59 Minutes (21 page)

I dropped it on the floor, set up a new code on the
lock and pushed it under the bed. I’ll get by on the stuff I have left and I
want to make sure that I can move quickly should the goons show up. I have no
reason to think they will, but the closer to the flight date I get, the more I
fear that something will stop me.

I went to work and came back around eight. I grabbed a
glass of milk on the way up to my room and met Martin on the stairs. He looked
slightly flushed and embarrassed. I asked what was up but he just shook his
head, muttered something about paying your debts and squeezed past me.

I was up to date on the rent but I knew I was still a
grand in the hole with him for other stuff and my promise to pay it all back
within the month had been well off the mark. I entered my room, put the glass
on the bedside table and slumped on the bed.

I lay for five minutes before sitting up and swinging
my feet over the other side of the bed and reaching for the milk. My feet
clipped the suitcase and I leaned over to push it back in. I froze.

The case had been well and truly pushed under the bed
when I left. There was no doubt.

I reached down, pulled it out, placed it on the bed
and checked the lock. The tell tale scratches from a knife or something sharp
were scattered around the lock mechanism. I was too long in the tooth not to
know when someone had been at a lock and the only person it could have been was
Martin.

I dialled up the code, popped the lid and looked
inside. Things looked much like I had left them. I took everything out and laid
it on the bed but nothing seemed amiss. I double checked and then re-packed.

If Martin had been in the case he hadn’t taken
anything. But why would he want to see inside? He knew I had nothing. I thought
about confronting him but if he denied it, all I could call him was a liar and
that would be me back on the street.

Let sleeping dogs lie was the order of the day.

I quit the hotel early.
Too much like hard work and my mind is firmly on
Spain
. My boss surprised me by pulling me
to one side and asking if I fancied the role as his number two. I was a
slightly at a loss for words. He told me he needed someone that had both smarts
and was a grafter. His current number
two was retiring in three months.

I declined but I think it is the first time
I’ve been offered a legitimate job since my days on the factory floor. I was
quite touched.

I now have an outline plan of action for
Spain
, but it is hard to pin down exactly what I’ll be
doing. For a start I have three or four ideas as to how to get into the safety
deposit box but I’m not even sure that there is a box - or, even if it exists
that it contains anything - or if it does exist and does contain something that
I will be able to get at it - or -or - or - or - you see the problem.

There is also no sign of the goons. Not
even a whiff. That could be good or bad news. The good would be that Dupree
considers me such a low level threat that he has reassigned his resources to
better usage. The bad news is that I may now mean so little he could decide
that getting rid of me might prevent a problem in the future.

I remember a lesson at school where we were
discussing the Coliseum in
Rome
. Our teacher made the mistake of telling
us that, although Nero had planned the building he had never given the famous
‘thumbs down’ sign in it because he died before it was completed. This opened the
floodgates - ‘thumbs down’ - what did that mean. As soon as we found out it was
a signal for the victor to kill the defeated, we were over it like a rash.

Playtime was spent ‘thumbing-down’ everyone
in sight. That day I learned a small but valuable lesson. Even at playtime
‘thumbing-down’ a friend or someone you respected was far harder than
‘thumbing-down’ a nonentity. In fact the game showed quite a few people who
their real friends were, as ‘thumbing-down’ often resulted in some painful
punishment.

Dupree would think nothing of
‘thumbing-down’ me and I knew it and he probably knew that I knew and we
probably both had the Kursal Flyers single ‘Little Does She Know’.

Martin seems cool, if not cold but he isn’t
showing signs of throwing me out and, as far as I can tell, he’s not been back
inside my luggage.

I fly out on the 1
^st
of August
and I’m beginning to feel like a cross between a schoolboy going on his first
trip abroad and someone looking at death row.

D-day tomorrow. I need to be up with the sparrow fart
but I don’t care. This needs to be done. I’m not on a standard holiday package
- it seems Inca isn’t a hotspot for the visiting Brits - but I’m on a charter
flight. Heaven help me - screaming kids, early morning boozers, cramped
seating, delayed flights - the joys.

Martin is dropping me at the airport - not a happy
bunny given the hour - but he’ll oblige. He has been very quiet on the whole
thing. I’ve been expecting a grilling on my plans but it hasn’t happened. He
knows the rough gist of the Charlie Wiggs conversation but not all of it and
I’m keeping it that way.

He did ask me what the plan was when I get home and I
realised I didn’t have one. I’ve been so focused on the trip to
Spain
that I
haven’t given a second thought to what comes next. I’ve just assumed that
whatever happens out there will dictate what happens back here. Martin was more
practical. For instance where was I planning to stay? Where was the cash for
living coming from? The basic stuff.

I asked if I can have one more month at his and I’ll
be out of his hair. As to cash, that is something I’ll worry about on my
return.

Early to bed.

That was hell. I mean hell. Why would
anyone put up with that nonsense to go on holiday? Forget the screaming kids,
early boozers and delayed flights - let’s talk about the woman next to me with
the social graces of an ill bred monkey.

I’ve never hit a woman in my life but twice
I had to go to the toilet - an experience in itself - to avoid assaulting her.
What didn’t she get about me? All I wanted to do was endure the two and half
hour flight and get off the bloody plane. All she wanted to do was - and this
is in rank order - chat, sing, ask me to move (three trips to the toilet),
chat, borrow a pen, borrow some paper, read my newspaper, read my book, chat,
fart, sing and chat - and that was all in the first hour.

She wasn’t even on the pop - although she
should have been on something - Valium would have been good.

Palma airport was a surprisingly cool
experience - my experience of Spanish airports, albeit more than 15 years ago,
revolved around planes parked on the apron and being emptied on to saunas on
wheels, then standing in industrial length queues to show my passport followed
by a crazy length of wait for my bags.

Instead we were offloaded through an air
conditioned air bridge. The passports queue went like snow of a dyke and the
bags were as quick as I could have reasonably expected.

I breathed a massive sigh of relief when my
bag appeared and I wasn’t stopped at customs - the tool kit had weighed on my
mind for the whole flight.

Finding the car hire company was a battle.
The office in the airport terminal, logically, had nothing to do with hiring
cars. I was directed to a multi storey building two hundred yards away and had
to dodge inbound cars and vans to find the service desk. I finally found a
Spanish type queue and an hour later I was away.

Inca is not tourist central. It lies in the
middle of the island and is by-passed by one of the island’s few motorways.
It’s highly industrial and the main tourist attraction seems to be the weekly
fair that runs every Wednesday. Other than that there is little to note.

My hotel is small but clean and, importantly,
has the benefit of killing the climate through working air conditioning.

I dropped my bags and changed into
something a little less heat retaining and went for a walk.

I found the bank quick enough and just down
the road was the office of Mallorca Security. The one question still bouncing
around my head is the link to the bank. The first note clearly decoded as the Colonya
Caixa de Pollenca in Inca but the second sheet seems to refer to Mallorca
Security. I’m working on the theory that the box, if it is a box, is in Mallorca
Security and will have some connection to the bank.

I had formed the impression that Mallorca
Security was a bit of a tuppence hapenny affair. Certainly Charlie’s
description of the web site led me to believe that.

The truth is slightly different. The
building is barely two hundred yards from the bank and looks more like a bank
than the bank. It has a large frontage, which puts it at odds with the shops
around it. To the left there is a shop that seems to specialise in art that is
connected to light - lamp shades, chandeliers, lit sculptures - that sort of
thing. It was open and a quick visit ruled it out as an entry point to my
target.

The entire adjoining wall is floor to
ceiling with racking, filled with every knick-knack imaginable. The wall behind
looks solid concrete. There is a door at the rear to a small storage room and
fortunately it was ajar. A quick glimpse inside and it was obvious the wall
runs the length of the shop. If I had a jack hammer and three days to spare I
might get through to the next shop.

On the other side of my target is a café
and it doesn’t look any more promising. This time there is no storage room,
just the adjoining wall that acts as the back drop to the serving counter. It
is filled with an espresso machine, a rack of various crockery and a painting
of a footballer in mid scissor kick. No way through.

I wanted to get out the back and have a
look at the target from the rear but it was getting late and I was tired. The
last thing I needed was to get caught somewhere I shouldn’t be. Anyway I need
to meet Charlie’s friend. For all I know the
Palma
branch may be a better first bet - but I doubt it.

Charlie’s friend turned out to be a bit more
than ok. He is a little star. His name is David MacDonald and is one of your
died in the wool ex-pats who hates everything Spanish but won’t go home because
of the weather.

I met him at a small café ten minutes from
my hotel. He looks like he could do with a good feed. He’s six feet four or so
but probably weighs in at less than thirteen stone - painfully thin was a
phrase created just for him.

We clicked from the start. He’s big into
music and we hit common ground in seconds. Him a fan of Orchestral Manoeuvres
in the Dark, me a fan of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - go figure - I
thought I was the only one. Fifteen minutes into the conversation he takes out
a plastic folder and drops it on the table. I go to reach for it and he places
his hand on it.

‘Ten percent or five grand.’

I give my ‘what the fuck’ look and he
smiles.

‘The contents of the box - ten percent or
five thousand - whatever is the greater.’

He had me sussed - wasn’t hard. I nodded
and he pushed the folder towards me. If the box turns out to have no cash I
would have to worry about his five thousand later.

I opened up the wallet and pulled out a
number of sheets. I realised why he had ushered me into a seat with a wall
behind me. The sheets were copies of the blueprints to two buildings.
Mallorca
Security, Inca and
Mallorca
Security,
Palma
.

He had me well, well sussed.

I scanned them and realised things were not
looking sweet.

I had expected the offices to be light weight
affairs. The sheets in front of me told me that the buildings were serious
about their purpose. They really were banks and banks were a completely
different game. I may have been good at safes in my time but cracking a bank
took a team and money - I had neither.

I sipped my coffee and flicked through the
sheets.

‘Not easy,’ said David.

I nodded.

He reached under the table, pulled up an
envelope and flicked it onto the table. I grabbed it and opened it. Inside was
a blurry picture of a girl sitting at a restaurant table and scribbled below a
number and a name. Her name was Maria.

‘She works in the Inca branch. I think she
has money problems.’

It was all he had to say about her. She was
pretty although the photo wasn’t good enough to make out any real detail. I
took another slug of coffee. Between the plans and the girl there might just be
another way to do this.

We chatted about nothing for a while and
parted. I had some planning to do.

At
one o’clock
I was standing across from the Mallorca Security building watching the
comings and goings.