The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter. Desmond Bagley
into the dinghy, and Metcalfe said quietly, ‘You’re not cut out for my kind of life, Hal. Don’t try it if you’re thinking of it. It’s tough and there’s too much competition.’
As I rowed back to Sanford I wondered if that was a veiled warning that he was on to our scheme. Metcalfe was an honest man by his rather dim lights and wouldn’t willingly cut down a friend. But he would if the friend didn’t get out of his way.
At three that afternoon we cleared Tangier harbour and I set course for Gibraltar. We were on our way, but we had left too many mistakes behind us.
When we were beating through the Straits Coertze suggested that we should head straight for Italy. I said, ‘Look, we’ve told Metcalfe we were going to Spain, so that’s where we are going.’
He thumped the cockpit coaming. ‘But we haven’t time.’
‘We’ve got to make time,’ I said doggedly. ‘I told you there would be snags which would use up our month’s grace; this is one of the snags. We’re going to take a month getting to Italy instead of a fortnight, which cuts us down to two weeks in hand – but we’ve got to do it. Maybe we can make it up in Italy.’
He grumbled at that, saying I was unreasonably frightened of Metcalfe. I said, ‘You’ve waited fifteen years for this opportunity – you can afford to wait another fortnight. We’re going to Gibraltar, to Malaga and Barcelona; we’re going to the Riviera, to Nice and to Monte Carlo; after that, Italy. We’re going to watch bullfights and gamble in casinos and do everything that every other tourist does. We’re going to be the most innocent people that Metcalfe ever laid eyes on.’
‘But Metcalfe’s back in Tangier.’
I smiled thinly. ‘He’s probably in Spain right now. He could have passed us any time in that Fairmile of his. He could even have flown or taken the ferry to Gibraltar, dammit. I think he’ll keep an eye on us if he reckons we’re up to something.’
‘Damn Walker,’ burst out Coertze.
‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But that’s water under the bridge.’
I was adding up the mistakes we had made. Number one was Walker’s incautious statement to Aristide that he had drawn money on a letter of credit. That was a lie – a needless one, too – I had the letter of credit and Walker could have said so. Keeping control of the finances of the expedition was the only way I had of making sure that Coertze didn’t get the jump on me. I still didn’t know the location of the gold.
Now, Aristide would naturally make inquiries among his fellow bankers about the financial status of this rich Mr Walker. He would get the information quite easily – all bankers hang together and the hell with ethics – and he would find that Mr Walker had not drawn any money from any bank in Tangier. He might not be too perturbed about that, but he might ask Metcalfe about it, and Metcalfe would find it another item to add to his list of suspicions. He would pump Aristide to find that Walker and Halloran had taken an undue interest in the flow of gold in and out of Tangier.
He would go out to the Casa Saeta and sniff around. He would find nothing there to conflict with Walker’s cover story, but it would be precisely the cover story that he suspected most – Walker having blown hell out of it when he was drunk. The mention of gold would set his ears a-prick – a man like Metcalfe would react very quickly to the smell of gold – and if I were Metcalfe I would take great interest in the movements of the cruising yacht, Sanford.
All this was predicated on the fact that Walker had not told about the gold when he was drunk. If he had, then the balloon had really gone up.
We put into Gibraltar and spent a day rubber-necking at the Barbary apes and looking at the man-made caves. Then we sailed for Malaga and heard a damn’ sight more flamenco music than we could stomach.
It was on the second day in Malaga, when Walker and I went out to the gipsy caves like good tourists, that I realized we were being watched. We were bumping into a sallow young man with a moustache everywhere we went. He sat far removed when we ate in a sidewalk café, he appeared in the yacht basin, he applauded the flamenco dancers when we went to see the gipsies.
I said nothing to the others, but it only went to confirm my estimate of Metcalfe’s abilities. He would have friends in every Mediterranean port, and it wouldn’t be difficult to pass the word around. A yacht’s movements are not easy to disguise, and he was probably sitting in Tangier like a spider in the centre of a web, receiving phone calls from wherever we went. He would know all our movements and our expenditure to the last peseta.
The only thing to do was to act the innocent and hope that we could wear him out, string him on long enough so that he would conclude that his suspicions were unfounded, after all.
In Barcelona we went to a bullfight – the three of us. That was after I had had a little fun in trying to spot Metcalfe’s man. He wasn’t difficult to find if you were looking for him and turned out to be a tall, lantern-jawed cut-throat who carried out the same routine as the man in Malaga.
I was reasonably sure that if anyone was going to burgle Sanford it would be one of Metcalfe’s friends. The word would have been passed round that we were his meat and so the lesser fry would leave us alone. I hired a watchman who looked as though he would sell his grandmother for ten pesetas and we all went to the bullfight.
Before I left I was careful to set the stage. I had made a lot of phoney notes concerning the costs of setting up a boatyard in Spain, together with a lot of technical stuff I had picked up. I also left a rough itinerary of our future movements as far as Greece and a list of addresses of people to be visited. I then measured to a millimetre the position in which each paper was lying.
When we got back the watchman said that all had been quiet, so I paid him off and he went away. But the papers had been moved, so the locked cabin had been successfully burgled in spite of – or probably because of – the watchman. I wondered how much he had been paid – and I wondered if my plant had satisfied Metcalfe that we were wandering innocents.
From Barcelona we struck out across the Gulf of Lions to Nice, giving Majorca a miss because time was getting short. Again I went about my business of visiting boatyards and again I spotted the watcher, but this time I made a mistake.
I told Coertze.
He boiled over. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he demanded.
‘What was the point?’ I said. ‘We can’t do anything about it.’
‘Can’t we?’ he said darkly, and fell into silence.
Nothing much happened in Nice. It’s a pleasant place if you haven’t urgent business elsewhere, but we stayed just long enough to make our cover real and then we sailed the few miles to Monte Carlo, which again is a nice town for the visiting tourist.
In Monte Carlo I stayed aboard Sanford in the evening while Coertze and Walker went ashore. There was not much to do in the way of maintenance beyond the usual housekeeping jobs, so I relaxed in the cockpit enjoying the quietness of the night. The others stayed out late and when they came back Walker was unusually silent.
Coertze had gone below when I said to Walker, ‘What’s the matter? The cat got your tongue? How did you like Monte?’
He jerked his head at the companionway. ‘He clobbered someone.’
I went cold. ‘Who?’
‘A chap was following us all afternoon. Coertze spotted him and said that he’d deal with it. We let this bloke follow us until it got dark and then Coertze led him into an alley and beat him up.’
I got up and went below. Coertze was in the galley bathing swollen knuckles. I said, ‘So you’ve