“There’s a ferry in fifteen minutes.”
“There we are then. To the docks!”
As they pulled away from the curb, Eulalie noticed Mrs. Belfast walking around the office, sprinkling drops from a tiny bottle onto the floor. She barely had time to think about what this could mean when Chief Macgregor claimed her attention again.
“It’s still early, but we could get lunch on the ferry.”
Eulalie looked at her watch. It was only eleven o’clock, but she knew that missing meals made Chief Macgregor anxious, so she was happy to go along with the suggestion. The trouble with eating bowls of sugary cereal for breakfast was that they left you hungry by late morning. She could definitely force down a panini on the ferry.
Her phone buzzed, and she looked down to see a text from Mrs. Belfast.
Lorelei Belfast: No BB guns, Daisy rifles, or pellet guns of any description registered to Damien Hodge. I can’t find anyone connected with him who has one either. Should I broaden my search terms?
Eulalie showed Chief Macgregor the text. He raised his eyebrows.
“That’s what my search turned up too. All it means is that he doesn’t own a pellet gun legally. The gun that fired at you was modified to fire shot. I’m pretty sure that violates the terms of use of most brands of pellet guns. I suspect that the person who shot at you doesn’t observe the niceties of gun ownership.”
“It’s all tied in,” Eulalie said as they reached the docks. “It all relates to my investigation. I’m just not sure how yet. Let’s see if I can annoy someone enough to take a pot-shot at me today.”
“You know what you should do if you want to make real progress with this case?”
She gave him a sideways look. “What?”
“You should spend the night on Monk’s Cay.”
Chapter 23
Eulalie knew this was coming – had known it ever since Monk’s Cay had come back into her life in the form of Nancy Shrike. She had tried to avoid it, to run around the problem by interviewing multiple people and investigating everything but the source of the problem itself.
Even going to Monk’s Cay had been an avoidance strategy. She had gone during the day and not at night. Whatever it was on Monk’s Cay that made nineteen-year-old girls disappear without a trace - it came out at night, and not during the day.
A cold wind seemed to pass over her skin leaving her chilled and shivering. In her mind’s eye, she saw a pair of bony wrists emerging from the folds of a monk’s robe. At the end of the wrists were hands, and those hands were pushing a boulder into the path of two young children.
“You’re right,” she said to Chief Macgregor. “But you’re coming with me.”
If she had expected some show of reluctance on his part, she was disappointed.
“Okay,” he said cheerfully.
“Aren’t you nervous?”
“About what?”
“Spending the night on Monk’s Cay?”
“You think we’ll meet a band of smugglers? I suppose it’s possible, but between the two of us we should be able to deal with them. I’ve seen you in the forest before, remember? I know what you’re capable of.”
Eulalie had seen Chief Macgregor handle a firearm, and knew what he was capable of too, but somehow it didn’t make her feel any better.
“It’s not the smugglers I’m worried about. It’s the other stuff. The… you know…” She made circling motions with her hands.
Chief Macgregor looked mystified. “The what?”
“The part about it being haunted,” she said. “The ghosts.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t believe in them. So, it’s ‘ghosts’ in the plural, is it? There’s more than one of them?”
Eulalie gave him a narrow look. More than once in the past few months, she had suspected him of teasing her. With his personality type, that wasn’t supposed to be possible.
“There’s just one, as far as I know.”
“Is it a girl ghost or a boy ghost?”
She couldn’t help smiling. “It’s a boy ghost. It’s the ghost of a monk who was executed here on Monk’s Cay more than a hundred years ago. He was caught in a compromising situation with one of his fellow monks. His name was Brother Sebastian.”
“That’s very specific. You must have researched this carefully.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
As close as they’d become in a relatively short time, she still wasn’t comfortable talking to him about her dreams. She wasn’t comfortable talking to anyone about them.
“Well, whatever his name is, I’m not afraid of him. I’ll be very happy to accompany you on an overnight visit. Shall we do it today?”
“Today?” Panic wanted to choke her. “But we haven’t made any plans.”
“We can make them now. The ferry ride to Logan Cay is even longer than the one to Monk’s Cay. You can catch me up on everything you’ve learnt in your investigation. How long did it take you and Fleur to get to the clearing in the forest where you suspected something was being stored?”
“It took about an hour there and an hour back. The beach is the best access point into the forest.”
“Then we’d better leave ourselves about an hour and a half at night. You won’t be able to see your way so well in the dark.”
“Don’t worry about that, Chief. I can see just fine in the dark. I don’t move any slower through the forest at night than I do during the day.”
He nodded in agreement – a man whose ego in no way depended on being better than a woman in any particular sphere.
He took out a pack of flashcards and a pen. “Okay, shoot. Tell me what you’ve discovered so far.”
So, she did. She told him about the three boys and their different accounts of what had happened that night. She told him about Nancy Shrike and the various bartenders and pub owners she had interviewed, and their opinions about the relationship dynamics between the three boys and Jessica Manilow.
She described her interviews with the doorman and the guard at the yacht club, and the delay in getting a search and rescue boat out to look for them. She told him about the eyewitness accounts of the deputy harbormaster and the skipper of the boat that found them, and what they had noticed.
She reminded him about what she and Fleur had discovered in the middle of the forest on Monk’s Cay. She even took him through the day of the Prince William’s Day parade and described her conversations with Damien Hodge and Carson Fairweather. She remained convinced that the hail of pellets that had missed her narrowly a few hours later was not unrelated to that conversation.
She took out her phone and showed him the data analysis Mrs. Belfast had done on the patterns and frequency of the flashing lights. She drew his attention to the fact that while most of the lights seemed to be coming from Monk’s Cay, there were some that originated from Logan Cay as well.
Without naming names – because he was an officer of the law, after all – she told him about the information she had received from Jimmy the Knife and from Gigi’s brothers. He agreed it was significant that the Prince William Island underworld knew nothing about any supposed smuggling operations from Monk’s Cay. The last piece of the puzzle would have to be supplied by the man they were going to see now. Chief Macgregor told Eulalie that his name was George Saint-Auguste.
Apparently, the police had no knowledge of his connection to any smuggling rackets. He had been questioned several times in his capacity as food and beverage manager on Logan Cay. He was always willing to help the police in their investigations when anything went missing, but there had never been a breath of suspicion attached to his name.
When Chief Macgregor phoned ahead to make an appointment, he had been only too happy to meet with them.
Chief Macgregor wrote each point on a different flash card. Then he set the cards out face up on the deck, as though he were playing Solitaire. He showed Eulalie how reshuffling the order of the cards could make one see connections and unanswered questions one hadn’t
noticed before.
“When I trained at Scotland Yard,” he told her. “There was a detective there who was close to retirement age. He had never got the hang of technology - never saw the point of the internet. But he swore by this system. The thing about police work is that you’re often not dealing with a puzzle. Most of the time you know exactly who did it. The difficulty lies in gathering the evidence to prove it. But occasionally we get these head-scratching cases, and I’ve found that this method works well. There’s something about the tactile reality of the cards and one’s ability to shift them around that helps one to see connections.”
“I’ve heard of this method,” said Eulalie, staring at the arrangement of cards he had made on the deck. “Sometimes it helps to go analog.”
She moved three of the cards. She put the Carson Fairweather card next to the Jessica Manilow card, and moved the Damien Hodge card closer to the cards that mentioned his parents. Then she took the deputy harbormaster’s card and put it next to George Saint-Auguste.
She looked at the new patterns she had just created and nodded.
“You’re right, this is a very good system.”
An announcement warned passengers that the ferry was about to dock. A cheer went up from the port-side deck where a group of young tourists had been hitting the ferry bar hard. They were excited to get to Logan Cay where the party went on twenty-four hours a day.
Eulalie had always found it a depressing place during the day without the festive shimmer of lights to give it a romantic glow. The nightclubs looked tawdry, and the drunk youngsters lurching around in the streets seemed desperate.
She and Chief Macgregor made their way to the Paradise Road Hotel where George Saint-Auguste had his offices.
Much of Logan Cay was developed and asphalted over, but it also had its wild side. The west side of the island consisted of rocky and inhospitable cliffs that would probably never feel the touch of development. That was the side that faced Monk’s Cay, which could just be seen in the distance with the naked eye.
The two islands seemed to fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Eulalie imagined that they had been part of the same land mass millions of years ago, before the continental drift began.
They were shown into a boardroom where the food and beverage manager waited for them.
He was a small, dapper man with a charming manner. He started off speaking French but switched to English when Eulalie pointed out that Chief Macgregor was more comfortable in that language.
“Mr. Saint-Auguste,” she said. “We are here on a matter of some urgency, connected to the disappearance of Jessica Manilow five years ago.”
He smiled. “Forgive me, but the girl has been missing for five years, not so? How is this an urgent matter now?”
“Our investigation has momentum for the first time ever. It is starting to look possible that we might find out what happened to her. If this is allowed to go stale, her disappearance might never be solved. There are people who care about her who would desperately like to know what happened.”
His smile stayed in place, but there was no softening of his expression.
“What makes you think that I hold the answers to your questions? I have given the police nothing but unstinting co-operation every time there are incidents of theft here.”
“You were recommended to me by two people in particular.” Eulalie saw the arrested look in his eye and pressed her advantage. “Jimmy the Knife and Bobo Bartineau are both close acquaintances of mine. They were sure you would be willing to help us.”
The mention of Jimmy the Knife got his attention, but it was the name of Gigi’s oldest brother that clinched the deal.
The manager sat down, his upright posture slightly slumped. Without the professional smile in place, his face looked different. Suddenly Eulalie could see him for what he was – a wheeler and dealer, loyal to nobody but himself.
“What do you want to know?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve been wondering,” said Eulalie. “Why brandy? Why is that the big-ticket item for smuggling? I understand that it’s a premium product and quite expensive, but the taxes on Prince William Island are so low that I don’t see the point in smuggling. Where is the advantage to the buyer? Is he really paying so much less for the smuggled item than he would to buy it wholesale? There are drugs that move in and out of our ports every day and they aren’t as big a secret as the brandy. How does that make sense?”
“It makes sense if you understand who is buying the brandy,” said George. “The biggest market for Prince William Island sugarcane brandy is in the Middle East. There are countries there that are dry by law. Their citizens, and especially their government officials, are not allowed to touch alcohol in any form. But there are certain wealthy families and senior officials who have a taste for cane brandy. They are not allowed to obtain it through legal means and there can be no record of these transactions. They are prepared to pay dearly – very dearly indeed – for what they want.”
“So, selling brandy on the black market is more profitable than selling it legitimately, even with the price markup and our low import and export taxes?”
“At a conservative guess, I’d say it is approximately five times more profitable.”
“Five times?”
“Conservatively.”
“Okay,” said Eulalie. “This is starting to make sense now.”
“Ms. Park believes that Monk’s Cay is central to the brandy smuggling trade out of Prince William Island,” said Chief Macgregor. “Do you have any idea whether she is correct?”
“I know there is a thriving black market in cane brandy leaving Prince William Island and going to certain dry countries in the Middle East,” said George. “And I have heard rumors that Monk’s Cay is an important waypoint in this process.”
“And do you have any idea who is behind it?”
The manager shrugged. “You could spend a year looking for a local who was prepared to work on Monk’s Cay overnight and not find one.”
“We have heard the rumor that it is not locals.”
“Then you know as much as I do. There are several local businessmen – I’m talking about the kind who operate out of Finger Alley – who would love to get their hands on a piece of the brandy smuggling business. But nobody knows who’s behind it. The consensus seems to be that they are outside operators. You’d think it would be polite to include the local entrepreneurs in your business ventures, but they never have. It’s all a bit mysterious.”
“What about operatives right here on Logan Cay?” asked Eulalie. “We have reason to believe that whoever is working on Monk’s Cay has accomplices here.”
“You’re talking about the lights, aren’t you?” George Saint-Auguste sighed. “Again, this is something I am aware of without being able to tell you who is responsible. All I can say is that it is not me. I’m in this career for the long haul. I like my job, and I like the opportunities for advancement. I’m not doing anything to mess that up.”
“I can understand that.”
“If the disappearance of that girl is really related to the brandy trade, then I hope you catch them. The big brandy producers have been badly hit by the constant loss of stock. And what’s bad for them is bad for me. If you manage to stop it, I’ll be the first to cheer. Now, if there’s nothing further, I need to get to another meeting.”
“Where are we going?” asked Chief Macgregor.
“I want to check out the west side of the island.”
Eulalie led the way towards a cliff path that ran along the western edge of Logan Cay. It was rough and overgrown and clearly not used regularly. This was the side of the island that faced Monk’s Cay.
She stood on the edge of the cliff and looked down.
“I wonder if there could be some sort of signaling system built into the cliffs below. Either that, or the lights are portable and brought here only when needed. What do you think?” She looked up to see Chief Macgregor standing well back from
the edge and looking a little anxious.
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you have to stand so close to the edge?”
“Well, yes. I’m trying to see if I can spot whatever lights they’ve been using.”
“It’s a long way down.”
“Are you worried about me, Chief?” Eulalie took a step closer to the edge.
“Frankly, yes.”
“That’s so sweet.” She stood on one leg and bent forwards in an elaborate arabesque. “But you were the one who stationed me on top of City hall.”
He turned his head to face away from her. “City hall doesn’t activate my vertigo like this cliff does. Intellectually, I know you won’t fall, but emotionally I’m afraid you will.”
She put her foot back down and stepped away from the edge. “You can look now. I’ve stopped.”
“Did you see anything?”
“The angle isn’t great. I need to climb down a little way to see if I can spot anything. Maybe you should turn away again.”
He turned his back to her, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing her drop out of sight behind the cliff. He reminded himself that she was an expert free-climber and that he should stop worrying.
“Can you see anything?” he asked, more to hear her voice than anything else.
“No, but this cliff-face is huge. There could be lights embedded anywhere along here and I’d never spot them.”
She pulled herself back up onto the ledge.
“Okay, you can turn around. I can’t see anything here.”
“It’s a good spot for communicating with Monk’s Cay, though,” said Chief Macgregor as he turned and looked out to sea.
“Yes, it is.”
“I think we’ll find our answers on Monk’s Cay tonight.”
“Maybe.”
Eulalie couldn’t bring herself to be enthusiastic about their expedition. Facing your fears was overrated. But if she had to do it, there was no one she would rather have at her side than Chief Macgregor.
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 63