by steve higgs
Thanking him, I took them from his hands once he had extracted them from the case and made sure they were clean, then I trained them on the crowds of people leaving. I had no interest in the island ahead of me. Or rather, I did, but since I wasn’t going to get to explore it, I figured I might as well tell myself I didn’t and do something constructive instead.
The question I had, was whether I would be able to spot Flint Magnum from up here or not. The binoculars were certainly powerful enough. So powerful, in fact, that when I zoomed in, I could tell if men needed to clip the hair in their ears. I had to pan back to a wider view in order to view the crowd properly.
Jermaine took up a rigidly upright position next to me. He was determined to treat me like royalty. ‘You know, I clean toilets in rich people’s homes for a living.’
He nodded stiffly. ‘Nevertheless, you are the lady of the ship and I intend to see you treated as one.’
‘That’s very good of you, Jermaine. However, I’m not sure how you are going to manage that while I am locked away in here.’ He had no reply, nor did I expect one. My circumstances were not his fault. I had another question for him though, ‘Can I ask where you are from?’
‘Jamaica, madam.’
‘Really? How is it then that you sound like you grew up in Chelsea?’ I took the binoculars away from my face to look at him. He looked embarrassed.
‘I, um. I didn’t think the Jamaican accent went with the role, madam,’ he supplied, hanging his head guiltily.
I had to laugh. ‘So your accent is completely fake? Where did you learn it?’
He looked up to meet my eyes. ‘Watching Downton Abbey.’
I laughed again.
‘Good morning,’ said Barbie in her usual relaxed, breezy manner as she joined us in the sunshine. To the side of me, as I watched through my binoculars, the two of them chatted about something. I ignored them as I continued to scan the crowd.
Then, like spotting something for a half second that I then couldn’t find again, I swear I saw Flint Magnum. I jumped up for a better look as if moving forward two feet would make a difference. I spotted him again though, one hundred yards from the boat and funnelling along with everyone else. He was wearing knee-length, garish surfer shorts with writing down the side and a vest top that showed off his milky skin and terrible part-tan where his forearms had caught the sun up to his biceps and then stopped. His calves were so white they were almost translucent. It had been a lucky guess that he might choose to go ashore, but there he was, and I knew what he was wearing.
‘I’m going ashore,’ I announced. Barbie and Jermaine just stared at me. ‘The chef disguise won’t work this time. I need something better.’
‘Um,’ said Barbie, ‘I have an idea, but you might not like it.’
‘Why what is it?’ I asked.
‘No. Not you might not like it,’ she replied, then turned to face Jermaine. ‘You might not like it.’
Ten minutes later when she returned, I understood why. I was going to leave the ship pretending to be a Jamaican.
‘This is culturally insensitive,’ Jermaine insisted several times while he helped Barbie cover my face, arms and any other exposed skin in thick dark brown makeup that she had liberated from a friend who worked in the ship’s entertainment department. Add sunglasses, the dreadlock wig, a few bits of jewellery and a brightly coloured skirt, and from a distance, if a person was blind, then maybe I would pass muster.
I didn’t look like Patricia Fisher though and that was the point. Though I felt uncomfortable about it, I was going to pose as Jermaine’s mother and Barbie was coming as his pretend girlfriend.
Many decks down, we joined the teems of guests filing slowly out of the ship and onto the dock that led into Funchal. I could have avoided the queue and left via the royal suites private entrance but that would have exposed me to the captain who I could see once again greeting and well-wishing the top paying guests as they were collected in golf carts and driven around the riffraff normal people to get to Funchal without their delicate feet having to exercise.
None of the staff paid me any attention, nor did I expect them to. This was a holiday cruise ship, and the staff were not looking out for a suspected killer looking to flee from justice. I doubted most of them even knew about me or Mr Langley. Once again, I was invisible and unlike yesterday evening in the restaurant when I had been expecting someone to reveal who I was at any second, today I felt relaxed and almost happy. Jermaine on the other hand, looked terrified which was my fault. Even though he knew I was innocent, he was putting his job on the line for me. Smuggling me off the ship was an enormous risk and he knew it.
Barbie, in contrast, was acting as if this was just a lovely day out. Her biggest concern was that I had insisted there was no time for a morning work-out. My assurances that we could go harder at it later after we had caught and exposed Flint Magnum as the real killer was only just enough to convince her.
Of course, now we were off the ship and heading into Funchal, I had to admit that I had no idea how to find our quarry. He had left the ship more than half an hour before us and could be in Funchal by now, in a bar or heading to the beach or going to a brothel where he planned to spend the whole day for all I knew.
Jermaine asked how I planned to find him. My answer - the use of blind luck. It was all I had but since I was desperate, I saw no choice but to go with it. Jermaine and Barbie were holding hands and looked like a genuine couple. Jermaine had on normal person clothes for the first time since I met him, which for him meant a skin-tight top in day-glo pink and pair of short denim hot pants that Daisy Duke might have blushed at. He looked ready to party with Mardi Gras bead necklaces around his neck and left wrist. On his feet he wore strappy sandals. I had a pair just like them, but these must have been made for a man because his feet were huge. Beside him, Barbie was showing just how perfect her body was in a tiny red bikini that barely covered the crack of her ass. Wrapped around her was a lace sarong that did nothing to cover her up and here’s the thing about Barbie – she looks like a Barbie doll. You remember the ridiculous gravity defying boobs and impossible small waist that Barbie dolls all sported? Well they could have used Miss Berkeley as a model. Oh, to be twenty-two again. In their summer outfits, they were doing fine in the heat. As part of my disguise I had gone with a shawl to cover as much of my exposed brown skin as possible and I was already starting to sweat. Would the makeup run off? It made my face itch more than anything, the temptation to scratch myself almost overwhelming though I knew I would most certainly ruin the disguise the second I did so.
At the end of the jetty, we began meeting men hawking their wares; street sellers with all manner of worthless rubbish they were pushing on the tourists pouring from the ship. I pushed through them, with Jermaine and Barbie just ahead of me, my eyes constantly vigilant for Jack’s real killer. He was nowhere to be seen though. We spent the first hour going in and out of all the bars and eateries close to the port. There were a few tourists in them that might have been from the ship, but food and drink were plentiful on board, so why would someone come ashore and go directly into a bar?
‘What else might he get up to?’ Jermaine asked. None of us had an answer though because there were too many options. He might be culturally inclined and have jumped on a bus to get to a museum or he might be a sex tourist and actually be in a brothel. Splitting up to look for him separately was discussed and dismissed, we were better off together and no one wanted to find themselves alone with the killer.
The heat and the lack of progress led us to a bar not far from the port that Jermaine claimed made a good Espetada which I discovered was a skewer of barbecued garlic pork served with a circular flat bread called bolo de caco. It came with a side of rice and a basic salad and would have been a nice lunch if Barbie hadn’t insisted I order my salad without dressing and banned me from eating the bread. She also told Jermaine he needed to cut back on his carbs but he stuck his tongue out at her, making her laugh and someho
w getting him off the hook.
We drank water, not that Barbie would have let me have the cool refreshing beer I could see being poured at the bar, but in deference to the heat it was undoubtedly the right thing to be drinking.
The ship was due to sail at seven o’clock. The guests were requested back on board by six, so at just after noon, when the waiter in the little bar we were in collected our plates, there was a lot of day left to kill. Not only was I getting bored, but my butt was beginning to get sore from the cheap plastic seat I was perched on.
‘What do we do if we don’t find him?’ asked Jermaine.
It was a good question. ‘If we assume we have not missed him, then he has to go back on board at some point, right?’ Jermaine nodded but Barbie was looking the other way.
‘Isn’t that him there?’ she asked, pointing across the street from the café place we were sitting in front of. ‘Milk bottle legs with board shorts and a vest?’
Jermaine swiped her arm downwards as the man turned around but sure enough. There he was.
Alright then. Action time.
I stood up. ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Barbie, also beginning to get out of her chair.
‘I don’t know. Probably straight out ask him why he killed Jack. Or maybe wrestle him to the floor and grab his passport so I can find out his real name.’ I should have been terrified at the prospect of confronting the man, but I was more angry than scared.
As I stepped out from under the awning at the front of the café, Jermaine grabbed my hand, ‘Wait. I have a better idea.’
I paused, glanced at the man to check if he had seen me, forgetting of course that if he had there was little chance he would recognise the woman beneath the makeup, but he was looking at a stand of sunglasses outside a shop across the street.
‘What’s your idea?’
He let go my hand but turned his attention to Barbie. ‘Barbie, can you keep him busy for a few minutes?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘What should I do?’
Jermaine cocked a hip and shot her a look. ‘Seriously? Girlfriend, you are the finest woman on the face of the Earth. All you need to do is stand in the street and he won’t see anything else happening around him. Go and talk to him.’
She looked across at Flint Magnum in his terrible shorts and vest with his blotchy white skin and back at Jermaine. ‘What if he doesn’t like me? What if he is gay?’
Jermaine chuckled, ‘He’s not gay.’
‘How can you tell?’ she asked.
‘I can tell.’
While their exchange was going on, I was getting impatient. ‘What’s the plan?’
Jermaine shooed Barbie across the road with a final instruction, ‘Bring him to the fortune teller at the back of the bar in ten minutes.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Do you think you can pretend to be a medium?’
‘A medium?’
Jermaine had grabbed my hand and was heading to the bar. ‘Yes, a medium. You know? Like a fortune teller?’ He waved his hand at the barman to get his attention. ‘My aunt was a fortune teller. Made the whole thing up her entire career. Said it was the easiest job going because fools would believe anything. All you had to do was pick up on little cues.’ He pointed to my hand. ‘Like a recently absent ring. She might say that she could sense a broken heart or some rubbish like that. Soon they would be telling her all kinds of stuff about themselves so that she could pick that apart and waste fifteen minutes of their time while giving them nothing but an act.’ The barman arrived. ‘Can we borrow that?’ Jermaine asked, pointing to a shelf behind the bar.
‘This?’ the barman confirmed, then lifted it off the shelf. He held it back before handing it over though. ‘You’re not going to do anything weird with it are you?’
‘No,’ Jermaine assured him. ‘We are just going to sit in the back corner of the bar and see if we are attuned to the mystic powers today.’ The barman cocked an eyebrow but handed the crystal ball over anyway.
‘So, do you think you can do the medium thing?’ Jermaine asked.
‘I guess, but why?’ Mostly I wasn’t thinking why. I was thinking I was more of a large than a medium. I kept that thought to myself though.
‘If you confront him as Patricia Fisher and ask him if he murdered Jack Langley, he will probably say no and what do you do then? If instead you play the part of the fortune teller and pretend you know things about him because the spirits are talking to you, then you can reveal that you believe he travels under a false identity and that he has dealings with a dead man. You get where I am going with this? I’ll set my phone to record it…’
‘And I have to trick him into admitting to the murder.’ It was a simple plan but brilliant nevertheless. It was certainly superior to my daft plan of poke him in the chest until he gave in and confessed. From our position at the back of the bar, I could still see across the street. Barbie was chatting with Flint and being tactile, touching his arm, laughing at something he said and it was clear he was going to do anything the Baywatch babe in the bikini asked. It was no surprise then when she looped her arm through his and came toward the bar.
‘Ooh, here they come. Quick, get in position.’ Jermaine put the crystal ball on the table. We were right in the back of the mostly empty bar. I placed my glass of water on the table and settled into one of the chairs as Jermaine put his phone under the black table cloth so it couldn’t be seen but would hopefully still record what was being said.
I could see that Barbie was playing her part well. Of course, blonde bimbo was an easy role to play if, like she had said yesterday, people saw her and expected her to be dumb. She led him to the bar across the room from us without looking our way. She laughed about something and had Flint buy her a drink. His hand was looped around her waist already, his hand resting on her left hip and unwilling to let go as if he might not be able to get it back there again.
Jermaine set off. ‘I’m going to get them.’ He walked to the bar, his accent now hard Jamaican instead of his clipped butler’s English. ‘Fortunes read,’ he announced as he approached them. They were the only people at the bar so he couldn’t be talking to anyone else.’
‘No thanks,’ said Flint instantly.
‘Accurate predictions, mon. Don’t miss out. Find out now if this lady is in your future.’ Jermaine’s hard sell didn’t seem be having any effect on Flint until Barbie spoke.
‘Ooh, yes, let’s see what the fortune teller has to say about tonight,’ she purred at him while leaning in close enough that her boobs squashed against his chest.
Suddenly, getting his fortune read was a cracking idea.
‘Come along, come along,’ I beckoned, trying to copy Jermaine’s Jamaican accent. I should have practised it earlier because now I was giving it a go, I thought I sounded utterly fake, but changing my accent now would be even worse so we were stuck with it. ‘Fortunes read, predictions given.’
‘How much?’ asked Flint as he sat himself in the seat opposite me. Jermaine had deftly pulled it out for him and swung a second seat in for Barbie to sit next to him.
The question caught me out though. What did a fortune teller charge?
‘Ten dollars US,’ said Jermaine, saving me.
He shrugged in acknowledgement but didn’t reach for his wallet. ‘Tell me my future then,’ he said, derision dripping from his voice. ‘Impress me.’
I was trying not to panic as I raised my hands and wafted them ridiculously around the crystal ball. I had not been given enough time to think about what I wanted to say or how I needed to act so now I was waving my arms around and trying to form a coherent sentence in my head.
‘The spirits are circling,’ I said, my eyes closed. ‘They are whispering to me.’
‘Yeah?’ he all but laughed. ‘What are they saying?’
I snapped my eyes open and fixed him with a stare. ‘They say you have a terrible secret.’ I was feeling my way into the role now. ‘They say you are not who you tell people you are.’
His wide
eyes were looking back at me, he was hooked already. It made me feel powerful. Now I needed to milk it. ‘The spirits are telling me you call yourself….’ I spun it out longer for effect before finishing with, ‘Flint Magnum.’ He looked shocked. How could the strange lady sitting across from him know his name? ‘What is your real name?’ I asked.
Under my spell, he didn’t resist at all. ‘Neil Hammond.’ The name came out at a volume just above a whisper.
I had his name. Now it was time to press on. I closed my eyes again and did some more of the arm waving thing since he was buying my nonsense. ‘The spirits tell me you are alone. You are on a voyage. Spirits, why is he on this voyage?’ I asked the air. I opened my eyes again. ‘Are you on this voyage for a purpose?’
Slowly he nodded.
‘You are working, not taking a holiday. You are following someone. The spirits say you are frustrated.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘really frustrated.’
I let my eyes roll back in a fake display of communing with the other side. ‘The spirits are angry. They tell me you carry a great burden.’
‘Great burden?’ he echoed.
‘They know what you did. They are whispering to me.’
‘What did I do?’
I began to increase the volume of my voice, ‘They say you did something terrible.’ Louder yet. ‘They say you took a man’s life.’ I brought my eyes down to stare at his again. ‘The spirits need you to say the name of the man.’ Finally, I reached a crescendo so I was all but shouting at him, ‘Say the name of the man you murdered.’
‘Murdered?’ Instead of the wide look of incredulity he had shown a minute ago when he was surprised by the way I knew facts about him, now he just looked confused. ‘Why would the spirits think I killed someone?’
‘Say the name of the man you murdered,’ I repeated, praying he would drop the act and confess for the recording.
The man formerly known as Flint Magnum sat back in his chair and slowly folded his arms. He was staring at me, sizing me up or something. He tilted his head to the side as if trying to look at me from a different angle. Then he looked at Jermaine and then swung his attention to Barbie. He nodded to himself, coming to a conclusion then leaped from his chair, diving across the table to get to me.