A single light illuminated the elegant timber panelling and brass fittings on a smaller boat – the carpet from which older bloodstains had so recently been cleaned – and bounced off the crystal glass of Islay whisky that was a little unsteady in my hand. I could hear the soft whisper of the shower, the faint sound of Sian singing. A slightly twisted smile lightened my face.
I remembered a similar situation a short while after my brother, Tim, had been shot dead in this same saloon. Sian had emerged from the shower, and we had sipped gin and tonics while debating – perhaps agonizing – over whether a return to the UK was a good idea. Well, that decision had been made some time ago, but in the space of twenty-four hours the world seemed to have slipped on its axis. Suddenly we were off balance, struggling to keep a hold on reality when the solid ground beneath our feet was beset by tremors.
Or perhaps, I thought wryly, it was just me feeling that giddy sensation of everything being out of kilter. Sian, if her recent actions were anything to go by, was serenely unaffected.
I had met her in Norway; Sian taking a break from military duty – instructing an intelligence cell on deep water exercises in high-speed inflatables – me on holiday and stepping gingerly onto skis for the first time since my own stint in uniform. Over many pleasant evenings seated before a roaring fire in the ski lodge I learned that this young woman who looked as warm and soft as honey and melted butter had seen her Scottish seafaring father lost overboard in an Arctic gale when she’d been ten years old and illegally aboard his ship, had returned to nurse her dying mother in the Cardiff slums and, years later, with a university degree under her Shotokan karate black belt, had moved north to become something of a legend among the high peaks of the Cairngorms. From there the army had seemed the most natural next step on her climb to the top.
Some time before the holiday that had brought us together I had bought Bryn Ayr – the hill of gold – a stone farmhouse set against the foothills of Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach in North Wales. Across the yard from the main house, set beyond a massive oak tree, there was a workshop where I set out to design and manufacture what had since been acclaimed by purchasers as the world’s finest toy soldiers. It was there that I took Sian Laidlaw at the end of the skiing holiday (the house, not the workshop), and over the years since then my blonde Soldier Blue had shared my home and frequently my bed. But on more than one occasion I had caught myself reflecting that nothing’s settled until it’s settled. The move to Gibraltar – mutually agreed – had proved to be yet another thorn, another fly in the ointment, another twist in a relationship in which the plot was always thickening.
We had moved to the iconic Rock towering above the narrow strip of water separating Europe from Africa to take over a security business from a Gibraltarian friend who wanted to spend the rest of his days fishing from a lazily rocking boat, cans of beer clinking in a net submerged in the cool blue sea. But we had almost come to grief when I was dragged into a murder inquiry where I would have been the chief witness for the prosecution. Before that could happen, we took on the villainous Skaill family. We had both been injured, my brother murdered in cold blood.
And now? Well, now there was another puzzle to unravel. But unlike our usual investigations involving a crime and a perpetrator, this one seemed to have several of each, and each one seen through a glass darkly.
Which, I thought ruefully, might be a warped misuse of a biblical quotation, but it seemed the only one I knew that ideally fitted the circumstances.
Deep in thought, I lifted my glass and almost chipped a front tooth when a damp and perfumed Sian Laidlaw came padding in from the shower.
‘How’s the foot?’
‘I have two.’
‘You balanced ballerina fashion on one, kicked hard with the other. You kicked again, and that one connected with bone and could have caused damage.’
‘Oh, it did.’
‘I mean to your foot.’
‘Ebenholz has lightning fast reactions. I doubt if anyone noticed, but as fast as I attacked, he’d already begun riding the blow.’
‘Yet even so you knocked him cold.’
Sian grinned. ‘If he’d stayed stock still, he’d be crawling around that gin palace looking for his head.’
‘You must think …’ I hesitated. ‘Well, I really don’t know what you must think of me.’
‘I think your reactions are somewhat slower than Ebenholz’s. And I took you by surprise. By the time you realized what was happening, mulled over the situation and decided to come heroically to my aid, it was all over.’
‘Mm, slow but steady. Yet I seem to remember that a long time ago when we came up against Dakin, the taxidermist turned killer, I saved your life with a similar skilful martial arts manoeuvre.’
‘That was then, this is now.’ Sian smiled sweetly. ‘You’re a lot older.’
‘Than you, or than then?’
I sighed. ‘Damn it, but you were impressive. That raw-boned Digger said it all didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did. But I have the uneasy feeling that if ever I were to come up against him, he’d be a damn sight more dangerous than his bruiser of a colleague.’
‘Why uneasy? It’s not likely to happen.’
‘You don’t believe Rickman?’
‘I don’t understand Rickman. We spoke to Prudence Wise at, what was it, eight o’clock or thereabouts? It’s now a little after midnight. In that time, a man we don’t know has used threats to force us to find another man we don’t know. From him we’re supposed to recover stolen jewels, and hand them over to – guess what – yes, another man we don’t know.’
‘I think the idea under all that talk is that we should give them to Rickman.’
‘Yes, well, we know where they’ll end up after that – or do we?’
‘If we don’t, it’s about time we sat down and worked this out.’
So saying, Sian flopped down on one of the soft seats and cast a meaningful glance towards the cocktail cabinet. I rolled my eyes, got up, refreshed my own drink and mixed a gin and tonic for her. There was a board, with ice barrel, knife, and half a lime. I rattled ice, cut a slice of fruit, perched it on the rim of the glass. When I held it out to her she grasped my wrist, touched the tips of my fingers with her lips, pressed my knuckles against her still-moist cheek.
‘What’s that for?’ I said softly.
‘For understanding. For not being the ultimate macho male. For not angrily berating me.’
‘Ah. You mean when you emasculated me, metaphorically speaking, by taking on that muscular thug?’
‘Something like that.’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s teamwork. You’re the brawn, I’m the brains.’
She pouted, took the drink then slapped my hand away.
‘Then do some, big boy. Thinking, I mean.’
‘Mm. All joking aside, you were right. We really must sit down and work this out.’
I plopped down opposite her, shook my head.
‘For a start, I meant it when I said I don’t understand Rickman. And the bit I don’t understand most is why we’ve been dragged into this. Looked at logically, we’re surplus to requirements. If he wants to find Wise, he’s got two armed men working for him who are well capable. I’m sure they got within a whisker of catching Wise when they riddled his Sunseeker with bullets.’
‘You think it was Clontarf and Ebenholz with a Kalashnikov?’
‘Of course.’
Frowning, Sian sipped her drink. Sucked the slice of lime. Dropped it into the glass and swished it around.
‘If we don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, ‘it’s because we don’t have enough information. We’re in the dark. So what we do is go along with Rickman’s weird ideas – or act in a way that makes it look as if we’re doing that – and then … well, we see what transpires.’
I smiled. ‘I can’t see much transpiring when I haven’t got a clue where to start. Wise’s boat was found rocking in a heavy swell out in the Straits of Gibraltar. Bad place from which to start following a trail.’
‘That’s not like you.’
‘I’ve got no starting point, nothing to go on.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Charlie and Adele jumped ship, went Christ knows where. Same for Prudence. She checked out of the Eliott, and disappeared.’
‘Yes, but although Prudence drove her little Micra off into the sunset, she left something behind. Her laptop. There must be some personal information on that hard drive.’
I closed my eyes, disgusted with myself.
‘You’re right, I’m being stupid. And, actually, so are you. We don’t need her laptop. When Pru said she was staying here for a while, she mentioned a website. Her website will have contact information.’
‘Yes, you big pudding, but you can’t look at a website without a computer. You have to go to Romero, get the laptop.’
‘Mm, I don’t know. We have to assume every move we make will be watched. If we’re really doing Rickman’s bidding – and that’s the impression we want to create – we should stay well away from the police.’
‘In that case, I know where there’s an internet café. You can pay to go online for as little as fifteen minutes.’
‘Hang on a minute. A thought has occurred. While we’ve been soaking up the sun, Calum’s been installing a modern computer system in the office at Bryn Aur.’
Sian groaned. ‘Now he tells me.’
I looked at his watch.
‘Which way does this hour’s difference work?’
‘It’s earlier in the UK.’
‘Then Mr Wick will have finished his day’s work casting toy soldiers, and is probably sitting in my living room drinking my fine liquor. Now’s the perfect time to get him up off his backside.’
Digging my mobile out of my pocket, I keyed in the number and winked at Sian as I listened to the landline telephone ringing in distant Bryn Aur.