The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [5]
It was too much to bear. ‘Come on!’ she said and started across the cobbled hard towards the quayside with the protesting Jeremy scuttling after.
‘But what are we doing here? We don’t even know where we’re going!’ he said indignantly once they were safely on board the boat, having very nearly missed it.
‘Call yourself a journalist,’ she answered, as they made their way across the uneasy deck, which was already feeling the effects of the choppy water, even before they had reached the harbour entrance. ‘You’ve got to have the nose 17
of a truffle pig if you’re going to find stories that are worth anything. There’s something strange going on, and I’m going to find out what.’
‘A truffle pig?’ said Jeremy. ‘You’re just nosy.’
‘That’s right,’ she agreed cheerfully. ‘Got anything better to do?’ she added, grabbing hold of the rail as a particularly insistent lurch threatened to send her flying.
‘Thinking of doing a spot of sunbathing, were you?’
Some two hours later, even Sarah could have thought of a host of better things to do. She’d quickly found the Brigadier, morosely sipping a large scotch in the shelter of the little bar, and managed to slip away again without his noticing her.
Rejoining her reluctant colleague, who was already starting to turn pale, she’d studied the map on the wall of the main saloon, trying to guess which of the islands the Brigadier might be making for. Lipari, the biggest, was the most likely, she decided.
Not a bit of it. Not Lipari; not Vulcano; not Salina; not Panaria; at none of the group of Aeolian islands was the Brig to be seen amongst the disembarking passengers. It became increasingly (and, as, the wind and the sea rose, increasingly uncomfortably) obvious that he was intending to stay on board until the ship reached its last ports of call –
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the little islands of San Stefano Maggiore and San Stefano Minore away to the west. She pointed this out to the inert body lying on the bench seat opposite and was rewarded by a grunt; and, truth to tell, by the time they were bumpily coming alongside the jetty which formed the eastern boundary of the little harbour at Porto Minore, her enthusiasm for the expedition was hardly greater than his.
‘Wakey, wakey,’ she said. ‘We’re there.’
‘Where?’ a faint voice enquired.
‘Wherever.’ She surveyed the face attached to the voice (which was now a tasteful shade of eau-de‐nil). ‘You look ghastly,’ she said in an objective way. ‘Sort of dead-ish.’
‘I wish I were,’ came the nearly inaudible reply.
As Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart trudged heavily up the path through the orange trees whipping back and forth in the rising wind – it was so narrow and convoluted that it could hardly be accounted a road, even though it was the only way up the hill from the harbour – the plurality of worries which rumbled through his mind conflated into one overwhelming undefinable emotion: a sort of gloomy frustrated desperate rage.
Of course, he was thinking, Uncle Mario was clearly loopy when he first met him, when Granny MacDougal brought him to San Stefano on his first summer hols from 19
prep school – and Uncle was a middle-aged man then. But now! You only had to look at him, with his shock of spiky grey hair, hopping around like a cross between an aged Puck and an Italian Mr Punch – Pulcinello, they called him, didn’t they?
But surely his sort of pottiness couldn’t be hereditary, could it? But anyway, if it could, he was hardly in the direct line. Even if it were true that he was the old codger’s only living relative… Good grief, as if he wanted to take on the responsibility of being Lord of the Manor – Barone, or whatever – of a tiny little island in the middle of nowhere!… even if it were true, it was a pretty tenuous connection. Not even a great uncle, really. His grandmother’s second cousin – so what did that make him?
Third cousin three times removed or something ridiculous.
If it was in the blood, though…
On the other hand, some sorts of craziness were catching, weren’t they? Folie a deux. That’s what they