Touching the Sun: A Harry Beck Thriller (The Bahamas Series Book 1)

by Len Maynard

  The girl on the bed stirred and rolled over, the sheet slipping from her naked body, exposing her sun-kissed breasts. She murmured something dreamily and gave a throaty laugh, but didn’t wake. She had her arm raised above her head, folded on the pillow like a golden snake, her fingers tangling in her curling blonde hair.

  Her name was Jane and she was on vacation, holidaying in the Bahamas with three of her girlfriends. I was not sure how she’d ended up in bed with me; I’d been too drunk last night to remember anything that clearly. But now morning was here, and the bungalow smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sex, so it was reasonable to assume that I’d had a good time.

  A short, sharp knock sounded on the back door, and I stubbed the cigarette out in a shell-shaped brass ashtray and went to answer it. Stevie was standing there dressed in a purple halter neck and denim shorts. She said nothing, but pushed past me into the bungalow. Her bare feet padded across the wooden floor, and she’d reached the bedroom before I could stop her.

  ‘See you’re still banging the tourists, Harry,’ she said in a voice loud enough to rouse the recently and not so recently deceased from their slumbers. Jane didn’t stir. ‘I thought you’d mended your ways.’ She was grinning mischievously as I reached past her and closed the bedroom door.

  ‘So, what are you suddenly, my mother? And keep your voice down. Someone’s sleeping in there.’

  She shook her head, a gesture of giving up on a lost cause. ‘You’re beyond help, Harry. A pretty face, a whiff of perfume, and you’re no better than an alley cat. No, on second thoughts, most alley cats have more self-control than you.’

  ‘Have you just come here to insult me?’

  She looked at me hard, taking in the stubble on my chin, the dark half-moons under my eyes. I looked like shit, and I felt worse than I looked. She chuckled and flopped down on the couch. ‘Feeling fragile, are we?’

  ‘Obviously we aren’t, but I most definitely am.’

  She picked up a magazine and started leafing through it, then looked up. ‘Mine’s white, no sugar. For you I recommend black, and as strong as you can take it.’

  I glared at her half-heartedly, and went through to the kitchen to make the coffee.

  Stevie Bailey, like me, was a native white Bahamian. She had just turned nineteen, and was tall and willowy with light brown hair, cropped boyishly short. Her skin was tanned and flawless, unless you counted the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her slightly up-tilted nose as a flaw, and she was really quite pretty, though if you told her that she would probably flatten you with one of the fiercest and most feared left hooks in Freeport. She’d been crewing for me since she was fifteen and her father, Tom Bailey, died, leaving her with a list of gambling debts and not much else.

  Stevie had inherited very little from her father except a love of the sea, a ferocious temper, and a skill with things mechanical that defied belief. She knew her way around The Lady of Pain’s Penta engines better than I did myself, and in all the time she’d been crewing for me we hadn’t lost more than a day due to mechanical failure.

  Running flat out the engines gave The Lady a top speed of thirty knots, quite respectable for a boat of that class. She was a Striker 38’, built with a steel hull back in ’74, original in every way except for the engines. When I first acquired her, she was powered by twin Daf 165hp diesels, but I pulled them out and replaced them with the Penta 235hp diesel turbos, making her a much more powerful craft. Stevie kept her in immaculate condition, a job she loved. A job she was very good at.

  She threw down the magazine, grabbed an apple from the bowl on the side table, and bit into it. Juice dribbled down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of her arm, leaving tiny droplets of apple juice glistening in the down-fine hairs.

  ‘So, what are you doing here?’ I said, placing a cup of coffee down on the table beside her. ‘It’s Sunday, or don’t we have a day of rest in this outfit anymore?’

  ‘One boat, a handful of commissions, and he thinks we’re an outfit,’ she said. ‘Alan’s looking for you.’

  ‘Oh? Where did you bump into him?’

  ‘He showed up at the harbor. I was down there on The Lady.’

  ‘Why didn’t he try here first?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him. He was on his boat. What a beast that is. I’d love to get my hands on her engines. Anyway, I told him you’d probably be here, but he didn’t seem to take it in. He was acting as if he had something on his mind. You know, distracted? I went back to what I was doing, and when I turned round again he was heading out to sea.’

  I lit another cigarette. ‘Did he say why he wanted to see me?’

  ‘You smoke too much,’ she said disapprovingly.

  ‘Christ! Since when have you cared what I do?’

  ‘Just keeping an eye on my future, that’s all. Good employers are hard to come by.’

  ‘At least I score some points on the positive side of the scale. Well?’

  She bit into the apple again and shook her head. ‘Just said he wanted to see you, that’s all.’ She changed the subject. ‘What’s on for tomorrow?’

  ‘Pleasure trip. A family from the hotel wants a tour around the island.’

  Stevie mimed an extravagant yawn.

  ‘I see you’re impressed.’

  ‘Squawking kids, henpecked husbands, and whining wives. Hardly the stuff of great adventures.’

  ‘True, but it means we can eat for another couple of days. Drink your coffee. I’m going to take a shower, and then I’ll go up to Alan’s house. He might be back there by now. Will you still be here when I come out?’

  ‘No. I’m going back down to The Lady. A bearing on one of the shafts is beginning to wear. I want to check it out before it seizes. Are you coming down later?’

  ‘Maybe. I’ve a few things that need attending to here first.’

  She smirked at me. It wasn’t one of her more attractive expressions. ‘Young enough to be your daughter, that one.’ She nodded her cropped head at the bedroom door.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I was thinking more of giving the place a cleaning. I wouldn’t want the word getting around that I’m a slob.’

  ‘Why not? The truth never hurt anyone,’ she said with a grin, and jumped up from the couch before I could throw something at her. In two mouthfuls the coffee was gone and she was out the door. After she’d gone I checked on Jane, who was still sleeping, then went and took a shower.

  When I came out the bedroom was empty and Jane had gone. C’est la vie.

  3

  Alan Lancaster owned two hotels on Grand Bahama Island, as well as several on the Out Islands…or the Family Islands, as the government preferred for them to be called these days. We’d known each other since childhood, but despite this our backgrounds were very different.

  Alan’s house was about a mile away from my bungalow, and as it was a fine summer’s morning, I decided to walk. Even this early the temperature was close to eighty and the humidity was high, but a breeze was coming in from the sea, making the heat more bearable.

  I reached the house and rang the doorbell. Elsa, the Lancaster’s German maid, opened the door but didn’t greet me with her usual welcoming smile.

  ‘Mr. Lancaster isn’t at home,’ she said flatly. ‘And madam isn’t receiving visitors.’

  ‘I think Anna will see me, Elsa,’ I said.

  She looked at me skeptically, shaking her head slowly.

  I didn’t give her time to argue. ‘I’ll go around the back and wait by the pool.’

  The Lancaster’s house was probably one of the most modern buildings on the island. It had been designed by Phillip France, the American architect responsible for designing the Blue Water Hotel on Eleuthera, the latest and most prestigious member of Alan’s hotel chain. The back of the house was constructed almost entirely from glass, giving a dramatic view of the shoreline.

  I glanced up at the top floor window and saw Anna standing there, staring out at the sea. I waved but she was ob
livious to me. I saw her turn as Elsa came into the room, and I heard her voice rise in anger. I couldn’t hear what she was saying – the glass did a good soundproofing job, muffling the words – but I caught the tone, and assumed that my visit wasn’t the most popular event in Anna’s social diary for that day. I sat down on a sun lounger and scratched my head, wondering what the hell I’d done to upset her.

  Finally, she came to the window and stared down at me. I threw her a salute and received a scowl in return, and then she moved out of sight. Moments later she was through the sliding glass doors to join me poolside.

  Anna Lancaster was a stunningly beautiful woman, tall and slim with chestnut colored curls that fell to her shoulders. Her skin was flawless, and she looked ten years younger than her thirty-five years. She was wearing a simple white cotton shift, a stark contrast to the Balmain and Oldfield dresses she normally favored, but it did nothing to detract from her natural elegance. She would have looked breathtaking in a potato sack.

  She stared at me with her almond-shaped, tourmaline-green eyes and said, ‘What the hell do you want, Harry?’

  ‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ I said lightly, trying to bring a smile to lips that seemed to have been cemented into a thin grim line.

  She stood over me as I sat on the lounger, regarding me coolly for a full thirty seconds, and then said, ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  ‘Sure.’ I fished in the pocket of my shirt and brought out a crumpled packet of Marlboro. I eased one out, trying to straighten the kinks so she wouldn’t notice, and offered it to her. She took it abstractly and leaned forward for a light. The sun was glaring down over her shoulder, and I had to squint to focus on the end of the cigarette as I touched it with the flame from my Dunhill lighter. She stood erect once more and inhaled deeply, blowing out the smoke in a thin stream from between pursed lips. ‘I was looking for Alan,’ I said.

  ‘He isn’t here.’ She walked past me and stared down into the blue water of the pool. ‘And in another half an hour neither will I be.’

  ‘Going into Freeport?’

  She shook her head and, before I could ask anything else, Sally, the Lancaster’s seven-year old daughter, burst from the house like a greyhound after a hare and leapt into my arms. She planted a wet kiss on my cheek and said, ‘Hello, Uncle Harry. Guess what? Mommy’s taking me on an airplane.’

  ‘Is she now?’ I said, staring over her shoulder at her mother.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it exciting?’

  ‘Sure is.’

  Anna turned to face us. ‘Go and play, Sally,’ she said.

  ‘But Uncle Harry is here and he hasn’t told me a story yet.’ For some reason Sally put me on a par with Hans Christian Anderson as a teller of fairy stories.

  ‘Sally, do as you’re told,’ Anna said sharply.

  Sally pouted, tears moistening her eyes. I set her down on the ground and ruffled her straight fair hair. She looked up at me beseechingly. ‘Next time I come, two.’ I held up a finger on each hand. ‘Two stories.’

  ‘Three,’ she said.

  ‘You drive a hard bargain, just like your daddy. Okay, three.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and spit.’

  ‘Ugh!’ she said, but considered the deal for a moment then said brightly, ‘Okay, but remember, you promised.’ She darted off around the side of the house and I turned my attention to her mother. ‘An airplane?’

  Anna threw the cigarette to the ground and crushed it petulantly with the toe of her expensive Italian sling backs. ‘Stay out of this, Harry. This is between Alan and me.’

  I shrugged. ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ I said, sitting back down on the lounger and lighting a cigarette.

  For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of the pool’s water filter and the high-pitched buzzing of an itinerant mosquito. She sat down on the lounger beside me and buried her face in her hands. When she took them away her palms were wet, her eyes tearful. ‘I’m leaving him, Harry. I’m taking Sally and flying back to Charleston, to Dad. He said we could stay with him for however long it takes to get things arranged legally.’

  ‘So this is permanent?’

  ‘I think so. It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘You’d better ask Alan. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Try,’ I said gently.

  She shook her head. ‘There’s no point. I’ve spoken too many words and shed too many tears over that man, Harry. I’ve had enough. I just can’t take any more. And it’s not just me. There’s Sally to consider too.’

  It shook me to hear her talking like this. From what I’d witnessed of their marriage I would have rated it as one of those matches that could only have been made in heaven. Which only went to prove how little I knew.

  ‘I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. You’re probably in it with him.’

  ‘In what?’

  She carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘You two were always thick with each other. You’re buried as deep in the filth as he is.’

  ‘Anna, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ I said. I laid my hand on her arm but she snatched it away.

  ‘Don’t lie to me. Please, Harry, don’t insult my intelligence.’ There was fire in her eyes as she got to her feet. ‘It’s funny, you know, but I always thought that out of the two of you Alan was the bigger bastard. I always had you figured as an honest, decent man, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I? Now, if you don’t mind, I have to pack.’

  She ran back into the house, leaving me sitting there, open mouthed but speechless, wondering what I’d said, but wondering even more just what the hell Alan had done. Whatever it was I wasn’t going to get any answers sitting there imitating a bullfrog catching flies. If I wanted answers, I had to find Alan.

  Stevie had spoken with him down at the harbor. Maybe she hadn’t told me everything Alan had said; not deliberately, of course, but there just may have been something more, if only a clue to his whereabouts now. I really didn’t fancy the idea of touring the island until I found him.

  The Lancaster’s house stood between my harbor and Freeport International Airport. I’d gone only a couple of hundred yards before I heard a car on the road behind me. I stopped walking and turned to see the Lancaster’s silver-grey Mercedes gliding towards me, Anna at the wheel, grim faced, Sally in the back. As they passed Anna slowed briefly, and for a moment I thought she was going to stop, but she obviously thought better of it. I heard the accelerator being gunned and the car picked up speed again.

  As the Mercedes drew away, I saw Sally climb up onto the back seat and wave from the rear window. I raised my hand to wave back, but suddenly there was a searing, blinding flash of light, and the car disintegrated into a ball of smoke and flame. The noise and shock of the explosion followed a split second later, blowing me off my feet, leaving me sprawling in the dust at the roadside.

  Dazed and deafened by the blast, I pushed myself up onto my elbows and looked back down the road. A thick pall of oily black smoke hung in the air above the few chunks of twisted burning metal…all that remained of the Mercedes.

  Of Anna and Sally there was no sign at all.

  4

  Inspector Hector Reynolds strode up and down the deck, his hands clasped behind his back, his crisp white police uniform dazzling in the late afternoon sun.

  Stevie was below deck, tinkering with the engines. When I had come back and told her what had happened to Anna and Sally Lancaster she’d hardly reacted at all, though she knew Anna quite well. There was a flicker of something behind her eyes, but it was well concealed. I’d asked her the same kind of questions Reynolds was now asking me, and I could understand Reynolds’s frustration.

  The wife and daughter of a prominent Bahamian businessman had been blown to pieces by a car bomb. The said businessman had vanished without trace, and the two people who had last seen the husband and wife alive could offer precious little information
to throw any light on the tragic events.

  ‘A strange name for a boat, Mr. Beck, The Lady of Pain, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ Reynolds said. He said the same thing to me every time we met. Fortunately, that wasn’t often on his official business, but we were aware of one another. I was a law-abiding citizen, at least by my own definitions.

  I was leaning against the rail, smoking, watching my hand tremble as it held the cigarette. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew the particular lady the boat was named after.’ It was my stock response to his comment about the name of my boat. I was sure he knew exactly who she was named after.

  Reynolds cocked an eyebrow, but I wasn’t in the mood to play the games he clearly thought would work in his favor and elicit more information than I was giving him. He turned around and gripped the rail, staring across the clear blue ocean to the horizon. ‘So, you don’t know where Mr. Lancaster is, and you don’t know anyone who held a grudge against him or his family?’ That was pretty much the sum of all I had told him.

  I was getting tired of the questions. ‘Inspector,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you. I haven’t seen Alan in days. And in answer to your other question, no. Alan is a very good businessman, and less ruthless than some I’ve known. I’m sure he hasn’t reached his position without stepping on a few toes along the way, but I know for a fact he’s never stabbed anyone in the back to get what he wanted. He might have business rivals, but he simply isn’t the type of man to make enemies.’

  ‘A laudable testimonial, Mr. Beck, but, I fear, erroneous. A man with no enemies does not lose his family in such a murderous manner.’ Reynolds’s face had the appearance of black granite as he stared off into the distance.

  He spent a lot of time on minor crime; drunks, low level drugs busts, domestic violence. He was more than capable of dealing with serious crime, as he had shown on regular occasions with murders, drug smuggling, and organized crime syndicates.