300 Days of Sun, page 5
The cry of a doughnut vendor against a background of waves collapsing and receding brought Nathan to mind yet again.
The only possible conclusion was that Nathan Emberlin was not his real name. Possibly he had chosen it because it was one of those rare things, a completely blank slate. But why?
T he wind picked up and fanned some life back into the coast. By the time I had returned to town, washed the sticky sand out of my hair, and assessed the red burn marks on my shoulders, the temperature had fallen back to a pleasant simmer for the evening.
I wandered down towards the marina. Perhaps I would try a new place to eat that Tomas had recommended. With plenty of time to decide, I had a fizzy water at a waterside kiosk. A couple of guys raised their glasses to me, and I felt good as I strolled towards the maze of cobbled streets. I’d worried sometimes over the past few months that I’d forgotten how to have fun.
A top in one of the clothes shops had caught my eye on the way to class, and I thought I’d go and try it on, might even wear it later to one of the clubs Nathan talked about. It was about time I had a little adventure. I turned the corner into the entrance on the Rua Vasco da Gama.
About thirty metres ahead of me was a tall man with white hair and a loose cotton drill jacket. He looked just like Ian Rylands. I picked up my pace, keeping him in sight. The evening parade packed the street. Casual shoppers stopped dead and changed direction right in front of me. Couples stood reading menus outside restaurants. Children ran swerving arcs through the crowd. I bumped into someone and in the seconds I looked away from the white-haired figure ahead, to apologise, I lost him.
I walked faster towards the junction with a small triangular square where restaurant tables were laid for dinner under some trees. Cars were permitted here, and on the other side of the square the man was waiting to cross the road. I could see his face. It was Ian Rylands. There was no doubt about it. I called out. He appeared not to hear.
I carried on behind him, deciding not to run, just to catch up naturally. Only a few streets to the northwest of the main tourist area, even more businesses were closed, apartment blocks were shabby, and peeling buildings stood empty under À Venda notices. One house, once beautifully dressed in blue and white tiles, was now stripped to patches of terra-cotta and graffiti. Weeds tufted from the gutters.
Rylands was still ahead of me, though not by very far now. I expected him to sense my approach at any moment and look round. But he didn’t. He kept up a steady march down unprepossessing side streets.
We emerged into a large square dominated by a church and a modern post office. He headed straight across the cobblestones to the steps of the church. That was when I hung back, feeling as if a line of acceptability had been breached. I’d only wanted to catch up with him to thank him for the book, and possibly to ask him why he’d chosen to leave it at the Aliança without even letting me know it was there. But he had led me so far from where I’d spotted him that I felt too self-conscious. Any approach would now be awkward.
He went into the church.
I wasn’t going to follow him. Suppose he was a devout man. That would make me—well, I didn’t care to contemplate what that would make me.
Tucked into the side of the square, camouflaged by plane trees, a small bar offered a couple of tables with a view of the church steps. One was taken by a group of older men playing cards. I took the other and ordered a beer.
The waitress didn’t know whether there was a church service on Saturday evening. Or, more likely, she couldn’t work out what I was trying to ask her, either in Portuguese or in English. I made my bottle of Sagres last as long as I could, but Rylands did not reappear on the church steps. After a while—and the euphoric effect of the beer on an empty stomach may have had a bearing on this—my decision to hang back no longer seemed so vital.
I made a circuit of the square and then gave in to impulse. Beggars held their hands out as I paused at the entrance to the church. A mad shriek from across the square made me jump. Two drunks had started fighting down by the post office, flailing arms beating the dust out of each other’s clothes. I went in. The Church of the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I read in English.
The space was more intimate than the exterior had indicated. A soaring arch over an ornate altar and the reredos behind it was embellished by astonishing gold work. Intricate baroque carvings dripped with gilding. In contrast, the wooden pews were plain, in rows over a red carpet. They were empty.
To the right of the altar was an entrance into an antechamber with the air of a dining room in a Tudor house.
“The Chapel of Bones?” asked a middle-aged woman quietly in accented English.
She handed me a printed brochure. I read the word “ossuary” and allowed her to make the sale. For a euro coin, I was granted access to a cramped garden. It might just be possible to claim I was doing my sightseeing at a quiet time when the tourists had gone, so I opened the brochure and looked around.
A short path led to another doorway. This was the mysterious Chapel of Bones. An inscription over the threshold read: “Stop here and think of the fate that will befall you—1816.”
At first glance, it seemed to be a shell grotto. I registered the skulls first. Then, I saw it: the inner walls and ceiling were entirely covered with a mosaic of skulls and other human bones, laid out in patterns that were all the more macabre for their intricate orderliness. Some were so small they must have been children’s heads.
Ian Rylands wasn’t there. But Nathan was.
He stood in the far corner, looking uneasy. I went over to him, unable to hide my surprise. Dark circles under his eyes and the prominent bones of his face made for uncomfortable comparisons with the surroundings.
“Nathan! Bloody hell. What are you doing here? And where have you been?”
He tried and failed to rally his easygoing persona. “Just . . . hanging.”
I wasn’t in any mood to be messed about. “Where’s Rylands?”
“What?”
“Ian Rylands.”
“Who?”
I gave him a hard stare.
Nathan wiped his hands through his hair and looked away.
“Don’t play games with me, Nathan.”
“I’m really not. What the hell are you doing here anyway?”
A standoff ensued. I kept quiet until he cracked.
“OK. I came to meet someone here—but they didn’t turn up.”
“They?”
“He.” Nathan sighed. He looked as if he needed to sleep for a week on a food drip. “Look, shall we get out of here? I’ve been here for an hour and it’s giving me the creeps.”
“An hour?”
He led the way back out into the garden. “I was told to be here at seven.”
“Who, though? Who were you meeting?” My impatience was increasing.
We nodded at the woman in the Tudor dining room and passed through into the nave without speaking. Still no one in the pews. Nathan reached into the side pocket of his jeans as we went out onto the church steps, and took out a coin, which he gave to the nearest beggar, a toothless woman in black. I looked around for Ian Rylands—down in the square, by the ugly modern post office building, under the trees outside the bar—but he was nowhere to be seen.
We set off towards the marina. Smells of hot oil and garlic and fish funnelled down the narrow streets; clatter and chatter wafted from small dark restaurants.
“Who, Nathan?”
“All right, all right. A bloke called Peter Maitland. I’ve been doing what you said. I went to Albufeira as it’s the nearest big town to Vale Navio and I checked the records. It was easier than I thought. There was a girl on the information desk at the town hall, and she was super-helpful.”
“Which records?”
“The electoral roll. If Terry Jackson was registered, there would be an address for him.”
“And was he?”
“No.”
“Might not be the right place. Or he might not be eligible to vote.”
“For sure. But I reckoned Albufeira was a big town and it would cover places all around. I got them to look at the lists of local taxpayers, too, but they still didn’t come up with anything. So I’m going down the corridor to leave and this man runs after me and gives me a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. Peter Maitland. Apparently, this Maitland had been in recently asking to check the records for Terry Jackson, too. And he left his details, saying that if ever anyone else came asking the same question, would they pass them on.”
“So you got in touch with him.”
“Exactly.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Yeah, but not for long. He didn’t seem to want to say too much, and neither did I.”
“Did you ask why he was interested in Terry Jackson?”
“Didn’t get a chance. He told me to meet him at the small chapel at the Largo do Carmo at seven o’clock today. He didn’t say it was full of flaming bones—not sure I appreciate his sense of humour.”
We passed several unsmiling older men, stepping off the pavement onto the road as they seemed determined not to give way to us. They moved with a compacted strength that might have been borne of aggression, or a barely buried resentment of the tourists who were keeping the town afloat.
“But Peter Maitland never showed up,” I said, feeling queasy. “Did you see anyone who you thought might have been him?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you got to the church, was there anyone else there—in particular, a man who you thought might have been this Peter Maitland?”
“There were a few people around in the main part of the church. I didn’t really look too closely. I went straight to the little chapel because that’s where he said to go. No one came into the bones place except a French couple, and then some women—and then you.”
“You didn’t notice a tall, white-haired man with a loose, cream cotton jacket?”
“Now you come to mention it . . . perhaps there was someone who looked like that. He was over by one of the gold recesses on the other side of the altar.”
“Did he seem to notice you?”
“How would I know? Why do you ask?”
“Because I followed Ian Rylands and I saw him go into the church at about ten to seven. Rylands is the Anglo-Algarve Association guy I met last week,” I reminded him. “He couldn’t wait to help me out with what I wanted to know. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“It’s just a coincidence.”
“Perhaps, but . . .” I shook my head. “No. What did this Maitland sound like on the phone? How old did he sound? Did he have any kind of accent?”
Nathan gave a long exhalation. “He sounded . . . older. Quite a posh accent. A bit like yours.”
“Or Rylands’.”
W hen we spotted a modest pizzeria close to the junction where I’d almost caught up with Rylands, I steered Nathan into it, fed him a large pizza and limited his alcohol intake to a small beer.
“Now I want to ask you something else,” I said. “Is Nathan Emberlin your real name?”
He blinked. “It is for now.”
“Care to explain?”
His elbows were on the table and his head went down into his hands. I watched the long brown fingers kneading his scalp through the mop of hair.
Minutes went by.
When he raised his head he looked me straight in the eye. “This is not easy,” he said. “And you probably won’t even believe me. I don’t even know whether I do, actually.”
He twisted the buttons at the open neck of his shirt. I noticed for the first time that his fingernails were bitten, or maybe they hadn’t been before. I smiled to let him know I was on his side and could wait as long as necessary.
“You know the other day I said I might have found out something about the children who have been snatched down here? That it was nothing new—it’s been happening for a long time?”
“Yes.”
He paused to change the position of the pepper and the bottle of chili oil, then began to twist his empty beer bottle.
“When I said Terry Jackson was a family friend . . . I thought he was, anyway, but maybe he wasn’t. He used to come round once in a while to see my dad when he was still alive. Lung cancer, before you ask. Eight years ago. Too many cigarettes.”
The beer bottle was being ground into the table.
“I thought Roy was my dad and all. I didn’t know anything until my mum died six months ago. A hit-and-run as she was crossing the road outside where she worked in Bexleyheath. And she wasn’t my mum either, it seems. They never said a word about it.
“But when mum—Sue—was in hospital a letter arrived for her. I put it in a pile in the hall and forgot about it. She wasn’t in any state to read anything. She was just lying there with tubes and machines bleeping. It was weeks afterwards that I opened the letter. It was from Terry Jackson, sent from Portugal, telling her to stop asking questions and stirring up the past. I had no idea what it was all about, and there was no return address for him. But the tone of it was pretty unpleasant. I’d always known Terry had dealings in Spain and Portugal, and that Roy was a bit of a South London wheeler-dealer, minor league. There were things you didn’t ask about, with both of them.
“Then, when I was clearing out the house—I suppose I was looking more carefully for anything that could explain what the letter meant—I found some adoption papers. I couldn’t believe it. I was two years old when Roy and Sue became my legal parents. What’s more, the papers were in Spanish. I couldn’t understand what was going on.”
“Any other family that you could ask?”
“We weren’t big on family. Roy had fallen out with his family over the company he kept, and hers had never liked him. There wasn’t anyone to ask about it. I went mental for a while. I hadn’t seen that one coming. I was so angry that they never told me . . . who doesn’t tell their child they are adopted? Maybe years and years ago, but not nowadays.” He raised his palms in despair. “So I decided to get myself over to Spain and see if I could find out anything about my real parents. It was all I could think of to do.”
His eyes were almost black.
“The address on the adoption papers was an agency in Malaga, but it no longer existed. I went back time after time, asking all the older people I could find in the area whether they had ever heard of it, and no one had. Then, one old dear in the next building told me she used to know someone who worked there, who had been very kind when her cat got injured, took it to the vet, paid for it . . . Anyway, to cut to the chase, she put me in touch with this woman, and I managed to meet her. She was very nervous, but I think she really was a nice woman, and she did want to help. She said she’d left the adoption agency when she found out it wasn’t all above the line. Most of it was, but
some wasn’t.
“I got out the papers and showed them to her. She studied them and went a bit shaky. She said she remembered my case and she hadn’t been happy about it. I asked how she could remember one case that far back, and she said it was because it was the first one she had questioned.”
“Questioned in what way?”
“She was told to put on the form that my birth parents were Spanish, from a specific village down the coast, but she knew that wasn’t true. She’d overheard the agency director talking about the two-year-old boy who had been brought from Portugal. A place was mentioned, somewhere called Horta das Rochas. And she knew that there was some kind of deal brokered with a man called Jackson. She found out later he was a small-time criminal based on the Algarve.”
“She didn’t contact the police?”
“I think she was scared. She claimed she didn’t know Terry Jackson was dodgy until some time after the adoption had gone through. Perhaps she found out other bits and pieces it was better to keep quiet about. Malaga has a reputation, you know. But she definitely felt guilty about it when I came along. Made me swear on my life never to give her name.”
I bit my lip. “To rewind a little bit,” I said gently. “You said that child abductions have been happening here for a long time. Are you saying what I think you are?”
He nodded.
“It’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?” I said.
“That’s what I want to find out. There were several child abductions linked to Vale Navio in the early nineties. There might have been more that never made the news. I knew that was where Terry Jackson worked because I remembered him talking about it when he came to see my dad. He used to go on about it all the time, boasting about the money he was making there. It kind of became a family catchphrase. If anyone did a sweet deal or came into money, we called it ‘Vale Navio.’ ”
“How many other people have you told?”
“No one.”
We sat quietly for a while.
“Why ‘Nathan Emberlin’?”
“Because that was the name I had when I arrived at the adoption agency in Malaga, the name on the papers when the agency handed me over, supposedly all nice and legal, to Roy and Sue Harris on September 16, 1992. It was on the document.”
“Do I still call you Nathan?”
“I quite like it. It’s more who I really am than Josh Harris, after all.”
I made Nathan put his number in my mobile, and then rang it while he was still there to make sure it was correct, and that he had mine. This time, I wanted to get everything right.
“You should get some sleep,” I said. “You’ll make yourself ill if you don’t.”
“Fat chance of that. The girls in my house will be raring for action, and they don’t take no for an answer. There’ll be too much noise and then everyone’ll be off clubbing again. And then . . . look, I don’t want you to think I’m losing it or anything, right, but I think my room got broken into. My stuff was messed about, but I couldn’t find anything missing. Then one of the girls told me the man who was asking about me had come back and that he gave her the creeps. Now I keep thinking I might have seen him myself, and that he’s following me, but there again, I might be getting paranoid. I mean, if he wanted to see me, why doesn’t he just knock on the door?”
