Panteco scratched five circles with his pen before the ink flowed.

“Name,” he began, but even as he noted it down Panteco was exhausted by a sense of futility.

“Address?” He asked. Abdul Hadi didn’t even have a visa. It wasn’t like the old days when Panteco’s grandfather fired his cannon at six o’clock and the Moors had to leave town for the night. Now they lived here. A plague of them. Coming to work on the tunnel. Coming to enter a Europe without frontiers. Poisoning his patch with their bundles of hash on their way. Crossing on the bridges of their own dead.

Tabacañeros like this Mohamed were harmless. The harm was done by men the other side of La Mujer Muerta. Until five years ago, these men had been content to smuggle the hash they grew between tomatoes in Ketama. But the tunnel had made them greedy. They had set their sights on whiter drugs. If one believed El Faro half the Tercio were zombies. Panteco’s boss believed it. Panteco believed it too. He saw them in the streets, outside schools, collapsed in. church. They left their trail in blood on elevator doors and on the backs of pews. He had only to look into their eyes to see what they had done. They’d look at you, through you, like maniacs.

“The darkest place is always underneath the lamp.” That’s what Panteco’s grandfather, the night watchman, used to say. The biggest maniac was not in Ketama. He was not in Tetouan or Tangier. He was here among them, in Abyla. No one knew who he was, or even what he looked like. No one knew anything – save that he was known to all as El Callado.

“Get the bastard’s ass in here, Panteco,” said his chief.

“Oh, yes sir, by all means.” But how? Panteco had already been five years on the trail, and for five years he had been looking at no El Callado. It was like untying a knot when you’re fishing, a maddening, inextricably tangled knot that caused you to sit there picking while the plumpest fish you ever saw swam a slow striptease in the water, gurgling “Panteco, Panteco, Panteco . . . ”

Five years on, he believed he had identified El Callado’s boat, a Ford-Maclaren which started on gear. It had the power to leave Abyla, make the pick-up off La Mujer Muerte, cross to Atunara and be back in an hour, clean as his whistle. El Callado paid three million pesetas a job, that’s what his chief reckoned. Not that El Callado was silly enough to register the boat in his name. It was chartered from some bona fide smart arse in Bermuda and never to the same crew. They were weekend sailors who walked on deck in shoes and tied weird knots to fenders and if the poniente blew forgot the springline. If they sailed out of Abyla at night, Panteco would telephone Algeciras. Sometimes Algeciras bothered to send a helicopter and its lights would criss-cross the sea searching for a telltale wake. Or they might send the turbo which could race without fear over the tunny-nets, the trouble being it only raced at 40 knots. El Callado’s men sat on Monte Hacho with radio sets and night-goggles and when the coast was clear they flashed their torches into the telescope on the belvedere and just the person at whom the telescope was pointed could see the sign. All this Panteco knew. But in Abyla he didn’t have a helicopter. He had no turbo. He had a crab boat suitable for monitoring the rocks – and for catching tabacañeros like Mohamed.