Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah elected to interview Mr. Horatio Livingstone first. He rang him at his house in Shantytown just after sunrise, and the politician came to the phone after several minutes. Yes, he would be delighted to receive the man from Scotland Yard within the hour.
Oscar drove the Jaguar with Detective Parker beside him. Hannah was in the back with Dillon of the Foreign Office. Their route did not pass through the center of Port Plaisance, for Shantytown lay three miles down the coast, on the same side of the capital as Government House.
“Any progress with your inquiries, Mr. Hannah, or is that an unprofessional question?” Dillon asked politely.
Hannah never liked to discuss the state of an inquiry with anyone other than colleagues. Still, this Dillon was apparently from the Foreign Office.
“The Governor was killed by a single shot through the heart from a heavy-caliber handgun,” he said. “There seem to have been two shots fired. One missed and hit the wall behind him. I recovered the slug and sent it to London.”
“Badly distorted?” asked Dillon.
“I’m afraid so. The other bullet seems to be lodged in the body. I’ll know more when I get the results of the postmortem from Nassau tonight.”
“And the killer?”
“Seems to have entered from the gate in the garden wall, which was torn off its locks. Fired from about a ten-foot range, then withdrew. Apparently.”
“Apparently?”
Hannah explained his idea that the torn-off lock might have been a ruse to distract attention from an assassin coming from the house itself.
Dillon was most admiring. “I’d never have thought of that,” he said.
The car entered Shantytown. As its name implied, it was a village of clustered homes made of wooden planks and galvanized sheet roofing, with some five thousand inhabitants.
Small shops selling an array of vegetables and T-shirts jostled for space with the houses and the bars. It was clearly Livingstone territory—no posters for Marcus Johnson were to be seen here, but those for Livingstone were everywhere.
In the center of Shantytown, reached by its widest (and only) street, stood a single walled compound. The walls were of coral blocks, and a single gate wide enough for a car admitted entry. Beyond the walls could be seen the roof of the house, the only two-story edifice in Shantytown. Hannah knew of the rumor that Mr. Livingstone owned many of the bars in the village and took tribute from those he did not.
The Jaguar halted at the gate, and Stone sounded the horn. All down the street, Barclayans were standing to stare at the gleaming limousine with the pennant fluttering from the front right wing. The Governor’s car had never been into Shantytown before.
A small window in the gate opened, an eye surveyed the car, and the gate swung open. The Jaguar rolled forward into a dusty yard and stopped by the verandah to the house. Two men were in the yard, one by the gate and one waiting at the verandah. Both wore identical pale-gray safari suits. A third man in similar dress stood at an upstairs window. As the car halted, he withdrew.
Hannah, Parker, and Dillon were shown into the principal sitting room, cheaply but functionally furnished, and a few seconds later Horatio Livingstone appeared. He was a large fat man, and his jowly face was wreathed in smiles. He exuded bonhomie.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, what an honor. Please, be seated.”
He gestured for coffee and seated himself in a large chair. His small, button eyes flickered from one to the other of the three white faces before him. Two other men entered the room and seated themselves behind the candidate. Livingstone gestured to them.
“Two of my associates—Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown.”
The two inclined their heads but said nothing.
“Now, Mr. Hannah, what can I do for you?”
“You will know, sir, that I am here to investigate the murder four days ago of Governor Sir Marston Moberley.”
Livingstone’s smile dropped, and he shook his head. “A dreadful thing,” he rumbled. “We were all deeply shocked. A fine, fine man.”
“I’m afraid I have to ask you what you were doing and where you were at five P.M. on Tuesday evening.”
“I was here, Mr. Hannah, here among my friends, who will vouch for me. I was working on a speech to the Smallholders Association for the next day.”
“And your associates, they were here? All here?”
“Every one of them. It was close to sundown. We had all retired for the day. Here, inside the compound.”
“Your associates—are they Barclayans?” asked Dillon.
Hannah shot him a glance of irritation; the man had promised to say nothing.
Livingstone beamed. “Ah, no, I fear not. I and my fellow Barclayans have so little experience of organizing an election campaign, I felt I needed some administrative help.” He gestured and beamed again, a reasonable man among reasonable men. “The preparing of speeches, posters, pamphlets, public meetings. My associates are from the Bahamas. You wish to see their passports? They were all examined when they arrived.”
Hannah waved the necessity away. Behind Mr. Livingstone, Mr. Brown had lit a large cigar.
“Would you have any idea, Mr. Livingstone, who might have killed the Governor?” asked Hannah.
The fat man’s smile dropped again, and he adopted a mien of great seriousness. “Mr. Hannah, the Governor was helping us all on the road to our independence, to our final freedom from the British Empire. According to the policy of London. There was not the slightest motive for me or any of my associates to wish to harm him.”
Behind him, Mr. Brown held his cigar to one side, and with the much-elongated nail of his little finger, he flicked an inch of ash from the tip so that the ash fell to the floor. The burning ember never touched the flesh of his finger.
McCready knew he had seen that gesture somewhere before. “Will you be holding any public meetings today?” he asked quietly.
Livingstone’s small black eyes switched toward him. “Yes, at twelve I am addressing my brothers and sisters of the fishing community on the docks,” he said.
“Yesterday there was a disturbance when Mr. Johnson addressed people in Parliament Square,” said Dillon.
Livingstone showed no pleasure in the ruining of his rival’s meeting. “A single heckler,” he snapped.
“Heckling is also part of the democratic process,” observed Dillon.
Livingstone stared at him, expressionless for once. Behind the creased jowls, he was angry. McCready realized he had seen that expression before; on the face of Idi Amin of Uganda, when he had been contradicted.
Hannah glowered at Dillon and rose. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Livingstone,” he said.
The politician, exuding jollity again, escorted them to the door. Two more gray safari suits saw them off the premises. Different men. That made seven of them, including the one at the upstairs window. All were pure Negroid except Mr. Brown, who was much paler, a quadroon, the only one who dared smoke without asking, the man in charge of the other six.
“I would be grateful,” said Hannah in the car, “if you would leave the questioning to me.”
“Sorry,” said Dillon. “Strange man, didn’t you think? I wonder where he spent the years between leaving here as a teenager and returning six months ago.”
“No idea,” said Hannah. It was only later, in London, when he was thinking things over, that he would wonder at Dillon’s remark about Livingstone leaving Sunshine as a teenager. It was Missy Coltrane who had told him, Desmond Hannah, that. Dillon had not been there.
At half-past nine, they arrived at the gates of Marcus Johnson’s estate on the northern flank of Sawbones Hill.
Johnson’s style was completely different from Livingstone’s. He was clearly a wealthy man. An assistant in psychedelic beach shirt and black glasses opened the wrought-iron gates to the drive and let the Jaguar proceed up the raked gravel to the front door. Two gardeners were at work, tending the lawns, flower beds, and earthenware jars of bright geraniums.
The house was a spacious, two-story building with a roof of green glazed tiles, every block and stick of it imported. The three Englishmen alighted in front of a pillared Colonial portico and were led inside. They followed their guide, a second brightly shirted “assistant,” across a reception area floored in marble slabs and furnished with European and Spanish-American antiques. Rugs from Bokhara and Kashan splashed the cream marble.
Marcus Johnson received them on a marble verandah scattered with white rattan chairs. Below the verandah lay the garden and tonsured lawns running to an eight-foot wall. Beyond the wall lay the coast road, which was one thing Johnson could not buy to give himself direct access to the sea. On the waters of Teach Bay, beyond the wall, was the stone jetty he had built. Next to it bobbed a Riva 40 speedboat. With long-range tanks, the Riva could reach the Bahamas at speed.
Where Horatio Livingstone was fat and creased, Marcus Johnson was slim and elegant. He wore an impeccable cream silk suit. The cast of his features indicated he was at least half white, and McCready wondered if he had known his father. Probably not. He had come from poverty in the Barclays as a boy, been brought up by his mother in a shack. His dark brown hair had been artificially straightened, from curly to wavy. Four heavy gold rings adorned his hands, and the teeth in the flashing smile were perfect.
He offered his guests a choice of Dom Perignon or Blue Mountain coffee. They chose coffee and sat down.
Desmond Hannah asked the same questions about the hour of five P.M. the previous Tuesday evening. The reply was the same.
“Addressing an enthusiastic crowd of well over a hundred people outside the Anglican church in Parliament Square, Mr. Hannah. At five o’clock I was just finishing my address. From there I drove straight back here.”
“And your ... entourage?” asked Hannah, borrowing Missy Coltrane’s word to describe the election campaign team in their bright shirts.
“All with me, to a man,” said Johnson. He waved a hand, and one of the bright-shirts topped up the coffee. McCready wondered why he had no local serving staff inside the house, although he would have Barclayan gardeners. Despite the subdued light inside the verandah, the bright-shirts never removed their wraparound dark glasses.
From Hannah’s point of view, the interlude was pleasant but fruitless. He had already been told by Chief Inspector Jones that the prosperity candidate had been on Parliament Square when the shots were fired at Government House. The Inspector himself had been on the steps of his own police station on the square, surveying the scene. He rose to leave.
“Do you have another public address scheduled for today?” asked Dillon.
“Yes, indeed. At two, on Parliament Square.”
“You were there yesterday at three. There was a disturbance, I believe.”
Marcus Johnson was a much smoother operator than Livingstone. No hint of temper. He shrugged.
“The Reverend Drake shouted some rude words. No matter. I had finished my speech. Poor Drake—well intentioned, no doubt, but foolish. He wishes the Barclays to remain in the last century. But progress must come, Mr. Dillon, and with it prosperity. I have the most substantial development plans in mind for our dear Barclays.”
McCready nodded. Tourism, he thought, gambling, industry, pollution, a little prostitution—and what else?
“And now, if you will forgive me, I have a speech to prepare.”
They were shown out, and they drove back to Government House.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” said Dillon as he climbed out. “Meeting the candidates was most instructive. I wonder where Johnson made all that money in the years he was away.”
“No idea,” said Hannah. “He’s listed as a businessman. Do you want Oscar to run you back to the Quarter Deck?”
“No, thank you. I’ll stroll.”
In the bar the press corps was working its way through the beer supply. It was eleven o’clock. They were getting bored. Two full days had elapsed since they had been summoned to Heathrow to scramble to the Caribbean and cover a murder inquiry. All the previous day, Thursday, they had filmed what they could and interviewed whom they could. Pickings had been slim: a nice shot of the Governor coming out of the ice house from his bed between the fish; some long shots of Parker on his hands and knees in the Governor’s garden; the dead Governor departing in a bag for Nassau; Parker’s little gem about finding a single bullet. But nothing like a good, hard piece of news.
McCready mingled with them for the first time. No one asked who he was.
“Horatio Livingstone is speaking on the dock at twelve,” he said. “Could be interesting.”
They were suddenly alert. “Why?” asked someone.
McCready shrugged. “There was some savage heckling here on the square yesterday,” he said. “You were at the airstrip.”
They brightened up. A nice little riot would be the thing—failing that, some good heckling. The reporters began to run some imaginary headlines through their minds. “Election Violence Sweeps Sunshine Isle”—a couple of punches would justify that. Or if Livingstone got a hostile reception, “Paradise Vetoes Socialism.”
The trouble was that so far, the population seemed to have no interest at all in the prospect of freedom from the Empire. Two news teams that had tried to put together a documentary on local reaction to independence had not been able to secure a single interviewee who would talk. People just walked away when the cameras, microphones, and notepads came out. Still, they picked up their gear and sauntered toward the docks.
McCready took time to make a single call to the British Consulate in Miami from the portable phone he kept in the attaché case under his bed. He asked for a seven-seater charter plane to land on Sunshine at four P.M. It was a long shot, but he hoped it would work.
Livingstone’s cavalcade arrived from Shantytown at a quarter to twelve. One aide boomed through a megaphone, “Come and hear Horatio Livingstone, the people’s candidate.” Others erected two trestles and a stout plank to lift the people’s candidate above the people.
At noon, Horatio Livingstone hoisted his bulk up the steps to the makeshift platform. He spoke into a megaphone on a stem in front of him, held up by one of the safari suits. Four TV cameras had secured elevated positions around the meeting, from which they could cover the candidate or, hopefully, the hecklers and the fighting.
The BSB cameraman had borrowed the cabin roof of the Gulf Lady. To back up his TV camera, he had a Nikon camera with a telephoto lens slung across his back. The reporter, Sabrina Tennant, stood beside him.
McCready climbed up to join them. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” said Sabrina Tennant. She took no notice of him.
“Tell me,” he asked quietly. “Would you like a story that would blow your colleagues out of the water?”
Now she took notice. The cameraman looked across inquisitively.
“Can you use that Nikon to get in close, really close, on any face in that crowd?” asked McCready.
“Sure,” said the cameraman. “I can get their tonsils if they open wide.”
“Why not get full-face pictures of all the men in gray safari suits helping the candidate?” suggested McCready. The cameraman looked at Sabrina. She nodded. Why not?
The cameraman unhooked his Nikon and began to focus it. “Start with the pale-faced black standing along by the van,” said McCready. “The one they call Mr. Brown.”
“What have you got in mind?” asked Sabrina.
“Step into the cabin, and I’ll tell you.”
She did, and McCready talked for several minutes.
“You’re joking,” she said at length.
“No, I’m not, and I think I can prove it. But not here. The answers lie in Miami.”
He talked to her again for a while. When he had finished, Sabrina Tennant went back to the roof. “Got them?” she asked.
The Londoner nodded. “A dozen close shots of every one, every angle. There are seven of them.”
“Right, now let’s shoot the entire meeting. Get me some footage for background and cutting.”
She knew she already had eight magazines of footage, including shots of both candidates, the capital town, the beaches, the palm trees, and the airstrip—enough, skillfully cut, to make a great fifteen-minute story. What she needed now was a lead angle, and if the crumpled man with the apologetic air was right, she had it.
Her only problem was time. Her main feature spot was on Countdown, the flagship program of the BSB current affairs channel, which went out at noon on Sunday in England. She would need to send her material by satellite from Miami by no later than four P.M. on Saturday, the next day. So she had to be in Miami that night. It was nearly one o’clock now, extremely tight to get back to the hotel and book a Miami-based charter to be in Sunshine before sundown.
“Actually, I’m due to leave myself at four this afternoon,” said McCready. “I’ve ordered my own plane from Miami. Happy to offer you a lift.”
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“Just a holidaymaker. But I do know the islands. And their people. Trust me.”
She had no bloody choice, thought Sabrina. If his story was true, this one was too good to miss. She went back to her cameraman to show him what she wanted. The telephoto lens of the camera lazed over the crowd, pausing there, there, and there. Against the van, Mr. Brown saw the lens pointing at him and climbed inside. The camera caught that too.
Inspector Jones reported to Desmond Hannah during the lunch hour. Every visitor to the islands for the past three months had been checked through passport records taken at the airstrip. No one answered either to the name of Francisco Mendes or to the description of a Latin American. Hannah sighed.
If the dead American Gomez had not been mistaken—and he might well have been—the elusive Mendes could have slipped into the Barclays in a dozen ways. The weekly tramp steamer brought occasional passengers from “down island,” and official coverage of the docks was sporadic. Yachts occasionally stopped by, mooring in bays and creeks around Sunshine and the other islands, their guests and crews disporting themselves in the crystal waters above the coral reefs until they hoisted sail and passed on. Anyone could slip ashore—or leave. Hannah suspected this Mendes, once he had been spotted and knew it, had flown the coop. If he had ever even been there.
Hannah rang Nassau, but Dr. West told him he could not start the autopsy until four that afternoon, when the body of the Governor would have finally returned to normal consistency.
“Call me as soon as you have that bullet,” Hannah urged.
At two, an even more disgruntled press corps assembled in Parliament Square. From the point of view of sensations, the morning rally had been a flop. The speech had been the usual nationalize-everything rubbish that the British had discarded a decade earlier. The voters-to-be had been apathetic. As a world story, it was all cutting-room-floor material. If Hannah did not make an arrest soon, they thought, they might as well pack up and go home.
At ten past two, Marcus Johnson arrived in his long white convertible. He wore an ice-blue tropical suit and an open-neck Sea Island shirt as he mounted the back of the flatbed truck that served as his platform. More sophisticated than Livingstone, he had a microphone with two amplifiers strung from nearby palm trees.
As Johnson began speaking, McCready sidled up to Sean Whittaker, the free-lance stringer who covered the whole Caribbean from his Kingston, Jamaica, base for London’s Sunday Express.
“Boring?” murmured McCready.
Whittaker gave him a glance. “Tripe,” he agreed. “I think I’m going home tomorrow.”
Whittaker reported stories and took his own pictures as well. A long-lens Yashica hung around his neck.
“Would you,” asked McCready, “like a story that would blow your rivals out of the water?”
Whittaker turned and cocked an eyebrow. “What do you know that nobody else does?”
“Since the speech is a bore, why not come with me and find out?”
The two men proceeded across the square, into the hotel, and up to McCready’s second-floor room. From the balcony, they could see the whole square below them.
“The minders, the men in multicolored beach shirts and dark glasses,” said McCready. “Can you get full-face close-ups of them from here?”
“Sure,” said Whittaker. “Why?”
“Do it, and I’ll tell you.”
Whittaker shrugged. He was an old hand; he had had tips in his time from the most unlikely sources. Some worked out, some did not. He adjusted his zoom lens and ran off two rolls of color prints and two of black-and-white.
McCready took him down to the bar, stood him a beer, and talked for thirty minutes.
Whittaker whistled. “Is this on the level?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you prove it?” Running this sort of story was going to need some hard-sourced quotes, or Robin Esser, the editor in London, would not use it.
“Not here,” said McCready. “The proof lies in Kingston. You could get back tonight, finalize it tomorrow morning, and file by four P.M. Nine o’clock in London—just in time.”
Whittaker shook his head. “Too late. The last Miami-Kingston flight is at seven-thirty. I’d need to be in Miami by six o’clock. Via Nassau, I’d never make it.”
“As a matter of fact, I have my own plane leaving for Miami at four—in seventy minutes’ time. I’d be happy to offer you a lift.”
Whittaker rose to go and pack his suitcase. “Who the hell are you Mr. Dillon?” he asked.
“Oh, just someone who knows these islands, and this part of the world. Almost as well as you.”
“Better,” growled Whittaker, and left.
* * *
At four o’clock, Sabrina Tennant arrived at the airstrip with her cameraman. McCready and Whittaker were already there. The air taxi from Miami drifted down at ten past the hour.
When it was about to take off, McCready explained, “I’m afraid I can’t make it. A last-minute phone call at the hotel. Such a pity, but the air taxi is paid for, and I can’t get a rebate. It’s too late. So please be my guests. Good-bye, and good luck.”
Whittaker and Sabrina Tennant eyed each other suspiciously throughout the flight. Neither of them mentioned to the other what they had or where they were going. At Miami the television team headed into town; Whittaker transferred to the last flight to Kingston.
McCready returned to the Quarter Deck, extracted his portable phone, programmed it to a secure mode, and made a series of calls. One was to the British High Commission in Kingston, where he spoke to a colleague who promised to use his contacts to secure the appropriate interviews. Another was to the headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, in Miami, where he had a contact of long standing since the international drug trade has links with international terrorism. His third call was to the head of the CIA office in Miami. By the time he had finished, he had reason to hope his new-found friends of the press would be accorded every facility.
Just before six, the orange globe of the sun dropped toward the Dry Tortugas in the west, and darkness, as always in the tropics, came with remarkable speed. True dusk lasted only fifteen minutes. At six, Dr. West called from Nassau. Desmond Hannah took the call in the Governor’s private office, where Bannister had set up the secure link to the High Commission across the water.
“You’ve got the bullet?” Hannah asked eagerly. Without forensic backup, his inquiry was running dry. He had several possible suspects but no eyewitnesses, no clearly guilty party, no confession.
“No bullet,” said the distant voice from Nassau.
“What?”
“It went clean through him,” said the forensic pathologist. He had finished his work at the mortuary half an hour earlier and had gone straight to the High Commission to make the call. “Do you want the medical jargon or the basics?”
“The basics will do,” said Hannah. “What happened?”
“There was a single bullet. It entered between the second and third ribs, left-hand side, traveled through muscle and tissue, perforated the upper left ventricle of the heart, causing immediate death. It exited through the ribs at the back. I’m surprised you didn’t see the exit hole.”
“I didn’t see either bloody hole,” growled Hannah. “The flesh was so frozen, it had closed over both of them.”
“Well,” said Dr. West down the line, “the good news is, it touched no bone on the way through. A fluke, but that’s the way it was. If you can find it, the slug should be intact—no distortion at all.”
“No deflection off bone?”
“None.”
“But that’s impossible,” protested Hannah. “The man had a wall behind him. We’ve searched the wall inch by inch. There’s not a mark on it, except for the clearly visible dent made by the other bullet, the one that went through the sleeve. We’ve searched the gravel path beneath the wall. We’ve taken it up and sifted it. There is one bullet only, the second bullet, badly smashed up by the impact.”
“Well, it came out all right,” said the doctor. “The bullet that killed him, I mean. Someone must have stolen it.”
“Could it have been slowed up to the point that it fell to the lawn between the Governor and the wall?” asked Hannah.
“How far behind the man was the wall situated?”
“No more than fifteen feet,” said Hannah.
“Then, not in my view,” said the pathologist. “I’m not into ballistics, but I believe the gun was a heavy-caliber handgun, fired at a range of more than five feet from the chest. There are no powder burns on the shirt, you see. But it was probably not more than twenty feet. The wound is neat and clean, and the slug would have been traveling fast. It would have been slowed by its passage through the body, but nowhere near enough to drop to the ground within fifteen feet. It must have hit the wall.”
“But it didn’t,” Hannah protested. Unless, of course, someone had stolen it. If so, that someone had to be within the household. “Anything else?”
“Not a lot. The man was facing his assailant when he was shot. He didn’t turn away.”
Either he was a very brave man, thought Hannah, or more likely, he just couldn’t believe his eyes.
“One last thing,” said the doctor. “The bullet was traveling in an upward trajectory. The assassin must have been crouching or kneeling. If the ranges are right, the gun was fired about thirty inches off the ground.”
Damn, thought Hannah. It must have gone clean over the wall. Or possibly it hit the house, but much higher up, near the guttering. In the morning Parker would have to start all over again, with ladders.
Hannah thanked the doctor and put the phone down. The full written report would reach him by the scheduled flight the next day.
Parker had now lost his four-man forensic team from the Bahamian Police, so he had to work alone the next day. Jefferson, the butler, aided by the gardener, held the ladder while the hapless Parker went up the house wall above the garden looking for the imprint of the second bullet. He went as high as the gutters, but he found nothing.
Hannah took his breakfast, served by Jefferson, in the sitting room. Lady Moberley drifted in now and again, arranged the flowers, smiled vaguely, and drifted back out again. She seemed blithely unconcerned whether her late husband’s body, or what was left of it, was brought to Sunshine for burial or taken back to England. Hannah gained the impression that no one had cared much for Sir Marston Moberley, starting with his wife. Then he realized why she seemed so blithe. The vodka bottle was missing from the silver drinks tray. Lady Moberley was happy for the first time in years.
Desmond Hannah was not. He was puzzled. The more the hunt for the bullet went on in vain, the more it seemed his instinct had been right. It was an inside job, the torn-off lock on the steel gate a ruse. Someone had descended the steps from the sitting room where he now sat and had circled the sitting Governor, who had then seen the gun and risen to his feet. After the shots, the assailant had found one of his bullets in the gravel by the wall and taken it. He had failed to find the other in the dusk and had ran off to hide the gun before any interruption came.
Hannah finished his breakfast, went outside, and glanced at Parker up near the gutter.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Not a sign,” Parker called down.
Hannah walked back to the wall and stood with his back to the steel gate. The previous evening he had stood on a trestle and stared over the gate at the alley behind it. Between five and six, the alley was constantly busy. People taking a short cut from Port Plaisance to Shantytown used it; smallholders returning from the town to their scattered homes behind the trees used it. Nearly thirty people had passed up and down it within the hour. At no time was the alley completely empty. At one time there had been seven people walking down it, one way or the other. The killer simply could not have come in that way without being spotted. Why should Tuesday evening have been so different from any other? Someone must have seen, something.
Yet no one had come forward in response to the posters. What islander would forgo a thousand American dollars? It was a fortune. So ... the killer had come from inside the house, as he had surmised.
The grilled front door to Government House had been closed that evening at that hour. It was self-locking from the inside. Jefferson would have answered if anyone rang the bell. No one could just walk through the gates, across the gravel forecourt, through the front door, across the hall, through the sitting room, and down the steps to the garden. It was no casual intruder; the front door would have blocked them. The ground-floor windows were grilled, Spanish style. There was no other way in—unless an athlete had vaulted the garden wall and dropped to the grass. ... Possible.
But how to get out again? Through the house? Then there was a very good chance of being seen. Back over the wall? It had been minutely searched for scrape marks, as of someone climbing, and there were glass shards along the top. Out through the steel gate, previously opened? Another good chance of being seen.
No—it looked like an inside job. Oscar, the chauffeur, had vouched for Lady Moberley, who had been away at the children’s hospital. That left harmless, bumbling old Jefferson, or young Haverstock of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards.
Was this another white society scandal like the Kenyan affair before the war, or the killing of Sir Harry Oakes? Was it a one-killer affair, or were they all in on it? What was their motive—hate, lust, greed, revenge, political terror, or the threat of a ruined career? And what about the dead Julio Gomez? Had he really seen a South American contract killer on Sunshine? If so, where on earth did Mendes fit in?
Hannah stood with his back to the steel door, walked forward two paces, and dropped to his knees. He was still too high. He went on his stomach and propped his torso on his elbows, his eyes thirty inches above the grass. He stared at the point where Sir Marston would have been standing, having risen from his chair and taken one step forward. Then he was up and running.
“Parker!” he yelled. “Get off that ladder and come down here!”
Parker almost fell off, so loud was the shout. He had never seen the phlegmatic Hannah so disturbed. When he reached the terrace, he scampered down the steps to the garden.
“Stand there,” said Hannah, pointing to a spot on the grass. “How tall are you?”
“Five foot ten, sir.”
“Not tall enough. Go to the library and get me some books. The Governor was six foot two. Jefferson, get me a broom.”
Jefferson shrugged. If the white policeman wanted to sweep the patio, that was his business. He went for a broom.
Hannah made Parker stand on four books on the spot where Sir Marston had stood. Crouching on the grass he aimed the broom handle like a rifle at Parker’s chest. The broom sloped upward at twenty degrees.
“Step to one side.”
Parker did so and fell off his books. Hannah stood up and walked to the steps that ran up the wall to the terrace, rising from left to right. It was still hanging on its wrought-iron bracket, as it had for three days and before that. The wire basket, packed with loam, cascaded brilliant geraniums. So thick were the clusters, one could hardly see the basket from which they came. As the forensic team worked on the wall, they had brushed the streaming flowers out of their faces.
“Bring that basket down,” Hannah said to the gardener. “Parker, bring the murder bag. Jefferson get a bedsheet.”
The gardener moaned as his work was strewn all over the bedsheet. One by one, Hannah extricated the flowers, tapping the loam clear of their roots before placing them on one side. When only the loam was left, he separated it into hand-size clods, using a spatula to break the clods into grains. And there it was.
Not only had the bullet passed through the Governor intact, it had not even touched the wire frame of the basket. It had gone between two strands of wire and stopped dead in the middle of the loam. It was in perfect condition. Hannah used tweezers to drop it into a plastic bag, wrapped the bag, and dropped it into a screw-top jar. He rocked back on his ankles and rose.
“Tonight, lad,” he told Parker, “you are going back to London. With this. Alan Mitchell will work through Sunday for me. I’ve got the bullet. Soon I’ll have the gun. Then I’ll have the killer.”
There was nothing more he could do at Government House. He asked that Oscar be summoned to drive him back to the hotel. As he waited for the chauffeur, he stood at the windows of the sitting room looking out over the garden wall toward Port Plaisance, the nodding palms and the shimmering sea beyond. The island slumbered in the heat of midmorning. Slumbered—or brooded?
This isn’t paradise, he thought. It’s a bloody powder keg.