Absolute Money: Part I: An Oliver Holmes Caribbean Thriller

by C B Wilson

  13

  Police Constable Beckford’s day off this rotation was Sunday. His wife looked forward to that. She said it made her feel like they were a normal family. Mid-morning, playing football in the garden with the eldest, he took a call and then told his wife that he had to go out. She complained about him leaving her with kids screaming, lunch cooking, her parents due any minute. Beckford slammed the door as he left, not wanting to go but not having any choice and not wanting to tell his wife how powerless he felt and how he hated feeling powerless.

  He drove for half an hour, and then pulled off the road, up the steep little mud track, greasy after the rain, heading up to the shack on the edge of the coffee plantation, his car not suited for the mud, sliding a little too close to the drop when he slipped out of the ruts made by other cars.

  When he reached the shack, the turning space in front of it was filled with Conrad’s car. The guy was smoking and flicking his ash out of the window. He didn’t seem to care about being in the full sun when he could have sat in the shade of the trees on the plank across two oil drums already there for that purpose. Beckford pulled up behind him. Got out.

  “You bring a gun?” asked Conrad, not bothering to apologise for taking him away from his family, or saying hello.

  Beckford said he hadn’t. Nobody had told him this was something he might need, it being his day off and all. Conrad pushed a new Glock 17 at him, probably confiscated in a cargo shipment from Miami and never destroyed. Beckford didn’t want to take it, but didn’t want to refuse. Taking it was easier. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “What do I need it for?”

  “Constable Lawrence Daley died today. He was the officer shot at Charles Street.”

  Beckford was sad about that and said so.

  “The shooter was Omar Hall. Gunman out of Tivoli Gardens. Information is that Mr Hall is associated with a white British male – Oliver W Holmes. You should consider both of them armed and likely to resist arrest.”

  Conrad showed Beckford a slim file with a picture of Omar, Holmes and an address in the smart part of Kingston, but he didn’t hand it over. Beckford memorised the address and asked what he was supposed to do.

  Conrad said, “Watch the house. When you see them arrive, call Roy.”

  The sinking feeling in Beckford’s heart went straight on through his feet and down into the warm red earth. He knew what he was being asked to do. He just didn’t want to think it, because thinking made it real.

  Beckford said, “Is this an official…” and the sentence tailed away, choked off by its own pointlessness.

  Conrad said, “Can I count on you?” His eyes drilled straight into Beckford’s, Conrad being one of those people who fancied he could judge the depths of a man’s character by staring at him. “Constable Daley was a little bit older than you. Left a wife, two pickneys. I’m not looking forward to the funeral.”

  “I remember him from the academy.”

  Conrad said, “Can I count on you?”

  Beckford didn’t want to say “yes”, didn’t want to say “no”, but saying “yes” was easier.

  Conrad started the car, said, “Whatever happens, I got your back on this.” The sergeant drove off slowly, the car spitting mud and sliding dangerously close to Beckford’s car as he made the first turn down the hill.

  14

  The hotel where Nikki and her friends were staying was on the beach in a private bay a few miles out of Montego Bay. It was the kind of place that welcomed the rich and the beautiful and made everyone else feel uncomfortable.

  Holmes pulled up in the circular driveway in front of the hotel. He spilled out of the driver’s seat in a crumpled shirt with a stain down the front from a poorly constructed lunchtime sandwich he had eaten while driving. He looked like he’d been on the road for days instead of a few hours. He was always like that. His colleagues called him “The Crumpled Man” because he made clothes look like he’d slept in them as soon as he put them on.

  A doorman offered to park his car. Holmes didn’t know whether or not to tip him. In the end, not having any cash in his wallet made the decision for him.

  The staff wouldn’t let Holmes wander round the hotel on his own so a flunky was sent to show him to where Ms Grainger was waiting for him. The guy kept a close eye on Oliver all the way in case he stole some of the monogrammed towels or goosed one of the sunbathing rock stars, or whatever it was that they were worried about.

  The path through the hotel to the beach wound its way across pointless little streams with ceramic lizards and ironic gnomes with fishing poles. There were pools everywhere and fake waterfalls and gliding waiters with cocktail trays. Nikki and her friends were next to the infinity pool, which wasn’t working as a feature that afternoon because the sky and the sea were both grey under the clouds while the pool was an unnatural blue.

  Nikki saw him approaching and ran towards him. He had forgotten how beautiful she was. He could have watched her moving towards him all day. He barely had a chance to look at her before she was in his arms, and he held her as though the last five years had never happened. She fitted perfectly into his arms, her head pressed against his chest, his head on top of hers, breathing in the smell of her.

  When Holmes had first met Nikki she had been beautiful but in a reserved way, as though she didn’t have confidence in her own appearance. But that had clearly changed. Holmes stepped back and looked at her.

  The Nikki he had known always wore long skirts and baggy shirts and he had never seen her with make-up, and now here she was, a short beach wrap showing off her long, slim brown legs and taut stomach. His eyes travelled up to her admirable breasts, spilling out of a bikini top. And her hair…Once it had been scarlet, now it glowed a deeper red, like the inside of an active volcano. She had clearly spent a lot of time and money on her appearance and Holmes wasn’t about to complain.

  Nikki hugged him again. She whispered in his ear, “I’m so glad you came. Thank you, thank you.”

  They broke out of their clinch, and Holmes was introduced to Nikki’s friends. On the first round of handshakes, he couldn’t match the name with the blonde. One had lots of hair in a swirly mass, the other had a skirt shorter than her bob and sunglasses bigger than her bikini top. They were either Charlotte or Ellie but Oliver couldn’t quite pin the names on them at first. He put them at somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties but he was bad at guessing ages and could have been five years out either way.

  Holmes hadn’t ever seen three women this beautiful.

  Apart from a few unremarkable holidays, Holmes had been in the field for the last eleven years. The list of places where he had worked in that time would have been a close fit with a list of worst countries to be in at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Kurdistan, Iraq, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Afghanistan…

  Apart from his doomed, painful relationship with Nikki, most of the women Holmes had had relationships with during that time tended to be very earnest NGOs with scraped-back hair and sensible shoes and Tibetan hats. They were too busy saving the world to worry about lip gloss and Louboutins.

  His first impression was that Charlotte and Ellie weren’t dressed appropriately or behaving correctly for women who had just lost their friend, but he let that thought slide when the women started interrogating him.

  The younger of the two women clearly didn’t like her first impression of him either. She was hostile and her attitude suggested that talking to anyone less than the head of the FBI was a mistake.

  “Are you a private detective?”

  Oliver said, “No I’m not. I don’t do car chases or gunfights. I read files. I conduct interviews.”

  He could see that his answer didn’t satisfy her but there was nothing he could do about that. She pressed him with a couple more questions until Oliver held up his hand and said, “If this is an interview and you’ve got another candidate, please, take him for the job. I’m not a missing persons expert.”

/>   The other blonde, the more relaxed one that Oliver thought was called Charlotte, said, “But Nikki said you are an investigator, so that must involve finding people – doesn’t it?”

  Oliver shook his head. “Yes, I’m an investigator, but I’m a human rights investigator.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Oliver said, “I work for an NGO called Justice Unlimited. All round the world state security services murder their own citizens. I write reports about the murders so that powerful and important people can ignore them.” Oliver waited for the women to say something about that but they didn’t.

  Nikki filled the awkward silence and asked Charlotte to go and get them some drinks. The older, nicer blonde went in search of a waiter, which cleared up the problem of who was who.

  “As I understand it, your friend has been missing for thirty-six hours, so maybe the best thing to do,” said Holmes, “is for you to tell me what happened to her and what you’ve done about it and then we can figure out what to do next.”

  The women thought that was a good idea. Ellie told him that, on Friday, they had been invited to a party on Plutus, one of the world’s largest super yachts. It was moored off the coast near Montego Bay because it was too big for the marina and because the owner liked his privacy. She got a little bogged down in telling Oliver how enormous and luxurious Plutus was and then Charlotte came back with the waiter who took the women’s orders for cocktails. Holmes ordered water.

  Holmes nudged the story back on track and Charlotte took over. “There were four of us. We were on holiday, travelling together and Nadia, our other friend, she…”

  Ellie interrupted. “Nikki got into a fight with one of the guests.”

  “It wasn’t a fight.”

  “And we got thrown off the yacht.”

  Holmes said, “You got into a fight? An actual physical fight?”

  Nikki said, “This drunk guy tried to hit me. Then he fell over a table and cut himself. It looked a lot worse than it was.”

  “Is that relevant?”

  Nikki said, “I don’t think so. But maybe. They said the man who fell over was very angry with us.”

  “Anyway,” Charlotte said, “they kicked us off the yacht, which was like really embarrassing, but we couldn’t find Nadia so we came here, but in the morning, there was no sign of her.”

  Holmes said, “What did the people on the yacht say?”

  “They said she wasn’t on the yacht anymore.”

  “They said she left the party with a guest on a jet-ski in the middle of the night.”

  Oliver said, “Problem solved. She’s with a guy on a jet-ski. Probably on a beach somewhere. Romantic.”

  Nikki said, “No.”

  Ellie said, “Nadia has a regular client. He’s a very wealthy man. She was supposed to be flying to Miami today to meet him.”

  Charlotte jumped in. “She organised the whole of this trip around meeting him. She would never let him down.”

  The sudden realisation of what he was dealing with hit Oliver like a kick in the stomach. He stumbled over the words. “You said she had a client? Like a client, client?”

  Charlotte said, “He pays for everything. Her flat, her car, her clothes. All she has to do is show up for a few days a month. No way would she dump him. She actually likes him.”

  Oliver looked at Nikki, who was sitting back, studying his reaction. He said, “A client?”

  Nikki nodded but Oliver couldn’t quite accept it. He needed her to say it. She didn’t.

  Suddenly it all made sense to him – the location, the invitation to the yacht, the grooming… He said, “You’re prostitutes.”

  The word hung there between them for a while.

  Nikki said, “No. We’re not prostitutes. We’re escorts.”

  Ellie was aggressive about it. She said, “They are very different things.” Then, “Is that a problem for you? Because if it is…”

  Oliver said that it wasn’t a problem. But the information had put him off his stride. He was floundering. He turned to Nikki and said, “I’m just shocked… surprised. I mean, it’s fine. Whatever you want to do. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  Nikki said, “Ellie’s right. Being an escort is a very different thing to being a prostitute, OK?”

  Oliver said, “Really? Do you want to tell me how exactly?”

  Ellie said, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  Oliver got the feeling that she was about to lose her temper.

  Charlotte said, “Do we need to go through this now?”

  “You’re right. We should get on with trying to find your friend,” Holmes said. “We don’t want to waste any more time.”

  Nikki fixed her eyes on a point above Oliver’s head. She said, “No. It’s important that you understand this right from the start. I’m not a prostitute. The men I see are paying for my time. They’re not paying for sex.”

  Oliver said, “I don’t want to have this discussion now but if you want to explain it, then fine. But what I don’t understand is…you do end up sleeping with them anyway, so…”

  “If I like a client and I want to sleep with him, then that’s fine. If I don’t, I won’t,” Nikki said. “Same as I do in my non-professional life.”

  Oliver said, “I’m having a hard time believing that you can say ‘no’.”

  “Sure you can,” said Ellie. “You ever go out to dinner with someone and then have sex afterwards?”

  “It’s called a date,” said Oliver. “Well, a good date.”

  “But the woman didn’t sleep with you because you bought her dinner. She did it because she wanted to. Right?”

  Oliver said, “I hope nobody’s been sleeping with me just for the fried chicken and a couple of cocktails.” His attempt at humour flopped badly.

  Nikki said, “But sometimes you bought a woman dinner and she decided she didn’t want to sleep with you afterwards, right?”

  Oliver agreed that had happened a couple of times in his life.

  “Same with us,” said Ellie. “It’s just that the things they are paying for are a little more expensive than fried chicken.”

  Nikki said, “But that’s OK for them because they’re rich.”

  Talking over her, Ellie said, “And most of the time, these are interesting, intelligent guys who have made a lot of money because they’re smart. Call me a snob, but it’s a lot more appealing to have sex with them than the guys you get in a massage parlour in Leicester.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been there.”

  Ellie said, “A girl’s got to start somewhere. But if you ever tell anyone about Leicester, I’ll kill you.”

  Charlotte joined in. “Think of it like this, a wealthy man wants to take someone to a gallery opening, or an opera. He wants a well-dressed, hot young woman on his arm, and he doesn’t mind paying for it. Probably won’t even ask for sex anyway. So the word prostitute is not right. Just call them escorts. It’s easier that way.”

  “Thanks for putting me straight on that,” said Oliver. “But you’re not an escort?”

  “She’s a trust-fund baby,” said Ellie. “She likes hanging around with rich guys.”

  Nikki said, “She’ll probably marry one, one day.”

  Charlotte said, “That’s the plan!”

  “OK,” said Oliver and chewed at his thumbnail for a while as he figured out what he felt about the whole thing.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter to me what you do,” he lied. “The important thing here is that we find your friend.”

  “You’re lying. You think because she’s a hooker that somehow Nadia deserves what happened, ” Ellie said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “You’re like the cops. She’s a prostitute so you think it’s not such a big deal that she’s missing.”

  Holmes said, “You’re upset because your friend’s missing, so I’m going to forget you said that, but just so you know – I’m not like that.”

  Charlotte stepped in quic
kly to move the conversation away from the conflict between Holmes and Ellie. She told him how useless Mike, the private detective, had been. “He didn’t know what to do, so we photocopied some flyers with her photograph on and a reward. He’s out distributing them now.”

  Nikki showed him a flyer, printed amateurishly by the hotel front desk. Holmes looked at the picture of Nadia and said, “She’s beautiful.”

  Ellie said, “Mixed race. I bet that puts her even lower down your list. A mixed-race prostitute. What’s the point in even looking for her?”

  Holmes sighed, “Really?”

  “And she liked sex,” Ellie said “She was a real whore. Probably got what she deserved - right?”

  “What’s your problem? Ever since I got here you’ve been rude,” said Holmes.

  “Because everything you’ve said shows what you really think.”

  Nikki stepped between them with her hands up. “Give it a rest, OK? We have to work together to find Nadia. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “She’s the one with the problem,” said Holmes.

  “Oliver. Please.”

  “Well he’s certainly no Sherlock Holmes, I can tell you that.”

  Oliver said, “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that?”

  Nikki said, “Will you two stop it?”

  Charlotte said, “Like we said, there’s no way that Nadia would have missed that flight this morning. The man in Miami was a big part of her life.”

  Holmes wanted to get their conversation onto a different track. He took a deep breath and said, “What if the guy she met Friday night was even richer than Mr Miami? Like a billionaire instead of a millionaire. He took her off, they’re right in the middle of it…”

  Ellie said, “You don’t think we talked about that? You don’t think we wanted to be sure before we went to the police or got you involved?”

  Charlotte said, “Even if she had met Mr Right and she was going to dump Mr Miami, she would have texted us.”