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 proble
m 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.”
The Deceiver Page 46