thought she was asleep, but he couldn’t be sure, because he couldn’t see her eyeballs, because of the mirror shades.
So he kept his own eyes front.
John Carr had retired from 22 SAS as a Squadron Sergeant Major, having fought his way across every theatre of operations from the first Gulf War onwards in a long and distinguished career.
He’d twice been decorated for gallantry – not for nothing had he been known as ‘Mad John’ – and he had taken no shit from anyone in a very long time indeed.
But Alice, seventeen years old, and sixty-two kilos wringing wet, could bring him to heel with one withering look and a few choice words.
He wasn’t sure what they were filling her head with at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, for his thirty-five grand a year, but a lot of it seemed to revolve around the patriarchy, feminism, and the objectification of women.
It mystified Carr, who’d grown up in the 1980s on the streets of the rough Edinburgh suburb of Niddrie: he respected birds, right enough, but since when had it become a sin to fucking look at them?
Still, better safe than sorry.
He rubbed the livid, inverted-crescent scar on his chin, and stared dead ahead.
They were twenty metres from the sea.
It really was beautiful.
Shame about those screaming kids.
One of them was really wailing now – he’d dropped his ice cream in the water, snot was bubbling from his nose, and his fat, orange, German dad was trying to calm him down.
Shame about the kids, and a shame about the sand in Carr’s shorts, too.
And in the crack of his arse, and between his toes, and gritty in his mouth.
He sighed, and looked to his right.
His son George – seven years older than Alice – was eyeing up a couple of pretty Spanish girls, his own girlfriend face-down on her towel and oblivious.
Beyond George, a couple of older blokes casually ogled Alice as they trudged by.
Carr stared at them, hard, and once they caught his eye, and clocked his menacing physique, they looked quickly away and moved on.
He glanced down between his legs and flicked at a piece of dried seaweed with a grey driftwood twig.
Funny how life turns out.
You grow up in a council tenement block, surrounded by concrete, broken glass and graffiti, you don’t expect to find yourself rubbing shoulders with Europe’s filthy rich on a beach at Puerto Banús.
Back home in the UK, Carr’s day job was as head of London security for the Russian oligarch Konstantin Avilov. Earlier in the year Carr had taken out a Ukrainian hitman who had tried to kill his boss on the streets of London, as part of the ongoing, low-level power struggle which increasingly stretched out from Moscow in every direction around the globe.
As a thank you, his boss had given him a big payrise, and a Porsche Cayenne – bit tacky, for Carr’s taste, so he’d quickly swapped it for a classy 5.0L V8 Supercharged Range Rover, in Spectral British Racing Green.
Avilov had insisted, too, that he take a couple of weeks at his Marbella villa, a ten-bedroomed, chrome-and-white monument to vulgarity, in a gated community five minutes away at Vega del Colorado.
Take the family, Johnny. It’s a thank you for everything what you done for me.
Including saving my life, he hadn’t said.
But both men knew.
A woman in her early thirties came into his eyeline, canvas bag in hand and diaphanous sarong hugging her hips, and gave him a long look through her Dior shades as she passed by.
Carr grinned at her, and then she was gone.
He looked at his watch.
One o’clock.
God, he was bored.
Sitting here, slowly chargrilling himself to death, in the heat of a Spanish midday in early August.
Christ, the heat.
Unlike many Scots, he was dark-haired and he tanned easily. Added to which, he’d spent enough time in hot, sandy places – carrying a rifle, 100lbs of kit and ammo in his webbing and bergen, and wearing a lot more than a pair of shorts – to have got used to it.
But somehow Afghan heat, Iraqi heat, African heat, didn’t feel so bad.
He grinned to himself: maybe it was the rounds cracking off past your swede. That had a funny way of putting things like the ambient temperature into context.
The two pretty Spanish girls got up and wiggled and jiggled off down to the water, giggling as they went.
Carr risked a quick glance.
Caught George’s eye.
‘You sad bastard,’ said his son, with a grin and a shake of his head. ‘You sad, sad bastard.’
SIXTY KILOMETRES NORTH-EAST, the MS Windsor Castle sat at anchor on Pier 1 of Málaga’s Eastern dock.
On the bridge, the captain – an Italian, Carlo Abandonato – sipped his coffee and studied the latest weather reports.
In a few hours, they would be underway again, heading up and through the Strait of Gibraltar, three days out from Southampton on the final leg of the cruise.
The Strait could be a tricky little stretch, even for a ship such as the Windsor Castle, which – while not in the front rank of such vessels – was relatively modern and well-equipped.
The convergence of the roiling Atlantic with the almost tideless Mediterranean, in that narrow channel where Africa stared down Europe, created strange and unpredictable currents, and local weather conditions could make that much worse.
The cold Mistral, blowing down from the Rhone Alps, could quickly turn a warm summer’s day such as this a bitter, wintry grey, and when the Levanter blew across from the Balearics it often brought with it a sudden summer fog.
Worst of all was the Sirocco, which whipped up heavy seas and hurled sand from the distant Sahara at you in a blinding fury.
But today the water was duckpond flat, the wind no more than a warm breath, and the radar was set fair for the next few days.
Good news for Captain Abandonato, good news for the crew, and good news for the five hundred passengers who were currently drinking, eating, and sunbathing on the six decks behind and beneath him, or enjoying lunch ashore in one of Málaga’s many excellent restaurants.
He was looking forward to getting to Southampton; from there he would head up
