Hollow Mountain by Thomas Mogford

sprout on the other side, the narrow pavements jammed with cars. A red British phone box throbs on the street corner. Behind, filling my mirrors, is a London-style double-decker bus .
    I turn left off the roundabout and pass a wholesaler’s shop. The white van of earlier is parked outside. I memorise the name above the door, then press more deeply into the heart of the fortress .

Chapter Eighteen
    The pile of reference books towered precariously at the edge of Spike’s desk. He checked the time and found he’d been working for three hours straight. Only last week, anxiety about Zahra had been getting in the way of his work; now he realised that he’d barely had a chance to think of her in days. He felt a sudden stab of guilt as he imagined her abandoned in Italy, then remembered her cold impersonal voice on the phone, Jessica’s insistence that she always found a way to come out of things on top. He would wait and see what Enrico Sanguinetti sent back from Portofino, then decide what to do next.
    Back to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 . . . Something Clohessy had said about the cost of remaining moored in the Straits had suggested a possible line of attack. The competition Neptune faced from its rivals – you only had to type the company name into Google for the current location of their ship to come up – meant staying in possession of the site was all the more vital. The seas were full of unregulated salvage bandits, none of whom would be scrupulous enough to declare valuable unlisted cargo. Spike had found numerous examples of companies failing to disclose what they’d scavenged from the sea floor. Then there was the continuous harassment of the Guardia Civil: always worth bringing in the noisy Spanish neighbours to get a Gibraltarian court onside.
    The one irritant was the lack of news from Jardine. A clear accord between the salvor and the Ministry of Defence was the starting point for the case. Friday lunchtime had come and gone without any contact. So much for military efficiency. Then, as if summoned, his desk phone rang. ‘Spike Sanguinetti?’
    ‘Hugh Jardine.’
    ‘You’re late.’
    ‘Top brass took a while to debate. And we’ve decided not to press any claim on the silver.’
    Spike paused. ‘No claim at all?’
    ‘Technically the silver bars are not MoD property.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘You also said they would probably be confiscated by Customs and Excise.’
    ‘It’s possible.’
    ‘And even if they aren’t, well, frankly no one here can quite believe we’re in for a multi-million payout for some old lead. We’d rather not rock the boat with Neptune, if you’ll forgive the saying.’
    ‘You do realise the value of the silver could be five times that of the lead?’
    Jardine seemed to hesitate. ‘Try and see it from our point of view, Spike. The MoD is suffering the most swingeing cuts since the end of the Cold War. There could be hundreds more shipwrecks hidden in the Straits.’ He chuckled. ‘The wise man plays the long game.’
    ‘So that’s the official MoD position?’
    ‘I’ll have my secretary email through the documentation.’
    ‘Very well. See you on Monday.’
    ‘Monday?’
    ‘The hearing.’
    ‘I suppose I ought to be there.’
    ‘I suppose you ought.’
    Spike hung up. Baffling: Clohessy must have got to the MoD somehow. Discount the silver or we walk away. Ruthless bastard.
    He returned to his skeleton argument, cross-checking it with Galliano’s original notes. As he flicked through a printout detailing the scope of Gibraltar’s territorial waters, he noticed a faint pencil mark in the margin he’d missed the first time round. He twisted the page, trying to decipher Galliano’s sloping, artistic hand. ‘Simon,’ he read aloud, ‘Grainger’. Simon Grainger . So Grainger really had been in touch with Galliano.
    There was a phone number sketched beneath, which Spike dialled at once. ‘ Hola ?’ came a female voice. A televisual hum in the background, then