I ran to the sideboard and picked up a bottle for a weapon and charged back to the sprawling mass of woman and snake in the chair, but Gloriana’s right hand came up, holding the spray gun, and it was pointed at me. I backed off, and then saw that it had only momentarily been aimed at me. She was choking and breathing hard, trying to locate Lilith’s head. She grabbed at it with her left hand and brought the right round but as she fired—a long, soft hiss of sound—the python’s head jerked, forcing her hand aside and I saw the quick spread of vapour envelop the tousled red-gold hair and obscure her face.
They went, both of them, woman and snake, within three seconds, collapsing, both of them, into the chair, and perhaps for another five seconds there was a slow dying ripple of movement along the length of Lilith’s coils, but no movement from Gloriana. She lay there with her blue eyes seeing nothing.
*
I got a taxi and went to Letta’s club and met her. I took her back to my hotel and got a room for her. She wanted more explanations than I was prepared to give but in the end—knowing about Gloriana lying dead in her apartment —agreed not to go back until Manston got in touch with her at the hotel. Manston had people in Paris who would clear up the situation smoothly and without publicity.
CHAPTER 12
Trio in a Flat
I told Olaf the full story on the plane—and then it took me an hour to convince him that the best way for him to help Wilkins was to stand by at Ibiza airport as a contact for Manston when he arrived.
His parting words to me were, ‘You make a mess of this, Mr Carver, and I break your neck. Hilda is the world to me.’
I took a taxi from the airport to San Antonio. It was about a twenty-mile drive from the airport. It was hot with the promise of real baking summer days to come. Old ladies in black sat under the olive trees, knitting, and keeping an eye on their goats and sheep. The earth had that dry, reddish colour and was the kind that the wind breaks down to fine dust and spreads over everything. The hills were green with scrub and, here and there, a pair of buzzards circled high in some air current over the crests. I didn’t look at the scenery much. I kept telling myself that what I was doing was right, I had to get more definite information. I wanted to have enough information to be sure that Manston would have to take action on it. Bill Dawson was going to be returned anyway. But I wanted Wilkins back.
San Antonio was spread around the shores of a wide lagoon on the north-west of the island. One side was packed with new hotels for the tourist trade, and the other side held the old town, sloping gently uphill from the waterfront, a maze of narrow alleys and streets. It was all pink and white and ochre, and fast being spoiled and modernized. Buildings were going up everywhere, and every other shop was a tourist trap—postcards, beach hats, sandals, sunglasses, pottery and trashy jewellery. It was a miniature Brighton or Blackpool under a hot sun. Every holiday resort in Europe was getting to look more and more alike, a babel with a twenty-four-hour developing service, fish-and-chips and beefsteak and middle-aged mums wearing shorts or holiday outfits that they wouldn’t have dared to sport at home. Well, good for them.
The taxi took me into the town, up the hillside through a maze of crowded little streets, and finally dropped me at the end of the Paseo Maritimo. It was a narrow passageway running parallel to the hillside. Number 7 was wedged in between a butcher’s shop and a carpenter’s workshop. An old man in faded blue shirt and trousers, barefooted, was sitting on the doorstep contemplating his dirty toes.
I said, ‘Por favor, José Bonifaz?’ That practically exhausted my Spanish.
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the hallway and stairs behind him. I went into a gloom that smelled of frying fish and tobacco smoke. At the top of the first flight of stairs a small girl was sitting, cuddling a doll and crooning to it. I gave her a big smile and repeated my Spanish. She got up, still crooning, and went along the landing to one of three doors and knocked on it for me. I heard a voice say something inside and I went in.
José Bonifaz may have been a student but he certainly wasn’t studying. The place, I realized now, was some sort of pension. This was a bed-sitting room. There was a table, crowded with books, under a small window, a chair with an opened can of peaches on it, a wardrobe with a cracked mirror front, and an iron bed with José Bonifaz on it. He was reading an English paperback with a lurid cover and, although it was long past midday, was still wearing pyjamas, the jacket open to show a thin chest as brown as a berry from the sun. His hair was as black as coal and needed cutting, his eyes were almost as dark and were the twitchy kind, never still for a moment in their sockets. He had a thin, birdy little face
