They had their first glimpse of the sea, emerald blue and mirror-smooth to the end of space and then in the glimmering golden sunshine they saw the Palace, standing high above the harbour. Below the trees the white flat-topped houses and the spires and towers of the Churches gave Jācara an almost Fairytale beauty.

It was impossible to think that treachery or cruelty or injustice could be rife among so much loveliness and Skye thought how little she had known about Mariposa and its people when her yacht had nosed its way so gaily and confidently into the harbour.

She remembered standing on dock with Jimmy and how she had said to him a little breathlessly,

“Mariposa at last!”

“I only hope it is the El Dorado you believe it to be,” he answered.

“Why not?” she enquired. “Surely one doesn’t always have to be disappointed?”

He smiled at her enthusiasm.

“Not always,” he agreed.

She knew that his hopefulness had been born only out of his fondness for her.

‘If only we had known,’ she thought now, if only either of them had had the slightest inkling of what lay ahead.

She looked sideways at El Diablo as they rode side by side. His eyes were fixed on the town. He was frowning a little and, as always when his face was in repose, it accentuated his hawk-like features and gave him a slightly sinister appearance.

It was the way he looked, Skye knew, when he was most determined and it was too how he had looked at her the first time they had met.

‘El beso del Diablo’ – how well she remembered hearing those words, whispered by the frightened boy who had crossed himself at the sight of the dead man!

Since then she had known many other kisses of El Diablo’s – kisses not of death but of love.

She felt herself quiver a little at the memory of them, of last night when he had kissed her lips, her hair, her eyes, her neck a thousand times, wildly, fiercely, possessively, as if it might be for the last time, loving her with a passion that seemed almost to be born of fear.

They were drawing nearer to Jācara.

It was no longer a distant scene, but a living reality. They were now travelling on red, hard-baked roads. There were houses and gardens, wayfarers on their donkeys and small boys trying to sell them melons, bananas and red figs and even little native birds in tiny homemade cages.

On the outskirts of the town El Diablo called yet another halt and then, while the men flicked the dust from their boots, wiped the sweat from their foreheads and set their hats at an even more jaunty angle, he gave his last instructions.

He would ride ahead and the rest would ride in threes directly behind him, Skye in the foremost rank in the centre, with a man on either side of her.