by Jacob Ross
‘I still say he deserve different treatment!’
‘Not from me,’ I said.
DS Chilman came to his feet. ‘Okay, Digson! So you upset! You not happy, what you got in mind?’
‘Like I say, the woman got two children left behind. Ain got no law in Camaho that exempt police. I prepared to make a statement on that woman’s behalf in court.’
‘It not going to go to court,’ Malan said.
Pet shook her head, then looked at Lisa with a wide-eyed, appalled expression. Pet hadn’t lost her cool yet, but I had no doubt that she was getting there.
Miss Stanislaus swung around to face Malan. ‘Scuse me, Missa Malan, you wrong! It got to go to court and if it don’ want to go to court, I going make it go to court.’
They locked eyes, a tight-lipped unflinching stare from Miss Stanislaus. Malan’s was dark-eyed and clenched. He could barely disguise his hostility towards Miss Stanislaus. He’d never recovered from her first day at the office when he tried to humiliate her. I’d never seen anything like the fury in those big brown eyes when she cut him down: told him about his womanising ways, the young wife he hid from the world and the child he’d anchored her at home with – all in a coupla minutes and without ever meeting him before. It shocked his arse to realise so much of his private life was in full view to a person who knew what to look for. It shocked me too. Made disciples of Pet and Lisa.
Chilman spread his palm in front of me, the rum-yellow eyes on mine. I pulled out the keys and dropped them in his hand.
He passed the keys to the officer from San Andrews Central.
In silence, we watched the young policeman leave.
DS Chilman gestured at the door. I followed him to the courtyard. He ran a hand over his salt-and-pepper head then looked into my face. ‘Common sense tell me to advise you to let this go. But I know you – you like a dog with a bad case of lockjaw. When you get your teeth into somefing, you won’t let go, not even if I make it an order. When you arrest Officer Buso, it was a snake that you pick up in your hand. He’s friends with the same kinda policeman who kill your mother. We still got a few left in the Force. And now they see what you done to Buso,’ he coughed into his hand, ‘they’ll be wondering if is them next. They going to have their eyes on you, Digson. Mebbe is time for people to know who your father is.’
‘Nuh!’
‘Okay.’ He pushed a dry-stick finger under my nose. ‘Then start wearing your blaastid piece. From now! That’s an order.’ He hitched up his trousers and headed for his car.
I stared down on the wide curve of the Carenage, cluttered with inter-island cargo boats. There were days when I could barely look down there. It was where, in ’99, a posse of renegade police officers, led by a man named Boko, murdered my mother and disappeared her body.
I heard Miss Stanislaus’s crisp footsteps behind me, then I smelled her lime-lavender-nutmeg perfume. She placed herself beside me, her sea-green dress complemented perfectly by matching shoes and handbag, her hair pulled back in a glossy bun. She had a hand inside her handbag, which could just as readily emerge with a tissue or that little Ruger revolver she loved. She called the gun Miss Betsy.
‘Missa Digger, how come you didn greet me when you come in?’
‘Sorry, Miss Stanislaus. How you?’
‘Too late,’ she sniffed. ‘What botherin you?’
Chief Officer Malan came out the office, jumped into his jeep and slammed the door. He gunned the engine, the vehicle shot out onto the road. I followed the yelp of his tyres as he took the corner further down the hill.
‘Let’s take some breeze,’ she said.
‘Something on your mind?’ I said.
She did not answer.
‘What’s going on, Miss Stanislaus?’
I thought it might be her daughter, Daphne – a thirteenyear-old mini version of Miss Stanislaus. They were the only two people whose voices I sometimes confused. They had the same bright gun-barrel stare, the same love of vivid colours, and a delicacy in their movements that hid the steel inside them.
I glanced at my watch: 1pm. ‘Let’s go eat something,’ I said.
I took her to Kathy’s Kitchen, one of those eating places in San Andrews town that you have to know existed in order to find it. No signs on the door, no menu. The woman served one meal a day and it was whatever she fancied cooking. It was always working people’s food. We walked into a small front room with a single fluorescent light. Floor carpeted with linoleum, five plastic tables – a pair of matching chairs pushed against each one. We sat before a bowl of calaloo soup with photos of Miss Kathy’s family staring down at us, deadeyed and unsmiling.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
She threw me a quick glance. Miss Stanislaus had those eyes you couldn’t help noticing. Bright, translucent brown, with a luminosity that seemed to come from inside. There were times when I thought I saw hints of that glint in her father’s, Chilman’s, too.
‘Still not sleeping?’ I said.
‘I awright, Missa Digger. Somefing I want to show you.’ She lifted her bag from her lap, rested it on the table. Miss Stanislaus eased out a newspaper cutting and slid it towards me.
The article was three days old. I remembered it. One Lena Maine from Kara Island, aged thirty-two, had walked into the sea and drowned.
‘Is Juba Hurst cause it,’ she said.
My heart sank.
She’d pushed the bowl of soup aside, was almost mumbling the words. ‘I been on the phone to people back home becuz it didn make no sense to me. Kara Islan woman know trouble from the time she born, and if she can’t fight trouble, other woman help her. She don’t kill ’erself. Look at the day it happen!’
I shook my head.
‘Saturday, not so? Juba Hurst come back from Vincen Islan every Sunday. Miss Lena kill ’erself the day befo becuz she can’t take it no more from him.’
‘Evidence, Miss Stanislaus . . . ’
‘Is what Dada, her gran’mother, tell me on the phone and I got no reason to doubt them. She say Juba come to her gran’daughter every Sunday night stinking like a grave. Lena don’t want im near her. People hear she bawlin like a cow and they dunno how to save her. Becuz if she don’ let im have his way, he say he kill her and her chil’ren—’
‘Miss Stanislaus,’ I said, ‘is ten years plus since Juba Hurst assault you, erm, sexually—’
‘I not talkin about that! You not listenin to me! Months I been sayin this to San Andrews CID – my own department dat I work in.’ She halted on that and shook her head, her face tight with outrage and disbelief. ‘I tellin y’all dat somefing bad happenin on Kara Islan and we got to tackle it. Right now, Missa Digger, Juba rule Kara Islan. Coupla years ago, he take over all my great-uncle, Koku, land. To make matters worse, nobody can’t find my great-uncle since Juba take his property. And nobody can’t go near that place ’ceptin some ole wimmen who don give a damn no more. Last three months, they been burnin down his place soon as he go off to Vincen Islan becuz they say is bad fings he dealin in.’
I looked at her dabbing at the side of her mouth, her other hand restless in her lap. My mind switched to Juba Hurst – suspected murderer and enforcer. Eight cases of serious assault against minors with intent to commit buggery, four attempted murders, fifteen threats to kill, twelve unlawful woundings, nine indecent assaults on a female, two reported cases of detention of a woman against her will – every one of those cases had been retracted a day or two before it went to court. I had my ears and eyes tuned in on that fella. The problem was, he lived on Kara Island and from what I heard, the few police over there were terrified of him. Without proof of some new crime to pin on Juba Hurst, we could not move.
The only jail time Juba did was for the abduction and rape of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl on Kara Island. That schoolgirl was Miss Stanislaus. Happened a week after Chilman walked away from Miss Stanislaus and her mother and moved to Camaho. First daughter, and Chilman didn look back, not even when Juba left her with a chil
d I saw her struggling to love.
I picked up Miss Stanislaus’s daughter Daphne from lateevening netball practice in San Andrews on Fridays and dropped her off at their little painted gate. A couple of weeks ago she remained in the car, her schoolbag on her knees. Daphne looked at the gate and then raised wide, entreating eyes at me. ‘Missa Digger, I can come stay with you – mebbe for a while?’
‘Not possible, Daph. Miss Stanislaus won’t allow it and I can’t either. What’s the problem?’
‘She don’ like me no more, Missa Digger. She won’t even talk to me, not even to—’
Daphne broke down.
I tapped out a text message to Miss Stanislaus: Daphne don’t want to come in. I taking her to Miss Iona house or mine. U got 2 mins 2 dcide.
My phone vibrated. Miss Stanislaus, soft-voiced, exhausted, was at the other end. ‘Send her in, Missa Digger. Fanks.’
I touched Miss Stanislaus’s arm. She pulled away, her eyes hot and fierce on mine. Then something in her crumbled and her voice dropped almost to a murmur. ‘I want y’all to believe me, Missa Digger. I – I dunno what to say to make you believe me.’
She sat staring past my head for a while, then drew breath. ‘Problem is, Missa Digger, now Miss Lena gone – Juba Hurst goin throw himself on some other woman, not so? He going find them wimmen who been burnin down his place and is what he won’t do to them. Gimme a reason why I should sit down here in Camaho and allow that to happen to my fam’ly.’
‘I didn know Lena was family,’ I said.
She threw me a sideways glare. ‘On Kara Islan, Missa Digger, everybody is fam’ly.’
She got up, dragged her bag towards her and strode out.
3
I parked at the side of the road and walked up the concrete path to my house. My body craved sleep; my limbs were heavy with it. I’d sat through most of the night in the office scrolling through scores of Googled pages, my mind full of Miss Stanislaus. I’d stopped at PTSD and was seized with a kind of terror when I took in what it said. Rape survivors have a harder time overcoming it than combat veterans.
And there was not always an end date.
They’d listed sleeplessness, depressive disorders and denial. Suicidal thoughts were there too, irritation and self-loathing, even anger. It crossed my mind that they hadn’t met a case like Miss Stanislaus. If they had, they would have added another: revenge. Not only that – in her case, they would have placed it top of the list. It was clear to me that Miss Stanislaus was not the kinda woman to forget an outrage against her body however long ago it was. She’d brought the rage with her when Chilman dumped her on San Andrews CID. All that indignation! Sometimes I saw her struggling to hold it back. There were days when she shrank at the slightest touch, grew dangerous and moody when news of a sexual assault reached our department.
I pushed those thoughts out of my head and played a game with myself. I pretended to be a private investigator entering my own house.
*
I climb three concrete steps, pull the bolt of the glass-fronted door and switch on the ceiling lights. I tiptoe past four Morris chairs and a sofa in the front room. Shelves line every wall, stacked with books that cover every aspect of the human body before and after death. Books on human bones cover the kitchen worktop. The thickest has a pencil in it: Osteometry: The Mathematics of the Human Form.
Two fridges. I pull open the door of the smaller one. Its shelves are crammed with bottled chemicals, the frozen larvae and pupae of arthropods and blowflies at every stage of their development. Old 35mm film canisters stuffed with soil samples, burrs and blades of grass. Human tissue in phials of formalin.
A music player sits in the far corner with stacks of CDs crowding it, mainly jazz, some Lovers’ Rock, a pile of Bump n Grind with Lycra-clad Jamaican rude-gals cocking fully loaded, G-stringed backsides at the camera. Downright provocative.
A spare room on my right with a skeletal iron bed jammed against the wall. A battalion of vintage-labelled rum bottles on the floor.
There is a furnished bedroom at the far end of the house. An ancient mahogany bed takes up more than half the space, with a single slatted wooden window about five feet above it. All the other windows in the house are glass. Hurricane house, obviously, built circa 1955, stripped of its Guyana wood, extended and strengthened with concrete, steel and Temple stone.
Expensive condoms of the super-sensitive variety on the side table. No evidence of cohabitation.
Conclusions so far: male occupant aged twenty-three or thereabouts, obsessed with death and human body parts. Possibly cannibalistic. Visiting relationship, if any. An unhealthy interest in rum cocktails and disgusting music.
I leave the wall of the living room for last. There are three photos. The first is of an old Indian woman sitting on wooden steps, the door behind her propped open by a length of wood. She is staring at the camera with the cocked chin of a warrior. The second is of a young Afro-Indian woman in her mid-twenties with a glorious head of untamed hair and a smile white and wide as a beach. I wonder what happened to that woman. A little boy is leaning against her thigh. His eyes are wide, his mouth half open.
The last is a framed newspaper photograph, pasted on a sheet of Bristol board. A tallish, not-too-bad-looking fella is standing beside a full-fleshed woman with big brown eyes – pretty like hell in her tie-dyed ocean-blue dress. A swarm of red and yellow coral fish populate the lovely garment. She stands like royalty beside the not-too-bad-lookin’ fella, an aquamarine handbag dangling from her elbow.
The caption reads: Michael ‘Digger’ Digson (left) and DC Kathleen Stanislaus (right) of San Andrews CID. The duo that cracked the Nathan case.
I concentrate on Miss Stanislaus’s eyes. Now, I see something there I didn’t notice before: a deep-down hurt, a simmering outrage. A sadness that makes me want to cry.
4
Friday, great columns of cloud were gathering over the eastern hills, dulling the day and releasing the occasional measly scattering of rain that only raised the humidity.
I took the airport road to work, driving through Coburn Valley – the gateway to the Drylands and the tourist south. I had a craving for raw cane juice and it was the only place to get it.
The seller had his own little mobile mill designed and built by himself. I’d handed him the money and turned back to my car when I felt eyes on me. I looked up quickly. A San Andrews Central Police jeep had stopped in the middle of the early-morning traffic. Vehicles edged past it, their drivers casting nervous glances in their rear-view mirrors. Three officers trying to stare me down. It was about Buso, of course, the drunken officer I’d locked up for running over a woman. I knew all three, their names usually got mentioned in the same breath. Skelo – because the bones of his skull were so pronounced. Machete – murderous, they said, when he lost his temper, which by all accounts he often did. Machete had his arms wrapped against the driver’s wheel, his chest pushed forward, his head angled at me. Staring. The officer in the front passenger seat I knew as Switch. He controlled the two.
Switch was an older version of Malan – perhaps forty, with a reputation to maintain. A grim-faced human with a mouth and eyes designed for intimidation. The kind of officer that would think nothing of smashing a fella’s face through a pane of glass or demanding sex from a woman in exchange for not arresting her. The subspecies you found in every police force in the world. The type that murdered my mother. I raised my chin and stepped onto the sidewalk.
Switch must have seen the rush of hatred on my face. He directed a gob of spit in my direction, said something to the driver and the engine came to life.
‘I’d do it again,’ I shouted. ‘Any fuckin time!’
Their engine revved, the vehicle shot off. And just like that, my morning was soured.
At the office, I greeted Miss Stanislaus. She didn’t answer me. Her face remained directed at the window. I pulled a chair and sat in front of her. She left her desk and walked off to the bathroom.
Pet an
d Lisa were looking at me as if I’d done the woman something criminal.
Malan strolled past, glanced at my face and chuckled.
I went back to my filing and kept my head down, but much as I tried to pretend otherwise, I felt dismissed.
Miss Stanislaus and I argued all the time, especially in the heat of a difficult case. We looked forward to it, knowing that at some point a spark would fly and ignite an idea that would lead us to a breakthrough. This felt different.
I went down to the marketplace and bought her lunch, returned to the office, laid the cartons in front of her and watched the woman eat my food with pleasure. She still wouldn’t talk to me.
I sucked my teeth, grabbed my bag and strode out of the office with Pet’s chuckles trailing after me.
5
Saturday was beginning to feel chilled out.
I was looking forward to a laid-back night with Dessie Manille at The Blue Crab – a late-night drinking hole with its own little beach facing Whale Island. I was thinking of jazzy steelpan music and dressed-up rum cocktails, fussed over by a bartender who knew how I liked my mixes.
Close to morning, Dessie and I would drive down to Grand Beach, shed our clothes on the sand and throw ourselves into the sea. What happened between us with the water above our shoulders was nobody’s business but our own.
Woman waiting, she’d texted.
Man ready, I’d replied. I shrugged on my shirt, my eyes on the time.
My cellphone buzzed. I placed it against my ear, deepened my voice. ‘Patience, woman, I coming.’
‘Mind my arse, Digson! Is Chilman here! I want you in the office right now.’
‘The—’
‘Y’hear me first time.’
‘I can’t, Sir. I got an, erm, encounter in a few minutes.’
‘Tell me about it when you get here.’
‘Is past midnight!’
‘Same time here too. Come right now.’
I could hear the old man breathing down the phone. He didn’t sound drunk but that was always a matter of degrees.