What her employers did not understand was that she was not a cold-blooded murderess. She was an executioner, who dealt the ultimate sanction to people whose guilt was proven and who could not be reached by conventional means. Rodrigo had been guilty of nothing. To have killed him simply to make her getaway secure would have lowered her to the level of Capillano himself.
In any event, being able to discover that Senorita O’Brien had made herself scarce and fled the country, even if she had also been armed with a small pistol, as four of the dead men had been killed by the Browning did not necessarily indicate that she had carried out the killings; if she had been an inadvertent witness to what had happened, she might well have determined that her best course was to get as far away as possible as rapidly as possible. But the Mexican police would certainly want to interview her, and possessing her description they would undoubtedly trace her movements. But lacking a photograph, and with conflicting descriptions, persuading people to remember her would be difficult; wearing her hippie gear she had melded as much into the background as it was possible for someone like her to do. There would then be only a name, and the suggestion, supplied by the staff at the Airport Hotel, that she had been on her way to New York.
Satisfied, she got up, had a shower, dressed, strapping on her pistol, although she could not imagine herself ever needing to use it in Nassau – lacking her shoulder bag and with her new handbag stuffed with money and passports and toiletries and her spare magazine, there was simply nowhere else to carry it – put on her jewellery and ordered breakfast. She felt totally rested, rejuvenated, and ready to enjoy her private paradise. She was drinking her second cup of coffee when the phone rang. ‘Tommy Rawlings is here for you, Miss Fitzjohn.’
‘Thank you. Tell him I’ll be right down.’
‘And there’s a telegram for you. Shall I send it up?’
‘Why not read it to me?’
‘Yes, ma’am. It says, “Good girl. I love you. Joe.”’
‘Isn’t that sweet?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I’m on my way.’
She hung up, put on her hat and winged glasses, picked up her handbag, and went down to the lobby, where she paid her bill in cash.
‘Welcome home, Miss Anna.’
‘Tommy!’ She shook hands with the large black man wearing a yachting cap.
‘It sure is good to have you back.’ He had now worked for her for over two years, and still regarded her with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. He knew nothing about her background, or about what she did when she mysteriously disappeared for a fortnight at a time; even on those occasions she had required him to crew her to Miami, and either wait for her or return for her when called, he was quite prepared to respect her whims. Nor did he have any idea of her worth, although having been with her since she had bought the cay he had to know she was pretty wealthy; it was her sheer aura even more than her beauty that left him, as it left most men, feeling that he was in the presence of a goddess. Kali, she thought; the Hindu Goddess of Death.
‘I’ve only been gone two weeks,’ she reminded him.
‘Seemed like an eternity, ma’am.’
‘You say the sweetest things. Well, I hope it’s going to be an eternity before I have to travel again.’
‘No baggage, ma’am?’
‘I lost it along the way. Thank you, Charles.’ She smiled at the waiting maitre d’, and slipped a twenty-pound note into his palm. ‘See you again soon.’ She accompanied Tommy down the steps to the waiting taxi, got into the back seat beside him. ‘All well on the cay?’
‘No problem, ma’am. That Jupiter near caught a ray a couple of days gone.’
‘Oh, good lord! He didn’t get hit by the tail?’
‘No, ma’am. He missed, and the fish was so scared he swam away too quick.’
‘Thank God for that. Boat at the dock?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Take us to Rawson Square, will you please,’ she told the driver.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
A few minutes later they were disembarking beneath the statue of Queen Victoria.
Anna paid the driver. ‘Now, Tommy, I have a couple of things to do. You wait for me on the boat. I’ll be about half an hour.’
‘No problem, ma’am.’
Anna walked along Bay Street, as always attracting the attention of just about everyone she passed; Anna Fitzjohn in distinctive dark glasses and a summer dress which flared in the wind, with her golden hair floating out from under her straw hat was a sight sufficient to stop traffic anywhere.
She went first to the bank, ignored the various tellers’ cages in favour of the open counter, and smiled at the accountant.
‘Miss Fitzjohn! Good to see you.’
‘Nice to see you, Mr Newton. I’m terribly sorry, but I seem to have forgotten my chequebook on the cay. Could you cash a counter cheque for me?’
‘Of course. How much would you like?’
She still had five thousand of the original twenty thousand dollars with which she had begun her trip, but that money – picked up from the CIA agent in Miami on her way to Mexico – was not something anyone in this bank should know about; the Bahamas, as a British colony, were within the sterling area and thus subject to the very strict exchange control rules governing that area. There was also the three hundred pounds. But she didn’t intend to leave the cay again for some time, and she liked to be ready for any emergency. So she said, ‘I’m a little low. I think a thousand will do.’
Newton looked pained. He well knew, from the balance in her account as much as from the large deposits that were regularly paid in to that account that to Anna Fitzjohn a thousand pounds was the equivalent of ten pounds to his average customer – he had absolutely no idea where her capital had arisen or where it was invested, or indeed, where she herself had come from – but the idea of a somewhat insouciant young woman walking the streets of Nassau with a thousand pounds in her purse was extremely disturbing.
Anna was well aware of what was going through his mind, and with her wicked sense of humour could not help wondering what his reaction, and that of his staff, would be should she faint and have to be removed to the rest room for resuscitation and the pistol strapped round her thighs be uncovered. ‘Half in tens and half in twenties,’ she said brightly.
He swallowed. ‘Of course, Miss Fitzjohn,’ he said, and hurried off.
When Anna left the bank, her handbag stuffed with the additional seventy-five notes, she went to her favourite boutique. ‘Do you remember that lovely big shoulder bag you sold me last year?’ she asked the manageress. ‘The one with the thick leather strap?’
‘Of course, Miss Fitzjohn.’
‘Can you match it?’
‘I should think so. But . . . those bags are supposed to last forever. Well, for a very long time. If the material has proved defective in any way . . .’
‘No, no,’ Anna said. ‘The material is fine, so far as I know. But I lost it. The bag.’
The woman stared at her.
‘I must have put it down somewhere,’ Anna explained. ‘And forgotten it there. And now I can’t remember where it was.’
Another pained expression. Again Anna could tell exactly what was going through her mind: this dumb blonde, for all her good looks, shouldn’t be allowed out without a minder. But she said, ‘I’ll just get the bag, ma’am.’
With the bag, even if presently empty save for her purse, resting reassuringly on her hip, Anna made her way to the dock where Tommy was waiting, seated patiently on the upper steering position and reading the Guardian. She stood for a moment admiring the Chris-Craft motor cruiser. She had never been on something like this until just under two years before. Then, with the assistance and advice of a CIA agent who knew about boats, she had bought this at a Miami boatyard. Jimmy Flynn had also crewed her across to Fair Cay, a matter of some two hundred and fifty miles.
By the time they had got there, she had overcome her initial hostilit
y to the sea; the last time she had been on a ship it had been torpedoed! But with Jimmy’s encouragement she had been helming herself, and fallen madly in love. Forty-two feet long, driven by two powerful diesel engines which gave her twelve knots cruising and fuel tanks with a range of seven hundred miles, and with comfortable accommodation for six, she was the ultimate freedom; at sea, while one had to understand the weather, and the tides and currents, and how to read a chart and navigate – which she found fascinating – there were no street signs, no policemen or pedestrians, and above all, no possible enemies lurking round street corners; the enemies were all beneath the surface, and all one had to do was keep on top of the water. With its well-equipped galley and full water tanks, it was a world of its own, where only one rule mattered: hers.
She had called it Fair Girl.
*
Anna took off her high heels and stepped on board. Tommy stood up ‘OK, ma’am?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’ She went into the saloon, which was also the lower steering position, and down the short companionway into the aft, master, cabin. Here she always kept several changes of clothes, so she stripped, removing her suspender belt and stockings as well as her pistol belt, stowed them in one of the lockers, put on a shirt and slacks, thrust her toes into canvas shoes, tied her hair in a bandanna, and returned to the bridge. ‘Eleven o’clock. We’ll be home for a slightly late lunch.’
She half turned the two ignition keys, waited until the glowing lights on the facia faded to tell her that the heat starts had kicked in, then completed the turn; both engines burst into life. Tommy took in the mooring warps, and the little ship moved away from the dock, watched by a considerable crowd of spectators, both on account of the beauty of the craft and of the helmswoman.
Now an expert, Anna steered the cruiser between the various wharves and moored craft into the wide expanse of the harbour itself, turning east, with Hog Island on her left hand. Sparsely inhabited, even, nowadays, by the hogs that had given it its name, it possessed, on its northern side, a magnificent beach, a very popular destination with Bahamians on a Sunday morning. As it could only be reached by boat, there were various suggestions that the harbour should be bridged, but that was an enormous proposition for a not very wealthy community; Anna doubted that it would ever happen.
The normal entrance to the harbour was at the west end, where there was a lighthouse and a broad, deep-water channel, although the bigger ships still required the use of a pilot. The eastern end was narrow, shallow and encumbered with reefs, but Anna, with her photographic memory and immense powers of concentration knew it like the back of her hand, and they were soon through and in open water, following, some five miles off shore, the chain of islands stretching to the north-east.
Fair Cay was some forty miles away from New Providence, and they had not been under way for more than an hour before she could see it on the horizon. The sea around them was empty, so she switched on the auto pilot and went down to the saloon to use the radio; the radios on the cay were always on stand by, but not closely monitored, and she had to call several times to raise a response.
‘Fair Cay! Is that you, Anna?’
‘It’s me, Mama. We’re out of Nassau and should be with you just after two.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Not since breakfast. What’s for lunch?’
‘Grouper steaks.’
‘Couldn’t be better. You go ahead and have yours; I’ll eat when I get in.’
‘All right. Anna . . .’ Even if she had no idea where her daughter had been and what she had been doing, Jane Fehrbach knew enough about Anna’s background to be unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice.
‘I’m here, Mama. All in one piece. See you in a couple of hours.’
She returned to the bridge, reclaimed the helm, and studied the island, growing larger by the minute. A slow glow of exultation spread through her body. Fair Cay was the first thing of value she had ever legitimately owned; her jewellery had been ‘retained’ from her Nazi masters when she had escaped. Just over a mile long, the cay had originally belonged to a wealthy American recluse, who, like this more recent wealthy Irish recluse, had turned it into a permanent home. When Anna had selected the Bahamas as her refuge – close enough to her employers to suit them, and yet capable of being utterly remote – she had hunted through all the many possible sites before choosing this one, renaming it Fair Cay, which, while reasonably sensible to most people, was, like the name of her boat, actually a play on her real name, Fehrbach . . . but this was known only to herself and her parents.
Now she could make out both the ripple of surf on the reef that entirely surrounded the cay, and the main house, which was two-storied and rose above the trees, and the radio mast; the little dock was on the eastern side, sheltered by the other islands in the chain which enclosed a large area of relatively shallow water; here the reef was closer than anywhere else, within three hundred yards of the dock, which was gained by a single narrow passage between the coral heads, but this also was like a front drive to Anna, and just after two they were nosing alongside the stone breakwater, where there waited another boat, an open twenty-five-foot runabout. This belonged to her staff, a gift from Anna; they lived on the island during the week, but went back to their home island of Eleuthera, a large bank on the northern horizon – it was over a hundred miles long – every weekend.
Although the main house had been comfortable enough when she had first come here, she had spent a quarter of a million dollars on making improvements, not only to the house, but on building a cottage for Tommy and his wife Desiree, and another for the three other black men, the ‘boys’, who looked after the garden and the farm; the island was self-sufficient in vegetables and tropical fruit, and she kept a large poultry flock: the boys also caught all the fish she required, leaving only fresh meat, drinks, whether soft or alcoholic, and such things as milk and household items to be obtained from the nearest inhabited island, Spanish Wells, just off North Eleuthera. These items she left to her mother, who went up there with Tommy three times a week.
She had also installed a saltwater swimming pool, right up against the house and therefore absolutely private. This was not such an absurdity as it might have seemed on a Bahamian island. There was certainly a splendid beach on the north-west side, fronting the lagoon created by the reef, a quarter of a mile from the shore, but it was exposed to every passing boat. Anna liked to bathe in the nude, and although she had no objection in principle to being overlooked, she had no desire to draw any attention to herself by causing the least breath of scandal in gossip-hungry Nassau.
*
The boat secured, they plugged in the electric cable to the shore supply that Anna had had laid on to the dock; this maintained constant power to the fridge as well as keeping the batteries always topped up – at sea the fridge ran off battery power, when the engines did the job of charging. Then they walked up the path towards the trees surrounding the house, listening now to the growl of the generator that was the sole source of power for the island, including, apart from the boat, the houses’ electric light, and such essentials as the huge chest freezer for food storage and the water pumps, both for fresh from the cistern and salt from the sea; apart from the pool, all the toilets used salt water.
As they left the dock they were greeted by a baying sound, and the two huge Dogos came charging down the path. Anna had selected Dogos as her pet-cum-guard dogs because of their twin characteristics of complete and faithful loyalty to their owner, and unbridled ferocity towards anyone else. The eight permanent inhabitants of the island were their friends; anyone else was an enemy, unless they happened to be accompanied by their mistress and told what not to do. The known fact that the fearsome creatures were resident on the island effectively protected it from any trespassers, just as the fact that they would accept no food except from one of the Fehrbachs or one of the Rawlings meant that they could not be fed poisoned meat.
Anna braced herself for the cha
rge, ruffling the huge white heads and having her hands licked again and again. ‘Juno! Sweetheart! Jupiter, you old devil! Tommy tells me you’ve been chasing stingrays. You are a naughty fellow.’
Jupiter, if he could not understand her words, could certainly understand the tone of censure, and hung his head accordingly. Anna gave him another stroke and led both animals up to the house, and to the two people standing there, waiting for her.
It always gave her a glow of warmth to see them, even after a day’s shopping trip to Nassau. When Johann and Jane Fehrbach had been arrested in Vienna in 1938, and their elder daughter had been taken away from them, they had feared the worst. When their guards had triumphantly told them that their Annaliese, the sweetest and most docile of their children, was now working for the Nazis, they had realized they had not understood how bad the worst could be.
Thus for seven years they had endured their relatively humane captivity, their lives distorted by shame and indeed loathing, compounded by tragedy, as their younger child, Katherine, fed up with imprisonment, had voluntarily joined the Reich and progressed, like her sister, into the ranks of the SD. But not being an Anna, Katherine had not survived.
Then had come the day when Anna had been able to extricate them from their Polish prison camp. Her immediate plan to get them out of Germany had failed, but she had been able to reveal to them that she was actually an Allied agent. Their relief and suddenly renewed love for her had been almost overwhelming, and only a few months later she had been able to rescue them from the collapsing chaos of the Third Reich to the safety of England.
Yet the mental scars of their ordeal had remained, accentuated by the fact that at that time she had been unable to be with them, except occasionally. But when, three years ago, she had achieved her last triumph over the by then defunct Reich, once she had chosen her spot, she had removed them here to be with her for the rest of their lives.
In the utter peace and tranquillity of Fair Cay they had bloomed like dying flowers suddenly given light and water. Johann, now nearing sixty, kept himself busy writing, as he had done all his life; whether or not his books would ever be published was of no importance; putting words, thoughts on paper was all he lived for, and after a lifetime of suffering the restrictions and indeed dangers of living under a dictatorship, either before or after the Anschluss of 1938, was a dream come true.
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