The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  Before I left the office, Chilman told me that, in his day, sea folks had no time for police. These people who wrestled with the ocean to make a living handed out their own justice in swift and secretive ways. When a fella amongst them did some unforgivable thing against their own, they took him out to sea and left him to the sharks. I had no doubt that they still had it in them.

  I felt the small adjustments of the men, their hands urging the women backwards, exposing me.

  Travis saw what I was carrying, drove himself to his feet. A fast turn of his thick body and his hand was lifting the harpoon gun. I felt the shuffling confusion of the men beside me. They heaved themselves backward as I leapt and threw the net.

  Travis fought the gillnet with grunts and thrusts of his blade, and a scalding string of words. But I was on him before he could free himself, my left arm locked around his throat, my right knee driving into his tailbone, my forehead slamming into the back of his head. I felt him shudder, felt myself dragged down by his weight. It was then that the others threw themselves on him.

  I pulled away, dizzy with exhaustion. I took out my phone and called the office. Pet picked up.

  ‘Digson here,’ I said. ‘I got ’im. Like I done tell y’all, I need transport to bring him in.’

  Pet was so quiet I thought we’d lost the line.

  ‘Pet you there?’

  ‘Where’s Caran?’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Caran not there?’

  ‘Who’s…’

  I felt a nudge at my elbow, looked around to see a broad-faced man, brown and solid as a mahogany tree in green khaki. Two men stood beside him; like him they’d laid their rifles across an arm with the muzzle pointing skyward.

  The man took the phone from me. ‘Caran here, Miss Pet.’

  I could hear Pet’s voice coming high and fast.

  ‘I didn go no way, Miss Pet. I had my piece on Travis all de time. Nothing would’ve happen to the fella. Remember y’all tell me last-minute. Not so? Is instructions that I follow. Okay I pass ’im over to you.’

  When I took back the phone, Pet had rung off.

  ‘I was covering you,’ he said, lifting his chin at the window of the house next door, his voice indignant as if he were still arguing with Pet. He turned honey-coloured eyes on me. ‘Maan, you move fast. I never see nothing like it.’

  He jerked his head in the direction of the trussed-up man. ‘Lemme deal with that.’

  With a small convulsion of his shoulder, Caran flipped the rifle round, his fingers slipping smoothly through the trigger guard. He slid down the mud bank and stood over the fallen man.

  It looked as if all of Leapers’ Town had come out. Quiet. Watching with a kind of detached curiosity – some of them with phones against their ears.

  The man holding the bottle of Jack Iron winked at me. ‘I could get accustom to this, yunno. I could give up chasin fish and start fishin fellas.’ He pointed at the net. ‘Same equipment not so?’

  Shadow had come to stand beside me. He was flicking his tongue across his lips. ‘Leave im with us; we’ll do the rest.’

  ‘What’s the rest?’

  Shadow slid sly eyes at the sea. ‘As far as we see, govment wasting food on Dog Ears in jail. We could fix dat for yuh.’

  ‘Them days done,’ I said.

  ‘Who say?’

  ‘I say.’

  He threw me a sour look, ‘We had plans fuh him, yunno, and y’all come and spoil it.’

  ‘Criminal intent we call that. You want me to arrest you for criminal intent?’

  ‘Yuh have to catch me first.’ He sucked his teeth and slipped away.

  6

  According to Chilman’s secretary, police departments used to keep their own records, but the hurricane of 2004 changed all that. They moved everything to the old colonial fort above San Andrews.

  The search to find out what happened to my mother would have to begin there.

  Fort Rupert squatted on a hill above the hospital, as if presiding over the island’s illnesses. In the upheavals of ’83, a whole government had died within its colossal stone walls, and there remained the abiding memory of terrified school children leaping from its ramparts to die at its feet.

  The archives were housed in a building that hugged the fort’s north-eastern slope. I showed my ID to the officer at the desk. He leaned forward from his kiosk and poked a biro at the corridor. ‘Right at the end,’ he said.

  A quiet room, shadowy under a single tungsten bulb. Box folders with their labels faded and unreadable sat on strutted aluminium shelves that seemed barely able to withstand the weight. Inside the boxes were folders; within the files, police reports – some handwritten, some typed. Many of them were templates with questions that officers were required to fill in. I scanned the contents: various kinds of assault, criminal damage, GBH, praedial larceny, minor public order offences…

  The murder files were stored in red box-folders at the back of the room. They became fatter and fatter year on year. The victims, if not women, were men in rumshop brawls, the occasional stabbing at a fete, or a brother warring with another over land. The weapon of choice almost always a machete.

  Of the disturbances – the ones that involved guns – there was nothing. The ‘Sky Red’ uprisings of ’51; the demonstrations and killings of ’74 and ’83; the Rape Riot of ’99. Nothing. It was as if the island’s history of blood and confrontation had no place on paper.

  But I was hoping that somewhere inside these folders a diligent or careless policeman might at least have scrawled a note with some reference to the incident.

  Each evening after work I climbed the steep hill to the archives, entered the quiet dusk of the little room and pulled a stool. Sometimes I spent a whole night paging through the files, while the town emptied itself of outer-parish workers in a bedlam of horns and chuntering minibuses. At 2 am, the duty officer jangled his keys and pulled the door, reminding me as usual to let myself out at the back of the building – if I was going home that night. He never once asked me what I was searching for.

  I enjoyed the quiet, when San Andrews became a different place, with the sea beating against the esplanade, and the buildings echoing the scrape of footsteps on the asphalt. Men catcalled and young women laughed. On the court below, basketball players pounded the concrete, their rubber shoes yelping on the hard surface. It was as if the residents of San Andrews came out only at night to repossess their town.

  I’d replaced the files, was heading for the back door when I heard the crunch of gravel outside. The footsteps halted; the latch shook. Warm air and the smell of tar drifted in.

  The rattle of a cleared throat, and I knew immediately it was DS Chilman. He made his way up the narrow steps, emerged in the corridor, swaying.

  The DS considered me with lowering eyes. ‘Dead-end, Digson,’ he coughed. ‘I telling you right now is a dead dead-end you heading toward.’

  Chilman leaned forward, holding out something in his hand.

  ‘Wozzat, Sir?’ I felt awkward and embarrassed at his drunkenness.

  He shook the bag. ‘You don’t want it? I come all the way to bring this for you.’

  He stuffed the paper bag in my hand. It was warm and yielding – a roti.

  ‘What’s up, Sir?’

  ‘What’s up.’ He made a circle with an arm, rolled his eyes at the ceiling ‘He asking me what’s up. I’ll tell you what’s up, Digger: you searching for a pinhead in a jungle, that’s what. You looking for what not here. That’s why I bring you ah-ah fish roti. because…’ He steadied himself with a hand against the wall. ‘Because you, Missa Digson, need to feed that hole in here.’

  He tapped his head, stumbled forward. I reached out to steady him. The DS slapped my hand.

  ‘You think she dead? Nuh! She alive and kicking inside there.’ He levelled a finger against his temple. ‘Aaall the fuckin time. And she never going be dead until you, you, you, Mikey Digson find a way to kill she. Until we… kill… all… ov e
m. And that, youngfella, is… yunno is…’ – this time he tapped his forehead – ‘im-posss-ible. I ever tell you about Nathan?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me. Nuh.’

  But there wasn’t an officer in the force who hadn’t heard of the ghost that DS Chilman was chasing.

  Nathan – a young man whose mother came to the office a couple of years ago and reported him missing. She was sure he hadn’t left the island. In fact, she knew in her bones that something had happened to her nineteen-year-old son. She’d managed to infect the DS with that certainty. From what I heard, he’d visited Nathan’s mother many times, interviewed friends who knew the youth. Even with no evidence of a crime, the DS remained convinced.

  ‘You didn hear about Nathan, but you hear about The Runner right?’

  ‘The Runner happened last month, Sir.’

  ‘And you remember what happen last month?’

  ‘Is a different kinda case, Sir.’

  Throughout the past month, newspapers carried the photo of a Scandinavian woman smiling out at us: blond, about thirty, a black Alsatian at her side. She’d left her residence in the Drylands to take a run with her dog. We found the animal by the side of the road with a broken right hind-leg. The woman had disappeared. The Justice Minister took over, made his office the operational headquarters, then called out every retired policeman to join the search. A press statement left the Ministry of Justice every couple of hours until, three days later, a man walked into South San Andrews station and gave himself up.

  ‘So, you telling me that Nathan not people too?’ Chilman’s eyes were steady on my face. He’d spoken quietly, dangerously. I needed to be careful with my words, not for his sake but for mine. I opened my palms at him, then gestured at the door.

  ‘You pushing me out?’

  ‘Nuh, Sir, I was about to leave.’

  He fumbled with the handle of the door and let out himself before me.

  ‘Yuh going about it wrong, youngfella,’ he said. ‘You not seeing what your mother was seeing.’ He slammed the door in my face.

  I stepped out, followed the unsteady shape under the street lamps until it disappeared down the hill.

  I could have put down Chilman’s words to drunkenness, but his drinking never really clouded his mind. We’d all learned that the hard way. I picked up something else in the old fella’s tone. It was as if he were speaking from some personal grievance. And it was not just about the fact that his case had been taken away from him by the Justice Minister when that white woman disappeared.

  Look where your mother was looking…

  What the arse he mean by that!

  When I came in next day, Chilman didn’t look up from his conversation with Pet and Lisa, which was unusual. I hung around my desk, placing myself in his line of vision. The DS finished passing instructions to the two secretaries and cocked his head at Malan.

  ‘Go pick up the fella now. Digger, you go with him.’ He made a quick sideways movement towards his office. A couple of strides and I was beside him.

  ‘Sir, just a quick clarification.’

  ‘About?’

  I dropped my voice, ‘What you said last night.’

  ‘Last night?’ He looked totally confused.

  ‘In the archives, Sir.’

  ‘The archives! Which archives? Where?’

  ‘Around two o’clock, Sir. You bring me a roti… and…’

  ‘Roti! Dunno what you talking about, youngfella. Go on, Malan waiting on you.’

  At the door, I threw him a hateful glare.

  Chilman winked at me, then waved. ‘Enjoy each other, I partnering y’all from now on.’

  Malan adjusted his seat, jerked his head at the building.

  ‘You like that fella?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I said.

  ‘I sure.’ Malan gunned the engine and shot off. ‘That sonuvabitch don’t like me. I dunno why he force me to take this job. The ole bull can’t stand the best bone in me. Is like I do him something. I was gettin on perfect before he interfere with me.’ Malan sounded aggrieved.

  Chilman had conscripted him six months before he picked on me. In his short time in San Andrews CID, Malan had already developed a reputation throughout the island. Chilman had arrested him on Grand Beach with a shopping bag of skunk and a knife in every pocket. He gave Malan a choice: join San Andrews CID or face 14 years in jail and an unlimited fine for directing, organising, buying and selling a Class B drug.

  It was our first outing together. Our job was to bring in a youth named Switch who’d been distressing his parish with a spate of break-ins, burglaries and praedial larcenies. The latest, an arson attack on his uncle’s house, almost burnt the family in their beds.

  It should have taken us forty-five minutes to get to Falaise. Two and a half hours later, we were still on the road because Malan’s thing was women. As soon as he glimpsed a swaying arse ahead, he stopped the jeep in the middle of the road and started a conversation. If the woman ignored him, he sucked his teeth, revved the engine and drove off. He hung out for a couple of minutes at the rumshops, had brief conversations with the bartenders before driving on.

  ‘‘A fella like you could make a killing, Digger. How much ooman you got?’

  ‘We should be there by now,’ I said.

  ‘Relax, man. I not in a hurry and I sure Switch not in no hurry either. Chilman assign you a piece yet?’

  ‘You expecting a gunfight?’

  Malan chuckled. ‘You think that’s the only thing gun good for? I’ll show you something when we reach.’

  At the entrance of the parish, Malan stopped again. An old woman sat under a frayed straw hat at the gap of a small wooden house, with a tray of mangoes on her lap.

  Malan braked, left the vehicle and crossed the road. I followed his hand as he dug into his pockets and pulled out a roll of notes. He unpeeled a few and gave them to the woman. She looked at the money, then quickly up at him. A dry hand reached down beside her foot and handed him a large plastic bag. He cleared the tray of the mangoes, walked back and dumped the bag on the back seat. The smell hit me in the throat.

  ‘You want?’

  ‘They rotten,’ I said. ‘You can’t see that?’

  He jerked a thumb backward. ‘Too proud to beg. So what the ole queen do? She decide to sell bad mango to kill people.’

  A series of hiccups came from him. It took me a while to realise he was laughing. ‘Most expensive mango I ever buy and I can’t eat one.’

  He slowed at a small bridge, grabbed the bag and slung the whole thing over it. ‘Okay, I promise I not stopping again.’

  Falaise was a beach facing a tiny offshore island around which boats were moored like a multicoloured necklace. A couple of small concrete buildings stood so close to the shoreline they were almost in the sea. A freshly painted dry-goods shop faced the road. On the left, a mud track led up a hill to a nest of houses tightly packed against each other.

  I counted nine boys on the culvert ahead, below them a ravine full of muddy water, its banks bordered by wild pine. Three women bent over basins of jacks and coral fish, stirring them with lazy movements of their hands.

  Malan pulled the vehicle off the road and we stepped out. He looked up at the houses, the mud track leading up to them, then at his shoes. ‘I not dirtying them,’ he said.

  The conversation on the bridge had died, the boys gone still, their bodies leaning forward. One of them rose to his feet. Malan shook his head and he promptly sat back down.

  The fisher-women had straightened their backs, eyes shifting between Malan’s face and mine. They eventually stayed on Malan’s.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said.

  Malan eased a hand under his shirt, took out his revolver and laid it on the bonnet of the jeep.

  He jerked an arm at the boys on the culvert; they got up immediately and came running towards us, eyes switching from Malan to the revolver. It was not just the coal-blackness of his eyes and his locked-down mouth that made Malan look different n
ow. He exuded the danger of a man capable of anything.

  ‘Any one of you is Switch family?’ He said.

  Fingers pointed at the tallest amongst them – a bug-eyed youth with a narrow head, and limbs as knobbled as a stick of campeche wood.

  Malan stepped towards him. The boy backed away, the big eyes rolling in his head.

  ‘Switch your brother?’

  ‘Nuh, Sir. We cousin, we…’

  ‘Tell im I down here waiting.’

  ‘I don think he…’

  ‘Bring im,’ Malan grated. ‘I going in this shop. When I come out, he better be here.’

  The youth shot off, his thin limbs pumping up the hill, arms windmilling outward. Malan picked up the gun and pushed it down his trouser waist.

  ‘What you drinking, Digson?’

  ‘Something soft,’ I said.

  I sat on the stool, while Malan brushed at his sleeves. The linen shirt looked as if it had just been ironed.

  The woman at the counter passed him a Malta. ‘How you, Dregs?

  ‘I easy. You having same thing, Digger?’

  The woman slid a bottle across the counter at me.

  We were halfway through our drinks when the boy returned. Another stood behind him – in a khaki shirt, mud-caked Roebucks, and jeans cut at the knees. He was panting and sweating, his arms straight down at his side.

  ‘Yessah, Missa Dregs. I’z… I’z Switch.’

  Malan barely glanced at him.

  ‘Clean your shoes, then go in the jeep and wait.’

  The young man looked at me. I avoided his gaze. He shuffled out of sight.

  ‘That’s how you do it?’ I said.

  Malan sipped his drink, angled his head at me. ‘Fear is – erm – eco-nom-ical. It save effort. I hear a whitefella say that once.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  He took a long drag before dropping the bottle on the counter.

  A bigger crowd had gathered on the culvert. Switch was leaning against the rear door of the vehicle, his face still wet with sweat.