Paxo dragged on a cigarette like an asthmatic at his inhaler. Tess was sitting on the grass with her legs stretched out in front of her, looking slightly shell-shocked by the experience. Daz looked from one to the other and grinned triumphantly as William and I pulled in alongside him.
“You lot are riding like a bunch of old women,” Daz jeered.
“At least the rest of us stand a chance of surviving long enough to get to be old,” William said as he unbuckled his helmet and ducked out of it. His voice was placid but the sweat ran down his temples and beaded across his upper lip.
As I took off my own lid I ran a hand through my hair and realised that my prediction about the state of it had been on the optimistic side. I looked like a wet traveller’s dog and felt worse.
Jamie and Sean were last to arrive. The twisty roads had given Jamie a better chance of keeping his smaller bike close to the pack than long fast straights would have done, but still he looked exhausted. Sean yanked his lid off and, although I could tell by the muscle jumping in his jaw what he thought of the pace Daz was setting, he held his tongue.
“Who’s for an ice cream?” Daz asked brightly. Before anyone could answer, he headed off towards the cafe. As he walked away from us he was clicking his fingers together nervously, like he was on edge and couldn’t keep them still. I wondered seriously if he was on something.
As though the same thought had occurred to them at the same time, William and Paxo exchanged silent glances and followed Daz to the cafe. Jamie muttered about finding the loo and went after them.
Sean stripped off the top half of his leathers and leaned against the Blackbird to let the sun and the wind dry him off. He seemed relaxed but he had angled himself, I noticed, so he could keep an eye on the approach road.
I went across and sat beside Tess on the grass, digging in my pocket.
“By the way – I think you dropped this in my room last night,” I said, holding the ring out to her. The diamond sparked and flared in the sunlight.
I was watching her face carefully enough to see the spasm of horror that passed across her features, quickly damped down into something approaching mild relief.
“Oh brilliant, thanks,” she said, taking the ring from me. She dug in the inside pocket of her leathers and produced a clear plastic bag full of her remaining jewellery. I assumed her fingers were still too sore to get the rings back on. Small wonder she had hardly noticed one of them was missing.
“It’s a lovely ring,” I said, cautious. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Sean had stilled, listening, even though his attention seemed for all the world to be elsewhere. “It must be worth a bit.”
Tess laughed a little too loudly and for a little too long. “Nah, I told you – I made it myself,” she said. She swung the bag round her finger, casually, so the contents jingled together.
“So, what’s the stone?” I asked, guileless. “It’s a nice looking cut.”
“Mm, I liked it,” she said, still distracted by the way the rings danced in the light. “Shame it’s only paste.”
She looked up as she said it and I knew she’d realised full well that she didn’t have me fooled. And she didn’t care either. She caught my momentarily dumbfounded expression and laughed again.
“What? You never thought this lot was real, did you?” she demanded, shaking the bag and still grinning. “Oh yeah, right – like I’d walk round drippin’ in diamonds! Money comin’ out of my ears, me.”
For what it was worth, I would have pressed her further but the boys reappeared at that point.
“Oh good, ice creams,” she said unnecessarily. “Hey! Mine’s the one with the Flake in it.” She jumped to her feet and trotted over to them, stuffing the bag of rings back into her pocket as she went.
I got to my feet to follow, but Sean caught my arm as I went past and shook his head.
“Let it go, Charlie,” he murmured. “For now. You won’t get anything useful out of her.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I nodded reluctantly, leaned my hip against the FireBlade, and waited for the boys to reach us.
Apart from Daz, they were carrying two ice cream cones each, all of which had chocolate Flakes in that had already semi-melted in the heat. Jamie had given one ice cream to Tess and William passed me another. That left Paxo with the one for Sean, a fact that had him scowling more furiously than usual. He practically handed it over at arm’s length, snatching his fingers back like he was expecting the other man to bite them. Sean just smiled his predator’s smile, unnerving him further, and accepted graciously.
“Come on then,” Daz said, bouncing on his toes. “We’re here to see a bit of culture, so let’s go have a look- see at this causeway.” He picked the Flake out and sucked the ice cream off it. “Any ideas who built it?”
William rolled his eyes. “Nobody built it, you jackass,” he said. His sweat moustache had now been replaced with a vanilla ice cream one but he didn’t seem to care. “It’s made up of basalt. The rock forms that shape naturally, without any interference from anyone else.”
There was a bus ferrying people down the steep incline to the beach but we chose to walk, eating our ice creams as we went. The landscape was alien and deeply strange. A tangled pile of curious hexagonal stones, stacked and jumbled like someone had pushed them off the edge of the cliff above with a JCB and left them where they fell.
We joined the other tourists who were walking and clambering over the rocks. Close up the stones looked a little like interlocking concrete sections. It wouldn’t be hard to be convinced that the whole structure was man- made.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” William murmured, staring across the formation.
“Yeah, suppose so,” Paxo said, looking around him with a totally nonplussed expression on his face. He checked his watch. “Now then, where’s this distillery, mate?”
