dancing. The air was full of the incense of enjoyment — music, food and tobacco. Under the silken tented ceilings women plaited the air above their heads with sinuous arms, the men upright, chins raised, shoulders braced torero-style.
He walked amongst the people, all of them smiling and laughing, as if drugged. How could there be so many and so happy? In this small galaxy he seemed to be the only human present with a direct line to misery, the only one with memories and guilt, hopelessness and fear. He wondered if he would ever be able to plug himself back into a whole life from the half-life in which he’d been living.
A burst of handclapping snapped him back into the fantasy world of the Feria. The rhythm of the Sevillanas being sung and danced all around him insinuated, and as he passed one of the smaller casetas he heard his name shouted.
‘Javier! Heh! Javier!’
A small, dumpy woman in a white traje de flamenca with big red polka dots appeared to know him. She danced a few steps, her feet suddenly dainty and her hands turning and twisting, beckoning the air, as if encouraging him.
‘You don’t recognize me. I’m Encarnacion. Welcome, stranger,’ she said. ‘Will a stranger dance a Sevillana with me on the first night of the Feria de Abril?’
His housekeeper, the perfect stranger, one who represented all that was uncomplicated in the world, had finally taken bodily form. He followed her into the caseta. She insisted that they start with a dance and a glass of fino. She took two sips of her pale Tio Pepe while Javier knocked his back in one. He slammed his glass down, raised his head, clicked his heels together and they started their first Sevillana.
Encarnacion was instantly transformed. The sixty-five-year-old woman became elegant and smouldering, coquettish and daring. They danced four or five Sevillanas, one after the other. He ordered more fino. They ate a plate of paella and some calamares and he remembered how good food tasted. They danced again. His anguish subsided, his misery drifted off. He forgot everything and concentrated on one thing — the mood of his Sevillana — and he threw himself into the dance, each sequence drawing him closer to the perfect expression. And he realized that he’d found it again — the Sevillano solution to misery —
A Small Death in Lisbon
Robert Wilson
A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals. Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.
1941. Klaus Felsen, SS officer, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history, where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs, dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. There he meets the man who makes the first turn of the wheel of greed and revenge which rolls through to the century’s end.
Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Ze Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl. As he digs deeper, Ze overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice, for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Ze must face the most chilling opposition.
‘Compulsively readable, with the cop’s quest burning its way through a narrative rich in history and intrigue, love and death’
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 651202 8
The Big Killing
Robert Wilson
Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in West Africa, smells trouble when a porn merchant asks him to deliver a video at a secret location. Things look up, though, when he’s hired to act as minder to Ron Collins, a spoilt playboy looking for diamonds. Medway thinks this could be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shootout and the discovery of a mutilated body, the prospect of retreating to his bolthole in Benin becomes increasingly attractive — especially as the manner of the victim’s death is too similar to a current notorious political murder for comfort.
His obligations, though, keep him fixed in the Ivory Coast and he is soon caught up in a terrifying cycle of violence. But does it stem from the political upheavals in nearby Liberia, or from the cutthroat business of diamonds? Unless Medway can get to the bottom of the mystery, he knows that for the savage killer out there in the African night, he is the next target …
‘A narrative distilled from pure protein: potent, fiercely imagined and not a little frightening’
ISBN 13: 978 0 00 647986 4
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
Benin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a ‘fixer’ for traders on that part of the coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave. It’s a tough existence, but Medway can handle it … until he comes across the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off further involvement by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat, Steven Kershaw.
Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer … and sado-masochist. Against background rumblings of political disturbance and endemic official corruption, Medway pursues his elusive quarry with a doggedness even he cannot explain. But as he soon learns, nothing in Africa is what it seems, and those who seek the truth find out more than they wish to know …
