Domino Island

by Desmond Bagley

  He told me. He had taken off his white coat and was dressed neatly in smart civvies. ‘Are you going off duty now, John?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said stolidly.

  ‘Were you here the day Mr Salton walked out – the last day he was seen alive?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do you know what Mr and Mrs Salton talked about just before he left?’

  There was a sudden widening of his eyes, a movement quickly cancelled. He said quietly, ‘I don’t talk about the doings of my employer, sir.’

  One in the eye for Kemp. I ought to have known not to pump the servants. Christ, what a lousy job I had. He stared at me steadily with defiant brown eyes, daring me to make something of it. He knew, all right! He knew what the Saltons had quarrelled about. But he wasn’t telling.

  I said, ‘That’s good, John. Keep it that way.’

  ‘Is that all, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned away and I said, ‘How long have you worked for the Saltons?’

  He was walking away as he said without turning his head, ‘Twenty-two years. It’s twenty-two years since I started with Mr Salton.’

  I watched him until he was out of sight and thought what a right bastard I was, then I went into the changing room, showered, dressed and headed for the kitchen.

  It was exactly what you’d expect to find in a house like that: a lot of stainless steel, eye-level ovens, islanded preparation counters, all gleaming and clean as a whistle. Jill Salton had changed, too. She was wearing a short frock, a simple little number you can buy anywhere for $1,000. As I arrived she said, ‘How do you like your martinis?’

  I’m not a martini mystic. I shrugged and said, ‘As they come.’

  ‘You must get a lot of different martinis that way,’ she observed, and poured a healthy slug from a gin bottle into a shaker.

  ‘I like variety.’

  She mixed the drinks and poured them, strained through cracked ice into chilled glasses taken from the refrigerator. ‘How often do you see my uncle?’

  I smiled. ‘As little as possible. We don’t exactly rub shoulders.’

  She handed me a glass. ‘He thinks a lot of you. He said so this afternoon.’

  I sipped the martini. It was very good. ‘Face to face?’

  ‘Via satellite. He sang your praises a lot. He says you’re the best man in the business.’

  ‘I’ll have to remember that when I negotiate my next contract.’

  She lifted her glass and her cool, green eyes appraised me over the rim. ‘What business would that be?’

  ‘What else but insurance? I’m a money man at heart.’

  She smiled. ‘I doubt that. Are you married?’

  ‘Not at present.’

  ‘You sound as though you’ve been burned. You were married?’

  I hooked over a chair with my foot and sat down. ‘Twice. My first wife died and my second divorced me.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about the first, and surprised at the second.’

  ‘Surprised?’

  ‘I can’t see how a woman in her right mind would let you get away.’

  I thought she was joking but she seemed serious enough. Abruptly she put down her glass and walked across the kitchen to open the lid of a big deep freezer. I played it lightly and said to her back, ‘There was nothing to it. I didn’t wriggle off the hook – she threw me back.’

  ‘Why? Were you tomcatting?’

  You ask some damn personal questions, Jill Salton, I thought, then reconsidered. Come to that, so did I. Perhaps this was her way of giving me a taste of my own medicine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She didn’t like bigamy. I was married to the insurance industry.’

  She took some packets to a counter and switched on an oven, then began to prepare the food. From what I could see, millionaires didn’t eat any better than the rest of us – just the same old frozen garbage. ‘Some women are fools,’ she said. ‘When I married David I knew what I was getting into. I knew he had his work and it would take up a lot of his time. But there’s a certain type of woman who doesn’t understand how important a man’s work can be to him.’ She paused with a knife upheld. ‘I suppose it means as much as having a baby does to a woman.’

  ‘You’re not the liberated feminist type, then. When were you married?’

  ‘Four years ago.’ She got busy with the knife. ‘Believe it or not, I was still a virgin at twenty-four.’

  She was right – I did find it hard to believe. I wondered why the hell she was telling me all this. My acquaintanceship with beautiful young heiresses was admittedly limited, but I’d come across a handful in the way of business and none had felt impelled to tell me the more intimate details of her life. Still, statistically, anything can happen given a long enough period of time, and maybe she’d get around to telling me about the quarrel with her husband.

  She said, ‘David was exactly twice as old as I was, give or take a couple of weeks. My family said it would never work.’

  ‘Did it?’

  She turned her head and looked at me. ‘Oh yes, it worked. It worked marvellously. We were very happy.’ She looked down at the counter again and wielded the knife. ‘How was your first marriage?’

  I looked back along the years. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Nothing much to tell. We married young. I was a second lieutenant and she was an army wife.’

  ‘So you were a soldier.’

  ‘Until ten years ago, when I started working with Western and Continental. I’m still in the reserves.’

  ‘What rank?’

  ‘Colonel.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘You must have been good.’

  I laughed. ‘Good, but not good enough, tactically speaking.’ I found myself telling her about it.

  I had worked my way upwards from my green commission with a rapidity that pleased me until I found myself a half-colonel commanding a battalion in Germany. I did not get on very well with my superior officer, Brigadier Marston, and the bone of contention was that we disagreed on the role of the army. He was one of the old school, forever refighting World War II, and thought in terms of massed tank operations, parachute drops of entire divisions and all the rest of the junk that had been made obsolete by the pax atomica. For my part, I could see nothing in the future but an unending series of counter-insurgency operations such as in Malaya, Cyprus and Aden, and I argued – maybe a bit too forcibly – that the army lacked training for this particular tricky job.

  When Marston wrote my annual report it turned out to be a beauty. There was nothing in it that was actionable; in fact, to the untrained eye the damned thing was laudatory. But to a hard-eyed general in the War House, skilled in the jargon of the old boys’ network, the report said that Lt-Col William Kemp was not the soldier to put your money on. So I was promoted to colonel and I cursed Marston with all my heart. A colonel in the army is a fifth wheel, a dogsbody shunted off into an administrative post. My own sideline was intelligence, something at which I was particularly skilled, but my heart wasn’t in it. After a couple of years I negotiated very good freelance terms with Western and Continental, who paid willingly for my expertise. I would still be pushing pieces of paper around various desks but I’d be getting £15,000 a year for doing it. Marston, meanwhile, was in Northern Ireland, up to his armpits in IRA terrorists and wondering what the hell to do with his useless tanks.

  I finished my story and looked up at Jill, who was staring hard at me. My army experience had exposed me to some brutal interrogation techniques, but Jill Salton could give my instructors points. ‘So that was it,’ I said. ‘I quit.’

  ‘But your wife had died earlier.’

  ‘I was stationed in Germany and my wife was flying out to meet me. The plane crashed.’

  She said thoughtfully, ‘You must have married your second wife after you left the army.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘But how did you figure that?’

  ‘Any woman who can’
t stand the pace of living with a man who works for an insurance company would never be an army wife.’ She put dishes into the oven and closed the door. ‘Dinner in thirty minutes. Time for another drink.’ She came over and picked up my glass. ‘For you?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  As she mixed another shakerful of martinis, she said, ‘What was it like when your wife died?’

  ‘Bloody,’ I said. ‘It gave me a hell of a knock.’

  ‘I know.’ She was suddenly still and when she finally turned her head towards me her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Bill. You understand.’ She slammed down the shaker and said passionately, ‘This damned house!’

  The tears came, flowing freely, and I knew what the matter was. Plain loneliness. The reserve that stopped her communicating her inner feelings to her friends melted with a stranger. She was open with me because I would be gone within days and she would probably never see me again, never have to look into my eyes and know that I knew. People who travel receive a lot of confidences from total strangers who would never dream of relating the same stories to their friends.

  But there was something else. As she said, I understood: I had been there too, and this made a common bond.

  So she cried on my shoulder – literally. I held her in my arms and felt her body tense as she wept. I said the usual incoherent things one says on such an occasion, keeping my voice low and gentle, until the storm blew itself out and she looked up at me and said brokenly, ‘I’m … I’m sorry, Bill. It just … happened suddenly.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  I saw her become aware of where she was and what she was doing. Her arms, which had been about me, went limp and to save her embarrassment I released her. She stepped back a pace and touched her tear-stained face. ‘I must look awful.’

  I shook my head. ‘Jill, you’re beautiful.’

  She summoned a smile from somewhere. ‘I’ll go and clean up and then we’ll have dinner. Don’t expect too much: I’m a terrible cook.’

  She was right. She was the only woman I knew who could ruin a frozen meal. But it was another thing that made her more human.

  II

  We drove into San Martin in my car, the headlights boring holes through the quick-fallen tropical night. She sat relaxed in the passenger seat and we talked casually about anything and everything that didn’t concern her or her husband. She had come back after repairing the damage and we’d had another drink before dinner and neither of us referred to what had happened.

  I turned a corner and nearly rammed a large vehicle approaching on the wrong side of the road. It was only strong wrists and quick action that saved us from a collision. The car scraped through a narrow gap which I thought would be impossible and then we were on the other side and safe.

  I pulled to a halt. ‘What the hell!’ When I looked back I saw that whatever it was had not stopped.

  ‘A jitney,’ said Jill.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A jitney – a local bus.’ Her voice was composed. ‘They’re a law unto themselves.’

  ‘Are they, by God?’ I put the car into drive and set off again, turning the next corner more circumspectly. ‘It was about here that I saw your friend, Dr McKittrick.’

  ‘He lives quite close by.’

  ‘Stern didn’t seem to think much of him.’

  ‘Abel Stern is a dyed-in-the-wool, pre-shrunk and pre-tested conservative. He thought even David was in danger of turning communist, so what do you think he makes of Jake McKittrick?’

  ‘Is McKittrick left-wing?’

  ‘Labels – how I hate them.’ There was a new edge to her voice, something I hadn’t heard before. ‘He’s a human being trying to make the best of things, as most of us are.’

  I said, ‘You mentioned a quarrel between your husband and McKittrick. What was it about?’

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘I’d like to hear about it.’

  She stirred in her seat. ‘Jake was a bright boy – lots of brains but no way to use them. He lived with his parents on a smallholding in North End but there wasn’t much of a future in it. David got to know him, saw the potential and sent him to the States for his education. Jake chose medicine and when he’d done his internship and taken his degree, he came back here to practise.’

  ‘That was very good of your husband.’

  ‘He was always doing things like that,’ she said. ‘Jake and David were good friends for a while, until David took an interest in politics when he came back here to live. The trouble with Jake was that his ideals didn’t match up to reality. He used to say his medical practice was actually all about economics, and what was the point of curing a man of an illness if he couldn’t afford to eat? He reckoned not enough money was getting to the rural communities in Campanilla.’

  ‘He sounds a good man too,’ I commented.

  ‘You say you saw him planting corn. He was probably helping someone out so that he wouldn’t have to treat them for nutritional deficiencies this time next year. Jake’s a great believer in preventative medicine.’

  ‘So what went wrong with your husband?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. Things were all right between him and David for a while. They both wanted to knock the government off its perch and install a more equitable system. But David wouldn’t go fast enough for Jake and that led to friction. I can see Jake’s point of view; he worked at the grassroots and saw things David didn’t. But David had a more practical view of politics. Anyway, they pulled further and further apart until finally there was a huge bust-up – it was out at El Cerco, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t involved in the conversation but you’ve seen the place: there was no way to keep an argument like that quiet. Jake called David a wishy-washy liberal, David called Jake a political illiterate, and that was that.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A little over two years ago, I suppose.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t think David and Jake spoke again after that. I ran into Jake from time to time. He told me things about this island that make me ashamed. But then we drifted apart.’

  I said, ‘What did you think of your husband’s brand of politics? Did you go along with him?’

  ‘Of course.’ She seemed surprised that I should ask. ‘This government is corrupt to the core – it must be toppled.’

  ‘And you think your husband’s approach was best?’

  ‘It wasn’t the best approach,’ she said wearily. ‘It was the only approach. No one wants a bloody revolution, not even Jake, but that’s what will happen if he keeps heading the way he is.’

  I thought of David Salton, the crusading liberal with his shining armour all nicely burnished, the man who would be next Prime Minister – with the help of Mafia gambling money, if Jackson was to be believed. Either Salton was an idealist who’d inexplicably compromised those ideals for a shot at the main prize, or he was an opportunistic chancer who’d somehow been able to fool his wife for years. It didn’t make sense whichever way you added it up. And then Salton was suddenly dead – most conveniently so, from the point of view of Prime Minister Conyers and his government. The whole thing stank to high heaven.

  I said, ‘Did your husband have any business dealings with Gerry Negrini?’

  Her voice rose. ‘What business would David do with a gambler? Bill, you should read some of David’s speeches some time. He was dead against the gambling interests moving in when independence came, and after the election he was all set to close the casinos.’

  ‘And yet he was personally friendly with Negrini. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

  She was silent for a while, then she said quietly, ‘I did wonder about that myself. But you should understand that Gerry Negrini is a genuinely nice man, and they can be in short supply in the kind of circles David moved in. I think he liked David personally and regarded the political thing as a chance he’d have to take. He is a gambler, after all.’

  ‘You mean he viewed the whole thing as a game.’

>   ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Do you really think your husband would have won the election?’

  ‘I’m certain of it.’

  I drove in silence for a long way before she said, ‘Bill, you’ve been asking a lot of questions and I’ve just been adding them up.’ Her voice was strained. ‘The answers I’m getting are beginning to frighten me. Do you really think that David was m—?’

  I cut in quickly before she said it. Once you say a thing it’s impossible to unsay it, and things once said acquire a reality of their own. ‘I’m not thinking anything. I’m not a policeman, Jill, and I’ll be leaving soon – probably the day after tomorrow. Let it lie and don’t talk about it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said harshly. ‘Nothing can be proved now one way or the other, and loose talk might stir up a lot of grief for a lot of innocent people. If the Chronicle is anything to go by, it already has. Adding things up can be a dangerous pastime: there’s an infinity of wrong answers but only one right answer. Making a mistake in a thing like this could have bad consequences.’

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘My God!’

  She didn’t speak again until we were in San Martin amid the glaring neon and the bustling traffic. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I thought that David Salton had turned out to be a very bad insurance risk.

  III

  The Blue Water Casino was on Buque Island and the owners ran their own ferry service from San Martin free of charge. It was possibly the only free ride to be had on Campanilla. So the boat was crowded with tourists who grabbed at the opportunity of a sea trip gratis and who, in return, could be expected to drop a few dollars on the casino tables.

  As we sat down I said to Jill, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I mean, you coming here with your husband just dead. I wouldn’t want to compromise your reputation.’

  Her chin came up. ‘I can look after my reputation,’ she said coolly.

  That settled that, so I turned to look out over the water as the boat left the quay. It didn’t take long to cross Pascua Channel – maybe fifteen minutes – and the boat docked in a channel that ran right inside the casino. Even before stepping ashore we could see the crowds around the tables through plate glass walls.