Free An Artistic Way to Go by Roderic Jeffries

kind used to hold medicinal pills.
    The sea came right up to the cliff face and there would only be traces of his having fallen if he had done so in too shallow an arc and struck the rock face during his descent; even then, it might be virtually impossible to detect these.
    What action was to be taken? He said the car was to be kept under guard until he had examined it.
    After the call was over, he settled back in the chair. Contaix was on the north coast, at a point where the jagged, stark cliffs were a hundred, or more, metres high. When oar or sail had been the only form of marine propulsion, ships had frequently been driven ashore by adverse winds, with the usual result that whole crews had been drowned. There were villagers who claimed that in a gale from the north, the cries of drowning men could clearly be heard above the howling wind. Because the village had once been all but isolated, the inhabitants were much more inward looking than most – it was said that they would always greet a stranger with a scowl rather than a smile and there was the expression, as bloody-minded as a Contaixian. It was a village, indeed an area, that he hardly knew, not so much because of the nature of the inhabitants, but because it was a land of heights and depths and both these terrified him.
    The drive to Contaix was one that would have confounded all those tourists who believed the island to consist of nothing but beaches, happy hours, lager louts, and concrete. The road wound its way up and down and around mountain after mountain, some bare rock, some covered with pine trees. Sometimes it seemed as if the walls of rock were about to fall and crush, sometimes there were distant views of great natural beauty. In a valley there would be a small village and cultivated land, beyond would be a wild fastness in which only the road itself gave evidence of human intervention.
    He passed through Contaix – untouched by tourism because it was seldom visited; a jig-saw of roads, mostly very narrow, lined by shuttered, stone-built houses with bleak exteriors – and a cutting that had had to be blasted out, to reach a short stretch of narrow, relatively flat land, halfway along which was a signposted viewing area which lay between the road and the cliff. The green BMW and a Guardia Renault were parked in the centre of the area. He turned off the road and braked to a halt behind the Renault, climbed out. Llueso had been swelteringly hot; here, it was merely pleasantly warm, thanks to the sea breeze.
    The driver of the Renault spoke through the opened window. ‘It’s taken you long enough to get here.’
    â€˜I’m a busy man.’
    â€˜So are we, but we’ve had to sit here and watch the seagulls.’
    â€˜You must know old Marx’s motto – each according to his abilities. Anything more turned up?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I’ll check out the car, then.’
    â€˜Tell you one thing. In this day and age, it’s a miracle that a car like that can be left standing around and not be stripped out.’
    Alvarez went forward to the BMW and searched it, surprised to discover that everything was as had been reported – the newspaper on the front passenger seat, the signet ring and wallet in the glove locker, the empty bottle of whisky and three silver-foil strips in the back well. In addition, three cigarette stubs were in the front ashtray and in the boot was an empty, scrumpled pack of Lucky Strike.
    He crossed to the recently erected Armco barrier – in the past, people had been left to decide how stupid they were – and with each step his fear grew. It was ridiculous and he always despised himself because of it; again and again, he’d promised himself that he would overcome it; but now he knew once more the terror that made him want to turn and run, the siren’s song that tried to lure him on by turning his terrible fear into a terrible longing … He reached the Armco