The Corpse with the Crystal Skull

by Cathy Ace

  “I didn’t” said Sheila, looking bemused. Lottie poured her another brandy.

  I pressed on. “Granted, it’s true that Henry Morgan was in some trouble with Charles II in 1672, and was called to London, but instead of being prosecuted and possibly hanged, he ended up being knighted and returned to Jamaica as its lieutenant governor. Over the next decade or so he oversaw a programme of intense ‘cleansing’ of Jamaica’s less palatable inhabitants, especially around the Port Royal area. He died an extremely rich man in 1688. He lived in hard, unforgiving times, and certainly did some dreadful things, such as ensuring that Jamaica was able to become a key port in the trafficking of slaves. There are so many lenses through which you can view his actions, but one thing’s for certain, for a boy from rural Wales, he lived an extraordinary life.”

  Sheila looked impressed, as did Lottie. I felt somewhat gratified.

  Lottie smiled. “I thought you’d know a bit about him. But it’s his time in Panama that I’ve researched most deeply.”

  “He sacked Old Panama City in 1671, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” said Lottie, her eyes glowing. “However, despite the fact he took the city with minimal loss of men on his side, and huge losses on the Panamanian side, the bounty for each man who fought with him – the share they got from the monies he captured – was small. From that time onward there have been tales about him hiding a great deal of treasure that he managed to sneak out of Panama and hide on a ship to come to Jamaica. He arrived in Port Royal, in the harbour opposite Kingston, in March 1671. The treasure must have come to Jamaica with him, because this is the only place he landed after leaving Panama. Then, in April 1672 he was arrested here, and sent back to England, as you said, with the idea that he might stand trial for ignoring the Treaty of Madrid that had been signed between England and Spain just before he ransacked Panama. So, he must have hidden the treasure in that year before he was arrested.”

  “But you can’t be sure there was any treasure,” interrupted Sheila from her supine position.

  “Yes, I can. I have good evidence – but I’ll get to that in due course,” snapped Lottie. She was sitting very upright on one of the dining-room chairs, and was at full alert, focussed on her tale. “When Captain Henry Morgan – as he then was – got to London, he didn’t end up being tried for breaking the law at all, instead, Charles II knighted him, made him Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, as you said, Cait, and sent him back here with the new governor, the Earl of Carbury, and the new chief justice, Colonel Sir Thomas Modyford, who’d been governor here from 1664 to 1670. All three men knew each other, and I’ve always thought that Charles II saw in them an excellent triumvirate with the right skill set to secure and rule Jamaica on his behalf. And the treasure? Well, that was why I think Morgan accepted a political role – he wanted to get back to it, here. He wasn’t a politician, he was a fighter, and the life of a man who owned plantations, and had endless meetings with people about liaisons and agreements just doesn’t seem to fit with the earlier years of his life.”

  “He might just have had enough of fighting,” I suggested. “It’s one thing to make your mark in your twenties and thirties, and quite another to have to keep going off to battle all the time in your forties and fifties,” I added.

  “Especially when you’re rich,” said Lottie, seizing on my point. “You see, although he was paid handsomely for his privateering, and for his official roles once he returned here, there’s no way he could have afforded to buy everything he bought, and build everything he built, using just that wealth. That’s where the treasure came in. I believe he used it, a bit at a time, to be able to do what he wanted. Building the tower here, for example. He married his cousin in 1666, but they had no children. In his will he left all his money to his two godchildren, with some for his sister. Can you imagine Jamaica in the 1600s, and a man like that – a hero, a vital man, the lieutenant governor – not having any female companions additional to his wife? I believe the stories that he built the tower for a mistress, or consort.”

  I sighed. “He might have just wanted to live in it himself, Lottie. It’s close to the beach. He must have loved, and probably missed, the sea, having spent so much time sailing on it. It’s also a building that would be pretty easy to defend, if he found himself in trouble again,” I suggested.

  “Stop it,” snapped Lottie. “That’s not the point. The point is he built it, owned the land upon which it stood – stands – and more surrounding it. The land he owned at the time was much greater than the size of this estate; it also encompassed what used to be a large plot to the west – which fell into the sea in the late seventeenth century – and it also included what is now the Caro Mio estate to the east. As Nina mentioned.”

  “And that’s relevant because – what?” challenged Sheila.

  “I think Freddie started looking for the Morgan treasure in the late 1950s and moved here, to this estate, in the early 1960s because he believed this was where it was hidden. He wanted the treasure to fund the lifestyle to which he hoped to become accustomed. And I think he did just that.” Lottie looked smug.

  I wasn’t convinced. I challenged Lottie with a direct: “How can you say that? What proof do you have?”

  “Have you ever read Live and Let Die?” she asked.

  Sheila shook her head. “I’ve sure seen the movie though,” she said. “Roger Moore, Jane Seymour. Filmed here, wasn’t it? Well, you know, bits of it.”

  I said, “I read the book, a long time ago. Why? Oh, hang on…SMERSH is using seventeenth-century gold coins to finance its Soviet operations, and the coins are supposed to be a part of Henry Morgan’s secret treasure, which they’ve discovered here, on Jamaica. Right?” Lottie nodded enthusiastically. “You do know that Ian Fleming wrote fiction, don’t you?” I asked as pointedly as I dared. “He invented landscapes to meet the needs of his stories, and he didn’t even do Henry Morgan’s real story justice. He just wove bits of poorly-sourced history into fiction to tell a better tale.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Lottie dourly. “Yes, I’m aware. But Fleming would have known the rumors about Morgan’s Panamanian treasure, just like everyone who lived here did. He wrote that book in 1953, before Casino Royale was even published. He wrote it in Goldeneye, his house just a few miles from here. He knew this tower, and I bet you he even had a theory about where the treasure was ‘really’ buried, as opposed to what he made up for the book. Everyone else had their favorite theory back in those days; many still do, today. They’d probably talk about it as they drank their cocktails and smoked their cigars – possibly in this very room, when Freddie was giving his famous parties in the 1960s – swapping stories about the good old days of the war, and the hateful Ruskies threatening Western supremacy. Trust me, Daddy goes on and on…and on…about all that stuff. Not that he was here back then, of course, it was before his time, but he was told tales by people who were, and the whole thing becomes part of the canon of what makes Jamaica, Jamaica.”

  “Don’t Jamaicans make Jamaica, Jamaica?” quipped Sheila.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have had that second brandy, not with those painkillers,” I observed. Maybe she’s just tired?

  Lottie looked confused. “No, Sheila, they don’t – well, yes, of course they do. But there’ve been people using the island for their own ends since Columbus arrived here; the Spanish followed in numbers, almost wiped out the poor Arawak and Taíno peoples, then they shipped in slaves from West Africa to work on their plantations. Then came the British, the privateers…and so on, and so on. It’s always been like that here; constant tension, for so many reasons.”

  I checked my watch. It was half past twelve. I hoped Bud and the boys would be heading back to the estate, and decided to press Lottie to get to the point where she told me something concrete.

  “And Freddie and the treasure?” I asked. “What evidence do you have he ever found it? Other than possibly the crystal skull you mentioned.”

  Lottie
studied her empty glass, placed it on a side table and spoke more quietly; she wasn’t declaiming any longer, but remembering. “I first met Freddie Burkinshaw when I was a girl; Mummy and Daddy would bring me here when they met their chums, and I would sit with Freddie and he’d tell me stories to ‘amuse’ me. He told me about the Nazi’s blitzing his home in 1941; he lived in Hull, which suffered more damage than any other British city or town from bombing during World War II. He grew up through rationing, and reconstruction, and always with the sea right there beside him. But it was a cold, unforgiving sea, not the sort of sea he read about in books. He told me about how the Bond novels captivated him. He laughed when he told me he hardly understood what they were about, but he loved them. He was just eighteen years old when he first came to Jamaica. It was his heart’s desire to see the place, and he managed to get himself a job with a shipping firm in Hull that did business here, and got transferred. He would light up when he told me about that – so pleased with himself. And I think that’s when he began his grand plan – to find the treasure he’d read and dreamed about.”

  Freddie was part of her family’s circle of friends back then, I thought. What I said was: “How on earth did he expect to manage that?”

  “Contacts,” said Lottie. “He was good at making contacts. Although Daddy’s never been terribly forthcoming, he did say that Freddie had a reputation for being able to get things for people. Unusual things. Probably some illegal things. Freddie built a network of contacts and used that to build a network of ‘customers’. By 1962 he was sufficiently well-placed to be considered a valuable enough resource for the British government to want to have him here, and he’d amassed enough money that he could afford to buy this place. Daddy only hinted at it, but I think paying a low price for this estate might have been a prerequisite of him gathering and providing information for London.”

  I lit another cigarette and checked my watch, again. “It’s a lovely story, Lottie, but what about the treasure?”

  “We weren’t here when the big earthquake happened in 1993, and we didn’t come back for a year afterwards; the island sustained a great deal of damage. They have hundreds of quakes here every year. In 1692 there was a big one, too; that’s when about a third of Henry Morgan’s lands here fell into the ocean – as well as the cemetery in Port Royal where he was buried, his remains being claimed by the sea after all. Ironic, really. Freddie first showed me the crystal skull when we visited in 1994. I’ll never forget seeing it for the first time—”

  “As you told us at dinner,” I interrupted. “But the rest of it?”

  Lottie tutted. “I believe Freddie couldn’t resist holding onto the skull for himself, but that he kept the rest of his find a secret, and sold it off a bit at a time. It wasn’t until I turned twenty-one and got all of Mummy’s money that I had the time and resources to dig a bit deeper and test my theories. It’s marvellous to have cash, and not have to work. I put all my efforts into it. I found records of sales of items that could only have come from Panama in the 1670s, and some which were likely to have been there at the time. The sales took place all around the world from 1995 right up to the present day. Golden chargers embossed with contemporary designs, or chased with the crests of families living in Panama in those days; small caches of specific, traceable coins; items of jewelry seen in portraits, or described in records of the time; and a magnificent chalice known to have been looted from a Panamanian church during the sacking by Morgan – its body was covered with cabochon rubies, signifying the blood of Christ. Unique. All the transactions were kept pretty hush-hush; rather than being made through the big sale rooms, the auctions took place online, even in the 1990s. I found someone who was prepared to act as an intermediary, to track down such items on behalf of an anonymous ‘collector’, and I was able to see photographs of the items being offered for sale, and being sold. I kept the photos, of course. So, yes, I’m certain that Freddie had indeed found Henry Morgan’s Panamanian treasure. I further believe that it must be located somewhere close to this estate – if not on it – because Freddie hasn’t left the place overnight since 1962, as he never tired of telling even those who didn’t want to know.”

  I gave some serious thought to everything Lottie had said. I had to admit she’d done her homework, and I felt more inclined to accept her theories about Freddie Burkinshaw’s source of wealth than I had done at dinner. But was there a connection to his death?

  Might Lottie herself have been desperate enough to discover the location of the treasure that she’d have killed Freddie during, or after, an attempt to get him to tell her where he’d secreted it? Or might someone else have also come to the same conclusions she had, and thereby ended up in a situation where his death resulted from some sort of interrogation?

  I realized how much we stood to learn once we were notified of Freddie’s autopsy results, and also wondered if – or when – the police might return the key to the tower room, so that I could get in there to have a proper look around.

  As I thought of the key, and of being able to enter the room I’d only been able to peer into, I realized I’d been incredibly stupid: the cops had called in someone to somehow open the door to allow them to access the body. If they’d done that, then they probably hadn’t been able to re-lock it. I could have got into the tower room any time I’d liked.

  I swore, internally. I really annoy myself, sometimes.

  “So, are you convinced?” asked Lottie, standing and smoothing down her still wet, and now exceedingly crumpled, dress. She tossed her long, damp hair as best she could.

  I pushed aside my self-chastisement and was just about to reply when Bud and John ran through the French doors. They were both soaked through, their eyes wild, and both were struggling to catch their breath. Bud had a large pink-ish stain on his shirt.

  My entire nervous system seized up – it looked like blood.

  Pool Party

  Bud shouted, “Everybody get into the pool. In your clothes. Just jump in, quick!”

  “Pardon?” said Lottie.

  “What?” I said.

  “Where’s Jack?” shouted Sheila, hoisting herself up onto an elbow.

  “He’s right behind us, Sheila. Now come on, quick.” He grabbed me out of the chair, then shooed me toward the open doors and the pool beyond.

  “You’re frightening me, Bud,” I said, everything clenching. “Don’t you dare push me into that pool. You know I can’t swim. I’ll get in for myself, at the shallow end.” And I did, though I had no idea why. Bud launched himself into the deep end.

  Lottie and John joined us – causing a mini-tsunami – just as Jack appeared from the direction of the beach. “Where’s Sheila?” he screamed.

  “She’s on the sofa. Sprained ankle. Can’t walk,” I called at his scurrying figure.

  As Jack disappeared into the house, Bud grabbed me and held me tight in the chest-high, undulating water. I tensed. “What’s going on, Bud? Did I see blood on your shirt? Is it yours? Have you been hurt? Are you alright?” I sounded as panicked as I felt.

  He held my face in his strong hands. “It’s blood, but not mine. We found the guy I needed to see, but he’d been attacked before I got to his shack. Shot. Twice. Left for dead, I think. Then we heard the cops coming. We ran for it. When they get here, we’ve all been messing about in and around the pool since getting back from dinner, okay? We’ve agreed that’s our story. Stick to it.”

  I looked into his eyes and could see his focus, his determination. I nodded, and kissed him.

  That was how the cops found us: Bud and me kissing in the pool like teenagers; John and Lottie shouting at each other, and splashing; Jack squished onto a sofa indoors, wrapped in towels, comforting his wife who had a sprained ankle. Just some idiotic tourists, doing idiotic touristy things, at a luxurious private estate in paradise.

  The cops were patient as we four got out of the pool and dried off; they were concerned for Sheila when we explained how she’d hur
t herself in the general frivolity; they were understanding when we explained how we weren’t usually that rowdy, but that we’d been out for a lovely dinner and had probably enjoyed a few too many cocktails. It helped that one of the officers was Constable Cassandra Lewis, who’d met us all when she’d attended the scene of Freddie’s death the day before.

  When we enquired – as one would – about why they’d come onto the estate from the beach, their answers were less than forthcoming. They focussed instead on asking us all if we’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. When her superior left us beside the pool, to talk to Jack and Sheila in the lounge, I took the chance to press Constable Lewis about what was going on…as one would.

  She seemed like a pleasant enough young woman, and she whispered, “An attack, on the beach, along the way a bit. Anonymous call came in. Old man, shot dead. Homeless. Harmless. Not a good thing to happen, but it does. We see a figure run off to the bush, behind the beach. Male, we think. Think him come this way. Also think we see another figure, running. Gender indeterminate. Couple, maybe? Followed. Ended up here. You all say they didn’t come this way.”

  “I suppose they could have got up onto the main road, or had a car waiting, or something,” I said. Helpfully, I thought.

  The officer tilted her head, thoughtfully. “Could be,” she said. “Two old men dead in two days, less than a mile apart. Violent deaths.”

  “So sad,” I said.

  “And unusual,” she replied.

  “Really? You can’t imagine that the deaths of Freddie Burkinshaw of the Captain’s Lookout estate and some homeless chap in a shack on the beach are connected, surely? Freddie killed himself; this man was murdered. Completely different.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I mention a shack?”

  My insides sank. “I think your colleague said something about it.” Best recovery I can manage.

  “When you all leave?” she asked, jutting her chin toward me. A challenge?