Does it scare you?’ I didn’t say anything and she turned her head away, facing the sea again. ‘Well, it does me.’ She said it in a whisper. ‘It’s so vast. That’s what I find disconcerting. It goes on and on and on – ten thousand miles of virtually uninterrupted ocean. And where we’re going the winds come from right around the globe.’

I sat down beside her, both of us gazing out through the mist at the heaving, pounding water, the noise of it thundering in our ears, filling our whole world with sound. ‘He’s coming with us, is he?’ I asked her.

‘Ángel? Yes.’ She nodded. ‘He’ll navigate us down into the ice, and afterwards he will act as our guide.’ And she added, speaking quietly as though to herself, ‘He knows where it is.’

‘You trust him?’

She hesitated. ‘No. No, I don’t trust him. But he will take us there.’

‘Why?’

She gave a hollow little laugh. ‘Ah, if I knew that …’

I waited, but she didn’t pursue the matter. ‘Do you love him?’ I asked.

She turned on me then, but not with anger, her tone one of contempt. ‘Love! That is not something he would understand. You don’t love a man like Ángel.’

‘What then? He fascinates you, is that it?’

Her mouth was compressed into a tight line. ‘It is none of your business. But yes, he is very attractive. Don’t you feel it?’ And she added slowly, ‘He is as attractive to men, you know, as he is to women.’

I wondered about that, why she had said it. ‘It’s you I’m concerned about. I’m asking about you.’ It was presumptuous of me, but I had to know, and now I had the opportunity. The atmosphere of the place, the mood between us, everything was right.

She nodded almost reluctantly. ‘I suppose. It is the way we are made. He is a devil, but you cannot help what the gods …’ Her voice tailed away in a little shrug of the shoulders that was like a shudder. ‘And he is not my brother.’

‘Not even your half-brother?’

‘No.’

‘Then who is his father?’

‘How the hell do I know? I have barely seen him since my father died.’

‘What about Carlos then? A cousin, you said.’

She ignored the question, turning to me and asking why Iain had brought us here. ‘Why does he insist on Chanchán? All these mud walls – it is so depressing.’ There was a pause, and she added, ‘He never does anything without a purpose. The play acting, those accents, the changes of mood – all is intentional I think.’ She was looking at me again, waiting for an answer. And I thought, my God! We’re going to lock ourselves inside the fragile skin of a small floating home, and all of us, three of us anyway, at odds and full of motives I didn’t understand.

She nodded as though she had read my thoughts. ‘Looking at that sea, you have reason to be scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ I assured her. ‘Just a little concerned.’

‘A leetle concairned!’ She laughed at her mimicry.

‘About Carlos?’ I reminded her.

‘What about him? He is all right. The police will sort it out, and if they have arrested the boy, then he will be released as soon as they realise the body is not mine, but that of some poor little Dockland tart.’

‘But your handbag.’

‘My handbag? Yes, of course. It suddenly came to me. If they mistook the body …’

‘And the ring. Victor Wellington said there was a ring of yours on the dead woman’s left hand.’

‘I got very wet.’ She nodded, smiling. ‘Also I was a little frightened, and the water was filthy. There was nobody around. Nobody saw me, thank God. Poor little Carlos!’ She glanced at me quickly. ‘Why are you asking about him? You think they will blame him?’ She said it almost eagerly.

‘You recognised him when he followed us out of Greenwich.’

‘Of course I recognise him. He is –’ She stopped there. ‘You ask too many questions.’

‘I only want to know what his relationship is to Gómez. You said he was some sort of cousin.’

She was staring at the sea again. ‘Per’aps he is. Per’aps not.’ She shook her head, the dark hair glinting with moisture, her eyes turned to me and searching mine. ‘I can talk with you, I think.’ I was to learn that her English always tended to deteriorate when her emotions took hold. ‘With Iain, no. I can’t talk to him, not about private matters. I don’t understand him. I suppose in a way I don’t trust him. On practical matters, yes. He is a good man to have with us on this journey …’ She shrugged. ‘You ask about Carlos. I don’t know what that boy is, except he is something very close to Ángel. His mother is that Rosalli woman, I think. But who his father is –’ Again the slight shrug of the shoulders. And then she got to her feet. ‘It is time we rejoin Iain and get going. We need to be in Lima tonight.’

‘Where is he?’ I asked as we turned our backs on the Pacific and began working our way back through the maze of walls and rubble.

‘I left him examining what appeared to be the remains of a cemetery. He was armed with an archaeological book he had dug out of that bulging briefcase of his and was on his hands and knees sifting through a pile of discarded bones.’

We found him seated on a particularly high section of wall sketching the decoration of an inner chamber, and when I climbed up beside him I noticed his vantage point gave him a clear view of the Toyota. When we had parked there hadn’t been another vehicle in sight. Now it had been joined by several cars and a coach was disgorging a gaggle of tourists. ‘I see you’re not taking any chances.’

I said it more as a joke, but he took it seriously. ‘Would ye after what happened on the way up to Cajamarca?’ I realised then that Iris had been right. It wasn’t entirely his thirst for knowledge that had made him insist on driving north to Chanchán.

It was almost eleven before we left that great mud complex, driving back through Trujillo and on south across dull, desiccated country, a lot of it near-desert. The sun gradually ate up the mist until by the afternoon we were in a blazing oven under a burned blue sky. By the time we rolled into Lima it was dark and, though we had taken hourly turns at the wheel, we were all of us limp with exhaustion.

The following morning we flew to Tacna in the far south of Peru, crossed into Chile by taxi and flew on from Arica to Santiago. From there a delayed flight took us on to Punta Arenas where we arrived late in the evening.

I don’t remember much about our arrival, only that the fourteen-kilometre drive from the airport was something of a nightmare with visibility almost nil in pouring rain mixed with flurries of hail and howling gusts of wind. It seemed bitterly cold after the heat of Peru. ‘Ah doubt this fuckin’ place has even heard o’ primavera,’ Ward said in his foulest Glaswegian, and that just about summed it up.

The house we were in was solid Victorian in style, both inside and out, except that it had a tin roof. Between the gusts, the sound of rain on the roof and water pouring off it was continuous. The place was owned by an old ship’s captain. He gave us coffee laced with Chilean brandy. ‘Es bueno. Hara dormir bien.’ He had been at sea on the Chilean coast most of his life, running cargoes between the isolated ports of the southern waterways, a marvellous-looking old man, big gnarled hands warped with rheumatism and a long wrinkled face, little lines running out from his eyes, which were slitted as though he were permanently peering out into fog. His hair was thick and iron grey, and the rather drooping moustache was curved round the mouth to finish in a little tuft just below the under lip. The effect was that he always seemed to be smiling.

I was half asleep when he showed us up to our rooms, Ward and I sharing one at the rear of the building, which, in place of beds, had a double-tier bunk in the corner. The wind in the gusts seemed directed straight at the small casement window, which rattled and banged. At times the whole house shook.

When I woke the sun was shining, everything very still. Ward had already washed and was getting into his clothes. ‘Mornin’.’ He was smiling. ‘Ah think we can regard this as being the start of our voyage. D’ye think it’s an omen?’

‘What?’ I was still half asleep.

‘Ye’ll see what Ah mean when ye get to the bathroom. It looks right out on to the Strait, and it’s flat calm, not a breath, the ships anchored off all standin’ on their heads in marvellous reflection. And somethin’ else –’ There was an excitement about him that showed the boy behind the man. He looked so much younger with a mountain peak all covered in snow peering over his shoulder through the little window. ‘Come on, stir yerself. Ye’ll find me down on the quay looking at her. She’s right there, right in front of us, and she’s rusty as hell. But she’s a good-lookin’ boat all the same,’ he added as he went out.

Thus my first glimpse of Isvik was from the bathroom window of a seafaring man, who had exchanged his small coaster for a house on the quay looking straight out on to the Magellan Strait. She was, as Ward had said, rusty as hell, but behind the rust she had a solid look to her. I just hoped he’d had a good surveyor on the job before committing himself.

By the time I reached the quay the water out in the centre of the Strait was darkening with little puffs of wind and the mountains west of the town were half obscured by cloud. My breath smoked and I began to feel the wind-chill even through my sailing jersey and the special anorak I had bought for southern latitudes. The quay was white and slippery with the granules of a recent hailstorm.

I was only a short time standing there, but long enough to take in the vessel’s lines, the quite dainty sheer, her size and the layout of the masts and rigging. By comparison with a freighter, moored so close her black stern virtually hung over Isvik’s knife-edged bows, she looked very small, but viewing her from the standpoint of the maxi in which I had raced round the world, I guessed she was roughly the same size – at least twenty-five metres long with a good beam and what looked like a deep V-shaped hull. There was a low deckhouse amidships with an upper wheel and emergency tiller steering from a small cockpit aft. I thought at first she was ketch-rigged, but then decided she was more of a schooner. Her running rigging was in an appalling state, the ropes all frayed and tangled, but the standing rigging, which was partly of stainless steel, seemed to have been well looked after. The hull was presumably steel; it was this that gave her a rust-streaked look under the dirty coating of ice and snow. The topsides and deckhouse, many of the fittings, were of aluminium or some smooth grey alloy.

A blackened pipe stood up out of the deck, just aft of the deckhouse on the port side, a heat haze dancing from the top of it and the ice on the metal supporting bracket dripping moisture. A delicious smell of bacon frying was wafted on a blattering down-blast of wind. I was suddenly very hungry. I went on board and from the open doorway of the deckhouse came the murmur of voices. ‘Mr Ward?’ I called his name twice, ‘Are you on board?’

‘Aye.’

But it wasn’t Ward who poked his head up the companionway. It was a big, bearded man with a shock of blond hair on a round bullet head that seemed to have no neck. The shoulders were immensely broad, padded out by the grey and brown loose-woven rollneck sweater he was wearing. ‘You are Pete Kettil, ja?’ And when I said I was he held out a massive paw that gripped my hand as though in a vice. ‘Nils Solberg. Velcome on board Isvik. The boss, he is already here. You come for frokost, ja? Bakkon, eggs, some seaveed, also fried lichen, what we call lav. Is god. Kom down.’

Ward was already eating. ‘Nils is a bloody good cook,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘But Ah learned one thing already. Ye take a gander at the engines. She may look a ruin topside, but beJaisus, the engine-room … Reck’n ye could’ve fried the eggs on the cylinder heads it’s so bright and clean and polished. That right, Nils?’

‘Ja. Engines okay.’

‘So we need a cook. First priority. Nils may be a good cook, but his time will be better spent away from the galley. And we need to dae somethin’ about the drive shaft.’

Apparently the retired sea captain, in whose house we were billeted, was willing to provide us with beds ashore, but nothing else. The deal was we made our own beds and fed on board.

‘What about Mrs Sunderby?’ I asked.

He looked at me with a quizzical lift to his eyebrows.

‘I suppose she’s sleeping it off.’ I said it without thinking.

‘Then ye suppose wrong.’ He was grinning. ‘She was down before me, breakfasted and lookin’ as though she was just off to complete a big business deal in the money centre of BA or wherever. In fact, she’s over at the Yard now chattin’ up some foreman or other she’s got eatin’ out of her hand. As ye doubtless noticed, there’s work to dae.’ He thrust his head forward as the big Norwegian dumped a plateful of an extraordinary mixture in front of me – a great wadge of fried bread, two eggs, two very thick rashers and the rest a mêlée of doubtful greenery swimming in bacon fat. ‘Ah’m Iain, this is Nils, Mrs Sunderby is Iris – no, better call her Eeris, she responds to that much quicker – ye’re Peter, or Pete for short, and what the hell we call Gómez we’ll find out in due course. But Christian names from now on. Quicker to say, quicker to react to. And by God, where we’re goin’ we’re likely to need quick reactions. Had a look at the riggin’?’

I nodded, suddenly realising what was coming.

‘That’ll be yer department. Ah know nothin’ about sails, nor does Nils – he’s a wizard of an engineer, that’s all. And Iris, she’s the managin’ director. Okay?’

‘And you?’ I asked, my mouth stuffed full of lichen which was really much nicer than I’d expected.

‘Me? Ah’m just old moneybags. But Ah tell ye this, laddie, Ah’m a helluva fast learner, so don’t think ye can pull the wool or sit around on yer fat little arse doin’ bugger all. Ah want that riggin’ fixed and workin’ inside of a week.’

‘And the sails?’

‘Iris is checkin’ on that now. We’ve yet to find out if they’ve any sail-makin’ facilities here at all. Ah suspect not, in which case we’ll have to measure them up and have them flown out. Or we make our own. In a place like this there are bound to be some good seamstresses and Singers will surely have had their salesmen down here back in the days of the square-riggers. Iris will soon have some women organised. She’s a great organiser, that girl.’

It was, in fact, Iris who found us a cook. He was a youngster of twenty-two just on the point of being invalided out of the Chilean Navy. Besides cooking, he seemed to have done most things, course after course. His name was Roberto Coloni and he had been in hospital following a bad fall in which he had broken his shoulder blade, forearm and two ribs, as well as suffering bad concussion, which had affected his hearing. It was because of his deafness, not his more obvious injuries, that he was being invalided out, and it was several days before he finally joined us and took up his culinary duties.

My immediate concern on that first morning in Punta Arenas was to learn all I could about the ship. Iain filled me in on the essential details while I was devouring that gargantuan breakfast. Isvik had been built in the Canadian Maritimes for an American millionaire who wanted to emulate Staff Sergeant Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounties who, in the years 1940–42, had sailed the schooner St Roch from west to east through the North-West Passage. He was the first to make the Passage except for Amundsen. And then he did it again in 1944, that time from east to west, the first man to make it across the top of Canada in both directions.

The design for Isvik was influenced to quite a marked degree by the Peterhead-type sailing vessels of the Mounties, also by a sketch made for him by that extraordinary Antarctic single-hander, David Lewis. ‘Roughed it out fur him on the back of an envelope, a squeeze-up steel hull design with platin’ thick as a tanker.’

It was, in fact, a much beamier vessel than the police ship, the hull fining up sharply towards bow and stern so that both fore and aft her deep, strong wedge-shape would cause the ice to squeeze her upwards in the event of her being caught in a series of pressure ridges. She was also much smaller, the police ship having been over three hundred tons. But it was from that and the scribbled design on the back of an envelope that Isvik had been pupped. Unfortunately her building was delayed by the failure of the small specialised steel company that was constructing the hull. Then the American millionaire had had a heart attack. He lost interest after that, his plan overshadowed by the oil tanker Manhattan making it across the top of America.

Lawyers handling his affairs had then dumped the boat on the market just after Wall Street had had one of its periodic crashes. Three years had passed since the time of her conception and she was still without spars and rigging and had not been fitted out internally. Her purchase by the B. J. Norsk Forsking of Larvik for seismographical work in the Bellingshausen Sea almost due south of the Horn was, as Ward put it, ‘just about the very first good thin’ that had ever happened to her,’ even if it was a slightly clandestine operation.

He didn’t say the vessel was jinxed, but after the sail plan and the interior layout had been redesigned and the ship completed for her new role in Antarctic waters, the B. J. Norsk Forsking, a drilling outfit operating in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, struck a bad patch following a fall in the price of oil and abandoned the Southern Ocean project. They had acquired Isvik at a knock-down figure, spent about the same again completing the fitting of her out to their requirements, and Iain Ward had picked her up for not much more than they had originally paid for her. ‘Ah tell ye this, Pete –’ He was leaning across the table, his little steely grey eyes bright with a barrow boy’s excitement at striking a bargain – ‘it’d cost a wee fortune now just to build the hull. She’s plated in the bows with steel eighteen mil thick. If we get caught up in the ice that means she’ll pop up like a cork when the pressure’s on. At least’, he added, with a down-turn to the corners of his mouth, ‘that’s the theory of it.’

‘What did your surveyor think?’ I asked.

‘Just that. In theory, that’s what should happen. There the wee man goes and spoils it all by sayin’ he’s not an ice man and if we get ourselves into a really bad pressure ridge he couldn’t say fur sure what would happen. The truth is, Ah suppose, if ye’ve got a berg sailin’ down on ye and ye’re trapped in the ice there’s no thickness of steel that will save ye from gettin’ crushed. That right, Nils?’

The big Norwegian shook his head, frowning. ‘Jeg forstår ikke.’ I don’t think he found Ward’s accent at all easy, and anyway, like many foreigners, he found it easier to speak English than to understand it. ‘Yu haf finish your café, Iain? Zen ve go look at skrue shaft, eh?’

There was an old pressure cooker half full of coffee simmering on the stove, a saucepan of milk beside it. I helped myself, and when I had finished, I went up on deck and began sorting out the rigging. Nils had already opened up the engine compartment, which was directly below the deckhouse, and he and Iain were sitting on the floor with their legs dangling over the big diesel, going through a list of requirements he had produced. As I stepped past them Iain had his glasses on and was peering at a diagram the engineer had roughed out in his notepad. ‘Well, that makes sense, but if it means takin’ the engine out and havin’ engineers crawlin’ all over the place so we can’t get on with the job of takin’ on stores and equipment –’

‘Nei, nei, nei. We cut the shaft there. I do it myself. No need for Yard engineers. No need for anything, only gears and lever to disengage. And new dynamo – small one so we haf power off the skrue …’

‘The propellor?’

‘Ja, ja, the propellor.’

I left them to it. Engines didn’t interest me very much. But rigging and sails did, and once I was on deck, coiling and sorting the ropes and making notes of what I would need, I barely noticed anything else, time slipping by and my mind so concentrated on the job that I barely felt the wind force rising, small frozen particles of snow driving almost horizontally. Periodically I went down into the warmth below, to write up my notes and check them over against the ship’s design plans, which Nils had produced for me before going off with Iain to talk to the Navy Yard people.

We were almost into November now and I didn’t need to be an expert navigator to work out from the charts, and the Admiralty Pilot lying open on the chart table, that to be into the south of the Weddell Sea in time to take maximum advantage of the summer loosening of the pack we would need to be away not later than end-November. It was a voyage of close on two thousand miles and, allowing for eventualities, it would be a month at least before we were within striking distance of the position where Charles Sunderby had had that brief sighting of the Andros. And Nils was planning a major operation on our engine. Also the snowmobile ordered in England had not yet arrived.

That evening we learned the name the Argentinians had given their reconstructed East Indiaman – Santa Maria del Sud. And it wasn’t Iris who told us, though she had known for some time that it had come through the Strait shortly after the Belgrano had been sunk. It was the old sea captain, in whose house Nils had billeted us, who told us. Iain had invited him over for a meal. The man lived on his own, except for a half-Indian woman who came in every morning. It was in the nature of a goodwill invitation, nothing more, none of us realising that he was the one man in Punta Arenas who had some idea of why an old wooden-walled East Indiaman, built like a frigate, should have been reconditioned and brought south by the Argentine Navy during the war.

Iris came aboard with him, wearing a long dress and in full warpaint. The Contraalmirante had invited her to dine at the C-in-C’s residence. He was a Rear-Admiral, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Third Naval Zone, he was the most important man in Punta Arenas. The Gobernador Marítimo would be there, also the officer in charge of the Navy Yard. How she had managed it, God knows, except perhaps that beautiful and exciting women dropping in out of the blue at the bottom of the world were not very plentiful. ‘It’s important we get the co-operation we need.’ She smiled and waved the formidable list of requirements I had helped her prepare.

The C-in-C was sending his car for her, and when it arrived, I saw her to the quay. By then it was blowing a full gale from the west, the wind slamming down off the mountains with katabatic blasts that hammered the luminous white of the water with such fury that it splayed out like shot, a reminder that the heights west of the port were almost six hundred metres high, the first ski-run only eight kilometres away by car. She looked like a Cossack in jackboot-black sea boots, the skirt of her long dress looped up and tucked into the strap of a gold lamé handbag, the top half of her padded out by a fur-hooded anorak. It was sleeting, the ice-cold droplets driving past the light on the quay in a white mist, the freighter’s stern glistening as though with salt spray. I was slit-eyed and shivering by the time she was driven off.

Our seafaring landlord was Finnish – Captain F. F. Kramsu. ‘Like the poet. Ve haf a poet, same name, but different view of life, very full of miseries. The F is for Frederik, so you call me Freddie.’ He was a little gnome of a man with intense blue eyes. ‘F for Freddie. I am from Lapland. They don’t speak my language here. It is English or nodding but their own sort of Spanish. So we speak English mostly and everybody call me Freddie – or something vorse in Spanish when they don’t think I understand.’ He grinned, baring rabbit teeth stained brown, his eyes crinkling with laughter as he reached for the drink Nils had just poured him. ‘Then I get big laff with them because I am by then very fluent in Chilean Spanish.’ He raised his glass, first to Nils, then to Iain, finally to me. ‘Skool!’ He knocked it back in one gulp.

‘It is pisco, I am afraid,’ Nils said apologetically. ‘Chilean brandy, not vodka. Vodka is difficult. So many foreign ships come through the Strait. The factory and freeze ships, they stay at sea, gobbling up krill and all the fish their boats bring them, and when they are full, they go straight back to Russia, Poland, wherever they come from, or if they haf trouble, they go to the Atlantic ports further north, in Argentine or Brazil. They are for them nearer to home.’

Captain Freddie’s position in Punta Arenas was an unusual one and largely a result of the Falklands war. Being Nordic, and regarded as a neutral, he had come to be looked on as port representative for foreign ships passing through the Magellan Strait, a sort of consul. It was not official, of course. Nobody had appointed him. It was just that, since he had sold his coaster and settled in Punta Arenas, he had kept a log of all ships passing through. He had brought his telescope ashore with him and mounted it in the little dormer window high up under the eaves of the steep-pitched east-facing gable of his house.

In that log book, which he showed me later, was the name, port and country of origin, of every ship that had passed through during the last eight and a half years, together with her age and condition, her destination, and of course the name of the captain and details of the cargo. As he pointed out to me, the port and other government officials, also the navy and military personnel, came and went, generally posted south for only a short period, whereas he was a permanent fixture. We learned later that he was paid an honorarium by the government in far-off Santiago, so that he was also in a sense their man in Punta Arenas, and it was, therefore, quite natural for him to cultivate us and be as helpful as possible.

He had a second book, started at the outset of the Falklands War, which though still in the form of a diary, was more of a journal. It not only covered ships passing to and fro through the Strait, but also included reports of Argentine air strikes, naval activity, including the sinking of the Belgrano, and even references to the British helicopter that had landed on the coast of the Magellan Strait almost opposite Punta Arenas, and had been destroyed by its pilot. He was full of all the gossip and rumours, most of it picked up from the ships he visited and seamen he talked to.

It was in this book that he was able to show me the first reference to the Santa Maria. The entry read:

On board the MV Thorhavn the first officer was from Helsinki. He told me they had put into Puerto Gallegos to land seven Swedish engineers with spares for Volvo and Saab equipment and had seen an old wooden square-rigger lying at the Navy Yard quay. She is the Santa Maria del Sud and had recently been brought down under tow from the Argentine naval base near Buenos Aires where she has been undergoing a complete refit. Captain of the Thorhavn, Olaf Peterson, tells me there were men aloft fitting aerials up the sides of two of the three masts and there was talk that the gun deck of this maritime relic, renovated just before the war as a museum ship, was now equipped with the very latest in electronics.

This is a translation, of course, the original being in Finnish. Then, shortly after the British Task Force arrived off the Falkland Islands, there was another reference to the Santa Maria del Sud:

There is talk of the British landing on the coast of Patagonia north of Puerto Gallegos. But it is just rumour. I do not think it probable they will land. It would not make sense. At sea they have mobility. This, and the carrier-borne Harrier aircraft, are their great advantage. The only vessels in today are an Argentine tug towing what I presume to be the Santa Maria del Sud. She is a wooden ship, not unlike the old clippers we used to run for the grain trade before World War I, but she is at least a century older. She has been excavated out of the mud that preserved her in La Plata, they say, and virtually rebuilt. Now they have aerial wires attached to the masts and this made me think they must intend to use her for some sort of electronic surveillance.

It was about a fortnight after I arrived in Punta Arenas that he showed me his journal and I was able to take a translation of those entries. But that first evening on Isvik we had it from him direct. Iain asked him what he thought the electronics were for. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t make any speculation. Not at that time. It is not wise because there are quite certainly agents of the Argentine Junta in Punta Arenas. I am well known here for the checkings I make of the movement of ships.’ He pulled a battered pipe from his pocket and began to fill it. ‘One time,’ he continued slowly, ‘I come back to my house to find it is rummaged, and they have taken out everything, all the drawers bottoms-up on the floor, also boards ripped up. I am telling the police, of course, but nothing happen, they don’t arrest nobody. But they know. I am very sure they know who do it.’

He lit his pipe, drawing on it slowly, a Puckish smile lifting the corners of his mouth. ‘Chile and Argentina …’ He gave an expressive little shrug. ‘You can see from the map how the frontiers between them here in the south are not made very good. So it is like a game of chess between them, eh? This country vile haf its own people in sensitive posts in the Argentine. They don’t want them arrested for doing what they are trained for, so they don’t arrest agents of Argentina. They live and let live. That is right, ja? You operate same vay, I guess. Anyway –’ He laughed and slapped the table – ‘they don’t get what they come for. I start a new book just before they land on Malvinas, when those demolition men start work on South Georgia, remember? It was the begin of the war. I think what I say in that book may be sensitive, so I keep it always on my body, and in Finnish. The other books, of course, they leave. They are of no interest. That is what make me certain who they are.’

‘They could have taken that book from you by force,’ Iain suggested.

Captain Freddie shook his head. ‘That is mugging, no? Ve don’t haf too much mugging in Punta Arenas.’ His smile was so elfin I was reminded of a troll and a performance of Peer Gynt I had seen at the Maddermarket in Norwich. ‘If they are mugging me, then it is too much obvious. The police do not hesitate then, and it is more important at that time for the Argentine to have their observers here in freedom.’

‘I understand.’ Iain nodded.

‘And even if they do take my book, they don’t find nothing.’ A crafty look had come over his face. ‘After I go on board I don’t write anything about my visit. Is too dangerous.’

Iain was leaning forward then. ‘Ye went on board?’

‘Kyllä, they invite me on board. That is when I begin to realise what the Santa Maria del Sud is about.’

Silence then, the sounds of the port coming to us softly through the night, partially overlaid by the persistent hum of machinery from the freighter moored ahead of us. Ward waited, but in the end it was only by persistent questioning that the details gradually emerged.

It must have been a very strange sight. Captain Freddie said he could hardly believe his eyes when he looked out of his bedroom window. It was like a ‘ghost ship’ – he used those words – the three masts standing black against the white of the low, snow-mantled line of the shore opposite and that enormously long bowsprit jutting out from the wooden hull of the ship ‘like a lance’. He hadn’t seen the tug at first because it was alongside on the far side.

The two vessels had laid there off the Navy Yard all that morning. Finally, in the early afternoon, he had been summoned on board the tug to try and resolve the ‘liddle difficulty’ that had arisen. The tow was on passage from Puerto Gallegos to the Argentine port of Ushuaia in the Beagle Channel. Just short of the entrance to the Estrecho de Magellanes they had encountered gale-force winds and off Cabo Virgenes the tow had begun to sheer violently and range up on the tug.

The tug-master had never, of course, towed a large sailing vessel before and had no experience of the windward effect of three tall masts in a gale. Periodically the ship had literally sailed up on to the tug, ramming her bows against the stern, and finally the towing hawser had ripped out the capstan to which it was fastened. All the tug could do then was to stand by the tow until the gale abated.

The towing hawser was finally reattached with rope strops round the bowsprit fastenings, and with this makeshift arrangement they had towed into Punta Arenas. What they were requesting was the co-operation of the Chilean Navy Yard in installing steel bits strong enough to ensure that the hawser did not again tear itself free. Also materials were required to effect temporary repairs to the starb’d bow where several timbers had been started by the ship riding up against the tug’s stern. And they needed the loan of extra pumps because she was making water. The difficulty was that there was a naval lieutenant in charge of the tow and he refused absolutely to let any officer of the Chilean Navy on to the Santa Maria del Sud to assess the damage.

That was when they had sent for Captain Freddie, and after what he described as a long, sometimes ‘vair ackermonious diskussion’, and after a good deal of long distance telephoning, fax instructions had finally come through that allowed the Chileans to accept his decision as to what was required. That was how he had come to go on board the Santa Maria del Sud.

‘It is a political decision, you see. On poliittinen pääatös, ymmärrättekö. Everything politics. There is a war, but they still want friendly relations.’ The fastenings for the steel bits would need to be on the gun deck, and it was on the gun deck they had some of the electronic equipment they did not want the Chilean officers to see. ‘They don’t want the purpose of the ship understood. I know nothing about electronics. Olen vain vanha lastilaivan kapteeni, siksi olen turvassa. Me know nothing, eh? Only old cargo boat captain.’ He smiled, his eyes twinkling as he told Iain how he had had a glimpse of the lower decks, which had all been cut away in the centre and some sort of plastic covering installed.

He had been on board the Santa Maria some two hours or more working out with the Argentine naval lieutenant and the tug’s engineers just what was required to get the tow safely down the short cut into the Beagle Channel and thence to Ushuaia. The pumps were sent out from the Navy Yard immediately. All the rest of the equipment, together with additional tools and a power generator, were sent out the following morning. Because they were effecting the repair work themselves it had taken longer to complete than if they had let the Yard do it, but even so the tow had been under way again shortly after noon on the third day.

That’s all he could tell us. What the precise purpose was of installing complex electronics in an old sailing vessel he did not know for sure, and Iain did not press him. However, he did ask him about the crew, particularly those on the Santa Maria. ‘Was there a man named Gómez among them?’

The old man shook his head. ‘Ei.’ There had been two Argentine naval officers, one on the tug and the other on the Santa Maria, and he had seen at least six crew, but he did not know the names of any of them. Iain dipped into his briefcase and pulled out a photograph. It was a picture full-face of Mario Ángel Gómez in Navy uniform. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked him.

His eyes flicked in my direction, but he didn’t answer. ‘D’ye recognise him?’ he asked Captain Freddie. ‘Was he one of the officers?’

The Captain stared at it briefly, then shook his head. ‘Ei. That man is not aboard the Santa Maria del Sud, nor the tug neither. Vy do you ask?’

Iain slid away from that, cross-examining him about the details of the electronic equipment. But all he could do was describe the look of the equipment on the gun deck. The rest was under wraps.

Iris returned, her eyes bright and her cheeks a-glow with the sudden transition from the cold outside to the warmth of the saloon. Everything was fixed, the Yard would do all they could to help. She had a private word with Iain in the after cabin, then put her anorak on over her dress and went off to bed, escorted by Captain Freddie. We had a final drink with Nils while he checked the list of his requirements for the prop-shaft alterations, then we went out into the night, walking quickly through the bitter blustering of the wind back to our billet.

That night I was woken by a thin, tinkling sound and sat up wondering where the hell I was. There was movement below me and I remembered that I was in the upper berth of a two-tier bunk and Iain had one of those wristwatches with a built-in alarm. I drifted off again only to open my eyes almost immediately to the sight of a head level with mine and arms reaching up. The wool of a sweater brushed my face. ‘What the hell’s up?’

‘Nothin’. Somethin’ Ah have to dae, that’s all.’

An almost full moon filtered through racing clouds to give a pale light and I watched as he pulled on his rubber seaboots and slipped out of the room. I rolled out of the upper berth and padded down the corridor to the bathroom. I needed a pee anyway. It was 03.17 and I was just in time to see him climb into a waiting car and drive off.

It was almost five before he returned. But when I asked him where he had been all he said was, ‘Go back to sleep.’ He undressed and got quickly into his berth.

‘You’ve been gone almost two hours.’

‘Ah had to make a telephone call. Now shut up. It’s cold outside and Ah want to sleep, even if ye don’t.’

I didn’t ask any more questions, just lay there listening to the wind. London. Via satellite. It had to be London. Europe anyway. Otherwise he wouldn’t need to make the call in the middle of the night. But what was it about, and why now? What was the urgency? Questions buzzed around inside my head and I think there was a glimmer of dawn before I finally dozed off.

I don’t know whether it was the overpowering sense of being imprisoned in a world of cloud and rock, the wild remoteness of it and the everlasting bludgeoning of the wind, but everything seemed to take longer than expected. And there were setbacks, of course. Coloni received a message to say his mother had been injured in some sort of political disturbance in Valparaíso, so instead of cooking for us, he decided to go home. Iris and Nils continued taking turns at the galley stove with the inevitable result that the dynamo that would run off the free-turning prop when we were sailing arrived by air from the States before the alterations to the drive shaft were complete. And then the ship had to be slipped, not once, but twice, first for the scraping, repainting and antifouling of the hull, then a second time for replacement of five defective keel bolts. Several items Iris had arranged to be flown in proved to have been wrongly listed and had to be sent back. About the middle of the month Nils discovered metal fatigue in two of the seacocks, the worst being the inflow to the heads, which meant that for all of a week, till we could slip yet again and fit replacements, we were using a good old-fashioned shit bucket. And all the time, work going on internally while I wrestled with rigging and sails, mostly on the open deck.

The one good thing was the Australian pair finally making up their minds to come, the wife’s partners having agreed to her taking up to a year’s sabbatical. Will join ship end-November – Andy and Go-Go Galvin, they cabled. And I had a piece of luck, too. The ship’s library, in addition to all the necessary navigational books, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, accounts of Antarctic expeditions and a dozen or so lurid paperbacks, contained one or two self-help books, among them one on the rigging and canvassing of sailing vessels. It had been written for an age when wind was still the motive power for most of the world’s shipping, so that, though technically out of date, it was invaluable for some of the work I was doing, particularly wire splicing, and if we were rolled over and had to jury-rig the ship it would be a life saver.

Re-rigging the ship for an Antarctic voyage inside of a week, after she had been lying idle for over a year, was quite impossible. A month at least was my estimate after I had sorted everything out. We were all working flat out and the only break we had was on the second Sunday when Isvik was on the slip and the Yard closed. For once the forecast was good. We took the semi-rigid rubber boat and went south towards Dawson Island, finally beaching it in a little cove of black sand and gravel on the shore of the Brunswick Peninsula just before the dog-leg that took the Strait north-west through miles of narrow channels to the Pacific. Moraine boulders were piled in rounded heaps and we walked inland through tufted heaps of tussac grass, climbing well up the scree-covered slopes to picnic in a spot where we had a magnificent view of the Strait and the channels and islands further west. The sun was shining, the water a deep indigo-blue and the air so crystal clear that it seemed as though I could stretch out my hand and touch the gleaming white of Sarmiento far to the south-east in Tierra del Fuego.

We had agreed not to talk about fitting-out problems and we lay in the sun drinking from the bottle Iain had humped up in his backpack. With the fish and cheese sandwiches Iris had brought the world seemed a different place, gentle and relaxed. And then she suddenly said, ‘Carlos is arriving on Friday.’

Iain had been telling us how ten to fifteen thousand years ago early man had crossed from Mongolia to Alaska by way of the Aleutian chain of volcanic islands and then, over a period of some five millennia, had worked his way down through North and South America until finally he had reached Tierra del Fuego, living out the winters virtually naked except for the natural hair of his body. He talked about Fitzroy, the naval officer who had carried out the first detailed survey of the waters we were looking down on, and of Darwin, who had joined Fitzroy in the Beagle for a second voyage in which the survey had been completed, followed by the long voyage home via the Galapagos and other islands, including New Zealand. ‘Five years it took them, the first tae of them spent in these waters, so Ah would guess Darwin’s first tentative thoughts about the origins of species started here.’

The range of Iain’s reading was a constant surprise to me, and he had that rare ability to remember what he had read so that he could pass it on. And then Iris, by that non sequitur announcement of Carlos’s imminent arrival, showed that, far from listening to him, her thoughts had been on the voyage and what lay ahead.

‘Why?’ She must have given Iain some idea of the boy’s background, for he didn’t ask her who he was, just that explosive question – ‘Why?’

‘Why? I don’t know why.’ She was lying stretched out, her head against a pillow of lichen-covered stone, her eyes staring straight up at the incredible blue of the sky. ‘All I have is this message.’ She fished a crumpled sheet of paper from the pocket of her anorak and handed it to him.

Arriving Punta Arenas 1700 27 Nov – Carlos Borgalini. He read it aloud, then handed the paper back to her, and I thought what a pity it was to have to worry about that wretched boy on the one really good day we had had since our arrival. There was nothing much she could tell us about him anyway, only what we knew already. ‘Ye’re sure he’s Gómez’s cousin?’ Iain had just bitten into a cheese sandwich and his mouth was full, so I don’t think she heard him properly. He swallowed and repeated the question, adding, ‘Ye’re quite sure?’

‘You have only to look at him to see he is some sort of a relation,’ she said sharply.

‘Borgalini. Who is Borgalini?’

‘I don’t know.’ She said it too quickly and he glanced at her.

‘Ah think ye dae. He is closely connected with that woman of yer father’s, Rosalli Gabrielli. Accordin’ to Rodriguez, that is, so why dae ye say he is a cousin?’

She didn’t answer that.

‘Is he a cousin? Or is he really somethin’ closer?’

She shook her head. ‘He is Ángel’s cousin, not mine. That is all I know.’

‘And Ángel is not your brother?’

She was silent, frowning.

‘That’s what ye told Pete. When he was with ye at the hacienda.’

‘Did I? I don’t remember.’

He was silent for a while, juggling with two small stones that were white like sugar cubes. At length he murmured, ‘Somethin’ wrong somewhere.’

‘Wrong? What is wrong? I don’t understand.’

‘My information …’ He stopped there, the click of the quartz-like cubes the only sound. ‘Pass me the bottle.’ He held out his hand and she gave it to him, watching him as he put it to his lips, her eyes fixed in an almost mesmerised stare.

‘What is this information? What is it you are thinking?’

He had turned so that he faced her, his body propped on that deformed arm of his, the sleeve of his anorak empty, the metal forearm and hand stuffed incongruously into his pack. ‘Let’s get this straight, Iris.’ He had reached over and was gripping her shoulder with his left hand, holding her so that her face was close to his. ‘Yer father was born Juan Roberto Gómez. Following the annulment of his marriage to Rosalli Gabrielli he went to Ireland and married yer mother, Sheila Connor. After that he hyphened the tae surnames and called himself Juan Roberto Connor-Gómez. That right?’

She nodded, her eyes locked with his.

‘Now, ye were born tae years after they were married. All very respectable. But our friend Ángel, when was he born? Dae ye know?’

She didn’t answer.

‘For God’s sake!’ His voice was suddenly high and sharp. ‘What sort of a person are ye? Ye go up there to Cajamarca, behave like a whore, try and trade yer body fur information about the position of the Santa Maria del Sud, and now ye pretend ye don’t know who the man is.’ And he added, in a voice that would have done credit to an elder of the Wee Frees, ‘If he is yer brother, then ye’ve been committin’ incest. That’s a carnal offence in the eyes o’ the Church.’ He paused. Then in a softer voice, ‘An’ if he’s no’ yer brother, then who the hell is he?’

The question hung there in the cool air of the mountainside, the whole world seemingly silent and listening. A bird slid past, wings soughing as it planed down towards the water below, darkening now with the beginnings of a breeze.

‘Well?’

And then she went for him, her voice trembling, her eyes staring with sudden hate, all the Latin in her coming out as she ripped his hand from her shoulder. ‘You big, filthy-minded shit. You spik to me like that again and you can go back to wherever is the name of that Glasgow slum where your drunken father spawned you.’ She was almost screaming at him. ‘All I wanted was to prove my husband right. I know Ángel has seen that ship. I know he has. I did get that much out of him. But he don’t say where. He don’t give me the position. So now I have to put up with him on the boat. And you throw it all in my face, calling me a whore, which I am not, and you know I am not. All I want is to show the world that Charles was not hallucinating.’ And she added, quieter now, ‘All right. Charles was scared. I know that. He was afraid of the ice. But there is nothing wrong in being scared. And there is nothing wrong with his brain. He don’t hallucinate. That’s what I want to prove.’

‘And yer brother?’ Iain’s voice, too, was suddenly very quiet, very controlled.

‘Ángel, do you mean?’

‘No, of course Ah don’t mean Ángel. Yer other brother, yer real brother, Eduardo. Don’t ye want to know what happened to him?’

Her eyes widened, as though the reference to Eduardo was something physical like a blow, the fury quite gone out of her as she said, ‘Why do you say that? Do you know something?’ She leaned forward, gripping hold of him. ‘What is it? What do you know?’ And when he shook his head, she asked him in a voice fallen to a whisper, ‘Who are you? Please, please tell me – who are you – what are you? I must know.’

And when he still didn’t reply, she said, ‘If you know something, for God’s sake tell me.’ The entreaty in her voice, the limpid, almost tearful look in her eyes … I suddenly had the feeling Eduardo meant more to her than anyone else in her life, even her husband. ‘Do you know what happened to him? Do you?’

‘No.’ He said it abruptly. And then, almost in the same breath, his voice gone hard, ‘What was the date of Mario Ángel’s birth?’ He was leaning towards her again, very tense. ‘Ah have the date yer father married Sheila Connor. What Ah don’t know for certain is what happened immediately before that. Was Mario Ángel already born then, or did Rosalli give birth to him afterwards?’

‘Why? What does it matter?’

‘Don’t be a fool. Ye know it matters. He claims to be yer father’s son. Now, dae ye know the date of Ángel’s birth or don’t ye?’

She was staring at him, her eyes wide, breathing quickly. ‘I know when his birthday is. October 17.’

‘And the year?’

‘I don’t think I can answer that – not for certain. You see, I never saw him till he came to stay with us in the school holidays.’

‘You mean he was a schoolboy then?’

She nodded.

‘And that was the first time ye’d ever set eyes on him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of impression did he make on ye?’

Her eyes had a sudden dreamy look. ‘He was different, totally different – different to any boy I had ever met before – quite … quite uninhibited.’

‘How old did ye think he was then?’

‘Oh, about ten, I think.’

‘Did ye ever meet a man called Borgalini? Roberto Borgalini.’

‘No. I never meet him. Why?’

‘He was Rosalli Gabrielli’s manager. He was also a member of the Mafia, and he was up to his eyeballs in drugs. Altogether a very nasty piece of work.’ He hesitated, then got to his feet. ‘He just could be Ángel’s father,’ he added, gathering up his things and starting back down the slope, scree-walking very fast over the first long patch of loose grey stones, swinging his pack, and the empty sleeve flapping against his hip.