They were male and white-skinned, and much of their power depended on keeping the blacks in their place and the island’s agriculture primitive. Yet Ella had to admit that one of the qualities she loved most about the island was its free spirit. It flaunted its indifference to any kind of rules. Its history was riddled with illegal rum-running and barefaced roguery, all the way back to the time when formidable pirates such as Blackbeard stalked its dirt streets with a pistol strapped to each thigh, or when wreckers lured ships onto rocks to plunder their cargo.
It took the appointment of Woodes Rogers as the first British governor of the Bahamas in 1717 to knock some law and order into the taverns and brothels of Fort Nassau. But the island always remained a magnet for risk takers. For blockade runners to the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and more recently for bootleggers of illegal alcohol making a quick buck out of Prohibition in the United States. Those glory days were gone now—when a boat packed with crates of rum could make more money in one dangerous night spent sailing across to Miami than it could in six months of hard fishing.
But the standard of living for the island’s black population continued to be woefully low and Ella could understand all too well why the riot had occurred last year. It was over inequality of pay between black and white construction workers on the new airfield. The physical damage inflicted on Bay Street had been repaired, broken glass and masonry rapidly swept out of sight, but the damage to the islanders’ trust in the fairness of the system went beyond the reach of a broom and a bucket of cement. Black Bahamians by nature were easygoing people, always ready with a smile and eager to break out their infectious calypso music over a beer. It took an awful lot to get them riled up, but the unrest was growing, just below the surface.
“Do you know what happened to me yesterday, Tilly?”
“I know you’re going to be wearing that surrey’s pretty little fringe on your bonnet if you don’t slow down, darling.”
In front of them was one of the decorated horse-drawn surreys that trotted up and down Nassau’s main streets, used as taxis by locals and as sightseeing vehicles by visitors to the island. Ella braked hard. The heat was billowing through the open window and the high wheels of the surrey were churning the road dust into a soup that stuck between her teeth.
“So what happened, Ella?”
“I was in Walker’s Haberdashery yesterday. That toffee-nosed wife of his refused to serve a black woman who wanted to buy a pair of gloves.”
“Christ!”
“Exactly.”
“Did you say anything?”
“Of course. I closed my account there.”
“Good for you.”
“Gwen Walker is such a damn hypocrite.”
Tilly lifted her sun hat from her lap and fanned her face with it. “Did you inform Reggie?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I bet he was cross.”
“He telephoned Rob Walker immediately.”
“What was his—”
A noise like a slap made Ella jump in her seat, and abruptly the world turned bright red. She blinked hard. Still red. She put a hand up to her face and pulled it away at once, her heart hammering.
So much blood.
Chapter 11
Dodie
What was the smell?
Dodie inhaled sharply. A distinct odor of sadness seemed to seep out of the woodwork. It made the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She had stood, rigid with indecision, outside the pink building with its green shutters and its blue glass lamp. It certainly didn’t look like a police station on the outside. In front of it a monstrous cottonwood tree stood in the middle of the buildings that made up Nassau’s administrative center in Rawson Square and Parliament Square. With their pink and columned façades arranged as charmingly as a doll’s house, the Assembly Hall, the Supreme Court, the fire-brigade HQ, the post office, were all gathered behind a grand statue of Queen Victoria.
But inside the police station it was no doll’s house. Dodie walked nervously toward the counter, where the duty sergeant was deep in conversation with a spiky-haired woman who seemed to be relating a complicated account of her dispute with her neighbor.
“Then the bastard chopped down my fig tree,” she complained loudly, flapping a handkerchief to her face. “I just loved that tree.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to let your goats trample all over his . . .”
Dodie stepped back to where a line of hard-backed wooden chairs waited. Three men were seated on them, two black, one white. The white one was old and drunk. The other two were young and silent, their mouths tight, like they had something to hide. Neither even glanced at her. It had not occurred to Dodie that there might be a queue. She wanted this whole thing to be over quickly.
She took a seat and waited. The minutes crawled past. Her hands kept fidgeting, plucking at the material of her skirt, so she sat on them to keep them still. She was supposed to be at work now. Olive Quinn would already be snapping at the other waitresses at the Arcadia Hotel because she was short-staffed. Dodie eyed the telephone on the desk. Maybe she could ask to use it to explain why she was late, but when she glanced at the sergeant she changed her mind. He had the intractable look of someone who enjoyed saying no.
“Can I help you, miss?” A face loomed over Dodie. It belonged to a tall white man with an English accent, in a lightweight suit and tie. She could see policeman printed all over him, in the way he stood with feet planted firmly apart as though confident of his claim to this piece of territory. His mouth was polite, friendly even, but his gray eyes were so direct and intrusive that for a split second she looked away.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Calder,” he said.
Before she could answer, the entrance door burst open with a crash and two women ran—literally ran—into the station covered in blood.
Everyone stared, but it was the tall policeman in the suit who reacted first.
“Call an ambulance, Sergeant,” he ordered as he stretched out a hand to the taller of the two, a dark-haired woman who was clutching a hat in one hand with blood trailing from its wide brim like scarlet ribbons.
She seized his wrist, leaving smears on his sleeve. “This is an outrage,” she shouted.
Blood was slashed across one side of her face, over her shoulder and blouse, puddling on her skirt, but the blond woman was worse. Her face was a mask of crimson, glistening on her eyelashes so that the intense blue of her eyes was startling in the midst of it, yet she was the one who remained calm. The top half of her summer dress was plastered against her breasts.
Dodie leaped to her feet. “Can I help?”
“We’re not hurt,” the blond woman announced. “It’s not our blood.” Her blue eyes glittered, bright with anger. “Fetch Colonel Lindop at once,” she ordered.
The detective gave a quick nod to the desk sergeant, who ran for the stairs, and then he slipped off his jacket and draped it around the scarlet shoulders of the blond woman. She pulled the jacket tight around herself, hiding her humiliated body from public gaze.
“Thank you.”
“What happened?” the detective asked. His voice sounded steady and comforting.
“We were attacked in the street.” The woman smacked her palms together, as if she would crush the offenders.
Sharp footsteps sounded and an older man with military bearing marched into the room, effortlessly drawing eyes to himself. All over the world men like him were propping up the Empire on their shoulders. He was wearing the khaki uniform of the island’s police commissioner with a black gun belt and highly polished boots. Immediately the atmosphere in the room altered.
“My dear ladies! Dear God, what the devil has happened to you?”
He advanced on them with outstretched arms, but Dodie noticed he didn’t touch, didn’t risk spoiling his crisply ironed uniform. Not like the one
who gave up his jacket.
“There were five of them, they threw a bucket of blood over us,” the blond woman declared. She had herself under control now.
“Whoever did this, I shall come down on them hard,” Lindop assured her.
“Black workers shouting at us, hurling blood at us,” the dark-haired woman said angrily. “I’m telling you, Colonel Lindop, that we’re lucky to be alive.” She had released the detective sergeant and her hands fluttered through the air like crimson butterflies in a panic.
“Tilly,” the blonde said, suddenly embarrassed, “don’t exaggerate. Other than . . . this”—she gestured at their ruined clothes—“they did us no harm. They ran off immediately.”
Colonel Lindop waved a hand toward a door at the far end of the room. “Come, ladies.” He glanced around the spectators, his gaze skimming over Dodie before returning to make a quick assessment of the two women. “Blake,” he said briskly to the desk sergeant at his elbow, “fetch a doctor. And a photographer. At once.”
Abruptly they were gone. The women vanished through the door and Dodie was left in the middle of the room. She turned toward the door that led to the street. She could leave now and no one would notice if she hurried back out on to the street.
“What can I do for you, miss?”
She swung round. Detective Sergeant Calder was leaning over her once more with concern.
“That was quite a shock, wasn’t it? Can I get you some water?” He briefly touched his chest as though to slow a galloping heart and Dodie’s eyes were drawn to the blood on his sleeve.
“No, thank you.” She had to push the next words off the end of her tongue. “I want to report a murder.”
* * *
The tiny interview room was full of stillness and heat. Dust motes drifted aimlessly across Dodie’s line of vision and she tried to focus on them rather than on the expression in Calder’s gray eyes. It made her uneasy, that look of wariness contained between narrowed lids. It wasn’t what she expected.
This is what she’d expected: she would tell them about Mr. Morrell. All of it. The policemen would listen attentively, then they would collect the—she could barely think the word—the body, and using whatever method it was that detectives used, they would find his killer, drag the culprit before a judge and jury, and then throw him in jail for life. She had even expected a little sympathy, like the two women received.
That was not what she got.
The moment she uttered the word “murder,” everything changed in the police station. The smiles vanished. People stepped away from her, as if she were unclean. Even Detective Calder with his bloodstained sleeve moved back, putting a no-man’s-land between them, and his shoulders seemed to lock into a rigid line.
He ushered her into an interview room that was windowless and fanless, so that the heat steadily rose. She sat down and told him the story while a young constable in a corner made notes. She kept it simple: I found Mr. Morrell last night wounded in the alleyway, I took him to my home where I nursed him, but he died today. He told me to bury him in a hole somewhere, but I couldn’t bear to do it. At the last moment I changed my mind and came here to you. When she’d finished, the length of the silence in the room felt like a rope winding around her neck.
“Miss Wyatt,” the detective said in a considerate voice, “that must have been a deeply shocking experience for you. I’m sorry.”
Sorry for her? For Morrell? For the reputation of Nassau?
“Yes.” Even to her own ears it sounded guarded.
“Why didn’t you call the police last night?”
“I told you. Mr. Morrell begged me not to inform anyone, not even the hospital. He said it was too dangerous.”
“And you thought that was more important than saving his life?”
“No, of course not.”
“So why didn’t you contact us?”
“I told you. He was frightened. He believed that whoever did this to him would come to finish the job.”
“So you forced a wounded and bleeding man to walk through the streets of Nassau.”
“He wanted me to get him away from there. He was frightened. I didn’t force him, I helped him.”
“At the cost of his life.”
“I didn’t know he was going to die. I thought that . . .”
That I could save him.
Instead she said, “I thought that he was getting better after I stopped the bleeding. He improved and started to ask me questions about my life and he even admired my quilt on the wall. He was”—she looked directly at the detective seated opposite her—“interested. I didn’t think people who were dying would be so interested in others. I liked him.”
Calder nodded and glanced at the few notes he had jotted down on a lined pad in front of him. He squared it up with the edge of the table, tapped it thoughtfully with one finger, then pulled out a packet of Players cigarettes from his pocket. He offered her one, but she shook her head. He lit his own and exhaled a string of gray smoke that hung lifelessly in the humid air, and she wondered what was coming next.
“I have some questions,” he announced.
“I’ve told you everything.”
The drumbeat of her own blood was loud in her ears.
“Where is the body of Mr. Morrell now?”
“I told you.” Why was he doing this? Making her repeat the facts over and over. “It’s in my house on the beach.” She noticed her use of “it” instead of “he.”
“May we have the key to it, please?”
She slapped her key on the table. “You have my address written down in front of you.”
He nodded. The constable in the corner shot to his feet, picked up the key, and took it outside before returning to his gloomy corner. Oddly, during the brief interval in which she and the detective were alone, Calder studied her face and gave her something that was halfway toward a smile. She didn’t know what it meant. It turned something ice cold inside her.
“A few more questions,” he told her. “What was Mr. Morrell’s first name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said he was American. Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was he here on business?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said he had no wallet or passport. So how did he get to be here on New Providence Island?”
“I don’t know.”
“What reason did his attacker have to stab him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was he staying?”
“I don’t know.”
Detective Calder leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto its back legs, and smoke hung on his lips as though reluctant to leave him. He stubbed out his cigarette and gave her a blank stare. “You don’t know much, do you, Miss Wyatt?”
Bile slid into her throat. She had made no mention yet of the gold coins or the name Sanford or of Mama Keel’s medicine.
“I’ve told you all I know,” she said.
He tucked his hands under his armpits and his eyes focused on hers. “I do hope so.”
She didn’t look away. She opened her mouth to tell Calder that she needed that glass of water now, but suddenly it dawned on her that he believed she might be the one who stabbed Morrell in that dark alleyway. It had happened before. A girl taking a man home for sex and getting caught thieving from his wallet. A knife in his guts before he could beat her to a pulp.
She snapped her mouth shut. A layer of sweat glistened on her skin. He thinks I killed Morrell. She looked down at her hands. I’m shaking.
“Now, Miss Wyatt, let’s start again,” the detective said in a controlled voice. “From the beginning.”
Chapter 12
Flynn
How do you tell when a man is lying?
You look at the disc
onnect at the back of his eyes.
You watch for the telltale twitch at the sides of his mouth.
You listen to the change of pace as his words fall from his mouth.
Sometimes you have to work at it. But today it was easy. Flynn Hudson could tell the Englishman seated opposite him was lying through his pearly whites by the way the tips of his ears turned pink. A fleeting rush of blood. Blink and you’d miss it. It happened each time he said the words “Believe me.”
“Believe me, Hudson, Meyer Lansky is incandescent over in Miami. Not at all happy about this outcome. It’s a fiasco.”
“Believe me, Hudson, I should have listened to Morrell. He didn’t want you to participate in this operation in the first place.”
Both lies.
Flynn yanked out a pouch of tobacco and took his time rolling himself a smoke. Johnnie Morrell was his friend and now he was dead. You don’t have a smoke with a buddy one day and call his death a fiasco the next. You just don’t do that. Not to friends. So to hell with this guy who spoke with a dainty British accent and talked as if he’d swallowed a dictionary for breakfast. He was calling himself Spencer. Another of his limey lies.
They were in a bar tucked away behind a seedy row of shops where locals came to drink beer and gripe about the soldiers getting first pick of the girls. The guy was wearing no tie and no jacket, which was clearly his idea of blending in, though the blade-sharp creases in his pants and the curve of distaste on his mouth didn’t exactly help with that plan. Half-moons of sweat had flared under his arms. They spoiled the look of his shirt. The light in the bar was dim, which suited Flynn just fine. It came as a relief to the eyes after the glare of the plate-glass sky outside. Around them there was a mix of skin colors, men who paid no heed to Spencer and himself because they had their own cares to drown in their beers. They didn’t need trouble from two strangers glaring at each other like a pair of fighting cocks.
The Far Side of the Sun Page 6