words, no cooking or washing-up.
Afterwards I ordered a pot of tea in the lounge and slouched in an armchair, assessing my fellow guests.
'Hello, how are you enjoying your stay?'
I turned and pushed myself more upright. It was Stephanie. 'Fine,' I answered, unsuccesfully trying not to look too pleased to see her.
'Dinner was good and I've caught the sun. What more could I ask for?'
'Good. I hear your car was bumped. Is it bad?'
'No, just a scratch. They've let me put it round the back, so it should be okay now.'
She apologised again, and was about to leave when I said: 'Can you recommend anywhere that does a decent paella? I've developed a craving while I've been here. Hope there's nothing wrong with me.'
She thought for a while. 'Anywhere on the Carahuela, I would have thought. I'm not all that keen on seafood myself, but I'll ask around.'
Ah well, make that paella for one, Manuel. 'Thanks. Maybe you can help me with one more thing.' She'd turned to go, but stopped and faced me again. I went on: 'I'm looking for a friend with a boat. A wealthy friend. Any suggestions where I might start looking?'
'If I knew I'd be looking there myself. Is this friend stinking rich?'
It occurred to me that she probably thought that I was quite well heeled. 'By Marbella standards, no; but by my standards, he stinks.'
'Try Puerto Banus. That's where they all hang out,' she said.
'All who?' I asked. Her reply had puzzled me.
She blushed and shrugged her shoulders. 'All… the rich people,' she answered, as she turned and left.
I was intrigued. People often ask me if I'm a policeman. If I went to a nudist colony, before long someone would say: 'Oh, hello, you must be the policeman.' Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. But Stephanie was different: she thought I was a crook. When she said 'All the rich people', what she was thinking was 'All the criminals'. It's an easy mistake to make. Tomorrow I'd have a long, hard look at Puerto Banus.
Puerto Banus is to money what the Vatican is to incense. It lies just outside Marbella, on the far side, beyond where yesterday's search had started. This was the big league. It was mid-morning when I arrived and parked the car between a Ferrari and a Cadillac, but there were elegant women walking about in cocktail dresses, accompanied by men in three-piece suits. Swarthy men, who kept their coats buttoned in the heat of the day. There was a definite pecking order for the boats. The biggest, with gold-plated names emblazoned across the front that would have looked reasonable above a cinema, were parked in the middle, immediately adjacent to the centre of the town. As you moved outwards they diminished in size, until, at the outermost berths, you had the half-a- million-quid wanna bees Egalitarian to a fault, I decided to start at one end and work my way through to the other, In the afternoon I started at the other end and worked my way back to the beginning. All my instincts told me I was close, but my eyes couldn't find the evidence. I had a glass of wine and some tap as and resumed the search. This time I just followed my hunches, picking out the boats that I guessed might be the right size. Hunches are unscientific and usually unreliable; today was no exception.
'That's it, Mr. Breadcake,' I said out loud. 'If you want me tomorrow you'll just have to come climbing mountains.' I found the car and drove much too fast back towards the hotel.
There is a supermercado in Benalmadena, so I decided to stock up with a few things that I might need the next day. As I swung into the car park I saw another red E-type, a convertible, obviously the one whose driver had waved to me the day before. I parked alongside it, but the owner was nowhere to be seen. I formed a picture of her in my mind and rehearsed a couple of opening gambits. In the supermarket I studied the weird concoctions available to tempt the different nationalities, and chose a jar with a German label that contained what looked like pickled testicles. They'd go down well in the office. I stayed with the basics for myself. I was low on T-shirts, so I grabbed a couple of those, too.
When I arrived back at the car a tall, elderly man was leaning on the boot of the other Jag. He beamed when he saw me. 'How do you do,' he said. 'I've been wondering who the old car belonged to.'
He had 'ex-pat' written all over him. He was wearing a checked shirt, with cravat, that would have looked more at home at Goodwood in winter, and had a respectable handlebar moustache. The freckles on his face had expanded with over exposure to the sun, and had started to join up with each other, so that he looked like a jigsaw puzzle of the Gobi Desert, before you'd put the pieces together.
'It's one of the fast ones,' I told him, adding, as I indicated towards his: 'Not one of those whippersnappers.' It was a fact that as the E-type evolved the engine was made bigger and bigger, but the car became slower and slower. They also ruined its looks his later version lacked the wicked symmetry of the original.
He held out his arm for a handshake and said: 'George Palfreeman, with two e's in the middle.' He gestured towards the pavement tables and added: 'Fancy a snifter?'
'Charlie Priest,' I told him, 'as in Roman Catholic. Why not?'
I put the groceries in the boot and followed him to the cafe next door.
We ordered a large whisky and soda for him and a pot of tea for me. An hour later he knew that I came from Yorkshire, but I had learned his entire life story. It's a trick of the trade. The moustache looked R.A.Fish but in fact he was a Navy man, with two years commanding a motor torpedo boat to his credit, during World War Two. Settling down hadn't come easily afterwards, and he'd moved round the Empire before establishing himself in Spain. His wife had died a couple of years ago, and now he was another lonely old man, eager to cling to a new audience. He'd had an interesting life, though, so I didn't mind listening to his tales.
'You'll have to come to the club one night,' he suggested expansively.
'How about tomorrow? Have you anything on?'
Drinky-poos with the Brits didn't appeal to me. 'Sorry, George, I'm planning on going off for the day. We'll have to make it some other time.'
He looked thoughtful. 'What about the night after, then? It's a bridge night, but I've stopped playing. Everybody takes it too damn seriously. I could do with someone new to talk to.'
It was my turn to do the thinking. I didn't like disappointing him, so I said: 'That'll be fine, but on one condition. We're not going to your club, I'm treating you to a big paella on the Carahuela. They only make it for two people, so I need someone to share one with me.'
'Splendid!' he beamed. 'I'll really look forward to that.' He went away a happy man. It hadn't taken a lot. I went back to my room at the Cala d'Or and prepared for another journey towards la creme caramel.
At breakfast I loaded myself with enough carbohydrates to sustain me through a day's walking in the hills. Passing through the foyer I caught sight of my reflection in the big mirrors. I was wearing grey shorts, a grey T-shirt and grey trainers. For an ex-art student the overall effect could only be described as, well, greyish. I could desperately use a splash of colour. I poked out my tongue. It was vermilion, fading to lilac at the back, and covered all over with minute lemon spots. That should do it. I might have a dull exterior, but boy, I was colourful on the inside.
In fifteen minutes I'd crossed the coast road and cleared the edge of town. After a couple of dead-ends I finally found a track that petered out at the base of the hills, from where it was possible to gain access to them. Coming through the outskirts of the town, where the locals lived, I'd been amazed how many of the villas had big dogs Dobermanns and Rottweilers — barking and slavering within their compounds. It appeared that this wasn't the peaceful, law-abiding community that I had believed it to be. The lower flanks of the hill were laid out with streets, complete with lay-bys and parking areas, waiting for the next speculator to come along and put up the money and the buildings. The biggest hill looked to be about two thousand feet high, with a smaller one to its right-hand side. The plan was to walk to the top of the small hill, then traverse the ridge to the summit of the big one. It was quite a modest walk by any standards, but I had the usual feelings of expectancy and well-being as the gradient steepened, and leg muscles that thought they had achieved redundancy began to protest at this unseemly disturbance.
I followed a path for a while, but it stayed too low, so eventually I struck off into the scrub. The ground was hard-baked clay, with sparse, evil-thorned scrub. In territory like this each bush or plant needs a certain catchment area to survive, and it never encroaches on to its neighbour's patch. This makes it possible to walk between them without difficulty, although my legs were soon covered in small white scratches. I puffed like an old tank engine for a while, but quickly struck up a rhythm in tune with the gradient. I was gaining height rapidly, and felt I could go on
