‘I want to go back to where the ferry docked. At least there was a breeze there, and it kept the insects away. I can’t stand this any longer.’
‘And the snake,’ came a call from the other jeep.
‘Let’s go back, Windy.’ There was a general chorus of agreement between all of them and the drivers took the quickest route to the shoreline. They were at least an hour ahead of time, but they may prove to be lucky.
They were, and Goodluck Johnston hadn’t gone off about other business, but had stayed put, talking to other boat users and old friends, thoroughly enjoying his day off. Not only had he got to go visiting, but he had made money as well, and good money, from this group of rich old pussies. He also had high hopes of the forecast storm developing, and getting a few days just chilling, while the seas were too rough for him to operate the ferry.
The stiff breeze they had left behind them on arrival was now a rising wind, and little white caps were developing on the waves of the channel between the islands. It was, after all, the Atlantic out there, and things could get pretty rough in no time at all. Windy gave it as her opinion that it had been a wise move to leave early as, if they’d waited any longer, it might have been too rough for them to get back home.
Her mind, on the return journey, was totally consumed with what had to be taken in from the garden, and what other storm precautions were to be instituted and replicated by all the girls, when Horseface asked her if the island they had just visited was the one they would fly back from. ‘Not at all. It doesn’t even have a landing strip for small planes,’ Windy informed her distractedly. ‘The planes go from the bigger island to the north.’
‘And how will we get there when we go?’ asked Horseface earnestly. ‘Is it the same ferry?’
‘No, you need to go from the north ferry landing stage, the other side of the cruise terminal,’ she finished, and flapped her hands at the other woman to get back into the train of thought that she had reluctantly been brought out of to answer irrelevant questions.
The wind continued to rise, and the ferry not only bobbed up and down, but rocked sideways as well in a movement that the ferryman described as ‘corkscrewing’, and after which Lady Amanda thought she might need to use one of those herself, for she felt like she would deserve a large drink after all this tossing and turning in nothing more substantial than a large old bathtub.. It hadn’t been a very pleasant day, so far.
At least one old girl had been ill over the side of the ferry on the way over; the jeep trip had been a nightmare on those rutted roads, and she felt very bruised and battered; lunch had been a poorly-cooked fiasco, and the attack of the ravenous insects had been horrible too, she thought as she scratched vigorously at a little nest of bites on her right shoulder. And that snake had just been the end. If Wuffles hadn’t suddenly cracked, she feared it would have been she, Lady Amanda Golightly, who showed cowardice in the face of the enemy.
Hugo, who was sitting vigorously scratching at both his knees, looked up and commented, ‘Been a rum old day, hasn’t it? I, for one, shall be glad to get back, won’t you?’
‘I will that, Hugo. Large glass of something relaxing when we get in,’ she replied, now applying the sharpness of her fingernails to her ankles. ‘I seem to have been bitten to bits.’
When they had docked and sent a runner to locate Winstone Churchill, Windy suggested that they go back to their own properties, and make preparations for the approaching storm. ‘All rubbish bins are to be put in the exterior storage cupboards, all windows and doors are to be closed and locked, and also all shutters to be fastened tightly. Anything that might be blown away by a strong wind has to be either brought indoors or stored. Any questions?’
‘Are the villas built to withstand the storms you get out here?’ asked a nervous Fflageolet.
‘Silly girl! Of course they are, otherwise they wouldn’t have withstood the first winter. We made sure they were built to the correct standard necessary not to blow down at the first hint of a tropical storm, and this probably won’t be a full tropical one, just a precursor of what’s to come later in the year. It’s a bit early, yet, for the stormy weather to set in. This will give you a demonstration that I couldn’t possibly have arranged for you, to see just how sturdy the structures are.’
By now, several of the old girls were on their knees, heads over the side of the ferry, and Windy was sure that most of what had been said hadn’t been taken in, so she’d make sure she repeated her instructions on the bus, when most of her old school chums weren’t too busy throwing up their goat or chicken stew over the side, to provide sustenance for the local fish.
Thus reassured, their trip home in the old wreck of a bus was in virtual silence, apart from Windy’s reiteration of the necessary storm preparations, and they left the vehicle in a very subdued manner, each heading for their own villa. As they disembarked from the bus, Wuffles muttered in Lady A’s ear, ‘You will keep me under your hat, won’t you? I don’t want my cover broken.’
There had been a tacit agreement between Lady Amanda and Beauchamp that, when the newlyweds had secured their property, if there was no danger to life or limb, they would go across to number fifteen, and have cocktails together. She had not yet had a chance to inform them of what she had learnt about Wuffles’ true reasons for being on the island, and another couple of pairs of eyes might make all the difference. It wouldn’t be an issue telling those two, although she wouldn’t let on to any of the others, not even Windy.
Chapter Thirteen
Back in number fifteen, Lady A and Hugo were enjoying a very large glass of chilled white wine. It was Manda who had had to wield the corkscrew, Hugo’s hands being too arthritic to allow the necessary gripping and pulling power. After a hearty swallow, he turned to his companion and said, ‘Gracious, Manda, if I ever stopped living with you, I’d have to start buying wine in screw-top bottles, or I’d never get a quiet drink, for I couldn’t stand having to go to a bar just for a glass of wine.’
‘Don’t be a silly billy, Hugo. The only reason you wouldn’t be living with me would be if either you or I were dead. If something happened to you, you wouldn’t have the need to open wine anymore, and if something happened to me, I’ve put it in my will that you are to live out the remainder of your days in Belchester Towers, when it would then revert to Beauchamp, so if I’m gone, you’ll always have him there to deal with bottles of wine, port or difficult cans and jars.’
Hugo wiped a tear from his eye, not sure whether he was moved by the thought that one or other of them must die first, or by Manda’s very generous alteration to her will, so that he need never go back into a home again. He was soon snapped out of this uncharacteristically sentimental mood, however, by a furious knocking on the front door. Whoever could that be, with the wind now starting to howl, and the first of the rain beginning to fall? It surely couldn’t be Beauchamp and Enid, who would certainly never consider making an uncivilised racket like that.
The staff helping out in the villas had been dismissed and allowed to go home to secure their own properties, and Lady Amanda thus rose to answer this urgent summons. On the doorstep, she found Windy, her hair and kaftan blowing all over the place, an envelope which she could barely hold onto clutched in her hand.
‘Come in! Come on in out of that ghastly weather and tell me whatever’s the matter with you, Windy, old girl.’ Lady A stood aside to admit her visitor, and pushed against the wind to close the door again. ‘What is it?’ she asked again, surveying the bedraggled, windswept wreck that was her next door neighbour.
‘We’ve had another one of those letters,’ she gasped, her breath quite taken away by the force of the wind, as she held out the hand still clutching the envelope for Lady A’s inspection.
‘The weather’s certainly living up to your nickname, isn’t it?’ the recipient of this damp missive asked rhetorically, then the words on the piece of paper that she had extracted from the envelope silenced her completely. When she had recovered from her sh
ock, she asked, ‘When did this come?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Windy. ‘It could have been put in the mailbox anytime from yesterday evening onwards, as we didn’t bother checking the box this morning, and I found it when I was going about storm protection measures. We daren’t risk there being anything left in there in case the mailbox is uprooted and blown away.’
‘“Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash buys my silence,”’ read Lady Amanda, in awe of the size of the sum and the audacity of the sender. ‘“I will be in touch about time and place.” How on earth are you going to deal with this?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. All the money’s gone on maintaining the properties, and after the global crash of the housing market and all that, we didn’t get what we’d hoped for them.’ Windy was very good at manipulating the truth. ‘If we don’t sell a couple more, we won’t even be able to live here, let alone further the development of the site.’
Lady Amanda knew better than this, having had that little snoop in Cocktails, while all the others were doing the viewing rounds, but kept her silence. She realised that she knew what the blackmailer knew, and she had, so far, not said a word to Hugo, or Beauchamp and Enid. She made a quick decision that she should leave things as they were, and decided that a bit of carefully worded enquiry of the other old girls might elicit the fact that one of them knew more than she ought to.
‘Let’s show this to Hugo,’ she said, leading her neighbour into the sitting room, but had to leave Hugo with the letter in his hands, as there was a more discreet knock on the door, and she opened it to find Enid and Beauchamp, an optimistic but nevertheless inside-out umbrella in the former’s hand. She had to get the butler to close the door, as the force of the storm was really too great for her now, and she led them into the sitting room where she had left the other two.
‘I say, this is a bit rich isn’t it?’ asked Hugo, waving around the sheet of paper with its gummed on message. ‘How on earth do you get hold of such a large amount of cash on a small island like this, in a hurry?’
‘That’s just it,’ replied Windy with great anxiety. ‘Not only is it impossible to get hold of a huge sum like that without a great deal of fuss and intrusive paperwork, but we simply don’t have that sort of money.’ Beauchamp took the sheet of paper from Hugo, and he and Enid read it.
‘How ghastly!’ exclaimed Enid. ‘And you’ve absolutely no idea who sent this?’
‘None whatsoever.’
At this point, Lady Amanda decided that it would be a good idea to rid themselves of Windy’s company, so that they could have a good old natter about developments about which two of them knew nothing, and something else she hadn’t mentioned, about which none of them knew.
‘I’ll just get these two a glass of wine before they fight their way back, and I really think you ought to be going, too, Windy. The weather’s not getting any calmer, and at least Enid has Beauchamp’s muscle-power to help her get home. I think you ought to get back to Beep-Beep. He must be worried sick about the storm.’
‘I just hope he’s back,’ she replied.
‘Back from where?’ was asked in chorus.
‘From securing all the empty villas from storm damage. They were all open for you lot to look round. If he leaves them with windows unlocked, and with the shutters open, they could be wrecked. It’s the wind breaching the barrier between inside and out that does the real damage.’
A strong sense of guilt pervaded the other three in the room, totally uncalled for, because they could not have foreseen the sudden change in the weather, but this was alleviated by a couple of stout thumps on the front door, and Beauchamp went to answer it only to find Beep-Beep standing there, looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.
‘Are you finished already?’ asked Beauchamp, admitting and, with some difficulty, shutting out the storm.
‘I left Windy shutting up our place, and started immediately; then, when I got back just now, I found a note from her saying she’d come round here to show you the letter. I’ll take her back home, now, so that we can ride out the storm together. You see if you can come up with any ideas as to who the blackmailer could be.’
Windy, hearing his voice in the hall, rushed out, and the two of them went back into the dark and stormy night mentioned in so many gothic horror stories. ‘I know why they’re so worried,’ stated Lady A out of the blue. ‘And I think I know who the blackmailer is, as well.’
‘You do?’
‘Who is it?’
‘How did you find out?’
Their hostess smiled, and began to give them the lowdown. ‘When I was on my little viewing trip the other day, I hung behind especially so that I could go through the pedal bins and waste-paper baskets inside the houses. I’d already gone through the outside bins when you were all partying.’
‘Good grief! You never said anything,’ Beauchamp interrupted with some surprise. He thought he and Enid were in on everything the woman did.
‘There hasn’t been much time to talk to either of you since we left dear old Belchester Towers,’ stated his employer baldly. ‘Anyway, on my trip through the gardens while you were all drinking cocktails, I discovered evidence of a small fire in the garden of number seven. When I went through the pedal bin while I should have been avidly viewing the properties, I found some slips of paper which I suspected found their way in there more by accident than design.
‘I suspect that whoever sent the letters gathered together what she thought of as all her “snippings”, then burned them out at the back. If she missed any perhaps one of the others found them on the floor and slipped them into the nearest waste-paper basket without another thought about them.’
‘Who’s staying in that villa?’ asked Hugo, now all ears.
‘Wuffles, Droopy-Drawers, and Longshanks,’ she answered.
‘Well, we can discount Wuffles because …’
‘Shut up, Hugo,’ barked Lady A. Hugo shut up like a clam. ‘It’s only because he’s taken a liking to her – reminds him of an old dog he had as a boy. Take no notice. Now, I have something else I discovered that I haven’t told you yet.’
Hugo looked pained. Manda had said nothing about the piece of Customs and Excise paper, nor the ‘meet me at midnight’ note, nor his eavesdropping from the other night. What was she up to? But he daren’t ask her before their guests had left. It was evidently something that she wanted to keep to herself.
Lady Amanda had her own agenda, though, and wanted to keep information in its correct pigeon-holes: first, any information concerning the blackmail, then a précis about what they had learnt about Wuffles. ‘Going back to it being one of those three women, I have evidence, as well, of why Windy and Beep-Beep are so unwilling to share this information with the authorities, or with any of the other old girls.’ At this, Hugo looked up in surprise. Whatever else had she found? A few bits of paper were one thing, but this sounded far more important.
‘While I was in Cocktails yesterday, on my riffle through pedal bins and suchlike, I happened to take a good look in Beep-Beep’s desk. I found bank statements that show that a very large amount of money has passed through their account, but has almost completely been spent – or moved.’
There were gasps of surprise at this. ‘Windy wasn’t kidding,’ she went on, ‘when she said they didn’t have much money in their island account, and certainly not enough to pay off a blackmailer. But there seems to have been another account, although I couldn’t really decipher very much, as it was in another language. She was only telling a half-truth. I think a lot of money’s been transferred to an account that no one but them – and now we – know about.
‘I also discovered a lease in there, too. If I tell you what was in it, you must promise not to indicate by word, look or deed, what I am about to tell you.’ There were actions of crossing hearts and cutting throats as the other three present stood in silence, wondering what on earth she was going to come out with next.
‘It was a lease f
or the land that Parrot Bay is built on. It was from the owner of the island, and specified no other land to be developed later. It also specified a period of only fifteen years for the lease, and it was signed ten years ago. No wonder those two are so eager to sell the other properties – so that they could make a run for it and follow their money.’ This information was greeted with complete silence, the shock at the duplicity of such an outwardly nice couple, being as hard to digest as a lead sandwich.
‘The reason I believe there were such large sums paid out of their bank account, is because I have the sneaking suspicion that they’ve been moving it to an account in South America – the language in which the letter I noticed seemed to be Spanish – where they’ve no doubt set up new identities, and established a base to which they can flee. These anonymous letters have put a spanner in their works big-time.’
This was such a dreadful revelation that Wuffles was not mentioned again, and Beauchamp and Enid left shortly afterwards, without anything else having been disclosed to them.
Hugo sat absolutely immobile on a sofa, dumbfounded and as silent as a ventriloquist’s dummy lacking the ventriloquist to pull his levers. ‘I thought,’ began Lady Amanda, ‘it was best not to get involved with telling them about what Wuffles is up to. There seems to be a much more serious situation involving the embezzlement of funds, and fraudulent leases issued to her old school chums. I simply don’t know what to do about it. Have you got any ideas?’
Hugo sat on in silence. The evening seemed to have passed very quickly, and he needed time to think about how he could disguise his knowledge of Windy and Beep-Beep’s criminal behaviour, and not let this show when he met them again. He was a naturally honest man, and he had a feeling that everything would be visible in his face whenever he had to speak to them. In that case, he’d better do his best to avoid them, no matter how inconvenient this proved, although Manda had managed to give nothing away about what she had discovered when they came round earlier.
Caribbean Sunset with a Yellow Parrot (The Belchester Chronicles Book 5) Page 14