by Philip Kerr
‘That’s right.’
‘You like football? I assume your father did. With a name like Everton.’
‘He did, that’s true. He was from Liverpool. But me, I support Tottenham Hotspur.’
‘I’m not sure that answers my question, but never mind. I guess it’s lucky your dad didn’t support Queen’s Park Rangers.’
Everton grinned a big grin.
‘Listen, Everton. I’ve come to Antigua to look for a guy named Jérôme Dumas. He was a guest here at the Jumby Bay over Christmas and New Year. A footballer from France. He’s about twenty-two years old, has studs in his ears that look like diamond panther heads and a stupid big watch on his wrist like my one, probably.’
Everton nodded. ‘This is the guy the police was looking for, right? The Paris Saint-Germain footballer who’s gone missing.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sure, I remember him. Big gold Rolex Submariner. Lots of gold chains and rings. He got all the best Louis Vuitton luggage. Same as Bono. Give me a pretty good tip for carrying it all, too. Nice fellow. French, you say? Figured him for something else. Reminded me of that other fellow, Mario Balotelli. They say he’s Italian, but it’s hard to tell these days where a fellow is from. Me, I’m from Jamaica, originally. But ain’t no work there. Just trouble. Couldn’t figure him renting such a big villa at Jumby Bay given that he was on his own. Couldn’t figure you out neither, until you told me what you was doing here. Most guys like you and him come with a nice girl. He didn’t look like the type who was into reading and playing chess with hisself.’
‘Did the island cops speak to you?’
‘Naw. They spoke to the concierge, the hotel manager, and to the ladies who cleaned his villa. But not me.’
‘What do you think happened to him?’
‘Only a hundred thousand people on Antigua, boss. It ain’t so easy to disappear in a little place like this. Even if you is black. Man with Louis Vuitton bags and diamond earrings is like a neon sign on this island, boss. He tends to stand out in the crowd.’
‘The police say he checked out of Jumby Bay and went straight to the airport.’
‘That’s true. I took him there myself. Even carried his bags into the airport building. But he never got on the plane to London.’
‘And they didn’t speak to you?’
‘Like I say, they is a joke.’
‘So how was he?’
‘He was all right, boss. Didn’t seem troubled or nothing. Said he was on his way to play football in Barcelona but that he was going to be training hard because he put some weight on while he was here. I told him that this wasn’t unusual, the food at Jumby being so good. Hey, make sure you try the restaurant at the Estate House while you’re here, boss. Is Italian cooking. And probably the best in Antigua.’
‘You talked?’
‘Sure we talked. Talked a lot. He said how much he’d enjoyed himself. The usual. He said he was looking forward to coming back again.’
‘He’d been here before? You said “again”.’
‘Yeah, I reckon he was here about a year ago. Something must have happened at the airport, I reckon.’
‘Like what?’
‘No idea. Like I say, he seemed fine. I walked him and his luggage into the terminal myself. I left him and his trolley at the newsagent. Reading a newspaper.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘What is?’
‘Well, most people buy a paper after they’ve checked in. Can you remember which paper it was? Something French? Libération? Something to do with football. L’Equipe, perhaps?’
‘Might have been. Whatever it was he didn’t look very happy.’
‘I see. What did he do – while he was at Jumby Bay?’
‘Ain’t much to do ‘cept lie in the sun, swim, use the spa, watch TV. Jumby Bay is quiet. People come here to get away from it all.’
‘What about the main island? Is that quiet, too?’
‘They like to party big time there, for sure.’
‘So maybe that’s where he spent his time. I expect the police will be able to tell me.’
‘The RPF?’ Everton laughed. ‘The RPF don’t know shit about nothing.’
The RPFAB was the Royal Police Force of Antigua and Barbuda. I’d sent them some emails and an inspector from the Criminal Investigations Department was expecting me at their headquarters in the island capital of St John’s the next day, but I was keen to get Everton’s opinion of their competence, or lack of it.
‘You don’t think much of them.’
‘The RPF couldn’t find their own balls in a bird bath, boss.’
‘Is there much crime here?’
‘More than our prime minister would have people believe. But if you keeps away from Gray’s Farm on the west side of St John’s at night I reckon you be safe enough. Most folks on the island call that place the Ghetto. It be where you go to score some weed, find a hooker, get yourself shot maybe.’
I nodded. Yep, I thought, that might be just the place someone like Jérôme Dumas would go.
‘As a matter of fact, there was a murder on the island while Mr Dumas was here.’
‘Oh?’
‘Local DJ called Jewel Movement got hisself killed on his boat. They arrested the guy who did it, mind. Caught him red-handed. Even the RPF couldn’t fail to catch him. By all accounts they found him with the body. Dead man’s blood all over him. According to the cops, the case is cut and dried. Which is just the way the cops like it, of course. I never yet met a policeman who wanted to go looking for a pineapple when he already got a peach.’
‘Cops are the same the world over, I guess.’
‘Damn right. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hang him for it, too.’
‘You still hang people here?’
‘When we’re allowed to, by your English courts. Legal system here allows these bastards to appeal to something called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Whatever that is. You ask me, it’s a lot of do-gooders who don’t know shit about Antigua.’
I smiled. ‘You know the Leeward Islands well, Everton?’
‘Like the back of me hand, boss. Got my own boat. I like to go fishing sometimes. When I’m not watching Asot Arcade Parham play football.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s a local side. Pretty good by island standards. Like they’re top of the Antigua Premier Division. But not Spurs standard, you know?’
I nodded. ‘Tell me something. How easy is it to get from Antigua to Guadeloupe?’
‘LIAT – that’s the local airline – they operate a flight most days from St John’s to Pointe-à-Pitre. A short hop. Half-hour at most. Cost you maybe eighty bucks.’
‘If Jérôme Dumas did decide to leave the island, then I’m thinking a boat would be the best way to do it, undetected.’
‘Oh sure. All sorts of folk come and go by boat, especially at night. Weed smugglers, mostly. Like DJ Jewel Movement. Word is he moved a bit of grass hisself, sometimes. But why Guadeloupe? Barbuda is nearer. And British, too. You don’t have to show your passport there when you land.’
‘Because Jérôme Dumas is originally from Guadeloupe.’
‘Gotcha. Well now. Ain’t no ferry service from here down to there, boss. But I could take you there on my next day off, no problem. Off the books, as it were. Guadeloupe is only a few hours’ sailing away.’
‘All right. It’s a deal. And ask around St John’s, will you? Discreetly. See if you can find out if anyone else with a boat might have performed a similarly clandestine ferry service for Jérôme Dumas.’
‘Tongues sure wag better when the nose smells cash, boss.’
‘True.’ I handed over a couple of hundred East Caribbean dollars. ‘See how much talk you can get with that, Everton. And keep the rest for yourself.’
Everton throttled back and let the boat drift towards the little wooden jetty where several porters were awaiting our arrival in what resembled a largish birdcage. A little red golf cart took me up to the main part of the hote
l where I swiftly checked in and went to my suite, which lay on the other side of an antique gate and at the end of a small private courtyard surrounded with palm trees overlooking the sea. There was an outdoor garden full of frangipani flowers with a rain shower and a tub. It was hard to believe that I was being paid, handsomely, to be here. I sipped my welcome cocktail, switched on the TV and settled down to find out what sports channels they had on cable. You do the important things first, right?
16
The RPF police station in St John’s Newgate Street had seen better days but none of them I’ll warrant since the British had left. A yellowing concrete three-storey building with iron bars on the lower windows and a threadbare flag on a crooked white pole in the front courtyard, it looked more like a cheap motel with hot and cold running cockroaches. Close by was the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda but the police station itself might easily have been one of the museum’s more interesting exhibits. Everything in there seemed to move at an invisible pace, as if displayed in some dusty glass case. Just around the corner to the east was St John’s Cathedral and a girls’ high school and a few blocks to the west was the island’s deepwater harbour where cruise ships as big as office blocks from places as far afield as Mallorca and Norway were now docked. The girls’ school was on its break or its lunch hour. I knew that because through the open windows of the police station you could have heard the girls’ screaming and shouting back in Palma and Oslo.
I’d seen the police inspector handling Jérôme’s disappearance before – on Google Images. His name was Winchester White. There was a photograph of the island’s top-ranking security officials in a meeting about something and, in the picture, it looked a lot like he was asleep. Maybe it was just an unfortunate photograph but, speaking to Inspector White, I quickly gained the impression that he was looking forward to closing his eyes again the minute I’d left his office – not least because there was a large tin of Ovaltine behind his woolly head. He wore a neatly pressed khaki shirt and a pair of matching trousers. His dark, peaked cap lay on the desk in front of him as if he’d been begging for change. Except for the fact that Winchester White was black he looked like the district commissioner from an old Tarzan movie. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d had an officer’s swagger stick.
‘It’s not that my employers doubt the efficiency of the RPF,’ I said. ‘Not for a minute. It’s just that they feel they have to be seen to be doing something. In fact, the insurance company is insisting on it. I’m sure you understand how that works. Jérôme Dumas is extremely valuable to both Paris Saint-Germain and FC Barcelona. Not to mention a whole host of companies with whom Mr Dumas has important commercial arrangements to do with his image rights. My intention here is not to step on the RPF’s toes but, perhaps, to provide a different perspective on exactly what might have become of him. Please understand, I’m here to assist, not to obstruct.’
This sounded good; shit, it might even have been true. There are times when I even manage to convince myself. The UN Secretary General himself couldn’t have sounded more diplomatic.
‘It’s not the RPF,’ he said dully. ‘It’s the RPFAB.’
‘Right. Thank you.’
‘You’re forgetting Barbuda.’
‘No, I wasn’t. I was just giving you some shorthand. So that I didn’t waste your valuable time. But my mistake. I can see now that wasn’t really important.’
‘It’s important if you is from Barbuda,’ he said. ‘Like I am.’
There was a longish silence while the police inspector tasted the inside of his mouth and then scratched an almost invisible pimp moustache before a short coughing fit had him hawking something up, and going to the window to spit. As he moved I caught the strong smell of sweat on his body, like the sharply sour odour of a waxed jacket, and I began for the first time to consider something of the everyday, harsh reality of his life as a policeman on a little tropical island. Against the bright sun he almost disappeared for a moment, like a character on Star Trek, before he strolled back to his swivel chair and sat down again amidst a cacophony of creaking wood, imitation leather and professional pride.
‘Go ahead and ask your questions,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you what I can tell you.’
‘Are there any leads you’re working on?’
‘Not as such, no.’
‘Have any bodies been found on the island that have yet to be identified?’
‘I don’t think he dead, if that’s what you mean, Mr Manson. Antigua’s a very safe place. Safer than London or Paris.’
‘Still, there are murders here, aren’t there? DJ Jewel Movement, for example.’
‘Murder is rare on the island. We caught the man who killed DJ JM more or less immediately. The whole thing be cut and dried.’
‘Yes, yes of course. But actually I was thinking of suicide.’
‘Don’t do it, Mr Manson.’ He grinned. ‘You’re still a young man with your whole life in front of you.’
I smiled back at him. ‘He was prone to depression, you see.’
‘What the hell he have to be depressed about when he can afford to stay at Jumby Bay?’
‘That’s a good question. But of course that’s not how depression works. His footballing career in Paris hadn’t gone so well. Which is why he was on his way to play for Barcelona. He’d broken up with his girlfriend. And he was taking antidepressants. So, maybe he heard about a favourite suicide spot on the island. You know? A cliff. A beach with a rip tide.’
‘You swim far enough you’ll meet a shark for sure and then we might never find him. Only, the desk clerk at the hotel said he was in a good mood when he left. Even after he’d paid the bill, which would have depressed me. ‘Sides, why go to the airport if you thinking of doing yourself in? It don’t make no sense that he should do himself in if he be about to check in and go home. I don’t see him packing all his bags and then going for a swim. Also, if you be going to do yourself in you generally leave something behind. Maybe not a note. But possibly your mobile phone. The rest of your stuff. But it ain’t just Mr Dumas who is gone, it be all his stuff too.’
‘Good point.’
The inspector sighed and waited for me to ask another question. It was beginning to seem as if in spite of my pretty speech he wasn’t about to volunteer any information. And I didn’t need to find a horse’s head at the bottom of my bed in the morning to get the message: me and my Inspector Poirot bullshit really weren’t welcome here.
‘Are you working on any theories as to what might have happened to Mr Dumas?’ I asked.
‘Theories? Shit, yeah. Got plenty of those.’
With each reluctant answer I was also aware of the dust on the floor, the chewed pencil on the desk, the brimful ashtray, the open door which, alongside the ceiling fan, was the room’s only air conditioning, and the many advantages of my own life compared with his. As he’d suggested, the bill I was very likely going to generate at the Jumby Bay Hotel would probably be as much as a cop like him made in a year. Sometimes you had to wonder how it was that more tourists in a place like that didn’t come to a sticky end. Quite what the inspector would have made of Jérôme’s more obviously luxury lifestyle – which was there for all to see in the latest edition of GQ that was on the coffee table in my suite – I could only imagine.
I waited for a long moment and then asked: ‘Might I ask what these are?’
‘I personally am of the strong belief that the man was snatched from VC Bird Airport minutes after he arrived there at the end of his holiday. That someone figure he be a man with lots of money. Like all of you folks at Jumby Bay. But unlike most of the folk who go holidaying in Jumby we happen to know he went to some bad boy clubs in St John’s that is frequented by drug traffickers. For that reason we think he came up on their radar as someone who might be worth kidnapping. And that they persuaded some girl to entice him away from there. I am of the opinion that he probably be held somewhere in the centre of the island. Signal Hill, perhaps. That they be loo
king to deliver a ransom request when they think it a bit safer than now. And that they be keeping their heads down for fear that we be catchin’ them. Fact is, I got my men searching the whole island looking for this young fellow and I am confident that we find him any day now. It’s just a question of time, see? Everything on Antigua take a bit longer than it does back in England. But rest assured, sir, that if he’s on the island, we will find him.’
I nodded. ‘What clubs are they – the bad boy clubs you were talking about?’
‘I wouldn’t recommend you go to any, Mr Manson. We got enough trouble as it is with one missing tourist.’
‘Nevertheless, I would like to know the names. For my report, you understand.’
He nodded. ‘All right. There’s a place off the Old Road on Signal Hill that’s called The Rum Runner. They smoke a lot of weed, get drunk on canita, run their whores, watch football and porn on TV. The satnav on an Enterprise Car that Mr Dumas hired showed he’d been there. He was also near a brothel in Freetown that’s widely known as the Treehouse.’
‘And have you questioned the people there?’
‘Questioned, sure. Didn’t get no answers. Didn’t expect to get any, neither. RPFAB ain’t welcome in they places. People tend to clam up when we start asking questions.’
‘Perhaps if we were to offer a reward. Say a thousand dollars.’
‘Here’s the thing about rewards, Mr Manson. As I told your employers in Paris they’re not a substitute for good old-fashioned police work. They waste my time. A high income on the island is thirteen thousand US dollars. People say anything in search of a reward which is as much as what you’re suggesting. For a thousand dollars I myself would tell you I saw the man abducted by aliens. Ya see what I is saying? I just don’t have the men to separate the time-wasters from what might be a genuine lead. So keep your money quiet, please.’
I tried another tack. ‘You’ve considered the possibility that he’s no longer on the island, of course.’
‘Sure. We’ve been checking out private airfields, boatyards all over Antigua. Believe me, sir, we leaving no stone unturned in the search for this man. I call you as soon as I find something. My advice to you is go back to your comfortable hotel and sit by the telephone.’