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  It was the same in Madrid. I don’t know where they went, but I was on my own in a hotel near the airport. ‘See ye tomorrow on the plane. Fourteen-thirty take-off. Iberia.’ And with a nod and smile the two of them disappeared into the crowd, heading for the exit. I had a feeling he didn’t want to be alone with me, even for a moment, or was it that they wanted to be on their own, a last night together before he took off for the Antarctic?

  Sitting in the hotel bar, drinking Fundador on my own, I felt as though I were in limbo, waiting for something to happen, a sense of unreality taking hold. I looked at the ticket I had been given – Madrid, Mexico, Lima, Santiago, Punta Arenas. And after that …?

  I had some more brandy, and that seemed to do the trick – I had a good night’s sleep. And in the morning, when I got to the airport, they were already there. ‘Look, I’ve got to talk to you, before we depart.’ It was my last chance. I couldn’t afford the fare back from Mexico City, and certainly not from Punta Arenas. ‘Some questions –’

  ‘Later. Ah told ye. After we take off.’

  ‘No, now.’

  But he shook his head, and when I insisted he leaned suddenly forward, his face gone hard. ‘Ah said later. We’ll talk later, when we’re airborne.’

  He was so close I could smell the stale sweat of his body. He had clearly had an energetic night and as he turned back to his girlfriend, I seized hold of his arm, my mind suddenly made up. ‘I’m not boarding that plane unless you tell me where the money comes from, why you’re in such a hurry.’

  I’d got hold of the wrong arm and the hidden claw fastened on my fingers as he swung round on me. ‘Yer baggage is already on the plane.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  The obstinacy in my voice got through to him at last. ‘Very well. Ah’m in a hurry because Ah’m concerned for Iris Sunderby’s safety.’

  I stared at him. ‘What the hell are you talking about? She’s dead.’

  ‘On the contrary, she rang me from Heathrow just before boardin’ her plane.’

  ‘What plane? When?’

  ‘Last Thursday evenin’.’

  Thursday evening, and her body pulled out of the dock on the Wednesday morning! ‘You say she was boarding a plane?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where was she going?’

  ‘Lima.’

  Iris Sunderby. Alive! I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, glancing up at the departure board, where green lights were flashing against our flight. ‘Time we were boardin’ Ah’ll explain later.’ He turned back to Kirsty Fraser, gave her some hurried instructions about somebody called Ferdinando Berandi, then bent and kissed her. ‘Take care.’ And she went clack-clack-clacking away on her too-high heels.

  ‘When she’s finished here,’ he said, ‘she goes on to Napoli.’

  ‘Why?’ He was standing watching her, but she didn’t look back. ‘What’s Naples got to do with it?’

  He turned abruptly, peering down at me as though unsure how to answer that. ‘The Camorra,’ he said finally. ‘Ah need to know somethin’ and she has contacts there. Kirsty knows Napoli well.’

  ‘But the Camorra is the Neapolitan version of the Mafia, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye.’ He was staring at me, not wanting to be questioned further.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘You told me she’s your secretary, so presumably she’s going to Naples on your behalf.’

  ‘Ah tell ye, Ah need the answers to one or tae questions.’

  ‘And she can get them for you? How?’

  His lips twitched, a glint of sudden humour in his eyes. ‘Ye don’t check up on a girl like Kirsty too closely.’

  ‘But why the Camorra?’ I insisted.

  ‘Because a lot of them come from Napoli.’ And he added by way of explanation, ‘Just remember this when we get to Argentina: the country was swamped at the turn of the century by a mass influx of immigrants, some three million of them Italian, mostly from the south. Full of piss and wind.’ His voice was suddenly contemptuous. ‘They call it braggadocio. It was braggadocio that sent Mussolini trampin’ into Africa. It sent the Argentinians into the Malvinas. Galtieri was full of it.’

  Another boarding announcement, a last call and he turned abruptly on his heel. ‘Come on. Better board the bloody thing and get on with it.’ There was a note of resentment in his voice as though he was embarked on something he didn’t relish. He picked up his overnight bag, and with a nod to me, walked towards the boarding gate. I followed him. His mind was now so obviously locked in on itself that there was no point in trying to question him further.

  I don’t know how much was curiosity, how much the sense of excitement I was inevitably feeling at being caught up in something bigger than myself, but whatever it was I found my mind was now made up. I would see it through. And once having taken that decision, I felt strangely relaxed. With the whole flight in front of me there was plenty of time to get the answers to all my questions.

  We were travelling first, something I had never done before, so that I was quite content, lying back after the meal, listening to taped music on the headphones and enjoying a brandy. I felt strangely disembodied, not sure that it was really me flying south-west in brilliant sunshine above a white sea of cloud. Another world, a world without worries, a world that had never heard of insects boring into wood, or fungi and damp rot.

  ‘Ye awake?’ The gloved steel hand pinched my arm. ‘Ah said, are ye awake?’ He was leaning towards me. ‘Take those earphones off fur a moment.’

  I did so and he smiled. It was a switched-on sort of smile that left me wondering what he was thinking. It didn’t extend to the eyes. ‘Ye’ve got some questions,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, I’ve got one for you.’ There was barely a trace of any accent now. ‘What decided you to come before I’d given you the answers to the questions you were worried about?’

  What had decided me? I shrugged and shook my head. ‘Iris Sunderby, I suppose.’

  He nodded, smiling again. ‘Aye. She’s a very attractive young woman.’

  ‘Is?’

  ‘Either is, or else the person phoning me Thursday evening was a very good mimic.’

  I thought of the body I had been shown in the hospital morgue. If it wasn’t hers, whose was it? But he wasn’t making it up, no point, and his face, close to mine, deadly serious. ‘Are you really Scots?’ I asked him. ‘Or do you just put it on as an act?’

  ‘Och, no. Tha’s me natural accent.’ And he added, ‘Ye want me life story?’ The smile was more like a grin now as he leaned back, half closing his eyes. ‘All right then. Ah was born into the Glasgae Mafia.’ He said it as though it was something to be proud of. ‘A Gorbals laddie whose drunken sot o’ a mother was pitched out into a grand new high-rise tower when Ah was two years old. She was a whore. Ah never knew my farther. By the age o’ seven Ah’d been arrested twice, a real little toughie, livin’ on the streets most o’ the time, scratchin’ a livin’ round the docks an’ watchin’ the unions kill them off. In the end, Ah stowed away in the loo o’ a sleeper to London, finished up just north o’ the Mile End Road workin’ fur a man who ran a bric-à-brac barrow.’

  He was silent for a moment, his eyes tight closed so that I thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. But then he leaned towards me again. ‘Clark was ’is name. Nobby, of course. Nobby Clark. Well known in the trade, ’e was – stolen stuff, see.’ Brought up as I had been in the East of England, I could recognise genuine Cockney when I heard it, and he had slipped into it so easily. ‘Some of it was straight, nat’rally. ’E mixed it up, Nobby did, and nobody ever nicked ’im. Portobello Road, four ack emma of a Saturday, that was ’is best pitch. The boys used to bring the stuff in as soon as ’is stall was set up an’ by six o’clock all the ’ot stuff was gone, ’is pitch as clear as a whistle by the time the first copper come nosin’ ara’nd. Cor, stone the crows!’ He was almost laughing now, his eyes wide open and alight with the fun of t
he life he’d led. ‘The things I learned in the three years I was wiv ’im you wouldn’t believe.’

  He sighed. ‘An’ then, when I was risin’ ten, an’ just beginning to get the ’ang of things, the silly old sod goes an’ dies on me. Gawd Christ! I loved that man, I really did. ’E was like a favver to me in the end. The only one I ever ’ad.’ His grey eyes, staring past me out of the window, were moist with emotion. ‘Yer know somep’n, Pete. I paid for ’is funeral. ’E hadn’t made any provision, like, so I paid for ’im to be buried a’t o’ what I’d saved. I thought I owed ’im that. Then blow me, if a lawyer man doesn’t grab ’old o’ me just as I was settin’ up on me own. D’yer know what Nobby gone an’ done – set up a bleedin’ trust for me eddication. Christ! I could’a killed the old bastard. ’Cept ’e was in his grave already.’

  He suddenly burst out laughing. ‘A reg’lar card, Nobby was. And so instead of gettin’ meself clapped in irons an’ sent to some bloody Borstal to learn new ways o’ maintainin’ the standard o’ livin’ to which I was becomin’ accustomed, I found myself at a middle-class prep school learning to speak posh the way the poor cuff-frayed masters thought the Queen’s English should be spoke. You ever been to a prep school?’

  I shook my head. ‘I was state-educated.’

  ‘Well then, you wouldn’t know what the little buggers get up to after lights out. They were on to the hard stuff, some of them, when I got there. Got themselves caught, of course, in the end, and the headmaster flogged the lot of them. This was the early seventies. The tabloids got on to it and tore the place apart. The Guardian even had a leader on it – hands off our poor little misguided darlings, not their fault. Blame the parents, the state, the social workers, private enterprise, down with the system. Needless to say, the school went bust. And I went to Eton.’

  He stopped there and I was left wondering whether he had made the whole thing up. No trace of an accent now, and speaking copybook English. ‘Why Eton?’ I asked him.

  ‘It was in Nobby’s will. The trustees were to get me into Eton. Nobby didn’t say how, and to this day I don’t know what strings they pulled, but to Eton I went. Why?’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘Lesson number one, I suppose – never get caught. The trustees, they even congratulated me on keeping my nose clean – very upright behaviour, my boy, model of rectitude. Well, what did they expect? I wasn’t throwing my chances away by peddling drugs in a prep school, and I certainly wasn’t getting myself addicted. Seen enough of that. Anyway, I got a nice little racket going in stolen car radios. Flogged them to unsuspecting parents on match days, speech days, and through other boys at half term and end of term.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. ‘You really were educated at Eton?’

  ‘That’s right. Old Nobby had written me a note, which the trustees solemnly presented to me in their Gray’s Inn offices. I read it there and then, but I didn’t tell them what was in it, though they wanted to know, of course. I think the best line – and the one that concerns you perhaps – was, “I don’t want you to finish up a small-time crook like me. At Eton, you’ll learn to do things right. They don’t get caught. Remember that. At least not often.”’ There was a smug look on his face. ‘Good advice, that was. And I haven’t been – not yet anyway.’

  ‘So you never made a million on the pools.’

  ‘Never done the pools. Waste of time when your life’s as full as mine. After Eton, instead of going to a university, I decided to see a bit of the world. The trustees were far too straight-laced to switch money earmarked for university education to supporting my wanderlust, but if you’ve been trained at the back side of an East End antique barrow it’s surprising how much you can make dealing here and there, especially across frontiers, and at that time Europe had plenty of them despite the Common Market.’

  ‘Is that how you made it?’ I asked.

  ‘What? Oh, the million.’ He shook his head, leaning close again, the claw gripping my arm. ‘Know something? If I knew I was worth a million it’d mean I was too busy counting it to lash out on an expedition into the Weddell Sea. I don’t know what I’m worth. I’ve got four mammoth great sleeper trucks running stuff through Turkey into the Middle East and the Gulf. I’m a trader, see. My money’s all tied up.’

  ‘But that cheque …’

  ‘What cheque?’ And when I reminded him of the press cuttings he had shown us on the Cutty Sark, he just laughed and said, ‘Any promotion outfit with a graphics department can run up a little thing like that and get it photographed. I had to have something visual, see, something I could show them that they’d believe in and at the same time that wouldn’t upset them on moral grounds. If I’d said’ I was running arms, wheeling and dealing with Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, all that gang, and using odd intermediaries, they wouldn’t have had anything to do with me. But a pools win …’ He winked at me, and suddenly I had a vision of him as a bookie in a loud check suit on Newmarket Heath, even a ticktack man. He had that sort of a face – battered and slightly coarse. But you didn’t really notice that because the essence of the man was his vitality. Coarse-featured he might be, that big beak of a nose, but because the energy that drove him constantly showed through, it was his personality, not his features, that stamped themselves on the memory, so that after a while I wasn’t even conscious of the bulge in the half-empty sleeve. And when he smiled, as he was smiling now, the battered features had a warmth and vitality that gave them quite extraordinary charm. ‘Bit of a mixture, aren’t I?’

  He was certainly that – if all he had said was true. ‘Was your mother really a prostitute?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And you never knew your father?’

  ‘No.’

  I thought he must be making at least some of it up, and in the close proximity of an aircraft it didn’t seem to matter that I’d asked him two such personal questions. ‘So why have you told me this?’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Ah don’t know where we’ll land up, how long we’ll be together or what will happen. But this isn’t a fun ride, and one thin’ is certain, if we take this boat she’s persuaded me to buy down into the Antarctic, you and me and the Sunderby girl, a Norwegian engineer Ah’ve never met and a guy she thinks has seen the ship and is a competent navigator, all five of us are goin’ to be livin’ cheek-by-jowl in the close confines of a very small vessel. Ah know all about ye. Ah made a few enquiries, and anyway yer character is written all over yer face. Ah needn’t have bothered. Ye’re reliable and Ah know Ah can get on with ye okay. The question is, whether ye can get on with me and Ah thought maybe this was as good an opportunity as any to give ye a glimpse of my background. Just so as when the chips are down and thin’s get tricky ye’ll have some idea why Ah’ll behave the way Ah probably will.’ He suddenly grinned at me. ‘Ah’m no’ an easy man, ye ken. So if ye’ve any more questions, now’s the time.’

  ‘Well, of course – the obvious one.’

  ‘Sunderby?’ He nodded. ‘Ye don’t believe she phoned me, is that it?’

  ‘No, not quite. But are you sure you’ve got the right day? Thursday, you said. In the evening.’

  ‘That’s right. She was flyin’ to Paris, de Gaulle airport, then to Mexico City and on to Lima.’

  ‘Are you saying the body they pulled out of South Dock that Wednesday morning wasn’t hers?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been, could it?’

  ‘But her handbag …’

  ‘She must have thrown it into the water. It was the only positive evidence of identity the police had produced.’

  ‘Did she say she’d done it?’

  ‘Thrown the handbag in? No, she didn’t say so. She didn’t need to, and anyway she was talkin’ about something else. About that student fellow, Carlos. She was very hepped up, excited. D’ye think she takes drugs?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’ She had seemed much too sensible.

  ‘Nor would Ah. But the excitement in her voice –’ He hesitated, his eyes staring past me at the clo
udscape billowing up to the west of us, a great rampart of convoluted cu-nim towering in fantastic shapes and back-lit by brilliant sunlight. ‘Was he good-looking? You saw him, you said.’

  I shrugged. ‘He was slim, with a somewhat serious face. Yes, he was good-looking all right in a rather Spanish way.’

  ‘Italian, you mean. The boy’s Italian.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘His mother was Rosalli Gabrielli, a Neapolitan lady of very doubtful virtue whose one period of respectability was when she was married to Iris’s father, Juan Connor-Gómez, the playboy son of a chain store millionaire. Carlos’s father was a Sicilian named Luciano Borgalini. Luciano’s brother Roberto used to pimp fur Gabrielli.’

  So that was why he was sending Kirsty Fraser to Naples. But when I asked him what more he needed to know about Carlos, he shook his head. ‘There’s nothin’ further Ah need to know about him. It’s his uncle, Mario Ángel Connor-Gómez, Ah’m interested in. He’s the issue of that brief marriage between Iris’s father and Rosalli. Ah’m beginnin’ to build up quite a dossier on him, but Ah need to know a whole lot more about his background. He was one of the Montoneros. Ángel de Muerte, they called him, and that’s a nasty reputation to have. Maybe that nephew of his is no better. Maybe it’s in the family. And if they’re both killers …’ He paused there, looking suddenly thoughtful. ‘Some women like playin’ with fire. So if she’s a bit of a nympho – and don’t forget this, they’re related in an odd sort of way – if that vitality of hers runs to sex …’ A lift of the eyebrow and he left it at that.

  What he was suggesting was that Carlos had a fatal attraction for her and that she had got a kick out of the thought that the police might arrest him on suspicion of having dumped her body in the water. ‘You think he was planning to kill her?’