Vandervell’s jacket lay over a chair. She waited for three hours for him to return. By this time the noise from the crater was continuous. The lava flows dragged and heaved like chains, shaking the walls of the house.

At five o’clock Vandervell had not come back. A second crater had opened in the summit of the volcano, into which part of the village had fallen. When she was sure that the devil-sticks man had gone, the woman took the money from Vandervell’s jacket and drove down the mountain.

The Beach Murders

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of the Beach Murders — involving a Romanoff Princess, a CIA agent, two of his Russian counterparts and an American limbo dancer — may care to approach it in the form of the card game with which Quimby, the absconding State Department cipher chief, amused himself in his hideaway on the Costa Blanca. The principal clues have therefore been alphabetized. The correct key might well be a familiar phrase, e. g. PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH, or meaningless, e. g. qwertyuiop… etc. Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery, like the motives and character of Quimby himself, lies forever hidden Auto-erotic As always after her bath, the reflection of her naked body filled the Princess with a profound sense of repose. In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself, the scent of the Guerlain heliotrope soothing her slight migraine. She lowered her arms as the bedroom door opened. Through the faint mist of talcum she recognized the handsome, calculating face of the Russian agent whose photograph she had seen in Statler’s briefcase that afternoon.

Statler waded through the breaking surf. The left cup of the brassiere in his hand was stained with blood. He bent down and washed it in the warm water. The pulsing headlamps of the Mercedes parked below the cornjche road lit up the cove. Where the hell was Lydia? Somewhere along the beach a woman with a bloody breast would frighten the wits out of the Russian landing party.

The self-contained face of the bullfighter, part gamin, part Beatle, lay below Quimby as he set out the cards on the balcony table. Whatever else they said about the boy, he never moved his feet. By contrast Raissa was pacing around the bedroom like a tigress in rut. Quimby could hear her wide Slavic hips brushing against his Paisley dressing gown behind the escritoire. What these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all.

Those bloody little capsules, Raissa thought. No wonder the West was dying. Every time she was ready to lure Quimby over to Sir Giles’s villa he took one of the tranquillizers, then went down to the sea and talked to the beachniks. At Benidorm he even had the nerve to bring one of the Swedish girls back to the apartment. Hair down to her knees, breasts like thimbles, the immense buttocks of a horse. Ugh.

The Princess slid the remains of the eclair into her mouth. As she swallowed the pastry she pouted her cream-filled lips at Statler. He lowered his rolled-up copy of Time Atlantic, with its photo of Quimby before the House Committee. The dancers moved around the tea-terrace to the soft rhythm of the fox-trot. There was something sensuous, almost sexual, about Marion’s compulsive eating of eclairs. This magnificent Serbo-Croat cow, had she any idea what was going to happen to her?

Lydia felt his hand move along the plastic zipper of her dress. She lay on the candlewick bedspread, gazing at the sea and the white sand. Apart from the dotty English milord who had rented the villa to them the place was empty. As Kovarski hesitated the silence seemed to amplify all the uncertainties she had noticed since their arrival at San Juan. The meeting at the nudist colony on the Isle du Levant had not been entirely fortuitous. She reached up and loosened the zip. As her breasts came out she turned to face him. Kovarski was sitting up on one elbow, staring through his Zeiss binoculars at the apartment block three hundred yards along the beach.

Quimby watched the olive-uniformed policemen ambling along the shore, their quaint Napoleonic hats shielding their eyes as they scanned the girls on the beach. When it came to the crunch, on whose side would they see themselves — Stat’s, the Russians’, or his own? Quimby shuffled the Cordobs-backed cards. The platinum-haired callgirl who lived in the next apartment was setting off for Alicante in her pink Fiat. Quimby sipped his whisky. Five minutes earlier he had discovered the concealed aerial of Raissa’s transmitter.

Kovarski was worried. The sight of Raissa’s body on the pony skin reminded him that Statler was still to be reckoned with. The piercing whistle from the portable radio confirmed that Raissa had been lying there since dusk. He knelt down, eyes lingering for a last moment on the silver clasps of her Gossard suspenders. He put his finger in her mouth and ran it around her gums, searching for the capsule. A cherry popped into his palm. With a grimace he dropped it into the vodkatini by the radio. He opened Raissa’s right hand and from the frozen clasp of her thumb and forefinger removed the capsule. As he read the message his brow furrowed. What the devil had the Princess to do with Quimby? Was this some insane CIA plot to restore the Romanoffs?

The jade reptile shattered on the tiled floor at Sir Giles’s feet. With an effort he regained his balance. Pretending to straighten his Old Etonian tie, he touched the painful bruise under his breast-bone. He looked up at the tough, squarejawed face of the American girl. Would she hit him again? She glared at him contemptuously, bare feet planted wide on the pony skin. Ah well, he thought, there had been worse moments. At Dunkirk the bombs falling from the Stukas had made the beach drum like a dancing floor.

Statler gazed at the ‘white salver-shaped flowers in the lobby. Their nacreous petals, bled of all colour, reminded him of Manon’s skin, and then of Quimby’s large pallid face, with its too-intelligent eyes watching over the sunken cheeks like a snide Buddha’s. Was the exchange a fair one, the Princess for the complex, moody cipher chief? He walked out through the revolving doors of the hotel into the bright Alicante sunlight, realizing with a pang that he would never see Manon again.

Raissa bent forwards over the bed. With the ring finger of her right hand she lifted her eyelid. For a moment the elegant mask of her face was contorted like an obscene paroquet’s. She tapped the lower lid and the microlens jumped on to the tissue. The minute R on its rim shone in the beam of the Anglepoise. She wiped the lenses and placed them in the polarimeter. As the door of the safe opened, revealing the dials of the transmitter, she listened to Quimby singing Arrivederci Roma in the bathroom. All that drinamyl and whisky would keep the pig drowsy for at least an hour.

The bar had been a mere twelve inches from the floor, Kovarski recollected, as he felt the hard curve of Lydia’s iliac crest under the midnight blue stretch pants. For once the nightclub in Benidorm was hushed, everyone watching as this demented American girl with the incredible thighs had edged under the bar, hips jerking to the throb of the jukebox. Kovarski picked his nose, involuntarily thinking about Stat. The CIA man had a face like ice.