closed the border crossing. Hundreds of cars and buses waited in a gritty haze of engine exhaust, while teenaged girls grizzled and their grandmothers shouted at the Spanish soldiers. Ignoring the impatient horns, the Guardia Civil were checking every screw and rivet, officiously searching suitcases and supermarket cartons, peering under bonnets and spare wheels.
‘I need to be in Marbella by five,’ I told the rental office manager, who was gazing at the stalled vehicles with the serenity of a man about to lease his last car before collecting his pension. ‘This traffic jam has a permanent look about it.’
‘Calm yourself, Mr Prentice. It can clear at any time, when the Guardia realize how bored they are.’
‘All these regulations …’ I shook my head over the rental agreement. ‘Spare bulbs, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher? This Renault is better equipped than the plane that flew me here.’
‘You should blame Cadiz. The new Civil Governor is obsessed with La Linea. His workfare schemes are unpopular with the people there.’
‘Too bad. So there’s a lot of unemployment?’
‘Not exactly. Rather too much employment, but of the wrong kind.’
‘The smuggling kind? A few cigarettes and camcorders?’
‘Not so few. Everyone at La Linea is very happy – they hope that Gibraltar will remain British for ever.’
I had begun to think about Frank, who remained British but in a Spanish cell. As I joined the line of waiting cars I remembered our childhood in Saudi Arabia twenty years earlier, and the arbitrary traffic checks carried out by the religious police in the weeks before Christmas. Not only was the smallest drop of festive alcohol the target of their silky hands, but even a single sheet of seasonal wrapping paper with its sinister emblems of Yule logs, holly and ivy. Frank and I would sit in the back of our father’s Chevrolet, clutching the train sets that would be wrapped only minutes before we opened them, while he argued with the police in his sarcastic professorial Arabic, unsettling our nervous mother.
Smuggling was one activity we had practised from an early age. The older boys at the English school in Riyadh talked among themselves about an intriguing netherworld of bootleg videos, drugs and illicit sex. Later, when we returned to England after our mother’s death, I realized that these small conspiracies had kept the British expats together and given them their sense of community. Without the liaisons and contraband runs our mother would have lost her slipping hold on the world long before the tragic afternoon when she climbed to the roof of the British Institute and made her brief flight to the only safety she could find.
At last the traffic had begun to move, lurching forward in a noisy rush. But the mud-stained van in front of me was still detained by the Guardia Civil. A soldier opened the rear doors and hunted through cardboard cartons filled with plastic dolls. His heavy hands fumbled among the pinkly naked bodies, watched by hundreds of rocking blue eyes.
Irritated by the delay, I was tempted to drive around the van. Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating. Intrigued by her lazy sexual confidence, I smiled as she fingered her mascara and lightly brushed the undersides of her eyelashes like an indolent lover. Who was she – a nightclub cashier, a property tycoon’s mistress, or a local prostitute returning to La Linea with a fresh stock of condoms and sex aids?
She noticed me watching her in my rear-view mirror and snapped down her sun vizor, waking both of us from this dream of herself. She swung the steering wheel and pulled out to pass me, baring her strong teeth as she slipped below a no-entry sign.
I started my engine and was about to follow her, but the soldier fumbling among the plastic dolls turned to bellow at me.
‘Acceso prohibido …!’
He leaned against my windshield, a greasy hand smearing the glass, and saluted the young woman, who was turning into the police car park beside the checkpoint. He glared down at me, nodding to himself and clearly convinced that he had caught a lecherous tourist in the act of visually molesting the wife of his commanding officer. He moodily flicked through the pages of my passport, unimpressed by the gallery of customs stamps and visas from the remotest corners of the globe. Each frontier crossing was a unique transaction that defused the magic of any other.
I waited for him to order me from the car and carry out an aggressive body-search, before settling down to dismande the entire Renault until it lay beside the road like a manufacturer’s display kit. But he had lost interest in me, his spare eye noticing a coach filled with migrant Moroccan workers who had taken the ferry from Tangier. Abandoning his search of the van and its cargo of dolls, he advanced upon the stoical Arabs with all the menace and dignity of Rodrigo Diaz out-staring the MOOR at the Battle of Valencia.
I followed the van as it sped towards La Linea, rear doors swinging and the dolls dancing together with their feet in the air. Even the briefest confrontation with police at a border crossing had the same disorienting effect on me. I imagined Frank in the interrogation cells in Marbella at that very moment, faced with the same accusing eyes and the same assumption of guilt. I was a virtually innocent traveller, carrying no contraband other than a daydream of smuggling my brother across the Spanish frontier, yet I felt as uneasy as a prisoner breaking his parole, and I knew how Frank would have responded to the trumped-up charges that had led to his arrest at the Club Nautico in Estrella de Mar. I was certain of his innocence and guessed that he had been framed on the orders of some corrupt police chief who had tried to extort a bribe.
I left the eastern outskirts of La Linea and set off along the coast road towards Sotogrande, impatient to see Frank and reassure him that all would be well. The call from David Hennessy, the retired Lloyd’s underwriter who was now the treasurer of the Club Nautico, had reached me in my Barbican flat the previous evening. Hennessy had been disturbingly vague, as if rambling to himself after too much sun and sangria, the last person to inspire confidence.
‘It does look rather bad … Frank told me not to worry you, but I felt I had to call.’
‘Thank God you did. Is he actually under arrest? Have you told the British Consul in Marbella?’
‘Malaga, yes. The Consul’s closely involved. It’s an important case, I’m surprised you didn’t read about it.’
‘I’ve been abroad. I haven’t seen an English paper for weeks. In Lhasa there’s not much demand for news about the Costa del Sol.’
‘I dare say. The Fleet Street reporters were all over the club. We had to close the bar, you know.’
‘Never mind the bar!’ I tried to get a grip on the conversation. ‘Is Frank all right? Where are they holding him?’
‘He’s fine. On the whole he’s taking it well. He’s very quiet, though that’s understandable. He has a lot to think over.’
‘But what are the charges? Mr Hennessy …?’
‘Charges?’ There was a pause as ice-cubes rattled. ‘There seem to be a number. The Spanish prosecutor is drawing up the articles of accusation. We’ll have to wait for them to be translated. I’m afraid the police aren’t being very helpful.’
‘Do you expect them to be? It sounds like a frame-up.’
‘It’s not as simple as that … one has to see it in context. I think you should come down here as soon as you can.’
Hennessy
