300 Days of Sun, page 3
“I don’t have any contacts here,” I said.
“But you’d know how to get started, at least?”
“Nathan, I’m not an investigative reporter. I’m a politics and economics specialist.”
“It’s important.”
He looked about sixteen, hungry, and desperate. I responded as anyone with a heart would. “I can’t promise anything.”
Silence, except for the call of a gull.
“You’ll have to tell me exactly what you want to know with as many details as you have. Names. Places. Dates as near as you can get. It might also be worth telling me why you need to know.”
He shot an anxious look around. On one side a gaggle of teenagers, boys and girls, were oblivious to anything but their own noisy flirtations; the young couple on the other side were speaking together in French, discussing whether it was worth hiring a car.
“There are two places. One is called Horta das Rochas near
Albufeira. It’s a resort on the coast, with a golf course and spa. The other is Vale Navio. Its reputation isn’t great. It’s changed hands several times, sometimes for dirty money—Portuguese, and British, too. The name of the man I want to find out about is Terry Jackson.”
“Pick an easy subject, why don’t you?” I kept my voice down. “I’m not sure either of us should get involved in anything like this.”
“I’m not saying I want to get involved. There’s no getting
involved—it all happened a long time ago. I just want to find out if there’s anything on record about it.”
His eyes were locked onto mine.
“Well, OK. I take it you’ve done the obvious Google search?”
“As I said, this was early 1990s. There’s not a lot that goes that far back online, certainly not that I can find in English. That’s what I mean—if you had to write a newspaper story about this, how would you get started?”
The wind blew my hair back from my face and I could taste the salt in the air. I watched the boats rocking at anchor in the channel and a plastic jerry can float by.
“If I was at work, I’d probably call the local English language newspaper. Ask one of the journalists there if they could help with some research, sweeten the request with the implication they’d be giving their career a little boost, or at the very least their bank account.”
“Would you be up for that?”
“Well, obviously I’m not at work.”
“You could have a go, though, eh?”
“You still haven’t told me why this is so important.”
“I will do. Just not here. But trust me, it is.”
“Give me a bit more to go on,” I said.
Nathan rubbed his hands over his face. I waited, and he seemed to reach a decision.
“You know the little girl who disappeared in Praia da Falesia years ago—the famous case, parents both lawyers who did everything they could to keep the case in the news?”
Tilly Stern. A three-year-old at the time she was snatched from a holiday apartment in the middle of the night while her parents slept in the next room. It would have been around 2006, because I’d landed my first job on a financial magazine after Oxford and, even there, it was one of those stories no one could avoid. I nodded.
“I think there could have been others. Going back a lot longer.”
The engine of the ferry started up. Vibrations overrode the slight tremble in my limbs. Some of my best stories had started this way, the shot of adrenaline confirming the strength of my instincts.
“Connected to the resort developments you mentioned?”
“It’s a possibility.”
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t seen any of this conversation coming.
“Terry Jackson,” I managed, eventually.
“Horta das Rochas. Vale Navio.”
Neither of us said anything more. He watched Faro’s apartment blocks appear over the water, an unlovely jumble of utilitarian concrete, their uniform balconies serving as shutters pulled down over the western side of Faro. Overhead, planes screamed in and out of the airport. I gazed out across the marshes at the glimpses of the lighthouse on the rim of an outer island. It wasn’t until the ferry bumped the jetty outside the fortified walls of the Old Town back where we had started that it occurred to me.
“You didn’t ask any of the others to come today, did you?”
“No.”
“And to be straight about other matters as well—you know all this, how? Have you got into something over your head?”
“Not me. But Terry Jackson obviously did.”
We disembarked and joined the file of wind-blown beach trippers flip-flopping past the old-fashioned seafood restaurant and the Bombeiros Voluntarios, the fire station.
“So tell me what you know about this Terry Jackson, then.” To be honest, I was starting to feel irritated by Nathan’s methods, and his patchy approach to detail. “Where are we most likely to find him?”
“Don’t know exactly. Vale Navio. Albufeira . . . could be anywhere along the coast here.”
“And you think he was involved in the abduction of
children?” I hardly knew where to begin. “And he was, what? Actually taking them, organising some paedophile ring?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So what’s Terry to you, Nathan?”
“A family friend.”
“But you don’t have an address or phone number.”
“He wasn’t that much of a friend, as it turned out.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
We walked slowly and sun-drunk to the edge of the Jardim Manuel Bivar. He didn’t add anything more. I gave him a quick hug as we parted. His shoulder bones were light and angular as a bunch of twigs.
I don’t know where he went that evening. I didn’t ask.
I’d told Nathan I was running away, but it really wasn’t that exciting. It made a good headline for a dull story, that’s all. Marc was a forty-year-old European banking lobbyist (keep awake at the back). Never married. Dual nationality, thanks to a Belgian mother (a French-speaker, known as a Walloon) and a British father. Undeniably handsome and diploma-clever, with a fondness for bureaucratic in-jokes that weren’t funny at all, but once in a while he pointed me in the direction of a bloody good story. I never should have moved in with him, but I was swayed by his sheer persistence, and some surprisingly great sex. I never saw it lasting, but it seems he did.
Hard to believe that only a week previously I was still in Brussels, cold cloudy home of transactions and transitions. Marc and I sat morosely in the Grand Place, with its gilded mercantile houses that seemed to glow as the grey sky darkened, and hammered out our own deal. He called it a trial separation and I called it an escape, though not to his face. I watched men and women in suits scuttle into the surrounding streets of restaurants where bureaucrats go to stuff their faces, and played it the Brussels way, hedging my bets and lying if necessary to get what I needed. It seemed a world and a lifetime away.
It’s astonishing how quickly the mind adapts to new surroundings and stimuli. A week before, I had never been to Faro and knew no one here. Now, it was expanding around me in unexpected directions, displacing the old preoccupations. Nathan was clever, I’ll give him that—perceptive, too. His hunch about a journalist’s nose for an intriguing story was bang on the money. I was never going to pass on this. By the time Monday morning came around I had a list of English-speaking publications, websites, and societies all along the Algarve coast and had already emailed the most likely sources of information. The Internet didn’t close down for the weekend like libraries and records offices. There were plenty of Terry Jacksons online but no sign of the right one in Portugal, criminal or otherwise. That didn’t really surprise me. As Nathan said, not everything that happened in the eighties and nineties is accessible on the Web. If it were, he wouldn’t have needed my help.
The Algarve Daily News had a lengthy archive on Vale Navio. It was the first time-share resort in Portugal, I learned, comprising a hundred villas and three hundred apartments on a scrubby expanse of coastal hillside. It had been designed in the 1970s to what, at the time, were enlightened environmental ideals. Only three pine trees had been cleared to make way for its construction. But with its success had come rapid expansion. Ideals had been jettisoned in favour of fast profits. By the late 1980s there were repeated allegations of corruption involving planning permissions granted by the local municipal authorities, and criminal prosecutions of aggressive touts.
Portugal Today also covered Vale Navio’s decline. Neither had much on Horta das Rochas beyond a few mentions of it in general terms. It was a much more upmarket resort the other side of Albufeira from Vale Navio, and looked to be a well-maintained and fairly expensive option, with appreciative reviews.
For anything more penetrating, I was going to have to wait for a response to one of my queries. I didn’t see why a local journalist wouldn’t want to speak to me but, even so, I’d fudged the issue of my current employment status.
My mobile rang as I was walking to the language school. I fished it out of my bag and was surprised to see it wasn’t Marc calling for once. I didn’t recognise the number.
“Yes?” I said.
“Joanna Millard?”
“It is.”
“Ian Rylands.”
I hesitated, unable to place the name; so many new ones had passed across my consciousness in the previous twenty-four hours.
“You left me a message.”
“Sorry, I—”
“The Anglo-Algarve Association.”
“Of course! Thank you so much for calling back. I wasn’t expecting such a quick response.”
It had been a very long shot. I hadn’t expected anything to come of it, far less for this to be the first bite.
“You were asking about Vale Navio and Horta das Rochas. I might be able to help.”
“That would be great. I was wondering—”
“Where are you? Might be better to meet.”
“I’m in Faro.”
“That’s fine for me. When are you free?”
There seemed no reason to delay. “How about early evening today?”
“All right, then. I will be at the marina bandstand at six.”
“I’ll see you then—and thank you very much.”
Nathan managed a lop-sided smile when I saw him in class, but he looked dreadful. He hadn’t bothered to shave and his complexion was so pallid it lent his tan a sallow orange tinge.
“Hungover,” he grimaced when I asked the obvious. “I haven’t slept since . . . Friday night.”
“Good weekend, then.”
“Not really.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
I stared at him, expectantly.
“The girls at my house . . .”
Part of me didn’t want to know but I waited for him to go on.
“ . . . they said that some bloke had been round asking about me. Then I got beaten up on Saturday night. Nice.”
“You’ve hit on someone’s girlfriend?”
“Didn’t think so.”
“Where did this happen—at the house?”
He shook his head. “Nightclub.”
“Are you badly hurt?”
“Not really. Few bruises.” He rubbed his chest. “At least no one can see them.”
“It might not have been connected,” I said, trying to be dispassionate. “You’re sure you’re all right? Did anyone see—did you report it to the police?”
“I’m a bit shaken, to tell the truth, but all right. No one saw. And no, I didn’t tell the police. What’s the point?”
“Well . . .”
“No police.”
I shrugged, to show I didn’t agree but that it was up to him. I didn’t tell him about Ian Rylands. I was going to, but was wary of saying anything that the others might overhear. Besides, Nathan wasn’t in any state for serious conversation. He was uncharacteristically quiet all morning, and bunked off after lunch.
By the end of the day only one other reply to my request had come in, from a woman who ran an expat information website based in Vilamoura. The message was friendly enough but offered little in the way of information.
iii
At ten to six I was walking slowly through the public garden towards the bandstand at the far end. I was curious. What kind of man would arrange to meet an unknown woman at a bandstand these days? One who ran an expat association, I
supposed.
It was a circular Victorian relic, insignificant and neglected in comparison to the steel scaffolds and lighting rigs of the temporary stage across the road where, later, the Folk Faro festival would showcase singing and dancing from around the world. That night, according to the sound checks and flashing signs, there would be performances from Guatemala, Romania, Spain, and India. I had been giving it a wide berth, though I had gone down to listen to a local fado singer the previous night; her mournful wails had called to a weakening of my determination to stay strong.
“Joanna?”
I turned around.
The man was elderly, in his early seventies, perhaps. He was white-haired, tall and broad-shouldered but perhaps not as substantial as he had once been. The cotton drill jacket hung loosely, bulging with whatever he had crammed into the pockets.
“Ian Rylands?”
“At your service.”
We shook hands and he accepted my offer to buy him a drink. I allowed him to lead the way into the familiar cobbled pedestrian streets. We stopped outside the grand old café that had seen better days.
“The Café Aliança,” he said. “The perfect spot for an interesting conversation.” He gave a little chuckle. “It’s not really a café, you know. Not any longer. It closed down a few years back, but now it’s been reopened for a few months in the run-up to the elections. It’s being used as a political meeting place. A spot of damage limitation conceded by the authorities. Things have been getting rather ugly, what with the protests and other—unpleasantness.”
“The storks, you mean?”
“Ah, you know about that. Nasty business. Some say it was done by a far-right group, but that’s what the far-left activists always claim. Both sides shouting equally loudly, neither with any workable answers and ignorant at all times of human nature. After you.”
Ian Rylands stood back, upright in a military stance, as he allowed me to take the revolving door first.
We took a table by one of the high arched windows. A huge potted plant gave us the illusion of privacy, dispelled as soon as we sat down by the barman coming over and addressing him as Senhor Rylands and staying to chat in Portuguese, very little of which I understood.
A small carafe of Vinho Verde was brought swiftly, along with a plate of cubed cheese and olives.
“Your Portuguese sounds excellent,” I said. “How long have you been here?”
His forehead and cheeks were sun damaged; deep creases surrounded his mouth. It was a fair bet that he had been living abroad for quite a while.
“Retired down here seven years ago.”
“What did you retire from?”
“The civil service. Couldn’t get out quickly enough.”
“What made you choose Portugal?”
“Had some good holidays here. The sun. My wife and I enjoyed a game of golf.”
“Enjoyed?”
“She passed away two years after we got here.”
“I’m sorry.”
He waved a hand as if to indicate he accepted my sympathies but wanted to move on. “It was after that I started the Association as a way to meet other people. There was only so much drinking on my own I could do.”
I acknowledged that with a sympathetic nod.
“On the whole, the expats down here are pretty congenial. A few petty-minded individuals, of course, like anywhere. You learn to avoid them.”
He took a contemplative sip of his wine. The backs of his hands were mottled. On one, a mole had flowered into a black rose, ridged and ominous. If I hadn’t only just met him, I might have urged him to show it to a doctor. “You said you wanted to know about Vale Navio and Horta das Rochas. And you’re a journalist? Remind me who you write for.”
I heeded a warning against glib half-truths. He was sizing me up intently, and I recognised him as someone who might well have had experience of dealing with newspapers. I should have asked him what exactly he’d done before he retired.
“The Independent—or rather, I used to. I’ve just left after six years. Made redundant,” I said. So much for thinking I could bluff it out.
“Did you specialise?”
I was right to be wary. “Economics, mainly. Latterly on the European desk in Brussels.”
“Tough business.”
“Every newspaper I know has been cutting its staff.”
Milky blue eyes stared intently at me over his raised glass. “Do you know Will Venning?”
“I do, yes.” Will was one of the nice guys, a feature writer at the Indy with a wife and five kids, still hanging on grimly to his job.
“I’ve met him,” said Rylands. “Well, I say met . . . not quite. We’ve spoken.”
“When was that?”
“A couple of years ago. I helped him out with some information he needed.”
I nodded, expecting he would enjoy telling me what that was, but he sat back in his chair and made an expansive gesture with one arm. “This, this space we’re in, this room with the high windows and panelling . . . this is Portugal’s modern history. And,” he smiled, revealing uneven teeth, tending to brown, “for various reasons it has plenty to do with Horta das Rochas and even Vale Navio, if you can bear with.”
“Tell me.”
“The Aliança is one of the oldest cafés in Portugal, or it was until it got closed down due to safety and environmental health issues. The building was in a state of near collapse. They say they’ve shored it up, but—well, let’s not count on that. Be ready to run if you hear an ominous creak. As I say, a deal’s been done to open the place again for political meetings, concerts, and poetry readings. Bright idea by one of the socialist candidates who said he’d rather pay for the reopening than for billboards. Gives everyone a chance to reconnect with a part of Faro’s history. Have you seen the Hall of Fame at the back?”
