‘We’ll just wait in the bar Vera,’ said MacLean pretending to be preoccupied with something Leavey or MacFarlane had said in the background.
‘I need your room number sir,’ repeated Vera. ‘For the bill.’
MacLean breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, I think I’ll just pay cash,’ he said. He leaned on the desk conspiratorially and stage-whispered, ‘The company’s paying for us chaps to have a bit of a break but I don’t think they’ll run to cars and casinos, eh?’
‘Very good sir,’ said Vera dutifully.
MacLean gulped down a brandy at the bar as Leavey and MacFarlane congratulated him. ‘That deserved an Oscar,’ said MacFarlane.
‘As long as it deserved a car,’ replied MacLean.
FIFTEEN
At six o’ clock precisely a blue Seat Ibiza was delivered to the front door of the hotel and Vera signed the driver’s docket. She finalised the paperwork with MacLean and ushered the three of them to the door, reminding them that it was the Sunkist barbecue on Saturday.
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world Vera,’ said MacLean with a big smile as he accepted the keys.
‘Good luck at the casino.’
MacLean waited until another car just passed the hotel entrance before nursing the Seat out behind it to thread through the milling football supporters and out of the square. Leavey and MacFarlane ducked down below window level and MacLean held his breath as they slowly passed the police patrol guarding the bottleneck at the head of the square. The policemen paid them no attention. ‘Okay,’ he whispered as they picked up speed. ‘We’re out.’ A few moments later they picked up their first road sign and started following the route to Motorway 7. Ten more minutes of town traffic and they were heading south on the Mediterranean Highway.
The initial euphoria at being out on the road and back on course gave way to quiet reflection on what might have been. They had come perilously close to falling at the very first hurdle. ‘We were lucky,’ said Leavey and no one disagreed.
It was dark by the time they saw the lights of Alicante twinkling up ahead. MacLean checked the fuel gauge and found no immediate problem. He asked if there was any other reason to stop and took the silence as a negative.
‘We have a decision to make,’ said MacLean. ‘The motorway ends soon. We can either follow the Med Highway right round the coast or we could turn off and head up into the Sierra Nevada; that would be shorter but presumably slower. What d’you think?’
Leavey went for the coastal route and MacFarlane agreed; if they encountered problems it would be easier to deal with them on the busy coast road rather than up in the snowy mountain passes.
‘The Med Highway it is then,’ said MacLean.
They stopped in Murcia to take on fuel and have something to eat at a local cafe. ‘How far have we come?’ asked MacFarlane as he leaned back in his seat to allow the waiter to place a small plate of tapas in front of them. ‘About two hundred miles,’ replied MacLean, helping himself to a black olive. ‘Only three hundred to go.’
Leavey returned from the toilet and they placed their order, all of them going for steak with Rioja red to wash it down. Leavey declined any more wine after one glass, saying he would take over driving when they left. MacLean didn’t argue; the events of the afternoon and the first section of the drive had left him feeling tired. He looked forward to taking a bit of a nap on the next leg.
They stopped again at Almeria on the eastern tip of the Costa del Sol. The highway had taken them well back from the coast since leaving Murcia but now it had returned to court the shores of the Med. The moon was high and they found an all-night bar with a veranda, which permitted them to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight on the water as they sipped cold beer. MacLean watched the water lap therapeutically against the rocks for a while before looking up at the moon and thinking of Tansy. Their mission had got off to a shaky start but things were now running more smoothly. He was beginning to feel less tense. He looked at his watch and suggested they might as well sit where they where a while longer. There was no point in getting to Malaga before breakfast time so they had another beer.
The sun was up and shining brightly on the cliffs of Malaga when they drove into town and looked for somewhere to park near the harbour. MacLean, not wishing to presume too much on the good nature of his friends, suggested that they book into a hotel for a bath and a decent sleep before they continued. Leavey and MacFarlane would not hear of it, insisting that they weren’t tired at all. Instead of putting off time they would have breakfast and then start shopping for maps of the surrounding district.
To his surprise, MacLean came across a booklet entitled, MIJAS, among the maps and tourist guides to Andalucia. He picked it up with a strange feeling of guilt and bemusement. In his mind, the name had come to symbolise a most secret place, the place that Jean-Paul and Eva had died to discover, the place that Lehman Steiner would kill to keep anyone away from and here it was being advertised as a tourist attraction. It didn’t seem right.
MacLean felt a thousand imaginary eyes follow him as he bought the booklet along with two other maps. As they walked back to the harbour, an awful doubt began to nag away at him. Could there be more than one place in the world pronounced May Haas? They had all been so pleased at Tansy’s deduction that none of them had considered this possibility.
MacLean read through the booklet by the harbour wall. Eventually he sighed and snapped it shut with a shake of the head.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Leavey.
‘Maybe,’ said MacLean. ‘According to this, Mijas is a pretty little Andalucian village cut into the mountains with lots of little white houses, all with geranium-filled window boxes, donkeys in the streets and the sound of guitars. Plenty of bars and cafes but as for pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories, forget it. There aren’t any.’
‘Maybe they keep that sort of thing away from the tourist area,’ suggested Leavey.
MacLean was worried. ‘It’s high in the mountains,’ he said. ‘Not exactly the location for an industrial estate.’
They got back into the Seat and set off to find the bus station in Malaga, having decided it would be unwise to drive up to Mijas. Leavey had convinced MacLean for the time being that Tansy had not been wrong and that they were on the right track. This being the case, they must continue to take all precautions.
The bus station was crowded, not with the young tourists that the summer would bring, but with the old who were escaping the misery of winter in northern Europe. Their faces were tanned and the sun was easing arthritic joints. MacFarlane found the correct queue but Leavey came up with a better alternative.
A property company was promoting sales of their villas in a new development near Mijas by running guided tours of their site. A bus would leave for the mountains in ten minutes and there was room on board for the three of them. They would tour the site, be shown around one of the company’s villas and then be given time to look around Mijas to ‘capture the atmosphere of the place’. MacLean agreed that this would be the ideal safe way to visit Mijas. They would be as near to anonymous as they could get in such a party.
The bus climbed slowly up into the mountains of the Sierra de Mijas, labouring in low gear all the way up the zig-zag road until they had reached the property development. It was located on the eastern edge of Mijas itself and afforded them a spectacular view out over the coastal resort of Fuengirola to the Mediterranean and even, their guide insisted, to the coast of North Africa beyond. MacLean shivered slightly as he waited patiently for the guided tour of the villas to end. It had been pleasantly warm down on the coast but up here in the mountains it had become markedly chilly.
Clutching their presentation packs in blue folders, the twenty or so people on the tour were taken into Mijas itself and invited to look round for themselves. The bus would leave for Malaga in an hour. MacLean and the other two had decided in advance that they would split up and search independently before meeting up again at the curiously small bullring which sat on the western edge of the village.
MacLean had to admit that Mijas was indeed pretty but the more he saw of it the more his fears were being
