Later that afternoon I would meet Frank and his lawyer in Marbella, a forty-

minute drive up the coast. But when I collected my car from the rental ofce
near the airport I found that an immense trafc jam had closed the border
crossing. Hundreds of cars and buses waited in a gritty haze of engine exhaust,
while teenaged girls grizzled and their grandmothers shouted at the Spanish
soldiers. Ignoring the impatient horns, the Guardia Civil were checking every
screw and rivet, ofciously searching suitcases and supermarket cartons,
peering under bonnets and spare wheels.
'I need to be in Marbella by fve,' I told the rental ofce manager, who was
gazing at the stalled vehicles with the serenity of a man about to lease his last
car before collecting his pension. 'This trafc jam has a permanent look about it.'
'Calm yourself, Mr Prentice. It can clear at any time, when the Guardia realize
how bored they are.'
'All these regulations . . .' I shook my head over the rental agreement. 'Spare
bulbs, frst-aid kit, fre extinguisher? This Renault is better equipped than the
plane that few me here.'
'You should blame Cadiz. The new Civil Governor is obsessed with La Linea.
His workfare schemes are unpopular with the people there.'
'Too bad. So there's a lot of unemployment?'..-
'Not exactly. Rather too much employment, but of the wrong kind.'
'The smuggling kind? A few cigarettes and camcorders?'..-
'Not so few. Everyone at La Linea is very happy - they hope that Gibraltar will
remain British for ever.'
I had begun to think about Frank, who remained British but in a Spanish cell.
As I joined the line of waiting cars I remembered our childhood in Saudi Arabia
twenty years earlier, and the arbitrary trafc checks carried out by the religious
police in the weeks before Christmas. Not only was the smallest drop of festive
alcohol the target of their silky hands, but even a single sheet of seasonal
wrapping paper with its sinister emblems of Yule logs, holly and ivy. Frank and
I would sit in the back of our father's Chevrolet, clutching the train sets that
would be wrapped only minutes before we opened them, while he argued with
the police in his sarcastic professorial Arabic, unsettling our nervous mother.