“Do you mind if I bring Dolores?” he said, hoping she would mind. Rosita didn’t mind. Dolores was her friend too. The only person Rosita minded about these days was the Englishman Silkleigh.

It tormented Panteco. Silkleigh was small, the perfect shape for a diver. Panteco was too tall for a policeman. Everyone saw him coming. He couldn’t help his booming voice, so that before they could see they could very often hear.

He pressed the handkerchief to his nose and then mopped his cheeks where his complexion was worst. The doctor had diagnosed his acne as an acute manifestation of Rock Fever, seeing the same people every day, seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, believing this was the world. “Rock Fever, my arse,” said his chief. “You don’t wash your ears out.” Panteco’s problem was that his brain was too small for his body.

Panteco’s head rose above the table. He placed the handkerchief in a safe corner.

“The newspaper,” suggested Abdul Hadi, sitting handcuffed on the bench.

“You think I haven’t thought of that?” said Panteco, feeling ugly. He spread the pages of El Faro over the table.

“Let’s start again,” he said and he waved at the damp, black fists of paper in the wicker basket. “Forget those lies. You’re a mouse with only one hole, Mohamed. This time, the truth.” He smoothed out a fresh form.

The truth was this. At two in the morning, one mile north-west of La Mujer Muerta, he had apprehended Abdul Hadi in the illegal possession of twelve crates of Winston cigarettes.

“What are you doing, Mohamed?” asked Panteco, steering his crab-boat alongside. He looked at the crates bobbing in the water. This little Mohamed’s having a party, he thought. Abdul Hadi, holding himself upright by his carbide lamp, surrounded by a lot of cardboard boxes that wouldn’t sink, about eight of them, which was a lot of Winston rubios, but not quite as many as Abdul Hadi would have liked because there were still ten crates on board which in that stretch of water constituted a criminal offence meriting four months in this Holiday Inn, said, “What do you think I’m doing, monsieur? I’m fishing. They’re not mine. They’re just there.”

“I got you fried, Mohamed. Hear that? Frito!” Captain Panteco stepped on board. “Do you have any arms, stowaways or animals?”

But Abdul Hadi had only the cigarettes. Panteco knew where the Winstons had come from. They came from Gibraltar, purchased from Stagnetto’s in Main Street for £245 a crate and sold to Abdul Hadi for £325. The profit of fifteen thousand pesetas was nothing to what Abdul Hadi would make in Abyla. Each crate contained fifty cartons. They bore no health warnings and were sealed with a United States blue sticker. Inferior Winstons made under licence in Spain were sealed in grey.

Panteco had seen all manner of Mohameds on the Playa Benitez, their trousers rolled, running up the beach with ten thousand fags on each shoulder. There was precious little Panteco could do. Every time he tried to do something, an army of fisherman’s wives and children rushed from their houses and blocked his path to Mohamed’s lock-up in El Hadu.