My cabin is situated in the sand dunes, facing the sea, and is a quarter of a mile from the nearest house. It has a small weed-infested garden which I pay Toni, my good-for-nothing house-boy, to keep neat; a veranda with faded sun blinds, one big living-room, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen big enough to swing a cat in, providing it is a Manx cat.
The charm of the place to me is that it is lonely and quiet and you can’t hear anyone’s radio and you can sing in your bath without getting a brick through your window. But because it is so isolated it is also an ideal spot for anyone who wants to slit my throat. My yells for help would be as futile as a short-tempered man trying to slam a revolving door.
I was sinking the key in the lock when I heard a soft foot-fall behind me. Normally my nerves will pass in a crowd with a light behind them, but the excitement and strain of the past five days had made them a little edgy. I swung around with a quick intake of breath to find a shadowy figure right on top of me.
The right-hand punch that automatically started got no more than half-way when I saw that my visitor was a woman. I lowered my fist, gulped in a little of the hot night air and said as even as I could, ‘Must you sneak up like that and scare me out of my wits?’
‘Your name Malloy?’
I peered at the slim figure before me. It was too dark under the veranda roof to see much of her, but what I could see appeared to be worth looking at.
‘Yeah. Who are you?’
‘I want to talk to you. Let’s go in where we can park.’
As I led the way into the main room, I thought it was a pity she had a voice hard enough to crack a rock on. We stood in the darkness, close together while I groped for the light switch. I found it, thumbed it down and looked into a pair of wide brown eyes that knew all the answers and most of the questions too.
She was around twenty-four or five, and dark. Her thick glossy hair was parted in the middle and framed a face of standard prettiness that was a shade paler than it should have been and too hard and bitter for the number of years she had been using it. Her over-bright red lips, put on square, and the faint smudges under her eyes gave her a sexy look that would make men stare at her and wonder, but probably they’d get no farther than wondering. Her figure under the fawnand-green silk wind-breaker and the highwaisted slacks was good enough to advertise the best foundation garment in the business.