300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson Read Free Book Online

wanted to say a great deal more but was holding back.
    â€œYou should read it,” he repeated.
    The waiter interrupted us there with the bill, which I insisted on paying, and Rylands accepted after a gentlemanly show of reluctance. It was only as we stood to leave that I remembered.
    â€œHorta das Rochas,” I said. “When you told me the Café Aliança had plenty to do with it, was that just in the abstract, or was there a specific link?”
    â€œThere is a link.”
    He gave a chuckle. It seemed to be a sound he used to denote a private joke. I was never keen on playing games for information, but sometimes there was no way round. I was the one who had made the first move, and so I had to let him draw even.
    â€œTell you what,” he said. “I’ll get hold of a copy of Esta Hartford’s book and let you have it. Then we can talk again.”

 
    iv
    N athan was still distracted when I told him about meeting Ian Rylands. I had to admit I hadn’t learned anything new about Terry Jackson, and there didn’t seem much more to say.
    On the Thursday he didn’t turn up for morning class. No one thought it was that surprising. He’d been out on the tiles again. Even he couldn’t escape the cumulative effect of too many all-­nighters.
    It was quiet without him. The others in the class were all right, but the women seemed to have formed a group that didn’t automatically include me. Enzo was eager to take me out to dinner, and I was having to find more and more feeble excuses to avoid the inevitable. Tomas the IT man from Berne was pleasant and friendly, but there wasn’t the frame of reference and easy humour I shared with Nathan.
    When I went into Café Aliança on the Friday morning, I hadn’t heard anything more from Ian Rylands. I’d called the Algarve Daily News , but the reporter I needed to talk to was on holiday and wouldn’t be back until the following week.
    I took it as a kind of acceptance that the same tubby barman prepared a coffee for me without being asked. This time the minuscule coffee cup came without chips in the china, and what’s more, breakfast was on offer.
    â€œTosta?” he asked.
    I now knew that was toast and cheese, and accepted eagerly. We attempted a halting continuation of our exchange. His name was João. It would soon be the weekend, I managed to say, as if that might have been news to him (this is the worst aspect of trying to speak in a new language: it makes you seem stupid), and I had decided to go to the beach.
    João nodded encouragingly and asked slowly and clearly if I liked to swim. I did. He told me to have fun but not to fall asleep on the beach; the wind could burn. It wasn’t a meeting of minds but it was progress.
    As I paid the small bill in coins and picked up my bag to go, João raised a finger and reached under the bar. He brought out a small package, its brown wrapping paper mummified by parcel tape, and held it out to me.
    â€œWhat is it?” Actually, I think I asked him how it was.
    â€œFor you.”
    Sure enough, in the small exposed patch of paper was my name, etched in neat block capitals.
    I didn’t open the package there and then, mainly because it was bound too tightly to be ripped into, and partly because I’ve learned the value of a public poker face when confronted with anything unexpected. João delved again under the counter and produced a knife, but I shook my head and slipped the parcel into my bag.
    It weighed like lead in the bag over my shoulder until I got to the nearest pharmacy and went in to buy a pair of nail scissors. On a bench on a small square at a junction of cobbled streets, I slit open the tape and extracted the contents. There was no note enclosed, but there was no need for one.
    It was a book, an old hardback with a torn dust jacket. The Alliance by Esta Hartford.
    I hurried on, hoping to find Nathan had used his day off wisely