Desmond Hannah began work the following morning just after seven, while the cool of dawn still lay on the land. His starting place was Government House.
He had a long interview with the butler, Jefferson, who related to him the Governor’s unswerving habit of retiring to his walled garden about five each afternoon, to take a whiskey and soda before the sun went down. He asked how many people would have known of this ritual. Jefferson frowned in concentration.
“Many people, sir. Lady Moberley, Lieutenant Haverstock, myself, Miss Myrtle the secretary—but she away with her parents on Tortola. Visitors to the house who had seen him there. Many people.”
Jefferson described exactly where he had found the body, but he averred that he had not heard the shot. Later, this use of the word shot would convince Hannah that the butler was telling the truth. But he did not yet know how many shots there had been.
The forensic team from Nassau was working with Parker on the grass, looking for spent cartridges ejected from the killer’s gun. They searched deep, for careless feet might have trodden the small brass case or cases into the earth. The feet of Lieutenant Haverstock, Inspector Jones, and his uncle Dr. Jones had walked all over the grass on the night of the killing, erasing all chances of useful footprints.
Hannah examined the steel gate in the garden wall as the Bahamian fingerprint man dusted the steel for possible prints. There were none. Hannah estimated that if the killer had entered by the gate, as seemed to be the case, and fired immediately, the Governor would have been standing between the gate and the coral wall below the steps that led to his reception area above. If any bullet had passed through him, it should have hit that wall.
Hannah switched the attention of the team crawling about the lawn to the path of crushed conch shells that ran along the base of the wall. Then he went back to the house to talk to Lady Moberley.
The Governor’s widow awaited him in the drawing room where Sir Marston had received the protest delegation from the Committee for Concerned Citizens. She was a thin, pale woman with mousy hair and skin that had been yellowed by years in the tropics.
Jefferson appeared with a chilled lager beer on a tray. Hannah hesitated, then took it. It was, after all, a very hot morning.
Lady Moberley took a grapefruit juice. She looked at the beer with raw hunger. Oh dear, thought Hannah.
There was nothing really that she could contribute. So far as she knew, her husband had no enemies. Political crime was unheard of in the islands. Yes, the election campaigns had caused some small controversy, but all within the ambit of the democratic process. She thought.
She herself had been five miles away at the time of the shooting, visiting a small mission hospital on the slopes of Spyglass Hill. It had been endowed by Mr. Marcus Johnson, a very fine man and a great philanthropist, after his return to his native Barclays six months ago. She had agreed to become patroness of the facility. She had been in the official Jaguar, being driven by the Governor’s chauffeur, Stone.
Hannah thanked her and rose. Parker was outside tapping at the window. Hannah went out to the terrace. Parker was in a state of great excitement.
“You were right, sir! Here it is.”
He held out his right hand. In the palm, badly distorted, was the flattened remnant of what had once been a lead bullet. Hannah stared at him bleakly.
“Thanks for handling it,” he said. “Next time, shall we try tweezers and a plastic bag?”
Parker went pale, then scuttled down to the garden, put the bullet back on the conch-shell gravel, opened his murder bag, and took out a pair of tweezers. Several of the Bahamians grinned.
Parker laboriously lifted the crushed bullet with the tweezers and dropped it into a small clear bag.
“Now, wrap the bag in cotton wool and place it inside a glass jar with a screw top,” said Hannah.
Parker did as he was told.
“Thank you. Now put it in the murder bag until we can send it to Ballistics,” said Hannah. He sighed. This was going to be a hard slog. He was beginning to think he would have done better alone.
Dr. Caractacus Jones arrived, as requested. Hannah was glad to be able to talk to a fellow professional. Dr. Jones explained how he had been summoned from his home and surgery just after six the evening before last by Jefferson, who had been sent by Lieutenant Haverstock. Jefferson had told him he should come at once, as the Governor had been shot. The butler had not mentioned that the shooting was fatal, so Dr. Jones had brought his bag and driven over to see what he could do. As it turned out, the answer was, nothing.
Hannah led Dr. Jones into the late Sir Marston’s office and asked him, in his capacity as the island’s coroner, to sign a release for the body to be removed that afternoon to Nassau for a post-mortem.
In British jurisdiction, the court with the highest of all authorities is actually not the House of Lords but a coroner’s court. It takes precedence over every other kind of court. To remove the body from the island of Sunshine to the territory of the Bahamas, a coroner’s order was required. Dr. Jones signed without demur, and then it was legal. Bannister, the junior staffer from the Nassau High Commission who had accompanied them to Barclay’s, typed the release on Government House notepaper. He had just installed the new communications system and was prepared to transmit.
Hannah then asked Dr. Jones to show him the body. Down at the dockside, the ice house was opened, and two of Inspector Jones’s police constables slid the cadaver of their former Governor, now like a frozen log, out from between the fish and carried him to the shade of the nearby warehouse, where they laid him on a door supported by two trestles.
For the press—now joined by a team from CNN out of Atlanta who had tailed Hannah all morning—this was wonderful stuff. They photographed it all. Even the Governor’s bed companion of the previous thirty-six hours, the marlin, got a spot on CNN’s Headline News.
Hannah ordered the warehouse doors closed to keep them out, and he made as thorough an examination of the rigid body beneath the layer of ice as he could. Dr. Jones stood by his side.
After peering at the frozen hole in the Governor’s chest, Hannah noticed a neat, circular tear in the sleeve of the left arm. Slowly he kneaded the fabric between his finger and thumb until his own hand’s warmth made the material more pliable. The frost melted. There were two such holes in the shirt sleeve, one in and one out. But the skin was not marked. He turned to Parker.
“Two bullets, minimum,” he said quietly. “We are missing a second bullet.”
“Probably still in the body,” said Dr. Jones.
“No doubt,” said Hannah. “But damned if I can see any sign of entry or exit holes. The flesh is too puckered up by the cold. Still, Parker, I want the area behind where the Governor was standing or sitting gone over again. And again. Just in case it’s there.”
He ordered the dead Governor replaced in the ice house. The cameras whirred again. The questions rained in. He nodded and smiled and said, “All in good time, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the early days yet.”
“But we’ve recovered a bullet,” Parker said proudly. The cameras all swiveled toward him.
Hannah began to think the assassin had shot the wrong man. This was turning into a press conference. He did not want one yet. “There’ll be a full statement this evening,” he said. “For the moment, it’s back to work. Thank you.”
He hustled Parker into the police Land-Rover, and they went back to Government House. Hannah asked Bannister to call Nassau over the new system and ask for a plane with stretcher, trolley, body bag, and two attendants by midafternoon. Then he accompanied Dr. Jones to his car. They were alone.
“Tell me, doctor, is there anyone on this island who really knows everything that goes on and everyone who lives here?”
Dr. Caractacus Jones grinned. “There’s me,” he said. “But no, I couldn’t hazard a guess as to’ who did this. Anyway, I only returned from Barbados ten years ago. For the real history of these islands, you should visit Missy Coltrane. She’s like ... the grandmother of the Barclays. If you want someone to guess who done this, she might.”
The doctor drove off in his battered Austin Mayflower. Hannah walked over to the doctor’s nephew, Chief Inspector Jones, who stood beside the Land-Rover still.
“I’d like you to do something, Chief Inspector,” Hannah said politely. “Would you go to the airstrip and check with the passport officer? Has anyone left the island since the killing? Anyone at all? Except the pilots of aircraft who arrived, turned around, and flew away without leaving the airstrip.”
Inspector Jones threw up a salute and left.
The Governor’s Jaguar was in the forecourt, and Oscar Stone, the chauffeur, was polishing it. Parker and the rest of the team were behind the house looking for the missing bullet.
“Oscar?” Hannah asked. “Do you know Missy Coltrane?”
“Oh yes, sah. She fine lady.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Yessah. Flamingo House, top of Spyglass Hill.”
Hannah checked his watch. It was half-past eleven, and the heat lay heavy. “Will she be in at this hour?” Oscar looked puzzled. “Of course, sah.”
“Take me to see her, will you?”
The Jaguar wound its way out of town, then began to climb the lower slopes of Spyglass Hill, six miles west of Port Plaisance. It was an old Mark IX model, a classic by now, made the old-fashioned way, redolent of aromatic leather and burnished walnut. Hannah sat back and watched the landscape drift by.
The lowland scrub gave way to the greener vegetation of the upland slopes, and they passed small plots of maize, mangoes, and papayas. Wooden shacks stood back from the road, fronted by dusty yards where chickens scratched. Small brown children heard the car coming and scampered to the roadside to wave frantically. Hannah waved back.
They passed the neat white children’s hospital that had been endowed by Marcus Johnson. Hannah glanced back and saw Port Plaisance sleeping in the heat. He could make out the red-roofed warehouse on the docks and the ice house next to it where the frozen Governor slept, the gritty sprawl of Parliament Square, the spire of the Anglican church, and the shingles of the Quarter Deck Hotel. Beyond, on the other side of town, shimmering in the haze, was the walled enclosure of Government House. Why on earth, he wondered, would anyone want to shoot the Governor?
They passed a neat bungalow that had once belonged to the late Mr. Barney Klinger, rounded two further curves, and emerged on the top of the hill. There stood a pink villa, Flamingo House.
Hannah pulled the wrought-iron bell chain by the door, and somewhere there was a low tinkle. A teenage girl answered the door, bare black legs emerging from a simple cotton frock.
“I’d like to see Missy Coltrane,” said Hannah.
She nodded and admitted him, showing him into a large and airy sitting room. Open double doors led to a balcony with spectacular views over the island and the glittering blue sea that stretched away to Andros in the Bahamas, far off below the horizon.
The room was cool despite having no air conditioning. Hannah noticed it had no electricity at all. Three burnished brass oil lamps stood on low tables. Cooling breezes wafted from the open balcony doors through to the open windows on the other side. The array of memorabilia indicated it was the home of an elderly person. Hannah sauntered around the room as he waited.
There were pictures on the wall, scores of them, and all of birds of the Caribbean, skillfully painted in delicate watercolors. The only portrait that was not of a bird was of a man in the full white uniform of a British Colonial Governor. He stood staring out at the room, gray-haired and gray-moustached, with a tanned, lined, and kindly face. Two rows of miniature medals covered the left breast of his tunic. Hannah peered to see the small label beneath the oil painting. It said, SIR ROBERT COLTRANE, K.B.E., GOVERNOR OF THE BARCLAY ISLANDS, 1945-1953. He held his white helmet, adorned with white cockerel feathers, in the crook of his right arm; his left hand rested on the pommel of his sword.
Hannah smiled ruefully. “Missy” Coltrane must in fact be Lady Coltrane, the former Governor’s widow. He moved farther round the wall to a display cabinet. Behind the glass, pinned to the hessian board, were the former Governor’s military trophies, collected and displayed by his widow. There was the deep purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry in the field, and the date of its award, 1917. It was flanked by the Distinguished Service Cross and the Military Cross. Other items the warrior had carried on his campaigns were pinned to the board around the medals.
“He was a very brave man,” said a clear voice behind him.
Hannah spun around, embarrassed.
She had entered silently, the rubber tires of her wheelchair making no sound on the tiles. She was small and frail, with a cap of shining white curls and bright blue eyes.
Behind her stood the manservant who had pushed her in from the garden, a giant of awe-inspiring size. She turned to him.
“Thank you, Firestone. I’ll be all right now.”
He nodded and withdrew. She propelled herself a few feet farther into the room and gestured for Hannah to be seated. She smiled.
“The name? He was a foundling, discovered on a rubbish dump, in a Firestone tire. Now, you must be Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah from Scotland Yard. That’s a very high rank for these poor islands. What can I do for you?”
“I must apologize for calling you Missy Coltrane to your housemaid,” he said. “No one told me you were Lady Coltrane.”
“No more,” she said. “Here I am just Missy. They all call me that. I prefer it that way. Old habits die hard. As you may detect, I was not born British, but in South Carolina.”
“Your late husband”—Hannah nodded toward the portrait—“was Governor here once.”
“Yes. We met in the war. Robert had been through the First War. He didn’t have to come back for a second dose, but he did. He got wounded again. I was a nurse. We fell in love, married in 1943, and had ten glorious years until he died. There were twenty-five years between our ages, but it didn’t matter a damn. After the war, the British Government made him Governor here. After he died, I stayed on. He was only fifty-six when he died. Delayed war wounds.”
Hannah calculated. Sir Robert would have been born in 1897, got his Victoria Cross at twenty. She would be sixty-eight, too young for a wheelchair. She seemed to read his mind with those bright blue eyes.
“I slipped and fell,” she said. “Ten years ago. Broke my back. But you didn’t come four thousand miles to discuss an old woman in a wheelchair. How can I help you?”
Hannah explained.
“The fact is, I cannot perceive a motive. Whoever shot Sir Marston must have hated him enough to do it. But among these islanders, I cannot perceive a motive. You know these people. Who would want to do it, and why?”
Lady Coltrane wheeled herself to the open window and stared out for a while.
“Mr. Hannah, you are right. I do know these people. I have lived here for forty-five years. I love these islands, and I love their people. I hope I may think that they love me.”
She turned around and gazed at him. “In the world scheme of things, these islands matter for nothing. Yet these people seem to have discovered something that has eluded the world outside. They have found out how to be happy. Just that—not rich, not powerful, but happy.
“Now London wants us to have independence. And two candidates have appeared to compete for the power: Mr. Johnson, who is very wealthy and has given large sums to the islands, for whatever motive; and Mr. Livingstone, a socialist, who wants to nationalize everything and divide it up among the poor. Very noble, of course. Mr. Johnson, with his plans for development and prosperity, and Mr. Livingstone, with his plans for equality—I know them both. Knew them when they were boys. Knew them when they left in their teens to pursue careers elsewhere. And now they are back.”
“You suspect either of them?” asked Hannah.
“Mr. Hannah, it is the men they have brought with them. Look at the men who surround them. These are violent men, Mr. Hannah. The islanders know it. There have been threats, beatings. Perhaps you should look at the entourages of these two men, Mr. Hannah.”
On the drive back down the mountain, Desmond Hannah thought it over. A contract hit? The killing of Sir Marston had all the earmarks of one. After lunch he thought he would have a talk with the two candidates and take a look at their entourages.
As Hannah returned to the sitting room at Government House, a plump Englishman with several chins above his clerical collar jumped up from a chair. Parker was with him.
“Ah, Chief, this is the Reverend Simon Prince, the local Anglican vicar. He has some interesting information for us.”
Hannah wondered where Parker had got the word Chief from. He hated it. Sir would do nicely. Desmond, later—much later. Maybe.
“Any luck with that second bullet?”
“Er, no—not yet.”
“Better get on with it,” said Hannah. Parker disappeared through the French windows. Hannah closed them.
“Well now, Mr. Prince. What would you like to tell me?”
“It’s Quince,” said the vicar. “Quince. This is all very distressing.”
“It is indeed. Especially for the Governor.”
“Oh, ah, yes. I meant really—well ... my coming to you with information about a fellow of the cloth. I don’t know whether I should, but I felt it might be germane.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” suggested Hannah mildly.
The reverend calmed down and sat.
“It all happened last Friday,” he said. He told the story of the delegation from the Committee for Concerned Citizens and their rebuff by the Governor. When he had finished, Hannah frowned.
“What exactly did Reverend Drake say?” he asked.
“He said,” repeated Quince, “ ‘We have to get rid of that Governor and get ourselves a new one.’ ”
Hannah rose. “Thank you very much, Mr. Quince. May I suggest you say no more about this, but leave it with me?”
After the grateful vicar scuttled out, Hannah thought it over. He did not particularly like stool pigeons, but he would now have to check out the fire-breathing Baptist, Walter Drake, as well.
At that point Jefferson appeared with a tray of cold lobster tails in mayonnaise. Hannah sighed. There were some compensations to being sent four thousand miles from home. And if the Foreign Office was paying ... He poured himself a glass of chilled Chablis and started.
During Hannah’s lunch, Chief Inspector Jones came back from the airport. “No one has left the island,” he told Hannah, “not in the last forty hours.”
“Not legally, at any rate,” said Hannah. “Now, another chore, Mr. Jones. Do you keep a firearms register?”
“Of course.”
“Fine. Would you check it through for me and visit everyone who has a listed firearm on the islands? We are looking for a large-caliber handgun. Particularly a handgun that cannot be produced, or one that has been recently cleaned and gleams with fresh oil.”
“Fresh oil?”
“After being fired,” said Hannah.
“Ah, yes, of course.”
“One last thing, Chief Inspector. Does Reverend Drake have a registered firearm?”
“No. Of that I am certain.”
When he had gone Hannah asked to see Lieutenant Haverstock. “Do you by any chance own a service revolver or automatic?” he asked.
“Oh, I say, look here. You don’t really think ...” expostulated the young subaltern.
“It occurred to me it might have been stolen, or misappropriated and replaced.”
“Ah, yes. See your point, old boy. Actually, no. No gun. Never brought one to the island. Got a ceremonial sword, though.”
“If Sir Marston had been stabbed, I might think of arresting you,” Hannah said mildly. “Any guns in Government House at all?”
“No, not to my knowledge. Anyway, the killer came from outside, surely? Through the garden wall?”
Hannah had examined the wrenched-off lock on the steel gate in the garden wall at first light. From the angles of the two broken hasps and the torn-apart bar of the great padlock, there was a little question that someone had used a long and very strong crowbar to force the old steel to snap like that. But it also occurred to Hannah that the snapping of the lock might have been a ruse. It could have been done hours or even a couple of days earlier. No one had ever tested the gate; it was deemed to be rusted solid.
The killer could have torn off the lock and left the gate in the closed position in advance, then come through the house to kill the Governor and retreat back into the house afterward. What Hannah needed was that second bullet, hopefully intact, and the gun that had fired it. He looked out at the glittering blue sea. If it was down there, he’d never find it.
He rose, wiped his lips, and went out to find Oscar and the Jaguar. It was time he had a word with Reverend Drake.
Sam McCready also sat at lunch. When he entered the open-sided verandah dining room of the Quarter Deck, every table was full. Out on the square, men in bright beach shirts and wraparound dark glasses were positioning a flatbed truck decorated with bunting and daubed with posters from Marcus Johnson. The great man was due to speak at three.
Sam looked around the terrace and saw a single vacant chair. It was at a table that was occupied by one other luncher.
“We’re a bit crowded today. Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Eddie Favaro waved at the chair. “No problem.”
“You here for the fishing?” asked McCready as he studied the brief menu.
“Yep.”
“Odd,” said McCready after ordering Seviche, a dish of raw fish marinated in fresh lime juice. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have said you were a cop.”
He did not mention the long-shot inquiry he had made the previous evening after studying Favaro at the bar—the call to a friend in the Miami office of the FBI—or the answer he had received that morning.
Favaro put down his beer and stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “A British bobby?”
McCready waved his hand deprecatingly. “Oh no, nothing so glamorous. Just a civil servant trying to get a peaceful holiday away from the desk.”
“So what’s this about my being a cop?”
“Instinct. You carry yourself like a cop. Would you mind telling me why you’re really here?”
“Why the hell should I?”
“Because,” McCready suggested mildly, “you arrived just before the Governor was shot. And because of this.”
He handed Favaro a sheet of paper. It was on Foreign Office-headed notepaper. It announced that Mr. Frank Dillon was an official of that office and begged “to whom it may concern” to be as helpful as possible.
Favaro handed it back and thought things over. Lieutenant Broderick had made it plain that he was on his own once he entered British territory.
“Officially, I’m on vacation,” Favaro began. “No, I don’t fish. Unofficially, I’m trying to find out why my partner was killed last week, and by whom.”
“Tell me about it,” suggested McCready. “I might be able to help.”
Favaro told him how Julio Gomez had died. The Englishman chewed his raw fish and listened.
“I think he may have seen a man on Sunshine, and been seen himself. A man we used to know in Metro-Dade as Francisco Mendes, alias the Scorpion.”
Eight years earlier, the drug-turf wars had started in South Florida, notably in the Metro-Dade area. Prior to that, the Colombians had shipped cocaine into the area, but the Cuban gangs had distributed it. Then the Colombians had decided they could cut out the Cuban middlemen and sell direct to the users. They began to move in on the Cubans’ territory. The Cubans responded, and the turf wars broke out. The killings had continued ever since.
In the summer of 1984, a motorcyclist in red and white leather, astride a Kawasaki, had drawn up outside a liquor store in the heart of the Dadeland Mall, produced an Uzi submachine carbine from a totebag, and calmly emptied the entire magazine into the busy store. Three people had died, fourteen were injured.
Normally, the killer would have gotten away, but a young motorcycle cop was giving a parking ticket two hundred yards away. When the killer threw down his empty Uzi and sped off, the policeman gave chase, broadcasting the description and direction as he went. Halfway down North Kendall Drive, the man on the Kawasaki slowed, pulled over, drew a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer automatic from his blouse front, took aim, and shot the oncoming policeman in the chest. As the young cop crashed over, the killer rode off at top speed, according to witnesses who gave a good description of the bike and the leather clothing. His helmet hid his face.
Although the Baptist Hospital was only four blocks away and the policeman was rushed into intensive care, he died before morning. He was twenty-three, and he left a widow and baby daughter.
His radio calls had alerted two prowl cars, which were closing on the area. A mile down the road, one of them saw the speeding motorcyclist and forced him into a turn so tight that he fell off. Before he could rise, he was under arrest.
By aspect, the man looked Hispanic. The case was given to Gomez and Favaro. For four days and nights they sat opposite the killer trying to get a single word out of him. He said nothing, absolutely nothing, in either Spanish or English. There were no powder traces on his hands, for he had worn gloves. But the gloves were gone, and despite searching every trash can in the area, the police never discovered them. They reckoned the killer had thrown them into the rear of a passing convertible. Public appeals turned up the Sig Sauer, tossed into a neighboring garden. It was the gun that had killed the policeman, but it bore no fingerprints.
Gomez believed the killer was Colombian—the liquor store had been a Cuban cocaine drop. After four days, he and Favaro nicknamed the suspect the Scorpion.
On the fourth day, a very high-priced lawyer turned up. He produced a Mexican passport in the name of Francisco Mendes. It was new and valid, but it bore no U.S. entry stamps. The lawyer conceded that his client might be an illegal immigrant and asked for bail. The police opposed it.
In front of the judge, a noted liberal, the lawyer protested that the police had only apprehended a man in red and white leather riding a Kawasaki, not the man on the Kawasaki who had killed the policeman and the others.
“That asshole of a judge granted bail,” Favaro said to McCready now. “Half a million dollars. Within twenty-four hours, the Scorpion was gone. The bondsman handed over the half million with a grin. Chickenfeed.”
“And you believe ...?” asked McCready.
“He wasn’t just a mule. He was one of their top triggermen, or they’d never have gone to such trouble and expense to get him out. I think Julio saw him here, even found where he was living maybe. He left his fishing vacation early to try to get back so Uncle Sam would file an appeal for extradition from the British.”
“Which we would have granted,” said McCready. “I think we ought to inform the man from Scotland Yard. After all, the Governor was shot four days later. Even if the two cases turn out not to be linked, there’s enough suspicion to comb the island for him. It’s a small place.”
“And if he’s found? What offense has he committed on British territory?” Favaro asked.
“Well,” said McCready, “for a start you could make a positive identification of him. That could constitute a holding charge. Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah may be from a different force, but no one likes a cop-killer. And if he produces a valid passport, as a Foreign Office official I could denounce it as a forgery. That makes a second holding charge.”
Favaro grinned and held out his hand. “Frank Dillon, I like it. Let’s go see your man from Scotland Yard.”
Hannah stepped out of the Jaguar and walked toward the open doors of the plank-built Baptist chapel. From inside came the sound of song. He stepped through the doors and accustomed his eyes to the lower light inside. Leading the singing was the deep bass voice of Reverend Drake.
Rock of ages, cleft for me ...
There was no musical accompaniment, just plainsong. The Baptist minister had left his pulpit and was striding up and down the aisle, his arms waving like the big black sails of a windmill as he encouraged his flock to give praise.
Let me hide myself in thee.
Let the water and the blood ...
He caught sight of Hannah in the doorway, ceased singing, and waved his arms for quiet. The tremulous voices died away.
“Brothers and sisters!” roared the minister. “We are indeed privileged today. We are joined by Mr. Hannah, the man from Scotland Yard!”
The congregation turned in their pews and stared at the man in the door. Most were elderly men and women, with a scattering of young matrons and a gaggle of small children with huge saucer eyes.
“Join us, brother! Sing with us! Make room for Mr. Hannah.”
Next to him, a vast matron in a flowered-print frock gave Hannah a wide smile and moved up, offering him her hymn book. Hannah needed it. He had forgotten the words, it had been so long. Together, they finished the rousing anthem. When the service was over, the congregation filed out, each member greeted by the perspiring Drake at the door.
As the last person left, Drake beckoned Hannah to follow him into his vestry, a small room attached to the side of the church.
“I cannot offer you beer, Mr. Hannah. But I’d be happy for you to share in my cold lemonade.”
He took it from a Thermos flask and poured two glasses. It was lime-scented and delicious.
“And what can I do for the man from Scotland Yard?” inquired the pastor.
“Tell me where you were at five P.M. on Tuesday.”
“Holding carol service practice here, in front of fifty good people,” said Reverend Drake. “Why?”
Hannah put to him his remark of the previous Friday morning on the steps of Government House. Drake smiled at Hannah. The detective was not a small man, but the preacher topped him by two inches.
“Ah, you have been talking with Mr. Quince.” He pronounced the name as if he had sucked on a raw lime.
“I didn’t say that,” said Hannah.
“You didn’t have to. Yes, I said those words. You think I killed Governor Moberley? No, sir, I am a man of peace. I do not use guns. I do not take life.”
“Then what did you mean, Mr. Drake?”
“I meant that I did not believe the Governor would transmit our petition to London. I meant that we should pool our poor funds and send one person to London to ask for a new Governor, one who would understand us and propose what we ask.”
“Which is?”
“A referendum, Mr. Hannah. Something bad is happening here. Strangers have come among us, ambitious men who want to rule our affairs. We are happy the way we are. Not rich, but content. If we had a referendum, the great majority would vote to stay British. Is that so wrong?”
“Not in my book,” admitted Hannah, “but I don’t make policy.”
“Neither did the Governor. But he would carry a policy out, for his career, even if he knew it was wrong.”
“He had no choice,” said Hannah. “He was carrying out his orders.”
Drake nodded into his lemonade. “That’s what the men who put the nails into Christ said, Mr. Hannah.”
Hannah did not want to be drawn into politics or theology. He had a murder to solve. “You didn’t like Sir Mars ton, did you?”
“No, God forgive me.”
“Any reason, apart from his duties here?”
“He was a hypocrite and a fornicator. But I did not kill him. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, Mr. Hannah. The Lord sees everything. On Tuesday evening the Lord summoned Sir Marston Moberley.”
“The Lord seldom uses a large-caliber handgun,” suggested Hannah. For a moment he thought he saw a hint of appreciation in Drake’s glance. “You said ‘fornicator.’ What did that mean?”
Reverend Drake glanced at him sharply. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Myrtle, the missing secretary. You have not seen her?”
“No.”
“She is a big girl, robust, lusty.”
“No doubt. She is away with her parents in Tortola,” said Hannah.
“No,” said Drake gently, “she is in Antigua General Hospital, terminating a baby.”
Oh dear, thought Hannah. He had only ever heard her referred to by name. He had not seen a picture of her. White parents live on Tortola, too.
“Is she ... how shall I put it ...?”
“Black?” boomed Drake. “Yes, of course she’s black. A big, bouncing black girl. The way Sir Marston liked them.”
And Lady Moberley knew, thought Hannah. Poor washed-out Lady Moberley, driven to drink by all those years in the tropics and by all those native girls. She was resigned, no doubt. Or perhaps she was not. Perhaps she had been driven a bit too far, just this once.
“There is a hint of American in your accent,” said Hannah as he left. “Can you tell me why?”
“There are many Baptist theological schools in America,” replied Reverend Drake. “I studied for the ministry there.”
Hannah drove back to Government House. On the way, he considered a list of possible suspects.
Lieutenant Jeremy Haverstock undoubtedly knew how to use a gun if he could get hold of one, but he had no apparent motive. Unless it was he who was the father of Myrtle’s baby, and the Governor had threatened to break his career.
Lady Moberley, driven too far. She had plenty of motive, but she’d have needed an accomplice to rip off that steel gatelock. Unless it could have been done with a chain behind a Land-Rover.
The Reverend Drake, despite his protestations of being a man of peace. Even men of peace can be driven too far.
He recalled the advice of Lady Coltrane to look at the entourages of the two electoral candidates. Yes, he would do that, have a good look at these election helpers. But what was the motive there? Sir Marston had been playing their game for them, easing the islands into independence, with one of them as the new Prime Minister. Unless one of the groups had thought he was favoring the other.
When he got back to Government House, there was a spate of news waiting for him.
Chief Inspector Jones had checked his firearms register. There were only six workable guns on the island. Three were owned by expatriates—retired gentlemen, two British and one Canadian. They were twelve-bore shotguns, used for clay-pigeon shooting. The fourth was a rifle, owned by the fishing skipper Jimmy Dobbs, for use on sharks if ever a monster attacked his boat. The fifth gun was a presentation pistol, never fired, owned by another expatriate, an American who had settled on Sunshine. The gun was still in its glass-topped case, its seal unbroken. And the sixth gun was Jones’s own, kept under lock and key at the police station.
“Damn,” snorted Hannah. Whatever gun had been used, it was not kept legally.
Detective Parker, for his part, had a report on the garden. It had been searched from end to end and top to bottom. No second bullet. Either it had deflected off a bone in the Governor’s body, come out at a different angle, and sped over the garden wall to be lost forever; or, more likely, it was still in the body.
Bannister had received news from Nassau. A plane would be landing at four, in one hour’s time, to take the body to the Bahamas for post-mortem. Dr. West was due to touch down in a few minutes, and he would be waiting to take his charge to the mortuary at Nassau.
And there were two men waiting to see Hannah in the drawing room.
Hannah gave orders to have a van made ready to bring the body to the airstrip at four. Bannister, who would return to the High Commission there along with the body, left with Inspector Jones to supervise the arrangements. Then Hannah went to meet his new guests.
The man called Frank Dillon introduced himself and explained his chance vacation on the island and his equally chance meeting over lunch with the American. He produced his letter of introduction, and Hannah studied it with little pleasure. Bannister from the official High Commission in Nassau was one thing; a London-based official who happened to be taking an away-from-it-all holiday in the middle of a murder hunt was as likely as a vegetarian tiger. Then he met the American, who admitted that he was another detective.
Hannah’s attitude changed, however, as Dillon narrated Favaro’s story.
“You have a picture of this man Mendes?” he asked finally.
“No, not with me.”
“Could one be obtained from police files in Miami?”
“Yes, sir. I could have it wired to your people in Nassau.”
“You do that,” said Hannah. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll have a search of all passport records made, going back three months. See if there’s a name of Mendes or any other Hispanic name entering the island. Now, you must excuse me—I have to see the body onto the plane for Nassau.”
“Are you by any chance thinking of talking to the candidates?” asked McCready as they left.
“Yes,” said Hannah, “first thing in the morning. While I’m waiting for the post-mortem report to come through.”
“Would you mind if I came along?” asked McCready. “I promise not to say a thing. But after all, they are both ... political, are they not?”
“All right,” said Hannah reluctantly. He wondered whom this Frank Dillon really worked for.
On the way to the airstrip, Hannah noticed that the first of his posters were being affixed to spaces on walls where room could be found for them between the posters on behalf of the two candidates. There was so much paper being stuck over Port Plaisance, the place was getting plastered in it.
The official posters, prepared by the local printer under the auspices of Inspector Jones and paid for with Government House money, offered a reward of one thousand U.S. dollars to anyone reporting seeing someone in the alley behind the wall of the Government House garden at approximately five P.M. on Tuesday evening.
A thousand American dollars was a stunning sum for the ordinary people of Port Plaisance. It should bring someone out—someone who had seen something, or some person. And in Sunshine everybody knew everybody.
At the airstrip Hannah saw to the loading of the body, accompanied by Bannister and the four men of the Bahamian forensic team. Bannister would see that the entire volume of their scrapings and samples went on the evening flight to London, to be collected at dawn by a squad car from Scotland Yard and taken to the Home Office’s forensic laboratory in Lambeth. He had few hopes it would turn up much; it was the second bullet he wanted, and Dr. West would retrieve that for him when he opened the body in Nassau that night.
Because he was at the airstrip, Hannah missed the Johnson rally in Parliament Square that afternoon. So did the press corps, who having covered the start of the rally, saw the police convoy driving past and followed it out to the airstrip.
McCready did not miss the rally. He was on the verandah of the Quarter Deck Hotel at the time.
A desultory crowd of about two hundred had gathered to hear their philanthropic benefactor address them. McCready noticed half a dozen men in brightly colored beach shirts and dark glasses mingling with the crowd, handing out small pieces of paper and flags on sticks. The flags were in the candidate’s blue and white colors. The pieces of paper were dollar bills.
At precisely ten past three, a white Ford Fairlane—certainly the biggest car on the island—swept into the square and up to the speaking platform. Mr. Marcus Johnson leaped out and ascended the steps. He held up his hands in a boxer’s victory salute. Led by the bright-shirted ones, there was a round of applause. Some flags waved. In minutes, Marcus Johnson was into his speech.
“And I promise you, my friends, and you are all my friends”—the dentifrice smile flashed from the bronze face—“when we are finally free, a wave of prosperity will come to these islands. There will be work—in the hotels, in the new marina, in the bars and cafés, in the new industries for the processing of fish from the sea for sale on the mainland—from all these things, prosperity will flow. And it will flow into your pockets, my friends, not into the hands of men far away in London—”
He was using a bullhorn to reach everyone in the square. The interruption came from a man who did not need a bullhorn. The deep bass came from the other side of the square, but it came over the sound of the politician.
“Johnson!” roared Walter Drake. “We do not want you here! Why don’t you go back where you came from, and take your Yardies with you?”
Suddenly there was silence. The stunned crowd waited for the sky to fall. No one had ever interrupted Marcus Johnson before.
But the sky did not fall. Without a word, Johnson put down his megaphone and jumped into his car. At a word from him, it sped off, pursued by a second car containing his group of helpers.
“Who is that?” McCready asked the waiter on the verandah.
“Reverend Drake, sir,” said the waiter. He seemed awestruck, even rather frightened.
McCready was thoughtful. He had heard a voice used like that somewhere before, and he tried to recall where. Then he placed it; during his National Service thirty years earlier, at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. On a parade ground. He went to his room and made a secure call to Miami.
Reverend Walter Drake took his beating in silence. There were four of them, and they came for him that night as he left his church and walked home. They used baseball bats and their feet. They hit hard, whipping the wooden staves down onto the man on the ground. When they were finished, they left him. He might have been dead. They would not have minded. But he was not.
Half an hour later, he recovered consciousness and crawled to the nearest house. The frightened family called Dr. Caractacus Jones, who had the preacher brought to his clinic on a handcart, and he spent the rest of the night patching him up.
Desmond Hannah had a call that evening during supper. He had to leave the hotel to go to Government House to take it. It was from Dr. West in Nassau.
“Look, I know they’re supposed to be preserved,” said the forensic pathologist, “but this one’s like a block of wood. Frozen solid.”
“The locals did the best they could,” said Hannah.
“So will I,” said the doctor. “But it’s going to take me twenty-four hours to thaw the bugger out.”
“As fast as you can, please,” said Hannah. “I need that damned bullet.”